Grandma threw back the curtains, turned the TV to BBC International, and flipped on the lights about seven hours before I was remotely interested in being awake.
I pulled a pillow over my head and said, “What the hell are you doing?”
“Language, Mercy, please,” said Grandma. “Now get up and get going.”
“It’s like two-thirty in the morning.”
“It’s six o’clock in the morning.”
Grandma’s pillow joined mine until she yanked it off.
“Hey!”
“We’re leaving in a half hour. No time to shower, but you don’t need to. Nobody will be smelling you,” she said.
“I don’t smell.” Do I?
“That’s right. Up and at ’em. We’ll get breakfast afterward.”
“After what?” I asked, rolling over and searching for the remote. I so didn’t need to hear dreadful news on some political strife or an earthquake. “Rubble Hill. Isolda told me about it and we’re going to hike it to see the sunrise.” Grandma pinned a brooch on her sweater and looked at me expectantly.
“Are you still drunk?” I asked.
“Don’t be silly. I’m Irish.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“I took an Emergen-C last night while you were asleep. I’m right as rain,” she said, frowning at me. “I should’ve given you some. You’re very pale.”
“I didn’t sleep well.”
“How come? Last night was wonderful. I can’t remember when I had such a good time.”
I had nightmares about having a kid like my dad and going freaking crazy.
“I was talking to Spidermonkey,” I said. “I am on a case, remember?”
“Oh, that.”
“Yes, that.” And so many other things.
She tossed a pair of jeans at me. “The hike will clear your head.”
“Never going to happen,” I said.
“I’m going to brush my teeth and when I come out. I want you dressed,” Grandma said.
“Good luck with that.” I found the remote, turned off the bad news, and checked my phone. Spidermonkey hadn’t come back with anything new since I’d gone to sleep. Disappointing, but expected. I had been working long into the night like I’d told Grandma, but it wasn’t on our case. Spidermonkey and I were going through the new lead she’d given me. Gladys Watts was really Giséle. Spidermonkey was absolutely stunned that that hadn’t turned up. He had no idea that she was French either. Gladys Watts had an American birth certificate. She was supposed to have been born in Iowa to American parents. Spidermonkey hadn’t had any reason to question her documentation and had taken it at face value. Everything added up until I threw France into the works. Grandma didn’t give me a last name, so all he had to go on was Giséle and the timeline.
“You really think Elias the Odd was Elijah’s father?” Spidermonkey asked.
“Definitely,” I said. “No doubts.”
“The numbers don’t line up. Elias disappeared in October 1910. Thomas Watts married Gladys in December 1910 and Elijah was born in September 1911.”
“They got a fake birth certificate for Giséle. They could get one for Elijah,” I said.
The two of us combed through ships manifests looking for a Giséle. I’d begun to think it was impossible when Spidermonkey found a Giséle Donadieu on a ship out of Marseille on November 1, 1910. She took a fast steamer and made it to New York in two weeks. He could find no trace of her after that. Giséle Donadieu disappeared from history. She never made it on a census and had no death certificate.
“What about Gladys?” I asked. “Can you find anything on her so-called parents?”
“There’s nothing, not in Iowa anyway, but it’s possible I just don’t know where to look. Don’t get too excited.”
“Too late. I’ve got a feeling and I got it the second Grandma said Gladys wasn’t her real name. I knew she’d be French. I just knew.”
“But you thought it might be Josiah Bled until you heard Elijah’s birthdate,” he said.
“I did. I mean come on. Josiah was a ladies’ man. It would track for him to have sired a child out of wedlock. Even The Girls think there’s probably at least one or two of his offspring running around somewhere.”
“Really?”
“Of course, but with Giséle coming from France and the name. It’s Elias.”
“The name?” Spidermonkey asked.
“Elijah. It’s out of character for our family. We get pretty boring names. Thomas, George. So I looked it up. Elias and Elijah are basically the same name. Two different versions of it.”
“That is a bit of a coincidence.”
“We’re not Watts at all. I know it,” I said.
“What’s your theory?”
“Giséle is the prostitute that supposedly broke Elias’ heart.”
“That’s a rough take on your ancestor,” said Spidermonkey.
