Wanted!

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Alice read what she had written. The message sounded insane. Usually, since E-mail skipped caps, punctuation, spelling and paragraphs, it had a sloppy, friendly look. But this looked demented. It looked like the work of a person whose wiring had crashed.

  Far from explaining the situation to her mother—and to everybody who would read it over her shoulder—it would make things worse.

  She would have to rewrite, and get her version in the correct order, and delete the part about the funeral, and—

  No. It was impossible. She could not talk to her mother about the death of her father on some dumb computer.

  Alice inserted Dad’s TWIN disk into the computer’s slot and scrolled down to where she’d left off at the college lab.

  In a few hours, it would be another day, and this time she could not just trot around, hiding and flinching and fearing and sobbing. She must do something intelligent.

  When she finished reading these entries, would she have knowledge, the way rockets have liftoff?

  Would she know what to do next?

  Chapter 10

  I WANTED ROB TO be just like me. I wanted Rob to pay attention to what I was doing, and imitate me. I told Rob I should have been the big brother, but Rob just grinned and went his own way. Rob was into computers. It was embarrassing then, because home computers were scarce, and only a failure with no friends and no abilities played with computers. It wasn’t that people were laughing at computers; your book club and your bank and your gas credit card were computerized. But people didn’t use them at home yet.

  Rob could do anything with a computer.

  Small companies who were using computers floundered around, trying to figure out how to get payroll attached to that computer, how to get inventory stuck inside that machine, how to get it to print, how to set it up on the page. Rob worked with them, and even had fun, the way I had fun with people who sold cars.

  Alice had a headache. Far away in the medicine cabinet was aspirin, but Alice could not gather the energy to struggle to her feet, fumble her way into the bathroom, hoist a glass, fill it with water, and swallow. The headache grew until it was like having another person under the tent of her blanket.

  So I’m the kid brother, begging for jobs at car dealerships, promising to clean trade-ins, be the guy that gets the gum out from under the driver’s seat and squirms into the trunk to scrub where a quart of antifreeze fell over two years ago. And Rob is the big brother, writing programs for people two or three times his age who are ready to have computers but don’t know how.

  And then a guy named Arren hired my brother Rob.

  Remember, computers are new.

  People don’t understand them.

  To whom was this file addressed? Alice wondered. Dad was talking to somebody. He had an audience in mind. Was it Alice?

  She didn’t think so.

  But he was explaining; trying to make himself clear; it was not an autobiography: it was preparation for some point he had yet to make.

  So this is early on, when utility companies and soft drink bottling companies and small local department stores aren’t worried about what they’ve got in those computer files.

  Well, they should be.

  Because Arren Company is one of the early smugglers of data.

  From the beginning of computers, there are crooks, and Arren Company is among them. Of course they don’t consider themselves bad guys. They are just “availing themselves of data.”

  That summer, my brother turned seventeen, and a month later, I turned sixteen. Nobody was ever so happy to turn sixteen. I could buy my car and I could drive it away. My first car was a tiny little old Triumph, in terrible condition. (It is extra easy to get a Triumph into terrible condition.) I did bodywork, getting the dents out; I reupholstered the driver’s seat. I had a lot of help. I suppose it’s possible I was actually the helper. But I don’t remember it that way. What I do remember was that the dealer took all my savings and then I had to sign a note promising to pay him another five hundred dollars. Back then? Serious money. Big bucks. It would take me forever.

  Then suddenly my brother Rob was the one with big bucks. Lots of money. He didn’t buy a fabulous car with it, which was what a normal person would do; he didn’t even buy computers, which was what a weird person would do. He just stared at the money, as if it bothered him. How could extra money ever bother a person?

  One day I was zipping him around in my Triumph, honking at everybody we knew and everybody we didn’t, and he said, “Marc!” in a high, scared voice. I stared at him. Rob was sick-looking. Like he was going to throw up. “Don’t get sick in my car,” I warned him. I really cared about the upholstery and the carpeting. After all, I had installed them.

  My brother gave me a blurry smile, a smile for things gone wrong, a smile for disaster. He put his hand on mine. We never touched. I don’t remember ever giving my brother a hug. His hand on mine was startling.

  Alice was appalled. She had no sister or brother to hug or not to hug. But she and Dad always greeted each other with hugs. She and Mom still cuddled.

  Never touched your brother?

  It seemed such a loss, such a terrible failure.

  Alice wept.

  Here, in this silent place—an apartment complex designed for people whose marriages died—her father really had died. He was gone. She had nothing left of him but the clothes in the closet and the journal on the disk.

  The apartment was full and thick with nobody. Being alone was crushing Alice.

  “What’s the matter, Robbie?” I asked. I never called him Robbie. Not since we were really little, five and six.

  “We’re doing stuff we shouldn’t be doing,” said my brother. I realized that he was thin, he’d lost weight, had developed a nervous habit of stroking his upper lip with his thumbnail.

