Ashes and Bones

by Dana Cameron

  “Still, it’s nice of him to come all the way up from Connecticut to help us,” Brian said. He glanced at me nervously, hoping that I’d be polite enough to refrain from arguing in front of Joel.

  “Sure. You want some chili, Joel?” I said, standing back so they both could come in.

  Joel entered the kitchen, sniffed and said, “Hey, are you sure that’s not spaghetti sauce?”

  I got the hot sauce out of the cupboard for him. Joel likes his food with a kick. He put hot sauce on pancakes, once. “You’re very funny. Never insult the one who is feeding you, boy.”

  Brian jumped in, eager to keep things going smoothly. “Joel, do you want to eat first, have a beer first, or start snooping?”

  Joel shook his head. “I’m starved. You got any wine?”

  “Uh…” I said. “We got some white in the fridge. Sauvignon blanc, I think.”

  Joel made a face. “With chili? I’ll stick with the beer, thanks.” He glanced at Brian, who shrugged, as if to say “Hey, I’ve tried to teach her.”

  We sat down and ate quickly.

  “Do you have any bread?” Joel was sweating profusely now, the beads glistening on his pale skin more to do with the extras he’d dumped onto his chili than anything I had put into it. Red pepper flakes, Tabasco, and something scary-looking he poured from a bottle he kept in his briefcase.

  “Yeah, but I made the rice to go with it…” I gestured to the bowl, but he’d already eaten it.

  “Just to mop up.”

  I got him the bread, and another beer for myself and Brian, who was more than usually chatty. Again, trying to prevent me from saying anything in front of Joel.

  And then we got to work.

  We all went from room to room—there was no way that I was going to be left out—and in each instance, Joel looked in the most likely places for a camera or bug. He told us why he was looking where, and we were able to give him the recent history of most of the rooms, having been intimately acquainted with the woodwork as its installers. After I told him about what had been in the room before the new molding, he looked approvingly at me.

  “You really pay attention to details.”

  “Brian did most of the finish work,” I said.

  “Yeah, but it’s good, you know when things happened and how. You know what cracks are old and new.” He struggled to find the words for what he meant. “You pay attention to your surroundings. Most people don’t.”

  “I’m sure it’s the archaeology,” I said. “Or maybe the up-tightness. Maybe paranoia, these days.” I looked over at Brian.

  My husband frowned and shook his head, wondering if I was going to start something.

  Joel waved the comment aside. “You know, a lot of scientific types are a bit paranoid. It’s a part of being tuned into trends and paying attention to detail. It’s not always a bad thing.”

  “No,” Brian and I both said quickly.

  “Okay, that looks good, far as I can see,” he said when we finished the last room. We’d spent a long time looking at the new plumbing and electrical box. “Let’s see your office, Emma, then we’ll figure out where to put the cameras outside.”

  “Cameras?” I asked.

  “We can put some cameras up, keep an eye on the outside,” Joel said. “It was a good idea that Brian had.”

  “Cameras?” I repeated at Brian, who pretended to be paying rapt attention to Joel.

  “Sure,” Joel said. “I’ve got a couple that will do the trick—Freddie the Freak will have to watch other people’s porn for a while—”

  “Dude, we don’t want to know your friends’ habits,” Brian said.

  Joel laughed. “Seriously not my friend. Co-worker. And it’ll be good for Freddie to watch professional pornographers for a while. And these cameras are out of date for what he’s into anyway. As for your present problem…you know, most hacks are worked inside the company, not outside. So if the facility is secure…then that helps. You keep the place locked up, right? And you use your alarm system?”

  Brian and I both nodded.

  “Good. No one with keys you don’t trust? The guy doing the work on the house?”

  “I haven’t given him a key,” I said, but suddenly, I wondered about Artie and his unreliable nature.

  “Good to hear.”

  “You said you weren’t an expert?” I asked.

