PERRI HAD PUT “Office Mom” on her business cards because she didn’t care about titles, and there was a certain pervasive wry humor at Hylist Software. And she was still a mom, in her heart, in her mind—that was an unchanged image. Hylist was a start-up company, ten months old, thirty employees strong, in an office overlooking a bend of Lake Austin. From her boss’s office Perri could see the soaring arch of the Pennybacker Bridge spanning Lake Austin along Loop 360. But the new HR chief, a prim-mouthed woman named Deborah, who seemed to lack any sense of fun, had told Perri that it was unprofessional and to replace her cards and use the title “Executive Assistant to the CEO.” Perri had smiled tightly and said, “All right.” She knew she could go to her boss and keep the original card, but that wasn’t how she wanted to start with Deborah. Here she would pick her battles.
She worked, officially, for the CEO, an old high school friend named Mike Alderson she’d grown up with in Lakehaven. She and Mike had been the less fortunate kids at what was often seen as a rich-kid school: he lived with his grandparents in an old house, one of the first built in Lakehaven, back when it was country and not suburban; she and her mother had lived in one of the few apartments in Lakehaven’s school district. Her mother cleaned houses and eventually started a housecleaning service that had a dozen workers. Mike had gone on to Rice, at full scholarship, for an undergraduate computer-science degree and then an MBA, while Perri, also on scholarship, stayed close to home at Texas State and got an English degree. She started teaching middle school, but then met Cal, who was a friend of Mike’s, and married him six months later. They moved to San Francisco for his first start-up company, and after a few more years she decided to stay home when she got pregnant with David and they moved back to Austin. So this had been her first out-of-the-home job in many years, and she loved it. Basically, she took care of the office. There were four execs—Mike, the marketing/sales, engineering, and HR vice presidents—but most of the employees were software designers, grinding out code to finish their first product release. They were building a product to simplify the integration of company-issued cell phones with computer networks, to make them easier to manage and to share information securely. Many of the developers were young, and they worked long hours. Perri often felt tender toward them. Aside from managing Mike’s schedule, she stocked the refrigerator, had dinner brought in when lots of the “kids”—she knew she shouldn’t think of them this way, but she did, some of them were barely older than what David would be now—were working late, and coordinated the Friday-afternoon beer break that was one of the rewards of working for a driven yet more casual company. She had taken two of the developers who were in sore need of fashion advice shopping for clothes suitable for high-level meetings with customers. She’d helped two engineers who’d moved here from San Francisco find places to live and a preschool for another family. She kept things running smoothly, while Mike and his execs wooed potential customers and the programmers coded and drew incomprehensible diagrams on whiteboards and lived off the pizza she ordered.
Perri had needed this, after David died. Activity and chatter to fill the empty hours. She liked the people, and she knew they liked her. She was valued.
She had gone in extra early the morning after the awkward dinner with Cal, ignoring the wine headache gently throbbing in her head. So she was productive about what needed to be done: she brewed two pots of coffee (the developers usually did this themselves because they drank it so fast), stocked the fridge with new cans of soda, cleared the conference rooms, reordered supplies.
“Good morning,” Mike Alderson said as he hurried past her desk. He was a nice-looking man, tall and trim, brown hair thinning, divorced for several years, with soft brown eyes and a bold smile. She had talked him into a more stylish pair of eyeglasses. He kept trying to talk her into dinner, a kind of dinner that seemed between more than friends. It was a side effect of long friendship and loneliness, but she could not encourage him. At least not now. She was deeply fond of Mike, but she wasn’t ready. “How are you?” he asked. “I’m sorry I was gone yesterday. You and David, and Cal, too, were much in my thoughts.”
They walked into his office together. She closed the door. “I’m fine. I don’t want to make a production of it here.”
“Of course.”
“But I do need your help. I want to unmask an anonymous Internet user.” Mike Alderson had been David’s godfather. Mike would want to rage at this person’s cruelty, fix the problem, take care of it for her, but he was busy launching what could be a hugely successful company. She didn’t want him involved.
“Is someone bothering you?” He took a step toward her.
“No, it’s nothing like that.” She said nothing more and he waited and she still said nothing.
Mike hesitated. “Is Cal being difficult?” Mike had kept his opinion about their separation to himself.
“Of course not. So who would you suggest?”
“At ferreting out someone who wants to be hidden? Maggie, I’d say.”
She gritted her teeth, but she put a bright smile on her face. “Thanks, I’ll ask her.”
“Is there anything else I can do to help you…?” He flushed with embarrassment. Mike had been a wonderful godfather to David, remembering every birthday, always encouraging him in his art and his sports and his studies, coming to his football games, laughing at his drawn comics. She would not tell him about the “ALL WILL PAY” written on the stone.
“If you feel up to it, could we have dinner this week?”
Perri hesitated for a moment, then said, “Sure.” He’s being your old friend and your boss. He’s worried about you.
“How about tonight?” Mike asked.
