Having done the head work over the book earlier in the day, I knew the corner I was now in. I could suggest she search the house, and she could choose to believe I’d stowed the camera elsewhere. I could demand she look through the last year’s credit card statements: she could laugh in my face and ask me how hard it was to get a couple hundred bucks out of an ATM and take a quick drive to the Bradenton Outlet Mall. Every time I set up one of these barriers for her to knock down, it would just make me look more and more as if I was not only lying, but doing it with malice and forethought. The harder I tried and the better I argued, the more it would look like I had my story straight, and that would just make it worse.
And anyway, the camera wasn’t the point.
I said all this. Steph agreed. She agreed all too readily. She agreed that the real point was that I had snuck around to Karren White’s apartment—on the pretense of being out at a meeting that (surprise, surprise) hadn’t materialized and thus couldn’t be checked. The real point, she was happy to see that I’d grasped, was not only was I obsessed with my coworker, but that I was enough of a loser to take stealth pictures of her naked, instead of having an affair like any normal person.
“Hold on,” I said. “Whoa. I’m not obsessed with Karren. What are you talking about?”
“No? So how come you’re always mentioning her?”
“What?” I couldn’t help being distracted by each untruth as it arrived. “Of course she crops up—we work in the same office. I know the names of everybody you work with at the magazine. I know the names of their children. Karren’s an operator, you know that. I only bring her up to say how I’m trying to get around her, to get my thing going, to build my rep.”
I took a step toward her. She stepped back, making a sound like a can of soda being opened.
“Don’t even try it,” she said.
“Steph, listen. Something else happened today. An e-mail.”
“You e-mailed her?”
“Just listen. When I got back from returning that book to Amazon, Janine was sitting in the office laughing at some joke she thought I’d sent.”
“Yeah, you sent it to me, too. It wasn’t funny.”
“That’s just it—I didn’t send it.”
“What?” Steph looked angry at being derailed.
“I didn’t send it. To you or Janine or anyone. Somebody else did, using my e-mail account. The reason I was late home this evening—before you even start speculating about that—is because I was talking to the IT guy from Shore, trying to work out what happened, how the e-mail got sent.”
She snorted. “Why would I believe that?”
I yanked out my phone. “His number’s top of the outgoing call list. Call him right now, Steph. Ask him if we just sat and had ice cream outside the parlor on the Circle. Ask him if he had a chocolate sugar cone. Or do you think I’ve gone so far into the heart of darkness that I’d recruit some random patsy to lie about my whereabouts?”
She didn’t say anything. The expression on her face remained lodged in a mixture of anger, hurt, and disgust.
“Wait one second,” I said, and sent up a prayer to whatever tiny god looks after Realtors who are in serious trouble not of their own making. I leaned over the laptop and fired up my e-mail app. Five e-mails came straight in. A couple of positivity newsletters, two from clients . . . and one from Kevin the Geek. Thank god.
I opened the e-mail. “Look.”
Reluctantly, Steph bent forward and read what was on the screen. A reference to the meeting I’d just described, a page of complex instructions on how to check for a keystroke checker, and an introduction to Wifi Spying 101.
She wouldn’t look at me. “So what does that prove?”
“Someone’s messing with my e-mail,” I said. “They ordered a book from Amazon in my name and this morning sent out a dumb, racist joke.”
“Even if this is true, how does it have any bearing on you taking pictures of Karren?”
I took a deep breath, then let it out. She was right, in fact. It didn’t. With the photographs, we were into new and uncharted territory.
Which we then set about exploring, at length.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Nothing had become clearer or more positive by the time Steph went up to bed. We’d gone round in circles until the momentum of tiredness pulled her out of my orbit. I didn’t follow straightaway. Steph and I have had very few full-blown rows in our years together, but I knew time was needed to deflate this, time and the space it would give for common sense to prevail. You don’t tell an angry person they’re wrong to be angry. You have to wait for the emotion to diffuse.
Before that, following the instructions in Kevin’s e-mail, I’d checked my laptop. There were no strange apps hidden among my login items, no windowless background processes chugging away—at least as far as I could see. Kevin had reiterated in his e-mail that there were more hard-core possibilities, but that any attempt by me to establish their presence would almost certainly result in my computer being “borked.” I didn’t know what that meant, but it didn’t sound good and I didn’t want it. My life felt “borked” enough already.
“Right,” Steph said, when I told her I’d drawn a blank. “So no supersecret spy software. How weird.”
She was sitting stiffly at the extreme far end of the sofa. She’d worn through some of the initial fury, but retained the air of a volcano that could wipe the hell out of town if it so chose. I guess she’d assumed that, presented with what she’d thought was incontrovertible evidence, I would cave immediately, throwing myself on her mercy. I hadn’t. In fact, while I’d been running the tests on my laptop, I’d been simultaneously delivering a point-by-point recap of the true events of the previous evening (which did not include amateur night soft-core pornography) and offering her my cell phone (again) to call Melania, Warner’s assistant, for confirmation.
