by Emma Accola
“According to this, your computer doesn’t recognize that printer or any other. You couldn’t print from it right now if you wanted to. And you don’t have any print jobs in the queue.”
I shook my head. “That can’t be right. I printed a new roster this morning using that printer.”
“Not anymore.” Micah stood up. “You’ll have to call somebody in technology support to get this computer back on the printer network. I don’t have the kind of access needed to do that.”
“I have been hacked.”
Suddenly he looked very worried. “I know.”
My mouth became dry. “Harry Spice could have changed that setting back and didn’t. He wanted me to know what he did here.”
“There’s no evidence tying this to Harry Spice,” Micah said, but to me his voice lacked the conviction of his words. “There’s nothing like that here.”
My fingers drummed on the top of my desk. “Somebody took my printer off the network.”
“Somebody did, but there’s no proof it was Harry Spice. If you go making accusations that you can’t prove, you’ll only sound delusional.”
“You’re really saying that to me? You weren’t at the hearing when Harry Spice was sentenced to prison. He started shouting about how he was innocent and called Caleb a fool who had chosen the wrong enemy. He yelled at me that he was going to burn my kingdom down. Caleb must have told you that.” I jabbed my finger at the computer screen. “He’s carrying out the threats. This needs to be investigated.”
“I will do what I can, but I doubt that either the college or the LMS company will expend resources to find a hack that we can’t prove occurred.” Micah’s words came slowly as if he heard the anxiety behind my voice. His phone chimed with a reminder. He glanced at it, then stood up and went to the door. He placed his hand on the door handle. “I’ve got a meeting.”
I jumped in front of him, rattlesnake quick, and leaned my back on the door. I wasn’t finished with him yet. His nearness made me hot. Tall and slender in his black two-piece suit, he smelled of sandalwood and freshly pressed cloth. Micah’s eyes flashed. He loomed over me, clearly unhappy at being trapped in my office.
“Really?” he asked.
I didn’t move.
His words came sharp and frosty. “You’re wearing an engagement ring.”
“And you’re wearing a wedding ring.” Since we were doing this, I put my hand on his where it rested on the door handle and felt the warm smooth gold of his ring against my palm. “You’ve been single for more than a year now.”
“And you never had a wedding.”
My heart jolted painfully. “You’ve been keeping up on me.”
He gave me a look of extreme arrogance, as if he were dismissing an annoying student. “We’re done here. Step aside.”
“Not until you answer my question.”
Micah’s eyes glittered expectantly. “What question is that?”
“I want you to tell me why you didn’t kiss me that day.”
Micah froze, speechless, as if I both repelled and fascinated him. I made him uncertain, and he wasn’t used to being uncertain. He tried to step back, but my hand still trapped his. The tops of his cheekbones became tinged with pink. His breath came quicker.
“You wanted to,” I went on, pressing my advantage. “We were standing in the winery so close that my dress was blowing against your legs. The tasting room had closed and we were alone in the shade of the patio. There was jazz playing and the air smelled of grapevines. We had been tasting red wine and eating dark chocolate. Your mouth was sweet with it.”
Micah seemed to pull back into himself. His eyes became unreadable and his reply came softly as he carefully plucked my hand off of his. “Pretty Gracie, some incidents ask questions and others answer them.”
It was all I needed. I stepped aside and let him leave. Alone, I sat down and stared at my computer screen. My chair was still warm from Micah. A slow, wicked smile tried to pull up the corners of my mouth. Whether he liked it or not, Micah would join me in the game Harry Spice had set in motion. This time Micah would be on my side. Harry Spice had underestimated me before, a mistake that put him behind bars for a year. Nobody’s fool, he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. Neither would I.
