Sounds like a tall order, right? You have no idea.
I sat at my father’s computer and booted it up. It was a dinosaur and took forever. In the meantime I rifled through drawers and found some pens, old rubber bands and paper clips, a bunch of files containing fascinating evidence like water, phone, and electric bills, the deed to a property they owned in New Mexico but had never built on, their marriage license and other legal documents. Finally the screen lit up and demanded a password. I didn’t have to think for long. I entered lullaby, the nickname he’d always had for me. A strain of electronic music praised my excellent deductive powers.
“What are you looking for?” I asked myself out loud.
My father had just been through a federal investigation. Anything incriminating on this computer would have been found by the authorities or deleted. Probably. I shamelessly began searching through Word files, scanning his “Household,” “Speeches,” and correspondence folders. He wasn’t a very computer-savvy guy, my father, so there weren’t many documents. It took me only about twenty minutes to go through everything and to find nothing but the most innocuous stuff: a letter to a painter who’d taken their money and left his work unfinished in the kitchen, a speech he gave on the signs of child abuse to which physicians must be vigilant (I doubt anyone’s been asking him to make that speech lately), a list including various organizing tasks around the house.
Next I scanned his e-mail. The usual slew of spam popped up when I opened his Outlook box. The cure for erectile dysfunction, hot nude girls, and an international lottery win vied for my attention. I searched through his sent mail, his recently received mail, and his recycle bin. Everything was empty, wiped clean, not one e-mail saved. I found this strange. I thought about my own e-mail box. I was compelled to save nearly everything I sent and everything I received, cataloged by person and purpose. It seemed odd that he’d save nothing; he was an even bigger pack rat than I was. Maybe that federal investigation had left him feeling skittish.
I started to feel as if I was wasting time, when I remembered something Jake had taught me. Your computer remembers every website you’ve visited. The websites you visit send a little message to your computer called a cookie and your computer saves that cookie to identify itself the next time you visit that site. There’s also a log on your computer that shows all the websites you’ve visited in the last week or few days, depending on how your computer is set.
I visited the cookies file and saw a bunch of them from places like amazon.com and Home Depot, some investment and news websites. Nothing unusual or interesting. I went to the log of visited sites and, at first, nothing caught my eye there, either. Then I ran across a site that seemed a little odd, just a collection of seemingly random numbers, letter, and symbols. As I scrolled down I noticed that he’d visited the site ten times in the last week and a half. The log was set to delete any listings more than two weeks old, so past that, I didn’t know. But it seemed safe to assume he was visiting this site nearly every day.
I cut and pasted the address into the Web browser and waited for the site to pop up. When it did, it was just a blank page filling the screen with a bright red glare, so bright it actually hurt my eyes. I waited for some type of intro or log-in prompts to pop up. Nothing. Just that bright red screen with no images and no text. Something about it was unsettling. It was the color of danger.
I dragged the cursor over it and double-clicked in various places but nothing happened. After a few minutes of staring at the red blankness, I felt my chest constrict in my frustration. I knew I was looking at something important but I couldn’t figure out what it meant. My impatience blossomed into a childish anger and I fought a sudden overwhelming urge to put my fist through the screen. I gripped the edge of the desk until my inner tantrum passed. I released a breath I hadn’t even realized I was holding and wrote down the mysterious URL on a piece of scrap paper, which I shoved in my pocket. I deleted all the junk e-mails that had downloaded during my visit and turned off the computer. (I had the urge to go to the kitchen, get some Windex, and wipe down the desk, the keyboard, and anything else I had touched-but that was just me being weird.)
I took a quick walk through the house, through the empty rooms of my childhood. The family room where we’d gathered for television or games was much the same, though the furniture had been updated recently and my parents had replaced the old television with a new big-screen. My parents’ bedroom on the ground floor looked out over my mother’s garden. In the spring, she’d leave the French doors open and let the room fill with the smell of roses. I remembered watching her sit at her vanity, doing her hair and makeup, and thinking she was the most beautiful woman in the world. The room, decorated in a sort of Martha Stewart/ Victorian theme with heavy brocades and floral prints, was typically tidy with stacks of books on each of the nightstands. Upstairs, I sat on my old bed for a minute, looked at my framed diplomas, my debate trophies, and the first article I’d had published in my school paper. My bed was still made with my old Laura Ashley sheets. A place that once had seemed the happiest and safest in all the world now seemed cold and dark; the heat was down and I pulled my jacket tight around myself. I felt those fingers of despair tugging at me again, but I brushed them off as I hurriedly left the room and moved down the stairs. I left my parents’ house, locked the door behind me, and headed back into the city.
I HAVE A TREMENDOUS ability to compartmentalize my emotions. Some people call it denial, but I think it’s a skill to be able to put unpleasant things out of your head for a little while in order to accomplish something else. For the next few hours I didn’t think about Agent Grace or Myra Lyall or about my truly devastating encounter with Esme Gray. I didn’t think about Max or if those ashes I scattered off the Brooklyn Bridge were really his. I just wrote my article about Elena Jansen, proofread it carefully, and e-mailed it in to my editor at O Magazine. I had already had most of it written in my head-it was just a matter of getting it down on paper. For me the actual writing is only about ten percent of the process; ninety percent is the thinking about it. Much of that is unconscious. I guess for me all action is like that.
I felt better after writing the article. Elena Jansen’s tragedy made the drama in my life seem silly and inconsequential…for a second or two, anyway. Maybe that was why I was writing these kinds of pieces, why I was drawn to these survivors. They reminded me that my own story wasn’t so bad. That other people had endured less survivable events. They made me feel as if one day I’d find my way back to a normal, happy life. Is that selfish?
Once I’d sent in the article, though, all the other stuff started nagging at me. I took the strange website address from my pocket and plugged it into my own browser. The same red screen popped up; I stared at it, transfixed for a minute. I dragged the cursor over the whole page, clicking randomly, like I had done at my parents’ house. Nothing. It started driving me a little crazy. I knew there was something there; if the website was down, the screen would show an error message. My father had been visiting this site every day. There must be a way in.
The phone rang then.
“Hey,” said Jake when I answered. “What are you doing?”
“Just working on an article due tomorrow.”
“Want me to come over?”
“Not tonight. I’m feeling pretty wrecked. And I don’t want to blast this deadline.”
“Anything wrong?” he asked after a pause.
“No,” I lied. “Nothing.”
“How are you feeling about everything? Max and all that.”
“Honestly,” I said, “I haven’t even thought about it today.”
The long silence on the other end told me he didn’t believe me. “Okay,” he said finally. “Talk to you in the morning?”
“Definitely.”
“Well, good night, Ridley.”
“Good night, Jake.”
8
After a terrible night’s sleep, I got up in the morning and made a few phone calls. Esme’s words and the things Agent Grace had told me about Myra and Allen Lyall were smoldering in my center. I’d seen a poster of their faces on the way back into the city the night before. There was an update on the morning news, which basically
