Crimes by Moonlight

The Conqueror Worm by Barbara D’Amato

Neal Hofstra had been home from work just three minutes-time enough to throw his coat on the sofa, stop in the bathroom, get a bottle of water from the fridge, and sit down at his computer and click up his e-mail. Although he complained about e-mail to his girlfriend, Sandy, claiming that because of it he never got away from his job, in fact he loved it. Neal was aware he wasn’t the most assertive man on the planet. Telephone conversations made him uneasy. He never quite knew how to end one and was left saying, “Well, okay-” or “Um, that’ll be fine, then,” and hoping the person on the other end would firmly say “Good-bye.” But with e-mail he could get the wording exactly right. Plus he could send off a note to a friend or even an order to a supplier-his job was supply manager for a chain of office supply stores-at any time of the day or night and not have to worry about disturbing the addressee. When he was forced to actually telephone somebody, he was sure he was interrupting. After all, if the person was at work, she was busy and shouldn’t be bothered. And if she was at home, she was resting and shouldn’t be bothered.

He sat down in his swivel chair and opened nkHofstra. He clicked on in-box. Three new messages in the in-box. It was like opening surprise packages.

From subject received

Sandy Hossler dinner tonight? 11/5/2008 2:44 PM

JDPutnam Brant erasable pens order 11/5/2008 5:01 PM

Earl Think reminder 11/5/2008 5:17 PM

The one from his girlfriend Sandy was a nice thing. He’d like to do dinner tonight, but he deleted it and would get back to her in a couple of minutes. The one from his boss with the pen order wasn’t such a nice thing. The 5:01 time made it irritatingly clear that Mr. Putnam knew he had left work on the stroke of five.

Well, screw him. Neal would get the stupid pens order in tonight. Brant’s took orders 24/7.

The mystery e-mailer was interesting. No attachment, so he opened it.

The message read:

Hello, Inky.

Neal shoved himself away from the desk so hard his chair caught its wheels on an electric cable, and he tipped over onto the floor. Grabbing the chair by the back, he slammed it down in front of the desk and dropped into it.

The rest of the message read “Just asking how you are after all this time.” It was signed “l. Amoco.”

Neal hit reply and typed “Who are you?” Then he hit send. He got up and walked around the room a couple of times until he realized he was holding his breath. The message was a joke. A stupid joke. He ought to be angry. No, he was angry. He sat back down and, furious, he deleted the original message with a hard thumb on the delete key.

But now there was an incoming message. This one from Moca Hooy, which had to be something different. Neal opened it.

You know who I am. Your old friend Berko.

Although Neal was trembling now, he managed to type a reply.

But you’re dead.

A ten-second pause and another message. This one from acc most.

Nope. Can’t get out of it that way, Inky.

Neal punched Delete. Went to the second message and deleted it. Then, thinking he was going to vomit, he ran to the bathroom. But as soon as he got there, the anger took over instead. He washed his hot face with cold water. Then washed it again.

All right. He was furious with whoever it was. But this was not the time to get crazy. Who else knew him by the name Inky? Berko had invented the nickname from his initials, N. K. Hofstra. He was always making up mildly insulting nicknames, like calling Henry Caringella Zorro because he got a zero on his first differential equations test. It wasn’t quite insulting, because it wasn’t Zero. Berko never used these names except in one-on-one conversations, as if it were some sort of intimate endearment. Neal had only heard about the Zorro name because Henry told him. Neal had certainly not told anybody about the Inky name.

Time to trace this thing. He wished he were a computer genius. Sitting back down again, he checked his in-box. Gone, of course. He had deleted the messages. But they would be in the delete file.

He clicked on the delete file. Oddly, the messages weren’t there. Could he have emptied the file? Well, he certainly didn’t remember doing so, and there was the deleted message from Sandy. And besides, he would have had to answer “Yes” when the program asked whether he was sure he wanted to permanently delete the messages, and then he would have had to return to his in-box, because that had been up on the screen when he got back from the bathroom.

And he certainly had not done all that and been unaware of it. There had been no mental blackout. He was angry, not insane.

What was the name the first message had come in under? Something about an oil company? He couldn’t remember.

Of course! He was so rattled he wasn’t thinking. Look in sent items! The first message would be there, attached to his response.

But it wasn’t. It and his response were gone.

The phone rang. He was trembling so much he could hardly answer.

“Hi, hon. Get my e-mail? Let’s do dinner.”

“ Sandy, I don’t think I’m up for dinner tonight.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m not feeling very well.”

“You sound funny. I’ll come over and take care of you.”

“No, honey. I think I’d better just hunker down. I’ll call if I need you.”

She was ringing his doorbell twenty minutes later.

He had loved Sandy when he first heard her speak. Her voice summed her up so well-gentle, willing to listen but willing to speak her mind, too. There was a trace of sadness in Sandy, which he thought was the result of her divorce. She had the air of a person who had made a mistake and grown as a result.

