Revealed (12 page)

“Better see what she wants,” my dad said. It sounded just enough like an order that I got to my feet. Trying to talk to my dad if he doesn't want to talk is a lost cause. “We'll eat when your mom gets home,” he called after our retreating backs. A second later I heard him switch on NPR.

“Cornelia, do you ever wonder about Dad's job?” I asked as we walked through the dining room.

“He's a consultant for Market Partners Consolidated International. They specialize in coordinating consolidations for international companies that—”

God, she sounded like one of the brochures he sometimes left lying around. “I know what he
does
,” I said, impatient. “Officially. I'm just wondering if . . . if he does something else, too.”

“Yes,” said Cornelia.

“Yes?” I snapped my head around to stare at her. “Yes he does something else?”

Cornelia's voice was calm. “Yes, I wonder about it, too.”

“Do you—”

She cut me off. “What I'm about to show you is of a time-sensitive nature. Do you want to see it or not?”

Time-sensitive nature sounded serious. Of course, so was the possibility of our dad's having some kind of secret life. “What is it?”

“I want to talk to you about Thornhill's computer.”

Thornhill's computer. Could she get me access to his files? Because if she could, maybe my screwup with Nia and Callie didn't have to be permanent. Maybe if I went to them with the infamous list, they'd forgive me for losing Amanda's box. Maybe everything between us would be the way it was before I basically handed Heidi Bragg all of Amanda's most precious secrets.

“What? What about Thornhill's computer? Did you find a way to get onto it?” Without realizing what I was doing, I practically lunged at her.

Something about my hysteria (or perhaps it was my rabid tone of voice) made her stare at me intently with those assessing eyes of hers. She held her hand up to indicate I should take a step back toward something resembling sanity.

I did.

“Are you seriously going to do something to his Facebook account?”

“What?” I remembered our first conversation about it. “No. Cornelia, I was joking. I thought you knew that.”

“Why would I know that?”

Sometimes Cornelia could be so literal it drove me crazy. “Cornelia, we're in the middle of a major crisis. Our friend is missing. Mr. Thornhill is in a coma and he may have been kidnapped. Do you really think I would take time out to play a practical joke on a man who's lying somewhere in a hospital bed
unconscious
?”

Cornelia shrugged. “Well, why did you take time out to joke with me?”

“Cornelia!” I yanked on my hair to keep from screaming.

She was unmoved by my dramatic display of frustration. “We don't really have time for you to freak out.” She glanced at her watch. “Mom's going to be home soon.” I knew what she meant—my dad's not exactly a follow-your-kids-around-and-see-what-they're-doing kind of parent, but as soon as my mom gets home from work she always comes to find us and say hello and see how our homework is going, etc.

In short, Dad's being around wasn't a problem, but if we had any . . . questionable activities, we definitely wanted to engage in them while our mother was safely out of the house.

Cornelia turned and continued on toward the den. Just seeing the filing cabinet where I'd fruitlessly searched for clues made me embarrassed.

She dropped into the rolling desk chair and gestured for me to sit on the sofa. Behind her, the screen saver showed insanely bright tropical fish swimming happy and oblivious through a digital salty paradise.

“What do you know about unilateral computer networks?” she asked.

“Um, nothing?” I offered.

Cornelia paused for a second, like a person translating a speech in her head from one language to another. Then she began to talk. “Okay, with most computer networks, information can flow in both directions.” Cornelia made her hands into fists and held them shoulder-width apart. “I can enter information on this computer”—she wiggled her right fist— “and retrieve it on this one”—she wiggled her left fist. “Or I can enter information on
this
computer”—she wiggled her left fist—“and retrieve it on
this
one”—she wiggled her right one.

“I'm actually following this.” I settled into a comfortable position. One of the coolest things about Cornelia is how she can make you think you understand how computers work.

“A unilateral computer network is different,” Cornelia continued after a brief nod to acknowledge my announcement that I am not completely dim-witted. “In a unilateral computer network, information can only travel one way.”

“Uni!” I shouted. “One.”

She ignored my enthusiasm. “Yes, uni indicates a single direction, and a unilateral network is a basic way of protecting a central database that people will be accessing from remote locations.”

Her last sentence made me slightly less confident than I had been a moment ago. “Okay, you're
kind of
losing me now.”