  “I’m not, I’m just a guy. But I know enough to be paranoid and I know plenty of security freaks and I know my way around a Radio Shack. I can fake it good enough for your purposes. So, lead me to your office.”

  I hurried up ahead, and quickly cleared a path to my desk. This resulted in a new pile off to the side. The CD I’d left playing while checking my email before I’d started dinner was still cycling.

  Joel cocked his head thoughtfully. “Beethoven?”

  “Yep. You need me to turn it off?”

  “No, turn it up.”

  I obliged, he sat down, cracked his knuckles and got to work. After a glance at the router, he looked at the monitor and frowned. He tapped the keys, bringing up screens I’d never seen before and didn’t know existed.

  Finally he looked up, wary disbelief on his face. “You don’t have your encryption enabled?”

  “Oh, the router has a firewall,” Brian said. “Don’t worry about it. Kam helped me with it when we set up the network.”

  Joel went even paler than usual. “Brian, how long have you had this wireless network?”

  The panic in his voice scared me.

  “Not long, just about a month,” Brian said slowly. “We put it in just before we went to Hawaii.”

  Joel shook his head. “With the wireless access wide open, anyone can see all your machines from behind the firewall. Damn it, you could have all sorts of crap on there.”

  I exchanged a look with Brian: this was all news to both of us.

  “Dude, you need to encrypt your wireless network, and install a firewall and some spy-detecting software on each machine.”

  Brian looked at me, one eyebrow raised so high it was lost under his hair. He needed that haircut soon. Maybe I was trying to ignore the note of anxiousness in Joel’s voice.

  “Why?” Brian said. “You really don’t need encryption if you’re as far out in the country as we—”

  “No, man, that’s not true. Anyone could get on your network from outside the house. And the firewall in the router is wimpy-assed; you should have them on each of your machines as well.” Joel explained in detail what was wrong as he worked. “I didn’t find anything too suspicious, but I think you’ll be a lot safer from viruses and stuff, at the very least.”

  Brian fancies himself the technologically literate one in the family, and he was particularly proud of having installed the new network. Although Joel had done a good job of explaining without pointing fingers, I could tell my husband was far from happy. But I had to hand it to him, he didn’t make excuses to Joel and he didn’t try to argue the point with someone who actually worked in the field. Taking even a gentle rebuke from Joel was hard, but Brian did it.

  “Hang on a second.” Joel pulled out his laptop notebook and spent a little time with it. “I’ve got some software on here that helps find open access points. You know about wardriving, right?”

  Brian said, “I’ve heard of it.”

  “No clue,” I said.

  Joel blew out his cheeks in frustration, then turned his machine so we could see the screen. I didn’t see anything I recognized; it was all just random numbers and letters, to me.

  “Look, right there? That’s you. That’s your wireless router shouting, “look at me, I’m a wireless access point at the Funny Farm!”

  “That sounds bad,” Brian said.

  My stomach felt like it was ready to be rid of the chili, and I concentrated on taking deep breaths.

  “It is bad. It means people could have been using your machine to look at your files, your email, use your computer to transmit files…”

  “Can we fix
it?” I could feel sweat running down my back, something that had nothing to do with the heat in my office.

  “Yep, I’ll set the encryption on the wireless network right now, but then we’d better do some shopping.”

  I said nothing, just followed him out of the house and into his Beemer. It was parking us in, and besides, Brian’s truck was too tight a fit for all of us. My car was was full of field gear, and a pile of books I’d meant to lend to Raylene Reynolds for her kids. To me, the BMW didn’t match Joel’s personality—unless you chalked it up to gadgetry and you thought of the ways in which geeks compete.

  Twenty minutes later, we were at the nearest computer megastore, and ten minutes after that, Brian was paying out a shocking amount of money for things I’d never heard of or believed I needed. He seemed to vaguely get what Joel was talking about while he threw things into our cart, but I still had no idea.

  Joel saw me flinch when I saw the total. “Trust me. It’s all necessary.”

  “You told us you weren’t an expert on security!”