“OK, but late this afternoon you’ve got that conference call with the San Francisco product testers, they’re two hours behind us, and they always run long.” He was notorious for not remembering his own schedule. She smiled. “But dinner with a friend sounds good.” He seemed not to notice her emphasis.
“You have the phone conference call in ten minutes with Brad—he’s calling you,” she reminded him, and he nodded. She closed his office door behind him so he could prepare his notes in peace.
Maggie. One might expect or hope that two women over forty working at a software company full of twentyish programmers would be fast friends, but she and Maggie had virtually nothing in common, and Perri found Maggie distant and odd.
She walked down the hall to the darkest office, where the lights were kept dim and the reclusive programmer typed by the glow of her monitor. From the computer, an Eddy Arnold song from the 1960s softly played: “Make the World Go Away.” Maggie Chavez had interesting tastes and did not bother with headphones, but she kept the music low and unobtrusive. The song choice, however, didn’t make Perri feel more comfortable in knocking on Maggie’s open door.
“Good morning, Maggie.”
Type, type, type. Maggie didn’t glance up from her screen. Apparently she didn’t react to greetings, but awaited further data.
“I have a technical question for you.”
“Did you try restarting the system?” She still didn’t look up.
“No, I know how to fix my own computer.” She moved a towering stack of Java and Python programming books, topped by a massive tome on regular expressions and algorithms, off Maggie’s spare chair. Maggie, she was sure, kept them there to discourage visitors from sitting down and chatting with her. Most of the other programmers didn’t keep libraries of books; Perri had seen them looking up code examples online, in a corner window of their screen. But then, Maggie had been programming longer. Eddy Arnold gave way to Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” on her computer speakers.
What a self-descriptive playlist, Perri thought. She sat. She waited. A minute ticked by.
Maggie Chavez kept typing in code, but realized Perri was not going to leave. “Sorry, OK, what? Does Mike need something?”
“How would I find out who created an account on Faceplace? They’re using a fake name.”
Maggie stopped typing. She actually looked away from her computer screen to focus on Perri. “Is this a fake account using your name?”
“No.”
“Are they bullying you?”
Perri explained. Maggie listened with a surprising intensity.
“So how can I find out who Liv Danger is?”
“You need to set a little trap for your target.”
Perri waited and Maggie sighed that the explanation wasn’t obvious. “You need to get whoever is posting as ‘Liv Danger’ to click on a link. It will take them to a custom-designed page, a trap containing code that gathers data about their computer.”
“I sent ‘Liv’ a friend request, but she, or he, hasn’t answered it yet.”
“Well, if they do, send them a private message with that link. Of course you could just ask them who they are, but they might lie.”
“I don’t think she’ll be dumb enough to click on a link. Won’t she be suspicious?”
“You give Liv Danger a great reason to click on it.”
Perri could not think of such a reason, but pushed the thought aside. “And once they visit this site…”
“The customized page harvests information about the computer looking at the page. It could tell you if it’s being accessed by a computer or a phone, the operating system, the IP address…”
“The what?”
“IP address. Each device accessing the Internet has a unique address. The same computer doesn’t always get assigned the same IP address from the service provider, but the provider would know which computer had a certain IP address at a certain time. Getting them to share it with you is another matter.”
“And that would tell me who was accessing the page? It’s like a Social Security number?”
“Well, the service provider would then know the physical billing address for the account, which might be the same as where the computer was accessing the Internet. They might not share that with you, but it’s enough to complain to Faceplace that Liv Danger is an imposter account. Then you can request the information, such as who created it, what time they did so, the IP address of the computer they used, and so on.”
“And that would be definitive?”
“I would think.” Maggie started to turn back to her computer, wisdom dispensed, ready to start coding again.
“Wait, where can I get this code…how would I set up this trap page?” She was embarrassed that she knew nothing about how to set up a website.
“Oh, you want to do that?” Type, type, type. “I thought you just wanted information.”
“No, Maggie. I want to know who is saying this about my son. Please.” Her voice cracked on the final word.
Maggie stopped typing again and looked at Perri as if for the first time. “Sure, Perri, I can do it for you. I can help you craft the message, too, so this Liv Danger will want to click on it.”
“Thanks. It means a lot.”
“It would be helpful if I could sign into Faceplace as you, if Liv responds.”
“Sure.” Perri wrote down her account name and her password on a sticky note.
Maggie tucked the note away. “I’ll have something for you by tonight. Is that OK?”
“Yes, Maggie, thank you.” She couldn’t help herself, she came around the desk and gave Maggie a quick hug. Maggie said, “Yeah, whatever, OK,” but in the reflection of the monitor Perri could see a little smile from her.
She went back to the desk feeling better; Maggie would find this prankster. Perri turned to her computer, to answer the five e-mails from different parties begging for Mike’s time that had arrived while she was gone. She was good at e-mail. She always sounded warm and cheery. So while she wrote e-mail answers with a tempered verve, she thought about what she would say—or do—to the defacer of her son’s grave.