Zeitgeist

by Grace Jelsnik

  She stared at him for a long moment. “I won’t be able to sit that far away without falling off the roof.”

  “I think that’s another joke, but it may have gone over my head.”

  “Play on words, the wannabe comedian’s fall-back: roof-slash-over-my-head. My, you are digging today. Are you set?”

  “I am or will be once I’ve cleaned up my mess and grabbed another cup of coffee to take upstairs. Damn. I don’t want to throw out perfectly good coffee. We’ll need to rinse out the pot, too.” He rose, tossed his fork in the trash, replaced the cake in the freezer, and swiped his forearm across the crumbs on the table. After opening several cupboards, he found the perfect vessel for his coffee: a glass vase.

  “You’re going to use a Waterford crystal vase for coffee?”

  Waterford. Nice. “I take it you wouldn’t,” he responded while emptying the coffee pot’s contents into the vase.

  “I do believe Daddy has an antique, carved Japanese vase somewhere, but Whitley may have broken it while packing his stuff. Yes, I suppose I’d use the Waterford.” Grabbing her laptop, she revolved slowly. “Looks good. Are you ready?”

  She’d been downright friendly this morning, and Grant wasn’t about to blow it by responding. Even a simple “yes” in his current too-eager state of mind could be misconstrued. After grabbing a plastic-wrapped platter of canapés from the refrigerator, he led the way up the stairs, pausing by her room to deposit his coffee and snacks, and headed to his own room to grab the laptop. The throw rug she’d found to cover the trapdoor looked natural, a fringed, chocolate-and-ivory, floral-patterned oval in the center of the room. No one would suspect what lay beneath it.

  Returning to her room, he saw her relaxing on the bed, her back braced against the headboard, while she munched on his canapés and drank his coffee. She’d placed a chair on the far side of the room, and he began walking toward it, glancing back sorrowfully at his breakfast and noting a gleam of amusement in the brown eyes, the second time he’d seen a look revealing what she’d been like before her world had been shattered. No matter what his sisters thought, he really was making progress.

  “I changed my mind,” she said, a trace of a smile on her lips. “You may sit beside me here. It’s much more comfortable, and we won’t have to run back and forth to share our findings.”

  “Beside you? On the bed?”

  The amusement fled, leaving militancy in its stead. “Beside me. On the bed. But for the sake of research and conspiracy only.”

  His heart lifted. “Research and conspiracy. My two favorite things to do.” He headed for the bed.

  “Seriously?”

  “No.” He glanced at the dresser, looking for the phone and not seeing it. “Do you have her phone?”

  “Right here.” She held the phone aloft and wiggled it.

  Grant settled himself beside her, leaving a full foot of space between them and reaching for the coffee.

  She passed it to him. “It tastes better in a Waterford vase.”

  He took a sip while watching her power on the phone. She was right. The coffee did taste better in an expensive vase, richer, fuller bodied. Once they were married, they’d drink their morning coffee out of nothing but Waterford vases. “Are there messages?”

  “I’m not certain how to check. This phone is different from mine.”

  Grant craned his neck to look at the screen and pointed at one of the icons. “It’s like mine. Hit that button.”

  She obliged and stiffened when the canned voice announced five messages. “How do I check?”

  “That button there,” he replied before taking another sip of coffee.

  “Uh oh. I need a passcode.”

  “A complication neither of us anticipated. Should I look through her luggage?”

  She frowned down at the phone. “No, wait a sec’. She gave me the passcode for her iPad. It might be the same. I’m trying to remember it. That was three years ago.”

  “Take your time,” he suggested, gracious as ever while taking advantage of the opportunity to drink more than his share of the coffee.

  She darted a glance toward the vase. “Back off, sidekick. You may have arranged transport for the coffee, but I made it.” She froze. “That’s it!” She looked back down at the phone and keyed in four numbers.

  Grant sat upright, the coffee forgotten, when the canned voice gave a time and date for the first message.

  “Okay,” she said, “this first one was left ten minutes after the plane exploded. How do I play it?”

  He pointed at an icon and relaxed back against the headboard to listen.

  “Linda, this is Charlie. We just heard about the Delaney plane, and we’re worried. Call us.”

  A distressed look crossed Fiona’s face, and she turned toward him. “Her real name was Linda. She looked like a Linda. I think Charlie is her brother. He’s the one who called the time I powered on the phone. He looked like her. How do I save the message?”

  Grant pointed at another icon.

  She pressed the icon, and the phone announced the next message. “This one’s thirty minutes after the explosion.”

  “Linda, it’s Brandon. Please call Charlie ASAP. We’re flying to Saint Paul. We’ll be there in three hours. We’re worried sick.”

  “She had people who loved her,” Grant reflected. “She couldn’t have been all bad.”

  “And for three years, they’ve been wondering what happened to her.” Fiona’s voice sounded wistful, with a hint of shame.

  “It’s not your fault, so don’t add this to the burden of guilt you’ve been carrying around. Anyone would have been suspicious, and even serial killers have people who love them.”

  She shot him a challenging look. “Name one.”