  He shook his head. “This is just basic stuff. I know you guys love Kam and all, but next time you’re doing something like this? Give me a call. I don’t mind, I don’t want anyone getting exposed to the creeps out there.”

  Brian didn’t say anything, but he colored, and nodded. I could tell that he felt guilty, or at least remiss, as the network had been his idea. “Sure. Definitely.”

  When we got back to the Funny Farm, Joel installed the new software and hardware, and then we started installing the cameras he brought outside. We reassured him that the barn had been padlocked, and the access to the connected buildings was kept locked as well. We finally put up a birdhouse Brian and I had bought, but now it camouflaged a camera.

  “There you go,” Joel said with satisfaction. “Beautiful job, if I say so myself. Just keep an eye on the cameras, try to make sure they don’t get wet. I’ll monitor the images, and I’ll send you an email with the directions so you can, too. I’ll let you know when the batteries go or anything.”

  “Okay,” I said, a little overwhelmed by the past few hours. I gave Joel a hug. “Thanks again, Joel. Any chance I should call Bucky, try to patch things up with her?”

  He tchhed, and shook his head. “Do you remember what happened when your parents tried to make you both take tennis lessons?”

  When we were kids, I had plodded on until the instructor finally said I had no talent and no desire. Bucky had picked up the racket, and threw it at the teacher. He only avoided injury by dint of a lifetime of lightning movement on the courts. “Right. It doesn’t pay to push her. Say hey to her for me, though, would you? And tell her to call me.”

  “You got it.”

  “Thanks again, man,” Brian said, and did the hand-slap thing again.

  “Thanks for the chili, Em. Good effort.” Joel got into his car, waved, and pulled out of the drive with a spray of gravel.

  Brian and I were left alone outside the house.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” Brian said, looking nervous.

  “Cameras…seem extreme to me,” I said carefully.

  Brian jumped right into it. “Well, it’s really like you said. There’s so little we can do about what’s happening, I figured it was better to try and do something, rather than just sit locked up in the house. And plus…you’re always after me to get along with Joel.”

  “Yeah, I’m glad about that, but can we stick to the topic at hand?” I said.

  Brian shrugged. “You know, Joel’s going to talk to Bucky, see if she can get the partners to do something like this at the clinic. Get something professional, though, not a kludge-job like this. I bet that would make her feel better. About the animals. It’s no big deal, and if it makes her happy…”

  “Yeah, but you…” I headed toward the back door. Brian followed me as I started clearing the dishes off the table, loading them into the dishwasher. I couldn’t help a purely communicative bit of banging and slamming as I dumped the leftover chili into a plastic bowl.

  Brian stood in the doorway. “Don’t take it out on the kitchen. We’ll have to pay the contractors extra to fix it all over again.”

  It was supposed to be a joke, but I just didn’t feel like it. “We have an alarm system. That isn’t enough?”

  “I just want to know whether someone has been hanging around. The alarm will only tell us if someone got in, while it is armed.”

  “You don’t think it’s a little much?” I asked. “A little paranoid?”

  “I don’t think it’s paranoid. I mean, now we know why things have been happening when they were happening. That someone could watch your email and know when you were going to be at the site, in Hawaii, or whatever.”

  “But, Brian…” I tried to sort out my jumble of thoughts. “You could have told me. That you called Joel. We…could have talked about it, first.”

  “I thought we were both going to try to be careful. This was my compromise. I thought you’d be happy about that.” Now all the defensiveness that Brian had kept from expressing around Joel came rushing out. “I thought you’d like that I was taking your concerns seriously.”

  “Yeah, but…this feels like you went behind my back.” It wasn’t a very strong argument, but somehow I’d just wanted to keep Brian from getting too involved. Like acting on the threat would make the threat more real, would direct it toward him.

  “I thought it was a good idea. I went for it.” Brian bit off each syllable, almost glad to have a real opponent, no matter how minor the issue. “Emma, I had to do something. This is real, there is a threat to you.”

