[To Die For 01] - A View to Die For (2012) (20 page)

Mother insisted on coming along to supervise the cleanup. Unlike the day before, there was no getting her out of our hair. She wanted to insure that nothing important was thrown out. “I really think I should go through those trash bags you boys put in the truck yesterday,” she said to me when we pulled up to her house. Kevin and Taylor were waiting for us when we got to Mother’s house. Kevin drove Taylor’s truck, and my mother and Fred rode with me in my rental. It would have been a lot easier for all of us to go in Taylor’s truck, but Mother refused to ride in it again.

Mother’s neighbor must have been watching from her window. She was out her door and coming toward us before I had a chance to help my mother out of the rental. She was wearing brand-new painter’s overalls with a matching painter’s cap. “Good afternoon, Hazel,” she said to my mother. “I felt so bad about not helping everyone yesterday, but I just didn’t have any work clothes. Have you ever tried to find the right clothes in this town? I’ll tell you, it took me all morning to chase these down,” she said, proudly giving us a mini-fashion show.

“I’ll let you two catch-up,” I cut in. “I better get in there and make sure the boys don’t throw out anything important. Once more, I left my mother to deal with her friend.

Our first task was to try and save my grandmother’s buffet. It was the only piece of furniture left in the house. Everything else had already been put in Taylor’s truck, or if they hadn’t been damaged too badly, put in the garage, until we could patch and paint the walls before moving them back into the house.

“It looks like firewood to me,” Kevin said while standing over the antique.

“Nothing a little Elmer’s glue can’t fix. Take a look at these dovetails,” I said and picked up one of the pieces. “This drawer just came apart. It’s not really broken. The glue dried up eons ago.”

“He’s right, Kev,” Taylor said. He had been checking out the oak frame that had been tossed on its back by the vandals. “We learned how to make those joints in shop class. It’s not like the mass-produced junk they make today. I don’t see a single nail or staple anywhere.”

Before I could say anything else, Fred started to bark. We all turned toward the front door to see my sister and Amy coming in the house. Mother was still talking to Mrs. Whitehead at the truck.

Amy bent down to pet Fred on the head. “Have you forgotten me already, Freddie?” she asked. She had her hair in a ponytail and dressed in some worn-out cutoff-jeans. Her shirt must have come from Taylor’s closet. When she stood up from petting Fred, I could see a small diamond stud in her navel. She gave me an impish smile and said, “Tell me what I can do to help, Captain.” I fell in love all over again.

“Don’t you have to work today?” I asked.

“I called in sick,” she said with a huge grin. “When the cats away, the mice will play.”

I was about to say
what
, and then realized she was referring to Hal. “Well, Mrs. Whitehead is all dressed to paint. How about the women start in the kitchen? There’s a couple of gallons of semi-gloss in the garage that my father must have had left over from the last time he painted. The boys and I should have these walls patched and spackled by the time you finish in there.”

Amy pretended to pout. “Please, Sir, can’t I help you instead? I promise I won’t be a bother, and you could teach me how to patch drywall.” She didn’t have to ask twice. We spent the rest of the afternoon working together while Megan kept the boys busy painting the kitchen. Luckily, Mother and her friend found the house too hot, and they spent the day next door in the comfort of Mrs. Whitehead’s air conditioning.

Amy turned out to be a great apprentice. She was putting tape and mud on the walls faster than I could patch holes in the wall with new drywall; I never was one who could talk and work quickly at the same time. It seemed she had a thousand questions. She wanted to know all about my cabin back in Colorado and couldn’t believe it when I told her I had built it myself. Then she asked about my novel and how it was coming along. It seems we spent more time talking than working. I was almost wishing the vandals had done more damage, for we finished the job way too soon.

It was another week before we completed repairing and painting the house. Because of her work, Amy didn’t return after the first day. Then Hal cut his business trip short, and he didn’t like her out of his sight. Mrs. Whitehead turned out to be a great help. She and my mother spent almost the entire time at her air conditioned house and out of our hair. Megan spent her time as our gofer, and Fred stayed out on the back porch, panting when he wasn’t sleeping on the job.

