by Shawna Seed
Elizabeth logged in at her computer using her regular ID and password.
She sifted through the papers stacked on her desk and found a project she’d started before she left for San Diego. She called up a database and initiated a search.
If anyone checked later, they would find that Elizabeth Ellsworth had logged in at her desktop and worked on one of her assigned projects.
Elizabeth locked her purse in her desk drawer and left the staff office.
Up on the next floor were computers that any student or university employee could access with a school ID. The staff had posted signs reminding users to log off when they’d completed their sessions, but people invariably left themselves logged in. Elizabeth was banking on someone’s forgetfulness.
Only one cubicle was occupied, by a student who appeared to be asleep.
Elizabeth made her way down the row, checking each computer. For once, students had followed directions. Everyone had logged out. She’d have to go with Plan B.
She sat down at the last cubicle, the one farthest from the sleeping student.
Because she ran the training for part-time student employees, Elizabeth had access to a generic ID and password. At least twenty people used the account, so the trail would not lead directly to her, not right away. Before this night, she’d always resisted the temptation to exploit it for personal reasons.
Elizabeth called up the prompt and entered the user name, then the password. She was proud of the password – it was Melvil, for the man (nee Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey) who invented the Dewey Decimal system.
On the drive from her apartment to the library, Elizabeth had puzzled over why Brian never showed up in any of the searches she’d tried.
She’d decided that she had to deal with the most obvious explanation first. Brian had been involved with dangerous people. Both Missy and Cliff ended up dead.
She called up the Social Security death index and typed in Brian’s full name.
No hits.
Elizabeth breathed a sigh of relief.
Then her professional training kicked in. She knew she’d made her search too restrictive. If Brian’s name were there without his middle name, or middle initial, or misspelled as Bryan, she’d missed him.
She hit “new search” and typed in “Lowry, Br” and then a symbol for a wild card. That would give her all the Lowrys whose first names started with the letters Br.
That search yielded hundreds of hits. Elizabeth paged slowly through them. Brandon, Brant, several Brendas, Brennan.
Then she saw it: Brian. Her heart lurched.
She clicked on the record and discovered that the birth date didn’t match. Elizabeth exhaled.
The next name on the list caught her eye.
Lowry, Bridget
Last benefits paid out in Oklahoma. Born in 1920.
This was Brian’s grandmother, the woman he called “Gramma.” She’d met Gramma once, at Kevin and Lynn’s housewarming. Gramma was fat and loud and sat in a lawn chair in the back yard knocking back beers with the young people. She had loved Gramma, in part because Brian’s mother was so obviously horrified by her.
It only took a few minutes to find Bridget Lowry’s obituary online.
Mrs. Lowry is survived by her sons, Mitchell of Houston and Roger of Tulsa, OK; five grandchildren, Lisa Burns of Dallas, Jerald Lowry of Broken Bow, OK, Mark Lowry of Olney, MD, Kevin Lowry and Brian Lowry of Houston; thirteen great-grandchildren and one great-great grandchild.
Elizabeth recognized all those people from Brian’s stories, even though she hadn’t met them – Uncle Rog, Jerry and Mark, Lisa, the only girl among the cousins, the princess who tattled when the boys got into trouble.
Because she’d never found Brian in phone databases before, Elizabeth decided not to bother with them. The obit said Brian lived in Houston; she’d start with property tax records.
As she waited for the search to finish, she thought about those 13 great-grandchildren. At least one, she knew, was Kevin and Lynn’s. How many were Brian’s?
Her hunch about tax records paid off. She discovered that Brian owned a house, purchased the year before for a price that seemed very low. His name was the only one listed. She was surprised; she expected Brian to be married. The tax filing didn’t mean he didn’t have a wife, of course, only that her name wasn’t on the deed.
Elizabeth tried to picture what Brian might be like in his 40s. He liked to work with his hands. Given his reading difficulties, it was unlikely he had a white-collar job.
Lots of jobs required state licensing. Elizabeth clicked over to the official Texas state website to see what sort of databases were available. She found him in the business licenses, the sole proprietor of something called Come Monday.
A few clicks later, she found the Come Monday website. Brian was in the business of repairing guitars – “making them right,” the website said.
Unbidden, a memory came to her of Brian at the Laundromat, singing for her.
Elizabeth dug the heels of her hands into her eyes. She needed to stay focused.
Why had she never found this website when she searched for Brian? She clicked quickly through the site and discovered that Brian’s name wasn’t listed anywhere.
She mapped Brian’s house and business. Total distance from Tallahassee: 721 miles. Total traveling time: 11 hours and 18 minutes. Elizabeth checked the clock. It was just past 2 a.m.
She would have to wait a day. Houston was too far, and she’d had too little sleep the past two nights.
Elizabeth logged out and headed home to get some rest. She needed to be sharp when she saw Brian.
ELEVEN
Elizabeth pulled out of her apartment complex at 4:49 a.m.
She’d managed to sleep for a couple of hours, but then she’d bolted awake. Now, her brain said. Go now.