The first time she visited his apartment, he’d cooked for her. She’d had a hard day at her job as a paralegal. The lawyers had kept her working through lunch. Without thinking much about it, he’d taken a carton of eggs from the refrigerator. He cracked six into a bowl, whisked them with a fork, and poured them gently into a pan where butter was bubbling on low heat. While they were scrambling, he took lox and a red onion out of the refrigerator. He sliced two bagels and lowered them into the toaster.

Sandy said, “Now I know you’re not a computer nerd.”

“What?”

“You cook.”

“Oh, yeah. You mean I don’t send out for pizza and have empty pizza boxes and Mountain Dew cans all over the floor.”

“Exactly.”

Tonight, she had not only hurried over, she had brought a large shopping bag that emitted the odors of Thai curry beef and coconut milk soup.

“Now I’ll go to the kitchen and dish out, and then we’ll eat, and you’ll tell me what’s wrong.”

While she was in the kitchen-a very tiny space with one work counter and room for a two-foot-diameter round table and two chairs, Neal edged cautiously to his computer. He touched the keyboard gingerly and looked at the monitor.

Another message. “Ah, much of sadness, more of sin, Inky. I’m going to get even.”

“ Sandy! Come here quick! I’ll show you.”

“What?”

“Look at this!”

She peered over his shoulder. “What, Neal? A message from your boss?”

Sandy said, “You’d better call Beetlejuice.”

He explained what was happening, the vanishing messages, but not the underlying reason. And certainly not the horrible thing he had done that caused all this. He knew he had to tell her eventually, but he had to work up to it. What would she think of him, once she knew? He didn’t want to lose her.

BEETLEJUICE Thomas said he’d come right over.

The man had been named by a mother with an antic imagination. But he thought his name was pretty funny. “Nobody forgets who I am,” he said.

When he burst in the door, he shouted, “You lucky folk, it’s me!”

But seeing Neal’s face, he sobered up.

Neal explained, just as he had to Sandy, what was happening, but not the story behind it.

Beetlejuice sat at Neal’s desk, flexed his fingers dramatically, and said, “Got any Jolt?”

“No. Sorry.”

“Mountain Dew?”

“I think so.”

Beetlejuice clicked keys for several minutes and began to look annoyed.

Neal said, “No luck?”

“Not yet. Why don’t you go get a soda for yourself and let me work?”

“Have you ever seen a problem like this before?”

Hearing Neal’s tacit criticism, he said, “Yes, actually, I have.”

“Did you fix it?”

“I’m researching it.”

“So when was this?”

“A couple of weeks ago.”

“Did you find the problem?”

“I haven’t yet.”

“How is the person who has the problem dealing with it?”

“I haven’t heard from him recently. I’ll have to check.”

Neal paced back and forth. Sandy brought him a glass of grape drink, but he just held it. He felt queasy. He peered over Beetlejuice’s shoulder. Which wasn’t appreciated.

“Go away! Just let me work. I’m restoring the backup of your e-mail data.”

Suddenly, Neal was hit by a thought. “Um-Beetle? When you get the e-mail, do you see it?”

“What?”

“Will you see the actual e-mail?”

“Yeah. Duh. You’re saying if I just find the messages, I shouldn’t open them?”

“Uh, yes.”

Beetlejuice and Sandy exchanged glances.

After a few minutes, Beetlejuice pushed the chair back and worked his shoulders.

“Got it?” Neal said.

“Well, no.”

“Now what?”

“Will you just let me do this? Now I’m going to run a data-recovery utility.”

Sandy sat on the sofa with her hands folded and her back stiff. Neal paced. A couple of times he thought he caught Sandy looking at him speculatively.

Finally Beetlejuice said, “It just doesn’t find them.”

“You mean we can’t tell whether the e-mails were ever sent?”

“Dude, I don’t think they ever came in.”

“But they did. I saw them!”

“Come on, Neal, man. Everybody gets times when they’re overstressed.”

“I did not imagine this!”

“Maybe that crappy boss is getting on your nerves.”

“No,” Neal said. He was not going to get mad at Beetle. After all, the man had come over here to help. Or at least he wasn’t going to show that he was mad. “Yeah-well,” he said.

“You know, Hofstra, there’s no such thing as a ghost in a machine.”

WHEN Beetle left, Neal knew it was time to be honest.

“ Sandy -listen.”

“What?”

“The e-mails are talking about something I did. Four years ago, I was out at a bar with a friend. His name was Berko. We came out later-maybe midnight-and we were halfway down the block when these four guys jumped us.”

“Oh, my God!”

“They said the wanted money, and we gave them our wallets, but they started beating us anyway with crowbars, or tire irons, I don’t know. I pulled out my cell phone, but they stomped on it, and I ran.”

“And you survived.”

“Yes. But Berko didn’t. If I’d stayed there and fought back, he might have.”

“Why wouldn’t you have been killed, too?”

“Uh-I might have been.”

“Honey, it was their fault, their evil, not yours.”

“What I did was my fault-”

“Everybody has something like that in their lives. Guilt is a terrible thing to go on feeling.”

“But I am guilty.”

“These things eat away at you. I know.”

