Autumn's Child

by Kathleen Gilles Seidel

  He had only dreamed about snowboarding once before. It had been a week into the software boot camp when he had realized that he was only okay at systems design. He wasn’t gifted, not like some of the other people there. They were so quick to see patterns and solutions. They couldn’t explain how they did it; they just could. That’s how he had been at coaching snowboarders. He had no idea how his eye went to the one tiny thing a rider was doing wrong, but it did. That had been his gift, not this.

  But first software engineering and now cyber-security was what he had chosen for himself, and he could make peace with being B-plus at it. He just needed to finish his degree and find a job. Then he’d been fine. He could adjust to anything.

  He looked out one of the back windows. The morning sun hadn’t risen above the tree line yet, but there were lights on in the big house. He found Colleen in her grandmother’s bedroom. She must have already been working for a couple of hours. The bed was stripped, and she was going through her grandmother’s clothes, folding a blouse into a shopping bag. A big black trash bag was nearby, and garments on hangers, some still in dry-cleaning bags, were piled on the bare mattress.

  This must be one of the things that his mother was worried about, Colleen getting all frenetic to mask her grief and confusion—and his mother hadn’t known anything about Autumn Chase. What stress that was adding. Someone needed to be here for her.

  He wasn’t the right person for the job. But he was the only one here.

  “Are you donating all that?” he asked. “Shall I start carrying it out to the car?”

  “That would be nice. The hospital in Staunton has a thrift shop. I thought I’d take things there.”

  Mrs. Ridge’s car was much bigger than Colleen’s. Ben got the keys from the kitchen and brought it to the front door. He left the passenger seat open for a while in case Colleen wanted to come with him. But the cable installers arrived, and Colleen needed to stay at the house. So he piled more bags onto the passenger seat and wedged shoeboxes on the floor.

  He had to sweet-talk the volunteers into accepting donations on a Monday, but that was the sort of thing he usually had a fair amount of luck at because of the Irish cheekbones, the Southern manners, and all that. The cable truck was gone when he returned to the lake. Colleen was in the library, her computer open. She had set up the household network herself, something his sisters usually asked him to do.

  She looked up at him. “Someone’s opened a new website. FindAriel.com. People are to put forth possible candidates for Ariel.”

  “They aren’t naming names, are they?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  How stupid could people be? “Has anyone named you?”

  “No one has even gotten close. This one”—she tapped her finger against the screen—“worried me because I went to Girl Scout camp, but that camp was in Colorado, and our council had our own camps. I never went out of state.”

  Ben looked at the post. The writer had gone to Girl Scout camp with a girl who had been adopted and had a birthday sometime in the fall. She couldn’t remember the girl’s name, but she would drive up to her mother’s over the weekend and go through the boxes in the storage unit, see if she could find something from camp. She was that eager to help Autumn find Ariel.

  “Now look at the one about collecting evidence,” Colleen said.

  That post started with an acknowledgment that it was important to obey the law, especially when dealing with a minor child…although Ben, proud brother of a police officer, quickly concluded that the writer wasn’t talking about obeying the law; she was talking about what illegalities would be tolerated by an overstressed justice system. As long as you did not use any words that might be considered a physical threat, she wrote, you could ring a person’s doorbell or speak to her in public multiple times. Even if the person called the authorities, a police officer might ask you to move along, but your behavior would not be actionable. Working in teams would help you avoid a pattern of established harassment.

  It was, they claimed, entirely lawful to collect “abandoned DNA.” You could retrieve something from a public trash can; a drink can, a toothbrush, or a used tissue could be a source of DNA.

  Ben shook his head. Snowboarders had crazy courage, but looking at this website, Ben was seeing all kinds of reasons to be alarmed. Dumpster-diving for used Kleenex? If someone would do that, what wouldn’t they do? Pull out a hunk of hair by the roots?

  There must be thousands and thousands of people who had been involved in an adoption and who were sane and happy, birth mothers who were content in the belief that by giving up their child they had done the right thing, and adopted kids who, like Colleen, believed that they had grown up in the right family. It was only the most troubled who got involved in these message boards, but there were enough of them to be dangerous.

  However secure Colleen had felt last week, her grandmother’s will must have made her feel like she was standing on quicksand. “Are you tempted to go forward?” he asked carefully.

  “I think Autumn is really unhappy, Ben. This matters to her. I hate to think of someone struggling if I can help.”

  That was a typical Colleen remark. “But what about you? Is coming forward right for you?”

  “If you were me, wouldn’t you want to know?”

  He couldn’t answer that. He was having enough trouble figuring out who he was if he wasn’t snowboarding, but if he had been born to a different family…he had no idea.

  “Your whole life,” she went on, “people have been saying that you look like Ryan, haven’t they?”

  “Yes.” Actually ever since his snowboarding career had taken off, people were more likely to say that Ryan looked like him.