“I’m not saying it’s true. People can be pretty harsh. Throughout history women like Josephine Bonaparte, for instance, have been called prostitutes without any proof just because they had power or made someone mad. I’m just saying it’s Giséle. She obviously had some kind of relationship with Elias and he wasn’t called Elias the Odd for nothing. As Moe recently pointed out, the Bleds are known for suicides. He could’ve just been clinically depressed and his friends blamed her.”
“Naming her as a prostitute is a pretty bad indictment.”
“It’s a weapon, calling her that. It made her nothing. Hey, you said something about her name. What was that?”
“Donadieu. They often gave orphans that last name.”
“How did people feel about orphans?” I asked. “Not great. You had no family. No status.”
Spidermonkey began typing. “I’ll look into the name in France and see if I can find where she came from.”
“Elias was a Bled. An orphan wouldn’t have been good enough and who knows what was going on. Grandma said Gladys was smart, a nurse, and started a business. She had a temper. Maybe she caused trouble for Elias’ friends, cutting off his generous ways.”
“She had skills,” said Spidermonkey thoughtfully.
“And initiative,” I said. “I don’t see the prostitute thing.”
“You never know. A female orphan didn’t have a lot of choices back then.”
“She did have money to buy a second-class ticket on a steamer. That wasn’t cheap,” I said.
“What do you think happened?” Spidermonkey asked.
“I think Elias killed himself for whatever reason and Giséle found herself pregnant, so she went to St. Louis for help,” I said.
“But they didn’t help her,” he said softly.
“The prostitute that caused Elias’ suicide turns up pregnant at the family doorstep? No way. Elias’ mother was Brina Bled. She was a force to be reckoned with. She’d never have believed that baby was Elias’. Giséle’s lucky she didn’t have her shot.”
“That’s a good point.”
“What is?”
“I’ll look for an arrest record for Giséle,” he said. “But I’m not convinced that Thomas Watts would do everything you say he did. He was a cop. He had a standing in the community. If there was a hint of scandal, it would’ve ruined his career.”
“All the more reason to turn Giséle into Gladys,” I said.
“And raise another man’s son?”
“They never had any other kids. Maybe he was infertile.”
“Would he know that?” Spidermonkey asked.
“He was no spring chicken at the time he married Gladys, was he?”
Spidermonkey typed and then said, “He was forty-five.”
“It’s not like there were condoms and birth control pills at the time. Maybe he noticed he never got anyone pregnant and figured it out.”
“Funny he never married before Gladys.”
“Are we sure he didn’t?” I asked.
“Nothing popped up, but I’ll take a look,” he said and hung up.
Hours later, he didn’t have anything new and now that I was awake, my mind was buzzing. We were so close. I texted Spidermonkey asking if he had anything on an arrest for Giséle or an earlier marriage for Thomas as Grandma walked out of the bathroom and put her hands on her hips.
“What did I say?”
“Go to sleep Mercy. You’re exhausted,” I said with a grin.
“Hilarious.”
“I thought so.”
“Get up.” She checked her watch. “Moe will be here any minute.”
“He can take you,” I said. “I’m fine here.”
She shook her head. “We can’t leave you unguarded.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Oh, really. I know you lie about things like that,” said my grandmother, doing a masterful impression of Aunt Miriam’s stink eye.
I crossed my heart. “I swear, I won’t go anywhere. I probably won’t get out of bed.”
“I can’t do it. I promised your mother I’d watch you,” she said.
“Look, I’ve got things to do and I can do them right here,” I said.
“Like what?”
I reminded her about the SCP research that Novak had sent me. That alone would take me hours. He’d sent me a ton of links and times, not to mention the kid’s own writings.
“And what will all that stuff tell you?” Grandma asked.
“I won’t know until I look,” I said.
Grandma paced around the room, wringing her hands, torn over the decision. “Why are you so difficult? You are just like your—”
Oh, it’s coming back to you now.
“What?” I asked innocently.
“I had a dream that I was talking about…did we talk about your father last night?” A pink tinge came up under Grandma’s makeup and that was quite a feat. She was not light-handed with the foundation.
“I forget.”
The pink got darker. “What did I say?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
“Did I happen to mention the name…”
“Kevin,” I offered.
Grandma dropped into a chair and put her head in her hands. “I can’t believe I told you that.”
I picked up the room service menu and said, “It’s not a huge surprise considering.”
She looked up. “Considering what?”
“That as a third-grader, my dad had you on drugs.”
“Oh, my God.”
