by Ruthie Knox
“I’m listening.”
She frowned as she thought of the way Judah had changed when she’d tried to steer the conversation toward the threatening messages. It was a dozen tiny things, impossible to describe, but she knew he was hiding something. Her mind kept bumping up against it, the way her tongue would seek out a new filling in her tooth and investigate it again and again.
“I probably shouldn’t even be bringing this up. It’s just, I don’t know. He doesn’t seem to care very much about the gay thing, deep down. I think it will be a relief when he finally comes out. But the messages … They bother him, and he hasn’t told me why. He knows something about them he’s not saying.”
Sean squeezed her hand.
“It’s just a stupid hunch,” she said. “I’ll try to stick to the facts in my report.”
“Don’t d-do that,” he said. “D-don’t apologize, and d-don’t ignore your instincts. You’re good at reading p-people. That’s what I need you to do. P-pay attention to what p-people tell you, but pay attention to how they make you ffeel, too. That’s where you’re going to find the t-truth about them.”
She gave him half a smile in the dark. “Thanks, but I know I’m hopeless at this. Getting Ginny buzzed while she talks about her glory days on the cheerleading squad isn’t going to help Judah.”
“T-tell me something,” Sean said. “Would Ginny ever threaten Judah?”
“Ginny? Are you kidding? She wants to bear his children. She has their names all picked out and everything.”
“Doesn’t she know he’s gay?”
“No. I mean, she knows, but she doesn’t know she knows. Being in love with Judah is, like, college for her. It’s the thing she’s decided to do next after high school. She’s somewhere in her junior year, doing all the hard seminar work, but before too long she’s going to get senioritis and start thinking about moving on with her life.”
Sean smiled, his teeth flashing white in the dark. “Is that what yuh-you were like in c-college?”
Katie shook her head. “I didn’t go to college.”
The usual wash of emotion accompanied this admission, and she dropped Sean’s hand, pulling her knees to her chest. She studied the passenger door handle and willed herself to get over it, already.
Sean’s voice, when it came, had grown tentative. “I th-thought you went to ssschool in Anchorage?”
“Levi did. I worked to pay his tuition. We were supposed to be taking turns.” Her fingers found the naked skin where her ring had been, and she reassured herself the past would stay put.
“But you d-didn’t get your turn.”
“No. I was going to enroll. I’d saved up, but he took all the money when he left.”
“All yuh-your money.”
“He left me the business. Levi didn’t have much of a head for practical things. He didn’t understand that Wild Ride wasn’t worth anything without him, because he did almost all the guiding. It was his personality that brought customers back for repeat trips and got us referrals. People left him huge tips at the end of the week. They loved him. When he left, there wasn’t any reason for me to keep Wild Ride going, and our assets barely covered our debts.”
“It sssounds to me like he robbed you.”
She glanced at him, but it was dark, and she couldn’t make out his expression. Still, the view of nothing out the window was safer. “I married him,” she said to the night. “Your husband can’t rob you, not when you share a bank account.” What was hers had been his, and vice versa. It had been her mistake, and she’d learned to live with it.
Besides, all of that was in the past. It didn’t matter anymore. She’d jettisoned it, sloughed away all those years in Alaska like a locust skin.
If only remorse weren’t so damn sticky. She’d wanted to go to college—far more than Levi had, actually. But he’d convinced her that he should go first, and then he could work on getting their guide business off the ground while she got her degree and helped him out around the office. Then, when it came time to launch Wild Ride, he’d asked for her help for just the first year full-time before she started school. One year had turned into three.
She’d worked twice as hard to save up money for her own school while she paid for his, and in the end, he’d taken it. All that effort, flushed away on the wrong person.
Sean had dropped out of high school, but he’d managed to finish and get through college without any help from anybody. He’d founded his own company and become successful—all in the time it took her to perform her supporting role in the two-bit Alaskan melodrama of Katie and Levi.
She could tell herself not to feel small and stupid—that it was no way for a best self to behave—but how did you do that? How did you just stop feeling ways you didn’t want to feel? Nobody had ever explained it to her. The self-help books were useless when it came to practical matters like how to shut off unwanted emotions.
“You married him,” Sean said, a dangerous edge to his voice, “but that d-doesn’t excuse his being a c-complete scumbag.”
“No.”
The snow fell harder, swooping crazily in the headlights. Virtually no one else was braving the roads. A wiser woman would drop this whole line of conversation with a Gallic shrug, feigning indifference to the subject of education, boredom with the topic of Levi Rider.
“I wanted to be a psych major,” she said. “Levi was a business major, and I read all his textbooks. I did a lot of the assignments for him, actually. He didn’t ask me to, but I liked the work, and it came in handy for running the office. And I’ve taken a couple of classes online since I moved back home. Just gen ed stuff, Intro to Humanities and Calculus. But it’s something.”
“Why psychology?” he asked.
“I don’t know. It’s stupid, I guess. I like people, is all.”
Sean’s hand found her shoulder. “I w-want you to listen to me, all right? Are you listening, C-clark?”
“Yes,” she said, nervous at how serious he’d become.