  I reached out to him. “And I’m glad that you believe me, now, that Tony’s behind this.”

  Brian pulled back. “Whoa, I didn’t say that. I believe someone is acting against you; I still don’t think that Tony Markham is necessarily the best suspect.”

  We glared at each other.

  Brian tried again. “Look, like I said, I had to do something. You’ve stopped trying to look forward. You don’t even care about what the Red Sox are doing, and they’re having a pretty good year. You used to talk about doing forensics or criminalistics or whatever—you know how that guy who was investigating the crime scene at the Chandler house was trying to get you into it?”

  “Stuart Feldman. With the State Police lab.”

  “Yeah, well, you don’t talk about that anymore, not since you got back from the conference in January.”

  I got a bottle of water and threw the cap angrily toward the trash: I missed. “How could I? When I was afraid that it was my…involvement in these things that was bringing this on us?”

  “Bringing what on us? Coincidences! At the conference, all someone had to say was ‘Tony Markham,’ no, not even; they said ‘Billy Griggs,’ and you flipped out. Yes, something is going on and we’re trying to take care of that. But you, something happens and you go to Def Con one: Against all logic, it has to be Tony.”

  I couldn’t stand that he was saying that, and I couldn’t dispute it either, not sensibly, not without sounding like a broken record. He made it sound so crazy, and I knew what I saw. “Whatever. I still think cameras are too much. What’s next? Dogs? Barbed wire? An armed guard?”

  “You’re picking a fight, Emma. You’re overreacting, and it’s not fair to me. I’m trying to do the right thing.”

  Again, Brian made me sound like a lunatic, just by being so damned…reasonable about it. “Yes, I’m mad you went behind my back. Yes, I’m glad you’re trying to come up with a solution that will work for us. I just don’t want…any of this. I didn’t do anything wrong, and yet…I don’t want this to be happening to us.”

  “I know. I’m sorry, and next time I have a brainwave, I’ll talk to you first. It’s done now. It won’t hurt you any, and maybe it will help. And besides, Joel cleared a whole pile of spyware and crap from the hard drive.”

  We were trying to make up, but I still felt like Brian was overcompensating for not bein
g able to make the threat go away. Maybe even for trying to take care of me, I thought, as ungrateful as that sounded. I just wanted it all to go away. The fact that I did feel like it was my fault was no help.

  I nodded, and finished clearing up. Brian took the vegetable garbage out to the compost heap and returned a moment later with the newspaper, a look of shock on his face.

  “What is it?” I asked immediately.

  “The front page. They found the car that chased you, not too far away from the police station.”

  “Huh?”

  “Someone torched the hell out of it. By the time the firemen got there, it was nothing but a smoking shell.”

  Monday, I stopped by CaféNation as a treat for breakfast. As I waited for the miracle of coffee to overtake me, a shiny red object on the register caught my eye. A closer look revealed that it was a key chain, a metallic red carabiner with a couple of keys and a charm, a shamrock that looked like real gold with a tiny diamond in the center. I picked it up, flicked the carabiner; there was a Volkswagen key and a couple of house keys, I noticed. I had to resist the urge to clip it on my own belt as I watched the play of light on the shiny red surface. A ready-made Emma toy.

  “Shoot, Tina, someone lost their keys?”

  “Yep.” She bustled with my coffee. “I found them right after the lunch rush, couple of days ago. Can’t imagine that anyone isn’t missing them, you know?”

  “Yeah, for sure. Lost house keys, you can work around, maybe. Lost car key, not so easy. Nice car, too.” I shrugged. “Maybe it was their Tuesday car, and they won’t miss it until next week.”

  “If that’s the case, we could just walk down the street with the key and keep pressing the alarm button until we get a hit.” She glanced over the espresso machine and smiled. “Go for a little joy ride. Got time for a run to the border today?”

  When I opened my eyes again after that first sip, I pretended to consider, “Which one?”