Cold Calls
Page 12
They probably started off with a time-based reminder that would pick away at the scab—7 months, 3 weeks, 5 days, 12 hours, and 25 minutes ago—then maybe cut to some sort of mental picture—how happy he was, how he loved to smile—then a reality check or two—the call from the hospital or what it was like to turn down the street and see all the police cars—for sure several paragraphs of insults, curses, and threats, wrapping the whole thing up with a wish-you-were-never-born finale.
And there it was, propped up against the plastic flower centerpiece.
She picked up the envelope. Three, maybe four pages inside, the paper crinkly from her mother’s firm handwriting.
Shelly knew there was a chance that the letter wasn’t anything like what she’d imagined, a chance that it wasn’t fueled by hate and intentionally cruel. There was even a chance that it might hint at some far-off forgiving, some come-home invitation.
There was a chance, all right.
Same as a snowball’s in hell.
She left her father’s note on the table and dropped the unopened envelope in the garbage.
Twenty-Two
THE FIRST THING HIS MOTHER SAID WHEN SHE GOT HOME from work was “How was your day?”
Considering the shit that was going to be hitting the fan soon, it was a good day, and Eric told her so. Conversation over, she announced that they were having hamburgers for dinner and asked him to get a fire started so the grill would be ready when his dad got home.
Burgers and the chance to play with fire? She didn’t have to ask twice.
Twenty minutes later—after half a quart of lighter fluid and roof-high flames—the coals settled down to a glow and Eric sat on the steps of the deck with his iPad and checked for Facebook updates.
Apparently something “absolutely frickin LMFAO hysterical!” had happened Saturday night at an undisclosed location involving shaving cream, vodka, a math textbook, and a page ripped from Playboy, and this event then led to a lot of repostings of lyrics from old Gorillaz songs and references to somebody named Sir Jasper of the Dip. Oh, and Marshall and Rosi were now officially a couple. Whoever they were.
Outta the loop for a few days, and it might as well have been forever.
There was a picture from a party at some senior’s house, and there in the background, almost invisible, was Ian, the guy who’d filmed his now-infamous mac and cheese attack and posted it on YouTube.
He and Ian weren’t friends because Ian didn’t have friends. And he seemed to like it that way, roaming the halls of the school with his black band T-shirts and black skinny jeans, black vests in the fall, black trench coat in the winter, his straight black hair keeping one eye always hidden. Too big to get picked on, and weird enough to pull a knife on the fool who’d try. There were plenty of rumors about him, and if only half were true, he was a guy you didn’t want to mess with. But it was those rumors that had had Eric tracking him down after school, and he didn’t flinch when Eric described it, no what-if-I-get-in-trouble? or what-will-the-coach-say? Just a simple cash transaction and it was done.
True, Eric hadn’t paid him yet, but he assumed that Ian would understand and there’d be time to make good on it.
Besides, there wasn’t much Ian could do about it now anyway.
There was a friend request from Fatima, and he clicked on confirm.
She was cool and, from what he could see, good-looking. Her headscarf covered her hair and ears, and she wore it tight under her chin, framing her face in white cloth. She had gorgeous dark eyes, and her skin had this tint to it, something between tan and brown, what April would have called an olive complexion. She had a great smile, too, which didn’t hurt. But it was probably a conversation with some guy that was behind her big secret, and the last thing he needed was another older brother threatening to kick his ass.
It was Fatima’s idea that she take home all the stuff they had printed out about their victims to see if she could find anything in common. She seemed excited by the challenge and promised a full report, and both he and Shelly were happy to let her do it. But even if she found something, they were running out of time to do anything. It was already Tuesday night. Thursday at this time, it’d be too late.
Wait, when on Thursday?
What was the deadline?
Noon?
After school?
Midnight?
First thing in the morning?
He wondered if it was in one of the caller’s old messages, so he clicked on Gmail, rekeying his password and hitting ENTER.
That’s when he saw the subject line for the new message.
Check out the hot picture I took of April!
For a lifetime he didn’t move, didn’t breathe, then a finger shot out and tapped open the email.
And there it was again.
The picture that started it all.
Taken with a camera app on an iPhone from the foot of the bed.
His bed. In his room.
Hi-res and in perfect focus.
Her head on the pillow, hands gripping the ends, eyes closed, a half smile biting closed on her lower lip, her blond hair all over the place, the earrings her parents had given her earlier that day for her seventeenth birthday catching the light from the flash.
The rumpled sheets made her early-summer tan look golden dark, and where she wasn’t tan, her skin glowed pinkish white. The bellybutton ring her mother said she was too young to have impossible to miss in the center of the photo.
Next to the bed, in a pile on the desk, her teal Abercrombie T-shirt, white Victoria’s Secret bra, and black Wet Seal thong.
