Cotton

by Paul Heald

  Serious Thai was located on the second floor of a converted cotton warehouse about two blocks from the newspaper and offered authentically spiced Asian food cooked by a Clarkeston native who had lived in Bangkok. The chef’s plan was to educate the palate of his town, even if its citizens complained about the heat from the chilies once in a while. James loved the place for its bold approach to the cuisine, the exposed brick and rafters of its dining room, and the fact that it was the only Asian restaurant in town without a greasy buffet line feeding its lunch patrons.

  After they ordered, the priest asked James to explain to Miriam exactly what had happened to her father’s boxes.

  “Well,” the reporter said after a quick apology, “I sat down with your father’s papers right after Thor gave them to me. I plowed through the first box pretty quickly.” He thanked the waiter as his bowl of clear soup arrived. “It was mostly a collection of stuff prepared by other people: conference materials, some old church bulletins, magazines, and the like. Then, I ordered a pizza and sat down with the second box until it got late. I’d say midnight or so.”

  “What was in the second box?” the young woman asked.

  “It was almost entirely sermons. I skimmed through a bunch of them and then went to bed. I intended to finish off the pile the following afternoon when I got back home from work, but they were stolen sometime in the morning when I was away.” He shrugged his shoulders and dipped a fresh spring roll in a small dab of chili paste on his plate. “The neighbors say they saw a brown delivery van at the house around ten o’clock or so. The cops think that might be related to the theft. They took my new laptop and a bunch of other papers too.”

  “May I ask why you wanted to see my father’s private papers?” She asked the question without hostility but still implied that his intrusion into her father’s work was inappropriate.

  The arrival of his basil duck gave him time to think about his answer. He saw no reason not to share his suspicions with the young couple before him. Sometimes the best way to get information was to share it, and one of them might have some insight into the role St. James and its political power brokers might have played in the cover-up of Diana Cavendish’s disappearance. He hoped she would talk about her relationship with Granville, although she might not want to bring it up with a potential beau sitting next to her.

  “This is kind of a long story,” he began, refolding his napkin in his lap and settling back in his chair, “but you’ll understand better if I start at the beginning.

  “A couple of weeks ago, I saw some pictures of Diana Cavendish online that I had never seen before and that I believe were taken shortly before she was abducted.” He could tell from Miriam’s expression that she remembered the notorious case. “I believe the photos were taken by Jacob Granville. After all, taking pictures was his main job at the newspaper, so either he posted them himself or someone with access to his camera or his computer uploaded them. In any case, I thought it critical to track down the source of the photos, so I contacted the US attorney’s office in Atlanta.”

  “But not the local police,” the priest interjected, with a glance at Miriam.

  James turned his attention to Miriam and elaborated. “I’ve always thought that the sheriff didn’t want the case solved, that he was covering up something.”

  He thought she looked surprised. Was she taken aback by the idea of a cover-up or by the fact that he suspected one? “Anyway, I went to the assistant US attorney, and she’s trying to track down the website and find out who uploaded the photos. She also went down with me to Vidalia to talk to Granville’s parents.” He took a sip of tea and revealed the emails from Mexico bearing Jacob’s name.

  “So, Jacob is still alive?” Miriam’s eyes were wide. She laid her fork down. “They’ve gotten emails from him? What did they say?”

  “Well,” the reporter cautioned her, “no one can be sure who sent the emails, and they were very short. The messages basically promised to explain everything later, but except for those three emails received shortly after Jacob’s disappearance, his parents haven’t heard a thing.”

  He watched her struggle to process the information. “But what does this have to do with my father’s papers?” A puzzled frown creased her face. “Why did you want to see the boxes?”