As her Honda glided down the hushed streets toward the highway, she thought about all the times she’d done this – hit the road with nothing but an audio book or her thoughts to keep her company. She’d driven to the beaches of South Carolina and the mountains of North Carolina, all the way to Washington to see the museums and monuments.
For a while, she’d made regular trips every month or so to Athens, Georgia. She dated someone there – Wyatt, a man she’d met on a trip to Savannah. She’d liked him so much that she’d let him stay in her life past the three-month mark, rationalizing that the distance between them would keep things in check. But then Wyatt started talking about missing her and wanting to see her more, and she’d had to cut him loose.
She’d enjoyed those drives. She’d savored the idea of Wyatt with a glass of wine, listening to music, keeping an eye on the clock. When she pulled into his driveway, he would always walk out onto his porch, smiling, glad she was finally there.
She didn’t know what kind of welcome she would get from Brian, but she refused to dwell on that. She set her cruise control and kept the car pointed west.
It was a perfect day for driving, nothing but sunny skies and dry roads. She stopped for coffee and a muffin in Pensacola, and again in Baton Rouge for gas and a sandwich. Gaining an hour as she drove west, she hit Houston at 3 p.m..
Brian’s house and business were only a couple miles apart, much closer to downtown than the suburb where he’d grown up. She didn’t recognize the neighborhood on the map, but then, she’d never really known her way around Houston. She’d relied on Brian.
Elizabeth had debated whether she should approach Brian at home or at work. There was no good way to do what she was about to do, but she’d decided that going to his business was the least disruptive.
She wanted to drive by his house first, though, just to check it out. When she’d looked at the property records and seen how little Brian paid for his house, Elizabeth worried that he lived in a bad part of town.
She was surprised and relieved, then, to find herself in a charming neighborhood full of Victorians, bungalows and small shops.
Brian’s street was on
the edge of the neighborhood, a mile or so from the grander homes. The houses were smaller here, mostly well maintained, although a few had peeling paint and sagging roofs.
Elizabeth rolled slowly down the block, ticking off the address numbers. When she got to Brian’s house, she fought the impulse to slam on the brakes in the middle of the street. Instead, she went to the corner and looped around so she could park opposite the house.
Brian’s bungalow was painted a grayish-blue with white trim. A wide wooden porch spanned the front of the house – crying out, Elizabeth thought, for a swing.
The paint job looked new and the house seemed to be in good repair. The yard was patchy, though. Flower beds had been dug along the foundation, but they were bare except for a new layer of mulch.
There were no potted geraniums that spoke of a woman’s touch, no toys or bikes strewn around. It was impossible to tell anything from the blank façade of the house.
A driveway ran alongside the house toward a detached garage at the back of the property. The drive was empty; the garage door was down.
The front of the house had one big window, set to the left of the door, and another small one to the right. Elizabeth could see something white poking out of the top of the mailbox, which gave her an idea.
Elizabeth rolled down the car window and listened. The neighborhood was quiet except for the whirr of air-conditioners and the hum of traffic on a nearby road.
She propped the printout of the map and directions on her steering wheel and pretended to study them. She waited five minutes, then ten. A dog began to bark somewhere in the neighborhood, then stopped.
Elizabeth checked the map one more time, noting the name of the next street over. If anyone asked, she’d pretend she was lost.
She got out of the car, crossed the street, climbed the three steps to the porch and knocked on the front door. She stepped back and waited, glancing at the envelope poking out of the mailbox. It was addressed to Brian. That didn’t help her at all.
Elizabeth knocked again, then peered into the big window, shading her eyes with her hand.
A brown sofa backed up against the wall under the window. In front of it was a coffee table, its surface bare. The light was too dim to see much else.
She did not see anything that seemed especially feminine. But the room seemed clean and uncluttered, which worried her, because Brian had always been such a slob.
The blinds were down on the other window, so there’d be no snooping there.
Elizabeth realized that she’d looked long enough.
Come Monday was a couple blocks off the neighborhood’s main drag, in a narrow storefront flanked by a Tae Kwon Do studio and some kind of computer business. The name was spelled out on a sign – simple font, no logo – that hung above a display window about 6 feet wide. The entire shop looked to be no more than 10 feet wide.
The block did not look prosperous, but it didn’t look down-at-the-heels, either. Most of the storefronts were occupied, although one lot sat vacant and weedy.
Elizabeth found a parking place at the opposite end of the block, next to a bar.
She’d imagined, a thousand times, what it would be like to see Brian again. But now that it was almost upon her, she couldn’t envision what would happen. She’d walk into his shop and Brian would… what?
The bar was open. For a millisecond, she thought about having a drink.
Instead, Elizabeth walked purposefully down the block to Come Monday. As she came even with the door, though, she saw that there was a customer. A pony-tailed man in shorts and a tie-dyed shirt was standing at the counter with one hand resting on an open guitar case, talking, though Elizabeth couldn’t see Brian or anyone else.
She hurried past the door and tucked under the awning of the business next door, where she had a good view through Come Monday’s display window. She pulled her cell phone from her purse and put it to her ear, pretending to take a call.