“I never wuh-want to hear you use the word ‘stupid’ t-to describe yourself again. You’re not stupid. You were sssmart as a whip in high school, and you still are. It doesn’t make any d-difference whether you have a diploma or whether you married ssome prick who didn’t deserve you. If you want a c-college degree, you can get one, but you don’t need a p-piece of paper from the University of Alaska to tell me or anyone else what you’re worth, and you already know more about human b-behavior than ninety-five percent of the p-people I’ve ever met.”
He slid his hand under her hair and cupped the nape of her neck. “So knock it off, okay? Quit running yourself d-down for what Levi did. Levi’s only real talent is manipulating p-people. It’s all he ever had going for him. That, and you. I bet you anything that asshole ffalls to p-pieces without you around to make him look good.”
It was the longest speech she’d ever heard him make.
It was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to her about Levi.
A gust of wind knocked the car a foot over the yellow line, and Sean put his hand on the wheel again. She turned her face toward the window and wiped her eyes quickly with the back of her hand, wishing she could go somewhere else to pull herself together. Wishing he didn’t keep finding ways to make her like him.
He was kind, was the thing. Intelligent, compassionate, and interesting.
Wounded and complicated and defensive.
He was so different from what she’d thought a week ago, and a hundred times more dangerous. Because she could fall for him. If she wasn’t careful, she would fall for him.
And then he’d leave.
When she thought she could talk again without sounding wobbly, she said, “Thanks.” She smiled, watery and weak, and added, “He’s actually living in Hollywood. His mom says he’s trying to write screenplays and hobnobbing with the rich and famous. He was supposed to be going to Tibet.”
“Tibet?”
“To find himself. He wrote me a note when he left that said he was b
uying a plane ticket to Tibet. I thought he was in Tibet until six months ago, or I would’ve divorced him sooner. Turns out he’s in L.A. Which is hilarious, because he always gave me a hard time for being addicted to celebrity gossip. He said the whole celebrity culture is plastic and toxic, and no sensible person would pay attention to it.”
“C-california can have him,” Sean said. “Little shit p-probably fits right in in L.A.”
“Didn’t you like it there?”
“I live in Ssilicon Valley, honey. Northern C-california is a different universe from L.A.”
“Right.”
“You’ve never been to C-california?”
“No.”
“It’s different than here. I remember when I first moved out to Berkeley, n-nothing felt real. Like the grass was the wrong shade of green, and the light was too b-bright and juh-just off, you know? But I g-got used to it. The weather’s b-better. I have a nice p-place. Friends. My c-company.”
“So what are you doing in Camelot?”
The silence that spun out between them lasted a long time, maybe thirty seconds, but she waited patiently. It wasn’t a silence she could fill, because she honestly had no idea what he was going to answer, or if he would give her an answer at all.
“It m-makes me c-c-crazy,” he said finally.
“What does? Camelot?”
“It’s the ssame. Everything is exactly the same, the sswings at the p-playground at the school and Bev behind the c-counter at the post office and the damn upside-down tree by the church.”
“Did you always hate it?”
He paused before he answered. “No. When we ffirst moved from Zanesville, I loved it. My muh-mom went on and on about how great it wuh-would be t-to live in a c-c-college town, with the c-culture and the lectures and all that, but I juh-just thought, Clean slate, you know? Nobody in C-camelot or Mount Pleasant had ever heard me ssstutter. I think I hoped the sstutter wuh-would just go away. That maybe I c-could start over, and yuh-you know how that worked out. If we hadn’t m-moved in down the sstreet from Mikey, I probably never wuh-would have talked to anybody at all.”
He took a deep breath and exhaled. “I was angry all the time when I lived in C-camelot. Being back here makes me feel like a ffifteen-year-old kid again. I fucking hated being a fffifteen-year-old kid.”
“Yeah.” She thought she knew what he meant. The day she’d climbed into Levi’s beat-up Ford F-150 and driven out of town, high on youth and dreams and love, she’d been delighted to think she would never see Camelot again except to visit.
When she came home from Alaska and moved in with her parents, the village had felt stifling. So small, and so freaking precious with the ivy-imitation college buildings and the teeny Village Pub, the wee market and the graveled path bisecting the town like a beautified artery. The undergrads everywhere, playing their perennial games of disc golf and handing out earnest Amnesty International pamphlets from a card table set up in front of the bookstore.
Everyone knew everything about everybody, and she’d walked around town feeling like one of those plastic toys you could see right through to the muscles and guts. The Visible Woman. If it hadn’t been for Caleb offering her his house to live in, she’d probably have had a breakdown in the line at the deli and been given a nice padded cell.
But it had gotten better. Caleb had helped, because he understood about leaving and coming back, and he didn’t give a rat’s ass what anybody in Camelot thought of her, or of him, either. He never had.
Plus, she’d figured out after a while that Camelot hadn’t done anything to deserve her surly attitude. Sure, her mom and the parish ladies and Bev at the post office knew her whole sorry life story, but they all had better things to do than sit around gossiping about the Tragic Tale of Katie Clark all the time. They smiled when they saw her, same as they did for anybody else. The only decision she had to make was whether to smile back.
