11
An academic adviser from the community college leaves me a message, saying that they are aware of my “extenuating circumstances” and if I want to come in for a meeting, he will help me find a way to fix my record. Madison, a girl who???d been in most of my classes at school, also calls, leaving another Are you okay? message.
I don’t return either call. I go back to work, picking up a few more cleaning jobs, six a week now, decent money. Meg’s laptop stays on my desk, along with the rest of my schoolbooks, all of them collecting dust. Until one afternoon, the doorbell rings. Scottie is on the porch, with Samson, who’s tied up to a rail. “I’m here to take you up on your offer to kick my butt,” he says.
“Come on in.”
We fire up the computer.
“What are we playing?” I ask.
“I thought we’d start with Soldier of Solitude.”
“What’s that?”
“Here, I’ll show you.” He clicks on the web program. “Hmm.” He fiddles around some more. “I don’t see your network. Maybe we have to reboot the router.”
I shake my head. “There’s no router, Scottie. No Internet.”
He looks at me, then looks like around like he’s remembering who I am, who Tricia is. “Oh, that’s okay. We can play something on your computer.” He pulls the laptop back toward him. “What games do you have?”
“I don’t know. It depends if Meg had any games.” Scottie and I look at each other and almost smile. Meg hated video games. Thought they sucked out valuable brain cells. And sure enough, there’s nothing on the computer except what came preloaded.
“We can play solitaire,” I say.
“You can’t play solitaire with two people,” Scottie says. “That’s why it’s called solitaire.”
I feel like I’ve let him down. I start to close the computer. But then Scottie holds it open. “Is that what she sent the note from?”
Scottie is ten. I am pretty sure it’s not healthy for him to be talking about stuff like this. Not with me. I close the computer.
“Cody, nobody tells me anything.”
His voice is so plaintive. I remember the good-bye she sent him, also from this computer. “Yes, this is the computer she sent the note from.”
“Can I see it?”
“Scottie—”
“I know everyone wants to protect my innocence and stuff, but my sister swallowed poison. It’s kinda too late.”
I sigh. I have a printout of her suicide note in the box under my bed, but I know that’s not what he wants to see. I know he’s seen the note, or read it, or heard about it. But he wants to see its origin. I open up the sent mail file. I show him the note. With squinting eyes, he reads it.
“Did you ever think it was weird that she said that the decision was ‘my own to make’?”
I shake my head. I hadn’t.
“It’s just, when we used to get busted for doing something together and she wanted to keep me out of trouble, that’s what she’d tell Mom and Dad. ‘Scottie had nothing to do with it. It was my own decision.’ It was how she’d protect me.”
I remember all the times Meg dragged Scottie into one of her schemes and then had to extricate him. She was always taking the fall for him. Most of the time, deservedly so. I still don’t quite get what he’s saying, so the ten-year-old has to spell it out for me.
“It’s almost like she’s protecting someone.”
12
After Scottie leaves, I go through Meg’s emails yet again. There’s all that deleted sent mail, which I haven’t been able to understand. Why would she delete only the sent messages but not the inbox? Or did she delete mail from her inbox, too, only I don’t know what to look for? Why those six weeks? And what else did she delete? Is there a way to find the old messages? Are they gone for good? I have no idea. I don’t know anyone who would know this.
But then I remember Harry Kang, Meg’s roommate, who studies computers. I fumble for the scrap of paper Alice wrote her cell phone on, and I call it. She’s not there, so I leave a message, asking her to have Harry call me.
The next morning, at seven forty-five, my phone rings, waking me up.
“Hello.” My voice is groggy.
“This is Harry Kang,” he says.
I sit up in my bed. “Oh, Harry, hi, it’s Cody.”
“I know. I called you.”
“Right. Thank you. Look, I don’t know if you can help me with this, but I have a computer and I’m trying to find deleted emails.”
“You’re calling me because your computer crashed?”
“It’s not my computer. It’s Meg’s. And I’m trying to recover files that I think she tried to delete.”
He pauses now, as if considering. “What kind of files?”
I explain to him about all the missing sent messages and how I’m trying to recover them, and recover any other messages that might’ve been deleted.
“It may be possible to do that using a data recovery program. But if Meg wanted those files deleted, maybe we should respect her privacy.”
“I know. But there was something in her suicide note that makes me think that she might not have acted alone, and then there’s a bunch of missing emails. It doesn’t feel right.”
The line goes quiet for a minute. “You mean someone might’ve coerced her?”
Can you coerce someone to drink poison? “I don’t know what I mean. That’s why I want to find those emails. I wonder if they’re in this folder I found in her trash. It won’t open.”
“What happens when you try?”
“Hang on.”
I turn on the laptop and drag the file from the trash. I open it and get the encryption message. I tell Harry.
“Try this.” He feeds me a bunch of complicated keystrokes. Nothing works. The file remains encrypted.
“Hmm.” He gives me another set of commands to try, but still they don’t work.
“It seems like a pretty sophisticated encryption,” Harry says. “Whoever wrote it knew what they were doing.”
“So it’s locked for good?”
Harry laughs. “No. Nothing ever is. If I had the computer, I could probably decrypt it for you. You can send it down if you want, but you’ll have to hurry because school ends in two weeks.”