Chapter 7

  “Give it back or else, Laura.”

  “What are you talking about, Sven?”

  “Don’t play dumb, Laura.”

  “Sven if you don’t tell me what and when I took something of yours, I’ll just a walk away.”

  “Oh no you won’t”

  “Are you in the third grade Sven, just what do you think I have taken of yours and when exactly was it taken?”

  “My laptop was stolen from my motel room.”

  “Well, I’m very sorry that happened to you. Have you called the police yet? I know the local cops, they aren’t csi material but they will do their best to get your laptop back. I’m surprised you didn’t have it with you.”

  I started to pull out my phone, to call August, my cousin and the chief of police.

  “No, no, I don’t want the police involved. I have private information on there I do not want to share with the police.”

  Now that was odd, I know some writers are paranoid that another writer will steal their idea. Or was it something more nefarious? Every day I read in the news that some person in upstate New York gets arrested for child pornography. I’m sure it’s not an upstate NY phenomenon, it must be happening all over the country but I see it here because of course it’s local news. The neighbors always say, but he seemed like such a nice guy. I don’t like Sven, and it’s not fair to blame a victim, but it is very odd how adamant he is about not contacting the police. Something else was bothering me about this. I just couldn’t figure out what that was. I was planning to sit out the writing sprints, the next item on today's agenda.

  “Sven, are you sure that you don’t want me to call the police, it won’t take long and it won’t guarantee that you’ll get the laptop back but it is your best shot. What did the motel manager say?”

  “I didn’t speak to the manager about it, I was sure you had taken it so I rushed back here to confront you.”

  “Well I swear, I didn’t take it, I’ve been out here with everyone all day, except for the lunch break when I went in and bought a load of used books, made a video call to Woodstock. Besides the point that I didn’t have time to steal it. I also don’t know where you are staying so even if I wanted to steal something from you I wouldn’t have been able to. You are welcome to go in and ask Lucy the manager, what I did on my lunch break. Go in now, before I can prompt her what to say.”

  “No, I believe you.”

  Well that certainly wasn’t an apology. But I suppose it was the best I was going to get.

  “Did you have your novel backed up to the cloud, Sven?”

  “Yes it was backed up, I just don’t want anyone to have access to it. It has a lot of great ideas that I don’t want anyone to steal from me.”

  “I get it, Sven, novels are a ton of work, you don’t want anyone messing with something you worked so hard on. I think I have an old laptop running Ubuntu in the stock room, you can use it for the rest of the weekend if you like, it has Libre Office on there than anything you write can be saved to your cloud account and you can delete the files off of my machine before you leave for home.”

  “Yes, that would be helpful.”

  So we went into the store and I introduced him to Lucy then I went into the store room and grabbed the old laptop. It was too old to run windows but it worked just fine with Ubuntu. It was even charged up. So I grabbed the laptop and the powerbrick and went back out into the store.

  “This will look a little different if you are used to Windows, but it works pretty much the same way. Libre Office works similar to the way Word and Excel do but if you have any problems with it, I’ll be happy to help.”

  “Thanks” he said gruffly and immediately headed back outside to the tent.

  “Keep an eye on him, Lucy. There is something not quite right with Sven, I’m not sure what it is. But don’t let him catch you watching him. I don’t think he’s dangerous but there is something. Just keep your eyes open and if you feel threatened or anything, go right to the kitchen and find Amy. With her contacts with the sheriff and the police from her time in dispatch she will have whole departments here in minutes. It’s probably nothing, just a feeling and on Monday you can say that I was paranoid.

  “Alright Laura, hey how come we don’t use Linux on all our computers.”

  “Well, some of the games I play occasionally play better under Windows and I have never had much luck getting Windows and Linux to network well together. So I wait until a machine is old then load linux on it and it runs like new again. It’s perfect for web browsing and any office software, even Obsidian. If I didn’t have any windows pcs and I wasn’t interested in sharing files between machines I’d run linux on all of my computers. If you are interested I have some flash drives with different linux distros on them you can boot into the pendrive. The only thing is the flash drives are slow compared to a hard and positively glacial in comparison to an ssd. I’ve got an old Raspberry Pi Three I believe. You can take it home, hook it up to a TV and attach a Keyboard and mouse and you have a decent linux experience. Plus they are just fun to play with.”