After a few seconds, a man came out of the back of the shop and walked to the counter with what looked like a catalog in his hand.
The way he walked, the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head – they were all instantly familiar to Elizabeth, all unmistakably Brian.
She had steeled herself for the possibility that Brian had not aged well. It was a bit of a jolt, then, to find him still fit and good-looking, if a little gray at the temples and in need, apparently, of glasses.
Brian put the catalog on the counter and spun it toward the customer. As the man studied the page, Brian lifted the guitar from its case and inspected it. He plucked a string and bent his head, listening. He said something to the customer. The customer replied, and Brian laughed. She remembered that smile.
Out of the corner of her eye, Elizabeth noticed a police car crawling down the street. She turned her head away, pretending to be engrossed in her call.
At the corner, the car made a U-turn and came back, gliding to the curb near Brian’s door.
Suddenly, everything felt wrong. She’d been so certain she had everything figured out, but now she had doubts. Could the website be a trap after all?
She put her phone in her purse and headed back down the block, toward her car, eyes front, not daring to look at the cop or Brian’s shop.
She needed a different plan.
Three people – they had the look of regulars – were clustered at one end of the bar when Elizabeth walked in. She sat at the other end and asked for a club soda with lime. The bartender nodded, then asked if she wanted a double. She forced a laugh.
Elizabeth loved bars. She could be completely anonymous in a bar, but at the same time, there was always the tantalizing possibility of easy camaraderie if she chose it.
As much as she loved bars, though, she had always done her serious drinking at home. Sometimes it was just one glass of wine, but often it was four or six or however many it took to soften the hard edges and make the bad things recede.
She never drove drunk, never missed a day of work, never embarrassed herself in public. The worst she ever did was wake up on her couch with a headache and the TV still on and an empty wine bottle on the coffee table.
She hadn’t really meant to give up drinking, not entirely, not at first. She’d only meant to quit keeping wine in the house, removing the temptation to kill a bottle when she was feeling low. But then she felt awful – anxious, nauseated, unable to sleep – for the first few days she didn’t drink, which scared her. So she quit altogether.
She didn’t really miss it. Of all the things she’d given up in her life, alcohol was the one she regretted the least, which allowed her to sit in a bar and plan her next move without even a twinge.
The police car had spooked her. Maybe it would make more sense to try to catch Brian at home. Of course, the reason that she’d gone to his business in the first place was that she wasn’t sure he lived alone.
A week’s worth of insomnia seemed to catch up with her all at once, and it occurred to her that she’d walked to the wrong end of the street. She should have gone to the espresso place she’d spotted at the other end of the block. She’d slept, by her count, about 12 hours in the past three days.
She thought about finding a hotel room and getting a good night’s sleep, trying Brian at home in the morning.
There was only one problem with that idea: She’d never get a good night’s sleep until this was done. Procrastinating was only going to prolong her misery.
She checked her watch; it was 5:10.
The sign in Brian’s window said he closed at 6.
Elizabeth caught the bartender’s eye and signaled for a refill.
After two club sodas, Elizabeth drove to Brian’s street and found a parking spot five houses down from his place. If he took the route she expected, she’d see him in her rear-view as soon as he rounded the corner. If he came from the other direction, she had a clear view of his driveway.
At 6:20, Elizabeth caught sight of a blue pickup truck in her mirror, Brian driving. He was alone, t
he window down, his hand tapping out a rhythm on the steering wheel.
Brian had always liked to sing along with the radio.
He was wearing sunglasses and starting straight ahead, but Elizabeth instinctively turned away as he drove by.
He parked in his driveway and got out. He opened the rear door of the truck’s cab and pulled out a backpack and a guitar case. Elizabeth opened her car door and got out.
She hoped to catch him outside, just in case someone else had come home since she checked earlier. But he was up the walk and inside too quickly for her. She’d have to knock on the door.
She walked past the truck in the driveway and up the steps to the porch.
Somehow, she’d known Brian would still drive a truck. The only thing that had changed was that this one was bigger than the one he’d driven when he was younger, with a little back seat so he could carry more than one passenger.
Her heart was pounding. Elizabeth took a deep breath and then another. She raised her fist, exhaled again and knocked.
As soon as she knocked, the realization of what she’d just seen hit her.
She whirled around to check. Yes. Brian had a child’s car seat in his truck.
Elizabeth backed away, preparing to leave, but the door opened almost as soon as she knocked.
Brian must have been just inside. He was in the middle of taking off his sunglasses, one earpiece clenched in his teeth, a case holding regular glasses in his hand.
Elizabeth started to say his name, but her mouth was too dry. She swallowed hard and looked into Brian’s eyes.
They were just as blue as she remembered them, friendly and… puzzled.
Brian didn’t recognize her.
Thank God. I can still salvage this.
“Can I help you?”
She half-turned toward the street and shook her head. “I must have the wrong street,” she mumbled. “Sorry to bother you.”
Brian smiled at her, that slow, lazy grin she’d always loved. “Where you headed? Maybe I can help.”
He put on his glasses and turned to put the case on a table just inside the door.