Sighing, Cornelia made her explanation even simpler. “Say you're a business and you want your employees to be able to work at home and send their work to a central computer in the building to be printed. But you
don't
want your competition to be able to hack into your mainframe and download your new secret recipe for the world's greatest chocolate chip cookie.” Again, she held her fists apart. “Employee X goes home, types up his PowerPoint presentation
here
, emails it to the design people
here
to be made into booklets for tomorrow's meeting.” She moved one of her fists on each “here.” “But when Competitor Y wants to sneak into your network and get the cookie recipe, he can't do it because information can only
enter
the system, not leave it.”

“Got it.”

“Some unilateral networks go the other way. You might want your employees to be able to take information from a central network without being able to download anything
to
that network, like a virus. Either way, a unilateral system is the first line of defense in a lot of computer networks. Even the CIA and NSA start by creating unilateral systems and build from there.”

“Wait, you know about the CIA's and NSA's computer systems?”

Cornelia stared at me but didn't say anything.

“Sorry,” I said finally, and she continued.

“Endeavor has a unilateral computer network.”

Incredibly enough, I'd gotten so caught up in Cornelia's explanation of unilateral computer networks that I'd actually forgotten there was a point. When she said the word
Endeavor
, however, it all came rushing back at me.

“Okay,” I said, my voice as even as I could make it.

“That means that teachers can enter grades into the system from home, but they couldn't download a kid's permanent record, for instance.”

“Okay,” I repeated.

“There's one exception.”

I felt my throat grow dry. Instead of trying to speak, I just nodded.

“One user has switched the direction of the unilateral system.”

I licked my lips with my suddenly parched tongue. “You're saying there's one computer that can take information
out
of Endeavor's central computer.”

“And that Endeavor's central computer cannot access,” she added, nodding.

“And that computer belongs to—” I began.

“Mr. Thornhill,” we finished together.

There was a pause as we allowed what she'd discovered to sink in.

“It's actually not that complicated, what he did,” Cornelia went on. “He basically replaced, or I should say supplemented, the open unilateral system of the network with a closed, reverse unilateral system between his computer and the school's mainframe.” My head was spinning so fast I missed some of what she said. Something about his computer being an unspecified “hub” with the ability to engage in “data interfacing” with a computer from a remote location.

“The point,” she finished, either because she was done or because she could tell she'd lost me a few miles back, “is that the school recognizes something different about Mr. Thornhill's computer and will release information to it.”

“So you're saying if we can get Mr. Thornhill's laptop, we can get the data he was downloading.” For the first time ever, I was a little disappointed in Cornelia. I mean, you didn't have to be a computer genius to know that if we
had
Thornhill's computer we could have the
information
on it.

“I'm saying the school computer will release information to any computer it thinks is Mr. Thornhill's,” Cornelia corrected, and though it took me a second to realize what she was saying, when I finally did, I literally leaped to my feet.

“So if the school's mainframe thought, say, this”—I pointed at the computer on the desk behind Cornelia— “was Thornhill's computer . . .”

“Then it would send or resend to it any documents it was asked to produce.” And with that, Cornelia spun around and hit a button on the keyboard.

An instant later, I was looking at a familiar computer screen, one I had seen less than a week earlier in the vice principal's office.

One I had thought I would never be able to see again.

“There's a catch,” Cornelia said from the chair beside me.

Michael Zalin
. . . the name meant nothing to me.
Zoe Costas
. . . definitely a kid in our grade.
Samara Cole
. . . no idea. The list wasn't alphabetical, and I just skimmed it hoping for a familiar name.
Beatrice Rossiter
was there.
Frieda Levinson
. Aha. Some of the names had little paper clip icons next to them; some didn't. I scrolled down the page. There I was:
Henry Bennett
. As I went to click on the icon, Cornelia touched the back of my hand to get my attention.

“I said, there's a catch,” and her tone made it clear she wanted a hundred percent of my attention.

“Sorry. I'm listening.” I made myself turn away from the screen and meet her level gaze.

“The central computer at Endeavor thinks this”—she pointed at the screen in front of us— “is Thornhill's computer.”

“Right, I got it.” In spite of my attempts to squash it, my impatience was evident.

