The Truth Hurts

by Nancy Pickard

  “What’s the matter?” Steve asks, because I’ve stopped walking and am just standing and staring. “Who’s the old guy?”

  Old guy. Hubert Templeton isn’t all that old, probably only just past sixty, but I suppose even that looks old to somebody in his twenties, like Steve. Plus, even from this distance it’s plain that the signs of a hard life are on him, aging him faster than he ought to. Feeling a sudden urge to make contact with him again, I step off the walk, onto the grass, and start to call out his name. But I don’t even get it out before he turns back around and disappears behind the house again.

  “He saw me,” I murmur to Steve, and then tell him who it was. “I know he saw me.”

  Have I changed that much, too? Or did he realize he was looking at the traitor’s daughter and decide he didn’t want to talk to me again? As abruptly as he moved to get out of my line of vision, I’m sure it was the latter.

  In the foyer, we wait at a beautiful, tiered, walnut reception desk for somebody to receive us. There’s an old-fashioned ledger lying open on the desk, with a fountain pen near it. Incongruously, amid the genteel elegance, there’s a small, square glass ashtray tucked nearly out of sight under a little ledge of the desk. The bottom of the ashtray is dewy, as if it has been recently washed out, but not completely dried. I look around me. Every wall is papered in busy floral prints; all the furniture looks antique; the “heart pine” floors gleam from a recent polish. Even though there’s air-conditioning, the house is a little warm and stuffy; the wooden paddles of overhead fans stir the air. Over a scent of lemon wax, I detect a lingering aroma of bacon, from the “breakfast” part of “B&B.” Classical music drifts down to us from upstairs.

  I pick up and ring a brass bell that’s sitting on the desk.

  Within seconds, a tall, bony, middle-aged woman comes hurrying through a doorway, wiping her palms on her black jeans. She’s wearing a man’s dress shirt over them, its tail hanging out, its sleeves rolled up, as if she might have been washing dishes when she heard our summons. She brings with her a noticeable waft of cigarette smoke, which explains the ashtray. When she speaks to us, I smell a strong breath mint.

  “Oh, hi,” she says in a voice so soft I can barely hear it. The whole South seems encompassed in those two syllables, which rise and fall and rise again in an accent as thick as the leaves on the crepe myrtles lining the street outside. “I’m so sorry! I hope y’all haven’t been waiting long? Welcome to the Old Southern Inn. Will y’all be checkin’ in with us today?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Well, that’s wonderful. We’re so glad you’re here.” Her smile is tentative and her glance only fleetingly meets my eyes. As she scurries behind the counter and turns a page in the ledger, she glances up at my companion. “Y’all must be the Sullivans? Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan, come all the way from Dallas?”

  “No, we don’t have reservations.”

  “That’s all right, we have plenty of room.” She picks up a pen and poises it over her ledger. “May I ask your name?”

  “Marie Lightfoot.”

  Is it my imagination, or does this woman freeze for just an instant at the sound of my name? If so, the moment passes so quickly I think it probably never happened, and she gives me another of her swift glances, like a shy woodland creature. She looks to be in her forties, a big-boned plain woman with a lot of flyaway reddish hair going to gray.

  And then I change my mind. “No, I’ll tell you what. I know this is going to sound a little strange, but that’s only my professional name. Let’s use my real name. Marie Folletino.”

  This time, when I see her freeze, I know it’s not my imagination.

  Her hand seems stuck to the fountain pen it holds. Since she’s not looking up, not saying anything, since her mouth seems frozen shut, I force myself to keep talking. “I was born here in Sebastion. Have you lived here all of your life? Maybe you knew my parents, Michael and Lyda Folletino?”

  Still not looking at us, she says, “That name’s familiar. I believe my father may have known them, you could ask him, if you like.”

  “What’s his name?” And then I realize she hasn’t told us hers. “I’m sorry. I didn’t catch your name, either.”

