consecutive times. “Wait a second. Why are there three entries in a row if she only went to the website once?”
“Ah. Because the fact of three different entries in the history window doesn’t mean three separate visits to the blog. Otherwise we’d see the names of other websites in between if she was doing other surfing. Those three entries are for navigation within the blog itself. See: if we click on this first entry here”-he moved the cursor and clicked accordingly-“we pull up the home page for the blog. This is the main page, what you get whenever you enter the main website address. Got that?”
He looked to both Rogan and Ellie for confirmation they were following his step-by-step tour.
“Okay. Then we go back to the history to see what happened next. We click on this second entry, and now we see the comments that came in response to the blog post for that day.”
Rogan nodded. “So Julia would have first seen the post of the day on the home page, but then she clicked to see the comments.”
“Correct. Now here’s what’s interesting. If you click on this third entry in her history, it takes you to the ‘Create Journal Entry’ box in the comments section.”
“Meaning that she posted a comment?” Rogan asked.
“Well, I can’t tell you that with a hundred percent certainty just from the laptop. The only way to do that would be if she had a keystroke recorder on her computer. But, yeah, I’m pretty confident that’s what happened.”
“Explain to me how you know that?” Ellie said. Pettinato was a detective-and perhaps a talented one at that-but she didn’t want his inferences. She needed to conclude for herself that two and two added up to four.
“Okay, but if I’m right, am I allowed to claim the hundred-thou reward? Just saw it online.”
“I’m quite sure the three of us aren’t eligible.”
“What I know for certain is that the three listings in her history correlate to these three actions. One, she pulled up the home page Saturday at 10:02 p.m. Two, she pulled up the comments, also at 10:02 p.m. And, three, she pulled up the page for entering comments at 10:03 p.m. Now, if you look here on the blog post that went up on Saturday, there’s only one comment posted within ninety minutes of that time, and it was finalized at 10:04 p.m.”
She understood now why Pettinato had concluded that Julia was the author of the comment posted at 10:04.
“And here’s the kicker.” He pushed back from the laptop to make sure they could get a clear look. “This is the comment that was posted that night.”
“If you thought that night twenty years ago was bad, wait until you see what I have planned. You won’t remember a single time on the clock. Maybe a day on the calendar if you’re lucky. Maybe a week. Or maybe I’ll keep you busy for a month. One thing I know for certain: You will not live to write about it.”
Ellie remembered the physics teacher saying that Julia was more likely to have been bullying someone else than being bullied herself. Julia may have only been sixteen years old, but these were not the words of a normal teenager.
“I assume you have no idea why your victim would say such a thing?” Pettinato asked.
They both muttered their no’s, still taking in the new information.
“Now, here’s where things get really perplexing. Your victim died Sunday night? Well, that’s all and well if we’re right about her posting the one comment on Saturday night. But guess what? There have been five other threats since Monday. Unless Julia Whitmire is surfing the Web from the afterlife, someone else out there is continuing whatever she started.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ramona was not usually an angry girl. She had been told over the years that she had plenty of reason to be an angry person. The word bitter had been used at times, too.
Usually the words came from people who thought their job was to tell Ramona how she should feel.
The first person she recalled telling her she was “allowed to be angry” was a school counselor in the- what? — the third grade? Yes, she was in Mr. Masterson’s class at the time, so it was the third grade. She didn’t get long division, so Dad got her a tutor. And when she still had trouble with long division, despite the private tutor, she saw the school counselor.
Why wasn’t she paying attention in school? Why did she seem so distant? Was she angry about her mother? You’re allowed to be angry, she was told. She was barely nine years old. What was there to be angry about?
Sometimes Ramona wondered how much she even remembered about her mother. Her dad was good about keeping photographs of her around, like that one of her and her mom by the bears statue. He also talked to Ramona about her-not so much anymore, but while she was growing up. She knew that memory could play tricks on a person. You could convince yourself from pictures and stories that you remembered a person, when really all you knew were two-dimensional images and rehashed anecdotes.
But Ramona was confident she had at least some true, authentic memories of her mother. Her name was Gabriella. Her girlfriends had called her Gabby, but at home, Ramona’s father always called her Gabriella. She wore this lotion that smelled like ginger and honey. When she was done applying it, she’d run her still-slick hands along Ramona’s forearms and say, “Now you and Mommy smell just the same.” That wasn’t a story Ramona’s father had ever told her, and someone can’t make you remember a fragrance that distinctively. That’s how Ramona was certain she really did remember her mother, Gabriella Langston.
Oddly, though, she could not remember learning she had died. She knew, because she certainly had been told, that her mother died shortly after Ramona’s fifth birthday. She knew because she had been told much later that a car on Egypt Lane had struck her mother during her ritual walk home from the Hamptons Equestrian Stables. She knew that the state police department’s accident-reconstruction experts believed that the car involved was a red Pontiac of some kind. Something about the tire tracks and paint transfer. A hit-and-run, they said. Probably a drunk, though there was no way to know since they never caught the guy. Ramona also knew that her mother’s ashes had been scattered in the ocean at Montauk, because she had loved the taste of the salty wind hitting her face as she stood on the rocky beach’s edge.
And she knew that, not eighteen months after her mother’s ashes had been scattered, her father had married Adrienne. She had been working as a nanny for another family in the building, back when she was still Adrienne Mitchell. The transition from neighbor’s nanny to supportive presence to new wife and stepmother was quick.
Then Ramona was in Mr. Masterson’s third-grade class and couldn’t do long division and got asked a lot of questions about being angry.
Then, in the fifth grade, she started complaining about being tired in the mornings. Her father sent her to her first therapist, who also asked Ramona if she was angry. In fact, she may have been the first to throw in the bitter word, not Mr. Masterson. The therapy sessions got down to once a month until a couple of years ago, when her father found pot in her purse. Somehow pot meant she needed to talk to a doctor once a week, like so many of the kids Ramona knew. And somehow all these trained experts seemed to think that Ramona should be angry.
The truth was that Ramona just wasn’t the angry type. She only remembered getting really angry about her mother’s death once. It was the first time Adrienne had tried to discipline her. Ramona must have been eleven. She pierced her ears without permission, and Adrienne had dared to express her disappointment. Ramona screamed at her-“You’re not my mother, Adrienne!” emphasizing the use of her first name-then ran to her bedroom. She could hear Adrienne crying in the living room but couldn’t bring herself to apologize.
When her father finally came home from work, she heard their voices in the kitchen. Maybe Adrienne wouldn’t mention the episode to him?
But then her father had come into her room and sat on the foot of her bed. She’d never seen him like that before. He was usually so flat in his affect. He didn’t show emotions. But that night, after putting in thirteen hours at the law firm, he had cried in front of his daughter. He said how much he missed her mother. He talked about the day he first met her, at a jazz concert in the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden.
She would never forget how matter-of-factly he had said that Adrienne was not Gabriella. Love at my age isn’t the same as meeting someone when you’re in your twenties, he had said. She hadn’t even questioned it at the