“It’s fine. I should’ve known he was a total pain from day one. Grandad told me about his freak out over the SATs,” I said.
“That was a nightmare. I thought we might have to commit him. He was that crazy over his score and it was a great score.” She buried her head again. “I do love them, all of them.”
“I know.”
“I couldn’t understand it. I was normal. My whole family was normal and I got three weirdos. Three. What are the odds?”
“Pretty good apparently,” I said, thinking of the Bleds.
“Between the shoplifting and the fires and the crying teachers, it’s a wonder I wasn’t committed,” said Grandma.
So this is getting worse.
“My dad stole stuff? My dad. Mr. Law and Order.”
“Goodness no. That was George. He went through a shoplifting phase and Rupert burned down the garage.”
That’s where I get it.
“They’re all right now,” I said.
“I guess.”
“What do you mean, you guess? They’re law-abiding citizens with jobs and stuff,” I said.
Grandma jolted to her feet. “You can’t tell anyone about Kevin.”
She sounded like she was having an affair or something.
“Believe me, I won’t.”
“I love all my boys.” She came and sat down next to me. “I really really do.”
“I believe you,” I said.
“Why? I told you that Kevin was my favorite and he’s not even mine.”
“Because they had a happy childhood. You might’ve been miserable, but they had a great time.”
She wiped her eyes. “They always knew how to have fun, but I’m a bad mother.”
“Look, Grandma, you didn’t kill them or beat them, did you?”
“I thought about smacking your father with a wooden spoon,” she confessed.
“But you didn’t. I call that love. So you like Kevin best. I like him best, too. Everybody does. Kevin is awesome.”
She threw her arms around me and hugged me tight. “If you promise not to tell anyone, I will leave you here.”
“I’m not blackmailing you, Grandma,” I said.
“Is it a deal?”
“Sure. I’ll stay in bed and you go flipping hiking at the crack of dawn. Sold.”
There was a knock on the door and she wiped her cheeks before getting it. Aaron trotted in with a mug and a teapot. Moe was right behind him, looking like I felt.
“I’m ready,” he said in a hoarse whisper.
“Mercy’s staying here,” said Grandma.
“How’d she manage that?”
She slapped his arm. “Oh, you. Let’s go. It’s going to be beautiful.”
Grandma grabbed her coat and dashed out.
“Seriously,” said Moe. “How’d you do it? I hate hiking. It’s for hippies and nature nuts.”
I shrugged. “I’m the granddaughter.”
“Life isn’t fair.”
“Granted.”
Moe bowed his head and walked out to unwillingly hike and Aaron poured me a thick hot chocolate.
“You always know,” I said, taking a sip. “Wow. Love the orange blossom essence.”
“You noticed,” he said.
“You’ve improved my palate immensely,” I said. “Is Novak up yet?”
“He was.”
“Was?”
Aaron topped off my mug and said, “We just finished.”
“You were playing Warhammer all night?” I asked.
“Yeah. You hungry?” He was looking in the direction of the room service menu.
“No. I order you to go to bed,” I said.
“You’re hungry.”
“Not anymore. I’ve got hot chocolate. You go to bed.”
The little weirdo didn’t leave and he didn’t try to feed me. Something was up.
“If you’re not going to bed,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“Planning a menu.”
“For what?”
“The culinary class at the high school. I’m going to teach tomorrow.”
I sat up. “That is so cool.”
Aaron went up on his tiptoes. “Want to come?”
“Do I have to cook?”
“You can eat.”
I grinned at him. “I’ll be there.”
Aaron turned around and trotted out.
Enough about that, I guess.
I sank back into bed and picked up my laptop. It was true. I did have work to do. Novak had sent a ton of SCP material. Everything from the last two months, which was wise. I needed to get a view of the boy before Anton’s troubles began, but it was so much material. Hours and hours of videos and I didn’t even know how much original work he’d done. It was a crap ton though.
I took a sip of heavenly hot chocolate and got started. No time like the present.
Two hours later, I had a headache and a pretty good idea of who I was dealing with. Neither was a good thing. The boy, whoever he was, was in big trouble. I’m no expert in child psych, but I was pretty damn worried about him.
Before the blackmailing began, the boy’s interest in the SCPs was fairly normal. He was into it but not overboard. First, he watched mainly Safe and Euclid videos and wrote on those storylines, too. During the blackmailing, his interest gradually left the Safe zone altogether. He moved into only Keter and then to the more bloody and frightening stuff. I seriously wished I hadn’t read some of those stories. Stephen King had nothing on those guys for horror.
