Chapter 7
"Sisters of Sycorax. Ha! And I suppose they sent their little nephew Caliban here to wreck the store? I tell you, if I catch the fishy wretch who did this, I'll take a leaf from Prospero's book:
I'll rack thee with old cramps,
Fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar
That beasts shall tremble at thy din."
Miss Price leaned on the handle of her sweeper as if it were a wizard's staff and raised one hand dramatically towards the ceiling as she spoke. Two teen-age girls who had been giggling in the celebrity biography section fell silent and sidled out of the store with looks of alarm.
"Just chill, Miss Price. Have some pie." Alice held up a paper plate occupied by a slice of pumpkin pie. Today her sniffles were in abeyance; the pink on the tip of her nose was the only sign of her cold.
"If life hands you a pumpkin, make pumpkin pie? Is that your point?" Miss Price gripped her sweeper and fiercely ran it over the carpet. She had steam-cleaned the carpet the night before; it was now several shades of gray lighter and mottled with faint beta-carotene splotches.
"Why not?" Alice cut another slice of pie and lifted it directly into her mouth. "Joe makes simply divine pie," she said through a mouthful.
"I'm glad somebody got something pleasant out of all this. I can't believe it. First I get arrested and then the store gets messed up. All those pumpkins smashed. I'm beginning to think Marla is trying to drive us out so she can expand her shoe store into the bookshop. She was asking nosy questions about the lease the other day," Miss Price said.
Alice licked pie filling off her fingers. "Maybe it was Becky. She didn't have enough gum to stick all over the tarot cards so she decided to put pumpkin guts on stuff instead."
Elizabeth rocked back on her heels. She was on the floor beside one of the bookshelves. Miss Price had invited her to take a break from the mailing list and properly sort some of the books she had misshelved the other day when she was picking up after the vandal. "I think Becky and Marla were on Belle Isle on Halloween. I saw them at the 7-Eleven when I was waiting for Bob to pick me up."
"Really?" Alice paused with her pie halfway to her mouth.
"Why didn't you tell me?" Miss Price demanded.
"I didn't really think about it till just now," Elizabeth said.
Miss Price stopped running her sweeper over the carpet and blinked thoughtfully. "My goodness. That could explain a lot. Excuse me, ladies." She disappeared into her office and closed the door behind her.
"So anyway." Alice leaned over the counter. "My date last night was wonderful. We roasted pumpkin seeds, made pie, drank coffee. What a man! And he's got the most adorable kitten too."
"I bet he only borrowed it to impress you," said Elizabeth.
"So how was your date?"
"We had dinner with his parents. His anorexic sister told me that the taxes haven't been paid on our house so we are all going to get evicted, and then his parents wanted to know why I didn't go to William and Mary. But then he made up for all that by taking me to see Jane Eyre."
"Ooh, a chick film. He owes you that and about five more for subjecting you to his parents. That was what made Sumi break up with him. They wanted to know why she chose University of Tokyo over William and Mary."
Elizabeth burst out laughing. "Do they have any idea what University of Tokyo means in Japan? No wonder she dumped him. But what's the deal with the taxes? Do you think there's something to it or was Jennifer just being bitchy?"
Alice shrugged. "From what I've heard of her, that wouldn't be out of character. I don't know anything about the house except that the trust is supposed to take care of all the taxes and maintenance." She looked up when the door opened. "Uh-oh."
The evil customer who wanted to know about her back-ordered self-help book came into the store, the fires of hell burning in her eyes. Abandoning the bookshelf, Elizabeth scuttled back up to the mail-order department and heartlessly left Alice to deal with her.
When the sisters came home from work, they found Bob asleep on the futon in the foyer. The shift changes and Halloween madness had left him so wiped out that he hadn't made it up to his own room on the third floor. How fortunate for him that Elizabeth had never bothered to store her futon. Alice reached into her purse and pulled out a fistful of dollars that she tucked into his hand, loosely curled with sleep.
"Miss Price's bail money," she whispered to Elizabeth.
Dirk was in the kitchen steaming vegetables and heating up a cake of tofu. His greeting was surly and Elizabeth wondered if more food had been stolen or if this was just his new habit. He only cheered up enough to offer them some tofu after Alice bestowed a dozen eggs from Miss Price's larder upon him.
Even so, the atmosphere did not thaw noticeably. Elizabeth left the kitchen as soon as she had fed herself adequately and hurried upstairs to curl up with her laptop and the Boccaccio. She was surprised to find herself hoping that Penrose would put in an appearance at some point. She would've been happy to hear him discourse on medieval Italian literature, or anything except her taste in men, but she was disappointed. Eventually her brain grew tired of reading and she found herself actually wanting to talk to someone. She knew that Bob would still be asleep, and that Dirk would very likely be grouchy, so she went down to her sister's room for a cozy chat.
Alice was again ensconced in her bed with her computer. She was chewing on her lip and typing madly when Elizabeth entered with a light knock on the open door.
"Oh, hi."
Elizabeth said, "Hi. What are you doing?"
"Blogging my little fingers off. I am regaling my loyal readers with the story of my arrest, redemption, and subsequent liaison with a police officer. Ironic, isn't it?"
"Yes, it is actually." Elizabeth removed a pile of clothing from a chair and sat down. "Are you writing about the incident on Belle Isle? That's like a confession, so if you expect to get out of this without any kind of penalty, you might want to not publicize your illegal doings. You have to make a court appearance, don't you?"
