Flirting With Disaster (Camelot 3)

“It m-makes me c-c-crazy,” he said finally.

“What does? Camelot?”

“It’s the ssame. Everything is exactly the same, the sswings at the p-playground at the school and Bev behind the c-counter at the post office and the damn upside-down tree by the church.”

“Did you always hate it?”

He paused before he answered. “No. When we ffirst moved from Zanesville, I loved it. My muh-mom went on and on about how great it wuh-would be t-to live in a c-c-college town, with the c-culture and the lectures and all that, but I juh-just thought, Clean slate, you know? Nobody in C-camelot or Mount Pleasant had ever heard me ssstutter. I think I hoped the sstutter wuh-would just go away. That maybe I c-could start over, and yuh-you know how that worked out. If we hadn’t m-moved in down the sstreet from Mikey, I probably never wuh-would have talked to anybody at all.”

He took a deep breath and exhaled. “I was angry all the time when I lived in C-camelot. Being back here makes me feel like a ffifteen-year-old kid again. I fucking hated being a fffifteen-year-old kid.”

“Yeah.” She thought she knew what he meant. The day she’d climbed into Levi’s beat-up Ford F-150 and driven out of town, high on youth and dreams and love, she’d been delighted to think she would never see Camelot again except to visit.

When she came home from Alaska and moved in with her parents, the village had felt stifling. So small, and so freaking precious with the ivy-imitation college buildings and the teeny Village Pub, the wee market and the graveled path bisecting the town like a beautified artery. The undergrads everywhere, playing their perennial games of disc golf and handing out earnest Amnesty International pamphlets from a card table set up in front of the bookstore.

Everyone knew everything about everybody, and she’d walked around town feeling like one of those plastic toys you could see right through to the muscles and guts. The Visible Woman. If it hadn’t been for Caleb offering her his house to live in, she’d probably have had a breakdown in the line at the deli and been given a nice padded cell.

But it had gotten better. Caleb had helped, because he understood about leaving and coming back, and he didn’t give a rat’s ass what anybody in Camelot thought of her, or of him, either. He never had.

Plus, she’d figured out after a while that Camelot hadn’t done anything to deserve her surly attitude. Sure, her mom and the parish ladies and Bev at the post office knew her whole sorry life story, but they all had better things to do than sit around gossiping about the Tragic Tale of Katie Clark all the time. They smiled when they saw her, same as they did for anybody else. The only decision she had to make was whether to smile back.

In the fall, the leaves turned scarlet and gold and orange before dropping in lazy, fluttering swoops onto Central Path, and the air began to bite. The students hurried to class with their hands shoved deep in their pockets and their books under their arms, serious in the pursuit of knowledge.

It was home.

It wasn’t Sean’s home, though. He’d spent only two years there, seething with rage and hurting. He hated her hometown.

He hated it, but he lived in it. He’d been living in Camelot for three seasons, for no logical reason she could grasp. No reason but pain, which she knew from experience created its own sort of paralysis.

Grief took so many forms.

“Hey,” Sean said. “You okay?”

She came back to herself. She’d been staring out the window again, lost in thought. “Yeah, sorry. I was just thinking. What have you been doing on the case? Are you getting anywhere?”

“I am, actually. That’s why I wanted t-to get to Camelot tonight. I think I’ve figured out a way to get c-closer to the identity of the p-person who sent these messages.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Judah won’t let me talk to anyone at Google to give up the IP info on the emails yet, and their ssecurity is too good for me to steal it myself.”

“I’m so disappointed in you.”

He flashed her a smile that made her heart thump. “If I had more t-time, I could probably figure it out. That would be really fun. And I’ve got contacts there I can hit up for a favor, so it’s not a lost c-cause yet. But in the meantime, I was looking at apps that let you post to all your different ssocial media accounts from one place, and it gave me an idea for a way t-to try to datamine all the different ways fans interface with Pratt to create profiles.”

Every time he talked about computer stuff or the case, he lost most of the stutter. He sounded confident in the most adorably nerdy way.

“So say a teenager in Poughkeepsie c-comments on his blog and follows him on Facebook,” he continued, “and she’s on his mailing list through the website and posts in fan-club chat rooms about him. She’s going to have all different usernames associated with the different accounts, right? That makes it hard to even tell she’s one person. She doesn’t have to go out of her way to c-conceal her identity. It just happens by default. But even so, she’s using the same IP address on all the accounts, say, and her interactions are getting routed through the same server banks in East Asia by her ISP.” Sean glanced at her. “You following me?”

“I’m good.”

That made him smile. He was excited, talk of computers bringing him fully out of the dark mood he’d been in most of the day. His enthusiasm had the unfortunate side effect of making her whole body perk up and stand to attention.

“So the ideal thing would be a program that pulls it all together and says, ‘All this is the same girl. Here are her account names, here’s her IP and all the details on her system and browser, here’s how often she’s been visiting and p-posting and such.’ ”

“ ‘Here’s her name and address?’ ”

“Not necessarily, but I can get us c-close enough that figuring out her name and address wouldn’t be that hard. The trick is to narrow the size of the field down to something manageable.”