Trail of the Spellmans

by Lisa Lutz

  It was time to remove myself from the conversation. “This isn’t over,” I said, and then I let myself out.

  It was only eight P.M. when I arrived at David and Maggie’s, so I rang their front doorbell.

  “Isabel!” Maggie said when she opened the door. She said my name more like it was an idea than a name.

  She let me in and then shouted, “Hey, David, guess who’s here?”

  I’d like to think that a surprise visit from me is cause to celebrate, but Maggie was far too enthusiastic, which immediately put me on guard.

  “I can come back at a better time,” I said.

  “No, this is great! Have a seat. Can I get you anything? Drink? Food? Water? Or seltzer water. We have one of those machines. Bubbles all the time.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, trying to gauge the tenor of the room. Something was off; I sensed danger, of all things.

  David descended the stairs, carrying Sydney.

  “Isabel, what are you doing here?”

  “I had to get out of my house and, well, the unit’s place is kind of like Chernobyl right now.”

  “I hear you,” he said.

  “You know what I’m thinking?” Maggie said.

  I had no idea.

  “Nope,” David replied. Apparently David didn’t know either.

  Maggie turned to me with pleading eyes. “Our babysitter has the flu.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I replied.

  Dead silence.

  I honestly had no idea what Maggie was getting at, so I misread the silence.

  “It’s not serious, I hope,” I said sympathetically.

  “What do you think?” Maggie said to David.

  David shrugged his shoulders and said, “I dunno if that’s such a good idea.”

  Maggie took her daughter from David’s arms and said, “It’s an excellent idea,” then she passed Sydney to me and said, “We need to get out of the house now. Please, please, please babysit. She’ll be asleep in no time flat. She’s been fed and changed. You know where the crib is. If we leave in five minutes, we can still make the movie. We’ll be gone three hours tops.”

  I’m sure that some protest emitted from my lips. I know words were coming out of my mouth, but they were in competition with other words not said by me, like “Hurry,” “Where’s my sneaker?” “Wear your loafers,” “I hate being late for movies,” and “Banana.”

  The next thing I knew, Sydney and I were gazing into each other’s eyes with absolutely nothing to say.

  She appeared bored at first and then panicked. She began to cry. I asked her not to cry. She continued to cry. I asked her again, more politely, meaning I used the word please. She still cried. Then I used that strange voice that people often use with children and still she cried. I said “banana,” which I knew I was not supposed to say, and she stopped crying and said “banana.” Then it took me exactly forty-two minutes to figure out which banana she wanted. Some kind of puffed snack made out of vegetables with a pirate as its mascot.

  I wasn’t sure if tiny kids brushed their teeth or not, so I skipped it. I figured since baby teeth just end up under a pillow one day, why go crazy?1

  I read The Cat in the Hat twice, The Cat in the Hat Comes Back three times, and Green Eggs and Ham twice. Sydney seemed to conk out halfway through the last book, but I kept reading just to be safe. I put her in her crib, brought the baby monitor into the living room, and poured myself a stiff drink.

  I spent the rest of the evening cycling through a couple hundred cable channels on David and Maggie’s fifty-two-inch plasma TV. It was a relic from David’s bachelor days—I don’t suspect he’d approve of such excess now. Still, it was the perfect salve to my brutal day of reality-facing. I’ve discovered that if you watch real people on television, you suddenly discover that you and every person around you are the picture of sanity and decency. Some of the people on TV made me think that Bernie wasn’t such a bad option. There are worse things than a cigar-smoking, strip-club-going, poker-playing, beer-bellied slob, right? Besides, Bernie said he was cutting back on the strip clubs. He was looking for a more cerebral connection.

  Once again, I fell asleep on their couch. Maggie gently shook me awake and suggested I sleep in the guest room. Since I wasn’t sure what was happening back at my place, it seemed wise. Or cowardly, depending on how you look at it.