  “My name’s Maureen Goodwin, but I go by Mo.”

  “Goodwin? Is your father Lackley?”

  She looks surprised, if not exactly pleased. “You know my dad?”

  “My parents did. I met him a few years ago. Was that Hubert Templeton we saw outside just now?”

  “Most likely. He does yard work all over town.”

  “My parents knew him, too.”

  “It’s a small world.” Her accent is soft and lush, and it glides from one sentence to the next so sweetly that one could almost fail to notice how abruptly she changes the subject. “Oh! You know what? There is a message for you, Ms.—Follentino. I told her I didn’t have a reservation under that name, but they said you might be checking in.”

  She seems not to know which of my names to use. Don’t feel bad, I want to tell her, it confuses me, too.

  “A message? Nobody knows I’m here.”

  That’s probably not quite true: Paulie Barnes probably knows.

  She smiles a little. “If they knew you were coming to Sebastion, this is the only place you could be.”

  “Oh, right.” She hands me a pink slip with no name, but only a telephone number on it. When I see the Los Angeles area code, my heart beats faster. Deborah!

  24

  Marie

  “Will you excuse us for a minute?” I say to her, already turning to leave. “I need to return this call.”

  She puts her right hand on a telephone on her reception desk, and lifts it to hand it to me, but I shake my head as I pull my own cell phone out of my purse. “No, thanks. I’ll use mine. Steve, come with me.”

  He follows me back out onto the veranda, where I lead him into a far corner, even as I’m dialing the number.

  “Erin? It’s Marie. I got your call. How’s—”

  “She’s fine,” my private investigator tells me, sounding her usual clipped, efficient self, and I begin to breathe again.

  Erin McDermit has an exceptionally low-pitched voice for a woman, and it’s not by accident of birth or from smoking either. She told me once that she purposely cultivated that husky tone so that strangers wouldn’t be able to tell if it was a man or a woman who was calling them, or coming up suddenly behind them with a gun.

  “We’re comfortable,” she tells me now, in that remarkable voice that always gives me the rather unnerving sensation oftalking to a sexy man. “I think we’re safe. Your cousin told us we can have the place while he’s gone.”

  “Nate’s not there? Where’d he go?”

  “I don’t know. He acted like it was a big secret.”

  “I thought it was your job to get secrets out of people.”

  “You want me to find out?”

  “No!” I hasten to halt the bloodhound. “He’s probably got a new girlfriend.” Which is none of my business until he chooses to tell me about her. Just because Nathan agreed to hide my assistant, that doesn’t give me carte blanche to invade all of his privacy. “Why’d you call, Erin?”

  “My people have been working on the E-mails.”

  “And?” My heartbeat picks up again, but this time in hope.

  “Bad news. Your Paulie Barnes knows how to hide in plain sight, Marie. He not only used a remailer, he used a cypherpunk remailer, and then chain remailed it. On top of that, he’s giving you encrypted reply blocks.”

  “Are you speaking a language that is known to the United Nations, Erin?”

  “You want I should translate?”

  “Please.”

  “Okay, but you don’t really want details, do you?”

  “God, no. Just start talking, and when my eyes glaze, stop.”

  “I can’t see you. How will I know?”

  There’s humor in her voice.

  “It will be accompanied by snoring.”r />
  “You just don’t know what’s interesting.” She means it, too. “Here’s the deal: there are depths of anonymity on the Web, and he is using some of the deepest ones. One of the first levels is, if you want to send somebody an anonymous message, you can subscribe to a kind of service that’s called a remailer. You e-mail them your message. They hide it behind an anonymous return address and remail it to your recipient.

  “The second level is to send it through chain remailers, which are just what they sound like, a chain of remailers who each add another layer of anonymity, with new anonymous return addresses. You could do that into infinity, creating such a maze that nobody could ever track back through it to find you. Remailers operate all over the world, Marie, so your messages from Paulie Barnes could have started anywhere and then gone through remailers in Finland, Japan, Nigeria, Australia, you name it, everywhere but Alpha Seven, and I expect that’s next.