I tracked the boy’s mood as he spiraled down into darkness, never coming back into the Safe or Euclid zones by the time of my kidnapping. After Anton’s death, he started looking at some SCPs regularly that he’d only touched on before.
One called “What comes after” depressed the hell out of me. The boy read it multiple times a week. I don’t know how he could stand it. The afterlife was the worst thing that could possibly happen to you. Total nightmare.
Another one wasn’t as scary, but what the boy did with it worried me. The story was about a musical score that compelled the people that saw it to finish the piece. They would go insane and finish with their own blood and eventually commit suicide. The boy started writing new stories about how the SCP escaped. In one, a high school student who saw it was slowly killing himself by draining all his blood. Another had a family working on the piece together and dying one by one.
In the last two weeks, the boy looked at nothing that wasn’t incredibly bloody or about dying a hideous death. All the light SCPs were totally gone. He didn’t look at any thread where the object was contained, except for the musical score one, and he changed that to fit his dark mood.
I tried calling Novak, but he wasn’t answering. I had to do something. But what? I didn’t have a name and the picture wasn’t great.
Hobbes.
“I hope you’re not in church,” I said as I dialed the counselor.
He was not in church because he wasn’t awake or thrilled with me.
“I’m so sorry. I just had to call.”
“Did you? Really.” He was slurring and sounding a whole lot like Grandma.
“Are you drunk?” I asked.
“I might be if I was awake, but I’m not,” said Hobbes. “Call me later. I’ll be awake later.”
“I think you have a suicidal student.”
“Son of a bitch. I’m awake.”
I explained the situation and the counselor calmed down.
“You don’t know it’s one of our kids,” he said.
“He’s an American, about seventeen,” I said. “It’s a safe bet.”
“There is an international school in Degerloch.”
“Does it matter if he’s yours or not?”
Hobbes cleared his throat and said, “No, a kid in trouble is a kid in trouble, but I don’t know what I can do about it. You don’t have a name.”
“I’ll send you the picture. You might recognize him,” I said.
“Where did you get this picture?”
“Let’s leave that alone, shall we?”
“Jesus, you are trouble,” said Hobbes. “Go ahead and send it.”
I sent the picture and a few minutes later, Hobbes called me back. “Sorry. That picture’s so grainy. It could be one of a dozen kids I know and I only have a segment of the population last names L through P. I sent it to Meredith. She’s got F through K, but it’s still a no.”
“Would you tell me if you did recognize him?” I asked.
He paused and thought it over. “I would, but I wouldn’t tell you who he was.”
I named the boys on the list I’d made from Anton’s AP papers. “Could it be one of them? Are any of those boys writers?”
“Not that I know of,” he said.
“Can you ask around? See if anyone recognizes him?”
“I still can’t tell you anything.”
“You know what? I don’t care. I just want you to find him,” I said.
“It’s that bad?” Hobbes asked and I could tell the fog of drink was lifting.
“Yes, it is. I have an instinct about things and I’m usually right.”
“The famous Watts intuition?”
“That’s it,” I said. “Something isn’t right with this kid. He needs help and quick.”
“Beyond the mental stuff…do you think he played a part in your kidnapping? We don’t have a troubled youth population, not like big cities. Crime with our kids is practically nonexistent.”
“He knows something, Hobbes,” I said. “And it’s tearing him up.”
He sighed and said, “I’m up. I’ll gather the troops and see if we can come up with something.”
“Thanks.”
“Thank you.”
I hung up and ordered breakfast. Hopefully, Aaron wouldn’t be too peeved since I was going to his class. While I waited, I took a shower, doing all the little beauty things Grandma taught me. She had a lot of potions and stuff, so it took a while, and when I got out my breakfast was at the door with a very tired Novak clutching a huge mug of coffee.
I took my tray and Novak slipped in to collapse on the bed.
“What are you doing up?” I asked.
“You called.”
“I left a message.”
“What did you want?” He spoke into the pillow and I could barely make it out.
“Well, a conscious hacker might be nice,” I said.
“I’m up.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
Novak flipped over and I asked, “What is going on? You wouldn’t get up for me.”
“My mother.”
“What about her?” I asked. “Oh. Is she still coming for Christmas?”