Her refusal to consider doing this weakened her position—even though, yes, I could still technically have driven up to Karren’s apartment regardless of whether a real meeting had been scheduled—but I took care not to belabor the point. Steph was genuinely upset, and with good reason. It didn’t matter how firm my defense—or whether she eventually came round to believing it—she’d still spent time believing something different. You can’t unthink a thought. Your mental patterns, your perception of someone, has been changed. That can’t be undone, only superseded by fresh and concrete evidence—which so far, I didn’t have.
“So it must be someone scanning our wifi,” I said, looking across the room to where the unit sat, close to where the cable feed entered the house.
“Oh, definitely,” Steph said acidly. “I wonder: will it be the Jorgenssons or the Mortons?”
She had a point. Quite apart from the basic absurdity of our neighbors wanting to screw with my e-mail, there were practical issues. The Jorgenssons were Longacres’ token oldsters, in their midseventies: healthy, golf-obsessed, surrogate grandparents to half the kids in the community—and no one’s idea of cybervillains escaped out of The Matrix. On the other side we had the Mortons. Again, nice people, and moreover a family who cleaved to a genteel subdivision of some Christian faith that had a downer on the Internet as a whole—source, as it is, of unwholesome images and concepts and ways of being. I remembered being apprised of this a while back, during an affable but interminable dinner party. They didn’t even have cable.
I sat back from the screen, baffled. “It’s not going to be the Smiths opposite, either. I had to install Microsoft Office on their computer for them.”
Steph chose not to reply. She just sat there looking at me, her right foot twitching up and down.
“It could be war-driving,” I offered weakly.
I was surprised to discover she knew what that meant. She poured scorn on the idea, but eventually conceded that someone’s kid in the community might possibly have the hardware, know-how, and adolescent assholeness to have cruised by the house, taken a snapshot of what was traveling through th
e ether, and snatched my e-mail and Amazon passwords from it.
The pictures remained harder to explain. I tried to tidy this away by harping on about the wifi conundrum, but Steph wasn’t buying. She asked how some kid could even know about Karren in order to take the pictures. I didn’t know the answer. All I could do was say what hadn’t happened. I denied taking the pictures, denied all knowledge of how they’d ended up on my machine. Denied it loud, denied it long. There was nowhere else that the conversation could go—nowhere, at least, without the fade down and back up of sleep.
Her anger had burned down to embers by the time she went to bed, but her eyes looked hollow. There was no parting shot before she went upstairs. She merely looked at me as if wondering what she was seeing, and then went. Maybe I should have gone up with her, but it didn’t seem like the right course.
Instead I went and floated around the pool for a while. I was thinking about the photographs, mainly, and eventually found myself opening doors that hadn’t occurred to me earlier—preoccupied as I had been with the clear and present danger, with dealing with the emotional firefight in front of me.
There was another thing to consider, I realized, something I hadn’t mentioned to Steph. Partly because I hadn’t noticed it at first, but then, once I had, because I didn’t know what it meant, and there was enough incomprehensibility between us. I hadn’t thrown the pictures of Karren away, though that might have seemed an obvious thing to do (“Look! See! I throw them away! Ugh!”). Steph had insisted that I should. She’d even tried to do it herself, shoving me aside and skating her fingers across the track pad during one of the more heated portions of the discussion. I’d used her own tactics back at her, asking what the point would be when I could have stashed copies on the net or on the memory card of this alleged camera that I didn’t own. I’d argued that I needed them to try to get to the bottom of where they’d come from. It was just after preventing her attempt to throw them away that I’d noticed this final thing—the fact that finally got me to climb out of the pool, cold and tired and confused.
I got out to check the folder on the computer once again, to make sure I’d seen what I thought I’d seen.
When I opened the door to our bedroom, the lights were out. I could hear Steph breathing in the darkness, however, and it didn’t sound to me like she was asleep.
She said nothing as I carefully slipped into bed. I didn’t say anything, either. I lay there on my back, thinking about what I’d confirmed. The pictures of Karren were all in a folder together on my laptop’s desktop. I keep as tidy a virtual desktop as I do in the real world, and knew I hadn’t created this folder. Someone else had, somehow, before filling it with these photographs.
The folder had been called MODIFIED.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Hunter returns, eventually. This time the man in the chair knows he’s coming. He hears the clatter of a distant door being opened and re-secured. It sounds like something temporary, a piece of hardwood with a padlock on it.
He hears the measured tread of footsteps approaching along the concrete of the floor below. These cease, beneath where he is sitting, to be replaced by a difficult-to-interpret sequence of noises that culminate in Hunter pulling himself up onto the half floor of this level. He does this with disconcerting ease, like a man hoisting himself out of the shallow end of a swimming pool. The man in the chair cannot know how much of this strength and agility comes from exercises Hunter performed, day in, day out, in his cell; alongside regimens in the yard and further programs during the twice-a-week free-weights sessions prisoners were allowed if they wanted. When he’s up, he dusts his hands off. He appears to ignore the other man, walking over to one of the tarps, pulling it aside, and looking out.