  Grant blocked, instantly regretting having used serial killers as a reference, their loved ones having a reputation for abandoning them upon publication of their heinous crimes. “Maybe not serial killers. How about mass murderers? Eva Braun loved Hitler.”

  She pondered his words before nodding. “Better. Here’s the next one. It was left two-and-a-half hours after the explosion.”

  “Valencia, this is Chad Farley, Vice President of Public Relations at Delaney.com. Whitley Delaney asked me to meet with you about the concerns you expressed in your recent telephone call. Please call me at 651-555-6942 to arrange a meeting.”

  Grant watched her face, waiting for her to react and surprised when she merely looked saddened, as though caught up in an unhappy recollection. “Dial M for Murder.”

  She frowned at him. “What?”

  “An old movie where a telephone call is used to establish timing for a murder. Not quite the same thing, in that this call was used to establish an appointment for the murder. You’ve heard that message before.”

  “Yes. It’s the same one he left in her hotel room, probably identical. I listened to it when I was picking up her suitcases. He called her cell phone, and then he tried the hotel.” She appeared to force a smile, more for herself than for him. “It’s a rerun. Let’s listen to the next one, which was made the following day.”

  “Fiona”—Grant straightened, spilling coffee down his front—“we know Linda took your place on the plane. We’ve obtained surveillance footage of the terminal, and we saw you leaving the woman’s restroom in Linda’s outerwear. For some reason, you’ve decided not to come forward, perhaps out of fear for your own safety. We believe you know who planted the bomb. We aren’t judging you, not without the facts. We’d like to know what you know. We can help. Please return this call.” It was the voice of the first caller, Charlie, but this time it sounded tired and somehow broken.

  “They knew. All along, they knew she was dead.” Fiona’s voice was pensive, and she addressed the comment more to herself than to him.

  “That’s a good thing,” Grant commented. “They didn’t wonder. You didn’t deny them closure.”

  The eyes she turned on him shone with unshed tears. “So many lives ruined, and
for what?”

  “We’ll find out,” he reassured her. “Once we’ve listened to the last message, we’ll get started on our research. Buck up. The end is in sight. We’ll get him.”

  Shaking her head, Fiona clicked on the next message, and her eyes widened when the date and time were noted. “That’s yesterday afternoon,” she whispered, as though the caller could hear her.

  “Fiona, we’re hoping you kept Linda’s phone, like you kept her Ruger. We found Chad Farley’s body and disposed of it. Ten bullets, all dead center. You are to be congratulated. We recognized him as the man making a video of the boarding and the explosion and have determined his profession. We think we know who hired him, and we think we know why, but we’re not certain. It’s time for you to quit running and help us while we help you. We want justice for my cousin. You want justice for your father. We can help each other. Please call.”

  Fiona saved the message before turning to Grant, her face devoid of expression but her eyes dark with sorrow. “She was his cousin.”

  Grant had been less concerned with relationships than with the information about the hitman. “You were right. It had to have been them taking the Worthing exit yesterday. It didn’t take them long to find Chad, either, or to run ballistics on the bullets.” He wondered how they’d managed to find Fiona’s house. As careful as she’d been to avoid leaving a paper trail, that would have taken serious resources. Could the cousin and friends also be the employers?

  “I need to decide what to do. Should I trust them? I trusted you, and if I trusted you, I should be able to trust anyone.”

  “I didn’t see a whole lot of trust last night.”

  “You walked past me with a knife large enough to fell an oak, and I didn’t shoot you. If that’s not trust, I don’t know what in the hell it is.”

  Grant mulled this over. “That’s true. Do you need to make your decision right away?”

  She shook her head. “No. We should begin our research, try to find out how Whitley is skewing the search results, well, not how, but to what end. Once we have that information, I’ll know enough to determine whether or not I need their help. For now, though, hand me the coffee you’ve set out of sight beside you.”

  Sheepish, Grant passed her the vase, watching it go with all the anxiety of a father on his child’s first day of school. Shaking his head to dispel the angst, he picked up his laptop and popped it open.

  Chapter 15

  After giving Grant the Wi-Fi password, Fiona accessed the Delaney.com website. It felt wonderful to be online again. Of all the amenities of home she’d missed the most these past three years, cell phones and Internet access topped the list. She’d left behind much more than family and friends when she’d run; she’d left behind her primary links to the world, to instant socialization and prompt communication. Stepping back in time to an era when people had face-to-face conversations and waited days for snail mail, it had been a month before she’d woken in the morning without reaching for her phone or thinking she must check her email.

  Fiona wondered whether her old Facebook page was still active. She resisted the urge to smile while watching Delaney.com load on Grant’s monitor. “What should we try first?”

  He set his laptop to the side and stood. “I need paper and pen.”

  Of course he did, paper and pen being as anachronistic as snail mail, and Grant being as out of touch with reality as he was. She jerked her chin toward her purse. “In there.”

  After collecting them while, in her opinion, rummaging overly long in her purse, he returned and scribbled on her notepad, tearing off the top sheet and placing it between them. “I’ve written four keywords down. I propose we key those in on several different genres and see what kind of results we achieve. If there’s a similarity in the results, it should cross genres. That’s my theory, anyway.”

