by Madelyn Alt
Had I failed?
Liss had obviously heard more than I had, which was next to nothing, so before guilt could strike a paralyzing blow, I asked, “Do they know what happened? Was it . . . well . . . was it an accident?”
“The police haven’t released any information regarding the situation that I am aware of.”
No, they wouldn’t. The last thing they wanted was an embarrassing debacle, like last time. My mind whirred along, testing paths. One thing was certain—freak warm spell or no, she could hardly have been swimming. I supposed she could have fallen in had she been walking along the river-bank, but . . . why would Amanda have been out there alone in the first place? She wasn’t the type to embrace the Great Outdoors, so a nature hike seemed highly unlikely.
“What about her car?” I wondered aloud. “Maybe there was something in it that could give them an idea of why she’d been out there alone.” I paused a moment, considering what I’d just said. “Wait a minute. Her car was found there, too?”
“That’s what led to the discovery of her body. The young men saw the car, and then went looking.”
The trestle bridge loomed in my memory. The river itself was at times overgrown along the banks, but the bridge wasn’t exactly hiding among the brambles. “That can’t be right. With all the search parties out looking for any sign of her, surely the car would have been spotted yesterday.” I frowned, trying to remember the map the search captain had consulted when he assigned me my area. “In fact, I could have sworn River Road had been crossed off the list. I covered the Riverside Park area myself.” The park was only a few miles from the old trestle bridge. I shuddered at the thought that I could have been the one to find the girl’s body.
That strange feeling I was having? I did my best to brush it off. Amanda’s death was nothing more than a tragic mishap. The fact that we’d had an actual murder in town two months before pretty much guaranteed that this was either (A) an accident, or (B) the unfortunate end to a young girl’s private misery. Stony Mill simply wasn’t the kind of place you could expect to see a lot of violence. With one homicide out of the way, I figured we wouldn’t be due for a good long time. Kind of like your average hundred-year flood.
“We could easily find out . . .” Liss was saying. “Erlin Price was heading it up, I believe. His wife Nancy is an Enchantments regular, you know.”
“No, forget about it. I guess my imagination is running away with me. I . . . knew Amanda. Not well, but I guess this has kind of shaken me up a bit.”
“Perfectly understandable. You’re human, Maggie.”
“She came into the store Saturday morning. To buy a Christmas gift for her mother. Her poor mom.” I couldn’t stop thinking about it, but at least the information dump was serving to relieve the stress of the last few days. “And Liss . . . I think I might have been given a warning.”
“What sort of warning?”
Slowly, guiltily, I described what I’d seen the morning Amanda had disappeared, and the sense that things had been off, somehow. Building up to something. Building up to . . . this?
“Oh, Maggie. You must stop. You’re not to blame. Sometimes we as sensitives intercept information that we are not meant to understand. Sometimes we just . . . pick up the signal.”
“You mean I was never meant to pick up the spirit energy, I just happened into it?”
“Because you’re sensitive to those energies, yes. It’s possible.”
I closed my eyes and gripped the phone even harder. I had so needed to hear this from Liss. She was my boss, yes, and my friend, but more than that, she was my mentor in an area in which I felt completely out of my element. Had I been raised to believe in the impossible, I might feel differently now, but as a born-and-bred Catholic, if things like witches, ghosts, and magic had been acknowledged at all, it was with the stern opinion that they were tools of the Devil and to be avoided at all costs. Being a practical kind of girl, I had always gone with the more secular viewpoint as taught in school, that they were nothing more than myths perpetuated by ignorance and fear and human desire. To discover that both viewpoints were wrong had, to put it mildly, thrown me for a loop. Now that I’d grown privy to the misty fringes of a shadow world that existed along with our own, and having seen proof of that world with my own eyes, I was conservatively starting to revise my opinion.
Hey, a girl can change her mind, can’t she?
The call from Town Hall came less than an hour after Liss and I said good-bye. “Ms. O’Neill? This is Sandra Poulson from Systems Support.”
