The Neighbor - Lisa Gardner [105]
He looks me right in the eye, and I shiver at what I see there. He doesn’t move a muscle. Neither do I.
“Tell me what you saw Wednesday night,” he states quietly.
“A car, driving down the street.”
“What kind of car?”
“The kind with a lot of antennas. Maybe a limo service; it looked like a dark sedan.”
“What did you tell the police?”
“That you’re a homicidal motherfucker,” I spit out. “Trying to offer me up on a serving platter to save your sorry hide.”
He glances at my head, my hands, my forearms. “What did you burn this evening?”
“Anything I wanted to.”
“Do you collect porn, Aidan Brewster?”
“None of your business!”
Jones sets down the ice pack. He stands up in front of me. I fall back. I can’t help it. Those deep dark eyes, rimmed in blood and bruises and God knows what. I have a sense of déjà vu, that I have seen eyes like that before. Maybe in prison. Maybe the first guy who dropped me in a bloody heap and banged the hell out of me. I realize for the first time that something about my neighbor isn’t quite human.
Jones steps forward.
“No,” I hear myself gasp. “I burned love letters, dammit. My own personal notes. I’m telling you, I’m not a pervert!”
His gaze sweeps the room. “Got a computer, Aidan?”
“No, dammit. I’m not allowed. Terms of my parole!”
“Stay off the Internet,” he says. “I’m telling you: One visit to one chat room to say one word to one teenage girl, and I will break you. You will swallow your own tongue just to get away from me.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
He leans down over me. “I’m the one who knows you raped your own stepsister, Aidan. I’m the one who knows exactly why you pay your stepfather a hundred bucks a week. And I’m the one who knows just how much your love will cost your now anorexic victim, for the rest of her sorry life.”
“But you can’t know,” I say stupidly. “Nobody knows. I passed the lie detector test. I tell you, I passed the lie detector test!”
He smiles now, but something about that look, combined with his flat eyes, sends shivers down my spine. He turns, walks down the hall.
“She loved me,” I call out weakly behind him.
“If she loved you, she would’ve returned to you by now, don’t you think?”
Jones shuts the door behind himself. I stand alone in my apartment, burned hands fisted by my sides, and think how much I hate his guts. Then I uncap the second bottle of Maker’s Mark and get down to business.
| CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE |
In the beginning, I worried about two things: how to ask my questions of Ethan Hastings without giving away too much and how to plot against my husband given my extremely limited free time. The solution to both problems turned out to be surprisingly simple.
I met with Ethan every day during my free period. I told him I was creating a sixth grade teaching module for Internet navigation. Under the guise of crafting a class project, Ethan answered all of my questions and more.
I started with online security. We couldn’t have sixth-graders visiting porn sites, right? Ethan demonstrated for me how to manage account and browser permissions to limit where users could go.
That night after Ree went to bed, I booted up the family computer and went to work. I opened the security window in AOL and busily “permissioned” away. Of course, after I went to bed, it occurred to me that Jason might not use AOL to surf the web. Maybe he used Internet Explorer or another browser.
I returned to Ethan the next day.
“Is there any way to see exactly which websites have been visited by each computer? You know, that way I can check and see if each student is going where he or she is supposed to be going and that our network security protocols are working.”
Ethan explained to me that each time a user clicks on a website, a cookie is created by that website and temporary copies of the web pages are saved in the computer’s cache file. The computer also stores a browser history, so that by glancing at the right files, I could tell exactly where that computer had been on the World Wide Web.