The way the camera had been held—high overhead, stretched up, trying to capture it all, a crazy-angle lucky shot—the photo showed another leg—lean, muscular, an unmistakable J-shaped scar from an ancient bike accident, still visible above his knee.
She had said, “Don’t even think of taking any pictures.”
And when the flash went off, she said, “Delete it now.”
Later she said, “Swear you deleted it.”
Swear it.
That was three months ago.
Eight weeks later, it was over, the picture the only reminder of what used to be.
A picture he said he wouldn’t take.
A picture he swore he’d delete.
A picture a stranger now had.
There was more.
Above the picture—separated by semicolons in tiny, eight-point type—the names, numbers, and email addresses of every contact on his phone.
The iPad bounced as his knees started to shake. He stood up fast, and the dizziness brought him right back down. He forced in a gulp of air and felt his stomach lurch, the roaring sound in his head making it hard to think, the voice in his head—his voice—screaming that it was already too late.
He got up, slower this time, and walked away from the house, toward the pine trees that lined the edge of the yard.
That picture.
No doubt at all as to who it was.
Where it was taken.
Or who had held the camera.
And now everybody he knew would have their own, personal copy.
Instinct made him scroll down past the picture, and that’s where he found the note.
Thought you’d like to see the message I’ll be sending out Thursday! ;P
The fifth time he read the line, he got it.
He was still safe.
His knees went wobbly again, so he sat down on the grass. He thought for a moment, then his fingers raced across the screen, adding the phantom email address to his contact list, trashing the email, then opening the deleted-items folder and erasing it from there. He knew that you could never totally delete anything, and that the picture was still buried somewhere in the megabytes, but this way it would be hard to stumble on, say, if a parent accidentally on purpose went snooping.
He still had time before his father got home, so he opened a blank email and pasted in the address. In the subject line, he typed, Thursday.
Eric hit SEND, and before he had time to close out, he had a response.
Thursday by 9:00 p.m. At 9:01 the picture gets sent. :(
The caller had been waiting.
The more he thought about it, the madder he got, the more he knew he’d find a way to get even. Now he waited, somehow knowing there was more.
Soon enough, another email binged in, and when he tapped it open, squared-off digital numbers of a countdown clock filled the screen.
49:26:59
49 hours.
26 minutes.
59 seconds.
Ticking down to nothing.
49:26:58
49:26:57
49:26:56
49:26:55
49:26:54
49:26:53
49:26:52
49:26:51
Fatima watched the numbers change.
It was hypnotic.
Relaxing, even.
The seconds were marked with a baby-bird peep, and the minutes with a water drop. She wondered what the changing hours sounded like. Probably another nature sound—an owl hoot or a cricket, maybe. She was sure that the final alarm would be a crack of thunder with a flash of hot lightning, since that was pretty much how she saw her family reacting to the scanned pages the caller would be emailing out.
The reproduction quality was amazing, at least 300 dpi. You could clearly see the curlicues at the ends of the Y’s, the little half circles that dotted the I’s and made her handwriting so distinct. And you could read every word, even the ones scrunched between lines of text, the dense paragraphs of declarative sentences that clarified the depth of her doubt. All without magnification. Even Teyta Noor, with her thick glasses and old-woman squint, could read it. And she would, too. Every damning word.
Fatima had thought she’d die right there when she opened the email and saw those addresses and those scans of the pages. And when she realized it was just a warning, that the email had only been sent to her, she sighed so loud that she startled herself, giggling with relief.
That all changed with the counter, and the realization of what would happen when it hit zero.
It even took the thrill out of solving the mystery.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t solved, but she was sure that it was cracked.
What had looked impossible turned out to be easy, a simple task of compilation, organization, elimination, and analysis. The same process that got her in this trouble in the first place.
When Fatima combined the pile of papers she had printed out about Connor Stark with the ones Shelly had found on Katie Schepler and the ones Eric had on Heather Herman, the stack was three inches thick. Scores of pages and hundreds of posts, with twice as many names and places and events to sort through, plus links and Foursquare check-ins and lists of friends and profile info and lines and lines and lines of Tweets. Eric had said it couldn’t be done, so of course she knew she had to do it. The cuter the guy, the more competitive she got, a stupid, uncontrollable urge that explained why she couldn’t get a boyfriend.
At least, she hoped it was the explanation.
She had started by spreading the papers out on her bed, the floor, the dresser, the chair. She assigned highlighters—yellow for school, pink for sports, blue for religion, purple for community service, lime green for everything else—then started in with the stack on her desk.
The first pages took the longest, but then she found her rhythm, her left brain sifting, compiling, subcategorizing, and cross-referencing, her right brain forming hypotheses, pulling patterns out of reams of random data, zoning out the distractions, zeroing in on the answers. Then logic took over, analyzing everything, dismissing the unproven, following the evidence, knowing that the truth would be waiting at the end.