“So if Thornhill's actual computer tries to upload any information from the system, the system will know something is wrong.”

I felt a sudden chill. “And what will the system do, exactly, when it realizes something is wrong?”

Cornelia shrugged as casually as if I'd just asked her if she thought it might rain. “I have no idea.”

“What do you mean, you have no idea?”

“I mean I have no idea. It depends on the security he put in place. Maybe he's set it up so he can simultaneously log on from two computers.”

“Oh,” I said, relieved. “Cool.”

My relief was short-lived.

“Or maybe,” she offered, “as soon as his computer logs on the system will send a virus to
both
‘Thornhill' computers and destroy them.”

I thought of all the places Thornhill's computer could be. His office, possibly. The police station. With Dr. Joy. Or Frieda's mysterious “
they.”

“It gets more complicated,” Cornelia continued.

“I'm so wishing we weren't having this conversation.”

“It's possible that the connection between Thornhill's system and the Endeavor system has a GPS component.”

I was completely confused. “GPS? You mean the thing in Mom's car that she's always saying gives bad directions?”

“I mean that thing in Mom's car that tells you where you are.”

“O-kaaay,” I said slowly. “So that would mean . . . ?”

“That would mean if someone knows about the system Thornhill set up, or if someone found
out
about the system, that person could track Thornhill's computer using GPS.”

I thought about what Cornelia was saying, then pointed at our mother's computer. “That person would be able to track this computer.”

“Right,” said Cornelia.

“That person would be able to find the physical location of this computer.”

“Right,” Cornelia repeated.

“That person—” I began, but this time she cut me off.

“I think,” she said, “that you should find what you're looking for as quickly as possible and then shut down the computer.”

“Once I do that, will we be able to get back on?”

Cornelia shrugged. “We might. Like I said, it depends on the security Thornhill set up.”

“So you're saying I need to find what I'm looking for fast and I might never be able to access this information again,” I summarized.

“That,” said Cornelia, standing up, “is exactly what I'm saying.”

In dreams, I'm sometimes trying to dial a phone or unlock a door but my hands are shaking so badly I can't hit the right numbers or I keep dropping my key ring before I can get the key in the lock. Sitting at my mother's computer and trying to make my way around Thornhill's files as quickly as possible, I felt like I was in one of those dreams. I went to hit the paper clip icon next to my name and ended up hitting an entry two names down: Sol Rosa. The screen immediately filled with photos of someone I'd never met, but when I went to go back, I didn't move the curser up high enough and I ended up opening one of the folders in Sol Rosa's file. Suddenly I was looking at a scan of a third-grade transcript, where I learned Sol “has done impressive work mastering cursive.” I clicked back, found my name again, and hit the right paper clip this time.

But what I found was almost as bewildering as what I'd left. At least a dozen photos of me appeared on the screen. The first was from a road trip my parents and I had taken cross-country the summer before Cornelia was born (my mom was pregnant with her at the time). I was standing between them in front of a sign that said elevation 12,671 feet. In the background were mountaintops so high they disappeared into the mist. I was giving the photographer a thumbs-up, and both my parents were smiling for the camera. I had no recollection of the trip and no idea where we were at the moment the photo was snapped.

In the next picture, I was with my dad and we were sitting in a boat, fishing. Neither of us was looking at the camera; it was like we didn't even realize we were being photographed. I looked at the next photo: a shot of me breaking a ribbon at a race I'd run in seventh grade—an Orion Township 10K—something I'd entered before I joined the track team in eighth grade.

My heart pounded in my chest. What the hell was going on? Why did Thornhill have all these pictures of me? It was almost like . . . had he been
following
me for some reason?

I clicked away from the screen with the photos to a document called L-C33159, and there was a list of addresses, places my family had lived. It was brief—both of our houses in Philly followed by our address in Orion. I clicked to a new file and found myself staring at the Bennett family tree.

There were tons of other documents. Report cards, medical records, IQ tests. Even vision and hearing tests that I had no memory of taking. I clicked back to the main list and clicked on Cornelia. Again there were the photos, the addresses, the school records. Seeing so much intimate information about my family members was starting to make me sick. Something dripped onto the keyboard, and I realized I was sweating. Wiping at my forehead with the back of my hand, I clicked away from Cornelia and onto a stranger, Maude Cooper. Maude was a short, older woman, maybe fifty. There was a photo of her standing in front of a house with a guy who might have been her husband. Maude, too, lived in Orion, as did Stefanie Stone and Laden Chapel. Back at the main list, I clicked on Beatrice Rossiter.