“She’s there.”
“Where?”
“In Paris.” He ran his hands through his half-cornrowed hair that looked…not great.
I put my tray on the bed and took off the cloche to smell the heavenly scent of more eggs benedict. “Well, if you’ve got to go home, I get it. I never expected you to come here in the first place.”
“She’s cleaning,” said Novak. “She called five times this morning and she’s cleaning my apartment.”
I’d seen Novak’s apartment and she didn’t have much to do. He was a neat freak.
“I’m surprised you let her in,” I said.
“I didn’t. She sandbagged one of my associates and he let her in.”
“Mom’s impressive.”
He bared his teeth. “Yes.”
“So what if she cleans? You like clean.”
“The entry area. She’s cleaning my cover.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s fantastic. I think I saw hepatitis on the floor.”
“It’s not fantastic. Do you know how long it took me to get it to the perfect amount of crack house until no one wanted to come in?”
“I do not and I think you’re crazy,” I said. “Hey. How about we get to work on my case? I’ve got a swell lead.”
“Will it get you to the kid and your blonde perp within a short amount of time so that this flipping interlude will be over?” Novak asked.
“Yes!”
“Not interested.”
“What in the hell? I’m paying you.”
Novak flipped back half a head of hair. “Not enough.” He looked a little sleazy and sweaty and I got worried. Usually, I could spot a man with a jonesing for me a mile away, but this came out of nowhere. He was recommended. Spidermonkey wouldn’t let him within a mile of me if he was a problem. I stepped away from the bed.
“I think you should go now,” I said, picking up my panic button.
Novak’s eyes went back and forth between my eyes and the button a couple of times and then he burst out laughing. “Don’t flatter yourself.”
“It’s not a compliment to me that you look creepy,” I said.
“I look exhausted.” Once he got himself under control, he went into the bathroom, Noxzema’d his face, and offered me a deal. A pretty good deal as it turned out.
“You want me to lie to your mother and say we’re a couple?” I asked. “And she’ll leave you alone for another year if I do?”
“I’ll do all your snooping for free,” he said.
“She’ll figure it out. I’m the sort of person that people know.”
“My mother is not an internet person. She doesn’t know you.”
“I don’t like to lie,” I said.
He laughed again. “Since when? It’s practically your hobby.”
“It is not.” I forked my poached eggs and glared at him.
Novak calmed down and got serious. “This is a lot of money and you’re splitting some of the cost with the client right?”
“I am.”
“Think of the savings. You’ll make a nice profit on this one.”
“It’s mean, making her think she’s got a hope of grandchildren at Christmas,” I said.
He drew back. “She has more than a hope of grandchildren. She’s got sixteen already. My brothers are all married.”
“Oh, well making her think you have a woman.”
“I have women.”
My doubts must’ve shown on my face because he said, “You don’t believe me.”
“I do not,” I said.
Novak went on to show me several very attractive women in various locations around Paris. He was in the photos and they did appear to be genuine.
“So just show her those and she’ll go home,” I said.
“I don’t want her to see my real women.”
I threw up my hands. “Fine. But I’m not talking to her. Just pictures.”
“Now?”
We took a bunch of pictures in bed, cuddled up because it was more convincing and then he had a long conversation with his mother while I was supposedly in the shower. She was happy. He was happy. I felt dirty but profitable.
Novak flopped back on the bed and said, “Not bad for a morning’s work. She’s going to see my brother in Madrid. He’s not raising his daughters right.”
“Poor guy,” I said. “What about you? She hasn’t seen you.”
“She really just wanted to force a call and do some shopping.”
“Whatever. Ready for what I’ve got?”
I showed Novak all my research and he was mildly impressed, which was pretty good for me. He went and got three laptops and set up on the desk again while I ate.
“What’s the priority?” he asked. “Sindelfingen?”
“Weil der Stadt,” I said. “I think it started there.”
“Good. Less Americans live there.”
He got to work and I got into my mom’s Ancestry account. She uses the same password for everything so it wasn’t exactly a challenge. From Mom’s account, I was able to see Grandma’s. She’d done a lot of work on the family tree. Most of her research was to do with her own line, but she had the Watts stuff in there, too. Grandma was quite thorough in the tree making. She’d loaded pictures and there were tons of branches and these little leaf hint things connecting our family to other families. I looked at the pictures going back slowly. I wanted to see each face and compare. First, my dad and then Grandad and then there he was, Elijah Watts. Of course, I’d seen that very picture proudly displayed on the mantle at my grandparents’ house, but I never paid it much mind. It was just one face in a sea of faces. But this was a face that ought to have stuck out. It was not a Watts’ face.
