Whom Dog Hath Joined (11 page)

“Crap,” I said.

He picked up his beer. “But you’re not getting anywhere
obsessing about it. This is supposed to be a celebration, right? You’re free
from the yoke of Santiago Santos’s oppression.”

I tapped my beer against his. “You’re right. Only happy
thoughts for the rest of the evening.”

We talked about classmates and changes in Stewart’s
Crossing, and by seven-thirty we were cleaning up. I got my laptop and my dad’s
gun, still in its leather pouch, from Rick’s dining room table.

I said goodbye to Rick and Rascal, and Rochester trailed
reluctantly behind me as I walked out, sorry to be leaving his friend and
playmate. I put the laptop and the gun in the trunk, just to be safe. After
all, both of them were dangerous.

When we got home, I stowed the gun in the nightstand beside
my bed, where it had been before Rick was forced to confiscate it. I’d kept the
laptop hidden away in the attic – but without the threat of a surprise visit
from Santos, I didn’t have to anymore. I left it right in the middle of the
kitchen table, a kind of “so there” at him.

Rochester was in a playful mood after his fun with Rascal.
He hopped around me, trying to hump me from behind, and I had to wrestle him
onto his side, burying my head in the golden fur behind his neck, raking my
fingernails across his belly. He wriggled onto his back and every time I
scratched the place where his left hind leg joined his body, he shook that leg
like he had a tambourine grasped in his paw.

Though I had a king-sized bed, there wasn’t a whole lot of
room there for me, Lili and a seventy-pound dog. Could the three of us cohabit
together? Would Rochester forsake me for Lili’s charms? I hugged him tight
despite his efforts to wriggle out of my grasp.

Eventually, though, he squirmed away, and jumped off the
bed. I heard him go down the stairs and then his toenails click against the
tile floor. I got up and followed him to the kitchen, and there, like one of
the Sirens of Greek mythology, was Caroline’s laptop.

“It couldn’t hurt to do a little searching online,” I said
to Rochester, who was lapping water from his bowl. “Nothing illegal.”

I turned it on and poured a tall glass of water for myself.
Once it had booted up, I decided to see what I could find about missing
persons. I discovered a whole site dedicated to Pennsylvania missing persons
and  unidentified victims. But there were only three males listed between 1962
and 1969, and none of them matched the details of the body.

The more I read, the more depressed I got. Not just at the sheer
number, but at the personal stories behind them. The worst were the kids who
had disappeared without a trace—the paperboy returning from a friend’s house, the
hitch-hiking teenager, the multi-racial girl with turquoise hair, the
small-town toddler in yellow boots and rain slicker.

I couldn’t imagine how those parents must have felt. I
remembered my father’s friend Des and his lost son in Laos, how his obituary
said that he’d never stopped hoping his boy would come home. The chances were
that every missing in child in that database was dead, but what parent could
accept that without the chance to say goodbye?

I’d read newspaper articles about hidden websites where
pedophiles connected to share sexually explicit photos and stories. Using my
hacking skills, could I delve into those, find some evidence of a lost child,
give some peace to a grieving family?

My fingers hovered over the keys. I knew how I’d get started,
the software I’d initialize, the unsecured ports I’d search for.

Rochester came up and rested his sloppy wet mouth on my leg.
“I’m not your napkin, dog!” I said.

That interruption was all I needed to break my trance.
Instead, I logged into my online hacker support group, using an email ID I had
created for that purpose, one that had no link back to me.

Each of our stories was different, but each was the same.
We’d all given in to those itchy fingers at some time. Some of us had good
reasons, or ones we thought were good; others did it for the thrill of sneaking
in somewhere or exacting revenge on some foe.

We were all anonymous there, so that we could be honest with
each other, or as honest as we could be, without fear of law enforcement. My ID
was CrossedWires – a tongue-in-cheek reference to Stewart’s Crossing as well as
to the idea that all of us have a few wires crossed in our brains. Mine had led
me to become a hacker.

I began to read the messages from other members. Stinger23 had
written a long post about his hair-trigger temper, and how he’d felt a physical
ache when he got angry and wanted to screw with someone’s identity. Ilovekitkat
was a teenager who had hacked into his high school’s computer system to change
his grades. He was smart, but not hard-core like Stinger23. He’d posted about
his temptation to hack in order to impress a girl.