  In the morning, the sound of an ill-played xylophone woke me. (It would have woken Rip Van Winkle.) Since I had actually caught more Zs than David or Maggie, I was surprised to see how chipper they were at such an early hour. “Morning,” I said as I shuffled into the kitchen. I had no idea where my shoes were located.

  This house was starting to seem a bit like a footwear Bermuda Triangle.

  “Thanks again,” Maggie said, pouring me a cup of coffee.

  “How’d it go?” David asked.

  “Fine,” I replied, “once I figured out that ‘banana’ meant ‘beer and beef jerky’ and that her bedtime reading was Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.”

  “Tropic of Capricorn,” Maggie said, correcting me.

  “Very funny,” David said, not thinking it was funny at all. “We’re not saying ‘banana’ anymore.”

  “I’ll try to respect that rule in this house, but in the real world, it might slip out on occasion.”

  “What did you feed her? Because she already had dinner.”

  “I gave her some of that stuff with the pirate on it.”

  “And then what did you do?”

  “We read the complete Dr. Seuss collection. Happy?”

  David’s brow unfurled and he crouched on the floor with his daughter. “Did you have a fun time with your aunt Izzy?” he asked in a high squeaky voice.

  Sydney stared at him blankly.

  “Say good morning to Aunt Izzy.”

  Sydney stared at me blankly.

  “Remember me from last night?” I asked.

  “Did you have fun?” Maggie asked.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” I replied.

  “I was actually talking to Sydney,” Maggie said.

  “Oh, well, she’d probably agree. We had an okay time, didn’t we, Sydney?”

  “Why can’t you talk to her like a normal person?” asked David.

  “I’m the only one talking to her like a normal person. You sound like a eunuch.”

  “Children respond to higher-pitched noises,” David said. “I’m not sure you have a maternal bone in your body.”

  “Me neither,” I replied, feeling his comment like a cattle prod.

  “That’s enough, David,” Maggie said.

  “Banana,” Sydney said.

  “See you later,” I said.

  THE BERNIE PROJECT AND OTHER MISCELLANEOUS ACTIVITIES

  Gerty was gone when I got home. Her bags had presumably been packed, her bed had been made (probably not by her, judging from the military corners), and every sign of the disorder that naturally surrounded her had vanished. Besides, the perennial note, I’m not here, was no longer there, which struck me as being ironic. But Gerty did send me a succinct e-mail explaining that she broke the news to her son. While I would never thank Bernie for the grenade he threw into my life when he and Gerty began their baffling affair, there was an unforeseen benefit that I couldn’t ignore.

  Once Henry had choked down the news from his mother, his hunger for any form of interpersonal communication was sated. His previous desire to talk had been replaced by an unprecedented desire to watch. I found him in the living room, staring blankly at a reality television show about reformed Dungeons and Dragons addicts. A show, under specific desperate circumstances, I could imagine myself toggling back and forth to, but not Henry. I removed the remote from his hand and changed the channel to cable news, which is his standby version of escape entertainment. He explained to me once that if you watch the news on what seems like a loop, suddenly it presents itself as fiction and you stop worrying (and maybe learn to love the bomb).

  In l
ocal news, the oak trees got a stay of execution while the campus authorities continued their negotiations with the tree sitters. On the national front, their fifteen minutes of fame were at least fourteen minutes shorter and clearly skewed in favor of the Man.

  “You know?” I said, as a conversation starter. And, frankly, this was one of those occasions when “Some weather we’ve been having” would have been superior.

  “I know.”

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “Popcorn.”

  “You need something to wash it down with?”

  “Beer.”

  I put on my coat and headed for the door. Then I figured I ought to say something.

  “In my defense, there was no way to predict this would happen. I mean, Bernie?”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “Thanks. But I promise it won’t last. I have a few more tricks up my sleeve.”1

  “Leave it,” Henry said. “There’s nothing you can do.”

  “If you say so,” I replied.

  But I’ve discovered very few situations in which there’s nothing you can do.

