The succulents were dying. Ben took a break from the laptop screen, looked over at their stringy and browned forms sitting on the shelves by the windows, each in a beautiful planter Luna had made. He tried not to think about the suffering plants as visual representations of his weakening hope. On the screen, the log-in page for the Best Western Dayton’s staff account system was reloading.
There had indeed been a way into the system, as he knew there would be. It had been as simple as logging into the hotel’s intranet as the employee Andy had targeted with her little scam, Dammerly Tsaba, and working from there. The internal system the hotel was using to manage its staff was pretty standard. Ben had seen it used for hospitality workers before in restaurants, diners, and casinos. He went in and accessed Tsaba’s last pay slip, got his employee ID number, and noted down his manager’s name on a piece of paper beside the laptop. He then went to the employee profile, where Tsaba could edit his address and personal contact details, and accessed his staff email account. Ben noted that Dammerly Tsaba’s staff email account began with “DTsaba,” which probably meant his manager’s username followed the same format. Ben clicked the option to change Tsaba’s account password. He got lucky. Instructions below the box where he could type his new password told him that the password could be as long as ten characters, but there was no mention of a punctuation mark or a numerical digit being necessary. That simple fact would cut the possibilities down from sextillions to quadrillions.
Ben went back to the staff log-in page and entered the log-in username “GFannet,” making an educated guess that Tsaba’s boss, Gloria Fannet, would have access to the hotel’s CCTV system. Tsaba, a lowly valet, did not. Ben flipped the page down, went to a folder on his desktop, and opened a password detection program. He told the program he wanted a password of not more than ten characters. When his program had generated an algorithm, Ben copied the link it provided. Once he had pasted the link into the password box on the log-in page, the program set about guessing Fannet’s log-in password from what Ben supposed was about four quadrillion possibilities. The password box filled with numbers and letters scrolling so quickly they blurred gray. Even with the program checking a thousand possibilities per second, Ben knew it could take days to find what he wanted. He looked at the plants again, then decided to get up and dig.
Ben had turned the apartment upside down at least five times since Luna and Gabe’s disappearance. He was sure he had been through every drawer, examined every sheet of paper, emptied every container, turned out every picture frame, and felt for hidden compartments in the base of every drawer and cabinet. In Luna’s handbag collection, he had emptied every pocket and unzipped every sleeve. But Andy’s comment about finding the password to Matt’s office computer on a Post-it note right by his monitor had Ben rattled. He didn’t want to have missed something in such a mind-bogglingly stupid way inside the apartment, something Andy might have spotted without really knowing what she was seeing, because she wasn’t familiar with his and Luna’s lives. He set about his mission, hoping to drag the sunrise closer to him through sheer mindless labor.
Ben had completed an exhaustive survey of Gabriel’s room, the kitchen, and the bathroom and was sitting on the floor in Luna’s room, with the contents of her filing cabinet emptied and spread around him, when a dark realization struck. Ben rose up onto his knees and patted the piles of carefully categorized paperwork around him. There was one for utilities. One for car-related paperwork. One for personal items—the old love letters and photographs Ben assumed all women had tucked away somewhere. There was one for Gabriel’s art. Ben’s hand fell on the pile from the folder Luna had marked “Certificates.” He toppled the carefully stacked pile, exposing her high school graduation certificate, her birth certificate, some awards and recognitions she’d received at various jobs. When the little blue booklet he was looking for did not reveal itself, Ben gathered up the stack and heaped it into his lap.
He leafed through the pile from beginning to end.
Then he leafed through it again.
Then he spread the pile out, fanned the individual pages.
Luna’s passport was not there.
Ben went to a pile of papers marked “Gabriel: Certificates.” He pushed aside the kid’s preschool enrollment, birth certificate, immunization records, searching for the passport.
The little blue booklet slid out from under a Helper of the Week award trimmed with gold filigree. Ben snatched the book up and flipped through it, his hands shaking.
He held his head.
Luna’s passport was gone. Gabriel’s was here. Ben clawed at his skull, tried to imagine a scenario in which he’d been wrong about Luna’s passport still being in the apartment after they disappeared. It had been. It had been. He was sure. Five times before, he’d noted that the passport was there in the file full of Luna’s certificates. Five times, he discovered the passport, held it, flipped through it, checked its expiry date, made sure it was current. Five times, he’d nurtured the little ember of hope—that could easily have been dread—that wherever Luna was, she hadn’t taken her and Gabriel’s passports with her. She had not deliberately fled from him. She had not “gone back to Mexico, where she belonged.” Ben knew that each of those times, he’d placed the passport back exactly where he found it. Keeping the apartment exactly as it was when Luna and Gabriel disappeared wasn’t just a grief ritual. It was a strategy. He was inside a living time capsule, a moment frozen when Luna turned away from the door to the bedroom in which he’d been sleeping off his illness, and he wished her a groggy and weakened goodbye, and never saw her again. The time capsule had been his to examine, yes, but also to preserve for future examination.
And yet it had been disturbed. Sure, he’d had to disturb it himself a few times. He’d had to keep it clean. Keep it functional. But this tiny detail, he was searingly, achingly certain, he had not altered. It had meant so much that the passport was there.
What did it mean, now, that it was gone?
Ben stood and looked down at the papers at his feet. A siren wailed somewhere, tickling the highly trained senses embedded in his brain that were addicted to the call. He went to the kitchen table and snatched up his phone to call Andy. As he did, the algorithm scrolling through password possibilities hit a match, waking the computer. The log-in page disappeared, and Gloria Fannet’s staff profile popped up.
He was in.