Read Online A Tap on the Window by Linwood Barclay - Free Book Online
Authors: Linwood Barclay
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to wait to find out what progress Haines and Brindle made in their discreet search for Claire. I could find her as quickly as they could, if not quicker. I knew something they didn’t. I knew what Claire’s friend looked like. If I could learn who she was, and get to her, I could find Claire. This girl had to know where she’d gone. They’d cooked up this disappearing act together.
I was betting I could get her name without even leaving the house.
I went to the kitchen, past Donna, who was standing at the sink with her back to me, and grabbed the laptop sitting there. I dropped into the recliner where I’d passed time the night before, and logged on to Facebook.
But not as myself. I didn’t have a Facebook profile.
After Scott died and I began looking into where he might have gotten the ecstasy, I needed to know who his friends and acquaintances were. Ten or fifteen years ago, that would have involved a lot of legwork. Once I’d found one friend, I’d have leaned on him to get the names of more. And then when I’d gone to visit those people, I’d have repeated the process.
These days, all I had to do was go to the number one social network. There wasn’t, in my experience, a kid today who wasn’t on it, although I suspected it wouldn’t be long before the younger generation found some other way to connect. All their parents were on Facebook now, ruining it for them, crowding them out, posting videos and pictures of dogs and cats and cute babies, and tarting up clichéd aphorisms—“This Is Your Life. Be Who You Want to Be!”—in colored boxes with fancy fonts.
When I’d started snooping around Facebook, the first thing I’d had to figure out was Scott’s password.
I worked at it, off and on, for three days. I entered everything I could think of, starting with the obvious ones many people use. Like. But I knew Scott was far too clever for that. So I moved on to his birthday, and tried every variation of it. Day, month, year. Year, month, day. And so on. No luck there.
Then I tried the names of pets. We hadn’t had that many over the years. There was our white poodle, Mitzy, who got run over by a FedEx truck when Scott was seven. He’d accidentally let the dog out of the house when he was heading out to play with friends, and saw Mitzy chase after the truck and get caught under its rear wheels. He cried for a couple of days straight, and we swore off any more dogs at that point.
There was a gerbil named Howard that came into our lives for three months when Scott was ten. He got out of his cage, and we found him, a week later, stuck behind a bookcase. It wasn’t pretty.
No joy onor.
So then I entered everything I’d ever known him to be interested in. Movie titles and characters. Celebrity names. Favorite songs and musicians. Names of cars.
Nothing worked.
Then, one day, I thought of two words he used all the time whenever he wanted to get our attention. He might shout them from any room in the house, or blurt them out when he came into a room. Two words that he ran together as one. From the time he was little, until the day he—
You get the idea.
“Momdad!” he’d yell. “Momdad!”
I tried MOMDAD .
I was in.
Trouble was, I was too overcome, my eyes too misted, to be able to study his list of friends for several minutes.
But once I did, I learned he had two hundred and seventeen of them. A respectable number, if not huge. While Scott was part of the network, he didn’t do all that much socializing on it. He posted rarely, and when he did—a clip, say, from a favorite movie or
Family Guy
episode, or a link to an article from one of his favorite sites—few people chimed in with comments. There were only a handful of people with whom he actually exchanged messages, but those were the people I’d first checked out. Some discreetly, some not so discreetly.
As I’d thought she might be, Claire Sanders was listed as one of Scott’s friends, but there was no interaction between them
I was betting I could get her name without even leaving the house.
I went to the kitchen, past Donna, who was standing at the sink with her back to me, and grabbed the laptop sitting there. I dropped into the recliner where I’d passed time the night before, and logged on to Facebook.
But not as myself. I didn’t have a Facebook profile.
After Scott died and I began looking into where he might have gotten the ecstasy, I needed to know who his friends and acquaintances were. Ten or fifteen years ago, that would have involved a lot of legwork. Once I’d found one friend, I’d have leaned on him to get the names of more. And then when I’d gone to visit those people, I’d have repeated the process.
These days, all I had to do was go to the number one social network. There wasn’t, in my experience, a kid today who wasn’t on it, although I suspected it wouldn’t be long before the younger generation found some other way to connect. All their parents were on Facebook now, ruining it for them, crowding them out, posting videos and pictures of dogs and cats and cute babies, and tarting up clichéd aphorisms—“This Is Your Life. Be Who You Want to Be!”—in colored boxes with fancy fonts.
When I’d started snooping around Facebook, the first thing I’d had to figure out was Scott’s password.
I worked at it, off and on, for three days. I entered everything I could think of, starting with the obvious ones many people use. Like. But I knew Scott was far too clever for that. So I moved on to his birthday, and tried every variation of it. Day, month, year. Year, month, day. And so on. No luck there.
Then I tried the names of pets. We hadn’t had that many over the years. There was our white poodle, Mitzy, who got run over by a FedEx truck when Scott was seven. He’d accidentally let the dog out of the house when he was heading out to play with friends, and saw Mitzy chase after the truck and get caught under its rear wheels. He cried for a couple of days straight, and we swore off any more dogs at that point.
There was a gerbil named Howard that came into our lives for three months when Scott was ten. He got out of his cage, and we found him, a week later, stuck behind a bookcase. It wasn’t pretty.
No joy onor.
So then I entered everything I’d ever known him to be interested in. Movie titles and characters. Celebrity names. Favorite songs and musicians. Names of cars.
Nothing worked.
Then, one day, I thought of two words he used all the time whenever he wanted to get our attention. He might shout them from any room in the house, or blurt them out when he came into a room. Two words that he ran together as one. From the time he was little, until the day he—
You get the idea.
“Momdad!” he’d yell. “Momdad!”
I tried MOMDAD .
I was in.
Trouble was, I was too overcome, my eyes too misted, to be able to study his list of friends for several minutes.
But once I did, I learned he had two hundred and seventeen of them. A respectable number, if not huge. While Scott was part of the network, he didn’t do all that much socializing on it. He posted rarely, and when he did—a clip, say, from a favorite movie or
Family Guy
episode, or a link to an article from one of his favorite sites—few people chimed in with comments. There were only a handful of people with whom he actually exchanged messages, but those were the people I’d first checked out. Some discreetly, some not so discreetly.
As I’d thought she might be, Claire Sanders was listed as one of Scott’s friends, but there was no interaction between them
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