by CD Reiss
I turned away from the car. Across the road sat a corrugated tin building with boarded windows and a Restaurant Supplies sign swinging in the wind.
In the foreground, Harper leaned on her car with her arms crossed, talking to Johnny.
“Did they say when the battery was coming?”
“Tomorrow or next day.”
Was that enough time to get Harper to release QI4? It was going to have to be.
“Here.” I reached for my wallet, feeling the little red pebble in my pocket as Percy sniffed my balls.
“Sit,” I said, and he did. “Good boy.”
“Pay me when the work’s done.”
We shook on it, and Percy trotted back to the garage behind Orrin. When I got back to Harper, Johnny was headed for his truck.
“Am I taking you to the airport?” she asked.
This was her way of getting me to go home and tell everyone about Barrington? That was the exact opposite of what I was going to do.
“How do you know I won’t just call the FBI?”
She crossed to the opposite side of the car. “What would all the hackers say if you narked on one of their own?”
“GreyHatC0n’s in eleven days.” I leaned over the roof of the Chevy. “We have a challenge running on day one. It’s worth a lot to me to plug this hole. You could do a bunch of things with that money. Buy furniture for the house.” I squinted at her in the bright sun.
“You think I went to all this trouble to buy a sofa?”
“Get help for your sister.”
Her jaw tightened, and her eyes narrowed. I’d hit a nerve. She went from pensive to sharp in a split second. Behind her, the big dog uhf uhffed.
“Small business loans,” I continued, “scholarships for the kids you were talking about. Supplies for the school. Whatever.”
She leaned over the other side of the roof, tapping the hollow metal. “I know you don’t come from money, Taylor. Not real money.”
“So?”
“Money, real money, is about maintenance.”
“Are you blackmailing me or asking for a job?”
Orrin watched from the office door. Harper gave him a dismissive jerk of her chin. He went inside.
I placed the pebble from the rooftop code on the roof of her car. “This is the same color as what’s on the Caddy. You were with me when the car was vandalized. And maybe this is a town of coders, but it’s not. You wrote on the factory roof. So who fucked up the car?”
“Maybe the hardware store’s got one shade of red.” She didn’t even believe that.
“Sure, Harper. Whatever. Or you can tell me what you want? I’ll give it to you, and you give me my life back. But tell me something I’ll believe.”
She laced her fingers together and tapped the pads of her thumbs. So much of her story was in her hands. The nails were cut short, and she’d taped her fingers again, but now I knew why they were wrapped like a hacker’s.
“If you want me to take you to the airport, I will,” she said.
“If I want you to unlock QI4 first?”
“You’ll have to wait.”
Progress. Too bad it didn’t matter. She was nuts, and I was walking a tightrope with her.
XVIII
My situation was precarious, unusual, unprecedented. I couldn’t tell if I was making a mountain out of a molehill or seeing the molehill from so close that it looked huge.
Harper had wondered if I was going to cut her into little pieces because she was imagining me in sections.
My phone was charged, and I got a moment of signal from the balcony overlooking the thorn bushes. Something was getting through the scrambler, or she’d turned it off.
Fuck encrypted texts. I called Deepak.
“Dude,” he said without so much as a hello. “Where have you been?”
“It’s her. Harper. The girl from MIT. She did it.”
“Why?” His voice cracked. He was exhausted.
“Plight of the working man. She wanted to draw attention to the recession. Whatever. I’m coming back.”
“How did she do it?”
Below me, the thorn bushes wove together like a square of steel wool. A bent and cracked white picket fence held the bed to shape.
“I don’t know.”
“And you’re coming home?”
I almost called him crazy before I told him I was coming home for shit sure, but he deserved an explanation. “There’s something off here. It’s like a cross between Children of the Corn and Wicker Man.”
“Are those movies? I’m more of a Bollywood guy.”
“Creepy. It’s creepy.”
“Oh. Well. In that case, come back. We’ll just tell the guys to find another job. Our clients will understand—”
“Deepak—”
“—why it’s so important for you not to be in a creepy place.”
Was he shouting? It was hard to tell with his voice so shredded.
“You don’t get it.”
“I get it, my friend. I fucking get it.” He’d never taken this sharp a tone with me, and for that reason alone, I shut up. “You’re in a new place with someone who has it out for you. Taylor Harden is a target and feels bad. Boo-hoo. Now get over it. You’ve had it easy your whole life.”
“Wait a minute. I worked my ass off.”
“But your head’s buried in it. Creepy is working your ass off for nothing. You worked your ass off for something.”
I could have argued, but I couldn’t have argued with his intensity. We were going to have a long, hard talk over beers when I got back.
“Fuck you, Deepak.” That was as close to capitulation as I intended to get.
“You too, baby.”
The line of the factory roof was solid brown against the horizon. A V of birds headed south along it. If I showed my face in the office without QI4 in one piece, I was going to be a laughingstock. Distance insulated me.
