Before and Again

by Barbara Delinsky

  Home was a relief. “What does ‘initial appearance’ mean?”

  “Indictment is read, charges are filed.”

  “Bail?” I asked.

  “None. Not in this kind of juvenile hearing. The prosecutors duked it out earlier this week to determine jurisdiction. Feds won. Ergo Rutland.”

  Kevin made a face. “Ergo?”

  “The chief’s word, not mine. Do you want to know what happened or not?”

  “I do,” I said. A naive little part of me had been hoping that the whole thing would be declared a misunderstanding, charges would be dropped, and the circus would end there and then. Apparently not.

  “The hacking was traced to Chris’s laptop,” Jimmy said. “The evidence is strong.”

  I was appalled. “How can that be?”

  “Hacking isn’t hard if you know passwords. School computers are networked, and the kids here all have school accounts. They do homework online. They email the teacher, the teacher emails back. I’m sure they trade passwords. Hell, bunches of them probably use the same one, so slipping from account to account would be easy, especially for a kid who’s into it.”

  “Which means it could have also been one of Chris’s classmates.”

  “Could have, but prob’ly wasn’t. One of the others wouldn’t have been able to get into the Spa network. You’d have to have an entry point, like having access to a computer that has access to the Spa. Chris did.”

  “Allegedly,” Kevin prompted.

  “There’s evidence.”

  “Allegedly,” Kevin insisted and scowled at Jimmy. “You’re becoming as absolutist as the rest of the force. You’re supposed to keep their minds open. Isn’t that the point of your being there?”

  “The point of my being there is to be paid,” Jimmy shot back. He and Kevin often bickered. I typically ignored it, even though it was sweet. Silence had pounded a nail in the coffin of my marriage—well, along with other nails—but communication was key. I appreciated that Kevin and Jimmy could do it freely, not to mention that this time I had a stake in the discussion.

  “I don’t have your fancy art degree,” Jimmy was saying, making art aht and drawing it out. “All I did was go two years to tech school, so I know how to use machines, and I know social media because there are plenty of times when I have nothing to do, so I play. I’m just saying what they’re saying.” After a short huff for Kevin, he faced me again. “Sorry. This may not be what you want to hear, but it doesn’t look good for the kid.”

  “But he is just a kid,” I argued.

  “He’ll be tried as a juvenile.”

  “And put in prison?”

  “A juvenile facility.”

  “But what harm did he do?” I asked, bewildered on behalf of my friend’s son. My crime involved death, which was the ultimate in harm. But here? “The high school records have been straightened out. And the Spa, what harm there? Okay, a crime is a crime, but how serious could this be? Devon isn’t the Pentagon.”

  “He got into Twitter.”

  “And did what harm?” I had a Twitter account. I used it to promote my work at the Spa. I couldn’t imagine harm that a hacker could do that would justify imprisoning a fifteen-year-old boy.

  “It’s Internet fraud,” Jimmy said. “That’s a Federal charge. The arraignment is Monday. We’ll have to wait ’til then to know about other charges. They could charge him with wire fraud, too.”

  “Isn’t that the same as Internet fraud?”

  “They’re different statutes. Add one to the other, and the penalty gets worse. They could also charge him separately for each post he made, so that could be a dozen counts, maybe two dozen counts.”

  “Chrissake, Jimmy,” Kevin said.

  “Okay, okay, let’s assume they leave it at Internet fraud. The government has to prove deliberate deception, which there was if he hacked into school accounts to change grades. They also have to prove he used someone else’s computer without permission.”

  “The school will never press charges,” I said. I knew many local teachers through Alex, and each one had struck me as kind. I was sure they would prefer counseling or an internal school punishment rather than incarceration.

  “Twitter’s the problem. The victim is Ben Zwick.”

  Kevin and I exchanged blank looks. “Who is Ben Zwick?” we asked together.

