but denies he put her up to burning Nicole. He insists his father would have disowned him if he found out he was in any way responsible for the acid attack, not to mention withholding information about the perpetrator. Apparently no Bendix has ever not been admitted to Harvard.”
“Those calls,” my father said. “What’d you want to talk with me about anyway?”
“I wanted your expertise. I’d interviewed Angela Sammick’s art teacher, and she’d shown me some of Angela’s work. Some of the pictures looked vaguely familiar, as if she’d copied some paintings that an art historian would be able to identify at a glance. I was looking for you to save me some time.”
“And why are you here now?” my father said.
“To check in on your son. I’m glad he’s all right.”
“So you’re dropping the obstruction of justice charge?”
“No.”
Later, I woke hungry. My father was still there, dozing in a chair at my bedside. I pretended to be asleep, enjoying the fact that we could be in the same room and relatively peaceful, even if it was a hospital room. The doctor came in. I watched through slit eyes as he showed my father the latest MRI on his iPad. “He’ll be fine,” the doctor said. “I’m releasing him tomorrow. But I just wanted to make you aware that your son has significant scar tissue buildup in his frontal lobe.”
“I am aware of that, Doctor,” my father said.
“This is not from what happened last night,” the doctor said.
“I know.”
“This is from an older injury-”
“I
The next morning, Thursday, I felt a soft hand on my cheek. I opened my eyes. Nicole looked beat up, but she was trying to smile. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“I thought you weren’t supposed to leave the house.”
“I snuck out.”
“Can you sneak me out?” I took the saline IV out myself, got dressed, and we just walked out, no problem. We stopped in the hospital cafeteria to pick up my father. He’d gone down to grab coffee, but now he wasn’t there. I tried his cell, no pickup. I texted him to let him know I would meet him at home.
We went to the diner. Nicole seemed oddly relaxed-not happy, but calm. The real Recluse was still out there, and Nicole didn’t seem to care. I was beginning to think Schmidt was right. The guy who paid to have Nicole burned had gotten what he’d wanted, and he’d gotten away with it.
Nicole picked up on my anger. “It doesn’t help,” she said. “Believe me, if it did, I’d have no problem hating them day and night, Angela and whoever put her up to this.”
“And Dave?”
She looked down at her burger. She’d only had a bite. She pushed her plate away.
FIFTY-TWO
We went back to Nicole’s. She wanted to hang. All I’d wanted to do was get her back home safe, and now I had to get home myself, back to my computer. “I have to check in with my dad,” I said. Nicole seemed sleepy anyway.
Mrs. Castro drove me home. She had this meditation track playing, the word
“Jay, I want you to know how grateful I am for all you’ve done for Nicole.”
“I didn’t do anything, ma’am.”
“You got yourself arrested for her. Mr. Castro insists that you let him hire a lawyer for you.”
“My father’ll never go for it.”
“You have to let the police do their job, Jay. I see it. Your anger. You have to let this go. We all have to move on.”
“Okay,” I said. “I will.”
She frowned and mussed my hair. “You’re horrible.”
My father wanted to go to the Palisades. He went there sometimes to smoke a cigar. “Pete says there’s a regatta going on. We could watch the boats, catch some fresh air, the sunset, grab dinner after?”
“Gotta sleep,” I said. “You go, though. Hang with Pete.”
He hadn’t gotten any decent sleep the night before either, at the hospital. He hit the couch and clicked to a hoops game he’d DVR-ed. He was snoring in five minutes. He was lying on his side, and his gut was hanging out of his undershirt. I wondered if he’d live to fifty.
I kept my bedroom door open with one eye on my father. I had some bullshit history assignment on my laptop screen in case he walked in on me. I followed the BinarTREE maps tracking Angela’s data flow into a chat room called Cutter’s Way. Angela had been using the site heavily. And then there it was again. She’d been calling herself GBAM. It was just such sad stuff. I kept looking at a string Angela was into the night before she was arrested:
GBAM: Blood?
Blood Princess: Howdy GBAM. You stay dry last night?
GBAM: Epic fail. I was going to be good, but at 3am, after my mother was asleep, I couldn’t hold off anymore.
bOYS cUT tOO: Carved the letters WOL into myself. I feel real when I see them.
Up Not Sideways: WOL?
bOYS cUT tOO: Waste of life. Why can’t I stop?
GBAM: Oh bct. I want you to love you. I want to help you stop. I want to help me. But how? It feels too good, burning blue.
Reading that last line in the string, I can’t say I forgave Angela Sammick, but I hated her a little less. That was the best I could do.
I didn’t have time to try to figure out what GBAM meant, but I figured if it was her username for Cutter’s Way, maybe she’d used it as the access name for her online storage vault. I took a shot at the major cloud vaults:
Username: GBAM
A password request came up on UniversalStorageTime.com. Maybe twenty minutes later I jumped the password wall. I started clicking wildly, opening multiple files at the same time.
An audio file, DBphonegrabOct21.aiff, from the same day I met Nicole in Schmidt’s office:
DAVE: You knew what you were getting into.
ANGELA: You were with me for three months before her, though.
(Eagles screeched in the background. There was a preserve at Ramapo.)
DAVE: I was up front with you from the beginning. I told you this had to be under the radar.
ANGELA: Under the radar. Right. You let me suck your dick no problem, but you’re embarrassed to be seen in public with me.
DAVE: Do you know what my father would do if-
ANGELA: Yeah, I know exactly what he’d do. He’d tell you I was a low-class whore, way beneath a Bendix’s station. Then, if you had any balls, you’d tell him to go to hell.
DAVE: Look, I’m sorry, okay? You want me to screw up my life? That’ll make you happy? It was a mistake, Angela.
ANGELA: A mistake? You have got to be kidding me.