*
On Fridays I wasn’t scheduled to teach any classes, so I had fallen into the habit of running errands in the mornings and working in the afternoons. I wore faded jeans and a stretchy shirt when I carried my briefcase and laptop out onto the patio. The afternoon sun heated up the enclosed area and felt good on my skin as I settled in to finish grading the King Lear essays. When the last one was done, my heart began an unpleasant racing because I would have to open the LMS to record the grades. This reluctance had been going on all week. Every time I opened it or the campus email, my body tensed, fearing something new from Harry Spice. Pushing down my anxiety, I logged in, swallowed hard, and found nothing out of the ordinary. Relieved, I began entering the grades into the LMS. When the last one was in, the sound of the neighbor’s patio door sliding open distracted me. It had to be Micah. He lived in the neighboring townhouse, something I hadn’t known until Gary handed me the keys. Very quietly I saved my work, closed my laptop, and slipped the essays into a folder. I hadn’t spoken with Micah since the threat incident three days ago. It now seemed like a bizarre memory, as if it happened when I was drunk.
“Gracie?” Micah was so tall he could look over the top of the privacy fence. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude. Do you have a few minutes?”
“You knew I lived here?”
“Of course I knew. Gary told me months back that he had offered you his place and suggested I bring you a pan of brownies as a welcome gift. He said that he didn’t know which would be stranger, having someone using his office or his house. May I come over?”
“Do you have brownies?”
He laughed. “No, but I talked to Ray Biles today.”
My face reddened, making me glad the light on the patio had grown dim. Ray Biles had stopped by my office yesterday saying he had nothing to report. Ordinarily people were captivated by the animal décor, but Ray didn’t seem to notice anything at all in the little room but me. His eyes traveled around my face in a way that made me know that he had formed a lot of questions about me. That both annoyed and embarrassed me.
“Has something happened?” I asked.
“It’s about Lucie Eagan.”
My heart gave a jolt. “What about her?”
Micah easily threw himself over the redwood fence and dropped down to my side, as if he’d done this many times in the past. He wore a charcoal gray suit and pale blue shirt, though at some point he had taken off his tie and unbuttoned the collar. My eyes found that little triangle of skin on his chest, and my palm tingled where I had touched his hand a few days ago.
“May I?” he asked, pointing to a patio chair.
I nodded. Micah lowered his body into the chair, all the while keeping his eyes on me, as if he were afraid of what I would do next. Then his eyes flicked over my low-cut shirt, faded jeans, and bare feet. The patio, only the size of a small bedroom, seemed to shrink, as if Micah and I were trapped in a high-sided box together. The gold ring on his finger glinted in the shadowed light.
“Could you put your cell phone and laptop inside, please?” Micah asked.
I didn’t need to ask why. Silently I set them on the kitchen table and pulled the patio door closed behind me. Micah watched me the whole time, missing nothing.
“Thanks,” he said once the door was closed. Relaxing, he leaned back in his chair.
“What’s this about?” I felt his eyes on me, missing nothing. This had to be about Harry Spice; otherwise, he wouldn’t have asked me to banish the electronics.
“Have you heard from your student Lucie Eagan?”
I felt a chill. “No. She wasn’t in class yesterday. I emailed that to Ray. Why?”
Micah unbuttoned his suit jacket. “Her mother contacted the camp
us police this morning. Apparently Lucie didn’t come home on Tuesday from her job at a shoe store in the mall. That in itself didn’t worry her mother because sometimes Lucie stayed over at friends’ and cousins’ homes. But yesterday the manager of the shoe store contacted Lucie’s mother because she didn’t show up or call in sick. Lucie’s mother wanted Ray Biles to find out whether she had attended any of her classes. Given that her name had come up earlier in the week with you, he called me.”
The expression on Micah’s face made me wary. “What’s Ray think?”
“He thinks it’s fishy that you claim to have found a threatening message from Lucie right before she goes missing. To be fair, though, he added that people have many reasons for disappearing.”
“And you? What do you think?”
Micah stiffened. “I would tend to agree.”
“Except?”
“Except that Caleb told me about the threats Harry Spice made after he heard the guilty verdict.”
