Cold Calls (16 page)

Thought you'd like to see the message I'll be sending out Thursday!
;P

The fifth time he read the line, he got it.

He was still safe.

His knees went wobbly again, so he sat down on the grass. He thought for a moment, then his fingers raced across the screen, adding the phantom email address to his contact list, trashing the email, then opening the deleted-items folder and erasing it from there. He knew that you could never totally delete anything, and that the picture was still buried somewhere in the megabytes, but this way it would be hard to stumble on, say, if a parent accidentally on purpose went snooping.

He still had time before his father got home, so he opened a blank email and pasted in the address. In the subject line, he typed,
Thursday.

Got the message. I'll be making the delivery you asked for, but then that's it. I'll need extra time on Thursday to get the video posted. It should be up by Saturday morning at the latest.

Eric hit
SEND
, and before he had time to close out, he had a response.

Thursday by 9:00 p.m. At 9:01 the picture gets sent.
:(

The caller had been waiting.

The more he thought about it, the madder he got, the more he knew he'd find a way to get even. Now he waited, somehow knowing there was more.

Soon enough, another email binged in, and when he tapped it open, squared-off digital numbers of a countdown clock filled the screen.

 

49:26:59

49 hours.

26 minutes.

59 seconds.

Ticking down to nothing.

49:26:58

49:26:57

49:26:56

 

49:26:55

49:26:54

49:26:53

49:26:52

49:26:51

 

Fatima watched the numbers change.

It was hypnotic.

Relaxing, even.

The seconds were marked with a baby-bird peep, and the minutes with a water drop. She wondered what the changing hours sounded like. Probably another nature sound—an owl hoot or a cricket, maybe. She was sure that the final alarm would be a crack of thunder with a flash of hot lightning, since that was pretty much how she saw her family reacting to the scanned pages the caller would be emailing out.

The reproduction quality was amazing, at least 300 dpi. You could clearly see the curlicues at the ends of the
Y'
s, the little half circles that dotted the
I'
s and made her handwriting so distinct. And you could read every word, even the ones scrunched between lines of text, the dense paragraphs of declarative sentences that clarified the depth of her doubt. All without magnification. Even Teyta Noor, with her thick glasses and old-woman squint, could read it. And she would, too. Every damning word.

Fatima had thought she'd die right there when she opened the email and saw those addresses and those scans of the pages. And when she realized it was just a warning, that the email had only been sent to her, she sighed so loud that she startled herself, giggling with relief.

That all changed with the counter, and the realization of what would happen when it hit zero.

It even took the thrill out of solving the mystery.

Okay, maybe it wasn't
solved,
but she was sure that it was cracked.

What had looked impossible turned out to be easy, a simple task of compilation, organization, elimination, and analysis. The same process that got her in this trouble in the first place.

When Fatima combined the pile of papers she had printed out about Connor Stark with the ones Shelly had found on Katie Schepler and the ones Eric had on Heather Herman, the stack was three inches thick. Scores of pages and hundreds of posts, with twice as many names and places and events to sort through, plus links and Foursquare check-ins and lists of friends and profile info and lines and lines and lines of Tweets. Eric had said it couldn't be done, so of course she knew she had to do it. The cuter the guy, the more competitive she got, a stupid, uncontrollable urge that explained why she couldn't get a boyfriend.

At least, she hoped it was the explanation.

She had started by spreading the papers out on her bed, the floor, the dresser, the chair. She assigned highlighters—yellow for school, pink for sports, blue for religion, purple for community service, lime green for everything else—then started in with the stack on her desk.

The first pages took the longest, but then she found her rhythm, her left brain sifting, compiling, subcategorizing, and cross-referencing, her right brain forming hypotheses, pulling patterns out of reams of random data, zoning out the distractions, zeroing in on the answers. Then logic took over, analyzing everything, dismissing the unproven, following the evidence, knowing that the truth would be waiting at the end.

And two hours later, there it was, the one thing all three of their victims had in common, the single element within the subset of C union K union H.

She still had to check her work, start from scratch and do the whole thing over again to be sure, looking for holes in her thinking, simple slip-ups that would give a false positive. Still, the first run-through was looking good.

If Shelly was right, it would tell them who the caller was. And if they knew who the caller was, they could keep their secrets from getting out.

That was the idea, anyway.

Now, would it work?

Probably not, but she still smiled. She had solved the puzzle—at least one part of it—and she'd done it in half the time she'd thought it would take.

It's what she did best.

The gift that made science and math so easy.

The curse that made faith so hard.

Then there were all those
What
if
s that drove her nuts.

What if
she had walked down a different row in the library?

She wouldn't have seen the book.

What if
her eyes were scanning the shelf above or the shelf below?

She would never have noticed the title.

What if
she hadn't slowed down, tilting her head sideways to read?

It would just have been a yellow blur, another cover on another book she'd walked past.

But she had gone down that aisle, looked at that row, and read that title.

God Is Not Great.

The second she read it, her gift took over, analyzing the words without being asked, the hypothesis involuntarily tested against previous truths.

Allah Akbar.

God is great.

The truth she had always accepted.

The only truth she had ever known.

The truth that gave her life meaning.

That held the universe together.

It must be true.

It
had
to be true.

Because if not . . .

At first she tried going back, pretending she hadn't seen it, shrugging it off as some stupid rant by an ignorant fool. She had heard things like that lots of times before, things about Islam being violent or how it said it was okay to abuse women. But she knew they were wrong. She had the proof, chapter and verse, right there in her Quran. Yet somehow this one title had gotten past that line of defense, snuck into her brain, and wouldn't go away, a horrible song that played over and over.

