Ben’s middle name was Horace. Benjamin Horace Kristal. Good thing I remembered that because Ben Kristal turned up zilch. And we still didn’t hit pay dirt until we typed in Benjamin. Things must’ve been pretty formal at the St. Luke’s Center.
We’d gone to the Bellmore library—a new addition to Tabs’s circuit. The woman librarian looked half-dead but sprang to life when we walked in—probably because she wasn’t used to anyone under eighty being there. She stared at us like specimens in a zoo, until we made it past the thriller section to the completely empty bank of computers.
“You know Nancy Drew was my first girl crush,” Tabs whispered.
Tabs used this thing called BackBox—a hacker’s best friend—plugging a flash drive into the USB port.
“It should get me into the hospital system,” she said. “Don’t imagine they’re worrying a whole lot about cyberpunks.”
I pulled my chair up behind her.
Tabs’s fingers flew across the keys—as if they knew where they were going before she did. Numbers and letters accumulated on the screen like bugs on the windshield of a dangerously speeding car.
“What do they mean?” I whispered.
“Entrance this way.”
She wasn’t bullshitting.
In less than ten minutes we were looking at a page with ST. LUKE’S CENTER PROVIDER PORTAL splashed at the top. She stopped typing, turned around, raised a needed-to-be-plucked eyebrow.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Patient records, I guess. We’re looking for 2007–2008.”
She punched at the keyboard a few times. Frowned.
“It’s a little like being in a dark cave,” she said. “You can go this way or that way and you don’t really know until you go ahead and try it. You can get lost just like that.”
Like Ben had. I pictured the seven-year-old Benjamin Horace Kristal wending his way through Tom Sawyer’s cave. And then suddenly having no idea where he was—clawing at the blackness with both hands, surrounded by ghost chatter. Is this what it was like for my sister? Ben later wrote on his memorial page. Being lost in a deep, dark hole, but never being found . . . ?
It was taking Tabs a while to navigate through the dead ends. The librarian kept making the rounds like a sentry—probably checking to see if we were accessing porn.
Tabs looked up and flashed the librarian an innocent-looking smile—like Do you think little ole me would ever do anything even semi-unlawful?
Guess not. The librarian creaked on her way—her heavy orthopedic-looking shoes squeaking with each step, which would seem like a definite no-no in a library, but maybe not, since it had basically turned into a senior center.
“Here we go . . . ,” Tabs whispered. “User list . . . word list . . . hack-me subdirectory . . .”
She was talking to herself now. Lost in the task at hand. Fingers dancing, eyes zigzagging up and down the screen. Sighing a lot. That too. “It’s password protected,” she muttered.
“What’s that?” I asked her, pointing to words positioned directly beneath St. Luke’s Center that were in a language I didn’t recognize.
Sinite parvulos venire ad me et nolite eos vetare . . .
“Latin,” Tabs said. “I was stupid enough to take it junior year. Suffer the little children . . . and . . . and . . . forbid them not to come to me. I mean, this is a Catholic hospital, right?”
Latin, okay, sure. Of which I knew one word—the one imprinted on my left hip in florid red ink: Vidi. I saw.
And suddenly I did.
That it just might be possible I knew two Latin words.
Another word besides Vidi that suspiciously looked and sounded a lot like those other words on the screen.
“What if it’s in Latin?”
“What?”
“The password.” I told her to try that word—the one that had just come to me.
“Huh?” Tabs shrugged, then turned and attacked the keyboard again. Ten seconds later, she cackled out loud. Too loud. The librarian shot us a dirty look.
“When I said I wanted to take Latin, my dad said, ‘What the fuck is that good for? You planning on dating Marcus Aurelius?’”
“Were you?” Her head was blocking the screen.
“I was actually more into Sappho. Guess we just found out what Latin’s good for. The password for patient records. The word you gave me—it’s Latin for therapy. That’s it. It was that fucking simple. Okay, how’d you know that?”
I didn’t answer her.
I was too busy staring at the screen. At the password that had just unlocked St. Luke’s patient records.
L-O-R-E-M.