Suddenly I felt sweaty and cold at the same time.
Micah went on. “I called the company that the college licenses the LMS from and asked one of the programmers whether it was possible for a file to be posted and then disappear after it was opened. He went on and on about how many precautions the company has taken to avoid being hacked by motivated computer engineering students trying to change their grades. Finally he admitted that if it’s digital, it’s vulnerable to a hack.”
I drummed my fingers on the patio table. “Harry Spice said that in this world there’s no such thing as a locked room or closed door or shuttered window. The right to privacy is only a façade and we’re all self-invading our personal lives with technology.”
Micah’s expression darkened. “He should know. His motto is that everything important in our lives should be run from a cell phone. The tech magazines call him a rising star.”
It was Harry Spice’s company that had installed the new computer network at my family’s winery, thereby bringing him into my life. “He’s no rising star. He’s a black hole who sucks in everything around him.”
“He didn’t suck you in.”
I tipped my head toward my patio doors. “My computer has tape over the camera. I keep a dish towel over my cell phone and put it in the closet if I’m doing or saying something I wouldn’t want the world to know. To me those devices are treacherous little spies, all eyes and ears that never need to sleep. I’ve made a deal with the devil and traded my privacy for convenience.”
“It’s not an either-or situation. You’re taking precautions.”
“Or reinforcing fear. He used Tamra’s computer to spy on her. He offered to pay her tuition and rent, buy her a car, clothes, as if her affection was for sale. But she was scared of him. She told him that if he didn’t leave her alone, she would get a restraining order. None of that is news to you, is it? You climbed all over our lives with a microscope.”
“I was Caleb’s criminal defense investigator.” Micah hadn’t missed the dangerous edge on my voice. “We don’t get to pick and choose so we only take cases for those we prejudge as innocent. That’s not how our justice system works and you wouldn’t want it any other way.”
My gaze never left Micah’s face as my history with him bubbled up. “Where were all your high-minded, due process notions when the police came looking for Tamra and me after someone roughed up Harry Spice?”
“Roughed up? He had black eyes, broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and lacerations. To clarify, Caleb and I didn’t call the police. They were summoned to the emergency room by the medical staff. Harry Spice claimed he’d been mugged, but the staff didn’t believe him.”
“For what it’s worth, I had nothing to do with that beating.”
“Tamra’s brothers didn’t either,” Micah shot back. “And you’re not going to even slightly pretend you’re sorry it happened.”
“I’m just keeping it real.”
Micah averted his gaze and stared into the clump of potted plants before speaking again. “Have you been able to make peace with your family?”
I flinched. For someone who kept his distance from me, Micah certainly knew a lot about my personal life. “Are we changing the subject?”
“Yes,” he said, drawing out the word.
“My family has nothing to do with you.”
“Or you either, apparently.”
“That was a low blow,” I said in frigid tones sharp enough to cut steel. “What do you care anyhow?”
Micah dropped his gaze, not looking at me. “Answer me and I promise you that you’ll understand why I asked.”
“Am I supposed to spill my guts and trust you?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not much of an answer for the guy who worked for Harry Spice.”
“Then ask a better question. Better yet, save your outrage for someone who doesn’t know what you’ve been through. I’m probably the only person in your life right now who is willing to listen to your side of the story without hating or judging. I’ve heard the gossip about what happened with your sister and her fiancé, and for what it’s worth, I haven’t believed it.”
A lump formed in my throat. Everyone else had. “Why is that?”
“Because a smart and beautiful woman like you wouldn’t demean herself with a man like your sister’s fiancé. You’re also too practical to believe the words of your own fiancé when your own truth tells you something different.”
Suppressed tears roughened my voice. “My brother still talks to me.”
“When no one is around to hear him?” Micah didn’t miss how his words made me wince. “Sorry. That came out like a cheap shot.”
