The laptop wasn’t password protected. The screen saver that came up was a photograph of Katherine and an older woman who looked so much like her, she couldn’t be anyone but her mother or an aunt. The two women were laughing, the camera obviously held in front of them in Katherine’s hand, as they yelled “Cheese!”
Anna clicked the START button and began methodically slogging through the files. Unlike paper files, computer files were snooper-friendly. There weren’t mountains of paper to hide the molehills of information. Katherine’s life was laid out and dissected as neatly as the wolf on the table in the carpenter’s shop had been.
Number-oriented, Katherine kept spreadsheets of her personal finances. She earned barely enough to live on but was subsidized by a monthly stipend. From her mother, Anna guessed by the notes Katherine had typed beside two of the entries. She paid her bills by computer. The usual cost of living was there: gas, water, electricity, food, insurance. Not surprisingly, Katherine spent about three times as much on books as she did on clothing and got her hair cut at a walk-in shop at the mall for ten dollars a visit.
She had been on the antidepressant Effexor for eighteen months. Half of America was on antidepressants, but Katherine had been given a hefty dose, 250 milligrams daily, plus.75 milligrams of Trazodone, an antidepressant and sleep aid. There were weekly payments to a Dr. Lewis. A psychologist, Anna assumed, from the regularity and frequency. Dr. Lewis’s name had appeared at about the time of the prescription payments for the antidepressants. The month prior to the advent of the mental health expenditures was an entry to another doctor with the note “D &C” alongside it. Other entries in the medical expenses were marked “co-pay.” This one wasn’t.
Maybe an abortion.
Then depression.
Under the file named “Black Ops,” Katherine had saved sixteen articles from newspapers and periodicals as ridiculous as The Star and as sublime as The Journal of the American Medical Association on the subjects of amnesia, traumatic amnesia, fugue states, repressed memory and multiple personalities.
The folder “Possibilities” contained short synopses of what Anna assumed were personal profiles from a matchmaking Web site. After each was written a number and a letter. Shorthand, possibly for the number of times they’d contacted and the letter grade Katherine had used to rate the contacts. There were considerably more F’s and D’s than A’s or B’s. The last entry had been two months before the “D &C” entered into the medical bills. One of the A’s or B’s might have been the father of the D &C. Or Katherine might have stopped dating – or shopping – at the time she became pregnant. What, if anything, this had to do with her death by wild animal attack a year and a half later Anna couldn’t fathom.
Under the file name “The Great Escape” were fragments of sentences, as if Katherine had been jotting down ideas or keeping a list.
THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS NEGATIVES ANYMORE.
IF MOTHER WAS DEAD, WHO WOULD CARE?
MURDER OR SUICIDE.
IF I WERE DEAD, WHO WOULD CARE?
MOTHER.
MURDER’S A DONE DEAL.
EVERYBODY’S ON THE NET.
WHO WOULD HIRE ME?
I WOULD DIE.
“Well, that’s just cryptic as hell,” Anna muttered. The list gave the impression Katherine was thinking of killing her mother or herself or her mother, then herself. The mother that gave her money every month. The mother she was hugging and laughing with on her screen saver.
THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS NEGATIVES ANYMORE.
The list that followed was nothing but negatives. “Everybody’s on the Net,” Anna read aloud. “Who would hire me? I would die.”
She minimized that screen and clicked on a file named “Pictures” from the main menu. Given the propensity to save everything when space is measured in gigabytes, Katherine hadn’t saved many photographs. Most were of animals, wild and domestic, that had been taken with more love than skill. There were a half dozen of Katherine taken with the woman on the screen saver, winter shots with mufflers and skis, both women smiling and laughing.
There’s no such thing as negatives anymore.
Because few people used film. Katherine had been talking about digital photography. Anna returned to the list saved in “The Great Escape” folder. Viewed from the perspective of photography, it made sense.
There’s no such things as negatives – in the classic stories of blackmail, victims had to buy back the negatives of incriminating photographs.
If Mother was dead, who would care? If Katherine was referencing compromising photographs this suggested, not that no one would miss Mother but that Mother was the person Katherine was most concerned about seeing the photographs.
What one didn’t want Mother to see was usually sexual in nature. Though born from Mother’s womb and because of her sexual congress with Father, girls – women – did not want Mom to see them in bed with some guy. Or some girl, Anna reminded herself.
MURDER OR SUICIDE.
Anna doubted the murder referred to Katherine’s mother. More likely it referred to the man who had impregnated her. Given the list of graded Internet “Matches,” it didn’t appear that Katherine had any steady boyfriend. She might not have had a flesh-and-blood beau at all. The men in “Possibilities” could have been fantasies, a virtual love life.
IF I WERE DEAD, WHO WOULD CARE? MOTHER.
Suicide was ruled out because of the devastating effect it would have on her mother. Katherine was thinking clearly enough to realize whatever the digital photographs contained, they would not damage her mother as much as the death of her daughter would.
MURDER’S A DONE DEAL.
The powerful emotion evoked by the concept of murder, with the other choice being self-annihilation, gave Anna the gut feeling that this line referred to the D &C, the death of an unborn child. Abortion was the word Anna would use. If Katherine used the word murder and still went through with the D &C to end her pregnancy, she had to have had a powerful motivation. The obvious one was that the child was terribly disabled or was a product of rape.
EVERYBODY’S ON THE NET.
WHO WOULD HIRE ME?
I WOULD DIE.
The rapist had sexually explicit photographs or videos of Katherine that he was threatening to put on the Web if she didn’t…
What? Anna wondered. Katherine had no money. A graduate assistant, it was unlikely she had any power.
If she reported the assault? If she pressed charges? If she didn’t continue to allow herself to be raped?
“Jeez, other people’s lives,” Anna whispered and shook her head, feeling suddenly sad.
Though prying eyes – should any be braving the night – had been shut outside, she closed the laptop partway and leaned her back against the wall.
The inferences she’d made from the list didn’t seem connectable to Katherine’s death. Blackmailers didn’t normally kill their victims; it was the other way around. There was also the annoying but inescapable fact that Katherine had not been coshed on the head and tossed into a Dumpster. She’d been brought down by Middle pack or Chippewa Harbor pack. There was no way to be certain since the only one on the island who could have run DNA from scat was dead.