Pirate Vishnu (A Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mystery) by Gigi Pandian Page A

attacker had gotten something far more important to my normal life: my laptop. I’m good at backing up my files, but I’d been distracted from the moment Steven came to see me. Besides hitting “save” regularly, I couldn’t remember if I’d backed up any of that full day’s work on my cloud server. As soon as I was done at the police station, I could use my office desktop computer to check for my latest backup. I took a deep breath and hoped for the best.
    Even if my research paper was safe, there was something I had no chance of recovering. I’d backed up the treasure map with a photo—but hadn’t counted on my phone being stolen. I swore.
    I wasn’t sure which loss I was more upset about at that moment. My paper on the British East India Company and the Battle of Plassey was so close to being done. The paper had been accepted by a prestigious academic journal, but they’d requested revisions that they were waiting for. The last handwritten notes I’d taken were tucked into my bag as well. I knew I could recreate the work, but it would take time, which I didn’t have. The editors were waiting, and the semester would be starting soon. I’d worked hard to get here, and I needed this paper to have a shot at tenure against Naveen. I couldn’t afford to have my work set back.
    I wasn’t usually such a negative person, but I couldn’t think of a single thing that was going right at the moment. First Lane, now all of this. My stomach rumbled again. I’d never gotten that snack, so now on top of everything else, I was starving. I hated being hungry.
    While I waited to talk to someone, I came up with a silver lining, albeit a small one. I’d left my pirate discovery research at the library. Whoever now had the map didn’t also have more information about Anand. As far as I knew, I was the only one who’d made the connection that Uncle Anand was Pirate Vishnu.
    The police officer who took my statement gave me some antiseptic and gauze for the concrete scrape on the ball of my hand and elbow. He looked all of twenty-two years old, but was a nice guy.
    “A treasure map ?” he said. “ Really ? You want me to write that in the list of items stolen?”
    I guess I had my answer about whether I should have gone to the police with what I knew about Steven Healy.
    Since the mugger had also gotten my phone, the policeman let me use a phone at the station to cancel my credit cards, ATM card, and phone. I even got in a call to Tamarind at the library to tell her why I hadn’t returned.
    I kept my keys in my jeans pocket—otherwise they always find their way to the very bottom of my bag—so at least I had my car and house keys. My injured elbow stiffened as I fished my keys out of my pocket on the way to my car. The pain from my hand and elbow was fully kicking in now that my adrenaline had worn off. I’d broken my arm the previous year, and even though it healed cleanly, it made me nervous when I got an arm injury.
    I knew I should have gone home, taken some painkillers, and put ice on my elbow. But there was no way I was going home yet.

    On the ground floor of the history department building, I was too anxious to wait for the elevator. I ran past the group of faculty chatting in the hallway and bounded up the stairs, praying that I’d remembered to back up my files the previous afternoon. I did most of my work on my laptop, since I could  bring it with me between home, office, and the library, so I rarely used the office computer provided by the university. But the desktop computer was networked, so I’d be able to see if I’d dropped my files into the remote backup after my day of work before Steven Healy had interrupted me.
    I was only a little bit out of breath when I reached my floor. I burst through the stairwell door near my office. A petite woman around my age gave a start as I did so. She jumped up from where she was crouched in front of my office door. It looked like she’d been about to slip a folded