Asking for Trouble - Leslie Kelly [84]
Promising to be gone only an hour or two, he left, and I went straight to my laptop. I wished, for a second, that I knew a little more about computers because I’d dearly love to try to track down whoever had been piggybacking on Simon’s network. But my knowledge was pretty basic.
I did, however, have a whole lot of experience with that modern marvel, Google. So, not even certain what I was looking for, I went to the familiar site and started typing names into the search bar. I started with the most pressing situation— Simon’s ghost.
Louisa Mitchell turned up nothing useful and a million sites that meant absolutely nothing to me. So I moved on, suddenly wanting to know more about Charleston.
Certainly the police in Charleston had searched for Simon’s attackers this way, but it was worth a try. So I typed in what I had. And using just the suspects names, Linda and Joseph Harrington, I again got a huge amount of hits.
Most of the first few pages were about the attack in Charleston, but the rest ranged from engagement notices to promotion announcements to articles on economics. Pages of them, and obviously too much to sort through. “This won’t work, the names are too common.”
I went a step further. Added in the mysterious Uncle Lou and the city of Philadelphia.
Which still went absolutely nowhere.
“Dammit,” I muttered, still trying to catch that thought.
I kept playing around with different combinations, using quotations here and there. With no luck.
Finally, realizing my eyes were beginning to get blurry, I thought about the fact that I had never even finished the job I was sent here to do. I’d gotten some good stuff on Josef Zangara for my professor, but I hadn’t even sent him all the information I’d collected. So opening my file of notes, I did a quick spell check, intending to zip them right out to him as an attachment.
I barely paid attention as the misspelled words popped up for verification or correction. Most were just formal names the software didn’t recognize. I was a pretty good speller. And honestly, I was so anxious to get back to work on Simon’s situation that I almost just said to hell with it and sent it without finishing. But there were a couple of typos, so I stuck with it. No sense having my first important, paid job look sloppy.
Then another box came up, with a misspelled word. Also a typo.
“Mrs. Zangara.” My eyes focused on what I’d written. Sighing, I said, “Obviously your name was not spelled Loussa unless you were one loose-a woman.”
Grabbing my handwritten notes to ascertain what the heck the woman’s real name had been, I got it and went right back to the document on my computer scene.
It wasn’t until I’d corrected the spelling that the word actually sunk in to my brain. I froze, and at that moment, that elusive, annoying little uncaptured memory burst into my mind like a dazzling ray of sparkling sunshine.
“Oh, my God,” I whispered. “Louisa Zangara.”
Louisa. Like Louisa Mitchell, the woman who’d been bothering Simon’s uncle. Louisa was not exactly an uncommon name but it wasn’t run-of-the-mill, either.
That’s what had been bugging me since last night. Some part of my brain had obviously remembered seeing the name before, when looking into the Zangara case, but I hadn’t been able to pull it into focus.
“Sorry, professor, you need to go back on the back burner.”
Immediately flipping back to the search screen, I typed in several new words. Louisa Mitchell. Louisa Zangara. Seaton House.
And immediately found what I had been searching for all along.
“This can’t be true,” I whispered, staring blankly at the words swimming before my eyes. I had to read it four times before I believed it.
The article was a brief one, from a small town newspaper outside of Philadelphia. It was dated three years ago and was a local interest piece about a woman becoming a centenarian. A Mrs. Louisa Zangara had just celebrated her 100th birthday.
At her side was her loving family, including her son, numerous grandchildren and even