  “Marc,” said my brother, “I’m the one doing it.”

  Rob and I were brought up with lots of talk about right and wrong. Our parents discussed it often. What other people did, what countries did, what presidents did, what we did. Right and wrong.

  I never paid attention.

  I mainly thought about cars and wrestling and boxing and baseball, though in the last year I’d been giving serious thought to girls and had actually started to spend money on something other than cars. Dates. I was beginning to wonder if maybe girls were better than cars.

  So far the balance was in favor of cars.

  “My after-school job is not helping Arren Company set up a payroll for a client,” said Rob. “My after-school job is getting classified information from those companies while Dick Arren keeps them confused and occupied,” said Rob.

  I burst out laughing. “Twin,” I said, “do you mean you are stealing?”

  “We don’t use the word steal,” said Rob. “Dick Arren calls it spying, which is less guilty-sounding.”

  “Spy is a cool word,” I agreed. “But I thought you were out at the hair dye place.” The biggest employer in our city made shampoo and hand lotion and hair dyes and tints. It was impossible to imagine spies hanging out among bottles of goo.

  “I am. Dick Arren is selling their formula to their competition. I’m the one getting the formulas.”

  At that moment, I was driving past the library. Two girls in Rob’s class walked out. Karen and Donna had long thin straight hair and long curvy bodies. When they giggled and poked one another, their ribbons of hair seemed to blend and fold, and I fell in love. I honked. Karen and Donna, who probably never noticed Rob or me, did notice my car.

  They grinned and waved.

  Rob did not see them.

  I decided on Karen. I was picturing Karen sitting where my brother was, while my brother was telling me about how when Dick Arren was working on payroll problems, they were problems Rob himself had set up. Dick Arren would joke with the secretaries and josh with the middle managers, while thin spotty-faced Rob would scour out the secrets which were hardly hidden at all but felt hidden to the company, because back th
en they didn’t know that anybody passing through the system could pick up data and carry it away.

  I drove on. Karen and Donna and the library vanished behind us.

  “Who do I tell, Marc?” said my brother. “The police? The only police I know are guys who set up roadblocks on prom night to catch drinkers. They’re not going to know from computers. Mom and Dad? The only parents I know are very heavily into right and wrong.”

  I could not work up the slightest interest in payrolls or hair dye. “Can’t you just tell the shampoo company?”

  “I’m a high school kid. I’ve never even met anybody there. Who would I talk to? Dick Arren smuggles me in and I pound away on the keyboard and I slip back out. Besides, Dick Arren is—well—he’s not a normal guy, Marc.”

  I grinned. “I guess not. Your normal computer spy expert would at least be stealing from the Pentagon.”

  “I’m serious, Marc. He’s not normal. There’s something really off about Dick Arren.”

  “Why don’t you just stop doing it then?” I said. I guess I was thinking of Rob’s difficulty as a car. Trade it in. Give it a fresh coat of paint. Then sell it.

  “Drop me off here” said Rob, and I dropped him off there.

  Where was it?

  I can tell you the corner. It was an intersection that doesn’t mean a thing to me. Didn’t then. Doesn’t now.

  Did my Twin, my only brother, just need to get out of the car? Was I failing him and he needed fresh air, and it wasn’t me?

  Or did he see something? Know something? Suddenly understand something? Did somebody live near there, or work near there, and he wanted to talk to them?

  I never found out.

  He got out, I yelled, “See you later,” and I drove away, with no thoughts in my mind but Karen and Donna. A McDonald’s had just been built near the library. McDonald’s wasn’t common yet, and you were still thrilled at going into a store and getting a paper bag filled with burgers and fries. I cruised past McDonald’s, but nobody I knew was there. I finally headed home.

  Rob never came home.

  He was killed that night.

  Run over by a car out at the reservoir.

  The reservoir was forbidden to the public. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence. Teenagers climbed over it, found the gravel road used by the water company, and walked in the dark to the water’s edge.

  But the night Rob died was a school night. Rob was the least likely person to go there. He never spent time out-of-doors; his life was in front of a screen. He had no car. The reservoir was miles from where I’d dropped him off.

  The padlock on the water company’s gate had been snapped. Half a mile down the lane, deep in the woods, Rob had been run over.

  I went there later. There was no way to get hit by a car in the place where Rob got hit by a car. The road is very narrow, very curved. A car couldn’t get up any speed. Its headlights would be visible through the bare trees. If Rob had been standing in the road, he’d have taken a step back and put a tree trunk between himself and the car.

  But Rob’s body was found lying flat on the road. Not as if he’d been knocked down and then run over, but as if he’d been lying down already, and gotten run over.

  Alcohol, said everybody, when they found Rob’s body. Kids drinking. Remember how the same thing happened last year? Same spot? Very similar accident. Boys will be boys, they drink, they get stupid.

  But there was no alcohol in Rob’s blood.

  Still, said everybody, it was kids, horsing around, not knowing when to stop.