"We were caught in the act," Alice pointed out. "I don't think there is any getting out of this. We're all first-time offenders and will probably end up with community service or something. This is my way of allowing other people to do wrong vicariously through me. Hey, maybe I can get the judge to say that blogging is a public service!"
"You don't actually believe that."
Alice subsided. "No, but wouldn't that be great?"
"Does the city have stuff online? Maybe they could let you overhaul the city website or something."
Mouth open, Alice looked up from her screen. "Now that might actually fly. They've got a site and it's really kludgy. I could get it cleaned up in no time. Here, take a look." Her fingers danced over the keyboard.
Elizabeth sat beside her sister and watched her attempt to navigate the city government's website. The site was one huge tangle of frames, reminding Elizabeth of the electrical situation in the kitchen for some reason. The site was rife with links that went in circles. If you were looking for a particular service and started at one page, you'd be directed to another page, and from there to yet another page, and back around to where you started without ever actually finding any useful information. And the misspellings! Those did not seem to bother Alice at all, but Elizabeth ground her teeth every time she saw "you're" spelled as "your" and "it's" used in place of "its".
She said, "Maybe Miss Price could have a go at this too."
"No kidding. Hey, maybe the copywriter is one of her former students. Miss Price's community service could be teaching city employees about proper punctuation," Alice said.
"Can you find out anything about the taxes on the house? I'm betting that they're paid up and Jennifer's just blowing smoke," said Elizabeth.
Alice clicked around for awhile, but the links only took her in circles. She chewed on her lip and pecked carefully at the computer. "I wonder if I can actually get into their network."
She began muttering to herself and her eyes took on a fixed look that made Elizabeth nervous. She had never seen her sister look so intent over anything less grave than deciding upon the exact right shade of nail polish to go with a prom dress. A few cries of "Earth to Alice" did nothing to regain her sister's attention. Elizabeth felt as though she was alone again. She decided to go take a shower and check back to see if her sister had returned to normal in twenty minutes.
One shower complete with a hair wash and a post-shower blow dry later, Elizabeth found Alice still staring fixedly at her machine. "Did you get in?"
Alice looked up from the computer. "I did and I don't like what I found. Look at this."
Elizabeth sat down on the bed again and looked at the text Alice highlighted with a cursor. "We are tax delinquent?"
"The record shows that the house has not had the taxes paid for ten years. That does not mean that the taxes were not actually paid, however. Look at this section. Here it says that this record was last modified three weeks ago. I saved a copy of the text to my machine and I've made a log of how I got in, so we can always take another look and see if anybody has changed it again. These are the initials of the person who made the change, EB, so we might be able to track him down and find out what gives."
"Assuming that the person who made the change used his (or her) own initials, or logged in as himself when he made the change," said Elizabeth. She was leaning so close to the computer that her hair brushed across the keyboard.
Alice swatted her away. "Too true. I don't know if this information is worth anything after all. But he didn't think to modify the date of the change."
"When are the taxes due anyway?"
"In the spring," said Penrose. He was standing in the doorway.
Alice said, "I don't know. Let me check." She toggled to another window. "Six months ago. I think we should tell the trust about this."
Penrose fidgeted, stepping into the room and then back out. He was clearly itching to take a look at the screen, but knew the machine would crash if he walked near it. "The city must have contacted the trust about the taxes, but the trust wouldn't know about the record being altered. Let me handle it."
Elizabeth said, "We'd better let the trust deal with it. They'd want to know how you found out and that might get you in more trouble. And the trust must already know. I'm sure they're taking care of things."
Alice pointed out, "They wouldn't know about the record being modified, unless they hacked in like I did."
Elizabeth remembered what she and Penrose had discussed earlier. She clapped a hand to her mouth and looked at Penrose in alarm. "Maybe the trust really is guilty."
Penrose said, "No, the recent modification to the record tends to exonerate them."
Alice said, "Do you really think so? I always thought there was something fishy about the way this place was managed, but it was such a good deal that I never thought about it too hard."
"Can your sister change the record back to show that the taxes have been paid?" Penrose was still stepping in and out of the room.
"Can you change the record back?" Elizabeth asked.
Alice said, "No way. I'm logged in on a sort of read-only guest account. I can't make any changes. I need inside information to do that. I'd have to get a city employee with that kind of access to give me his or her password. I don't even know anybody who works for the city."
Elizabeth said, "Have you forgotten? You're dating someone who works for the city. Officer Joe."
"Officer Joe does not work for the tax department."
"Oh." Elizabeth felt stupid.
Alice began closing out her connection to the city. As Elizabeth watched her sister easily navigate her way out of the network, presumably without leaving a trace of her passage, she wondered how a person who had majored in art history managed to come out of college with so little knowledge of art and so many other completely unrelated skills. Elizabeth had to ask.
Alice shrugged. "It's not like I'm a hacker. I just picked up a few things from a guy I dated."
Over by the door, Penrose raised his eyes heavenward. "Lock-pickers, hackers. I suppose we should be thankful she's dating a police officer now. Although one wonders what she will pick up from him."
"Chokeholds?" Elizabeth giggled.
"A predilection for handcuffs?"
"What?" Alice asked.
"Nothing. Goodnight." Elizabeth dove out the door before Penrose could elaborate.