“Who is he?”
“Oh man.” Shiny Suit’s voice had a tinge of awe in the nasal. “You’re such a dead man.”
That almost slowed me down. “Who is he?”
I showed him the fist again. He held up his hand in a pitiful defensive move. I could punch right through it.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “Danny Zuker. That’s who you’re messing with, pal. Danny Zuker.”
Unlike Otto, Bob hadn’t used his real name.
“You’re a dead man, bro.”
“I heard you the first time,” I snapped, but even I could hear the fear in my voice.
“Danny ain’t a forgiving guy either. Oh man, you are so dead. You hear what I’m saying? You know what you are?”
“A dead man, yeah, I got it. Lie on your stomach. Put your right cheek on the pavement.”
“Why?”
I cocked the fist again. He lay on his stomach and put the wrong cheek down. I told him that. He turned his head the other way. I grabbed his wallet out of his back pocket.
“You robbing me now?”
“Shut up.”
I checked his ID and read his name out loud: “Edward Locke from right here in Flushing, New York.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So now I know your name. And where you live. See, two can play at that game.”
He chuckled at that.
“What?”
“No one plays that game like Danny Zuker.”
I dropped his wallet onto the pavement. “So you plan to tell him about our little altercation?” I asked.
“Our little what?”
“Are you going to tell him about this?”
I could see him smile through the blood. “The minute you’re gone, bro. Why, you wanna threaten me some more?”
“No, not at all, I think you should tell him,” I said, using my calmest voice. “But, well, how will it look?”
With his face still on the pavement, he frowned. “How will what look?”
“You, Edward Locke, just got taken down by some chump you don’t know. He broke your nose, ruined your nice suit—and how did you save yourself from a bigger beating? Well, you sung like a bird.”
“What?”
“You sold out Danny Zuker after two punches.”
“I did not! No way I’d ever—”
“You gave me his name after only two punches. Do you think that will impress Danny? You seem to know him pretty well. How do you think he’ll react to your story of selling him out like that?”
“I didn’t sell him out!”
“Think he’ll see it that way?”
Silence.
“Up to you,” I said, “but here’s what I might suggest. If you say nothing, Danny will never know about this. He won’t know you messed up. He won’t know someone got the jump on you. He won’t know that you sold him out after only two punches.”
More silence.
“We understand each other, Edward?”
He didn’t reply and I didn’t bother pushing for one. It was time to leave now. I doubted that Edward would be able to see the license plate from here—Benedict’s license plate—but I didn’t want to take any chances.
“I’m going to leave now. Keep your face down until I’m gone and then all this goes away.”
“Except for my broken nose,” he pouted.
“That’ll heal too. Just stay down.”
Keeping an eye on him, I walked backward to the car. Edward Locke never so much as budged. I got in my car and drove away. I felt pretty good about myself, which, ironically, was not something I was proud of. I got back on Northern Boulevard and drove past the funeral home. No reason to stop there. I had stirred up enough trouble for now. When I stopped at the next traffic light, I quickly checked my e-mail. Bingo. There was one from the website who investigated charities. The subject read:
Here is your complete analysis on Fresh Start
It could wait till I was back, couldn’t it? Or maybe . . . I kept my eyes peeled. It didn’t take long. Two blocks up I spotted a place called the Cybercraft Internet Café. It was far enough away from the funeral home, not that I thought that they’d go searching nearby parking lots for me.
The place looked like an overcrowded tech department. There were dozens of computers lined up in narrow cubbies along the wall. They were all taken. No customer, other than yours truly, looked older than twenty.
“It’s going to be a wait,” a pure slacker yah-dude with more piercings than teeth told me.
“That’s okay,” I said.
It could indeed wait. I wanted to get home. I was just about to leave when a group of what had to be gamers let out a shout, slapped one another on the back, offered up complicated handshakes of congratulations, and rose from the terminals.
“Who won?” Slacker Yah-Dude asked.
“Randy Corwick, man.”
Slacker Yah-Dude liked that. “Pay up.” Then to me he said, “How long you need a terminal for, Pops?”
“Ten minutes,” I said.
“You got five. Use terminal six. It’s hot, man. Don’t cool it down with something lame.”
Terrific. I quickly signed on and opened up my e-mail. I downloaded the financial report on Fresh Start. It was eighteen pages. There was an income statement, expense graphs, revenue graphs, profitability graphs, liquidity graphs, a graph on useful versus depreciated life of building and equipment, something about liability composition, a balance sheet, something called a comparables analysis . . .
I teach political science. I do not understand business or numbers.