  While Henry quietly wallowed in the image of his mother with Bernie, I took action by attempting to machete every obstacle that lay in my path to . . . well, the status quo. What I wanted, I suppose, was for things to stay the same, for the universe to be in the same order it was in a few months ago (a simpler time) and for people to behave in the manner I had come to expect. I’ve got nothing against change, but sometimes it’s totally unnecessary.

  There was no dearth of projects for me to sink my teeth into. I began with the Bernie Project, making several phone calls and e-mail queries and even composing a few handwritten notes, revisiting my second-grade year, when Mrs. Averly had failed me on every English assignment simply because she found my penmanship abhorrent. As I waited for replies to my inquiries, I phoned Fred Finkel in the hopes of taking a more proactive approach.

  “Fred,” I said.

  “Isabel,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t you agree, after your flubbed surveillance work, that maybe you owe me?”

  “I hadn’t thought it over.”

  “I did pay you in full for shoddy work.”

  “So the scales are tipped slightly in your favor.”

  “I’m happy to hear that.”

  “Is that all?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” I replied. “I need you to do something for me.”

  “I figured as much.”

  “How old are you now, Fred?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Excellent. Do you have other friends in your age range? And when I say ‘age range,’ I mean under twenty-one.”

  “Uh, yeah. Where are you going with this, Isabel?”

  “I’d like you to go to a bar—the Philosopher’s Club in particular—and order drinks. Alcoholic ones, preferably. I’ll pick up the tab.”

  “Can I ask why?”

  “Plus twenty an hour.”

  “It’s illegal, you know,” Fred said.

  “I know. Are you in?”

  “Why not? I’ve always found the drinking age kind of random.”

  “Do me a favor.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “Don’t invite Rae.”

  “Hadn’t crossed my mind.”

  Two hours later, Fred sent me a text: In position.

  Five minutes later, I received another text: No go. Carded and discarded. UR paying travel costs, right?

  Then I got an actual phone call.

  “Izzeee,” Bernie said with the perky satisfaction of a winner. “Nice try.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I replied.

  Clearly the Bernie Project was going to be more time-consuming than I’d planned. I patiently waited to set stage two in motion.

  The next morning I moved on to the Chinese wall. I amassed a list of computer-repair establishments in the city, focusing on sole proprietors since I had a feeling I was most likely to find a hacker that way. I figured these people had some kind of code word for doing illegal activities, but I couldn’t call Robbie, so most of my inquiries fell flatter than a French crepe. Our conversations, if you can call them that,2 went something like this:

  ME: Let’s just say, hypothetically, that my father forgot the password on his computer. Would you be able to access it?

  ROBBIE #2: Uh, probably. What system is he using?

  ME: He’s got a special password. Like, someone installed a serious firewall and he doesn’t remember the password.

  ROBBIE #2: Do you even know what a firewall is or did you hear it in a movie once?

  ME: Whatever you call it, there’s something that’s keeping me—I mean my father—from accessing his computer.

  ROBBIE #2: Why isn’t your father calling me?

  ME: Because he’s not good with computers.

  ROBBIE #2: Oh, so you’re the computer genius in the family.

  ME Can you help me or not?

  ROBBIE #2: This sounds like the kind of annoyance suited for the person who set up your quote-unquote firewall. He’s probably waiting at home right now for your phone call.

  ME: He’s on vacation.

  ROBBIE #2: Wait until he gets back. You’ll survive.

  ME: I have no idea when he’s coming back.

  ROBBIE #2: What does he say when you e-mail him?

  ME: He doesn’t respond.

  ROBBIE #2: Amateur hour. He can’t check his e-mail on vacation? Hilarious. Okay, since I’m an actual professional, maybe you can hire me to fix this. I have a few openings in my schedule.

  ME: Do you work late? One A.M. would be awesome.

  ROBBIE #2: I don’t make house calls at that hour.

  ME: I’ll pay double.

  ROBBIE #2: Is this your boyfriend’s computer?

