It was always quiet in the morning, everyone in class or sleeping in. But it seemed unnaturally so that morning. There was a hush, a drawn-in breath. People had cleared out of the building. That’s what most sane people did when there was a murder suspect on the premises.
Soon I was on the fire stairs, creeping down fast and quiet. Then I was pushing out into the cold, bright morning. I could hear the crowd in the front of the building. Something was going on, because the volume went up-someone was leaving or arriving.
There was no one in sight out back. I walked, unseen, from the back door and headed straight into the woods.
I came up behind the Kahns’ house. I rang the bell at the back door and waited, though I knew no one would be home. Rachel would be at the shop, and Luke in school. The air seemed to be growing more frigid, but maybe it was just because I had been out so long, walking and walking. It would have taken me twenty minutes to get here on my bike. It had taken me nearly two hours on foot through the woods, a route I chose in order to stay out of sight. After a few minutes, I tried the key I had. It did fit in the back door. I wouldn’t have to go around front, where I had a greater chance of being seen. I stepped with relief into the warm kitchen. I locked the dead bolt and pocketed the key.
I dropped my bag by the table and I took out my cell phone. There were about a million messages, a list of alternating calls from Sky and Bridgette. I shoved the phone into my pocket and headed upstairs to Luke’s bedroom. On my way up, I peeked out the side window by the door. I half expected to see a crowd gathering outside, but it was clear. It was just the quiet street, trees bending in the window, windows dark, in a neighborhood where most people worked all day.
Why was I here? What was I looking for? It was clear to me that Luke had not written that note. But he was obviously involved somehow with whoever had. So I was hoping to find something in his room that would tell me who it was. Somebody had seen Beck and me together that night. Who was it?
I hadn’t forgotten Rachel’s journal, but that wasn’t why I’d come. So I passed her room and went straight to Luke’s. The locks on his door were even looser in their mounts, one of them dangling by a single screw. The door was ajar and I pushed it open. The room was tidier than it had been; it looked as if he and his mom had finished unpacking. The video-game system was no longer on the floor among a pile of games. It sat on an orderly-looking console, the game cases organized on one of the shelves. The bed was neatly made.
His computer stood on the desk under the window. I sat in his chair and touched the mouse. He didn’t have an e-mail account set up on his computer, and I remembered Rachel saying that she hadn’t allowed him to have one or to do any social networking. It was too hard to control, too many ways he could reach people, or the wrong types of people could reach him. She also said that she limited his Web access. But I had a feeling he might be smart enough to get around that.
I opened the Internet browser, went straight to his history. But I was disappointed. After a few minutes of scrolling through, I saw nothing but visits to online booksellers and video-game purveyors, gaming chat sites. He’d visited Wikipedia and some nature sites, probably for a report he’d been writing about bats. I kept thinking about Lester Nobody, the person who had posted on Facebook. Was it Luke? He had not, as far as I could see, visited any social networks, or any of the various Web-mail providers. But I kept clicking, back and back through his digital history.
Way down, around the time that he’d given me the first clue, I found a visit he had made to the Web site for The Hollows Historical Society. He’d clicked on the “Haunted Hollows” link, and visited the pages about the caretaker suicide and the Marla Holt grave site. It impressed me suddenly how sick the whole haunted tour was-profiting as it did from the misery and tragedy of others. But maybe it was a way to drain horrible events of their power, to make them earthly, manageable. Maybe it created a kind of distance from the real terrors of life and the world, made them seem like make-believe, almost funny. Or maybe people were just totally depraved and fucked up. I would have voted for the latter.
Next I checked the search-engine history. Again, at first glance it was pretty benign: questions about getting to the next level on his video game, general inquiries about bats in New York State, cool and scary scavenger hunts, killer chess moves (little bastard; I’d done the same thing). You could tell a lot about a person from his search-engine history. Don’t we all enter our questions into a little box on our computer screens? We expect all the answers to be there now, at our fingertips. Whatever ails us, worries us, interests us, makes us wonder. It’s all just a few keystrokes away, the whole universal net of knowledge accessible in a heartbeat. Our stream of consciousness is recorded now in digital form. Wading through Luke’s, I almost-almost-breathed a sigh of relief. He was just a kid after all. He found some spooky stuff online and he was trying to scare me. Any connection to the things that I was hiding was coincidence. I almost thought that. I almost had myself a good laugh.
Then, down near the bottom of the list, I saw my mother’s name. The sight of it cut a valley through me. He’d entered it weeks ago. In fact-I did some quick figuring in my head-he’d entered the name into his computer a week before I answered Rachel’s ad. I sat, staring at the screen, struggling to piece together how that might be and what it might mean. I ticked back over the last few weeks, months, to think how he and I might be connected. But there was nothing, just a dark churning in my mind. He does know me, I thought. He knows who I am. And with this thought, I felt equal parts terror and relief. The weight of lies is a terrible burden. It’s always a relief to lay it down, no matter how horrible the consequences.
There was a noise downstairs and I froze. I waited, feeling my heart thump in my chest. Then I heard it again and relaxed. It was the stupid icemaker, dropping cubes in the tray. I turned back to the screen and again began to follow the trail of his research. There was a mass of information about my mother and her murder-feature articles, entries on the crime Web sites, links to documentary footage, news-story clips.
Naturally, there was also a wealth of information about my father. There was the group lobbying for his freedom, led by a private investigator and a journalist who had recently published a book. They believed that my father, due to the sensational nature of the case, didn’t get a fair trial. Because he himself had been an acclaimed journalist before the murder, the media feeding frenzy was significantly ramped up and the pressure on the police to make an arrest was high. There was another man, my mother’s alleged lover, who was never found. The police, they claimed, arrested the most likely suspect even with a dearth of physical evidence, largely because of “the eyewitness testimony of a distraught and mentally disturbed child.” That would be me.
The group had another member-my father’s fiancée. She was a lawyer who’d worked on his case and subsequently fallen in love with him. As you might imagine, I worked very hard not to think about any of this, ever. I never watched television. I had hidden myself away in a little school under another name, and Bridgette and Sky had worked tirelessly to keep me cloistered and protected. But here it all was, scrolling out before me on an eleven-year-old’s computer screen.
I saw pictures of a much younger me, looking as grim-faced and pale as a corpse, blank really. That’s what the media kept saying about me: that I was blank, unemotional, odd. I was always sandwiched between my aunt and my grandmother (who died the year after my father was convicted. It took all the life out of her, really. You could see her draining, shrinking, growing gray).