“Beautiful day,” he says. “You possibly found it kind of warm, though, maybe.”
The man in the chair says nothing. Hunter has been back before, he knows. The man woke from a fractured drowse not long after dawn to see that a cool bottle of spring water had been placed in the middle of the floor, next to the chalked words saying “Who else?”
Not very subtle. But effective.
Were it possible for the human mind to move physical objects, the bottle would no longer be there, but instead in the man’s lap, and empty. It isn’t. It’s still standing next to the chalk letters. And it’s still full.
Hunter sees him looking. “Oh, right,” he says. “You saw that? The water? Looks good, huh?”
“Fuck you.”
“Want to know what I had for breakfast? Or lunch? Man, I am enjoying getting some proper food again.”
“I refer you to my previous answer.”
Hunter tells him anyway. The man tries not to hear. His head feels like it’s in a vice. Every swallow is bleakly memorable. He is finding it hard to think in straight lines, relying upon stitching together moments of clarity occasioned by surges of pain from his leg. It’s been bleeding intermittently ever since Hunter dropped the cinder block, and the muscle has started to feel heavy, thickened, right up into the thigh. He hopes part of this is merely related to the low, throbbing ache present in most of his body, dehydration, and having been forced into the same position for such a long time.
It says something for the magnitude of this discomfort that the man welcomes the distraction of wrenching twists of hunger when they come. He is a man whose needs are used to being met before they have to even raise their voice. His body is becoming shrill now. His body is getting concerned. Trying to think about abstract matters is the only tactic at his disposal for muting its visceral anxiety.
He has spent all day focusing on what to do, therefore, and finally thinks he has a plan.
It formulated late. Sleeping isn’t easy when you’re strapped to a chair, and his night was rough—not least because a series of short thunderstorms kept waking him up. He zoned out for a while in the early afternoon. Remembering stuff. Some recent memories, others from way back. He has tried to think only of good times, but he has learned a lesson, a little late. When you act in the world, consider that at some point—on your deathbed, or in your death chair—you may find yourself looking back. The ratio of good to bad within your personal story is shown in a very harsh light under these circumstances. Time can flatten out, too, making your early teens seem as present as the day before yesterday.
A small group of men, standing around a woman.
That time when he and Katy hitched a ride down to Key West and got burned to crap watching the rays swim in the harbor and then watched the sun go down and he didn’t mind feeling like one of the crowd for a while.
A half-naked woman, drunk on martinis, her hand raised to a young boy.
When he nods back into full awareness, he’s already accepted that he is going to have to give someone up. Everything about Hunter and the way he is conducting himself says he isn’t about to go away. That decision’s made. Done. He’s got a choice of only three, or so he thinks at first—and given that he’d already started to move against these people himself, he could not care less. The only question is whether the selection he makes will have any influence on his own chances of survival.
But then he realized there was another option, a name he could reveal that would not appear to involve betraying decades of trust, and that might even send a message that could bring help. The idea felt like a draught of cool water flowing briefly through his mind. Even strapped to a chair, shot and dehydrated, the icicle in his soul schemed how best to provide.
He thought it through and decided the new plan was good. He’d spent his life making judgment calls. On this, his judgment said yes. So it became a matter of timing.
The how, and the when.
Back to now, in the hot, late afternoon, and Hunter is standing closer, looking down.
“I don’t want to hurt your girlfriend,” he’s saying. “Lynn, right? Partly because she’s innocent, except for the adultery. Mainly I’m just not convinced you care about her. So it could be a waste of effort. And a waste of a pretty
woman, and god knows there’s little enough beauty in this world. I just dropped by her house when she wasn’t home, picked up that robe to show you I’m serious.”
The man in the chair says nothing.
“But now, time’s moving on. I don’t have any experience in this so I don’t know exactly how long you can last. I Googled it, though, and it sounds like forty-eight to seventy-two hours is when the really bad stuff starts to kick in. You look like shit already, though, to be frank, and they’re saying tomorrow’s supposed to be real hot for this time of year. So why don’t you just tell me who else I need to talk to, and we’ll see where we can go from there?”
The man in the chair remains silent. He can tell that Hunter is making an effort to keep his temper down but that he’s finding it increasingly difficult. Silence is a risk, but one he has to take. He looks up at Hunter and winks, for good measure.
Hunter takes a couple of steps toward him. “You’re beginning to piss me off.”
The man in the chair smiles.
Hunter looks at the man’s right shin. He sighs, and gives it a kick. The man in the chair takes a sharp breath, grits his teeth, and waits for the stars of white pain to fade.
“I don’t like doing this stuff,” Hunter says, sounding strangely sincere. “I stopped being that guy long before I ever even met you. But I’ve made it clear what I need, and you’re just not cooperating. You see how that makes things hard for me, right?”
The man in the chair raises his head. “You know what you sound like? You sound like the kind of father who’s going to hit his kid, hit him hard, who knows he’s going to do it, and for no good reason except he’s hungover and an asshole, but wants the kid to take the blame.”
Hunter opens his mouth, but shuts it again—so fast and hard you can hear a click.
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