  “I’ve never had that. No one has ever said that I look like anyone. Your bio says that both your parents were gymnasts in high school. It’s no surprise that you’re so flexible. But me? I’m really good at languages, but neither of my parents is. My dad says that my teeth are amazing, perfectly straight, very strong. No one else in the family has teeth like that.”

  “I guess it’s easy for me to say that none of that is important,” he admitted. “I’ve always had it. I don’t know anything else.”

  “I wish I knew what to do. My dad doesn’t want me to look.”

  “Oh?” That made any decision easier. “He knows about this?”

  She nodded. “He says that he and Mother promised that they would never look, that they wouldn’t have gotten me if they hadn’t made that promise, but this is different. We’re not looking. She is.”

  It sounded as if she was trying to persuade herself that it was all right to do this. “Don’t do anything impulsive, Colleen. Please.”

  She suddenly straightened. “Is that what you think of me? That I am all impulse? That I don’t have a rational bone in me?”

  Oh, crap. He had been thinking that way. Colleen was capable of flinging herself into this mess heart-first. As she had said, she trusted everyone. She would turn over her DNA, her Social Security number, and her last dollar to anyone who could make a good case for needing them.

  “I think,” he said carefully, “you are the most kind, the most thoughtful, the most helpful person that I have ever met, and in that way you are like your mother. You’re like that because of the way she raised you.”

  Chapter 10

  The cable guys had pulled a line out to the boathouse. Ben set up that network and set about learning more about Autumn Chase.

  She was a very attractive woman, but now only occasionally appeared in movies. There probably weren’t many parts for women in their forties. She kept herself in the public eye through her Lifestyle Collection, a line of products sold on a television shopping channel. She had purses, jewelry, kitchen accessories, bath mats, wallpaper, and organizers of every description. She offered items in a range of price points, and even the lowest-end items were made in the Un
ited States.

  On her blog, she offered little tidbits of advice about “living beautifully.” None of her advice involved spending money on anything, including Autumn’s own products. She didn’t tell her fans to exercise self-care by booking a massage; she told them how to moisturize their own feet with whatever product they happened to have. The advice she was offering was realistic about what a woman without much disposable income could do. She was respectful of the challenges such women faced. She was forgiving about the shortcuts they needed to take. A woman wasn’t a failure if her kitchen drawers were a mess.

  He liked that.

  He watched a clip of an appearance on the shopping channel. Her manner was warm and appealing; she seemed authentic. Viewers must feel as if they were getting to know the real her. No wonder her fans were so devoted to her.

  He went back to the message board that was on her site. A new banner was up, announcing that the site was now being moderated. Each post would have to be approved by an administrator. That was good. He scrolled through the threads. The angriest comments had been removed. That was even better.

  The other site, the unauthorized FindAriel.com, wasn’t moderated. People could post anything, and they were. Ariel was being selfish, one thread argued, by refusing to reveal herself. Didn’t she owe it to Autumn to come forward? Another thread countered that perhaps Ariel needed to be rescued. Perhaps she was too afraid of her “second family” to come forward.

  Whoever Ariel might be, she sure as hell should be afraid. Didn’t people know how dangerous the internet could be?

  He might not be any good at the emotional-support thing. But this was something he could handle. He could crash the site. All it would take was a DDoS—Distributive Denial of Service. You hammered the site with so much traffic that it shut down. A message board like this wouldn’t have the infrastructure to repel such an attack.

  Sure, the organizers could set up another site, but the crashed-site alert about third-party applications or unwanted website visits was enough to unnerve most amateurs, especially if it happened a second time.

  He found Colleen in the library; she was on her computer again reading the FindAriel.com board.

  “This can’t be a good way for Autumn to go about finding Ariel,” he said.

  “There are a lot of weird people posting,” she admitted.

  “Worse than weird, I’d say. I am thinking about crashing the site.”

  “What do you mean? Crashing it? Like taking it down? Is that legal?”

  “It’s not as if I would be stealing passwords or people’s data.”

  “But is it legal?”

  He shrugged.

  “No, Ben, really.” She pushed her computer away. “I know that you have had to learn how the hackers do all the bad things that they do, but surely you all are supposed to be like doctors—‘first, do no harm’ and all. Doesn’t your school have a code of ethics?”

  It did, and when he had tried to contact Leilah last week, he had adhered to it. He had done a deeper search than your average Joe could do, but he had not crossed any lines. “I would not call this doing harm. They are the ones causing damage.”

  “If you want to work for the government, aren’t they going to ask you if you’ve ever done anything like this?”

  She had a point. The security clearance you needed for the best government jobs could be denied for pretty minor infractions. “There are lots of other places that only care what you promise to do in the future.”

  “Haven’t you already done this to yourself once before?” Colleen demanded, her voice a little sharp.

  Where was that tone coming from? She was sitting up very straight and looking at him directly, her eyebrows raised, her head slightly tilted. Apparently he had not been turning in his French homework on time. “Once before? What are you talking about?”

  “Once before,” she continued, “you ruined your professional opportunities. You can’t work for any of the major snowboarding programs. Are you trying to make sure that you can’t work for the government either?”