  “But that’s not the end of it. Your guy has taken it to still another level, which is exactly what I would do. He’s using cypherpunk remailers and not only that, but cypherpunk chain remailers—”

  “Cyberpunk? Like, binary codes and tongue studs?”

  “No, cypher, as in wartime codes. As in cipher, with an i. As in zero, unseen, invisible. Cypherpunk.”

  “Shyte. As in shit with an i. What do they do?”

  “First he sends them an encrypted message, which he probably knows how to do because when he subscribes, they tell him how. Your E-mail address is encrypted in that message.”

  “Great,” I say, with a sigh.

  “The cypherpunk service decodes the message and then sends it on to you with an anonymous return address.”

  “What’s the point of that?”

  “The point is to keep anybody who finds him from being able to monitor where he is sending E-mails.”

  “So we can’t find him from either end?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And he complicates it even further by using a chain of cypherpunk remailers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good grief, Erin.”

  “Your eyes glazing yet?”

  “No, I’m riveted by this. But why can’t we find him by tracing him through the E-mails that I send back to him, Erin?”

  “Because he has closed that door, too, the clever bastard. Remember I used the term ‘encrypted reply block’?”

  “No, but what is it?”

  “It’s like those self-addressed, stamped envelopes that you use in publishing, only you might say it’s written in invisible ink. The way it works is, he provides you with a preaddressed, but empty, E-mail. You write your reply inside of it and send it off to him. It is routed back through all those same layers of remailers before it reaches him.”

  “Are you saying you can’t find him through the E-mails?”

  “Bottom line, that’s what I’m saying.”

  “Can anybody find him that way?”

  “Sure. All you’d need are a million court orders, a phalanx of international lawyers, the help of the FBI, and the cooperation of governments on several continents.”

  “My God, Erin! This is unbelievable!”

  “No, Marie, this is the twenty-first century.”

  “Isn’t there any other way to trace them?”

  “You mean, like, follow the money?”

  “Yeah, like.”

  “No. These services take one-time credit card payments through secured servers. The amounts would show up on his credit card bills under some kind of innocuous designation. They never bill twice. They keep no logs. They never sell their membership lists to third parties. Hell, most of them don’t even keep a membership list, Marie.” She sounds annoyed. This computer age is making her job both easier and harder. “You sign on, you pay, you log on each time, but they keep no record of you. Marie, these services are almost nonprofit. A lot of these guys ain’t in it for the money. What they’re in love with is privacy, secrecy, and conspiracy. They hate laws, regulations, and governments. They’re libertarians, is what they are, or anarchists.”

  “And you think Paulie Barnes has done all those things?”

  “We know he has. That’s what we’ve learned from the E-mails.”

  “Is he a computer genius, Erin?”

  “I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion. It doesn’t take a nerd to do any of this stuff, it just takes a few minutes on the Web to find these services and then a little while longer to follow some instructions. I could do it, you could do it, anybody could do it.”

  “But hackers get found, Erin!”

  “Fewer than you think, and only by international cooperation and high-level string pulling, and that really does take computer geniuses and a whole lot of time and patience, which we don’t have.”

  “So we have to give up finding him that way?”

  “I would, yes.”

  Suddenly I have a bright idea. “Hey, but what about the E-mails he exchanged with Deborah? Or the one he sent to the condominium manager at Key Largo? Do you know about those?”

  “We can’t get him that way, either, Marie. He went through layers of remailers to get to the condo manager. When he e-mailed Deborah, he didn’t go to all that trouble, he just used a fake name through a free server, but he did it at a public library.”

  “Which means?”

  “I found the library, but they get hundreds of people on their computers. Whoever he is, he didn’t give them any reason to remember him, and they don’t videotape their patrons.”

