He would make a perfect villain, and he wasn’t a villain at all. He did not deserve that. She needed to protect him—a thought that he would hate.
“I’m not alone, Dad. Ben Healy is still here, and he is being cautious about everything. He’s been talking to Ryan, and their dad knows what’s going on. So it’s not just me.”
“That’s good.”
After she hung up, she had no idea what to do with herself. She wasn’t going to keep searching on the Forbes family. Her in-box and social media accounts were full of messages from friends, chatter about their summers, pictures of their cats, pictures of other people’s cats, pictures of the meals they were about to eat, reposts of what they had been doing this time last year, and on and on. Why did she think that she had to keep up with every person she had ever met?
The phone rang. It was the landline again. How strange. In Charlottesville she didn’t even have a landline. No one did.
“It’s me. I mean, Ben.”
“I know who you are.” She recognized voices. If she heard a voice once; she remembered it. That was one of the abilities she had gotten from the Forbes family. “Did you hear about Gideon Forbes?”
“Yes, but there’s not time to talk about it. I need you to take the battery out of your cell phone and disconnect the modems in the house and the boathouse. Not just unplug them, but unscrew the input line.”
“What? Why?”
“I honestly don’t have time to explain. Just please do it and meet me in the village at the place with the computers. Can you do all that?”
“The arcade? Sure. I can be there.”
“Good. I will see you soon. I’m leaving the hospital now.”
“The hospital? Why—”
He had already hung up.
She hated not knowing what was going on, but she—unlike some other people—always did what she promised. She had to find a little screwdriver to open up her phone, and it took some tugging to get the battery out. She hoped she hadn’t broken it. The modem for the house was in the corner of the library. Unscrewing the cable was easy. Then she got the key to the boathouse and went across the lawn and took care of that.
The summer season was at its peak. All the parking spots on the village streets were full. She parked at the school and cut through the soccer field. It wasn’t raining, but the day was gray enough that the arcade was crowded. Little kids were shoving each other to get to the Whack-A-Mole; preteen girls were clustered around the dance machine. The driving simulators burst out with the sounds of shrieking tires and car crashes. The old pinball machines played tinny music, and the familiar “SPINNN TO WINNN” blared over everything.
No one was at either of the two computers. Colleen went to the counter to pay for some time. Some children were selecting which prizes to redeem with the tickets they had won. It was taking them long enough that the mom gestured to Colleen to step in ahead of them.
“If you go sit in front of the library, you can get wi-fi,” the kid behind the counter told her. “It’s free. The password is ‘guest.’ You don’t need to pay us. No one does anymore.”
“I’m meeting someone here,” was all Colleen said. She didn’t need to explain herself to everyone all the time.
As he had been driving from Staunton, Ben wouldn’t be here for a while. She turned on the computer, and because she hadn’t done so yet today, she entered the URL for Autumn’s site.
Suddenly the screen was completely filled with an image of an erect penis going in…
Horrified she tried to exit the site. That only brought up a worse image. She pressed the power button on the computer so hard that her finger turned white.
What had happened? She was no prude, but still…She hoped that none of the children had seen the screen. Or any of the grown-ups. Someone would probably call the police, and this was the sort of site that teachers lost their jobs over.
She moved to the other computer. Gingerly she turned it on and typed in the address for the Norwegian newspaper that she read a few times a week. That seemed safe.
Things were good in Norway. Greenhouse emissions were decreasing, thanks to more and more electric cars. Princess Ingrid Alexandria was turning into a very pretty young lady. The sailing team…
A shadow fell across the screen. It was Ben. The arcade was too noisy for her to have heard him approach.
“What on earth is going on?” She hoped he would know something. “Autumn’s site is coming up as porn.”
“It’s been hacked.” He pulled over the chair from the other computer and sat down. “And my identity’s been compromised. Look at this.” He pulled some folded papers out of his pocket. “The ladies at the hospital thrift shop remembered me and let me use their computer and printer. This is my credit card statement.”
Ladies did remember him. Colleen took the paper. Marked with a yellow highlighter were four charges made this morning. They were all small. The first one, $2.19, was the largest; the other three were under a dollar each. “I don’t get it,” she said.
“Two one nine…those numbers are my Social Security number.”
“Good Lord.” Someone was making these charges to flaunt that they knew his Social Security number. “That’s awful. Who did it? Is this what Ryan meant by Gideon’s fans being weird?”
“I assume so. If Autumn’s fans had this kind of skill, it would have been happening all along to the different Ariels and to the Gary Vogels.”
“But how did they find you so fast? How did they know you were Gary Vogel?”
He assumed that Gideon’s fans had found him by hacking into the publicist’s phone. “If they were really as good as they seem to be, it wouldn’t have taken them long at all. There were so many calls to my number. It never occurred to me to use a burner, but clearly I should have.”