It stung because Micah was right. Glen only saw me at coffee shops for visits that lasted half an hour at the most. He always came with an impatient air, glancing every few minutes at his cell phone, as if seeing me was a reluctant addition to his schedule between much more important matters. When I asked him about the winery or Mom and Dad, he would answer slowly, as if he were being deposed. Rarely did he look into my eyes. The clatter and voices of the coffee shop filled in the long, awkward silences. Even when I asked Glen about his job managing a grocery store, he had little to say, offering only the same reliable comment or two about the difficulty of getting good produce.
“Glen and Mom and Dad feel torn between Faith and me,” I said and then swallowed hard. The falling out with my sister had taken a terrible toll on the family.
“And you don’t want to burden them with requests that they see you too.”
“In time they will come around.”
“Don’t count on it. Time doesn’t heal wounds. Time passes and they’ll learn to live their lives as if you never existed.”
Micah’s words made my pain flare. “They can’t erase me like a scuff on the floor.”
“They’ll try because remembering you is worse.”
“What do you expect me to do? Train myself to forget them?” I asked with some venom. “Who do you think you are to say such things to me?”
“I’m the one who’s going through this with you.” Micah’s expression became narrow and knowing. “You’re mad at Faith, aren’t you, for not believing you when you told her that you weren’t the woman in the video with her legs wrapped around her fiancé? You believe that she should have taken you at your word because you’re her sister. And you’re even madder because you have no way of making this right, so there’s no way for the wound to heal. Not for either of you. And now you have to assume that Faith will never, ever again want you in her life.”
Hot blood pounded in my ears because Micah was right. My eyes burned with their endless supply of unshed tears. “She said that facts can’t be ignored.”
“And ears are useless when the mind can’t hear.” Micah’s insight seemed to pierce into my soul. “And she has you wondering what kind of woman you’ll be when all this is over.”
“How can this ever be over?” The injustice of being wrongly accused felt like being eaten alive,
one tiny little pecking bite at a time until there was nothing left of me but the unclothed bones of my innocence. And once reduced to that, nothing else would make a damn difference to me.
Until just now, I’d never talked about the pain of losing my family with anyone except Tamra. Any discussion about my family blew open the closet doors in my mind where my pain waited like a crouching animal. All my life I’d been taught that families were a blessing, a safe place to go for love and acceptance, but no one had any wisdom for those of us who were unjustly cast out. I doubted that anyone in my family had lately called me a gift from heaven. Worse, with every day that passed, my history with them in the winery became more removed, like hazy memories from a long ago vacation. This conversation about my parents and Faith had to end. My logic rose up to rescue me. I turned the microscope back on Micah.
“Why the hell are we talking about my sister instead of Lucie Eagan?”
“I’m asking because Tamra has gone into hiding and you seem to be alone.”
My pain made me harsh. “I only seem to be alone. I’m not desperate or anything. Besides, you’re still wearing your wedding ring. It’s not fair to lecture me when you’re still clinging to the past. What’s that all about?”
Micah’s face became like a thundercloud though his voice stayed soft. “Maybe I want the same thing you do since you’re still wearing the engagement ring of the fiancé you kicked to the curb.”
The idea unsettled me because I already knew that I didn’t want the kind of love Leonardo and I had shared, not anymore. Love wasn’t why I wore the ring, though I wouldn’t admit it to Micah. “I tried to give it back, but he didn’t want it.”
“That’s why you have it, but that’s not why it’s on your finger.” He leaned back and studied me with knowing eyes. “You can’t let go.”
“I have let him go. Him.” My words were soft with menace. “I choose to keep the ring.”
Micah tipped his head slightly as he regarded me. “That sounds like a distinction without a difference. So why do you keep the ring? It’s not because you’re sentimental about it. It’s not for the sake of a lost love or your feminine pride. You know yourself to be desirable because men hit on you all the time. No, you keep it because you need to figure out what happened, why a man you had been seeing for years suddenly begins cheating and you didn’t see it coming. Am I right?”