“You seduced her. How’d you do it? Drugs, alcohol, pretty words? You thought about it, you planned it. Because you were older, you had maturity and patience on your side. Maybe you waited, picked the right moment. She was sad and lonely about something, and there you were. You offered to rub her back. Maybe you poured her a drink. ‘Just a little drink,’ you told her. ‘It’ll help you relax.’ And maybe she was uncomfortable, maybe she tried to tell you to stop-”
“Shut up,” I tell him, words hard, warning.
He merely nods. “Yep, she definitely asked you to stop. She absolutely asked you to stop, and you didn’t listen. You kept touching and petting, pressing the advantage. What can she do? She’s only fourteen, she doesn’t understand everything she’s feeling, that she wants you to stop, that she wants you to continue, that this isn’t right, that she’s awkward and embarrassed-”
I cross the room in three strides and backhand him across the face. The crack is surprisingly loud. His head snaps to the side. The ice pack falls on top of a doily. He turns back slowly, rubs his chin almost thoughtfully, then picks up the ice pack and returns it to his forehead.
He looks me right in the eye, and I shiver at what I see there. He doesn’t move a muscle. Neither do I.
“Tell me what you saw Wednesday night,” he states quietly.
“A car, driving down the street.”
“What kind of car?”
“The kind with a lot of antennas. Maybe a limo service; it looked like a dark sedan.”
“What did you tell the police?”
“That you’re a homicidal motherfucker,” I spit out. “Trying to offer me up on a serving platter to save your sorry hide.”
He glances at my head, my hands, my forearms. “What did you burn this evening?”
“Anything I wanted to.”
“Do you collect porn, Aidan Brewster?”
“None of your business!”
Jones sets down the ice pack. He stands up in front of me. I fall back. I can’t help it. Those deep dark eyes, rimmed in blood and bruises and God knows what. I have a sense of deja vu, that I have seen eyes like that before. Maybe in prison. Maybe the first guy who dropped me in a bloody heap and banged the hell out of me. I realize for the first time that something about my neighbor isn’t quite human.
Jones steps forward.
“No,” I hear myself gasp. “I burned love letters, dammit. My own personal notes. I’m telling you, I’m not a pervert!”
His gaze sweeps the room. “Got a computer, Aidan?”
“No, dammit. I’m not allowed. Terms of my parole!”
“Stay off the Internet,” he says. “I’m telling you: One visit to one chat room to say one word to one teenage girl, and I will break you. You will swallow your own tongue just to get away from me.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
He leans down over me. “I’m the one who knows you raped your own stepsister, Aidan. I’m the one who knows exactly why you pay your stepfather a hundred bucks a week. And I’m the one who knows just how much your love will cost your now anorexic victim, for the rest of her sorry life.”
“But you can’t know,” I say stupidly. “Nobody knows. I passed the lie detector test. I tell you, I passed the lie detector test!”
He smiles now, but something about that look, combined with his flat eyes, sends shivers down my spine. He turns, walks down the hall.
“She loved me,” I call out weakly behind him.
“If she loved you, she would’ve returned to you by now, don’t you think?”
Jones shuts the door behind himself. I stand alone in my apartment, burned hands fisted by my sides, and think how much I hate his guts. Then I uncap the second bottle of Maker’s Mark and get down to business.
In the beginning, I worried about two things: how to ask my questions of Ethan Hastings without giving away too much and how to plot against my husband given my extremely limited free time. The solution to both problems turned out to be surprisingly simple.
I met with Ethan every day during my free period. I told him I was creating a sixth grade teaching module for Internet navigation. Under the guise of crafting a class project, Ethan answered all of my questions and more.
I started with online security. We couldn’t have sixth-graders visiting porn sites, right? Ethan demonstrated for me how to manage account and browser permissions to limit where users could go.
That night after Ree went to bed, I booted up the family computer and went to work. I opened the security window in AOL and busily “permissioned” away. Of course, after I went to bed, it occurred to me that Jason might not use AOL to surf the web. Maybe he used Internet Explorer or another browser.
I returned to Ethan the next day.
“Is there any way to see exactly which websites have been visited by each computer? You know, that way I can check and see if each student is going where he or she is supposed to be going and that our network security protocols are working.”
Ethan explained to me that each time a user clicks on a website, a cookie is created by that website and temporary copies of the web pages are saved in the computer’s cache file. The computer also stores a browser history, so that by glancing at the right files, I could tell exactly where that computer had been on the World Wide Web.
I had to wait five more nights, until Ree was asleep and Jason was at work. Ethan had showed me how I could click on the pull-down menu of the Internet search bar, and it would show me the websites most recently visited by the computer. I selected the search bar, got the pull-down menu, and saw three options, www.drudgereport.com, www.usatoday.com, and www.nytimes.com.
Right away, this struck me as not enough options, because when Ethan had done it in the computer lab, we’d easily gotten twelve to fifteen sites. So I booted up Internet Explorer, and tried its browser history, which gave me the exact same results.
I was stumped.
I monitored the browser history for a bit after that. Every few days, random times, when I thought I could quickly call it up without Jason noticing. Always I found the same three sites, which didn’t make any sense to me. Jason spent hours at a time hunched over the computer. No way he was simply reading the news.
Three weeks later, inspiration hit. I constructed a civics question to research for my social studies class regarding the five freedoms guaranteed under the First Amendment. Then I merrily Google-searched away. I found history sites, I found government sites, Wikipedia, all sorts of good stuff. I hit them all, and by the time I was done that evening, the pull-down menu showed a nice robust list of recently visited websites.
I went to school the next day and gave my class an impromptu lecture on freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom to peacefully assemble, and freedom to petition.
Then I raced home, barely able to contain myself until Ree went to bed and I could check the browser history of Internet Explorer once more.
You know what I found? Three websites: Drudge Report, USA Today, New York Times. Every site I had visited just twenty-four hours before was gone. Wiped out.
Somehow, some way, my husband was covering his online tracks.