  “Laura, you are pretty computer literate for an older person.”

  “Lucy, you can say for an old lady. I bought my first computer in nineteen eighty-two so I have been using them for forty three years. My first machine had four kilobytes, my latest has thirty-two gigabytes. Over eight million times the amount of ram, programs were stored on cassette tapes and it could take up to thirty minutes to load the program. I got it because they had these text adventure games. It was like reading a book that you could play. It’s also kind of like talking to a Gemini or ChatGPT but what it understood was very limited. But I loved it. Then I got a word processor for it called Paperclip. Eventually it even got a spellchecker. The problem with it was because we were using TV’s as monitors, the very low resolution Paperclip could only display forty characters per line on screen. But when you printed your document on the printer it came out eighty characters wide just like a typewriter. So what you saw onscreen didn’t match the printed output. It had a preview mode which gave you the basic shape of what the document would look like. But you had a word processor you could write books on. I was in love. I never had that romantic vision of Shakespeare scrunched over a desk lit by a single taper, as his quill scritched across some parchment. Nope, for me it was Paperclip, my first word processor. Writing was still hard but editing, holy crap, that was so easy. I learned a whole new concept, cut and paste. I have to go grab my laptop for writing sprints”

  I ran up to my room, grabbed my laptop and headed to the tent. I had planned on skipping the sprints, but I needed to write so I might just as well do it with the other writers. Sprints are designed to increase flow. Flow is like zen, when you are just really present in what you do. You set a timer for twenty five minutes and just write. Stream of consciousness, you don’t edit just put thoughts down on paper, you can go through the whole mess later on and maybe even make some paragraphs. But for now you just write let stuff pour forth. No research, just your own thoughts.

  I did this to get ideas out of my head and onto paper where I could pick them apart or expand upon them or if I got really lucky string a pair of those ideas together to form something new, something original. I didn’t need to do this in the tent, nor with a group. But I knew that I knew something important, I just needed to figure out what that was.

  If I knew something about Sven or his stolen laptop it would have to have been something that I’d seen or heard. If that is true it would have to be something that happened either last night or this morning. So I wrote it all down, with my eidetic memory it was pretty easy. The trick was not writing down stuff that wasn’t important in the context of what I was trying to figure out so I summarized all my interactions last night at the party except for my conversation with Sven, that one I wrote out word for word.

  No non-obvious connections popped out at me, so I decided to move onto my morning. I summarized my conversation with Amy. Amy thought Sven was a creep, he had been eyeing Jade, like a piece of meat. Did he do something to Jade, with Jade? My brain felt like it was tinglinging my non obvious connection between Sven and Jade. What about them? I hadn’t observed them interacting and I also hadn’t seen them actively avoiding each other. I think the latter can be more telling than watching an actual interaction. To actively avoid, you are trying to deceive those around you that you don’t know the person or that you are not in a relationship or that you hate or love the person or are suspicious of the person. Actively avoiding is a whole dance, you need good peripheral vision and your mind has to be able to do two things at once. Chat with the people directly in front of you while you also track the movements of the person you are avoiding.

  In an actual interaction it’s pretty easy to deceive a watcher with well acted chats about weather or the latest books/movies. The dance is harder to conceal, because the pair have to be in motion together. It’s like a dance conducted on a chessboard and everyone is just a piece to be used to block any contact between the pair. So I had my pair, as far as I know they haven’t interacted, even though Sven looked at Jade as an object.

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  Alright, I've made limited progress, I decide to continue with the writing and see where that leads. I gave my ebook proposal and of course Sven was dead set against it.But Jade had been for it, at least her smile and polite clapping led me to believe so. So I wrote out everything that Sven had to say about old ladies and hippies. I didn’t write out my rants but I did summarize them. Then I had gone inside and so I summarized my interactions with Lucy, Zoe, and Willow. Nothing, but my brain did fire up on Willow, I was intrigued to say the least about her great idea. But none of this was a non obvious connection between Jade and Sven.