I’d shared my sad story when I joined. Mostly I logged in to
remind myself of the trouble I could get into, but sometimes I added messages
of support to those in difficulties or reminded those who were tempted of the
consequences they could suffer.

By the time I had finished reading through all of them, the
urge to break in online had passed, and I spent some quality time playing
tug-a-rope with Rochester. I knew I’d never be fully “cured” of my desire to
hack – but I also knew it was important to those I loved that I keep trying.

13 – Thoughts of Heaven

Tuesday morning, I was on my way up to Friar Lake, Rochester
riding shotgun, when Rick called.  “You busy this afternoon?” he asked.

“No more than usual. What’s up?”

“I called George School and spoke to the headmaster. I asked
if Brannigan had left any papers there that might help me out in the
investigation. He passed me off to his secretary, Vera Lee Isay, who it turns
out was Brannigan’s secretary, too. She’s very twitchy, though. She finally
admitted that after Brannigan died in 1995, she boxed up all his personal
papers and put them into storage.”

“Do you need a court order to look through them?”

“Not if the person in charge of them gives me access. As
soon as I said I was looking for information about what Brannigan did during
the Vietnam War, she closed right up. I had to convince her I wasn’t interested
in going after him, just that I wanted information about the boys who he might
have helped.”

I turned onto River Road for the drive up to Leighville. The
swamp maples at the river’s edge were a bright gold, and I glimpsed bits of
gray-blue river through the branches.

“She sounds like a kind of lioness—been there forever, very
protective of his memory. Finally got her to agree I could take a look – but
only this afternoon. There’s some kind of program starting tomorrow and she
says she’ll be too busy to supervise me. I’m afraid there’s going to be too
much for me to look through on my own. Think you can come up and give me a
hand?”

“What time?”

“She asked me to wait until school was out. I guess seeing a
police officer, even one in plainclothes, would be too upsetting for the
delicate youth. So I said I’d be there at four.”

“I’ve got a meeting at three,” I said. “Should only take a
half hour. I can take the back roads to Newtown and meet you, but I’ll have to
bring Rochester. I won’t have time to take him home and I don’t want to leave
him at Friar Lake and have to go back for him.”

“Sure, bring the dog. What kind of trouble can he get into?
Dig up another body?”

“I’m assuming that was a rhetorical question,” I said. “I’ll
see you at four.”

“English teacher,” he said, and hung up.

When I got to Friar Lake I had contracts to review and sign
for the materials Mark Figueroa and I had discussed, and the morning went by
quickly. One of the disadvantages of leaving the campus was the lack of lunch
facilities out in the country, so I had begun bringing food for myself and
Rochester. Around noon, I walked down to the conference room and opened the
refrigerator.

Rochester was right behind me as I collected what I need for
a dog and daddy lunch alfresco. I opened the exterior door and he rushed right
to the picnic bench beneath a spreading pine tree. He barked once, and I said,
“Hold your horses, dog. I’m coming.”

When I got to the table, I poured food and water for him, then
sat down to eat my sandwich of chicken salad on challah bread, with sea salt
and black pepper potato chips. Rochester slopped up his water and downed his
chow, and then sat beside me with an expectant look on his face.

“You just ate,” I said. “Don’t give me that look.”

He slumped down to the ground, resting his head on the
grass. I wasn’t sure why I was still worried about making a commitment to Lili.
I had certainly made one to Rochester, hadn’t I? When I took my previous job at
Eastern, in the alumni relations department, I made it conditional on him being
able to accompany me. Rick had done something similar after he adopted Rascal.
He couldn’t take his dog with him to work, so he’d found that neighbor who
could keep the Aussie active during the day.

I had begun to organize my life around Rochester, making
sure that he was fed and walked, that his teeth were brushed, his toenails
clipped, that he was bathed regularly and saw the vet when he had to, that he
had toys to play with and lots of belly rubs.

