“Okay. And you’re a white hat?”
“Totally.” He tapped his head as if touching an imaginary white hat and let me pass into the room. It was covered in Legos, books, shoe boxes full of pieces of things, a soldering iron I hoped was off.
“Where’s the bed?”
He rolled an office chair to me.
“No screens in the bedroom. So this is like, whatever, my work space. Okay so, I developed this to do my project and, remember, white hat.” He touched his forehead again, absently as if it were automatic.
He rolled the ball back to the desk and sat on it, bouncing while I sat in the chair. The characters rolled fast inside the little window.
“What’s all this?”
“This is the script running, so this is how it works. I went to the LA County Registrar and found out what their email naming convention is: first initial last name @LACR. Easy. Then I found out what department has access to birth records and then found out who’s in that department. From there I can rebuild email addresses and put them with names. So then I have this other script . . .” He opened another window. “It checks social media for those people’s birthdays, addresses past and present, pet names, hobbies—”
“Whoa.”
“White hat.” Head touch. “So then I developed this script that takes all that and creates possible passwords, then I just run an easy-peasy brute-force attack, which, oh look! Bang.”
Before I could object or ask him if his dad knew what he was doing, he was on the search page for employees of the LA County Registrar, tapping keys lightning fast.
“So then it’s just putting in the password, doing a search for my name, and here we are, my birth certificate, which is the only thing I’m here to see, white hat, since Dad says he can’t find it.”
The screen showed a scanned birth certificate with the seal of the state of California, county of Los Angeles.
“Huh,” Phin said. “That’s . . . weird.”
I looked closely with him. “What?”
“That’s not Dad.”
He pointed to a section on the certificate.
FATHER: George Owen Whitman.
The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t place it.
“You should really talk to your father.”
Phin moved his finger across the screen.
MOTHER: Genevieve Tremaine Kincaid.
“Wait. Her last name is right, but . . .” He ran his finger over the baby’s name. “Could someone have my same name and birthday?”
“Obviously. I think—”
I thought a lot of things. Genevieve Tremaine Kincaid had a first and middle name too specific to be ignored.
Phin bounced up and went to his closet. The sliding door was already open, revealing the disaster inside. He jumped for a box on the top shelf.
“There’s an SSN associated with the birth certificate, so if I could just see mine.” He managed to grab the hanging corner of a folder, and the whole top shelf tumbled down. Undaunted, he picked up the box and opened it, letting the top fall. He took out a little wallet and picked out his Social Security card. He put it between his teeth while he got back on the big blue yoga ball.
His body language said he was very sure he was only checking the obvious before moving on.
“Huh,” he said, then whipped around to me. “Sometimes with ADHD I don’t pay attention to details and I miss things, so can you check this?” He tapped the screen where the associated SSN was and handed me the card.
I checked. They were the same.
“You really should talk to your dad about this.”
“Sure.”
New window.
Google.
Genevieve Tremaine Kincaid.
Nothing much. But he scrolled down, and results with Kincaid below it appeared.
The screen flooded with images of a beautiful woman who, now that I could see them side by side, looked as much like Phin as Carter did. Same coloring. Same nose. Same almond-shaped eyes. Her full, real last name must have been known and not known at the same time. You’d find it if you looked it up, but eleven years later, who was looking?
Phin clicked on one picture of her where she was smiling, sweet and approachable. Above the picture was a bold headline with the word murdered in it.
“If this is my mother . . .”
“You should talk to your father.”
I think he heard me the third time, but I couldn’t be sure. He didn’t make a move when the stairs creaked.
Carter, still in his coat, carrying a milk carton–shaped shopping bag, turned from the stairs into the hall. From the end, he could see the computer screen.
I waved. When he saw what his son was looking at, he dropped the bag.
“Phin?” I said softly.
I was barely finished with the last syllable when Carter leaped into the room, stepping on Legos and open notebooks, crushing a shoe box, reaching behind a chair and snapping the switch on the power strip.
The room went dark.
“Go to bed.”
“I haven’t finished my project.”
“A D isn’t going to kill you. Go to bed.”
“Who is Genevieve Kincaid? Is she my mother?”
“Go to bed!”
“I want to know!”
“I want a minute of peace and I want you to clean this room, but we don’t always get what we want. Now go to bed!”
Phin stormed into the hall, grabbed one of the doorknobs while still moving forward, opened the door with the force of the torque, spun, and— “Don’t you slam that—”
—slammed the door so hard the walls shook.
Carter went to the hall, paused in front of his son’s door. I wanted to tell him not to go in, but this was bigger than I was, bigger than whatever Carter and I had developed in the short time we’d known each other. He passed the door, picked up the milk, and went downstairs.
I wanted to go home. Whatever was going on, this family needed space. I felt like an intruder in something deeply pivotal and personal.
I hustled down the stairs and found Carter in the kitchen, opening the carton of milk.
“I can stay at Darlene’s.”
“Yeah. I don’t think so.” He slugged right from the container and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. I sat on the edge of the nook.
“I can stay in a hotel?”
He put the milk away and stuck his head in the refrigerator.
“I’m not trying to speak ill of the dead or anything, but his mother was a fucking pain in my ass.” He came up with plastic packages, kicked the door shut, and dumped cold cuts on the nook. “From the time we were kids.”
Plates. Knives. Napkins. Little cutting board. All on the nook. He stood at the end of it. Had she been a childhood sweetheart? Had they married, shared a name, lived happily until she cheated on him with George Owen Whitman?
I stayed silent. He was deep in thought as he put two pieces of bread on each of two plates.
“She dropped her clothes all over the house. She always left the front closet door open. Always. When Dad got on her about it, she blamed me, and I had to get up and close it.” He held a yellow jar. “Mustard?”
“Yes.”