  So then I moved on beyond lunch and it hit me that when I had arrived back in the tent, I was worried that my protest ebook had caused Jade and Sven to quit the retreat. But Jade had come back just before I started my talk on self editing, ding, ding, ding. Laptop in hand. But was that the same laptop that she had been taking notes on this morning. No, Jade stylish and beautiful Jade had used a Mac this morning. But the laptop that she carried back had been an HP. She might have two laptops, maybe she uses the HP for gaming and the Mac for writing. Maybe. But I didn’t believe that for a second. I think I had found Sven’s missing laptop.

  So I thought for a minute what is the best possible way to handle this situation. I already PO’d one of the writers, if I do the same to Jade, a woman I liked, I’d be doing the collective a disservice. But I also don’t really have a better idea than a direct confrontation. I have a day and a half to figure this out before all of these writers vanish. I don’t know if Jade applied to live in the collective and if she did do we really want a potential thief living with us.

  Lachlan had stolen from Monique and Harry had murdered him because of it. I certainly never want to go through something like that again. There was about five minutes left before the sprint was over so I quietly closed my laptop. I decided on my course of action, I wasn’t going to confront Jade.

  Jade was sitting in the back row so I walked behind her and whispered. “I’d really like to chat with you about your two laptops, would you mind meeting me in the bookstore, I’d prefer to do it in private. Then I walked into the bookstore. I was really hoping that she joined me. If instead she ran off, then I would call August, because that would be a pretty big red flag to me. Of course August might not be able to do anything. My suspicions about a crime that hadn’t even been reported well I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t give him probable cause to stop and question a woman about why she owned two laptops.

  A question she would be well within her rights to refuse to answer. Not a right that I want anyone to lose either. I’m just hoping that she is worried about what I know, literally nothing except that she happens to have two laptops with two different operating systems. Again not suspicious, I own multiple computers and with a mix of operating systems. If she comes in I’ll let her talk if she doesn’t have much to say, before accusing her, I’ll ask her if she knows Sven from somewhere else. I may even disclose what Amy had observed the evening before.

  Lucy was busy with a customer when I made my way to the reading nook. I could see the driveway but not the tent through the front window. I saw Jade appear with the canvas bag she used to transport her laptop and personal items. It looked like she was bolting, I reached for my phone and was about to call August, when she turned toward the store and walked down the driveway. I heard the front door open and waited for her to appear.

  I was sitting in my favorite chair overlooking Mirror lake. But I was ready for her when she quietly approached.

  “Thanks for coming, Jade”

  “Can we go somewhere a little more private, I don’t want the whole world knowing my business.”

  I considered this, a month ago I would have just invited her up to my room. But after having someone murdered in my store, I’ve become a little more cautious.

  “Sure, let’s go into the stockroom, no one’s back there and I’ll tell Lucy I need a private chat with you about your collective application.”

  “But I haven’t applied.”

  “It doesn’t matter, it's just a convenient excuse.”

  We went into the stockroom and after the door was closed Jade relaxed a little, but she didn’t start right away. She appeared to be considering just what to say. So I decided to encourage her to talk.

  “Jade, Why don’t you tell me what is going on, maybe I can help you.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “Well maybe you can help yourself. Tell me what is going on, as you tell it, an idea might spring to your mind.”

  “I don’t know where to start.”

  “Start at the beginning and then we won’t have to backtrack later. We have all day, no one will likely notice we are missing and if they do they’ll just assume we got into the flow while doing the sprint and we wanted to continue writing.”

  “Laura, my brother went missing or at least off the grid for about three months. The longest we have gone without speaking to each other before is around one week and only if we know that the other has been slammed by work. So not hearing from him is a huge red flag. Not like two siblings having a spat and not speaking to each other for a while.”

  I didn't say anything, she had been the one to bring it up so maybe she really thought that was the reason they had not spoken. She also hadn’t defined what she meant by off-grid.

  “Recently he has been getting more and more political, a big change for him. He never even bothered to register for a political party before. Suddenly he was all gung ho MAGA and conspiracy theories. The he stopped all social media posts, phone calls, letters. For the first two weeks I didn’t think anything about it. After three weeks I went to the police and was told that they couldn’t do anything about it. The detective I spoke to said that Ethan was an adult and he had every right to cut ties with me if he desired to.”