God Is Not Great.

It had to be wrong.

It said so in the Quran.

Besides,
everybody
knew it was wrong. Christians, Jews, Hindus . . . everybody.

That should've been good enough.

But it wasn't.

Her gift wouldn't let her off that easy, digging into the logic problem like it was bonus points on a physics exam.

Two days later, she was back,
accidentally
walking down the same aisle,
randomly
picking the book up off the shelf,
sorta
reading for a little while, the little while becoming a longer while, then a day later, checking the book out, taking it to school, hiding the laminate cover under a paper dust jacket from a biography of Lincoln, renewing it twice before being told she'd reached the renewal limit, warned yet again about writing in the margins. Finally, at the mall bookstore, a paperback copy of the book sandwiched between an issue of
People
and the CliffsNotes to
The Great Gatsby.
She had an it's-for-a-friend line ready, but the clerk simply rang it up and put it in the bag, no questions asked.

At least someone had no questions.

Even then, she still could have explained it all away, why she had a copy of such an evil book. But her gift, her curse, forced her hand, highlighting passages, scribbling in the margins, filling the end pages with notes, adding Islam-based examples the author had overlooked.

She couldn't help herself. She'd had to know.

And now that she knew, no one could help her.

Alone, she tapped a pencil on her desk in time with the seconds on the screen.

 

49:26:50

49:26:49

49:26:48

49:26:47

 

49:26:46

49:26:45

49:26:44

49:26:43

49:26:42

 

With a few clicks of her mouse, Shelly changed the screen saver on her computer, replacing the image from Aesthetic Perfection's “The Great Depression” video with the countdown clock. The red numbers popped on the black background, giving her whole room a fiery glow.

She hadn't noticed when the message with the clock had popped in, too busy staring at the subject line of the first email.

Marceli Romano.

There wasn't anything else in that first email.

There didn't have to be.

Her new look, the cross-state move, Jeff's last name?

None of it had worked.

The caller knew who she was.

And if the caller knew that, then the caller knew what she had done.

It had been kept out of the news—her name, the details, all of it—but obviously that didn't matter. Maybe she had seen the police report or talked to somebody at the hospital or her old school. Or the morgue.

Whatever.

The caller knew, and that's all that mattered.

There was a time when it seemed everybody knew. That's when friends had stopped being friends, everyone else whispering behind her back, her mother crying every time she saw her. Even Father Tony seemed to change, the Cain and Abel story coincidentally coming up Sunday after Sunday, the message of every sermon circling back to the “challenge of forgiveness.”

The real challenge had been at home. She had to give them credit—they made it through the spring and most of the summer before shipping her off to a near stranger who, by law, had to take her in.

For the people behind the dozens of email addresses pasted below the countdown clock, it would all come as a horrible shock.

Starting in 49 hours, 26 minutes, and 42 seconds.

Shelly recognized a few of the names on the list, girls at St. Anne's who she hung with, girls she liked and who seemed to like her, the ones who were as close to friends as she thought she'd ever have again.

But they were human and wouldn't be able to resist the urge.

Then they'd start asking questions. Not of her, of course. Other than forced hellos, they wouldn't talk to her at all. There'd be that one who, on a dare, would sit with her at lunch or ask to borrow a pen, but that would be all any of them would say to her, so they'd have to come up with their own answers to questions—

Why'd she do it?

Is she crazy?

Shouldn't she be in jail?

The funny thing is, if they did ask, she would tell them.

I don't know.

Probably.

Yes.

But she still had time.

Two days to keep Shelly Meyer from turning back into Marceli Romano.

In the red-hued darkness, she watched her time tick away.

 

49:26:41

49:26:40

49:26:39

49:26:38

49:26:37

“T
HAT'S IT?
”

“That's it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“And that's the
only
thing?”

“No. But it's the only thing that matters.”

Eric and Shelly looked at each other, then back up at Fatima, holding the fifth and final sheet of her presentation.

The first three sheets, taped on the glass wall by the door, had the names of their victims written across the top in black marker. Below each name were color-coded lists—mined from Facebook and Twitter and other must-be-on sites—of the things, events, people, and places in their lives. Yellow for school, pink for sports, blue for religion, purple for community service, lime green for everything else.

The fourth sheet, tacked to the bulletin board, was a mess of words and names and arrows, with things circled and highlighted and underlined and crossed out and written over.

On the last sheet, in capital letters three inches tall:
THE CUBIT SUMMER THEATER PROGRAM
.

“They have some friends in common too,” Fatima said, nodding at a yellow legal pad on the table, “but I checked a bunch of them, and they were all in that program.”

Shelly spun the pad around and ran her finger down the names. “So there could still be something else, some person you didn't check.”

“There could be. But this is it.”

“It makes sense,” Eric said. “My guy? Connor? He's a big theater geek.”

“They all are,” Fatima said. “That's what they have in common. Look at the charts.”

“Wait a sec. There
is
no theater at St. Anne's. I ought to know, I go there.”

“That may be true. But Heather still
does
theater.” Fatima dropped the sheet onto the table and stepped to the posters. “In eighth grade, she was in the chorus in the West Bloomfield Congregational Church production of
Godspell,
she played Bunny Byron in
Babes in Arms
at some workshop thingy two summers ago, she was in a musical revue at Limelight Dance Studio. Aaaannnd . . .” Fatima leaned over to the bulletin board and tapped a green box on the fourth sheet. “Two months ago, she was Hedy La Rue in the Cubit Summer Theater production of
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
”