Too Close to Home

I hardly needed to say “some old piece of crap.” It was all Derek and Adam liked to collect. They loved-well, had loved-tearing them apart, messing around with the hard drives, comparing the guts of old computers to the guts of new ones. Derek hadn’t left with the whole computer, just the tower. The keyboard and the monitor weren’t of much interest to him, although we did take them off Agnes’s hands and dropped them off at the dump on one of our occasional trips up there. I had a soft spot in my heart for Agnes Stockwell, living alone in her bungalow on Ridgeway Drive. She loses a husband, then a year later son Brett, a Thackeray College student, kills himself by jumping off Promise Falls. It’s not the highest waterfall in the world by any means, but when there’s nothing but jagged rocks at the bottom, how high does it have to be?

“So, Adam and me,” Derek said, “we’d been messing around with it. Seeing what kind of processor it had, that kind of shit, but we were also looking at what was on it.”

That, I’d learned, was half the fun. It probably never would have occurred to Agnes that her son’s computer was a repository of information about him. Old e-mails, stories, maybe saved porn images. Agnes, not exactly computer literate, probably figured all that stuff had evaporated by this time. How could all those things survive in a metal and plastic box all these years? But a tower like that was the ultimate shoebox of memories.

“Okay,” I said.

“Anyway, when we were in the house, with Barry? The cop? It wasn’t in Adam’s room.”

“How could you tell?” I asked. The image of Adam’s room hadn’t quite burned itself into my memory like the three enormous bloodstains, but I remembered it was a mess.

“I could tell, Dad. It had been right on top of his desk. I know what it looked like. It was like a beigy color; most of the other ones Adam had in there were black. And it wasn’t there.”

I thought about that for a moment.

“Was it there when you last saw Adam? Before he left with his parents?”

“I didn’t go up to his room. We were hanging out in the kitchen mostly. Last time I’d been up in his room was, like, the day before. Thursday? It was there then.”

“Did anything else in the room look out of place? Did it look like anything else was taken?”

“Not that I could tell, but, like, I only looked in there for a second. But I saw right away that it was gone.”

“Why didn’t you tell Barry?” I asked him. “That’s the kind of thing he wanted to know.”

“It’s just, like I said, it might not mean anything. Adam said to me, one of the last things he said to me, was that his dad was kind of pissed about it.”

“What do you mean? Mr. Langley was pissed because you had an old computer from Agnes Stockwell’s house? Why would he give a shit about that? You two were always collecting old computers and messing around with them.”

“I think Adam must have mentioned to him what we found on it.”

“What the hell did you find on it?” I asked.

Derek let out a long sigh. “Like, all kinds of shit was on the hard drive. Bunch of school essays, some really lame game based on the first Star Trek series. You know, the one with Kirk and Spock and those guys. Really sad graphics, but kind of cool at the same time, you know.”

“Okay,” I said a bit impatiently, trying to move him along.

“And there was a resume, and letters he wrote when he was applying to Thackeray and other schools, you know, and some letters to a teacher he had back in high school, but the main thing is, there was a story.”

“A story? What, a short story? Something Agnes’s son wrote?”

“Not a short story. It’s, like, a novel. A whole bunch of chapters. Twenty of them, at least.”

I was shaking my head, trying to understand. “Okay, so there’s a book or something in that computer. Why didn’t you mention it to Barry?”

“I don’t know. I guess because it was kind of embarrassing.”

“Why?”

Derek showed me the closest thing to a grin that I’d seen from him in a couple of days. “It’s pretty dirty.”

I leaned up against the workbench. “Jesus, Derek. So why would Adam’s dad be pissed that you found a computer with some porno on it? I mean, it’s not your fault what’s on somebody else’s computer, and besides, Albert didn’t strike me as someone who’d have a fit about that kind of thing.”

Derek shrugged. “I don’t know. Adam never said. I mean, it wasn’t even like it had pictures with it or anything. Maybe if it was really obvious porn, he might be upset, but when it’s all written out, it doesn’t seem like it’s that big a deal. The thing is, the book was actually pretty cool. Even though it was dirty, it was pretty well written.”

“So Agnes’s son wrote high-class porno,” I mused, raising an eyebrow. “Maybe he just wanted to write his own stuff to whack off to.”