  “Benjamin Zwick,” Jimmy said with relish. He drew a sharp line between what was confidential police business and what was not, and while he might slip with small details once in a while, this wasn’t small. Given how brashly he said the name, I assumed that the identity of Benjamin Zwick was public knowledge to anyone who had watched tonight’s news, which neither Kevin nor I had done. “He’s an investigative journalist with The Washington Post. He has credits a mile long. He’s always showing up on shows like Washington Week and Meet the Press. And he wrote a book.”

  A silent bell rang. Maybe I recognized the name, after all. “On antisemitism in Scandinavia?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Oh God. He won a Pulitzer Prize.”

  Kevin directed an unimpressed, “So?” at his partner.

  “So our friend Chris,” Jimmy quickly corrected himself, “allegedly Chris, hacked into Zwick’s account and made posts Zwick claims hurt his career.”

  “Like how?” I asked.

  “Like saying there’s proof the last presidential election was rigged by the Republicans. Like saying the Secretary of Defense is supplying guns to whoever wants to organize a home militia. Like saying the Prime Minister of Norway is a second or third cousin to Hitler, and then calling his editor at the Post an asshole for refusing to let him print that in a story.”

  “Those posts are over the top,” I said. “Anyone can see that.”

  “Not anyone. The retweets were even worse, haters from every side coming out. It took Zwick a couple days to realize what had happened and close down his Twitter account, which is also pissing him off. He says his name is smeared and people don’t trust him like they used to and won’t answer his calls. He’s hitting back hard. He wants whoever did this to him to be publicly skewered.”

  “A fifteen-year-old boy?” I cried.

  “He says he didn’t know who it was at the time, but that if a kid did it, he should know there are consequences.”

  Once, after the accident, when the only relief my mind could find was in books, I read something that stuck. A big part of growing up is learning to be cautious. It’s realizing that there are consequences to everything you do. Like the character in that book, Chris Emory was fifteen. Death might not be involved in the charges against him, but the potential consequences were still pretty heavy for someone that age to bear.

  “Is Zwick the one who leaked Chris’s name?” I asked Jimmy.

  “Nah. He’s too savvy for that. He made sure a colleague did it before the judge issued his gag order. He is one angry dude. He says he’s the victim and that this is about his reputation.”

  “It’s about publicity,” Kevin put in. I was thinking the same thing, but given my reasons for disliking the press, it was more valid coming from him. “He’ll make the rounds of the morning shows and sell a lot of books.”

  “Prob’ly. He says this is the only way he’ll be vindicated. I’m telling you, the guy has a big grudge and an even bigger ego.”

  That explained the media invasion. This wasn’t the first time Twitter had been hacked, but it took a well-known name to draw so much attention. If the man behind that name was media himself, he might not even have to pull in favors to do it. His colleagues would look at him, realize that it could have been them, and jump on the bandwagon in no time flat.

  This was human nature.

  So was my own sense of dread as the severity of the situation seeped in. This wasn’t something we could shrug off as a local incident. It went beyond the town limits, beyond anything that had happened in Devon during my time here, and it wouldn’t be going away tomorrow or the day after that.


  Feeling slightly panicked, I was relieved when Kevin took over the questioning.

  “So Chris is back home. What happens now?”

  “He registers with a pretrial probation officer. They talk on the phone once a week to make sure the boy hasn’t skipped town.”

  “He could call from anywhere on a cell phone.”

  “No cell. Has to be a landline.”

  “Grace doesn’t have a landline,” I said.

  “Then he uses one at the school or the Spa or my office. Boy calls officer from a validated number, officer calls boy back at that number to make sure he’s there. Oh, and he isn’t allowed to use computers, tablets, or phones.”

  “Not even a cell phone to call his mother?” I asked. Grace liked knowing where Chris was, and a cell phone was crucial for that.

  “Yeah, sure, of course. But he can’t use the phone to surf.”

  “How would they know?” Kevin asked.

  “He’s in the system. They’ll track what he does. They’ll be combing through his electronics to see what he used, where he went, and when.”

  “Collecting evidence for trial.”

  “Right. They’ll talk with Chris’s teachers and people at the Spa. They’ll look for motive, why he targeted the people he did.”

