After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall

JULY 2014

Just past midnight Julie, seated in front of her computer, put her hands to her face and pulled at the skin hard, trying to fully wake herself up. Today—no, yesterday—was her thirty-ninth birthday. Jake had called from Wyoming. Linda, in the midst of packing her family for Winnipeg, had dashed over with a chocolate cake with a mini-forest of candles. It had been a good day and Julie should have been in bed reliving it in dreams, but instead she’d sat at her computer for four and a half hours, flipping between news sites and screens full of data.

She almost had it, the right algorithm.

She could smell it, tantalizing as apples in October. But this was not autumn and this particular apple evoked Snow White’s Wicked Witch, Alan Turing’s cyanide-laced fruit, the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

God, she was beyond tired, or her thoughts wouldn’t turn so metaphorical. It wasn’t as if there weren’t enough to fear without figurative exaggeration.

Three more data points. One she felt certain about: the kidnapping in Vermont on the night Alicia was born. A three-year-old boy had vanished from his bedroom while his parents were out at a party. Local cops had his babysitter, a Dominican woman who barely spoke English, in custody. She swore she had been asleep on the living room sofa when the abduction occurred; undoubtedly they assumed she was lying. Julie knew she was not.

The other two data points were more uncertain. A break-in in a garden shop in Massachusetts, no forced entry, the cash box untouched. The usual bizarre collection of goods had been taken: rakes, seeds, wind chimes. And yesterday’s incident, the kidnapping of a Maine infant who was supposedly being watched by her teenage sister while the parents strolled on the beach. No trace of the baby girl had been found, but the whole thing so closely resembled a set-up that even the local cops were suspicious, regarding the sister as either a suspect or a scapegoat; Julie couldn’t tell which. Could be a significant, could not. The location fit with her current algorithm, but not so closely if she didn’t include it as a data point to create the algorithm in the first place, which was the kind of thinking that drove mathematicians crazy. And when had she started thinking of a lost child as a “data point”?

She had to go to bed. Just one more scan of breaking news. And there it was:

The article said nothing much. It didn’t have to. Julie, all exhaustion banished, ran into her bedroom and started packing.