“Ms. Poulson! Thank you for calling back. What did you find out?”
“Well, it pains me to admit this, but it appears you were right. There is something strange going on. The good news is, it doesn’t appear to be anything associated with the SunnyStonyMill site, per se . . . but unfortunately, it does appear that the site integrity has been . . . challenged, shall we say.”
“Challenged,” I echoed, frowning down at a just-opened box of cheerful, bulbous-nosed Santas. “What does that mean?”
“It’s really too soon to say, but I want to thank you for bringing it to my attention. The rogue attack was an extremely subtle one, and it appears to be inventively firewalled. I will be making the investigation of this situation my number one priority.”
A rogue attack. Now, I might not be an expert, but surely that description translated into computer hacking, of some sort. The question was why. Why would anyone hack into the community website for a rinky-dink town in Nowheresville, Indiana? It just didn’t compute.
It also didn’t sound to me like Ms. Poulson knew any more about the hacker’s doings than I did, thanks to the “inventive” firewall methods employed. But I knew someone who did. Two someones, in fact. And the first of them was due here any minute.
I was waiting patiently behind the counter when I heard the back door close with a metallic boom, followed by Evie’s breathless voice. “Maggie?”
“Up here.”
Evie pushed through the velvet curtains in a rush, the long flaxen strands of her hair catching on the soft fabric and lifting around her into a halo of static electricity. “They’ve—”
“Found her. Yes, I know.”
Evie dropped her book bag to the floor and slumped against the counter. “I don’t understand it. I just don’t understand any of it. How could this have happened? Here?”
I sighed and rose to my feet, turning away for a moment to make us both a cup of hot chocolate, heavy on the whipped marshmallow cream. Chocolate, the healer of a thousand ills. All hail. “I don’t know, Evie. Sometimes kids get into trouble and don’t know how to get themselves out. Maybe she was depressed and didn’t feel like she could talk to anyone about it. I’m not excusing it, but there has to be an explanation.”
“You’re assuming she did this herself. Just another troubled teen.”
I sprinkled a bit of cinnamon overtop the marshmallow, dropped in a candy cane, and set it in front of her. “Wasn’t she? I mean, that was one messed-up young woman I saw in here the other day. On the surface, she had everything to live for: She was pretty, nice parents who obviously have money, a good, solid upbringing. She had a charmed life. I’m sure she was planning to go to college. Everything seemed fine to us, but who can truly know another’s inner thoughts? It’s heartbreaking to think that someone could be suffering so much without anyone knowing, but . . . it happens.”
Sweet Evie’s frowns came so rarely that the intensity of this one threw me. “I didn’t know her very well—I’m not the kind of girl she’d have chosen as a friend—but I do know that Amanda Roberson was not the type of girl to end her own life. She was kind of a . . . a spoiled princess. She had this power over people like I’ve never seen before, and she wasn’t afraid to use it. She was the kind of person you could see being in charge of a big company someday, or maybe even going into politics. Rule the world, and keep the little people in their place.” Evie caught my eye. “People who are into power like that are too in l
ove with themselves to fall victim to self-doubt. Trust me, she thought way too much of herself for that.”
I took a sip of the hot chocolate, musing over melty marshmallow. “So what are you saying, Evie? That you think her death wasn’t accidental?”
Evie cast her gaze downward to the candy cane she was absentmindedly using to stir her cocoa. “Well, I don’t think she just fell in the river. No,” she said, looking up again with an expression of pure determination, “I know that she didn’t just fall in the river. I don’t know who or how or why, but I know. And I think you do, too.”
Damn. I didn’t want to admit it, not even to myself, but she was right. I did feel it, despite my attempts to talk myself out of it.
I shrugged noncommittally because I didn’t yet trust my instincts. It was still too new. I wanted to hear it in an official capacity before I owned up to anything. The fear of being ridiculed was just too strong for me to overcome at this stage of the game. Instead I set down my cup and folded my hands in my lap as I studied her. “Evie, I have to ask you a question, and I want you to be completely up front with me.”