  “There were others?” I asked. Grace and Nina had both implied as much, but I didn’t want to believe it. One voice might be called a blowhard. A chorus was more damning.

  “Zwick says so. He has his own investigators, and if he got names of other victims, you can bet he’s given them to the Feds.”

  So Chris had two factions working to lock him up, the government and a powerful member of the press. Feeling Grace’s pain, I pulled out my phone and, on the off chance she still had hers, sent her a text, then set it on the table to wait for a reply.

  Our burgers arrived, but I could only nibble. My stomach was in knots. Jimmy ate half of mine before his own appeared, telling us between bites who all had come for the show. I tried not to resent his excitement. Crime in Devon rarely went beyond noise complaints, so the police station had to be a sleepy place to work. Now, it would be alive with big-time law enforcement officers, not to mention the media arriving from hotspots from DC on up. If Ben Zwick had his way, I feared, the invasion would grow.

  When the conversation turned to speculation about the kind of money the press attention would bring to the town, I tuned out. When it turned to their own plans for Sunday brunch in Hanover, I sent Grace another text.

  “Where is she?” I muttered under my breath, setting the phone down again and staring at the screen.

  “Isn’t that the pertinent question,” Kevin remarked.

  Feeling a twinge, I looked up. “What do you mean?”

  “Where was Grace while her son was doing all this?”

  “Uh, working?” I was mildly offended. “Struggling, like single mothers do?”

  “Where’s the father?” Jimmy asked.

  “I don’t know. He’s never been in the picture.”

  “She could always call him.”

  “Or not,” I said with more force than I might have had I been with Kevin alone. I liked Jimmy, but I didn’t trust him like I did Kevin. It wasn’t that I thought he was fishing for information to pass on to the police. But my loyalty to Grace was key. I figured if Chris’s father was part of a past she didn’t want to discuss, there was a good reason. Men weren’t always a solution. There were times when they made things worse.

  Suddenly too antsy to sit, I reached back for my coat. “I have to go.”

  “No,” Kevin said in alarm, grabbing my hand as it closed on the phone. “Forget I mentioned Grace. It was a stupid question.”

  “No,” I said sadly now, “it wasn’t. I’m sure other people will be asking the same thing. But she’s a good mother.” Phone in hand, I slipped free. “She isn’t answering my texts. If she’s home with Chris, I want to go over.”

  “Maybe she’s saying she wants to be alone.”

  “Maybe she’s saying she’s scared and confused. Maybe she’s overwhelmed. Likely,” I said with mild accusation aimed at Jimmy, “they took her phone, which means she’s cut off from the world. Maybe they’ve disabled her so she can’t think straight. Maybe she needs a friend who can.” Arms in sleeves, I slid from the booth.

  Kevin had to shove at Jimmy twice until he slid off the bench and let him out. As soon as he was upright, he pulled me in for a hug. “Are you okay helping her?”

  “I’ll have to be. She has no one else.”

  “But are you okay?”

  I drew back and met his eyes. I considered the question, then nodded. “I am,” I said and smiled to prove it. “I’m a master at blocking out painful thoughts, you know?”

  I left without a single glance at the dark booth in the rear of the pub, but I walked quickly, even ran across the parking lot. My stranglehold on the steering wheel didn’t ease up until the pub was well behind me.

  * * *

  Edward hadn’t followed me. As I drove, I wondered if this was good or bad. He owed me an explanation for why he was here, and I didn’t mean his being the voice of a group. He knew I was in Devon. This was my turf. He could have let someone else be the voice. But he hadn’t. That made me really uneasy.

  Let it go, Maggie. Pack it away. Inhale, hold, exhale.

  As I cruised through the center of town, I repeated the exercise. The streets were their usual peaceful, quiet selves. On one of those inhales, I conjured up lemon verbena. I told myself that Devon was my ally. And it worked for a bit. When it came to denial, I was a pro.

