I brought up the artwork I’d created for the October forum on my laptop and passed it around. Everyone liked it. I walked over to Luke and asked him what he thought. Without looking up, he said, “Uh-huh.”
I asked, “Is it OK with you if we use this?”
Again, Luke said, “Uh-huh.”
Close enough for getting his approval on the artwork, I supposed.
Next, I approached Felix. I asked him to update the artwork on the forum while I worked on a post about Misty.
That was one of the most difficult pieces I’d ever written. I titled it Missing Girl in Romania, so that it would make it easier for the people posting in The Tiger’s Den to find it in The Flying Saucer if they ever Googled Romania or Missing Girl and—this totally creeped me out—it could also get noticed by anyone, including the kidnappers, following my online posts to see if I ever mentioned anything about Misty or the other missing girls. As Wolf Song had so annoyingly pointed out, I was known as a hero for saving Annie. It made sense for me not to give up on finding Misty, and there were probably some bad guys nervous about that. After changing the words a bazillion times, I finally settled on this:
My name is Galactic Shade Griffin. All of you who know me personally know me as Shade. I use my full name as my byline for newspaper articles that I write, including the one I published in our brand new online newspaper titled The Day the Alien Circus Came to Town. I hope you all enjoyed that article. Well, now I have something else to write about and I need your help.
Last year at my old school, my best friend went missing on Halloween night. It was terrible. We finally found her. She’d been kidnapped by a sex slave ring. As you can imagine, she was an emotional wreck for quite some time. She’s gotten a lot of help and is doing better now. Ursula Wooten, another kidnapped girl, died. A third girl, Misty Perkins, is still missing. The police believe she was taken to Romania. If you know anything about her, please contact me or any of the other forum administrators. Thank you.
When I had finished writing it, I passed it around. The room got deadly serious and very quiet. I could hear every shuffle and movement anyone made and the sound of Luke tapping on his keyboard seemed to echo off the walls. I became aware of the collar on Luke’s dog rattling as he moved around the attached shack. I heard Luke’s mom sliding something off a surface (maybe a book?) and sitting down in a chair.
Finally, Gail who was the last person to read it, said, “This is good. And it mentions Romania enough times to attract the attention of anyone connected with her kidnapping who might be searching the Internet to see if anyone’s looking for her.”
Felix said, “We need to be careful about this, though. You don’t want to set yourself up to become a target, Shade. We’re apparently dealing with a powerful international kidnapping ring. We’re going to need the help of the police here.”
I said, “Yeah, I can talk with the police back in my old hometown, no problem. That’s who figured out Misty was probably in Romania.” In my mind, I decided I’d talk to Gabriella who worked with the police rather than contact the police directly, but no one needed to know that. “Is it OK with you if I post this in the meantime?”
When he shook his head yes, even though he looked concerned, I posted it.
Fifteen minutes later, Felix changed the artwork to our Halloween theme. Now we had the proper mood: a haunted house, witches, werewolves and jack-o’-lanterns. For me, the feeling ran a little too deep. I became flooded with memories of losing Annie.
Shortly after the artwork and my post went up, Luke pounded his fist on the desk. He jumped up, sat back down, and said, “Got it!”