Toward the back I found a history of the organization. It had indeed been founded twenty years ago by three people. Professor Malcolm Hume was listed as the academic adviser. Two students were listed as copresidents. One was Todd Sanderson. The other was Jedediah Drachman.
My blood chilled. What’s a common nickname for someone named Jedediah?
Jed.
I still had no idea what was going on, but it was all about Fresh Start.
“Time’s up, Pops.” It was Slacker Yah-Dude. “Another terminal will be open in fifteen.”
I shook my head. I paid the rental fee and stumbled back to my car. Was my mentor somehow involved in this? What kind of good works did Fresh Start do that involved trying to kill me? I didn’t know. It was time to head home and maybe discuss this all with Benedict. Maybe he’d have a clue.
I started up Benedict’s car and, still dazed, headed west on Northern Boulevard. I had programmed the address for the Franklin Funeral Home into the GPS, but for the ride back, I figured that I could just hit “Previous Destinations” and Benedict would have his home in there. So when I hit the next red light, I turned the knob and clicked on “Previous Destinations.” I was about to scan down for Benedict’s address in Lanford, Massachusetts, but my gaze stopped cold at the first address, the place Benedict had most recently visited. The address didn’t read Lanford, Massachusetts.
It read Kraftboro, Vermont.
Chapter 26
M
y world tilted,
teetered, rocked, and flipped itself upside down.
I just stared at the GPS. The full address was listed as 260 VT-14, Kraftboro, Vermont. I knew the address. I had put it in my own GPS not long ago.
It was the address of the Creative Recharge Colony.
My best friend had visited the retreat where Natalie had stayed six years ago. He had visited the place where she married Todd. He had visited the place where, most recently, Jed and his gang had tried to kill me.
For several seconds, maybe longer, I could not move. I sat in the car. The car radio was on, but I couldn’t tell you what was playing. It felt as though the world had shut down. It took reality a while to get through my haze, but when it did, it hit me like a surprise left hook.
I was alone.
Even my best friend had lied—check that: was
still
lying—to me.
Wait, I said to myself. There had to be a reasonable answer.
Like what? What possible explanation could there be for having that address in Benedict’s GPS? What the hell was going on? Who could I trust?
I only knew the answer to that last question: No one.
I’m a big guy. I consider myself pretty independent. But right here, right now, I didn’t think that I had ever felt so small or such gut-wrenching loneliness.
I shook my head. Okay, Jake, snap out of it. Enough with the self-pity. Time to act.
First I checked through the rest of the addresses in Benedict’s GPS. There was nothing of interest. I did find his home address, so I set it up to lead me home. I started on my way. I flipped stations on the radio, searching for that ever-elusive perfect song. Never found it. I whistled along with what crappy song came on. It didn’t help. The construction sites on Route 95 pounded the hell out of what was left of my psyche.
I spent most of the ride having imaginary conversations with Benedict. I actually rehearsed how I’d approach him, what I’d say, what he might answer, how I’d counter.
My grip on the wheel tightened when I pulled onto Benedict’s street. I checked the time. He had a seminar for another hour, so he wouldn’t be home. Good. I parked by the guest cottage and started toward his house. Again I debated what to do. The truth was, I needed more information. I wasn’t ready to interrogate him yet. I didn’t know enough. The simple Francis Bacon axiom, one we constantly stressed to our students, applied here: Knowledge is power.
Benedict hid a spare house key in a fake rock by his garbage can. One may wonder how I know this, so I will tell you: We are best friends. We have no secrets from each other.
Another voice in my head: Was it all a lie? Was our friendship never real?
I thought what Cookie had whispered to me in those dark woods:
“If you don’t stop, you’ll kill us all.”
It was not meant to be hyperbole and yet here I was, not stopping, risking in a way I could still not fathom “all” these lives. Who was “all”? Was I always, in a sense, risking them? Was Benedict supposed to, I don’t know, keep an eye on me or something?
Let’s not get completely paranoid here.
Right, okay, a step at a time. There was still the possibility of an innocent explanation for the Vermont address being on his GPS. I was not the most creative fellow. I have a habit of seeing things linearly. Maybe someone else borrowed his car, for example. Maybe someone even stole it. Maybe one of his late-night conquests wanted to visit an organic farm. Maybe I was once again practicing self-delusion.
I put the key in the lock. Was I really about to cross this line? Was I really going to snoop on my closest friend?
Bet your ass.