And two hours later, there it was, the one thing all three of their victims had in common, the single element within the subset of C union K union H.
She still had to check her work, start from scratch and do the whole thing over again to be sure, looking for holes in her thinking, simple slip-ups that would give a false positive. Still, the first run-through was looking good.
If Shelly was right, it would tell them who the caller was. And if they knew who the caller was, they could keep their secrets from getting out.
That was the idea, anyway.
Now, would it work?
Probably not, but she still smiled. She had solved the puzzle—at least one part of it—and she’d done it in half the time she’d thought it would take.
It’s what she did best.
The gift that made science and math so easy.
The curse that made faith so hard.
Then there were all those What ifs that drove her nuts.
What if she had walked down a different row in the library?
She wouldn’t have seen the book.
What if her eyes were scanning the shelf above or the shelf below?
She would never have noticed the title.
What if she hadn’t slowed down, tilting her head sideways to read?
It would just have been a yellow blur, another cover on another book she’d walked past.
But she had gone down that aisle, looked at that row, and read that title.
God Is Not Great.
The second she read it, her gift took over, analyzing the words without being asked, the hypothesis involuntarily tested against previous truths.
Allah Akbar.
God is great.
The truth she had always accepted.
The only truth she had ever known.
The truth that gave her life meaning.
That held the universe together.
It must be true.
It had to be true.
Because if not . . .
At first she tried going back, pretending she hadn’t seen it, shrugging it off as some stupid rant by an ignorant fool. She had heard things like that lots of times before, things about Islam being violent or how it said it was okay to abuse women. But she knew they were wrong. She had the proof, chapter and verse, right there in her Quran. Yet somehow this one title had gotten past that line of defense, snuck into her brain, and wouldn’t go away, a horrible song that played over and over.
God Is Not Great.
It had to be wrong.
It said so in the Quran.
Besides, everybody knew it was wrong. Christians, Jews, Hindus . . . everybody.
That should’ve been good enough.
But it wasn’t.
Her gift wouldn’t let her off that easy, digging into the logic problem like it was bonus points on a physics exam.
Two days later, she was back, accidentally walking down the same aisle, randomly picking the book up off the shelf, sorta reading for a little while, the little while becoming a longer while, then a day later, checking the book out, taking it to school, hiding the laminate cover under a paper dust jacket from a biography of Lincoln, renewing it twice before being told she’d reached the renewal limit, warned yet again about writing in the margins. Finally, at the mall bookstore, a paperback copy of the book sandwiched between an issue of People and the CliffsNotes to The Great Gatsby. She had an it’s-for-a-friend line ready, but the clerk simply rang it up and put it in the bag, no questions asked.
At least someone had no questions.
Even then, she still could have explained it all away, why she had a copy of such an evil book. But her gift, her curse, forced her hand, highlighting passages, scribbling in the margins, filling the end pages with notes, adding Islam-based examples the author had overlooked.
She couldn’t help herself. She’d had to know.
And now that she knew, no one could help her.
Alone, she tapped a pencil on her desk in time with the seconds on the screen.
49:26:50
49:26:49
49:26:48
49:26:47
49:26:46
49:26:45
49:26:44
49:26:43
49:26:42
With a few clicks of her mouse, Shelly changed the screen saver on her computer, replacing the image from Aesthetic Perfection’s “The Great Depression” video with the countdown clock. The red numbers popped on the black background, giving her whole room a fiery glow.
She hadn’t noticed when the message with the clock had popped in, too busy staring at the subject line of the first email.
Marceli Romano.
There wasn’t anything else in that first email.
There didn’t have to be.
Her new look, the cross-state move, Jeff’s last name?
None of it had worked.
The caller knew who she was.
And if the caller knew that, then the caller knew what she had done.
It had been kept out of the news—her name, the details, all of it—but obviously that didn’t matter. Maybe she had seen the police report or talked to somebody at the hospital or her old school. Or the morgue.
Whatever.
The caller knew, and that’s all that mattered.
There was a time when it seemed everybody knew. That’s when friends had stopped being friends, everyone else whispering behind her back, her mother crying every time she saw her. Even Father Tony seemed to change, the Cain and Abel story coincidentally coming up Sunday after Sunday, the message of every sermon circling back to the “challenge of forgiveness.”
The real challenge had been at home. She had to give them credit—they made it through the spring and most of the summer before shipping her off to a near stranger who, by law, had to take her in.
For the people behind the dozens of email addresses pasted below the countdown clock, it would all come as a horrible shock.
Starting in 49 hours, 26 minutes, and 42 seconds.
Shelly recognized a few of the names on the list, girls at St. Anne’s who she hung with, girls she liked and who seemed to like her, the ones who were as close to friends as she thought she’d ever have again.