  This was sounding more and more like a fight between brother and sisters and what does it have to do with taking Sven’s laptop? But I had asked her to start at the beginning so I couldn’t very well tell her to cut to the chase so I just continued to listen.

  “So next I went to the software company he works for and spoke to his boss. Ethan had requested a two week vacation, three months ago and then had never come back to work nor responded to any of the communications sent by the boss or his human resources department. So they subsequently fired him. The boss was genuinely surprised by my brother's behavior, he had worked for the company for five years with regular promotions and was due for another raise shortly after he was to return from vacation.”

  Now it didn’t sound like sibling squabble but more like he disappeared while on vacation.

  “Next I went to a private investigator, which I really couldn’t afford. They understood that but agreed to run his finances for a small fee to at least tell me where he had gone on vacation. But his bank account and his credit card hadn’t been used in a month, the entire time he had been missing. The last transaction was at a coffeeshop in Manhattan the day before he requested vacation from his boss. So now I’m even more worried. If he was in Las Vegas or Bermuda and decided to get a new job out of the blue and was mad at me he still would have to use his credit cards or some money from his bank to get a place to stay or to buy food. Now I’m starting to worry that he is dead.”

  She has done a really thorough job, I try to think of any avenues that she may have skipped or not known about. It’s not really surprising that she was able to go through all those steps. She is a writer and she has sold plays, which tells me she is at least a decent writer and what do writers do when they are not writing? They research, so to my mind someone who is good at research should be good at investigating. You just take a big problem and break it down into its component parts. Like Watney in the Martian.

  “But I wasn’t going to just assume he was dead and go on with my life, so I tried contacting old friends and old girlfriends of his. But none of them had heard from Ethan for longer than I had. Finally stymied I sat at my computer and scrolled through all of his social media accounts again. None of them had been updated, I was trying to cyberstalk my brother and it came to me that I had no idea how to do that. So I opened Gemini and asked how to find a missing person. It gave me a list of all the things I had already tried. Family, that was me, friends, boss, police and landlord.”

  I hadn’t considered calling the landlord either. That’s why some type of list is always helpful in any task that has more than a few subtasks.

  “I had been to the apartment to see if he was home, but it never occurred to me that he might have spoken to his landlord. So it was too late that night but early the next morning I went to his building and started knocking on doors. It was early so some people weren’t happy but when I explained that I was looking for my brother most of the neighbors were nice enough. But none of them had seen Ethan for over a month and a half at this point. But at least I was able to get the landlord’s name and phone number from one of the neighbors. I called the landlord, explained who I was and asked if he had heard from my brother. He hadn’t and he wasn’t happy because the rent was two months behind and at the end of this month he was going to begin the eviction process. My brother was either missing or dead and all this guy could worry about was going to court and filing paperwork to have the man who has been living in his building for five years evicted.”

  Cold, the guy didn’t deserve to be called a landlord. Any absentee building owner should instead be called a slumlord. To show no concern whatsoever for someone that has been paying them for the privilege to live in their building, that makes them a greedy slumlord in my eyes. Why do some people only view other people as a way to make money? Advertisers, Social media CEOs, Corporate CEOs in general.

  “So I went home, I had been through the whole list. I went through it again and I had a thought, two thoughts actually. I could do something nice for my alive and deeply regretful brother who would thank and apologize profusely to me and I might be able to find a clue. So I called the landlord back and offered to pay Ethan’s back rent and keep it current until he arrived home. If the landlord agreed to give me a key to the place. I knew this was probably illegal but I had no doubt what the landlord would do. He had complained to me enough about the court costs and the hassle of filing paperwork, while showing zero concern for my brother. So I wasn’t in the least surprised when he readily agreed and gave me a time and place to meet him so that I would give him the cash after which he would hand over the key. He made it very clear what the order of business was, cash then key.”

  I was invested in this story now, I certainly hope that she finds something in the apartment after giving the scummy landlord cash. I often thought when I lived in New York, that it should be a law that landlords live in the buildings that they rent out. It would be the end of slumlords. They could only own one building and they lived there as well, the tenants would have immediate access. Months of not fixing problems in the building would likely become days. As the landlord wouldn’t want to listen to complaints anymore than the rest of us do.

  “Once I had the key in hand I went right over to the apartment and opened the door.”