His wife's friends gathered at their house as they did every Holiday season. 

His wife was sleeping with her best woman friend from out of town on a cot in the dining room off the kitchen. Other guests were sleeping in their marital bed. The man was sleeping on the floor of his small office room. 

He had had his office desk made specially for him to his specs. It was a doughnut. His swivel chair was in the hole of the doughnut. A panel in the wood desk was on a hinge that swung upwards to allow him to enter the hole when he worked. All of his files were on the round sides of the doughnut. Whenever he wanted a file he didn't have to break his concentration to get up and retrieve it, he just swiveled his chair. It was a messy office but he knew where everything was and had easy access to it all. No one was to touch anything on his desk but him and his assistant.

As the house was quieting and the guests were quieting and in their sleep places the man too lay down to sleep but he could not fall asleep because he had remembered the post-holiday trial that he had and the witness availability he had forgotten to give to his administrative assistant, who worked from a spare room next to his office when he was working from home. But she was not there then because of the holidays. Marie's friends were sleeping there, too.

The man got awake to look for the list of witnesses but the stiff yellow card that his assistant used to type the witness list for each case was not on the doughnut desk. It was not in the assistant's room he knew. 

The man got up to look for the stiff yellow card of witnesses. Quietly and with a pen flashlight so as not to disturb his sleeping wife and her friend he went into the kitchen and checked under the counter to see if the witness list yellow card had been put there with other of his assistant's papers to make room for the guests but it was not there either.

He went up to the second floor to look and his wife had awakened and had come up too. "I know where someone put them," she said as she followed him down the stairs as he ignored her. She showed him where they had been put, scattered randomly all over the house, on low shelves with her knick-knacks, stacked neatly but without order, mixed all together with other papers from other files, on desks and in drawers throughout the house.

He came to a low table and knelt down and saw some of his work next to some of Marie's things. At first he picked his papers out from her items and set his aside but then he felt the saliva build in his mouth as lava builds in a volcano and he began tossing her things on the floor without care. She could see the lava building and did not say anything. 

"I will kill whoever moved them and until I find out I will key each of their cars at random."

A fifteen year-old daughter, an arts student, of one of Marie's friends had moved them. "They looked better there", Carmen said breezily and he did not kill her.