I frowned. “But how many wakes have you had?”
“Five. Each one lasts about five hours. How many have you had?”
“One.”
This had to be what Martha meant about instability, trains speeding in different directions at different speeds, the risk of never being in the same place at the same time to vote.
There wasn’t time to worry about it, not yet. Kipling had opened the door and was beckoning me inside.
There on the couches sat Mr. and Mrs. Mason, tied up along with their four children, their eyes red from crying. They were watching Whitley in mute horror. She looked like a South American guerilla, bandana wrapped around her head, T-shirt knotted in a crop top around her waist, a mad glint in her eyes. She was holding a gun on Mr. Mason. The side of his face was swollen. It was a shock seeing Jim’s family like this, when at the last wake they were crisp as fresh flower arrangements, floating around, air-kissing people at Great-Uncle Carl’s funeral.
Spotting me, Whitley widened her eyes in surprise. She raced over.
“Beatrice,” she said, hushed. “Where the hell did you come from?”
I gave her an abbreviated version of what had happened, how I’d accidentally returned to a different date but managed to get back to the coastal road to change the wake.
“So you’re all right, then?”
I nodded. “Where’s Martha?”
“Trying to log on to Edgar’s computer. Not having much luck.”
“What about Cannon?”
“He’s gone.”
I stared at her. “What?”
She shook her head with a bleak look. “He never arrived. We have no idea where he is. One second he was there, and the next? Nowhere.”
I recalled the person I’d seen sprinting into the woods. Cannon.
“Hello? Oh, my God. Is that you?”
Mrs. Mason, sitting on the couch, craned her neck to get a better look at me. I’d never seen her so forlorn. She was almost unrecognizable. Her face was red; her blond hair, usually so immaculate, had wilted like a plant left too close to a radiator.
“Who? Who are you talking about?” asked Mr. Mason.
“That little girl Jim went with in school. You know. Her.” She glared at me. “You’re involved in this? You let us go right now. We have no information about Jimmy.”
I grabbed the gun from Whitley and pointed it at Mrs. Mason. She gasped.
“Tell me what you know about Jim’s death,” I said.
She glanced at her husband, terrified, then back at me. She began to whimper. It was an odd sound, like a beach ball losing air through a tiny hole.
“Leave her alone!” bellowed Edgar suddenly. “Gloria has nothing to do with this, you little con artist!”
I pointed the gun at him. “What happened to Jim?”
“I’ve told you people countless times now,” he said, spitting. “We know nothing.”
“That’s impossible.”
He shook his head. “The police told us it was suicide.”
“Jim never would have done that. And you know it.”
“I don’t. I don’t know it.” Mr. Mason appeared to be crying, staring at the floor.
That was when I remembered.
I stepped behind him, inspecting his wrists, which were bound with zip ties. I yanked up the cuff of his shirtsleeve. Mr. Mason knew what I was after, because he immediately began to contort himself, trying to move his hands away.
“No! Don’t you dare—”
It was the black rubber bracelet I’d seen him wearing. He still had it on, five years later, though this one seemed an even more sophisticated version, with digital letters and punctuation with the numbers. I couldn’t pull it off his wrist, so I went into the kitchen, returning with a knife.
“Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare!”
I sliced the bracelet off his wrist.
“Now you’ve done it. Good for you. Bravo. Kiss your future goodbye, missy, because you’ll be spending the rest of your life in a hole so foul you’ll beg to be sent to prison.”
“I should be so lucky,” I said.
I turned to Whitley, who was blinking at me in shock.
“What got into you?” she whispered.
“I’ll be in Mr. Mason’s office,” I said, racing up the spiral staircase.
Martha was stunned to see me.
“Oh, my God. What happened?”
“It’s a long story. But I’m fine.”
I raced into the all-glass tower, pulling a chair alongside Martha behind the hulking desk. She couldn’t seem to stop staring. Naturally it made me wonder if she had been the one to stab me with the bumblebee pin. But there was no figuring it out. Not yet.
“I’ve been trying to log on to Edgar’s laptop,” she said, indicating the screen. “It’s impossible. There are three prompts for encrypted passwords.”
I stared down at the shifting line of numbers, symbols, and letters on the bracelet. They reset every fifteen seconds. I typed the displayed sequence into the three password boxes.
The computer unlocked.
“Are you kidding me?” whispered Martha in awe. “Like that? How did you—?”
“I’ll explain later.”
Before I clicked into the desktop, I placed a piece of tape over the webcam. I didn’t know what would happen when it became clear that there was a security breach, but I knew we’d have to work quickly. Edgar Mason had a personalized email interface called Torchlight Command. As soon as I opened the program, a timer recording my activity appeared in the upper right corner of the screen.
The first thing to do was to search for emails from Jim.
We couldn’t find one. Searching for the names of his brothers and sisters turned up countless emails, but there was not a single message either to or from Jim.
“He’s been wiped from his father’s email,” whispered Martha. “Why?”
“Maybe he wrote something inflammatory.”
She shrugged.
On the hard drive, there were over two thousand folders on a cloud server called Torchlight Library. I searched for Jim Mason. Nothing came up. We found a trove of financial records, listings of obscure holding companies with names like Redshore Capital America and Groundview Fund, with addresses in the Cayman Islands and Panama City. There were trade receipts and wire transactions from a bank in Turkey to another in Switzerland, some of which listed dollar amounts so enormous they looked like typos. If any of it was illegal, or tied in any way to Jim’s death, the truth was buried under layers of names, numbers, and symbols, none of which could be easily excavated.
“Maybe Edgar’s committing fraud,” said Martha. “Sweatshops. Child exploitation. Maybe Jim found out about it, and they had a major falling-out.”
“If Jim had found out something like that, he’d have been devastated, yes. But he wouldn’t have killed himself.”
She shrugged. “What if Edgar hired someone to kill Jim?”
I stared at her, surprised. “His own son?”
“If he thought he was going to lose the empire he built? Why not?”
Suddenly she sat up, frowning, pointing at the glass walls. I realized in horror that every pane was breaking. All around us thin cracks were spidering through the glass, branching out, one after the other.
“The instability of the Neverworld,” whispered Martha.
I nodded and hurriedly clicked back into the in-box. I certainly didn’t want her to wonder what the destruction meant, if it was all being caused by me. I leaned forward, squinting at the screen.
“Most of Edgar’s emails are from this woman named Janet,” I said, clearing my throat. “His executive assistant. They have a system where she reads his emails and summarizes them.”
“?‘Chris Endleberg, president of Princeton, called,’?” Martha read slowly. “?‘He appreciates the way you handled the matter re S.O. They’ll hold off on disciplinary measures.’ Huh. Okay. What else?”