We never did find any coins in the trash Mother made us sort through; going through all that junk took almost as long as sanding and staining the floors. I for one was relieved that Kevin was wrong. It would have raised far too many questions of what the coins were doing in my father’s house in the first place. I was sure Hal had taken them back after Bennet killed Mike, and I didn’t need to complicate that theory by having the coins show up at my parent’s house.

Hal started using his computer the first day of his return. My spyware program caught his email ID and password on his company’s network the minute he logged into their site. I was smart enough not to try to connect to his work email, for that would have been pure stupidity. Fortune five-hundred companies watched everything their employees did – especially from remote locations. Besides, I didn’t think Hal was dumb enough to send email to Bennet through his work account. He had to be using an online email service that my spyware had yet to detect. Then, I got lucky the same day we finished with my mother’s house.

It was well after everyone had gone to bed. Even Fred was asleep at my feet. I was on my laptop, at the kitchen table with a now-stale pot of coffee, when I got the alert from my spyware. I had it set to send me a message whenever it collected anything with the keyword of ‘mail.’ I should have been sleeping after working all day on the house, but there was just too much on my mind. It had been weeks since I had seen any kind of income – the last being an electronic deposit of two hundred dollars for an article I had written over a year ago. That deposit showed up when I logged into my bank account. I was down to less than a thousand dollars, so I needed to do something soon. I was in the middle of sending out some queries for an article I had written before leaving home when the computer beeped with the alert from my spyware. The world would have to wait for my article on ‘How to fix a Roof Without Breaking the Bank or Your Neck.’

Hal was using a Yahoo account to do his dirty work. My little program sent me his username and password the minute he logged off. It was designed to collect web addresses, and anything he typed into his web-browser by storing the data in a cookie. The cookie was deleted once the information was sent to me. The program was far from perfect; any serious security measures would have either discovered it or disallowed the cookie, but I had made sure those precautions were turned off when I installed my program. I was so engrossed in my results, I didn’t hear my sister come up behind me.

“What are you doing, Porky?” Megan must have seen the lights on in the kitchen and come down to see who was up.

I nearly had a heart-attack. “My god, you scared the living shit out of me,” I said, clutching my chest.

Megan pulled up a kitchen chair and sat next to me, looking at the computer screen. “Sorry. It must be pretty interesting for you not to notice me. What is it? A porn site?”

“Funny. You should go on American Idol.” She wasn’t that far from the truth, though. I had the cookie data open and most of the sites Hal visited were porn. Then I opened up a web-browser and logged into his Yahoo account.

She smiled then squinted at the text on the screen. “You got into Hal’s private email. You really are a genius.”

“You won’t think that if I get caught. I’m committing a federal offense for which I could spend the next twenty years in Leavenworth,” I answered.

“At least we will be able to visit you then,” she said. “We’re only a hundred miles from there.”

“Great. Don’t forget to bring a cake with a file in it.”

“Can’t they trace it back to you somehow?”

“You would be the one they caught. I’m sure you’d never pass the metal detector.”

She quit looking at the computer and slapped me on the top of my head. “Don’t be a smartass, Porky. You know I meant whatever it is you put on Hal’s computer.”

I feigned injury by grabbing for the spot she hit me. “Sorry. A sour look would have sufficed,” I said with a fake frown. “You didn’t have to give me a concussion.”

She gave me a look used by a parent talking to a misbehaving child. “Well. Can they?”

“Of course they can,” I answered, “If they wanted to. But I’m not stealing from him. As long as they don’t suspect any foul play, they have no reason to do an IP trace. So keep this between us, or I’ll have to shoot you and anyone you tell.”

“Yeah, right.” She laughed and leaned in closer to the computer screen. “Is that Taylor’s truck?” I had searched for messages with the keyword of ‘truck.’ She had seen the subject header almost as soon as the results came back.

Her face was so close to the screen, I had a hard time seeing past her. “Well, let’s find out.” I said and clicked on the message. It was from a body shop owner in San Diego telling Hal to buy a 1985 F150 that was being auctioned off in Warrensburg. He was instructed to buy the truck and don’t touch anything until it was time. “I hate to say ‘I told you so,’ but it does confirm my theory.”

