Neverworld Wake(58)
He shook his head. “The police told us it was suicide.”
“Jim never would have done that. And you know it.”
“I don’t. I don’t know it.” Mr. Mason appeared to be crying, staring at the floor.
That was when I remembered.
I stepped behind him, inspecting his wrists, which were bound with zip ties. I yanked up the cuff of his shirtsleeve. Mr. Mason knew what I was after, because he immediately began to contort himself, trying to move his hands away.
“No! Don’t you dare—”
It was the black rubber bracelet I’d seen him wearing. He still had it on, five years later, though this one seemed an even more sophisticated version, with digital letters and punctuation with the numbers. I couldn’t pull it off his wrist, so I went into the kitchen, returning with a knife.
“Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare!”
I sliced the bracelet off his wrist.
“Now you’ve done it. Good for you. Bravo. Kiss your future goodbye, missy, because you’ll be spending the rest of your life in a hole so foul you’ll beg to be sent to prison.”
“I should be so lucky,” I said.
I turned to Whitley, who was blinking at me in shock.
“What got into you?” she whispered.
“I’ll be in Mr. Mason’s office,” I said, racing up the spiral staircase.
* * *
—
Martha was stunned to see me.
“Oh, my God. What happened?”
“It’s a long story. But I’m fine.”
I raced into the all-glass tower, pulling a chair alongside Martha behind the hulking desk. She couldn’t seem to stop staring. Naturally it made me wonder if she had been the one to stab me with the bumblebee pin. But there was no figuring it out. Not yet.
“I’ve been trying to log on to Edgar’s laptop,” she said, indicating the screen. “It’s impossible. There are three prompts for encrypted passwords.”
I stared down at the shifting line of numbers, symbols, and letters on the bracelet. They reset every fifteen seconds. I typed the displayed sequence into the three password boxes.
The computer unlocked.
“Are you kidding me?” whispered Martha in awe. “Like that? How did you—?”
“I’ll explain later.”
Before I clicked into the desktop, I placed a piece of tape over the webcam. I didn’t know what would happen when it became clear that there was a security breach, but I knew we’d have to work quickly. Edgar Mason had a personalized email interface called Torchlight Command. As soon as I opened the program, a timer recording my activity appeared in the upper right corner of the screen.
The first thing to do was to search for emails from Jim.
We couldn’t find one. Searching for the names of his brothers and sisters turned up countless emails, but there was not a single message either to or from Jim.
“He’s been wiped from his father’s email,” whispered Martha. “Why?”
“Maybe he wrote something inflammatory.”
She shrugged.
On the hard drive, there were over two thousand folders on a cloud server called Torchlight Library. I searched for Jim Mason. Nothing came up. We found a trove of financial records, listings of obscure holding companies with names like Redshore Capital America and Groundview Fund, with addresses in the Cayman Islands and Panama City. There were trade receipts and wire transactions from a bank in Turkey to another in Switzerland, some of which listed dollar amounts so enormous they looked like typos. If any of it was illegal, or tied in any way to Jim’s death, the truth was buried under layers of names, numbers, and symbols, none of which could be easily excavated.
“Maybe Edgar’s committing fraud,” said Martha. “Sweatshops. Child exploitation. Maybe Jim found out about it, and they had a major falling-out.”
“If Jim had found out something like that, he’d have been devastated, yes. But he wouldn’t have killed himself.”
She shrugged. “What if Edgar hired someone to kill Jim?”
I stared at her, surprised. “His own son?”
“If he thought he was going to lose the empire he built? Why not?”
Suddenly she sat up, frowning, pointing at the glass walls. I realized in horror that every pane was breaking. All around us thin cracks were spidering through the glass, branching out, one after the other.
“The instability of the Neverworld,” whispered Martha.
I nodded and hurriedly clicked back into the in-box. I certainly didn’t want her to wonder what the destruction meant, if it was all being caused by me. I leaned forward, squinting at the screen.
“Most of Edgar’s emails are from this woman named Janet,” I said, clearing my throat. “His executive assistant. They have a system where she reads his emails and summarizes them.”
“?‘Chris Endleberg, president of Princeton, called,’?” Martha read slowly. “?‘He appreciates the way you handled the matter re S.O. They’ll hold off on disciplinary measures.’ Huh. Okay. What else?”
We scanned the emails in the weeks leading up to Jim’s death.
There was nothing unusual. A board member was problematic. Patrick has to go. A real estate broker wanted to show Edgar an off-market listing for an estate in Bedford worth $48 million. Sick pad, man. Someone involved in a fast-food restaurant wanted another loan. I hear your concerns, but it’s time to expand on the line of frozen fried chicken dinners with romance-related flavor names. In the days following Jim’s death, there were emails about funeral arrangements and flower deliveries, the West Side Boys Choir, lists of who was attending and who would speak. It was oddly cold to read through. Just like that, Jim’s death was another action item in his father’s in-box. My name was buried among three hundred others.