The photo was from WWII. Great-Grandpa sat in a foxhole cooking something in an ammo box. Every time I’d looked at that photo before it was the chunky concoction in the non-too-clean container that I focused on, not the heart-shaped face of a slender man with pale eyes. Elijah was smiling, despite the fact that he was filthy with matted hair and what could’ve been blood on one of his hands. It was a great face. The face of a man you’d like to know.
Novak came over and stole some of my coffee. “Who’s that?”
“My great-grandfather Elijah,” I said.
“Kind of old for war, isn’t he?”
“He was thirty-three in 1944.”
“That is old,” he said. “Did he get drafted?”
I clicked on some connected documents and found Elijah’s enlistment papers. “He volunteered,” I said.
“That’s unusual. The older men usually had families and didn’t go.”
“He wasn’t married yet. Grandad was born after the war.”
“That explains it.” Novak went back to his search and I returned to Elijah’s picture. There was a weapon lying on a small backpack. The Mauser. My heart went out to my ancestor in a way it never had before. It was his weapon. I knew that, of course. But now it was our weapon.
I clicked the link for Elijah’s parents and another picture came up, also familiar. It was Dad’s namesake, Thomas, in his uniform and he was, also, not a Watts as I knew them. He wasn’t thin, far from, with big meaty hands and powerful shoulders. Thomas did have a certain twinkle in his eye, like he knew a joke that he was itching to tell. That could be my dad, but nothing else of Thomas was in any of my uncles or cousins or Grandad, for that matter. You’d think the big nose and lantern jaw would’ve shown up somewhere, but it hadn’t.
Next, I hovered my cursor over Gladys’ name and held my breath. I’d seen her face. Of course, I had. But now I was really going to see it. I clicked and she appeared. My family appeared. The Watts I knew. Gladys or Giséle was thin, tall, and pretty. She was holding a fat baby as though he might break apart in her grasp. The photo was black and white, so I had to take Grandma’s word for it that she was the origin of the Watts red hair. I clicked through a couple of photos and found the wedding picture. She didn’t appear pregnant, but the Edwardian dress and bouquet would’ve hidden that easily. It was a great photo and her face, something about her face…Gladys was smiling, but her eyes weren’t. Her jaw was clenched and I bet she had a death grip on those flowers, but was that fair? Old wedding photos from other eras were rarely the huge smiley things of today. Thomas didn’t look anything but stalwart and dignified.
I went back to the photo with my great-great-grandmother holding Elijah and that was Gladys. She might be a nervous mother but there was none of that tightness. Her smile was genuine and sweet.
“I know you,” I said.
“What was that?” Novak asked.
“I’ve seen her before.”
“Who?”
“My great-great-grandmother Gladys,” I said.
He didn’t stop typing and was doing it at a speed that boggled the mind. “Your family has photos, don’t they?”
“Yes, but I don’t know. I’ve seen her somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“No clue. She’s just so familiar. That smile.”
“You’re just remembering other photos,” he said. “Don’t get worked up over it. Look at something else and then it will come to you.”
“Is that what you do?” I asked.
Novak turned around and said, “I do. Sometimes my algorithm isn’t working or a firewall will not fall and I just have to turn to something else. Then it works. My brain needs a break.”
“My brain is busy. It doesn’t like breaks.”
“Then it needs them all the more.” Novak turned back and typed even faster than before. None of my hackers from Uncle Morty to Spidermonkey ever worked in front of me before. They were very secretive about their methods and even their identity. Novak wasn’t Novak. I knew that much. Whether that whole mother thing was real was up for debate. Him hiding his home and office inside a crack house told me he’d do the oddest things to hide who he was, but right then I had a full view of his screens. Nothing was hidden. I’d like to say I could make heads or tails of it, but massive amounts of data was crossing his screens. I caught little things like internet providers, but the rest was a mystery my brain could never solve. He probably knew that and figured I was safe. Kinda insulting but accurate.
I turned back to my computer and something I could understand. Grandma had conveniently attached Elijah’s birth certificate. Even though the certificate was pretty faded and the handwriting wasn’t the greatest, but I could make out the attending physician Dr. Walter Ames.