His entire online identity had been compromised, but the hackers were doing the oddest little things. There were these tiny charges on his credit cards; his health insurance now said that he had been born in 1943; he was actively commenting on an arborist’s website.
“They’re making me sound like I am some kind of Druid, that if you worship each tree’s individual spirituality, you don’t have to worry about pests and drought.”
“They could be having you comment on kiddie porn sites,” she pointed out. “But what about bank accounts?”
He had talked to his financial person. There had been some attacks on his big investment accounts, but they had been repelled by the wealth management company’s security systems. “We froze all my accounts, and actual people are monitoring them continuously, not just the computers. But again, all the amounts have been small.”
“If they don’t want money, what do they want?”
“They want you.”
“Me?”
“Of course. The child of their idol. The Lost Princess. They don’t yet know that it’s you, and believe me, I tried my damnedest to scrub all my data so that they can’t find you through my phone. We didn’t call and text that much, but you never know what is still out there. I’m afraid you need to freeze your accounts and delete your social media. Do you know your passwords?”
“Sure.”
He looked at her suspiciously. “Should I have said ‘password,’ not ‘passwords’? Jesus, Colleen, don’t tell me that you use the same password on everything.”
“Sometimes I capitalize the first letter.”
“That’s certainly taking security to the next level. Besides your money, what’s the worst thing someone could do to you online?”
She thought. Her father? Her brothers? “My students. Their grades.” Monkeying with kids’ transcripts could make a joke of all their hard work and potentially ruin their college plans. It was a horrible thought. She couldn’t let that happen.
Ben logged on to the school system with her access code. After a few keystrokes, the
familiar screen changed to lines and lines of code. They meant nothing to Colleen, but Ben was looking at them intently.
After a few minutes he shook his head. “Your school’s good. The transcripts are locked up tight. A person would have to be a thousand times better than me—” He broke off. “Of course, that is what we are dealing with, people who are a thousand times better than anyone. The safest thing is to delete your access and everything associated with you. Then if they do find out who you are, they will leave the school alone.”
She certainly didn’t want the school’s website to flash the sort of pictures that Autumn’s was. Ben deleted her name and photo from the faculty list. Then the French and Latin clubs lost their sponsor. She was gone. It was as if Colleen Ridge had never existed.
But she had existed. Judge Rutherford’s signature had made her herself.
Deleting her social media accounts was equally painful. All those pictures, years and years of pictures, her travels, her friends, a series of keystrokes and they were gone. And her contact information, all the phone numbers and email addresses. What was she going to do when this was all over? It wasn’t like you could open the phone book anymore and find people.
“I guess we’ve done what we can do,” he finally said. “You probably need to get in touch with the school and tell them what you had to do.”
She reached for her phone and then remembered that it didn’t have a battery. That was okay; the offices would be closed by now. She could send an email. No, Ben had closed her email account. It would have to wait until morning.
“I think it’s okay to use your grandmother’s landline,” he was saying. “The connection is so old that to tap it, these people would have to leave their mothers’ basements, and I bet that Gideon’s fans don’t do that much.”
Ben said that he had also parked at the school. Outside the arcade the sidewalk was crowded with the summer visitors. Someone bumped against her. Ben reacted quickly, putting his hand on her back, steadying her. But she was fine so he let his hand fall away.
Twenty-four hours ago she had been sitting on the library table, her legs spread, feeling the scrape of his belt buckle against her inner thigh. Now he touched her only as long as was polite.
This was worse than the miserable awkwardness she had felt last night. At least the awkwardness said that the sex had mattered. Yes, it had mattered in a bad way, but now it had no significance at all. They didn’t even feel awkward about it. He probably hadn’t thought about it.
Four years ago the story had been about them. Their relationship was the most important thing in their lives, and everyone else was encouraging and happy. But now the story was about everything else, Grannor’s will, Autumn, Gideon, her adoption, the hacking. What was between them was sitting at the edge of the room, not even trying to be heard.
There didn’t seem to be anything to do about that.
They crossed the playing field. As they got closer to the school parking lot, Ben cursed. “On top of everything, we just got parking tickets.”
Colleen looked at her car. There was a yellow slip tucked under the windshield. Apparently it wasn’t legal to park here even in the summer. She should have known. “At least the fine isn’t much,” she said as she looked at hers. “And we can pay them online…oh, no, we can’t get online unless we go back to the arcade.”
“And we don’t have any credit cards to pay them with. In fact, how much cash do you have?”
“Not a lot. Grannor had a stash, but Dad had me put it in the estate account.”
“I’ll call Nate.” Nate was one of his longtime friends. “He’s in West Virginia, just a couple of hours from here. He can go to the bank in the morning and get a couple thousand to tide us over.”
A couple thousand? How long was he thinking this would last?
Back at the lake, he went to the extension in Grannor’s room to make his call while she tried to figure out something for dinner. They hadn’t done a proper grocery trip in days, and now they had no way of paying for anything.
