Never Tell

by Alafair Burke

  Today’s CIS detective introduced himself as Peter Pettinato. From the first glance, Ellie could see he was not the usual only-left-the-basement-to-answer-the-door-for-carry-out type. He was an actual grown-up with short black hair and an equally tidy mustache. There were, however, signs of a creative personality. His cubicle was decorated with photographs of his pets and a few appearances he’d made in local theater productions. In place of a typical office chair, he sat on a bright blue yoga ball.

  As Pettinato reached for the closed laptop on his desk, Ellie noticed a sticker of a yellow bird with a white belly on the back of the computer, right above a sticker that read: “Mean People Suck.”

  The bird image was familiar. Where had she seen it before? The Brady Bunch? Something about it reminded her of the oldies repeat-channel she used to watch when she was little. That was it. The Partridge Family! It wasn’t an identical cartoon, but the bird reminded her of The Partridge Family.

  “Yo. Earth to Hatcher. You there, girl?”

  Rogan waved a hand in front of her eyes, as if to check her sight.

  “It’s like that parakeet hypnotized you for a sec.”

  “Sorry.” The bird sticker made her sad. Sadder than Julia’s water-pruned and lifeless body in the bathtub. With all the emphasis on the Whitmires’ wealth and Julia’s life of privilege and precociousness, Ellie had neglected to remember that she was still only a sixteen-year-old girl. A part of her had still been childlike. It was yet another fact Ellie had overlooked during that initial callout to the townhouse.

  Pettinato motioned for them to look over his shoulder. “All right, so here’s what seems relevant based on what you told me yesterday—suspected suicide, slit wrist, found in the tub. You asked me specifically to search for first drafts of the goodbye note, or for any Internet research about depression or suicide. I got zilch on both fronts. The only documents I found on the hard drive all appeared to be school papers—Shakespeare, Civil War, that kind of stuff. I didn’t find any Googling for methods of death, for mental heath issues, for anything like that.”

  “So what did she look at online?” Rogan asked.

  “Typical teenage fare. Facebook. Twitter—though that was more one-way communication.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Ellie braced herself for the usual loud sigh that followed questions that struck CIS detectives as stupid, but Pettinato showed no signs of attitude. “It’s how a lot of quote-unquote real people use Twitter. They don’t actually post—or tweet, in the lexicon. But they have accounts so they can follow their favorite celebrities. She followed twits like those big-butt sisters and smack-talking rap stars. That kind of nonsense. So, anyway, Facebook. Twitter. Lots of online shopping. Fashion sites. Yelp for reviews of restaurants and clubs and stuff. Celebrity gossip like TMZ, Us Weekly, and Perez Hilton. Really, not all that much activity as far as surfing goes. But I did find one hit over the weekend to a blog about childhood sex abuse. I thought maybe that could be related, you know?”

  If Julia had been abused, it would put her eating disorder and promiscuity into context. It would also make her a prime candidate for suicide.

  “And explain to us exactly how you can be sure Julia accessed the blog?” Rogan asked. “And, to be sure, we’re not total Luddites—we get history windows, time stamps, etcetera. It just helps when you break it down.”

  Pettinato was waving away the explanations. “I may be CIS, but I’m also a detective. I get it. So, like you said, there’s a history window involved. If we open Safari here . . . that’s the Internet browser”—he smiled at the exaggeratedly elementary level of the tutorial—“and hit Show All History, and then look at this column called Visit Date? Now we have a list of every site she went to, and the date and time when the visit occurred. And here, on Saturday night, you’ll see three entries for this blog.”

  He clicked on the link and the website opened. “Second Acts: Confessions of a Former Victim and Current Survivor.”

  Pettinato scrolled down the screen slowly so they could get a sense of the subject matter.

  “Can you tell if she’d been following the blog for long?” Rogan asked. “Or going to other websites related to sex abuse?”

  “No, this is the only one.”

  “It could be a complete fluke,” Ellie offered. She herself had wound up at countless unintended online sites thanks to random hyperlinks, pop-up ads, mistaken mouse clicks, and search-engine snafus.

  “That’s what I thought at first,” Pettinato said, “but I swear there’s a reason I thought you’d want to see this.”

  He pulled up the history page again, and this time Ellie noticed that the “Second Acts” blog was listed three consecutive times. “Wait a second. Why are there three entries in a row if she only went to the website once?”

  “Ah. Because the fact of three different entries in the history window doesn’t mean three separate visits to the blog. Otherwise we’d see the names of other websites in between if she was doing other surfing. Those three entries are for navigation within the blog itself. See: if we click on this first entry here”—he moved the cursor and clicked accordingly—“we pull up the home page for the blog. This is the main page, what you get whenever you enter the main website address. Got that?”

  He looked to both Rogan and Ellie for confirmation they were following his step-by-step tour.

  “Okay. Then we go back to the history to see what happened next. We click on this second entry, and now we see the comments that came in response to the blog post for that day.”

  Rogan nodded. “So Julia would have first seen the post of the day on the home page, but then she clicked to see the comments.”

  “Correct. Now here’s what’s interesting. If you click on this third entry in her history, it takes you to the ‘Create Journal Entry’ box in the comments section.”