I'd forgotten how pretty Beatrice had been before the accident. There was a picture of her standing with her mom (a tall, gorgeous African American woman) and her dad (a way-shorter and skinny white man with enormous glasses) in front of a restaurant that looked like it was in some European city. I clicked on a folder marked PC13342+13367 and suddenly the screen was filled almost entirely with a black-and-white picture of two smiling girls in identical wigs.

The girls looked so much alike that for a second I found myself thinking,
I didn't know Beatrice had a sister
,
and then I gasped. Because the smiling girl next to Beatrice wasn't some unknown sister I'd never met.

It was Amanda.

“Hi, guys, I'm home!”

I'd been sure I'd hear the garage door open, that I'd have time to exit whatever file I was looking at and pull up some innocuous blank Word document, but clearly I'd been wrong. I heard my dad talking, then my mother was calling, “Hal! Hal, come say hello.”

Beatrice and Amanda were friends?! I'd never seen them together and she'd never once mentioned her to me.

Not exactly a shocker, though, right?

“Hal? Are you upstairs?”

“Um, coming, Mom!” Beatrice and Amanda. Did Callie and Nia know? Nah. Callie had told us every detail of the night of Beatrice's accident; there was no way she would have left out the fact that Amanda wanted her to do right by Beatrice because they were friends.

“Hal?”

My mom's voice was coming from just beyond the den. If she came in and found me looking at a photo of Amanda, she'd start asking questions.
Lots
of questions. I clicked out of the window and onto my name, then spun around to face the door, hoping my expression wouldn't betray just how totally I was freaking out.

But just as I put my feet down to stop my spin, I realized what a colossal error I'd made in clicking back on my own file. The pictures of our family were guaranteed to catch my mom's eye, make her come over to see what I was working on. I needed to . . . I needed to . . .

“There you are!” She appeared in the doorway, still wearing her bright red raincoat and yellow hat.

It was too late. My mom was smiling at me, her eyes bright with pleasure at everyone's being home. I waited for them to widen when she saw what was on the screen behind me, but all she did was nod when I said hello.

“Dad's home!” she announced with enthusiasm.

What do you say when your parent states the obvious yet you do not want to piss her off? “Yes!” I half shouted, trying to match her excitement. Had she not seen the screen? Had she been too distracted by the prospect of a rare family dinner (one she did not have to cook) to focus on the pictures? Or maybe . . . of course, the screen saver must have come back on. She wasn't looking at the computer screen because she didn't care about a bunch of random tropical fish.

My mom pulled off her hat. “Good day?”

“Oh, yeah!” My relief translated itself into enthusiasm and I actually clapped my hands together.

“That's great, sweetie.” She came over and kissed the top of my head, then headed back toward the kitchen. “Dad says dinner is in about thirty minutes.”

I touched my hand to my damp forehead and breathed deeply in, then out. What I needed was to calm down. What I needed was a system. I'd look at the files of people I knew and compare them to the files of strangers. What did Hal Bennett have in common with Maude Cooper? What did Callista Leary have in common with Stefanie Stone? I reached into the middle desk drawer, took out a pad with Orion Community College printed on it, and grabbed a pencil from the Orioles mug on the desktop. Then I turned around and prepared to get to work.

But instead of facing a screen full of tropical fish, I faced a screen full of . . . nothing. No fish. No photos of me. Just darkness. I hit the Space key, then the Enter key, but still there was no response. I listened and realized that not only was the screen dead, but the computer itself was off.

Heart pounding, I pushed the Power button.

Nothing.

I pushed it again, this time holding it for a count of five. I released it, counted to thirty, then pushed it again.

Nothing.

There was no doubt about it: Something—or someone—had just murdered my computer.

Don't you know it's dangerous for you to be together?

They've got him.

You gave Amanda's most treasured possession to her enemy.

I put my head down on the cool plastic of the keyboard and tried to convince myself everything was going to be okay.