Nate Forrest had apparently thought nothing of lending a friend that kind of money. Ben had offered to drive to West Virginia, but Nate had agreed to meet Ben at Mountain Ash, the resort Ben would be working at for a week next winter. “I think he wants to figure out what I am doing. I also had him pay our parking tickets. I knew you would be worried about them.”
Parking tickets did seem trivial in light of everything else going on, but Ben was right. Colleen cared about the ticket. Nice girls paid their parking tickets right away. Going back to being a nice girl felt safe right now. “Thank you…and thank him too.”
“I will, but actually it was pretty awkward.”
“Oh?” Colleen was trying to make out the date on a package of chicken breasts she had found at the bottom of the freezer.
“When he entered the ticket number, the license plate came up with your name.”
“So?” Colleen gave up on the chicken. “What’s the—” Then she got it. “You never bothered to tell your friends that the place where you’ve been staying since April belongs to the Ridge family.”
“No, I didn’t.”
She opened the kitchen cabinet. She was pretty sure there was half a box of pasta somewhere. “That’s kind of insulting, Ben, that you’re ashamed to let anyone know you’re staying with me.”
“No, no,” he protested, but then he had trouble explaining himself. “They all liked you, everyone did that summer. They thought I was crazy to let you go.”
Colleen found the pasta. “You didn’t let me go. You pushed me.”
“I know that. They know that, and they didn’t let me forget it.”
“So what did Nate say when he found out?”
“He asked if I was fucking it up again.”
“And?”
“I said that I probably already had.” He looked down at his hands. “I hope you can believe that through this whole mess, I’ve wanted the best for you…except yesterday in the library. I don’t know what to say about that.”
At least he hadn’t completely forgotten. “You can say that you had affirmative consent.” Affirmative consent…how romantic was that? “If you’re done with the phone, I need to call my dad. Will you start the water for this?” She gestured toward the pasta. “There’s a jar of sauce, and I can open a can of corn, which won’t add much in the way of interest or nutrition.”
“I’ll go to the store as soon as we get money from Nate.”
Colleen knew that after calling her father, she was going to need to call Amanda. She was keeping a much bigger secret from her friends than he was keeping from his.
Genevieve answered the phone. Colleen asked her to stay on the line. Her father was going to need his wife to help him through this. While they were waiting for her father to pick up the phone, Colleen asked Genevieve if she would call Patty and Liz later tonight and tell them everything. Colleen figured that the story would be more complete if it went through the women.
She now knew how to get what she wanted from her family. In a perfect world her father and brothers would have worked with her to fill the holes after her mother had died, but the world was still many degrees south of Eden. She should stop waiting for the men, but work with their wives. Together, she, Genevieve, Patty, and Liz would create an extended family whose bonds would be as strong as if Mary Pat were still alive. She was very lucky that the other three would want that as much as she did.
“Good God, Colleen if they are doing this to Ben,” her dad said after she had explained the situation, “what would they do to you?”
“I don’t know, Dad. That’s what makes it sort of scary.”
“Is Ben there? Can I talk to him?”
Colleen supposed that her father was in the total “women and children in the lifeboats first” mode, wanting to talk to Ben because he was another man. But this didn’t s
eem like a good time to fight that battle. She handed the phone to Ben.
“Yes, sir…I agree…I’m sorry, Dr. Ridge, but I’ve had to close my accounts. I’m sure I’d need a credit card to do that…”
The conversation continued with Ben agreeing to everything her father said.
“What was that about?” she asked as soon as the call was over.
“He wants a security guard at the end of the driveway and one on the waterfront. He’ll set it up since we can’t.”
“Are you kidding? Is that really necessary?”
Ben shrugged. Clearly he thought so. “If you were a prize yesterday when it was only Autumn, think of what you are today.”
No. If Colleen were a prize, it was because she was a good teacher, a generous friend, a reasonably faithful Catholic, and a far better granddaughter than her grandmother had ever deserved. It wasn’t because a drug-addicted rock star had had sex with an emotionally starved teenage film star.
“How does this end, Ben? We can’t go on forever without credit cards or phones.”
“I know we can’t,” he admitted. “Let me make another call. Back at the thrift shop, I called a guy I know from school. He used to be a ‘black hat’ hacker, the sort who would have done this to other people. He’s gone legit, but he still knows a lot. I called him right away and asked him to see what he can find out about who is doing this. I told him that you wouldn’t want him to do anything illegal or unethical.”
Colleen wasn’t sure she cared as much about that as she once had.
She sat the table while he called. They were eating in the kitchen. This meal didn’t deserve anything better.
“It could be worse,” Ben said after he had hung up. “He called some other people to help, and they are all sure that my information isn’t on the dark web, at least as of fifteen minutes ago. As best they can tell, there are only two, maybe three, people at work, but as good as my guys are, they say that this group is better.”
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