“No, I mean what you said. About his world. I don’t think they are all the same. You know who Stewart Crothers is?”
“No.”
“He was the guy actually came up with the idea of Global Village. When him and Evan Bone were both at college. He wrote me. After . . .”
She slipped another sheet of paper from the wallet file and handed it to me. A print-out of an email.
Dear Ginny and Mike,
I read about your loss. I am truly sorry. I want you to know that my intention was for Global Village to be a way to bring people together, create a space where someone like Hazel could make friends, broaden her horizons and grow as a person.
Evan Bone evidently doesn’t see it that way. And I guess I should have known, because—right from the day we met, back at Stanford—he was always, shall we say, just a little bit different, a little bit strange. So no surprise, I suppose, that he has turned my idea into something more like a police state than an open network. It won’t be much comfort to you, I know, but if I could have just one wish, it would be that I had realized where he would go with it and never given him the chance.
Please share my condolences with your family and Hazel’s friends.
Best,
Stew Crothers
“You’re probably wondering where Mike is,” said Ginny Voss. “Fact is, he couldn’t stand it. Going on living here. Where we raised our little girl. And I couldn’t stand to leave. So he shipped out, and I stayed.”
“You mind if I take a photo of this?” I said. “Just for my own reference?”
“Go ahead.”
I got a couple of close-ups on my phone.
“You think it’s important?” said Ginny Voss.
“It all depends what he’s talking about, doesn’t it?”
“You going to ask him?”
I shrugged. “I could try. But I very much doubt if he’d tell me.”
“That’s what journalists do, isn’t it? Ask people questions? Get them to tell them stuff?”
“Men like Evan Bone and Stewart Crothers aren’t people. Not in the ordinary sense of the word. They’re completely protected. There’s no way of reaching them, if they don’t want to be reached.”
“Well, if he doesn’t, maybe there’s someone else would.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
I could hear the despair in her voice. She glanced round, scouring the blandness for a glimmer of inspiration. After a moment she turned back to me and said,
“You want to see her room?”
“All right.”
She stood up and led me through the kitchen into a narrow hall at the rear of the house. There were three identical doors, arranged in an L pattern. She pointed to the one at the end.
“In there.”
“You’re not going to—?”
She shook her head. She squeezed against the wall to let me past, then stood there, shoulders hunched, hands clasped, as if she were cold.
I pushed open the door. The room was dark, except for a few razor-slashes of sunshine slicing through the blinds. I switched on the light. The bed had been stripped, but everything else looked as if it was exactly as Hazel had left it. Despite the dust everywhere, there was still the Mary Celeste feel of something momentarily interrupted and waiting to be resumed. In one corner, two shaggy-haired dolls and a teddy bear sat together in a chair, stoically watching—as they must have done for years—the long ebb of childhood. All around them, evidence of the world that had taken its place: a little basket cluttered with make-up; a stack of fashion magazines; a poster—four smiling black-shirted boys, all still sticky from the chrysalis—for a band called Guyz! For a moment, looking at it, I could feel Hazel Voss in my arms, the bulk of her not-quite-formed body, the weight of all that unlived life.
“Jesus,” I muttered.
“Excuse me?” called Ginny Voss.
I switched off the light and went back into the hall. She’d opened the door to the next room and was standing just inside the entrance, one hand stroking her throat. Behind her I could see a double bed, spread with a pleated satin coverlet. Above it hung another Jesus, this time sans lamb.
“You see?” she said.
I nodded.
“That’s what we lost.” She shook her head. “And I don’t have much, but there’s nothing I wouldn’t give, nothing I wouldn’t do, to make that man pay.”
She held my gaze for a moment. Then slowly, deliberately, she started fiddling with the top button of her blouse. For a second I glimpsed the bare, blue-veined curve of her breast. I looked away hastily and caught the baleful stare of Jesus watching me over her shoulder.
“Please,” I said. “You don’t have to do anything.”
She started to cry. Shame? Relief? Humiliation that I’d rejected her? Whatever it was, I wished I could comfort her. But to hug her again now would only make things worse.
“Let’s go back in the other room,” I said.
She nodded, unable to speak, and re-buttoned her blouse.
Ten minutes later, I left. I opened the car windows and lit a cigarette, my first since Global Village. By the time I’d finished, I’d made up my mind. I drove into the center of town and checked in to the Riddick Motor Inn.
In my room, I lay on the bed and googled Evan Bone and Anne Grainger. Had he said anything about her? Expressed regret, or even just sympathy for her family?
No, there was nothing. A British reporter who’d asked for a response had been simply told: Mr. Bone is not available for comment,
OK, Anne, I said, I get the point. Evan Bone is a monster. The question is, what can I do about it?
No answer. But there was really only one option at this point. It was, I knew, a long shot: the equivalent of putting a message into a bottle and chucking it into the sea. But I tried to shorten the odds by picking my words carefully: informal conversation; entirely off the record, of course. If I’d read his email to Ginny Voss correctly, he was hungry for absolution. He might just see me as a no-strings-attached confessor.
I pressed send. I’d done what I could. Now, suddenly, I found myself yearning for a decent meal. I traipsed the streets of Riddick, looking for one. In the end, I had to settle for a Caesar salad the size of a football at Cherie’s Garden Restaurant.
5
NO RESPONSE FROM STEWART CROTHERS by the time I went to bed. No response when I woke up in the morning. The journalistic doldrums, Anne used to call it, when you’ve asked for an interview, and don’t know whether or not you’ve got it. A Yes will fill your sails and carry you forward; a No will leave you scanning the horizon for a rescue boat.
While I was waiting, I decided to research the man. It turned out there was frustratingly little about him. He’d been a contemporary of Evan Bone at Stanford, where he’d first mooted the idea of Global Village. After one semester he’d left university and started writing algorithms for the stock market. A year later he discovered that Evan Bone had taken the Global Village concept and was developing it himself. Crothers sued, and settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. Shortly afterwards, he retired from the tech world to concentrate on his first love, painting. He was now a virtual recluse, living in an isolated house at La Crema, on the California coast. There were a few muzzy photos