Megan got up and headed toward the kitchen. “Most of your theory,” she said while rinsing out the coffee pot, “I don’t see where it implicates Bennet.”

I sent the email to Meg’s printer and leaned back in my chair with my hands behind my head, watching her make the coffee. “Don’t make any for me; that last pot I made was terrible.”

“Did you use the bottled water?”

“No. Why? Should I?”

“Of course, Silly. Our tap water tastes like it’s from the septic. Mike always said he thought our well must be getting lake water, but when we had it tested, they told us it was the limestone that made it taste so bad.”

I watched as she reached under the counter and came back with a gallon jug of water. “Maybe that’s what killed Mike,” I said and went back to my email search. This time I tried searching for born2fish. “Oh shit!” I yelled.

She put the pot back down and looked at me. “What happened?”

“Someone cut me off,” I answered. “I can’t believe they caught me so soon.”

I immediately tried logging back in, thinking it was a connection issue with the internet. My password was denied. “Someone changed the password already.” I began to wonder what prison food tasted like.

I could hardly sleep the rest of the night for fear of the internet police knocking on our door. What the hell had I been thinking? My career as a software engineer would be over even if I didn’t go to jail. Of course, I knew the internet police were as likely to come crashing in as the library police. They didn’t exist. But this was an offense the FBI would pursue if someone reported it. Forget trying to save Megan’s house, I thought. I had to save my own butt now. I had to get my hands on Hal’s computer and remove all evidence of my snooping.

Fred didn’t lose any sleep over my predicament, and he made sure I couldn’t sleep-in the next morning. He woke me at the break of dawn, so I would let him out to water the trees. I was still making coffee when Megan joined me in the kitchen. “Don’t you ever sleep?” she asked.

“There will be plenty of time for that in Leavenworth,” I answered.

“Why don’t you sit down? I’ll finish this.” She took the coffee pot from me and tried to smile. “Do you really think it’s that serious?”

“Maybe. At first I thought Hal had simply changed his password, but my spyware hasn’t sent anymore alerts. Hal, or someone at his office, must have found my program and disabled or deleted it.”

Megan finished with the coffee pot and pressed the on button. Then she pulled down one of her copper-bottom skillets hanging above the cook-top. “I don’t get it. If it’s been deleted, why are you so upset?”

“Nothing to worry about if it was Hal,” I said. “He can’t turn me in without exposing himself to all the porn he has been downloading. However, if it was a remote administrator from his workplace, I need to get the first plane to Mexico.”

She absentmindedly inspected the skillet. It seemed to be easier than looking at me. “I’m sorry I got you into this, Jake. I didn’t know.” I thought she was going to cry.

“Hey, it’s not that bad. I just need to find a way to get my hands on that computer and remove all the traces of my snooping.”

She put the pan on the kitchen counter and sat down at the table. “How do you do that without being caught again?” she asked, while rubbing Fred’s ears. He had been lying under the table between our chairs, ignoring us until Megan had reached for the skillet. I could tell he was disappointed when she returned to the table without breakfast, but the ear-rub must have helped. He was smiling like a dolphin being fed a fresh mackerel until he heard voices coming from the upper-level.

“The answer to that problem, Sister Dear, is just getting up. Better make more of whatever you were planning for breakfast.”

“What’s for breakfast, Mom?” Kevin asked. I smiled when Fred went over to Taylor. I now knew how to get back into Hal’s computer.

“I didn’t think you boys would ever get up,” I said after they helped themselves to the last of the energy drinks from the refrigerator and sat down at the table. “We all need to be out of here before noon.”

“What’s up, Uncle Martin?” Kevin asked.

“The realtor wants to do a showing today. Your mom and I are going to go see your grandmother until we can get back into the house.” I amazed myself at my new lie. “Why don’t you guys spend the day at Taylor’s. You can bring me your Dad’s computer, Taylor. I’ve got an update I need to install for him.”

Megan put her pan on the stove and looked over at us. For a moment, I thought she was going to expose my lie. Then her expression turned from bewilderment to insight.