  Now, this was sensitive territory. Surely, she knew her father had been a passionate defender of Jacob Granville, but James had no idea whether she, too, thought he was innocent, or whether she believed her father had been tilting at windmills. He wished he knew when her relationship with Granville had ended and under what circumstances. “You might remember that I was the primary reporter covering the disappearance of Diana Cavendish. Your father was an eloquent advocate for Jacob, and sometimes he hinted about inside information concerning his innocence. He was certainly emphatic that Jacob could not have committed the crime. I’ve often wondered whether he had any basis for his faith and whether there might be something in his papers to shed light on it.” He shrugged his shoulders and resumed picking at his noodles. “You have to admit, the circumstantial evidence points at Granville.” He did not speculate on how the sheriff and his priest might have actively conspired to hide evidence relevant to his whereabouts.

  She looked unoffended by his explanation and after a moment’s reflection offered a cautious reply. “You’re right about one thing: Daddy always insisted Jacob could not have done it.” Then she unexpectedly waved the waiter over and asked for the wine list. “Would y’all care to join me for a drink?”

  James looked at Thor, who nodded cautiously, and Miriam ordered a bottle for them to share. She excused herself to visit the ladies’ room and arrived back at the same time as a bottle of chilled sauvignon blanc.

  “So,” she asked after taking a long sip of the wine, “did you find anything in Papa’s papers?”

  “Like I said, I only got halfway through the sermons, but I found the one I wanted, where he does everything but come right out and say that all the rumors about Jacob were malicious and untrue.” He lifted his glass and took another sip. The wine was crisp and citrusy. It went perfectly with the remnants of his duck. “It’s really quite a skillful use of scripture to suggest Jacob was not only innocent until proven guilty, but that he was, in fact, innocent.”

  He watched her carefully while he spoke, but his story elicited no more than a barely perceptible nod of the head. “The sermon was really well written, but I didn’t find anything else related to the case before the boxes were stolen, with one exception.” He now looked into her eyes and tried to channel the inquisitorial sympathy that sometimes helped him gather information from reluctant interviewees. “Next to one of the verses about wrongful persecution of the innocent, he wrote in the margin: ‘Miriam.’” He speared a red pepper and looked back at her. “Do you have any idea what he could have meant by that? Did he ask you any questions about Jacob around that time?”

  Once again, she failed to take offense at his line of inquiry or mention her own relationship with the disappeared photographer. Instead, she put down her wine glass and knitted her brow thoughtfully, as if straining to remember the day almost five years earlier when her father had taken to the pulpit in defense of one of his parishioners. “I have no idea,” she finally pronounced. “He knew I thought Jacob was guilty as hell, but he wouldn’t have needed to ask me any questions about that.” She shook her head. “I’m not the only Miriam in the world.”

  “True enough,” the reporter admitted, “and in the Bible the story of Miriam involves Moses’s sister spreading false rumors against her brother and getting punished for it. Maybe that’s it.” He emptied the bottle of wine with a generous splash in each of their glasses. “You can’t remember anything at all?”

  She gave another shake of her head and a shimmer of lustrous dark hair momentarily hid her face. “I’d love to help you. I wasn’t close to Jacob, and I don’t ever remember my father asking my advice on his sermons.”

  James accepted this without
response and the threesome finished their meal in the long pause that followed. He did not know what to make of Miriam’s lie. Was she trying to put him off the trail or was she just hesitant to talk about an old flame? If she loved Jacob as much as Jacob’s mother loved her, then the subject might be painful. On the other hand, five years had passed, and there was no reason not to help out a hardworking reporter.

  James saw the priest looking wistfully at the empty bottle of wine and heard him add his voice to the conversation. “What I don’t understand is this: who stole the boxes? I don’t believe in coincidences. Why steal only the boxes and your laptop? Didn’t you say nothing else was taken?”

  “None of my wife’s jewelry was taken, nor my coin collection or any other electronics.” He shook his head in wonder. “I agree. Why take a box of old sermons?”

  “Maybe someone else has the same suspicions as you,” Miriam said. “Maybe someone else thought the key to the mystery was somewhere in there.”

  “Yeah,” Thor jumped in, “but who? Only James and I and the church choir director knew who had the boxes!”

