Killer Move - Michael Marshall [32]
“So it must be someone scanning our wifi,” I said, looking across the room to where the unit sat, close to where the cable feed entered the house.
“Oh, definitely,” Steph said acidly. “I wonder: will it be the Jorgenssons or the Mortons?”
She had a point. Quite apart from the basic absurdity of our neighbors wanting to screw with my e-mail, there were practical issues. The Jorgenssons were Longacres’ token oldsters, in their midseventies: healthy, golf-obsessed, surrogate grandparents to half the kids in the community—and no one’s idea of cybervillains escaped out of The Matrix. On the other side we had the Mortons. Again, nice people, and moreover a family who cleaved to a genteel subdivision of some Christian faith that had a downer on the Internet as a whole—source, as it is, of unwholesome images and concepts and ways of being. I remembered being apprised of this a while back, during an affable but interminable dinner party. They didn’t even have cable.
I sat back from the screen, baffled. “It’s not going to be the Smiths opposite, either. I had to install Microsoft Office on their computer for them.”
Steph chose not to reply. She just sat there looking at me, her right foot twitching up and down.
“It could be war-driving,” I offered weakly.
I was surprised to discover she knew what that meant. She poured scorn on the idea, but eventually conceded that someone’s kid in the community might possibly have the hardware, know-how, and adolescent assholeness to have cruised by the house, taken a snapshot of what was traveling through the ether, and snatched my e-mail and Amazon passwords from it.
The pictures remained harder to explain. I tried to tidy this away by harping on about the wifi conundrum, but Steph wasn’t buying. She asked how some kid could even know about Karren in order to take the pictures. I didn’t know the answer. All I could do was say what hadn’t happened. I denied taking the pictures, denied all knowledge of how they’d ended up on my machine. Denied it loud, denied it long. There was nowhere else that the conversation could go—nowhere, at least, without the fade down and back up of sleep.
Her anger had burned down to embers by the time she went to bed, but her eyes looked hollow. There was no parting shot before she went upstairs. She merely looked at me as if wondering what she was seeing, and then went. Maybe I should have gone up with her, but it didn’t seem like the right course.
Instead I went and floated around the pool for a while. I was thinking about the photographs, mainly, and eventually found myself opening doors that hadn’t occurred to me earlier—preoccupied as I had been with the clear and present danger, with dealing with the emotional firefight in front of me.
There was another thing to consider, I realized, something I hadn’t mentioned to Steph. Partly because I hadn’t noticed it at first, but then, once I had, because I didn’t know what it meant, and there was enough incomprehensibility between us. I hadn’t thrown the pictures of Karren away, though that might have seemed an obvious thing to do (“Look! See! I throw them away! Ugh!”). Steph had insisted that I should. She’d even tried to do it herself, shoving me aside and skating her fingers across the track pad during one of the more heated portions of the discussion. I’d used her own tactics back at her, asking what the point would be when I could have stashed copies on the net or on the memory card of this alleged camera that