  “Meaning that she posted a comment?” Rogan asked.

  “Well, I can’t tell you that with a hundred percent certainty just from the laptop. The only way to do that would be if she had a keystroke recorder on her computer. But, yeah, I’m pretty confident that’s what happened.”

  “Explain to me how you know that?” Ellie said. Pettinato was a detective—and perhaps a talented one at that—but she didn’t want his inferences. She needed to conclude for herself that two and two added up to four.

  “Okay, but if I’m right, am I allowed to claim the hundred-thou reward? Just saw it online.”

  “I’m quite sure the three of us aren’t eligible.”

  “What I know for certain is that the three listings in her history correlate to these three actions. One, she pulled up the home page Saturday at 10:02 p.m. Two, she pulled up the comments, also at 10:02 p.m. And, three, she pulled up the page for entering comments at 10:03 p.m. Now, if you look here on the blog post that went up on Saturday, there’s only one comment posted within ninety minutes of that time, and it was finalized at 10:04 p.m.”

  She understood now why Pettinato had concluded that Julia was the author of the comment posted at 10:04.

  “And here’s the kicker.” He pushed back from the laptop to make sure they could get a clear look. “This is the comment that was posted that night.”

  “If you thought that night twenty years ago was bad, wait until you see what I have planned. You won’t remember a single time on the clock. Maybe a day on the calendar if you’re lucky. Maybe a week. Or maybe I’ll keep you busy for a month. One thing I know for certain: You will not live to write about it.”

  Ellie remembered the physics teacher saying that Julia was more likely to have been bullying someone else than being bullied herself. Julia may have only been sixteen years old, but these were not the words of a normal teenager.

  “I assume you have no idea why your victim would say such a thing?” Pettinato asked.

  They both muttered their no’s, still taking in the new information.

  “Now, here’s where things get really perplexing. Your victim died Sunday
night? Well, that’s all and well if we’re right about her posting the one comment on Saturday night. But guess what? There have been five other threats since Monday. Unless Julia Whitmire is surfing the Web from the afterlife, someone else out there is continuing whatever she started.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Ramona was not usually an angry girl. She had been told over the years that she had plenty of reason to be an angry person. The word bitter had been used at times, too.

  Usually the words came from people who thought their job was to tell Ramona how she should feel.

  The first person she recalled telling her she was “allowed to be angry” was a school counselor in the—what?—the third grade? Yes, she was in Mr. Masterson’s class at the time, so it was the third grade. She didn’t get long division, so Dad got her a tutor. And when she still had trouble with long division, despite the private tutor, she saw the school counselor.

  Why wasn’t she paying attention in school? Why did she seem so distant? Was she angry about her mother? You’re allowed to be angry, she was told. She was barely nine years old. What was there to be angry about?

  Sometimes Ramona wondered how much she even remembered about her mother. Her dad was good about keeping photographs of her around, like that one of her and her mom by the bears statue. He also talked to Ramona about her—not so much anymore, but while she was growing up. She knew that memory could play tricks on a person. You could convince yourself from pictures and stories that you remembered a person, when really all you knew were two-dimensional images and rehashed anecdotes.

  But Ramona was confident she had at least some true, authentic memories of her mother. Her name was Gabriella. Her girlfriends had called her Gabby, but at home, Ramona’s father always called her Gabriella. She wore this lotion that smelled like ginger and honey. When she was done applying it, she’d run her still-slick hands along Ramona’s forearms and say, “Now you and Mommy smell just the same.” That wasn’t a story Ramona’s father had ever told her, and someone can’t make you remember a fragrance that distinctively. That’s how Ramona was certain she really did remember her mother, Gabriella Langston.

  Oddly, though, she could not remember learning she had died. She knew, because she certainly had been told, that her mother died shortly after Ramona’s fifth birthday. She knew because she had been told much later that a car on Egypt Lane had struck her mother during her ritual walk home from the Hamptons Equestrian Stables. She knew that the state police department’s accident-reconstruction experts believed that the car involved was a red Pontiac of some kind. Something about the tire tracks and paint transfer. A hit-and-run, they said. Probably a drunk, though there was no way to know since they never caught the guy. Ramona also knew that her mother’s ashes had been scattered in the ocean at Montauk, because she had loved the taste of the salty wind hitting her face as she stood on the rocky beach’s edge.

  And she knew that, not eighteen months after her mother’s ashes had been scattered, her father had married Adrienne. She had been working as a nanny for another family in the building, back when she was still Adrienne Mitchell. The transition from neighbor’s nanny to supportive presence to new wife and stepmother was quick.

  Then Ramona was in Mr. Masterson’s third-grade class and couldn’t do long division and got asked a lot of questions about being angry.

  Then, in the fifth grade, she started complaining about being tired in the mornings. Her father sent her to her first therapist, who also asked Ramona if she was angry. In fact, she may have been the first to throw in the bitter word, not Mr. Masterson. The therapy sessions got down to once a month until a couple of years ago, when her father found pot in her purse. Somehow pot meant she needed to talk to a doctor once a week, like so many of the kids Ramona knew. And somehow all these trained experts seemed to think that Ramona should be angry.