I entered through the back door. My apartment would kindly be described as functional. Benedict’s resembled a third-world prince’s harem. The den featured dozens of upscale, brightly hued beanbag chairs. There were vibrant tapestries on the walls. Slim African sculptures stood tall in all four corners. The room was over the top in a thousand ways, but I had always felt comfortable here. The big yellow beanbag was my favorite. I had watched a lot of football on that. I had played a lot of Xbox there.
The Xbox controllers were lying on it now. I stared down at them, though I didn’t really think the controllers would offer up much information. I wondered what I was looking for. A clue, I guess. Something that would tell me why Benedict would have driven up to that farm/retreat/kidnapper-hideout in Kraftboro, Vermont. What that might be, I didn’t have the slightest.
I started going through the drawers. I searched the ones in the kitchen first. Nothing. I took the spare bedroom next. Nothing. I tried the closet and bureau in the den. More nothing. I headed into the bedroom and tried there. Nothing. Benedict had a desk in there with a computer on it. I checked the drawers underneath it. Nothing.
I found a file drawer. I checked the file cabinet. There were routine bills. There were student papers. There were class schedules. As far as anything truly personal, there was—drum roll, please—nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
I thought about that. Who doesn’t have anything personal in their house? Then again what would you find in my house? More than this, certainly. There would be some old photographs, a few personal letters, something that indicated my past.
Benedict had none of that. So what?
I kept looking. I was hoping to find something that would link Benedict to the Creative Recharge Colony or Vermont or anything really. I tried to sit at his desk. Benedict is a lot smaller than I am, so my knees couldn’t fit under the desk. I leaned forward and hit a key on the computer. The screen lit up. Like most people, Benedict had not shut down his computer. I suddenly realized how old-fashioned my house search had been thus far. No one keeps secrets in their drawers anymore.
We keep them on the computer.
I opened up his Microsoft Office and looked for the most recent documents. The first listed was a Word document called VBMWXY.doc. Strange name. I clicked on it.
The file wouldn’t open. It was password protected.
Whoa.
There was no point in trying to guess the password. I didn’t have a clue. I tried to think of another way around that. Nothing came to mind. The rest of the files under “Recent” were student recommendations. Two were for medical schools, two for law schools, one for business school.
So what was in the password-protected one?
No idea. I clicked on the Mail icon on the bottom. The mail, too, required a password to enter. I looked around the desk for a slip of paper with a password—lots of people did that—but I found nothing. Another dead end.
Now what?
I clicked on his web browser. His Yahoo! news page popped up. Not much to learn here. I clicked the history page and finally hit something approaching pay dirt. Benedict had been on Facebook recently. I clicked the link. A profile for a man named, believe it or not, John Smith, came up. John Smith had no photograph of himself. He had no friends. He had no status reports. His address was listed as New York, NY.
This computer was signed in to this Facebook under the name John Smith.
Hmm. I thought about that. It was a fake account. I know a lot of people have them. A friend of mine uses a music service that goes through Facebook, showing all his friends every song he listens to. He didn’t like that, so he created a dummy account like this one. Now no one can see what songs he likes.
The fact that Benedict had a dummy account meant nothing. What was more interesting though, as I typed his name into the search engine, was that Benedict Edwards didn’t have a real Facebook account. There were two Benedict Edwardses listed in the Facebook directory. One was a musician from Oklahoma City, the other was a dancer from Tampa, Florida. Neither was my Benedict Edwards.
Again, so what? A lot of people don’t have Facebook accounts. I had one set up, but I’ve almost never used it. My profile picture was the yearbook photograph. I accepted friends maybe once a week. I probably had about fifty of them. I had originally signed up because people were sending me links to photographs and the like and the only way I could view them was to sign in to a Facebook account. Other than that, social media in general held very little appeal to me.
So maybe that was what Benedict had done. We were on many of the same e-mail lists. He had probably set up the dummy account so he could view Facebook links.
When I looked down the history page, that theory immediately imploded. The first listing was for a man on Facebook named Kevin Backus. I clicked the link. For a second, I thought that maybe it was another dummy account for Benedict, that Kevin Backus was merely an online pseudonym. But that wasn’t the case. Kevin Backus was just some nondescript guy. He wore sunglasses in his profile picture and posed with his thumb up. I frowned at that.
I racked my brain. Kevin Backus. Neither his name nor his face was familiar.
I hit the “about” page. It was blank. It didn’t list a home, a school, an occupation, any of that. The only thing that had been filled out was “in a relationship.” He was, according to this, in a relationship with a woman named Marie-Anne Cantin.