Finding the doctor’s information was shockingly easy because he died seven months later of dementia at the age of seventy-seven.
“Thomas, you wily bastard,” I said.
“Did you get what you need?” Novak asked.
“Some of it.”
“Fun isn’t it?”
“It actually is,” I said, and I clicked back to Thomas’ records. He knew that doctor well enough to get him to fill out a fake birth certificate and it was fake. No way a seventy-seven-year-old guy with dementia was attending births. Dr. Ames wasn’t a relative, so there was one other way he’d know him. “No, it can’t be that easy.”
Novak chuckled and I stared at my screen. Dr. Walter Ames was the doctor on Thomas’ birth certificate. It was that easy. He went to who he knew. The marriage record was standard and nothing looked off about it. I had no reason to think it didn’t happen when it supposedly did. Since the whole snooping around thing was fun, I looked for an arrest record for Giséle Donadieu, but she didn’t exist, so I joined Mom to the international version of Ancestry and rooted around there. That was much more difficult. Gladys’ age on the marriage certificate said twenty-two and I assumed that to be in the neighborhood of the truth, but I couldn’t find any Giséle’s that fit the bill with Donadieu as a last name. The ones that were the right age didn’t appear to have left France.
“Are you ready?” Novak asked.
“Depends,” I said.
“I’ve got five families in Weil der Stadt with boys between the ages of fourteen and twenty.”
“That kid was not fourteen.”
“For the sake of being thorough, I included him. Kids can fool you.”
“Alright,” I said. “But he’s not.”
Novak waved me over and I pulled up a chair. “Of the five families, two have kids checking out SCPs regularly and one is active on the wiki.”
“Can I see them?” I asked.
He pulled up two photos from Facebook. They were white kids, average height, and fairly thin, but I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
“Look again.” He blew up the photos.
The boys fit the bill, but I wasn’t feeling it. No spark of recognition. “It’s not either of them.”
“That was my instinct, too, but you know how eyewitnesses get it wrong.”
I leaned back and crossed my arms. “You’re right. It happens all the time. Can you check and see if any of the candidates read SCP-012?”
“Good idea.” He began typing again and then said, “Or perhaps not. They all looked at it and viewed the various videos. It’s a pretty basic one.”
“Alright. Who had Anton in school?” I asked.
Novak chuckled. “All but one, the fourteen-year-old.”
“Dammit.”
“I know, but keep thinking.”
“AP Gov?”
“Three out of the four,” he said.
“Any emails to Anton?”
“A few about grades and test dates,” said Novak. “Nothing personal.”
“Do you have any good news?”
He shrugged and cracked his knuckles. “We’re narrowing things down.”
“So no,” I said. “Can you show me all the faces?”
“Sure, but you won’t like it.”
I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it a lot. All five of those guys were practically the same guy. Sure the twenty-year-old was more mature than the fourteen-year-old, but the faces, I couldn’t pick one out. I’d looked at so many photos in the yearbook and in Anton’s photos, they were all blending. Was I looking for the face in the window or for one that was familiar from one of the photos?
“Anybody jumping out?” Novak asked.
I pointed at the twenty-year-old, but I didn’t know why. I didn’t think it was him.
“I figured.”
“Why?”
“Check the expression. He’s unhappy. This was taken on vacation in Madrid. That’s a guy who didn’t want to pose. I picked it because it was the only photo that was dead on and close. Check this one.”
Novak brought up another photo and I instantly said, “It’s not him.”
He laughed. “Because he’s smiling, right?”
I groaned and put my head in my head. “We need something else.”
“I can move on to Sindelfingen and check those families.”
“Hold on.” I went back to my computer and clicked through one of the stories our kid had written. Then I checked another one. “Is there anyone who didn’t look at SCPs at all? I mean never.”
“Ah, yes.” He typed for a minute. “I’ve got two.”
“Great. Are you in their computers?”
“I can be,” he said. “What am I looking for?”
“Google searches for Gurkh Kukri,” I said.
Novak looked back at me. “I checked for visits to suicide sites and there was no activity.”
“Not for that. Our SCP guy used that knife in his stories about the musical score and in another story, too. He was very detailed about it, talking about the carved handle and etched blade. Either he had one or—”
“He googled it.” He typed for a few minutes and then smiled back at me. “Got him.”