  The truth was that Ramona just wasn’t the angry type. She only remembered getting really angry about her mother’s death once. It was the first time Adrienne had tried to discipline her. Ramona must have been eleven. She pierced her ears without permission, and Adrienne had dared to express her disappointment. Ramona screamed at her—“You’re not my mother, Adrienne!” emphasizing the use of her first name—then ran to her bedroom. She could hear Adrienne crying in the living room but couldn’t bring herself to apologize.

  When her father finally came home from work, she heard their voices in the kitchen. Maybe Adrienne wouldn’t mention the episode to him?

  But then her father had come into her room and sat on the foot of her bed. She’d never seen him like that before. He was usually so flat in his affect. He didn’t show emotions. But that night, after putting in thirteen hours at the law firm, he had cried in front of his daughter. He said how much he missed her mother. He talked about the day he first met her, at a jazz concert in the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden.

  She would never forget how matter-of-factly he had said that Adrienne was not Gabriella. Love at my age isn’t the same as meeting someone when you’re in your twenties, he had said. She hadn’t even questioned it at the time, because children instinctively think of their parents as old. But in retrospect, he was all of forty-six at the time but reminiscing as if his best days were already past. Adrienne wasn’t Gabriella, he had said, but Adrienne was a good person. She was young. She brought a different energy into the house. She was fun. She made him feel happy again. They had been married four years by then, and she was still helping him learn how to be happy without Gabriella. “And,” he said, “she loves you and really wants to be a mother to you.”

  But Ramona wasn’t done pouting. “She’s not my mother.”

  And so her father told her that her mother hadn’t really been her mother either, not according to the DNA. They had tried. They kept a calendar. She took all the expensive drugs that were available. They tried one round of in vitro, but still nothing. Some of their friends resorted to surrogates and egg transplants, but Gabriella cared more about being a mother than about the biology. They called a lawyer. They arranged a private adoption. Gabriella had been the one to choose the name Ramona.

  Adrienne wasn’t her mother, but neither was Gabriella.

  And so just as the baby version of herself must have come to accept Gabriella as her first mother, she resolved to accept Adrienne as her new one. Now, five years after that episode with the earrings, she didn’t think of her as a stepmother. Or an adoptive mother. Adrienne was her mother. She had never again questioned the truth of that relationship, not only because she’d made a promise to her father, but because Adrienne had earned it.

  Ramona returned her gaze to her mother’s computer screen, the browser open to the page that had appeared when she had typed in the password.

  The website was called Second Acts: Confessions of a Former Victim and Current Survivor. And the page wasn’t the blog as it would appear to any casual reader. No, Ramona was looking at the administrative “dashboard” on a blog-hosting service called Social Circle. This was the place where the author of the blog could draft new posts, delete comments, and modify content.

  Ramona was always so proud of the fact that, unlike her friends, she had a “real” relationship with her mother. But here she was—alone in her mother’s study, snooping around on her mother’s computer when she should have been in school, finally discovering why her mother had seemed so secretive lately.

  Her mother was a sex abuse survivor. Her mother was the author of this blog.

  And now, after all these years of being told that she had every reason to be angry, Ramona Langston was actually angry.

  Someone was threatening her mother.

  Five miles south, at NYPD headquarters, Ellie and Rogan were also reading the “Second Act” blog, paying special attention to the threats that had been posted since Julia’s death.

  “Can you tell if Julia accessed the blog anytime after that comment on Saturday night?” Rogan asked. They had evidence suggesting that Julia had
been the one to post the first threatening comment on Saturday. Clearly she had not authored the threats written since Monday, but she was still alive on Sunday and may have checked in on the blog then.

  “Nope,” Pettinato said, pivoting back and forth on his fitness ball. “Just the one hit the night before she died. But if I’m right and she was the one who posted the comment, she must have known the website well because she navigated through it so quickly. However, I have found no indication that she ever used this laptop to visit the website previously.”

  They had more questions than answers.

  “So how do we find out whose blog this is?” Ellie asked. “And what computer was used to post the more recent threats?”

  “The blog was created with a hosting service called Social Circle. They should be able to give you the IP addresses. That stands for—”

  “Internet protocol address,” Ellie said. She and Rogan had come up against these Internet situations before, where the bad guys cloaked themselves in anonymity. The IP address was like a computer’s numeric address on the Internet.

  “Good luck getting it, though,” Pettinato warned. “Unless you’re working with some corporate behemoth, the dudes who run these webites usually won’t cooperate without a subpoena.”

  She and Rogan were familiar with that world as well. Fortunately, she knew an assistant district attorney who liked her.

  Her cell phone buzzed at her waist. She didn’t recognize the number.

  “Hatcher.”

  “Detective Hatcher? This is Ramona Langston. You came to my apartment last night to talk to me about my friend, Julia Whitmire? You gave me your card?”

  “Sure, Ramona. What can I do for you?”

  “It’s not about Julia. But, um—I’m not sure who I should call. It’s about a website?”

  “What website?” Rogan and Pettinato both perked up on hearing her side of the conversation.