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Sienna’s jaw tightens. Aurora clears her throat. “They were pretty gross,” she says in a loud voice. “Like, way,waymore disgusting than I imagined e-mails like that would be. I can’t believe she...”
But she trails off as Sienna gives her a hard, inscrutable look. I don’t understand what’s gone down, but suddenly I’m filled with new questions.She?
I cock my head. “Do you girls know who Lolita is?”
Sienna raises her chin. “No, she doesn’t.”
“Aurora? You can speak for yourself.”
Aurora stares at her fingers. “No.” But a hot, crawling sensation eases across my chest.
“Is it a friend of yours?” I deliver the next line very, very carefully, glancing at Sienna. “Like Raina, for instance. She’s gorgeous. And she certainly seemed broken up about Greg’s death.”
Sienna sniffs. “Raina isn’t Lolita.”
But she covers her nose when she says this, an obvious tell that she’s lying. I hold her gaze, and she looks away first. “You don’t need to protect her,” I urge. “We need to figure out the truth.”
“I’mtellingthe truth.”
“Okay, then, who is it?”
“Why would I know?” Sienna slaps her thighs, then stands. “Why are we having this conversation?”
I glance at Aurora, but she’s staring blankly into her lap. “Okay. Well, whoever Lolita was, the cops will figure it out eventually, if they choose to look,” I say evenly. “There are ways to track the origin of those e-mails. By certain markers in the language. Or by the IP address.”
“The cops probably looked already,” Sienna says, her eyes shining. “And the IP isn’t going to tell them anything.”
This is the most effusive Sienna has been my whole visit. There’s even a sudden bloom of pink on her cheeks. “You seem to know a lot about computers,” I say carefully.
She shrugs. “It’s common knowledge. And I have a friend—he says IPs always just give you generalities about an area an e-mail came from, not the particular user.”
“That’s true. But sometimes getting a general location is a good clue. Did your friend tell you that?”
“Not necessarily.”
Her combativeness surprises me. Sienna is typically the one whodoesn’t want to make waves. I glance at Aurora, but she’s glaring as though the conversation irritates her.
I stand, sensing that I’m not going to get anything else from them. “Thanks for talking, girls. If you ever want to open up about Greg—aboutanything—I’m a sounding board. Seriously.”
The girls turn in relief, and their separate doors slam mere seconds after I’ve released them. I stand in the silent hall once more, the tips of my fingers tingling. I go over what they’ve just told me. Did Sienna just show her hand? Is she trying to push me away from searching the IP because it’ll lead me to Raina? Does this explain why Raina seemed so upset by Greg’s death? What could this say about the murderer?
I clomp downstairs and find my laptop on the kitchen table. It doesn’t take me long to pull up the hack database and find Greg’s e-mails to Lolita. I grab a pad of paper and write down the e-mail’s IP, a garbled mess of numbers and dots. I tap the next e-mail. It has the same IP—which seems like a good sign. It probably means Lolita—Raina?—wrote to Greg from a home computer instead of a cell phone, which would make it harder to track a location.
I navigate to an IP lookup database, my heart hammering. If I remember correctly, Raina lives in the dorms—where a lot of other kids live, too, so even if I do get an IP, it won’t be a direct lead to her. Still, it could prove Greg’s mistress was a student.
The results appear. I hinge forward, squinting at the screen. In broad font are about ten lines of text, starting with the continental location of the IP and narrowing all the way down to its specific longitude and latitude. My gaze fixes on the line that readsZip Code.I have to blink a few times before it sinks in. This isn’t Aldrich University’s zip code, though. It’s Blue Hill’s.Ours.
But that makes no sense. I get that Greg’s e-mails would come from here, probably his own computer in his study—and when I check, the IP is a different blend of numbers, though it still comes up as being a computer in Blue Hill.
Except Lolita doesn’tseemlike someone who lives around here—at least not an adult. Her writing is ebullient but hesitant, submissive and almost filial. It’s the writing of a young person who idolizes an older man. Not in the words Lolita uses—her vocabulary can be impressive, like how, in one of her last e-mails to Greg, she says,The only thing that keeps me going through my quotidian day are my thoughts of you.I’m so, SO sorry. Please don’t shut me out.But she’s needy. Self-conscious. Ashamed. Whoever wrote this knows what she’s doing is wrong.
Something catches in my mind. I click to the link Sienna sent me on the day of Greg’s funeral. It leads to a Wattpad page listing all the stories Sienna has posted. Last night, I read the first one, a gloomy tale about an aimless girl who works in a diner. I spot it right away—that word again.Quotidian.
Is it a coincidence?
A crack opens in my brain. On a hunch, I click back to Wattpad again. Sienna has also misspelled the wordloseasloose...in the same way Lolita has in an e-mail. Again, this could all be happenstance. Except...
My heart stills. I think over everything the girls said upstairs. On shaking legs, I rise back up and walk to the landing. “Girls?” I call out. “Come down here!”