  Turning north on the Blue, I drove past the entrance to the Inn. A tiny little voice said the parking lot there might be filled with vehicles whose tires I wanted to slash, but I pushed that from mind, too, and drove on.

  Grace lived at the far reaches of Devon, just close enough to the town line to allow Chris to attend our schools without having to pay, as students from outlying towns often did. I had been to her house many times. It was the fourth and last bungalow on a road that snaked around enough to set each home apart. She said she loved the privacy this gave, that she was barely aware of having neighbors at all, and I couldn’t fault that. Hadn’t I chosen similar isolation on Pepin Hill? The problem for me here was that the twists in the road hid trouble until I was smack on top of it.

  5

  The road was narrow. Rounding that final turn, I had to brake and plow left to avoid hitting the taillight of the SUV at the end of the line of SUVs parked half on, half off the crusted berm. The vans were parked head-in opposite these, their satellite dishes staggered on the uneven terrain. Some people remained inside, heads ghosted by phones. Others, at the ready, braved the cold to lean against bumpers.

  I had slowed to avoid that first car and stayed slow in the narrow funnel they’d left of the road. That was my first mistake.

  Doors were suddenly flung open, led by a person of indeterminable sex loping toward me, which meant that I couldn’t exactly speed up again without risking hurt. I had my foot on the brake and was completely stopped by the time she—I saw that, though it was little comfort—came abreast and gestured my window down.

  I might have yelled Go away! through the glass, actually would have yelled something more obscene, if that hadn’t seemed like a cowardly thing to do. Thinking that this was my town, my friend, my new life, I rolled my window down to tell her to let me pass.

  That was my second mistake. She had barely asked if I was a friend of the family when a camera appeared and a flash went off. I brought a hand up, but too late.

  Raising the window again, I faced forward and accelerated only enough to let her know I wasn’t chatting. I might have stopped had it been Ben Zwick, if only to tell him to go to hell. But I doubted he was here. The cynical part of me figured that, with the temperature having dropped into the twenties, he would be in a cozy suite at the Inn eating a flat iron steak—rare, with horseradish-dill aioli and a bottle of the sommelier’s vintage mer
lot. I was sure he had underlings doing his dirty work here in the cold, dark night.

  Others came forward as I inched ahead, a few running alongside my truck, but I kept my eyes on Grace’s home. It was a frame structure consisting of a modest bottom topped by dormers that looked uncannily like eyes whose brows were raised as they watched the road. But arched brows were the end of notable where the exterior was concerned. Grace’s show of spirit was on the inside, which, of course, these people would love to know, but couldn’t see. Every curtain was drawn. The only light escaped from those upstairs dormers and was thickly diffused. These were bedrooms, not that I expected either Grace or Chris was asleep.

  She had no bell, just a brass knocker in the shape of a frog. I used it at the same time that I texted to let her know it was me, which was a waste if the Feds had her phone. But I couldn’t be the first person using the knocker tonight, and she wouldn’t blindly open the door to this mob. I stood an arm’s length back, where she might see me from a window, and kept my head down against the ghosts, listening for footsteps inside, a shouted Go away!, anything. After what felt like forever, during which time I was swarmed by moving mouths and cameras, I heard the tumble of three different locks. Then the door opened enough for her to grab my sleeve and pull me in.

  Only when I was leaning against the closed door did I realize I was shaking. Blaming it on the cold, I breathed, “Nightmare.”

  “You don’t know the half,” Grace said as she rebolted the door, “but you can’t stay, Maggie.” She sounded exhausted, and though I could barely see her in the dark, the little light that seeped down the stairs suggested a wilted version of the woman I knew. Her curls were caught back in a scrunchie that left as much loose as not, and her face was glow-in-the-dark ghostly. Barefooted, wearing baggy sweats, she seemed smaller than ever.

  Feeling her helplessness, I said a gentle, “I heard about Rutland. How’s Chris?”

  “Terrified. They booked him. Do you have any idea what that’s like?”

  I did. Terrifying was a mild word for it. “Is he upstairs?” She lifted one shoulder. “Can I talk with him?”