He didn’t answer.

“I’ve had personal experience with this, Neal.”

“Well, you told me about your divorce. But I don’t think that’s the same, no matter how much you may blame yourself.”

“I didn’t tell you all of it. I didn’t tell you the reason for our divorce.”

“People are allowed to have differences-”

“No! Neal, we had a daughter.”

Neal shifted uncomfortably.

“She was four years old. Patricia. We called her Tishy.”

“If it hurts you too much, don’t tell me.”

She went on anyway. “Tishy and I always went to the store together. She loved to pick out things for dinner. She had-we had the proper child safety seat in the car for her, properly installed in the backseat. She always used it. She was such a good girl. She had gotten to the age where she was very proud of fastening the seat belt herself. She’d get in and say, ‘Buckle up.’ When she was younger, she called it ‘uckle up.’ ”

Neal shifted again but didn’t say anything.

“So this Tuesday, we got in to drive to the store. She climbed into her seat and buckled up. I heard the buckle click. I heard it! But she must have pushed it and let it go. We drove down Elk Road. There’s a stop sign going the other way. A driver-a young woman with three fraternity buddies in her car-ran the sign and broadsided us. Tisha was thrown sideways into the left rear door. She died. I only had a bump on my forehead.”

Sandy had not cried until she told how little she had been injured.

“The seat belt was defective,” Neal said.

“No. She hadn’t latched it. I heard a click, but I didn’t check. I didn’t check!”

SANDY left. Neal had said he needed to be alone. He had tried to comfort her, but all the while, he was thinking, You made a careless mistake. I didn’t make a mistake.

I didn’t make a mistake. I made a decision to be cowardly. What I didn’t tell Sandy was-I could have run down the street and found a store open and called 911. But I was afraid they’d follow me. So I ducked into an alley and hid behind a bunch of trash cans until I heard them leave.

Until I heard them leave. Oh, God. Berko was dying by then. He was surely beyond help by the time I found an open liquor store and called the cops.

I am slime.

A new message appeared. It was from Earl Think. It said, You killed me.

Quickly, Neal grabbed up his iPhone and took a picture of the monitor screen. He looked at the phone screen. Nothing.

But it had been there. Really, it had. It wasn’t his imagination or the effect of a guilty conscience.

Except-what difference did it make? He was guilty whether the messages were real or the product of his self-loathing. He had done something terribly wrong and cowardly, and he had killed his friend.

And he realized he could never tell Sandy the whole truth, that he had not only run away into the alley and hidden behind those trash cans. He had waited. He could have run down the street and found a phone, but he ran and hid and waited until he heard the muggers leave. It had taken another three or four minutes for them to finish stomping Berko. If he hadn’t wanted to hide so fast, if he hadn’t been afraid they’d follow him, if he had run down the street, Berko might have lived.

Neal was crying now. He was a coward and a worthless human being.

He went into the kitchen and rummaged in a bottom cabinet until he found the vodka, which he practically never drank. Carrying the bottle by the neck, he went into the bathroom and found aspirin. Then he returned to the computer and sat in his swivel chair and took a long drink from the bottle. He started to choke, but he kept calm. After a couple of minutes, he chewed two of the aspirin, then decided to wash them down with more vodka. He waited several minutes to make sure he wasn’t going to choke again. Then he repeated the process.

In the flash of a fading brain, Neal realized, anagrams! The thing was playing with him. Coma hooy = yahoo.com. Earl think = earth-link. L. Amoco = aol.com. But it all didn’t matter.

SANDY had reached her home troubled. Neal had been devastated, whatever was happening. When she had left, his eyes were wide and his cheeks looked hollow. He was having some sort of stress-induced hallucinations.

She gave herself a couple of minutes, to see whether her nerves would quiet down. Maybe she was overreacting.

But half an hour later, she was only more worried.

All right. She picked up the phone. He hadn’t said not to call, after all.

But there was no answer. She let it ring a dozen times. Well, no answer didn’t necessarily mean he was in trouble. He quite often didn’t answer the phone if he was entering orders for work. And he sometimes turned off the phone if he was going to bed. He’d had a stressful evening, that was for sure. Maybe he figured a good night’s sleep would straighten him out.

AT Neal’s apartment, he heard the phone very distantly. He made no attempt to answer it. In fact, he couldn’t quite remember where he had left it, and it sounded funny, echoey and hollow. He drank some more vodka, took another two aspirin, and put his head down on the desk.

SANDY knew she wasn’t going to relax until she was certain Neal was all right. She picked up her keys to drive back to his place, then hesitated. Maybe that was going too far too fast. He could be working, and he might be annoyed if she just burst in. What she’d do first is e-mail him. If he was working, he’d get a ding that there was an incoming message. He’d be alert for one, if he was awake, because he was waiting for the phantom e-mailer. If he didn’t answer her e-mail in, say, half an hour, she’d drive over.

She went to her desk and opened her e-mail.

Hmm, there was a message for her. She’d just take a minute to check it.

She opened the e-mail. The message said,

Hi, Mommy.