“I’m coming back as soon as I figure this out, and I’m not playing into what she wants. Make sure no one talks about where I am.”
“They don’t know.”
“Not a word to the press. No exposure. Nothing. My whereabouts are unknown.”
“Agreed.”
I peered into my room. Empty. Door closed. I did the same with the master suite. Empty.
“Can anyone hear you?” I whispered.
“I just got home. I live alone.”
Just got home? He’d probably combed through hardware and code for twenty-four hours or more.
“You’re working hard for something.”
“Make sure of it.”
I ended the call just as Harper came onto the balcony from the master suite. She had a disturbingly self-satisfied look that I wanted to kiss right off.
“How’s everything back home?” She leaned her hip on the railing, arms crossed, indicating the phone I’d left facedown on the railing with a quick twirl of her finger.
“About as wonderful as you’d expect. I left a full complement of guys with their limp dicks in their hands.”
She smirked. “That imagery is so appealing.”
“Does it make you nervous, at all? Being out here with me? The guy you’re in the process of fucking over? I could pick you up and throw you off this balcony right now. Leave you in the fucking thorn bushes.” I’d never threatened a woman with violence before, and the threats came out of my mouth so easily I scared myself a little.
Harper didn’t seem half as nervous about it as I did. “Who would unlock your system then?”
“I’ve cracked harder cases than you, miss.”
I was a little closer, my finger pointed right at her like a punctuation mark. She looked away. Now she was nervous. The idea of violence didn’t faze her, but the idea of being outwitted went right to the core.
“I didn’t think you’d actually come.” She touched my elbow, just brushing along it.
The normal reaction to being touched by an enemy would have been to pull away, but her electrical curr
ent didn’t throw me back. It created a closed circuit between us.
Luckily, my right hand knew what my left was doing.
I grabbed her arm with my other hand and held it there. “What do you want?”
“A lot.”
“What?”
“In five years? A house on the lake and a kid or two. Short term?” She put my hand to her chest. I was never going to get a straight answer. She was crazy and fucking gorgeous and too smart for her own good. All those things at once.
I was trying to put all the pieces together. She tilted her head, and I tilted mine. She leaned in a little, and I leaned with her as if I could hear her better. I was curious what she wanted short term because a clue to my fate was there.
“Short term I’d just like to—”
I leaned a little too far, brushing my phone off the railing. I grabbed for it. It bounced off my fingers, twisting in the air, off the back-porch overhang, spinning faster and away into the thorn bushes below.
“Fuck!”
I wanted to choke her, but it wasn’t her fault. It had been my elbow leaning too far left.
I ran downstairs, past Catherine puttering in the kitchen, and stood at the edge of the thorn bed. It was bordered by a two-foot-high white picket fence. The thorns went to the top of it and not an inch past it.
When I tried to part the brambles where it looked like the phone had fallen, I was rewarded with blood from two slashes.
Harper was right behind me. “Let me call you!”
“You know my number?”
She slid her finger over the glass. Of course she knew my number. I leaned over the bed.
“Is it ringing?” she asked.
“Fuck!” It wasn’t ringing. There was no light. No buzz. No nothing. “Is it ringing on your end?”
She put the speaker on. Half a ring then a cut to voicemail.
“Shit.” It had hit the wall and the ground from the second story, but the way it had smacked the porch overhang had probably had an impact.
“Maybe it just shut off when it fell?”
Her optimism was fucking touching. I didn’t hold out much hope that it would ever work again.
“I’m gonna hack the shit out of whoever stole my laptop,” I grumbled, scanning the bushes for an opening. “They won’t be able to buy a pack of gum again.” I walked around the perimeter, cursing myself for leaving it in the trunk.
Having circumnavigated the entire area, I crouched, trying to catch a glimpse of my lifeline to my world. The branches were so thick I could barely see an inch into the depths.
“Can we get in there?” I asked.
“I guess I can see if one of the guys can come by?”
“When?”
“Tomorrow afternoon, probably?”
I couldn’t tell if she was sincere. Couldn’t read her. Didn’t know if she was full of shit or if “the guys” weren’t available in the morning because no one did anything in a hurry. Didn’t matter. Every word out of her mouth was a lie.
Fuck it.
Wasn’t like it could ring anyway.
“Tomorrow, phone or no phone, you tell me what you want. I’m not staying around here without clarity on what I have to do to get my code back. If you won’t give it to me, well, they can all laugh at me. I don’t care. I will walk right out onto the interstate if I think you’re wasting my time.”
I didn’t wait for a cute excuse or a snotty word. I couldn’t tell up from down. I couldn’t be sure if I’d pushed the phone over the edge or if she’d made sure I knocked it over.
Didn’t matter. I was done with Harper Barrington and her bullshit.
XIX
For years, I called her Schrödinger’s mother.
Quantum logic is often explained by the simplified version of Schrödinger’s paradox. There’s a cat in a steel box. You know it’s there. You can’t see it, hear it, or measure it, but you can show its placement. Is it living or dead?
It’s both.