  ME: No. Of course not.

  ROBBIE #2: You think he’s watching porn, right? Let me tell you something. It’s perfectly normal.

  ME: Okay, good-bye.

  I suppose I could have gone with the truth, revealing Robbie as the wizard behind the wall and hoping that Robbie #2’s hubris would cause him to try to hack another guy’s system. I don’t know much about his world, but I do know that those kinds stick together. They’re like a cyberspace knitting circle. Five more failed attempts to get midnight tech support and I finally accepted that my father’s computer and the surveillance reports on Meg Cooper were off-limits. But I had enough personal data to take a hammer and chisel to the wall in my own private way.

  Most background checks involve criminal records, civil proceedings, property searches, and occasionally personal interviews. But finding the basic data on a person can take some time. I was trying to establish whether Margaret Slayter had any marriages prior to the one with Edward. She was thirty-five at the time of their wedding, so it was a distinct possibility. Margaret Slayter’s credit report went back only ten years. She possessed only one credit card under her maiden name, Cooper. She’d spent several years in San Jose, but there was no birth record for a Meg (or Margaret) Cooper in California and I wasn’t sure how to ask the client about her place of birth without raising suspicion.

  I pulled the notes from my preliminary meeting with Adam Cooper.

  We don’t ask clients for birth records or Social Security numbers, but a home address can tell you whether the client owns or rents. And from there, more information can be gleaned. Adam Cooper owned an apartment in the Inner Richmond. From that information I could access a DOB and a credit report.

  Cooper had a second mortgage out on his apartment and credit card debt hovering just over fifty thousand dollars. I reviewed the report a number of times because there was something familiar in the data that I couldn’t put my finger on. Until I did: an address ten years ago in Fremont, California.

  I pulled Meg Cooper’s saved credit report from my computer and found the same address in her file. While it wouldn’t be unheard of for siblings to live under the same roof well into the
ir twenties, this revelation struck me as a bit odd. It also occurred to me that Meg and Adam bore no physical resemblance to each other.

  Of course, it’s easy to chalk that up to the disguise of the modern woman. If you bleach, freeze, or paint every major feature, even a detective would have difficulty discerning your natural appearance. I hadn’t been looking for discrepancies in that part of the Slayter story. But once I started looking, they sprouted like weeds.

  A quick marriage record search in Fresno verified my assumption: Meg Cooper was Margaret’s name when she was married to Adam Cooper, the man now claiming to be her brother. That pattern I was speaking about earlier was losing its symmetry. So, the milquetoast, sweater-vested Adam Cooper hired us to follow his “sister” because it was less suspicious and ethically dubious than hiring us to follow his ex-wife. A job we would have at the very least questioned, and probably turned down. It’s one thing if a client is interested in a current spouse’s activities, but once the divorce proceedings are complete, surveillance begins to look an awful lot like professional stalking.

  I was now presented with my own ethical dilemma: tell the unit and deal with the consequences of both the breach and the cleanup, or take matters into my own hands. To be honest, the debate didn’t last very long.

  Before risking a surveillance on a client, I performed a full background check on Adam Cooper. His credit report provided the address where he and Meg had lived as husband and wife. I did a property search and found a Louise Meyers who had owned a home next to their apartment building going on thirty years. I took an educated guess that she was familiar with the goings-on in her neighborhood; homeowners and the elderly tend to be more invested in their neighborhoods. I phoned Mrs. Meyers and left a message, explaining that I was a potential employer looking for information on Mr. Cooper. I couldn’t provide any other information, since the job required some sensitive security matters. She phoned me back in an hour, eager to help.

  Mrs. Meyers said she made a habit of getting to know the people who lived in her vicinity (brownies were her icebreaker) and keeping up with the goings-on about town. As far as she could tell, Meg and Adam were a normal couple with their share of problems. When I inquired as to the type of problems they might have, Mrs. Meyers switched into generalizations, for fear of losing Adam a job, I suspect.