I rubbed my chin. Marie-Anne Cantin. That name didn’t ring a bell either. So, why had Benedict been on this Kevin Backus’s page? I didn’t know, but I suspected it was hugely important. I could start googling him. I looked again at the name Marie-Anne Cantin. It was typed in blue, meaning that she also had a profile. I only had to click on her name.
That was what I did.
When her page came up—when I saw Marie-Anne Cantin’s profile photograph—I recognized the face almost immediately.
Benedict carried her picture in his wallet.
Oh man. I swallowed, sat back, caught my breath. Now I got it. I could almost feel Benedict’s pain. I had lost the great love of my life. Benedict, it seemed, had done the same. Marie-Anne Cantin was indeed a stunning woman. I would describe her as high-cheekboned, regal, African American except, as I looked closer at her profile, that last part would be inaccurate.
She wasn’t African American. She was, well, African. Marie-Anne Cantin, according to her Facebook page, lived in Ghana.
This fact was, I guess, interesting, albeit in a not-my-business way. Somewhere along the way, Benedict had met this woman. He had fallen in love with her. He carried a torch for her. What that could possibly have to do with his visiting Kraftboro, Vermont . . .
Hold the phone.
Hadn’t I, too, fallen in love with a woman? I, too, still carried a torch for her. And I, too, had been up in Kraftboro, Vermont.
Was Kevin Backus Benedict’s very own Todd Sanderson?
I frowned. That felt like a stretch. And wrong. Still, wrong as it felt, I needed to investigate this. Marie-Anne Cantin was the only lead I had right now. I clicked her “about” link. It was impressive. She had studied economics at Oxford University and had received a law degree at Harvard. She was legal counsel for the United Nations. She both lived in and was from Accra, the capital of Ghana. She was, as I already knew, “in a relationship” with Kevin Backus.
Now what?
I clicked on her pictures, but they were set on private. No way to view them. An idea came to me. I hit the back arrow until I was on Kevin Backus’s page again. His photographs were not set on private. I could see them all. Okay, good. I started clicking through them. I don’t know why. I don’t know what I expected to find.
Kevin Backus had his photographs in various albums. I started with the one simply titled “Happy Times.” There were twenty, twenty-five pictures of either my boy Kevin with his main squeeze, Marie-Anne, or just Marie-Anne alone, obviously snapped by Kevin. They looked happy. Check that. She looked happy. He looked deliriously happy. I pictured Benedict sitting here, clicking through these photographs of the woman he loved with this Kevin guy. I could see the glass of scotch in his hand. I could see the room growing dark. I could see the blue light of the screen bouncing off Benedict’s oversize Ant-Man glasses. I could see a lone tear running down his cheek.
Too much?
Facebook loved to torture ex-loves by keeping them front and center. You couldn’t escape your exes anymore. Their lives were right here for you to see. Man, that sucked. So this was what Benedict did at night—tormented himself. I didn’t know any of this for certain, of course, but I was pretty sure that was how it played out. I remembered that drunken night in the bar, the way he carefully took out the well-creased photograph of Marie-Anne. I could still hear the agony in his slurred words:
“The only girl I’ll ever love.”
Benedict, you poor bastard.
Poor bastard perhaps, but I still didn’t have a clue what this meant or how it related to Benedict’s recent visit to Vermont. I clicked through some more albums. There was one titled “Family.” Kevin had two brothers and a sister. His mother appeared in a number of photographs. I didn’t see any sign of a father. There was an album called “Kintampo Falls” and another for “Mole National Park.” Most of the photographs there were shots of wildlife and natural wonders.
The last album was called “Oxford Graduation.” Curious. That was where Marie-Anne Cantin had studied economics. Could Kevin and Marie-Anne have attended together? Could they be college sweethearts? I doubted it. It seemed like a long time to be “in a relationship,” but, hey, who knew?
The photographs in this album were considerably older. Judging by the hairstyles, clothing, and Kevin’s face, I would say at least fifteen, maybe twenty years earlier. I would bet that these photographs predated digital cameras. Kevin had probably scanned them into his computer. I skimmed through the thumbs, not expecting to see anything of interest, when a photograph in the second row made me pull up.
My hand was shaking. I grabbed the mouse, managed to move the cursor so that it hovered over the image, and clicked. The photograph grew bigger. It was a group photograph. Eight people, all in black graduation gowns, stood with big smiles on their faces. I recognized Kevin Backus. He stood on the far right next to a woman I didn’t know. Their body language suggested that they were a couple. In fact, as I looked closer, it appeared that I was looking at four couples on their graduation day. I couldn’t be sure, of course. It could have been that they were just lined up boy-girl, but I didn’t think that was all.