“Sure.”
Reaching down, I withdrew the laptop from where I’d stowed it beneath the skirted counter, watching Evie’s face as I set it on the scarred wooden countertop. “The other day,” I began quietly, “Saturday . . . the morning that Amanda and her friends came into the store . . . I sent you and Tara into the back room. Do you remember?”
Something flitted behind Evie’s eyes, something unsteady and hesitant. “Y-yes.”
“And do you remember when I came back, after the girls had left the store? You had been on the Internet, and Tara was gone. Remember?”
This time I was certain I saw nervousness in Evie’s china doll eyes. “I remember.”
I nodded, keeping my expression as neutral as possible. “Funny thing happened. Now, I don’t want you to think I was checking up on you”—Ahem—“but I somehow came across a link that I think you must have accessed while you and Tara were surfing together.”
“Oh?” Her voice had faded, ever so slightly.
I cleared my throat and tried to look her in the eye. “Evie, what were you and Tara looking up on the SunnyStonyMill website? Honestly?”
Evie licked her lips as she avoided my gaze, staring instead at the closed laptop. “Um . . . well . . . gosh, this is hard.”
I waited for her to go on.
She got up and turned her back to me, facing the display behind her. “There’s a blog on the site. Well, not exactly on it, but . . . You see, it’s an underground blog. Tara showed it to me. Everyone’s talking about it. I was just curious about it, that’s all. I didn’t want to be the last kid in Stony Mill to be in on the whole thing. I’m always the last person people think about. The last one picked for the team. Not this time, though.”
An underground blog. An inventively firewalled one, according to Ms. Poulson. “Evie, what do you mean, everyone’s talking about it? Who is talking about it?”
“Well . . . the kids at school.”
I frowned, trying to understand what was going on. “All right. So there’s a blog. A secret one. So how is it that everyone’s talking about it?”
“People are passing the URL and passwords around to each other, friend to friend to friend. You know.”
And evidently, they were reading the blog as well. “What could possibly be riveting enough to hold the attention of a bunch of high schoolers?” I wondered aloud.
A pretty flush colored her cheeks. “Weeeell . . . it’s kind of embarrassing to talk about . . . I mean . . . geez!”
“Try me.”
“It’s about . . .” She coughed self-consciously. “Well, actually, it’s about . . . um . . . sex.”
I felt my eyeballs bulge as I tried to choke back a surprised laugh. “Oh.” And then: “Really?”
Okay, I’ll be the first to admit that my love life leaves a little to be desired. Well, maybe a lot. Lately. But even I couldn’t come up with an acceptable excuse for the flicker of curiosity that riffled through my mind. Shame-y, shame-y.
Still blushing, Evie could only nod.
“Oh. Okay!” I cleared my throat. “So, what kind of things are on this website, exactly? And who writes it? And how did it get on SunnyStonyMill.com?”
“It’s kind of hard to explain,” Evie hedged. “I didn’t see very much of it, you know. And I don’t think anyone knows who writes it. It’s all very hush-hush.”
Evie didn’t seem to know much about the subject, and she wasn’t the type of girl to lie. By way of omission, sure—she was a kid, after all—but other than that, I just didn’t think so. Not about something like this. On the other hand, I wondered how much Tara was privy to what was going on in Sunny Stony Mill. More than was healthy for a high school girl, for sure.
Determined to get to the bottom of it one way or the other, I unplugged the phone and plugged in the computer’s modem cord, powered up the laptop, then rotated the whole thing in Evie’s direction. “Listen, why don’t you just pull up the site so that I can see what we’re talking about.”
She hesitated, but for only a moment. “All right.”
