Death Before Facebook

have the skills yet to know how to defuse her. He saw her simply as a big kid attacking a little one and his instinct was to defend the underdog.
    She had to blame someone for her unhappiness, for her mother’s death, her father’s desertion, for being uprooted and moved to a strange town. Jimmy Dee was simply handy, Skip thought. Sheila had had two sessions with a therapist and after that had put up so much resistance to going it had been easier to let it go for a while.
    Skip adored her—adored them both, actually, but she identified with Sheila. Sheila was uncomfortable with her body, as Skip had been with hers most of her life, before she realized size could be an advantage and had become a cop.
    Sheila was in a place she didn’t want to be. Throughout her childhood, Skip had felt like an alien who’d somehow wandered into a culture she didn’t understand. Sheila actually was one.
    Sheila had a lot of attributes that were supposed to belong to boys; so did Skip.
    “Maybe we should just get Kenny some Barbie dolls and Sheila a football,” she had said once.
    Dee-Dee had raised an eyebrow: “As if being raised by a gay uncle isn’t confusing enough for them.” But he’d thought about it a minute. “Uh-uh,” he said. “It’s more like this. Kenny might like to do needlepoint, I think. Or knit maybe. And Sheila needs a Samurai sword.”
    “You really don’t like her, do you?’
    His face twisted into a grimace. “How can you not like a child? But she’s violent. What am I supposed to do with that?”
    “Well, let’s see. First we’ll have her pledge Kappa at Newcomb—”
    “Oh, cut it out.”
    There were two ways to get around both kids—one was to take them on an adventure, any adventure, and promise ice cream as part of it. The other was to have Auntie tell a few grisly cop stories. Skip had to censor, and she felt a little funny about telling stories from the streets, necessarily violent and scary stories, but she knew her tales were nothing compared to what was in the rest of the culture. Anyway, she liked to think she was a good role model.
    Tonight she told them about a suspect who vaulted a fence when she was chasing him, and in the course of it lost his wallet, which contained his identity and address. When she got to his house, his wife claimed he’d been in bed with the flu all day. Skip arrested him anyway, but had a bad moment when she came down with the flu two days later.
    Kenny, the one who’d looked forward to “macaroni and cheese,” almost forgot to eat. Sheila, who’d called dinner “pig slop,” shoveled pasta mechanically.
    Kenny stared. “He didn’t do it. Somebody stole his wallet.”
    “No, he did do it. He’d made bail by that time, so I went back over to his house, with a temperature of a hundred and two. What do you know, he was lying in bed, a whole different color from two days earlier, and sweat all over his forehead. We both got the flu from his wife, who got the idea because she was sick.”
    “Criminals have lousy imaginations,” said Sheila. She looked at Dee-Dee, then Skip, and Skip felt a momentary tingle. For a moment all was forgiven; uncles and aunts were okay people.
    Kenny said, “She wasn’t the criminal; he was.”
    Sheila hit him. “Oh, shut up!”
    Kenny set up a howl.
    Jimmy Dee had had a glass of wine by now. Skip thought this nearly always improved his parenting. “Sheila, could you apologize to Kenny, please?”
    “I didn’t do anything.”
    Jimmy Dee sent Skip a “help me” look. She said, “Honey, we have this thing in police work. Do you know what excessive force is?”
    Kenny answered for her: “It’s like when you hit somebody and you didn’t really have to.”
    Sheila raised her hand again, ready to give a second swat. But she caught Skip’s eye. “Overkill?”
    Skip nodded. “Overkill. As in, that’ll be enough.” She changed the subject quickly. “One of you wouldn’t have a laptop I could borrow, would you?”
    “I’ve got a notebook. That’s better.”
    She went home with a computer she could take to bed. Jimmy Dee had shown her how to attach her phone so the modem would work. All she had to do was ask it to dial the number of the TOWN (programmed in by Jimmy Dee at her request).
    Sure. She knew how that went. In about a week the glitches would be ironed out and she’d be connected.
    But not true; magically, the TOWN identified itself and asked her for login: Steve. Then her password: Skip2mLu. And