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The squeaky wheels of gurneys rolling past, call bells ringing, and unintelligible announcements in hospital code over the loudspeaker all faded into the background as Noel concentrated on Maren’s iPad.
He scrolled through icons at the bottom of the home screen until he came to an image of a globe and clicked on it to access the Internet. Once in, he could see Maren’s problem. The tablet had been set up by the retailer with a drop-down list of major email providers: Google, Yahoo, Firefox. He tried each one before determining that ecobabe.org email accounts had been established through a Gmail account in Google. He figured Maren had gotten stuck because she missed that step. After that it was simple—he used her email address and password to get to the administrator functions, which included a link to mail. He could view her list of sixty-two unopened messages. Maren definitely had some catching up to do. Noel would have stopped there, but something caught his eye.
Maren was terrible at visual challenges. She always had been. As a kid, she would throw partially completed jigsaw puzzles up in the air in frustration, dodging the pieces as they fell, then moving on to something free-form—painting or clay. Noel was the opposite. He took comfort in the patterns he encountered in life, like how their mother methodically set knives, forks, plates, and spoons on the table always in the same order. So when he saw that an email from the same address with the same subject line had arrived in Maren’s inbox each day at 12:01 a.m. for the past two weeks, his interest was piqued.
To: MKane@ecobabe.org
From: senrabyllit@talk.com
Re: Urgent—Investments!
It was not only a clear pattern, but also an unusual one since marketing spam on autosend was typically randomly generated to avoid detection by ad blockers. Groggy from his medication, Noel fought the wave of sleep that pulled at him, the desire to set the tablet aside and look at it later. He was concerned the messages might be malicious, perhaps carrying a virus. Given the recent demise of Maren’s laptop, he felt he better take a look rather than leave it to her. He might need to delete the message since opening it could activate the virus. But then again, he didn’t want Maren to miss something important, in the off chance this wasn’t spam. The gears in his overactive brain whirred.
Then he saw it.
Didn’t Maren say Sean called Tamara by a pet name, Tilly?
Senrabyllit is Tilly Barnes written backward.
There were two attachments. As he moved to open them, Noel’s heart raced.
A shrieking alarm went off. It seemed to be coming from the monitor by his bed. He heard running footsteps, then shouting.
Someone wrenched the tablet from his hands. Noel felt a stinging prick as the needle went in. He struggled to speak, but fell silent as the powerful sedative did its work. He could barely make out the voices.
“Were we in time?” asked the nurse.
“His heart rate is dangerously high,” Dr. Wheaton replied. “We won’t be able to image his heart to view the aortic tear to see whether there is any new damage until he is stable.”
“Will he be okay?” the nurse asked.
In a gesture uncharacteristic of a busy doctor, Wheaton removed Noel’s hat and gently adjusted his head on the pillow.
“I don’t know,” Noel heard the physician say, the last words he could make out before he lost consciousness.
But Dr. Wheaton was not done speaking.
“It is now between Mr. Kane and his God.”