Asking for Trouble - Leslie Kelly [75]
Oh, God, I hoped not his every move. The thought that someone might have seen us during an intimate moment made my flesh crawl. Simon obviously had the same concern because he whirled around, then crouched down in front of me. “The doors were closed.”
“The bastard’s getting around somehow. Who knows what secret peepholes he has in here?”
Thrusting a frustrated hand through his hair, he straightened up and resumed his pacing. “You really, genuinely believe this is what’s been happening?” he asked, not for the first time.
“It makes sense,” I said, hearing my own disgust. “The open windows, the beds, things being moved around, noises…how easy is that? I mean, you’re down here locked in your office all by yourself most days, you wouldn’t hear a herd of donkeys running around on the third floor. Before I came, I bet there were days when you never even left your room.”
He nodded slightly in acknowledgment.
“Someone could have gotten inside through one of these lousy old locks—hell, someone who once worked in the hotel might have a key! Then they just went and did their mischief, made some noise so you’d come investigate and find some weird, inexplicable situation. Voilà, you’re obviously psycho.”
He threw himself down in the chair beside the fireplace, his long legs kicked out in front of him. His fingers were clenched into tight fists on the armrests and fury was crashing over the man in near visible waves. “The woman?”
“The guy has an accomplice. Somebody did a little research into you, got a hold of some pictures—which is incredibly easy on the Internet now. And then he recreated a few moments to freak you out….” Rolling my eyes, I added, “If it weren’t so late I’d suggest going out and looking around along the cliffs. I bet we’d find very real footprints.”
“The rest…the smells? The pictures?”
“I’m no expert,” I said, voicing what I’d begun to suspect about some of the other weird goings-on. “But I know my great-aunt Cecelia has suffered migraines all her life. They are quite often triggered by cloying, sweet smells. Odors piped in through the air vents might very well have been intended to cause your migraines.”
He muttered a string of curses that even my foul-mouthed older brothers would have been impressed with.
“How could they know I have migraines?” he finally asked when he’d gotten just about every cuss word known to man out of his system.
“If they’ve been prowling around your house, they could have seen you dealing with one. Those curtains are never closed. How easy would it be for someone to peek in here and see you lying down with a cloth on your head?”
A muscle in his cheek kept flexing. “Yes. Possible.”
“As for the thing with the computer, jeez, Simon, I told you when I first got here that your network was way too easy to get into. No firewall whatsoever.”
“You can’t just make an attachment show up on someone else’s computer by sending an e-mail,” he said, immediately shaking his head. “There’s no way somebody crept in here and opened up a file while I was lying right beside the damn laptop.”
I thought about it for a minute, trying to remember some of the details from the computer classes I’d taken in college. “Look, sometimes in class when I was working on a program or presentation and ended up totally screwing it up, my professor would be able to take control over my system from his own computer. I’d sit back in my chair and watch the cursor moving around the screen like the stylus on a Ouija board and he’d fix whatever the heck I’d done wrong.”
Simon didn’t appear convinced.
“I’m not entirely sure how, but it can be done. I’ve seen it. And someone with a little computer knowledge probably wouldn’t have much trouble, especially if they got their hands on your laptop one day when you were in the shower or something.”
Simon stopped arguing, obviously seeing the plausibility of the scenario I’d described. It was plausible. Outrageous and vicious and vindictive…but plausible.
“It makes sense,” I said softly, completely