We all went over to his desk and leaned in to look at his computer screen. Luke brought up a map of Romania. He kept zooming in until he had limited the area. Waving his finger over it, he said, “All the posts about Romanian Literature and Mystic Poets and those coming from the usernames mysticpoet, williamblake and bitdefender originate in this area. Boom! Romania!” He moved his cursor and zoomed out until we saw enough of Europe to view both Romania and Italy at the same time, then zoomed into a mountainous area with the label Lake Como. Pointing at Lake Como, he said, “The posts from username vampirekiss originate somewhere around here.” He never looked up. As though replying to someone who had asked a question, he said, “My best guess is that the people with these usernames—mysticpoet, williamblake, bitdefender, and vampirekiss—are all working together. Lake Como is an area of palaces and aristocrats. A lot of rich people vacation there, including American movie stars and politicians. There’s also an airport there. Someone with the username vampirekiss may be coordinating the movement of kidnapped girls through Italy into Romania from the safe haven of their luxury accommodations in or near Lake Como. Girls kidnapped in the U.S. could be arriving by airplane or boat. If it’s by boat...” Zooming out to show us a larger picture of Europe, he pointed to the coastal area of France. “...they could be arriving here before being smuggled across the border into Italy and on to Romania.” He swiveled around in his chair and looked at us. “Now, mind you, this only relates to the girls brought to Romania, if indeed someone’s leaving clues about Misty being in Romania. Chances are this is a large international kidnapping ring in which people are being kidnapped to work as slaves in many different countries. If Misty’s in Romania, it doesn’t mean she’ll stay in Romania. We need to work quickly. Shade, how soon can you contact the police?”
Before the words were completely out of his mouth, my cell phone rang. It was Annie! I covered my cell phone with my hand and said to Luke, “I need to take this. It’s extremely important. Related to what we were just talking about. I’m going to step outside for a minute...”
I put my phone to my ear and said, “I’m in a meeting, Annie; but I can step outside. Just give me a second...”
As I opened the door to Luke’s room, I confronted the dog. It was not what I’d expected. It was large, but it was also the most adorable fuzzball I’d ever seen in my entire life. It started growling the minute it saw me. Luke’s mom jumped up out of a chair, grabbed it by the collar and told it to shush. I apologized and stepped outside.
The wind whistled through the rusted cars and blew debris across the front yard. I said, “Annie, it’s so great to hear from you!”
In a somber voice, Annie said, “I met with Gabriella.”
A perfect storm. Another bolt of lightning.
I just said, “OK...”
Annie said, “She’s really interesting. So is her house and the way she works.”
I said, “Yeah, I know...”
Annie said, “I took the photos of the guy in the mall to her. She said she had an item belonging to Misty—a knife with blood on it—that you and Kailee and George from our Newspaper Club brought to her?”
I said, “Yeah, that’s right. We found it in Misty’s bedroom when we were searching for you and Ursula and Misty. We gave it to her, along with Misty’s diary and one of her notebooks, so that she could use her psychic powers to get clues from it.”
Annie said, “Ahhh, that explains it. Well, Gabriella said she’s certain the man in the photos is somehow involved in Misty’s disappearance. She suspects that he kidnapped her. She said that after she looked at Misty’s diary, she sensed darkness. She said she told you guys she pictured a cold, dank dungeon in a basement somewhere near a lake or, more likely, a babbling stream. She also saw a giant pine tree bent over from strong winds that had the number four on it, a pirate on a boat and a young woman wearing a pretty dress who was very scared.”
I almost dropped my phone. In a voice barely more than a whisper, I said, “Oh. My. God. Annie, thank you so much for reminding me. We just found more clues here that match Gabriella’s visions. I’ll call you back...”
At that moment, I moved as though in a nightmare. Terror wrapped around my bones like skin. It possessed my muscles, slowing them down, weakening my resolve. I fought against it. Somehow, I walked back into the house, past the growling dog, and into
Luke’s room. I said, “Show me pictures on the Internet of Lake Como. Are there pine trees there?”
Luke tapped a bunch of keys. He brought up photographs people had taken. Lake Como was surrounded by trees! We had a lake. We had the trees.
I said, “Are there boats there?”
Luke tapped some more keys. He said, “Yup. Lots of boats ... and ferries.”
I sat down on the mattress to steady my shaking nerves. I told everyone what Annie had shared with me. I told them that Gabriella was correct so much of the time, the police turned to her with difficult cases.
Luke said, “I suggest we interact with all the usernames we think are connected to Misty. We don’t know yet if they’re friend or foe. It could be that Misty’s found her way to a computer and is trying to reach out for help, writing in coded language to avoid punishment if her captors find out. It could be a friend of Misty’s in Italy or Romania trying to do the same thing. Or it could be the kidnappers getting into the forums to troll for anyone who’s on to them.”