In the fall, the leaves turned scarlet and gold and orange before dropping in lazy, fluttering swoops onto Central Path, and the air began to bite. The students hurried to class with their hands shoved deep in their pockets and their books under their arms, serious in the pursuit of knowledge.
It was home.
It wasn’t Sean’s home, though. He’d spent only two years there, seething with rage and hurting. He hated her hometown.
He hated it, but he lived in it. He’d been living in Camelot for three seasons, for no logical reason she could grasp. No reason but pain, which she knew from experience created its own sort of paralysis.
Grief took so many forms.
“Hey,” Sean said. “You okay?”
She came back to herself. She’d been staring out the window again, lost in thought. “Yeah, sorry. I was just thinking. What have you been doing on the case? Are you getting anywhere?”
“I am, actually. That’s why I wanted t-to get to Camelot tonight. I think I’ve figured out a way to get c-closer to the identity of the p-person who sent these messages.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Judah won’t let me talk to anyone at Google to give up the IP info on the emails yet, and their ssecurity is too good for me to steal it myself.”
“I’m so disappointed in you.”
He flashed her a smile that made her heart thump. “If I had more t-time, I could probably figure it out. That would be really fun. And I’ve got contacts there I can hit up for a favor, so it’s not a lost c-cause yet. But in the meantime, I was looking at apps that let you post to all your different ssocial media accounts from one place, and it gave me an idea for a way t-to try to datamine all the different ways fans interface with Pratt to create profiles.”
Every time he talked about computer stuff or the case, he lost most of the stutter. He sounded confident in the most adorably nerdy way.
“So say a teenager in Poughkeepsie c-comments on his blog and follows him on Facebook,” he continued, “and she’s on his mailing list through the website and posts in fan-club chat rooms about him. She’s going to have all different usernames associated with the different accounts, right? That makes it hard to even tell she’s one person. She doesn’t have to go out of her way to c-conceal her identity. It just happens by default. But even so, she’s using the same IP address on all the accounts, say, and her interactions are getting routed through the same server banks in East Asia by her ISP.” Sean glanced at her. “You following me?”
“I’m good.”
That made him smile. He was excited, talk of computers bringing him fully out of the dark mood he’d been in most of the day. His enthusiasm had the unfortunate side effect of making her whole body perk up and stand to attention.
“So the ideal thing would be a program that pulls it all together and says, ‘All this is the same girl. Here are her account names, here’s her IP and all the details on her system and browser, here’s how often she’s been visiting and p-posting and such.’ ”
“ ‘Here’s her name and address?’ ”
“Not necessarily, but I can get us c-close enough that figuring out her name and address wouldn’t be that hard. The trick is to narrow the size of the field down to something manageable.”
“So how do you do that? If you write this program, doesn’t it give you, like, a billion results, with all these profiles of people? How is that useful?”
“Well, that’s a moot point, because I can’t sit down and write a program fast enough to give us that problem, anyway. But there’s ssome stuff I might be able to c-cobble together to do my bidding.”
The cocky way he said it made her suspicious. “Cobble together how?”
“I’m not going to tell you that part.”
“Is it legal?”
“More or less.”
“Would Caleb be mad if you told him exactly what you were going to do?”
“Probably. But I’m not planning to t-tell him.”
“So what’s the outcome if you manage to do this the way you want?”
“Hopefully I get
ssomething that lets me ID a group of people and then actually starts searching out their other business online and looking for ssuspicious activity. My goal is to figure out what a normal level of interest in Judah Pratt is and look for people who are outliers. Or for p-people who stalk the websites late at night.”
“All the messages from the psycho came after midnight.”
“Exactly. I’m hoping we’ll end up with a set of profiles we can sort through to find our guy.”
“Or girl.”
“You think it’s a woman?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” She’d assumed it was a woman all along, but she had no evidence to back that up. Caleb had warned her against making unfounded assumptions. Minus ten points for Agent Katie.
“This sounds good,” she said. “How long is it going to take you?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe before we go to Iowa City next weekend we’ll have some solid leads. It will help to have my own equipment. I’m gonna need your help, too, c-combing through the data. You know a lot more about Pratt than I do, and you’ll spot things I don’t see.”
“Just let me know when you need me.”
She didn’t mean it to be a come-on, but her voice emerged from her throat sort of husky and do-me, because Sean had her all revved up. Did it make her a complete pervert, that hearing Sean geek out about computer stuff was turning her on?
Probably.
Did she officially have a candy-apple-red girl crush on her partner?
Yes. Yes, she did.
Way to go, Smarticus. Very La Femme Nikita of you.
“Clark?” Sean asked.
Something menacing had crept into his speech. The good kind of menacing, if she wasn’t mistaken. The drag-you-to-bed-by-one-arm kind. She couldn’t make out his expression, but she thought if she could see his eyes they’d be almost black.
She didn’t answer him. She needed a minute.
“I’ve been thinking about last night,” he said. “What you told me.” His hand found her knee again. “Two years.”
“Yeah,” she whispered.