I watched as she logged on and typed in the mystery web address that I’d passed on to Ms. Poulson, Systems Support, just that morning. The familiar strobing screen came up almost instantly. Pointing the arrow to the X in the corner of the now-black window and receiving the Password? prompt in response, Evie typed in a string of characters that showed up as asterisks in the blank space provided, then clicked Go. But instead of immediately being flashed into the website as I’d expected, Evie was required to enter a string of passwords. A total of seven, in fact. She didn’t miss a beat on any of them, and without crib notes, a detail that did not escape my notice. Either Evie had a photographic memory she could access at will, or she’d been to this site more times than she’d let on.
My bet was on Curtain Number Two.
At first glance, the blog seemed to be as innocuous as they come, a confection of bubblegum pink background and hearts and flowers. Totally girly. But the chatter on the page was anything but innocent. The most recent entry was date stamped last Friday. My face heated with the very first paragraph: “Y’know, guys are a lot like lollipops. If you lick them a little, they melt just fine, but if you pop them in your mouth and swirl them around, they disappear soooo much faster . . .”
Sweet Mother Mary.
I have always loved those nineteenth-century authors who spoke to the hearts of their readers as though they were trusted friends. Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Louisa May Alcott. It was a kinder time, a gentler time, and this blog proved it in that in-your-face way so much admired these days. Instead of the sweet and innocent declaration of: “And so, Gentle Reader, I married him!” that made a girl’s heart go pitter-pat with thoughts of her own One True Love, the diarist of this web journal preferred the more direct approach of: “And so, Gentle Reader, I bopped his brains out.” In titillating, step-by-step detail.
I read on in silence, my brows stretching higher by the minute. Whoever the author of the page was, she was getting plenty of, shall we say, experience? Of course it was also fairly evident that she had watched way too many episodes of Sex and the City—she gave each of her guys an alias, like the Alligator Man, Papa Bear, Chicken of the Sea, the Anteater (I was trying my best not to picture that one), Buzz Lightyear. The funniest? The Mole (because he liked to burrow under the covers, so to speak—ba dum bump).
“Are you going to tell my mom?”
I peeled my eyes away from the laptop screen. Evie was looking at me with worried puppy dog eyes. I wished she wouldn’t do that. I’m a real sucker for puppies. “No, I’m not going to tell your mom. It’s natural to be curious. Besides, I’m pretty sure your mom would just freak, and you’re not doing anything to hurt anyone.” I paused a moment, then said hesitantly, “Listen. Evie. The things that are happening on that page . . . they have to be made up. That’s not real life,
you know?”
Evie nodded. “I know it’s not. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go out and try to imitate what’s going on there. I mean . . . geez! But I do think it’s a real diary, Maggie. And I’m pretty sure it’s someone from right here in Stony Mill. Everyone else thinks so, too. Besides, some of the guys from school are saying that they’re being featured. Like I said, everyone’s been talking about it.”
So someone from Stony Mill had highjacked a community website in order to spread news of her sexploits countywide. Was I the only one who saw the weirdness in that?
I wondered what Tara would have to say about the whole thing, being the one, evidently, who had showed Evie how to access the site in the first place. Maybe she would know who put the whole thing together. I’m sure Ms. Poulson would love to get her hands on that info.
“Evie, would you write down the passwords for me?”
“Okay.” She scratched them down in her neat, round, schoolgirl hand and passed the paper over to me. “You won’t say where you got them, will you?”
“No. I won’t tell.”
Chapter 5
I left Enchantments just after eight. The store had been abnormally quiet, devoid of the usual Christmas crowd that kept us hopping until well past closing. Evie’s mom came to pick her up, leaving me to my thoughts, which were admittedly dark. How could they not be? So much had happened . . . so many bad things. It had been a draining couple of days.
I prepared the day’s deposit, then went up front to lock the street door for the night. In the alcove I leaned my forehead against the cold glass of the door and gazed out upon the cobbled street and the storefronts lining this section of River Street. Once the buildings had been warehouses for a thriving river shipping industry. Over time they had fallen into disrepair, only to be adopted as a key part of a major town cleanup project several years ago. Revitalized and rejuvenated, the buildings had been snapped up, eventually becoming the picture-postcard ode to Americana that it was today.