Gail said, “We can do that. We should just be friendly, chat, give whomever it is an opening to confide in us.”
Mark said, “We shouldn’t all post in those discussions at the same time, though. It’ll look suspicious. Join in when the time seems right, when your comments seem natural.”
We all agreed to that.
What a day. What a perfect storm.
CHAPTER 16
Over the next month, discussions were lively in The Tiger’s Den and, eventually, The Flying Saucer. I and the other student administrators for The Flying Saucer looked through anything posted on either forum with keywords related to Romania or Misty with a kind of decoder lens. Looking for double meanings, it sure seemed like a whole lot of posts were being created with exactly that idea in mind.
The person going by the williamblake username started a second post in The Tiger’s Den on the Misty Poets of China titled The Origin of the Misty Poets. Their first post in that thread explained how they got their name:
The Misty Poets wrote in a misty, hazy or obscure way in an attempt to defy restrictions that the government had placed on art during China’s Cultural Revolution. Five of the Misty Poets were accused of inciting the Tiananmen Square protests with their poetry and were exiled. It’s painful to be in exile. One always hopes for a rescue.
My heart leapt into my throat when I read that one. If our decoder lens was the real deal, that post practically screamed out: Help me! I’ve been taken out of my country against my will!
The hair on my arms stood up. My scalp prickled. All my intuitive sensors started tingling. I paced back and forth in the tiny space of my room. OK, OK, OK, what should I do?
Kai said, “Could you maybe take off your shoes, so that I can concentrate? I’m trying to read Moby Dick.”
Oh, Good Lord. That would be hard to read in a soundproofed room with a caffeine drip for focus.
I was clearly used to being an only child with my own room. I said, “Oh, sure. No problem.”
Going over to the closet to kick off my shoes, I decided to grab the amulet necklace. As I fished it out of my jacket pocket, I noticed it was cool to the touch. Clasping it around my neck, I explained to Kai, “I think I’m going to wear this for inspiration.”
She said, “Yeah. You should.” Kai sounded far away in thought. Looking up, she said, “Why do you think people name their boats? I mean, we don’t name our houses. Not even trailers like the ones we live in, even though, if you think about it, they could be mobile like boats. I mean, if they weren’t cemented to the ground and didn’t have porches and all.”
For some reason, that struck me as funny. I started laughing. “What brought that up?”
Kai sighed. “The part in Moby Dick where Ishmael’s looking for a boat. He looks at three boats: the Devil-dam, the Tit-bit and the Pequod. Just got me thinking about why we name boats, but not houses.”
I laughed again and said, “Moby Dick will do that to you.”
Kai looked confused. “What do you mean?”
I smiled. “Make you think about anything and everything but the book itself.”
Kai grinned. She said, “Yeah, well, it keeps me engaged to think about stuff in my own life that relates to it.”
Swinging the amulet from my fingers, I asked, “So, what would you name your trailer?”
Kai said, “I don’t know. Maybe Shifter Shack. But that was a long time ago...” It wasn’t actually that long ago, only about a week. But I’m sure to Kai the time without her mother had started feeling like an eternity. As though guarding herself against memories that were still too painful, Kai went back to reading the details of purchasing a boat in the 1800s.
And I went back to mulling over posts in the forum.
Something about the discussion with boats triggered a memory that nagged at the edge of my consciousness. Then, I remembered!
I looked through the Discussion topics on The Flying Saucer forum. Things had really taken off! There were a boatload of topics (no pun intended). Scanning through them quickly, I couldn’t find it. Had it been deleted? Running down the list one more time, placing my finger on each line and making myself read the entire name of each topic, I finally found it. A Discussion titled: World Cruises and Other Boats. It seemed like such an odd title for a high school forum when I’d first read it. And it made the editor part of me scream. A cruise is an experience while a boat is an object, so a boat isn’t another type of cruise. You could say World Cruises and Other Types of Boat Travel, but not just Other Boats. But, anyway, that’s neither here nor there. I needed to see what that thread contained.