And neither.
A star, an atom, a mother with bipolar disorder—can be measured only by placement or mass, never both. Unsurety, in-betweenness, constant movement, randomness, the potential of all things to be in either one place or another, in one state or another, was the heart of quantum mechanics.
It was also the heart of my mother, who had become more and more unstable as the years went on. I eventually stopped calling her Schrödinger’s mother because that would have made me Erwin Schrödinger, who created the puzzle to disprove the physics I believed in.
How’s Mom?
Moving constantly.
Should I come home for Christmas?
Dad. Come home for Dad.
I did. When Mom was manic, she buzzed and spun around Dad. Her body was active, and her mind was focused on everything yet calm. When she was down, her body was in one place, usually bed, but her mind was elsewhere.
Harper was volatile and erratic. Or was she? I couldn’t predict her any better.
Catherine had told me she was at the distro center working a night shift. My phone had gone over the balcony as if Harper had timed it so she wouldn’t have to deal with the repercussions. As if having dinner with Catherine and whomever else showed up (Trudy and her kids, Orrin’s wife, another family whose names I didn’t remember) would calm me before bed.
I went to her bedroom door, seeing what kind of lock she had. I could open it, but it would be loud. Catherine saw me, and I couldn’t seem to disappoint her by breaking into her sister’s room.
So I waited until she went to bed, which never seemed to happen.
I watched the moon cross the frame of the window, imagining all the ways I could hack her if I just had my laptop.
Harper came back before Catherine was out of the way.
Harper was making me dependent on her, and someone in the town was in on it. Someone had spray painted the Caddy. Maybe there was an odd-shaped battery in there, but even if it would take a few days to be delivered, I was sure Orrin wasn’t going to put it in and let me go until Harper had what she wanted, whatever that was.
Catherine was about ten minutes into shaking the walls with her sorrow when I thought I heard my phone ring outside. It was a little after midnight. I looked over the balcony and convinced myself I could see the phone’s dim blue light in the bushes. But the illusion stayed longer than the time a phone would ring, and the sound of it melted into the mix of the wind and Catherine crying.
Piece by piece, I’d lost control over my life.
Right before I fell asleep, I wondered if I was going to die in Barrington.
The next morning, I got out of the shower to a steamed-up mirror. I found a note that only showed up when the mirror was fogged.
102 101 122 122 111 116 107 124 117
116 040 123 124 101 124 111 117 116
Decoded, it said “Barrington Station.”
She was lucky I could read octal or she would have been waiting there a long time.
XX
No one downstairs. The house had two states: full of people or deserted. I poured coffee and tried to think clearly.
Barrington Station.
Couldn’t Google it. Couldn’t locate it on satellite. There was phone on the wall. It was a beige box the size of a bag of coffee with a curly cord. I had no idea what to do with it.
When I picked up the handset, I discovered a clear plastic circle set into the base piece. The spiral cord connected the handset to it.
I had to pause for a second. I’d seen this in movies. Right. Finger. Turn. Wait. No problem. But who to call?
Numbers were scratched on the wall in pen, pencil, a few scratched through the yellow paint to the plaster beneath. Some had names above and some didn’t. It was like a living record of every number ever spoken through that old phone.
Car service. Right. They’d know.
I dialed. How people watched that circle tick around every time they wanted to make a call, I’d never know.
“Matt’s Car Service,”
the female voice answered.
“Hi, I’d like a car to Barrington Station.”
“Sure. You know that’s closed, right? Next best bet is Doverton.”
“It’s fine if it’s closed. That’s where I’m going.”
“Where we picking you up?” The dispatcher didn’t seem to care one way or the other. She was just trying to get the job out.
“I’m not sure of the address.” I’d never felt so incompetent. I could practically see her roll her eyes. “The Barrington house. The mansion. It’s on a dirt road off… I’m not sure.”
“I know it. You’ll be in front?”
“Yeah.”
“Fifteen minutes.”
She hung up. I waited.
* * *
Again, I’d done Harper’s bidding. Again, I’d come like a dog when called.
The cab driver was a Middle Eastern dude with a short beard. Ahmed. He looked to be in his twenties and about five foot five. He pulled over on a nondescript patch of road. A pair of square wooden stakes stuck out of half-buried concrete blocks. The station sign must have been there.
“Barrington Station!” he said.
“Can you wait for me?” I handed him cash.
“I have another pickup.” He handed a card over the front seat with the change. I took the card and left the rest in his hand for a tip. “Call and someone will come.”
“I don’t have a phone with me.”
“You got fifty cents?” He pointed at a payphone ten feet in, a relic from the days when people needed to call a cab from the station.
“It works?”
“I know it does. Trust me. Fifty cents. You need two quarters?”
“No. I have it. Thanks. Hey—” I stopped myself halfway out the door. “What if I wanted to go to the airport?”
He laughed. “Airport? Hundred forty miles?”
“How much would it cost?” I didn’t ask because it mattered but so he’d take me seriously.
