Authors: Michael Marshall
I didn’t say anything, and her face turned serious. “Sorry—did I just touch a nerve?”
“It’s fine. Really.”
“Okay. Just, you look as if you bit into a lemon. And not in a good way.”
“Long day,” I said, and walked away to my car.
I
drove home slowly, taking the time to run a detailed damage appraisal in my head.
The Amazon incident was done and dusted, and might even pay out, if Steph rolled with her response to my SMS of the morning. The e-mail didn’t seem to have materially offended anyone, had even hit the right note with Tony Thompson. It could be that this intrusion into my life might actually lead to improvements.
Conclusion:
minimal negative impact sustained
.
That didn’t mean it was okay.
By the time I pulled into the driveway, I had my ducks in a row. Step one, check for weirdness on my laptop. If I found some, throw it off. If I drew a blank, then I had to look into someone stealing stuff out of the air. I’d got the sense from Kevin the Geek that this was going to be a lot harder, but hoped the promised document would point me in the right direction. Either way, I could reset the minimal number of passwords in my life, keep a low online profile for a few days, and see if that killed the problem.
I parked and got out, full of purpose. As I was locking the car I heard the house door opening, and looked round to see Steph storming down the path.
“You okay?” I asked.
She slapped me hard across the face.
I
don’t know if you’ve ever been slapped by your wife, but it’s not a great experience. It hurts, for a start, especially when delivered by a woman who plays her tennis old school, with a fiercely single-handed grip.
“You
loser,
” she said. It wasn’t a shout. It was throttled way down, rasping deep in her throat.
“Steph,” I stammered. “What the
hell
?”
“Inside. Now.”
She turned on her heel and marched back up the path. I followed quickly, casting a glance down the drive to see if any of the neighbors happened to be in view. I couldn’t see any, though that didn’t mean there wasn’t someone in one of the three houses visible from our yard, standing beyond a window that had just turned into a screen featuring an intriguing new TV show. Shocked and nonplussed though I was, I still found a second to worry about whether the incident had been witnessed by others. That was part of it. But I realized I was also wondering if someone might be watching us.
Or watching me.
S
teph turned back to face me the moment I’d shut the front door. I’d had time to wonder whether she’d received the joke e-mail—I couldn’t recall whether she’d been on the list or not—and if this was a weirdly extreme reaction. Steph’s not a prude or too obsessed with being politically correct, but that was the only thing I could think of. Her face destroyed whatever minimal credibility the theory/hope had. She was furious, but there was something else in her eyes. They weren’t hard enough for it to be anger alone. There was the softness of hurt in there, too.
“Honey,” I said, reaching for the voice I used with clients when a deal had gone belly-up and the world needed making right. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“The sad thing is,” she said, her voice still at the reined-back snarl that I found more worrying than shouting, “I’m actually slightly relieved. In a bizarre way. I’d thought there might actually be something going on between you two. Okay, I didn’t
think
it, but the possibility had entered my mind.”
“Between who?”
“Oh
shut up
. You really think that’s going to play now? Don’t insult me.”
“Steph,” I said, disconcerted at how hard my heart was beating, “I have not the slightest clue what you’re talking about. Really.”
She started to say something, and this
would
have been a shout, but the words collided in her mouth and canceled each other out. Instead, she shook her head and marched off in the direction of the den. I followed.
The den, or family room (if you’ve got a family), is on the other side of the kitchen, a continuation from its open-plan cooking/eating area and sharing its view out onto the pool area. As I entered I saw that both of our laptops were lying open on the L-shaped sofa.
I stopped in my tracks. “What are you doing with my computer?”
“What
you
said you’d do two weeks ago,” Steph snapped. “And
again
a couple of nights ago. Pulling off the pictures from Helen’s birthday party. Remember?”
I started to protest, but I had nowhere to go with denial or self-righteousness. I had said I’d do those things, and it was also long-established practice for us to access each other’s computers as and when required. Why not? Neither of us had anything to hide. But it felt like an intrusion nonetheless, especially today.
I watched as Steph stormed over to my machine and banged a key. This caused the blank screen to blink back into life. Steph tried to say something, but once more it died in her mouth. She gestured at the screen instead.
I bent over the back of the sofa and looked. At first I couldn’t make out what I was seeing. A picture of some kind, but oddly framed: a skewed, multicolored oblong surrounded by near black, a short series of numbers in orange down at the bottom right.
Then it snapped into sense, and I realized I was looking at a photograph taken at night, through a window. The colored area showed the inside of someone’s house. A small, blurry blue-gray section was presumably a television screen. A portion of a blood-red sofa—which is what broke my first half-assumption, which was that the picture had been taken through one of
our
windows, of our den. Our sofa is pale blue.
The other thing that had broken it was the figure visible a third of the way along from the right side of the window. Also blurry, but flesh-toned, apart from a black bra. The hair that hung down almost as far as its horizontal line was a very dark brown.
“What the hell is this?”
“Bill, please. Spare me.”
I reached out and hit the cursor key. This brought up another picture, which was similar but in better focus. The edges of the objects within it were still fuzzy, suggesting that the photograph had been taken twenty or thirty yards from the window, using some kind of zoom. It was, however, sharp enough to tell both that the woman had removed her bra, and that she was Karren White.