  Wow. He hadn’t see this coming. “That was different. I don’t want to coach in a program that I don’t think is safe enough or fair to the parents.”

  “Then this is even more stupid because you wouldn’t have any high-falutin’ reason for doing it.”

  Protecting innocent people from being harassed seemed plenty “high-falutin’” to him. “You’re making too big a deal of this. I don’t know for sure what jobs require a security clearance and whether something as nickel-and-dime as this would matter.”

  “I don’t care if it is a half-a-cent matter.” She was very definite. “I won’t having you mess up this career on my account. If you don’t want to be in cyber-security, face that. Don’t back-door your way out of it. Whatever self-destructive urges you’ve got, you need to own up to them.”

  Self-destructive urges? Not want to be in cyber-security? She was really going overboard. Sure, a felony conviction wouldn’t look great on a résumé, but no prosecutor would ever go after him for shutting down an amateur message board when there had been no monetary damages.

  He could hair-split this until the cows came home, but he had asked her opinion. He probably hadn’t expected her to give one, but she had. He couldn’t go out and do it now.

  At least he could leverage this noble behavior. “If I leave the message board up, I need you to agree to my staying here.”

  “Why?” She suddenly looked a lot less schoolmarm-ish. Apparently her students didn’t try to make deals, or they weren’t as good at it as he was. “Are you afraid that I will do something stupid?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Are you about to say that if I don’t agree, you will call my father?”

  That had never occurred to him, but it wasn’t a bad idea, not because Dr. Ridge was her daddy, someone with patriarchal authority over her, but because he had been named executor. The executor was really the only one to authorize who could stay at the house.

  “The estate doesn’t have an executor yet,” he answered. “When it does, I will ask permission. In the meantime, I hope you and I could discuss this as adults.”

  “Oh, fine.” She sounded annoyed. “As long as you promise me that you won’t get all wizardy with this site.”

  “I promise.”

  * * * *

  He came to regret that promise as the week went along. By Tuesday morning the Find Ariel people had found a likely candidate, a graphic artist in San Francisco. She was adopted. She was the right age. She had an October birthday. She was petite and delicately beautiful just as everyone was imagining Ariel to be. Tuesday night the website published her name and the addresses of her apartment, her office, and her parents’ home. By Wednesday Autumn’s fans were waiting outside her apartment, trying to get her DNA, refusing to leave her alone. By Friday her parents had hired a lawyer and had released a copy of her adoption papers, both the translation and the original Korean. She was petite and delicately beautiful because, as anyone looking at her picture should have known, she was by birth Asian.

  What a nightmare for that family. Surely they would have wished that Ben had risked a future security clearance and shut down the site.

  Feeling a little like a stalker, he checked Colleen’s Charlottesville address on Google Earth. She lived in a slightly funky old Victorian house that appeared to have been cut up into apartments. The street was residential. People could easily gather on the sidewalk. He looked at a map of her school. Its campus had several buildings and was connected by sidewalks to the grounds of a large church. A public road lay between the school’s main campus and its sports fields. She would be vulnerable there too. At least here at the lake there was only the one unmarked driveway. Colleen was probably safer here than anyplace else.

  At least physically safer. Emotionally she didn’t seem to be doing so well.
Once she finished her grandmother’s room, she pulled everything out of the downstairs coat closet and the closets in the attic bedrooms. By Thursday she was unfolding tablecloths, measuring each one, guessing the fiber content, assessing the stains, noting all this on a card, and refolding the cloth. Ben couldn’t imagine why it was important to do this.

  He did not know what to do. He asked her if any of her friends were planning on visiting. That would be good. Maybe they could help her more than he could.

  She said that, yes, Amanda and Jason were coming the Fourth of July; they might be bringing some other people. No, they couldn’t come any earlier. Amanda was working in the school’s summer athletic camp. The Fourth of July was the only time she could take more than one day off.

  He felt helpless. One of the picture books that his older sister used to read to the rest of them had had a picture of a knight standing at the base of a stone tower. A beautiful princess was imprisoned in the top of the tower behind its one lone window. The knight had had a horse, armor, and a lance or whatever it was that knights had. None of those were going to help him reach the princess. Ben couldn’t remember which story it was or how it ended, but he supposed one or the other of them had figured something out.

  Which was more than he could do. He longed to help Colleen…although it wasn’t clear that she wanted help from him. This Rapunzel was not going to let down her long hair, not when she didn’t trust the knight waiting below.

  They had known each other forever. Their mothers had been such good friends. Why wasn’t that helping him reach her?

  There was one other thing. It seemed like a very odd idea, but he couldn’t think of anything else. At lunch on Saturday, he suggested it. “I’m going to the five-thirty mass in the village tonight. Would you like to come with me?”

  He had decided that he needed to phrase this as being about him wanting to go. This might result in him being stuck going to mass by himself, which would truly be a unique moment in ecclesiastical history, but at least it wouldn’t keep him from getting a security clearance.