In a strange way, I’d exchanged the restrictions of prison
life for the constraints of being a doggie daddy, though there were a lot more
benefits to life with Rochester. I bundled up my trash and took my big golden
boy over to a secluded part of the hillside where he romped until his tongue
hung long out of his mouth and he rolled on the ground beside me, in doggie
heaven.

Then we went back to the office, where he slept beside my
desk until I left him behind with a rawhide chew and walked out to the abbey
for the three o’clock meeting Joey Capodilupo had requested. “What’s up?” I
asked, when I found him in the abbey.

“What do you want to do with all these pews?” he asked.
“Architect’s drawings say this is going to be a big open space, so I’ve got to
pull them out. Shame to throw ‘em in the dumpster. Chop ‘em up for firewood?”

“Surely they’re too good for that!” I looked at the pews,
lined up in rows like the ones at the Quaker Meeting in Stewart’s Crossing, and
had a sudden memory of my own wedding to Mary, in a synagogue in Southern
California we had picked because it was convenient, had lots of parking, and
was willing to marry two people who didn’t belong to the congregation.

I remembered my parents walking me down the aisle on either
side of me, in the Jewish custom, then leaving me at the altar to wait for
Mary’s parents to deliver her. Would I ever wait for Lili that way, my heart in
my chest as I saw the sanctuary doors open and her standing there in her white
gown, looking radiant?

Probably not. Even if Lili and I did marry, it wouldn’t be a
big ceremony, and I was sure she wouldn’t wear a fancy white gown. That was
very far from her style. But I could see us doing something together someday –
a ceremony on a beach in Fiji, a climb to the top of a (small) mountain in the
Himalayas, a sunrise commitment during an African safari. Something
unconventional, to set our relationship apart from those we’d had with others.

“Steve?”

I looked at Joey. “Oh, the pews.” I leaned down and ran my
hand over the back of one row. “They’re in pretty good condition. And look at
the carving on the ends. You don’t see work like that these days. I wonder if
they could be refinished and sold as seating.”

“Looks like solid oak.” He pulled a tape measure off his
belt and measured the length. “Four feet long. I could refinish one of these in
a couple of hours.”

I must have still had marriage, or at least matchmaking, on
my mind as I realized what the next step ought to be and turned to Joey. “You
know what? I’ll bet Mark Figueroa could sell them in his shop. Why don’t you
work something out with him? You could refinish a couple of them to use here at
the center, and in exchange you could have the rest to sell.”

Joey smiled. “That’s a great idea. I’ll give him a call.”

I went back to the office and let Rochester loose for a
quick run. I watched him dash toward the trees, loving his athletic grace and
the times when all four of his paws were off the ground. I realized he was
chasing a squirrel, who scrambled up the trunk of a pine and disappeared in its
boughs.

Rochester put his paws up on the trunk and barked, but the
squirrel didn’t respond. Then he dropped back to the ground and started to dig.

“Rochester! No digging!” I yelled. He looked up at me, then
went back to clawing the ground.

I jumped up and strode across to him. “Did you not hear me
say no?” I tugged at his collar and he raised his head and looked at me, all
guilt and contrition.

It struck me then that I’d been feeling guilty myself for so
long – over the loss of my unborn children, the failure of my marriage, all the
bad decisions I’d made, including the one to break into those credit bureaus,
and my inability to be there for my father in his last days because I was in
prison.

I let go of Rochester’s collar and he smiled up at me, all
traces of guilt passed. I had to do the same thing, I thought. Move on. Stop
letting the past hold me back. And get on the road to my meeting with Rick at
George School.

14 – The Annex

As I headed inland on Durham Road, past farms and small towns
and isolated gas stations, Rochester leaned out the window, the wind streaming
through his glossy blond hair. I wished I felt as happy and confident as he
appeared but I had too many things to worry about, from Lili to my work at
Friar Lake to the body in the Meeting House..

As I pulled up beside Rick’s truck in the George School
parking lot, I saw him standing by the front door of the administration
building with a sixty-something woman in a severe black pants suit, her brown
hair pulled up into the kind of top knot that I thought had gone out of fashion
in the 1960s. She looked like a grim schoolmarm who’d rap your knuckles with a
ruler as soon as look at you.