There were twelve photographs. In all but four, the identity of the woman was clear. The others caught her from behind or at a nonrevealing angle, before and after she had removed her clothes and put on a terrycloth robe. They began and ended what was evidently a sequence taken from some vantage point near Karren’s apartment. I knew the building, near the bay at the north end of Sarasota, having sold an apartment there several years before.
“I have no idea how these got on my laptop,” I said.
“Yeah, right. I mean, for god’s
sake
. How lame do you have to be to do this? Never
mind
the lying.”
“Lying?” I said, confused.
“Good lord. You don’t even realize how clearly you’ve screwed up, do you?”
She jabbed her finger at the screen, where the last of the sequence of pictures—a relatively innocuous one, showing Karren in the process of leaving the room via a door—was still in view. I saw that Steph was indicating the sequence of numbers in the corner.
09•14•2011
A date, of course. The fourteenth of September. Yesterday. So the lie had been . . .
“
Steph, I’ve got to see a client,
” Steph snarled, seeing the penny had dropped. “
Steph, it’s so cool, I’ll get the commission. Oh no, honey—Karren won’t be there.
And of course, she actually wasn’t—except via what you could see through your putrid lens.”
“Steph,” I said. I was mirroring how she’d just spoken, but couldn’t help it. I was starting to get angry, but defensively assuming the offensive. “I don’t even
have
a zoom lens. I’ve got a three-hundred-dollar compact. You know that. You bought it for me.”
“Sure, I bought
that
one,” she sneered. “But who knows what other gadgets you’ve picked up in the meantime? From Amazon, maybe? Your favorite online retailer, from what I gather.”
Having done the head work over the book earlier in the day, I knew the corner I was now in. I could suggest she search the house, and she could choose to believe I’d stowed the camera elsewhere. I could demand she look through the last year’s credit card statements: she could laugh in my face and ask me how hard it was to get a couple hundred bucks out of an ATM and take a quick drive to the Bradenton Outlet Mall. Every time I set up one of these barriers for her to knock down, it would just make me look more and more as if I was not only lying, but doing it with malice and forethought. The harder I tried and the better I argued, the more it would look like I had my story straight, and that would just make it worse.
And anyway, the camera wasn’t the point.
I said all this. Steph agreed. She agreed all too readily. She agreed that the
real
point was that I had snuck around to Karren White’s apartment—on the pretense of being out at a meeting that (surprise, surprise) hadn’t materialized and thus
couldn’t be checked
. The
real
point, she was happy to see that I’d grasped, was not only was I obsessed with my coworker, but that I was enough of a loser to take stealth pictures of her naked, instead of having an affair like any normal person.
“Hold on,” I said. “Whoa. I’m
not
obsessed with Karren. What are you talking about?”
“No? So how come you’re always mentioning her?”
“
What?
” I couldn’t help being distracted by each untruth as it arrived. “Of course she crops up—we work in the same office. I know the names of everybody
you
work with at the magazine. I know the names of their
children
. Karren’s an operator, you know that. I only bring her up to say how I’m trying to get around her, to get
my
thing going, to build
my
rep.”
I took a step toward her. She stepped back, making a sound like a can of soda being opened.
“Don’t even try it,” she said.
“Steph, listen. Something else happened today. An e-mail.”
“You
e-mailed
her?”
“Just
listen
. When I got back from returning that book to Amazon, Janine was sitting in the office laughing at some joke she thought I’d sent.”
“Yeah, you sent it to me, too. It wasn’t funny.”
“That’s just it—I
didn’t send it
.”
“What?” Steph looked angry at being derailed.
“I didn’t send it. To you or Janine or anyone. Somebody else did, using my e-mail account. The reason I was late home this evening—before you even
start
speculating about that—is because I was talking to the IT guy from Shore, trying to work out what happened, how the e-mail got sent.”
She snorted. “Why would I believe that?”
I yanked out my phone. “His number’s top of the outgoing call list. Call him right now, Steph. Ask him if we just sat and had ice cream outside the parlor on the Circle. Ask him if he had a chocolate sugar cone. Or do you think I’ve gone so far into the heart of darkness that I’d recruit some random patsy to lie about my whereabouts?”
She didn’t say anything. The expression on her face remained lodged in a mixture of anger, hurt, and disgust.
“Wait one second,” I said, and sent up a prayer to whatever tiny god looks after Realtors who are in serious trouble not of their own making. I leaned over the laptop and fired up my e-mail app. Five e-mails came straight in. A couple of positivity newsletters, two from clients . . . and one from Kevin the Geek. Thank god.
I opened the e-mail. “Look.”
Reluctantly, Steph bent forward and read what was on the screen. A reference to the meeting I’d just described, a page of complex instructions on how to check for a keystroke checker, and an introduction to Wifi Spying 101.
She wouldn’t look at me. “So what does that prove?”
“Someone’s messing with my e-mail,” I said. “They ordered a book from Amazon in my name and this morning sent out a dumb, racist joke.”
“Even if this is true, how does it have
any
bearing on you taking pictures of Karren?”
I took a deep breath, then let it out. She was right, in fact. It didn’t. With the photographs, we were into new and uncharted territory.
Which we then set about exploring, at length.