  She studied the keywords. “Is there any special significance to these four keywords? ‘Native American’ seems a little out there.”

  “They’re keywords I would use if trying to bring up my first novel. I’ve done this before on other book vendor websites and am always surprised by the variability of the results, even from one day to the next on the same site, so they’ll make good test keywords for our experiment. We’ll split our search into broad genres so we can cover more ground. I’ll take contemporary fiction, genre fiction, and historical fiction. You try action & adventure, horror, and women’s fiction.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then we look at the top ten in each genre, based on those keywords. Type their titles into Word. Once you’ve looked at all three genres, sort them alphabetically. Some titles should show up in all three of your genres, if Valencia, I mean, if Linda was right. Then we’ll compare lists and see whether any titles duplicate between your lists and mine. If we find titles coming up on all six searches, we’ll analyze them and try to determine why Delaney.com’s algorithm would give them a bump. Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  They sat together in silence, passing a vase of coffee back and forth while they worked. Fiona placed the plate of canapés between them, and they munched and typed and scrolled and toggled and clicked links, and it felt natural. Fiona wasn’t about to tell him this—doing something that foolish would almost certainly result in him declaring his undying love for her and decreasing the distance between them—but more and more she took comfort in his presence.

  “Why are you smiling?”

  “That last canapé was really good. You missed out. Have you found anything so far?”

  “Yes, but we should table discussion until we’re finished and have complete lists. It’ll be more fun that way.”

  She should have known fun would top his list of priorities in any project, no matter how serious. Fiona began keying in the results from the second search. She felt her pulse race when five of the action & adventure novels bore the same title as five of the horror novels and raced through her typing, spelling “vampire” as “umpire.” Ten minutes later, she sorted her list and narrowed her eyes in satisfaction. Using Grant’s keywords, she had four titles appearing in all three genres. While Grant finished his list, she fixed her typos and re-sorted.

  He leaned back against the headrest, frowning at his list. “This can’t be right.”

  “What?” She leaned across to take a peek. “Wow. Six duplicates. I have four. I’ll read off my four. You tell me whether they appear on your list.” She read through her four duplications.

  He nodded while working the laptop mouse. “Two of them. I’ve highlighted them. There’s no way that’s a coincidence, not in six different broad genres. Linda was right. This has to be deliberate. I have an idea. Just for fun, key in these four keywords: artichoke, Mitsubishi, toilet, and karaoke.”

  While pondering what kind of a disordered mind could come up with those four words, Fiona obliged and hit enter. Flummoxed by the results, she studied the screen for several seconds before looking at him. “Only two novels came up, the same two showing up in all six genres. How is that possible?”

  “He’s fixed the algorithm so no matter what search terms you use those two novels come up.”

  Linda had definitely been onto something. Whitley was rigging the system, but why? “How do we decide why those novels were chosen? Are they what you call Soma Tomes, with pedestrian writing designed to numb the working class and thus prevent them from overthrowing the animal farm, or is there something else about them making Whitley deem them desirable literature?”

  “Let me look at the first one.” He clicked on a novel, reading in silence for two minutes before grimacing. “Not merely pedestrian writing with enough general words to fill a tanker truck headed for Illiterate Land but a flagrant and consistent misuse of prepositions. Can a person be ‘taken off by the activity,’ the context being she found the activity absorbing?”

  “If the activity is her being kidnapped or hot-air ballooning, yes, a person could be taken off by it.”

  He flashed her
a grin. “You’re coming along nicely with that sense of humor of yours. This writer is committing no more heinous an act than preposition-icide, probably a non-native English speaker. Let’s go on to the next one.”

  Fiona watched him read. This was his bailiwick, not hers, and she had nothing to offer. Why had she insisted on taking a year off before attending college?

  Without looking up, Grant remarked, “This fellow is a dash-ophile.”

  “You’re making up words as you go along, aren’t you? What’s a dash-ophile?”

  “It’s a person who loves his dashes. There are three uses on the first three pages alone.”

  “And this is a problem because?”

  “Dashes are the most emphatic form of punctuation, strong like bull. If you overuse them, you diminish their impact, and they’re reduced to nothing more than a sideways, stretched-out comma. Kinda takes the punch out of emphatic punctuation when it’s used over and over again. Like a boy calling wolf, after a while the readers quit paying attention.”

  “Is this what you call pedestrian writing, supporting your theory of elitist politics?” She glanced at him when he didn’t respond. “You’re frowning, and I fear I will be taken off, dash, by that activity, dash, if you continue to do so.”

  “Look at the publication dates on both, and then check out the reviews.”

  Glancing at her monitor, Fiona understood Grant’s serious expression. “The first one is four days from now and already has 1,945 reviews; the second one, two days from now and already has 900. How can a book have almost two thousand reviews four days before it’s published?”

  “Beats me. That’s not the first time I’ve seen this, though, and not only on Delaney.com. It’s a conundrum.”

  “It is indeed, but if it’s not specific to Delaney.com, it doesn’t interest us. Should we continue?”