Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six(45)

In her small, tidy kitchen, he picked up his phone and clicked onto the camera app. Mako, Cricket, and Hannah were in the hot tub. Liza, it seemed, had turned in early, a motionless form in the master suite. Bruce sat at the desk in the second big bedroom, his face blue in the light from the screen.

Bracken saw Bruce bring the phone to his ear and he clicked on the audio.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s right. Okay.”

He was grim and serious. People were so into their work, thought it was so important. Get outside, he wanted to shout. Enjoy your wife, the stars.

But if there was one thing he learned it was that you could only help people so much, at a certain point they had to help themselves.

“I just need to be sure that no one gets hurt.”

Woah. What was that now?

“My wife,” he said. “This is going to be so hard on her.”

Bruce nodded at whatever was being said on the other line. Bracken strained to hear, but it was muffled, a female voice maybe. “Yes, I know. You’re right. It’s time.”

When Bruce hung up the phone, he dumped his head into his hand. Bracken watched him a moment. What do you have going on, Bruce?

Bracken clicked through the rest of the rooms.

Where was the other guy?

A quick check of the driveway camera showed that one of the cars was gone. They should have everything they needed, he thought with mild annoyance; no reason for an intoxicated run into town.

Joshua. The mystery man.

The other guests were all wide open and living online. It had taken under an hour for him to learn pretty much everything he wanted to know about them. Hannah, wife and mom; that was her center. Cricket, the single party girl with big aspirations. Mako, the tech mogul with the huge Twitter following. Liza, the yoga influencer, with a popular YouTube channel. Bruce kept a lower profile, just a ConnectIn account listing his professional accomplishments, résumé, glowing reviews from former employers, as well as from clients of his company. No personal social media at all for Bruce. He was all business.

Bracken knew where they each went to school, who their friends were, where they shopped. He knew what they did on the weekends. He knew what was important to each of them, because people telegraphed so much about themselves without even realizing it. (He’d even taken one of Liza’s online yoga classes; it helped his back quite a bit.) Hannah: home, motherhood, family. Liza: mindfulness, the environment, wellness. Mako: fame, success, wealth. Cricket: beauty, enjoyment, partying but really looking for love. Bruce: work.

People told all in this confessional culture, showing one thing, and revealing so much more, maybe not even knowing about the kind of people out there, watching. Lucky for them, Bracken had their best interests at heart.

But Joshua Miller, there was nothing on him. In the rental application, Bracken required all the names of the guests staying at the house. And in the decade he’d been doing this, no one yet had balked at giving that information; it was a man’s right, wasn’t it, to know who was staying in his rental property?

But when he’d entered Joshua’s name into his search engine, there was only a little information. Just his name and picture on a bare-bones website for some tech company. Joshua was the head of security for a place called Razor. But there was almost nothing about the company, what they did; it wasn’t publicly traded, and there were no news items about it.

The site was very vague: systems consulting, some business-speak about helping companies to maximize the efficiency of their processes. What the hell did that mean? Joshua Miller had no social media. Or more accurately, there were so many Joshua Millers on social media that it was like a swamp of uninteresting people he’d have to wade through.

Bracken ran a simple background check on the name; he didn’t have access to a social security number and he really couldn’t ask for that. It would seem like an unusual request on an application for a rental. Maybe for the person paying, but not for each guest in the house, especially in this climate when people worried about identity theft. Which was funny—because they allowed themselves to be tracked by their phones, and broadcast every intimate detail of their lives online. But ask for those numbers and people got very careful.

Again, there were too many Joshua Millers and nothing leapt out when he scrolled through the items that came up on the online background check service for which he paid monthly. Not a crime to keep a low profile. Bracken had his bio on his vacation rental website, and that was the extent of his own online presence.

Where did you go, Joshua Miller? he wondered now.

And Bruce, Hannah’s husband. He was a bit of mystery as well. No social media presence except as he appeared in Hannah’s feed. Pieces of him—his arms holding the baby, a profile, smiling at the sunset, their hands clasped, rings glinting. There was a raft of wedding pictures, family shots at the baby’s “spiritual, not religious” blessing ceremony. He owned his own company, a consulting firm that “develops tailored business systems,” and “troubleshoots broken code.” But the language on his site was esoteric, clearly designed for a certain group who knew about things like “debugging” and “stack trace.” Bracken had him pegged as a standard nerd who found more to interest him on a screen than in the real world—like his beautiful wife in the hot tub downstairs.

Blink and you’ll miss it. You’ll miss everything, he wanted to tell Bruce. Whatever drama you have going on—another woman, some kind of business crisis—just let it go and be here now.