  But if it was kids, it wasn’t kids from our high school, because we would have known. You always know that kind of stuff: who vandalized the school buses, who put firecrackers in the girls’ locker room. Because that’s why people do that stuff—so everybody else will know.

  Nobody at our high school ran over my brother’s body.

  I told everybody what Rob had said to me in the car. The stealing of secrets from clients’ data bases. “My brother died and it was no accident,” I said over and over. “It was murder. Had to be. Dick Arren killed Rob because he was going to tell.”

  Our parents were furious with me. Bad enough they had lost their beloved older son—now I was trashing his good name? Calling him a thief about to confess?

  Rob’s math teacher (nobody taught computers yet) was scornful. Rob was a child; he did not have the computer skills or the chemistry knowledge to be obtaining secret formulas. I had been watching too much television.

  The police were more courteous. They listened. They took notes. They questioned Mr. Arren. The man was shocked that I would say such things. And whatever he said to the police, it was good enough for them.

  Nobody believed me.

  Alice got up and took aspirin after all.

  Her father’s writing had gotten jumpy, changing tense and narrator, little short sentences and long run-on sentences. Her mind felt the same. Jumpy and changing and skidding on toward punctuation.

  Two brothers murdered?

  Could the two deaths be linked?

  Could the same person have done each one? That would mean that Dad was killed by Dick Arren.

  But had Uncle Rob been murdered? The police seemed to feel it was a terrible teenager accident, not a planned murder.

  Besides…shampoo formula? It didn’t seem important enough. Would you kill a boy because he was going to talk about shampoo formula?

  The aloneness of the condo filled Alice, until her head swelled and her ears popped. She was thick with aloneness.

  Dick Arren was a young man. People in computers were always young then. He was only in his twenties. Exactly ten years older than I am. He’d be forty-nine now. He was an attractive man, with fine blue eyes and fine thin features. There was something both elegant and hard about him.

  He drove a black Porsche. I was awestruck by that Porsche. A car to die for, I thought.

  But the police told me that it was not the car that killed Rob, and I had to believe that. I said to the police: A person can own two cars. He can rent a car, borrow a car, steal a car. It was Dick Arren, I know it was!

  Cool off, son, said the police.

  After school, after the funeral, I drove to the offices where Dick Arren’s Porsche was parked, and when he left work, I followed him, he in his Porsche and me in my Triumph. He’d stop at a red light and I’d pull up next to him, driving right up on the sidewalk if I had to, and I’d yell, “I know what you did, and I’m going to prove it!”

  Arren grinned, and took off way faster than I could, and we were in a weird sick drag race that I could only lose.

  He should have been afraid of me. Even at sixteen, I was bigger than Dick Arren. I was bigger than most people. But he was not afraid. A man who has killed another man knows he can do something extraordinary: He can take a life.

  But he was not afraid of me. He was enjoying himself. He let me catch him. This time I pulled up next to Arren and he waved a wooden pencil—a yellow Ticonderoga pencil—out of his window and twirled it baton-style in his fingers. Then, smiling—a wide delighted ultrahappy smile; the smile, indeed, of a man who was not normal—he snapped the pencil in half. The pieces dropped onto the pavement between us. He giggled. “That’s your brother, kid,” he said. “Garbage in the road.” He gunned the Porsche and left me behind.

  I wanted to grab Dick Arren by the hair and jerk his head back, breaking his neck. The sound of his spine cracking would be music to my ears.

  But I could not chase him once he decided to use that Porsche the way it was designed to be driven, and I could not find him again, not at home, not at his office, not anywhere, so I went to the police.

  But of course Dick Arren denied to the police and my parents that he had said any such thing. He told my parents sympathetically that he would be happy to help pay for psychiatric help for me. My parents liked him. They thought he was a fine fellow. They didn’t think much of me, harassing and threatening an innocent man.

  And soon after this, t
here was nobody to follow. The company was gone. The office was empty. The house was empty. The garage was empty. The phone was disconnected.

  Arren had bailed out.

  I went to the police again, and they said, “He can run a computer business from anywhere. Why should he stay here and put up with you?”

  My parents didn’t live long after that. My dad had a heart attack when I was twenty and didn’t recover. Mom was lonely, with me at college and no husband at home. I’ve always thought she mentally lay down in the road, like the son she missed so badly, and let her physical problems run over her.

  I was an orphan at twenty-two, and there was no big brother to be Twins with. I found a job with a computer company myself and began to cast my computer net to find Dick Arren. I’d make him lie down in the road.

  I embarked on a newspaper search, which covered many cities and many years. I was going to find Dick Arren.

  And then something happened to change my life utterly and forever. I met a beautiful wonderful girl named Chrissie.

  Chrissie made me a better person. Together we created a perfect daughter. That baby was the love of my life. I would come home from work laughing, just thinking how my baby Alice would throw herself on top of me, shouting, “Daddy!” I never knew what a great word that was—Daddy!—until I heard it from my own child.