  Over the course of the next hour and another bottle of wine, the three new acquaintances tried to work out the disappearance of the boxes and how it might be related to the wider mystery of Jacob Granville and Diana Cavendish. James had no trouble convincing the priest that Granville was a murderer on the run, probably trying to cover his trail by emailing his parents. He may have posted the pictures of Diana because he was running out of money or as some sort of sociopathic fuck-you to the police. They all knew stories of criminals who could not keep their mouths shut. None of them, however, believed Jacob had come back to Clarkeston to steal a pile of Ernest Rodgers’s sermons. That had to be the work of some third party. Perhaps the choir director had told the sheriff about the boxes? And maybe there had been something deep in the third box, unseen by James and unnoticed by Thor, evidencing a cover-up?

  All three speculated enthusiastically about the mystery. James was relieved to share his obsession over Diana Cavendish, and he found himself warming up to the young priest. He found Miriam harder to read. She was an imaginative theorizer, but whether her energy came from a weirdly renewed connection to her father or other memories of the prime players in the story was unclear. Whatever the reason, she obviously enjoyed the interchange with her companions, and it was she who suggested they meet again in a week. She even proposed an agenda: James was to have another talk with the US attorney who had accompanied him to Vidalia, and on Sunday morning Thor should gently probe the sheriff about the boxes. She volunteered to ask her mother some questions about her father. Perhaps at some point in time he had made connections influential enough to protect Jacob Granville? James added another task for himself. He would track down the parents of Diana Cavendish. He was not aware of anyone who had ever talked to them. As far as he knew, they had never come to Clarkeston.

  XVII.

  HIJACKED

  Stanley Hopkins scratched his head and sat upright in bed. In the hazy fog of images that preceded his waking, a memory from law school had knocked on the door of his consciousness and refused to stop tapping until he answered. A phrase hummed in his brain: reverse domain name hijacking. The words came from the intellectual property course that he had taken his third year in law school, but he couldn’t remember precisely what they referred to, so he got up, padded into his library, and found his old textbook. The index sent him to the sixth chapter, and he carried the massive treatise with him into the kitchen to read while he warmed a packet of toaster pastries.

  He set the book down on the kitchen counter and poured himself a large glass of orange juice. Since his wife’s accident, his sweet tooth had contributed twenty pounds to his formerly lean frame, but he lacked the willpower to replace doughnuts and cake with oatmeal and fruit. On his most recent hike he was out of breath when he reached the summit, and he had sworn off sugar for the dozenth time, but that vow had not stuck any better than the previous ones.

  When he finally sat down, he placed the book directly in front of him and placed his drink and plate to either side of it. The pages of an entire chapter filled up with crumbs and drops of juice from his moustache as he gradually determined how to smoke out William Simmons, the elusive owner of Mygirlfriendsbikini.com.

  Since law school, he had been aware that the Internet domain-name system was a first-come, first-served affair. Whether United.com belonged to United Airlines or United Van Lines depended entirely on which business won the race to file the first application with ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or with one of numerous intermediaries, like GoDaddy.com or Namecheap.com, who could also arrange for registration. Unfortunately, the race-to-file priority rule had encouraged cybersquatters, who registered domain names containing famous trademarks and then sold them to the highest bidder. In fact, Hewlett-Packard, the tech company, had been slow to recognize the potential of the Internet and had seen HP.com registered by a lawyer in California, who offered to sell it back for an exorbitant amount. Congress eventually responded to those sorts of abuses with legislation designed to stop cybersquatting, but the most effective deterrent had come from ICANN itself in the form of a cheap online system of nonbinding arbitration.

  A short chapter in the textbook reminded him of the dispute-resolution procedure that governed all ownership fights over domain names. It was regarded as a model for avoiding costly litigation and efficiently transferring URLs to complaining trademark owners. When applying for a domain name, the registrant had to promise to submit all disputes to nonbinding arbitration before a neutral panel of experts. So, if the first person to register Coke.com was a teenage boy in Peoria waiting patiently for an offer from the Coca-Cola Corporation, he was bound to let Coke convene a panel that would cheaply and quickly order the transfer of the domain to the real Coke. Technically, the order was nonbinding, in the sense that the teenager could file a federal suit to protest his imaginary rights, but over ninety percent of panel decisions went unappealed. Because the cases were resolved entirely online and no lawyers were required, most disputes could be decided within a matter of days or weeks for a few hundred dollars.