The initial post from someone with the username studentwithdreams said:
Someday, I’d love to have enough money to travel the world on a cruise. I’m sick to death of life in our small town. I read a lot and I watch a lot of movies. I want to go to places I’ve read about in books and seen on the big screen. What about you?
This had been posted about two months ago. Two months, and I’d never made the connection! That same day, a person with the username vampirelove—so similar to vampirekiss in The Tiger’s Den!—made the first comment. They said:
I feel exactly the same way. I love-love-love The Twilight Series. When I read about Volterra, the place in Italy where the Volturi live according to that series, I looked it up on Google. Check it out sometime if you want to see a beautiful place to visit. The pictures I’ve seen on the Internet are incredible! I’d love to see the clock tower.
There were something like over 1,000 comments after that one. It took a couple of weeks for anyone to post the second comment; but then someone finally clicked on the first one, discovered a discussion about Twilight and—Bam!—discussion took off. The title should have been changed from World Cruises and Other Boats to Love and Hate for the Twilight Series because, man, there was an awful lot of both in that discussion.
As time-consuming as it was, I decided I’d better read through all 1,000+ comments. Best decision I’d ever made. Down around comment #150, someone with the username mysticpoet—same username as the person posting in The Tiger’s Den, pinpointed by Luke as coming from Romania—left this comment:
I’d love to go to Italy. There’s a place in Italy where famous people including George Clooney, Angela Jolie and Brad Pitt go for vacation: Lake Como. Google images for it. It’s gorgeous there! It could be just part of a trip, actually. You could take a cruise to France, then travel by train to Lake Como, then go anywhere else you’d like. You could even go by train all the way to Romania where the Romanian coven in Breaking Dawn is from. How cool would that be?
I scoured the replies to that comment for any more clues. Nothing. Everything else was Twilight this and Breaking Dawn that. But, man, oh man, that original post and the first comment afterward was chock-full of clues and this one totally gave me the chills: it was like a map. Go by boat across the ocean to France, take a train to Lake Como, then go by train all the way to Romania. Is that the
route Misty’s kidnappers took her on? Was she in Romania now? All signs seemed to point to that.
I didn’t want to bother Kai, but I thought I should share this information with her, since she was helping me monitor the forums. I decided it would be OK. She seemed to need things to keep her mind off her painful loss, and these clues popping up in the forums were a whole lot more fascinating than Moby Dick.
I looked over at Kai. Resting her head in the palm of one hand, she was holding a paperback open with the other.
I said, “Hey, Kai, I have something important to show you. Do you have time?”
She said, “Uh-huh. I’ve got lots of time. Nothing but time.”
Sitting next to her with my laptop, I showed her all the clues we’d found on both forums.
Kai’s eyes grew wider and wider. When I finished, she said, “Wow. I don’t think you could ever unsee those connections now. It’s like a web...”
I said, “Oh, my God, yes—a web! I should draw that, make a diagram with connecting lines to all the different posts and IP address locations.”
Kai said, “That’s a good idea. Then you’ll be able to see everything more clearly. If it’s like solving a puzzle, you’ll be able to see the pieces and where they might fit.”
I got to work. Pulled up a world map on my laptop. Copied it into my photo editing program. Placed gold stars on places in Italy that seemed important, silver stars on important places in Romania, red stars on connecting locations in the U.S. and Europe. I placed black stars at the beginnings and ends of relevant train routes and green stars at the beginnings and ends of boat routes. Then I typed usernames we’d identified as significant inside circles, so they could be easily seen, and stuck them in the locations where their IP addresses had been located. Then I drew lines between things that seemed to have a connection, for example there was a very good chance that mysticpoet was the same person on both forums, and that vampirelove and vampirekiss were the same person using a slightly different username for each forum.
Shade and the Skinwalkers Page 20