"Yeah, I'm sorry, I-"
But Aruda was already leaving. "I'll e-mail you those tapes of me coming home that you wanted so much." She said, moving a loose strand of hair away from her eyes.
"Please, I promise I didn't mean to hurt your feelings; I just wanted answers." He could tell it was cold comfort as he said it, but he still wanted to rectify things.
"You want my advice?" Asked Aruda, from the doorway. "Stay away from this whole sabotaging business. Silly people take it too far, and you'll end up losing your job. Or worse, we all will." And with that, she was gone. He felt sick with guilt. Worse still,despite proving her innocence, talking with Aruda had opened up even more questions for him. Why was she so completely certain that Mr. Crossley had framed her? How did he even do it?
Xeno's head swam until his phone alarm went off. Right, he was supposed to give a talk to those secondary schoolers. Or were they Uni students? He couldn't be sure. He was so completely, utterly muddled.
He got ready in the centre of the planetarium, turning on the interactive whiteboard, when the doors opened. Someone from Palaeontology that he vaguely recognised was showing people around. He heard them say "And now, Mr. Baxterson, who will be touring you through the stars."
He tried to wave at the employee, but they only stared daggers back at him. The rivalry between the palaeontology and astronomy departments was stronger than ever. As he was giving his talk, he could barely see the faces of the secondary school students, who all seemed relatively bored. He could barely focus, just giving the same pre-rehearsed speech about celestial bodies affecting each-other through gravity, and which A-levels to pick if they had wanted to become an astronomer. He, himself had done maths, further maths, physics and food tech (the last was just to appease his father for the last two years he had lived at home, giving him slight false hope that Xeno would go into baking.)
His thoughts were a blur. He kept imagining Aruda's hurt voice, how she had looked at him after he had practically accused her of a crime. As the schoolkids were milling out of the planetarium, he could only think of one thing. He was going to interrogate everything out of Mr. Crossley for what he had done to hisfriend. Besides, if today had shown him anything, it was that he was good at hurting people's feelings.
When everyone had cleared out, he was alone in the planetarium. Usually, there were at least some people moving through it as a quick shortcut to get from botany to history. Still, he appreciated the quiet. He checked his phone briefly, and saw that he had a text from Haiden that just read "Meet me in the astronomy gift shop in five."
CHAPTER NINETEEN:
Not knowing what else to do, Xeno responded with a thumbs-up emoji, and started walking over.
The astronomy gift shop was, in his opinion, the best one in the whole museum. It had celestial wallpaper and solid oak wood floors. Each and every shelf was lined with gifts and trinkets marketed to any aspiring astronomer, aged four through to eighteen. His favourite thing that they sold, however, were the little sherbet flying saucers. He knew he could get them elsewhere, so he rarely bought them from the museum. They just comforted him to see, in a strange way.
"Xeno?"
He jumped, taken out of the haze of his thoughts and put back into reality. He jerked his head up and was face to face with Haiden.
"Hey, what did you want to talk to me about?" Xeno asked.
"I was only curious about what you'd said to Aruda."
"Oh, yeah, I-" Xeno paused for a second. "How did you know I just talked to Aruda?"
Haiden shrugged; "I noticed that the scheduling changed yesterday. There was no reason to move you into the same time slot as Aruda today, so I figured you pulled some strings. You can see everyone's schedule if you go on the museum website with a staff code."
"That's.. actually really smart." Xeno replied.
"Thank you." Haiden replied, giving him a weak smile. "What did she say?"
"Basically, we know that she's innocent. She went straight home, she said so; there's even proof. But she got framed last time, not just randomly blamed like we thought. And she's pretty sure who framed her."
"And who was that?"
Xeno looked back at Haiden. "It was Mr. Crossley."
He seemed surprised, but then seemed to put the pieces together. "That makes sense. I got told something about them hating each-other when I was an intern here, but since he kind of took me under his wing, he only mentions her to complain. Do you know why?"
"Not a clue. All I know is, I'm pretty sure it's gotta be him, right? That's where all the evidence points."
"Don't judge him yet; give him a fair trial. We'll go in together if you don't think I'll give him a good enough questioning. I promise you we'll sort this out."
"Thank you." Xeno noticed that he was shifting uncomfortably. "Are you alright?"
"To be honest, while I was walking here, everyone was giving me dirty looks. Even Mrs. Pepper stopped me and asked me if I was bringing anything I shouldn't. I mean, I'm not surprised, someone stole Neptune from one of the displays the other day."
"Yeah, I heard something about that. That must suck, I'm sorry." Xeno said, realising that he had basically just done the exact same thing to Doctor Aruda.
"It's not your fault. And besides, we're one step closer to solving this, right?" Haiden asked, turning to face him.