  “What library?”

  “The one closest to you, Marie. He was right there. He only went under deep cover when he had to, and that’s when he started getting in direct contact with you.”

  “Dammit, Erin!”

  “Hey, don’t let anybody tell you it’s a brave new world, Marie. When it comes to these guys, it’s a cowardly one. What do you want me to do next? Besides baby-sit, I mean.”

  “I can’t think of anything else,” I say, feeling frustrated and angry. “The cops and Franklin are handling it from the evidence angle. I don’t know what else to do now, Erin.”

  “Take care, that’s one thing.”

  “Yeah. And you take care of Deb for me.”

  “I will. She’s a nice girl. Want to talk to her now?”

  But I don’t want to. I don’t want Deborah to hear thediscouragement I can’t keep out of my voice right now. “No, I’ve got to go. Just tell her I’m fine and not to worry about me.”

  “Yeah, right,” my private investigator says with a dry laugh, just before she hangs up. “Just like you won’t worry about her.”

  While I talked to Erin, I kept an eye out for Hubert Templeton to come back around into the front yard again. I won’t push myself on him if he doesn’t want to talk to me, but I’d like a chance to say hello to him if he’ll allow it, maybe even show him the supposed account of what happened to my parents and see what he might say about it. Midway through my phone conversation, however, I heard a slur of tires on gravel and turned just in time to see him drive away in a battered old black pickup truck. He glanced in our direction, nodded once, then kept on going.

  Steve and I walk back into the inn slowly enough for me to tell him what I’ve just learned. Once inside, we find that Mo Goodwin is still waiting for us behind her reception desk.

  “I’m so sorry to keep you waiting,” I tell her. “We’re ready to check in now. Do I understand correctly that all of your rooms are suites? So there are two rooms?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I hope that’ll be all right for you?”

  “Does that mean there will be a bed or a sofa for my friend here?”

  She glances up at Steve, blushes again, and looks confused. “Well, but—well, I could probably give you a rollaway, if that would be okay?”

  “That would be fine,” I say, looking at Steve, who nods to confirm it.

  The woman still looks flustered and confused, but she goes on to say, “If you’ll follow me, I’ll take you on upstairs
now.”

  “Don’t you need to see my credit card?”

  “Oh, no, that can wait until you’re ready to leave. I’m not worried about that. Everything’s included in the one price.” Her worry lines dissolve in a quick, warm smile. “And anyway, you’re in Sebastion now.”

  Apparently that means they trust strangers here.

  I’m certainly not in Florida anymore.

  With Steve carrying our bags, we climb the wide, carpeted steps, following her up to the second floor. Once there, she leads us down a carpeted corridor—wide enough for Steve and me to walk abreast behind her—to a double door at the end. For no apparent reason, she knocks at it. Getting no response—but then, whom did she expect, the previous tenants, ghosts? —she applies her key to the door and opens it. Then she hands that same key to me, steps aside, and leaves us there, after promising to deliver the rollaway. “If you decide you’d rather have an extra room,” she says, in her hesitant way, “I could turn one of our empty suites into a single bedroom.”

  “I’m sure this will be fine,” I assure her.

  She seems to believe that Steve and I are going to stumble all over each other if we share this suite, and maybe we will, but it would be pretty pointless to put my bodyguard in another room altogether.

  I enter first, and find myself in the main bedroom of a lovely sunny corner suite. There are three inside doors, all of them closed like the doors to prizes on an old game show. Straight ahead of me there’s a cushioned bay window where the sun is pouring in past the branches of one of the huge oak trees. The cheerful room is so large that a full-size couch, a card table and four chairs, an armoire, and a four-poster bed don’t even crowd it. The quilt on top of the bed looks handmade, and there are reading lamps on either side of it. This feels like a writer’s heaven to me, the sort of retreat where I could work undisturbed on finishing a book while somebody else does all the cooking and cleaning for a month.