  The low cost and easy access to the dispute-resolution system did pose a hazard. What if someone wrongfully tried to wrest a domain name from a legitimate first registrant? What if Outback Tours, Inc., a small family-run travel agency since the 1920s, were the first to register Outback.com, but the newer, nationwide restaurant chain of the same name pressured the family into giving up its URL? The dispute-resolution system could be used by litigious complainants to wrongfully strong-arm registrants into giving up a name to which they had a proper right. Reverse domain-name hijacking was a real possibility, and arbitrators were on the lookout to stop it.

  But an arbitrator could only stop a hijacking if the registrant came forward to defend its rights.

  So, Stanley Hopkins popped the last corner of his pastry into his mouth and decided to try his hand at hijacking as a way to smoke out the owner of Mygirlfriendsbikini.com. He was so excited that he called up Melanie Wilkerson in Atlanta to explain his strategy. No one else knew of his fruitless search and no one else would recognize the utter brilliance of his plan. And besides, she had the sexiest voice that he had ever heard over the telephone.

  “Okay,” he revealed, after waiting fifteen minutes for her to deal with another caller, “here’s what I’m gonna do. I know you can’t sanction it, but it’s just so freakin’ cool that I had to tell somebody.” He paused dramatically and then laid out his strategy. “I’m going to file a complaint against Mygirlfriendsbikini.com with ICANN, claiming that the registrant is a cybersquatter. I’m going to lie my ass off and claim that I’ve owned a clothing store by that name for twenty years and have prior rights to it.”

  “I get it,” the velvet voice on the end of the line acknowledged. “This will get the attention of the website owner and when he responds, you’ll know who it is.”

  “No
t quite that easy,” responded the professor, “because the only address for Simmons on file in the system is the false address we found on Whois. He won’t initially know that I’ve filed the complaint, because he lied when he provided his registration information.”

  “Then how will this smoke him out?”

  He spun out the logical course of events. “My complaint will win by default when Simmons doesn’t respond. How can he? The notice will go to the bogus address. The arbitrators will then order the transfer of the website to me as a matter of course. Simmons won’t even know he’s lost it at that point. Once the domain name is transferred to me, I’ll take the whole website offline and shut down all that profitable traffic.” He snapped his fingers at the phone. “That will get his attention, and I’ll just sit back and wait for him to contact me, the proud new owner of Mygirlfriendsbikini.com.”

  There was a long silence at the end of the line. “You can’t quote me, because I’ll deny it, but that’s the most fucking awesome thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

  * * *

  Not by his nature a liar or thief, Stanley struggled somewhat with the morality of his strategy, but he managed to overcome his qualms by emphasizing the reason why he had to adopt such devious means. Simmons, as owner of the website, had provided false information to ICANN in violation of the express rules that all domain-name owners promised to abide by. He had deliberately and wrongfully hidden himself from view, and now that he was needed to provide information in a murder investigation, he was unavailable. It was his fault. Besides, Stanley would transfer the domain name back to him just as soon as he obtained the name of the person who had submitted the photos of Diana Cavendish.

  At the end of their conversation, Melanie had expressed the worry that the elusive website owner might start up another site rather than respond to the hijacking, but Stanley wasn’t worried. The goodwill established in any successful website was tremendously valuable, and the upset owner would not be able to attract the same number of customers merely by adopting another name and starting up another site with the same content. Of course, if the owner were the murderer, then he would likely stay hidden, but Stanley thought that scenario doubtful. Simmons’s website looked like he collected free uploads from amateurs and maybe bought some professional soft-core images to augment his content offerings.