Death Before Facebook

thinking eagerly of diving in, with some of the same tingly excitement usually reserved for Linda Barnes novels, when Jimmy Dee called. “How would you like a pile of paper a foot thick?”
    “You got Layne’s program to work.”
    “Pretty neat once I figured it out. You wanted Geoff’s stuff, right? Layne wasn’t kidding, I can get you anybody’s.”
    “Geoff’s is good for openers.”
    “I’ll bring it over.”
    It looked like a long dull morning—she had Wizard’s material, and now this. She settled down comfortably with a cup of coffee.
    The deleted stuff was about the flashbacks. But why had Geoff erased it? Maybe he’d thought twice about being so public about something so private. Or maybe someone had lectured him. Since she’d been logging on, she’d wondered whether certain posters were exhibitionists or were simply deluded. She imagined Geoff sitting at his desk, Mosey on his lap, a cup of tea close at hand, enjoying the illusion of privacy; of coziness—imagining he was among friends.
    There were two provocative bits.
    In a musing on the subject, Geoff said he thought he could remember a fight. There was no mention of who fought or where. The other interesting observation was this: “Sometimes I wonder if hypnotism would work.”
    She checked Jimmy Dee’s printouts to see where and when the posts had been made. They were in the same session, but different conferences, about a week before his death. The first had been made in Confession about fifteen minutes before the other. The second, the remark about hypnotism, had been made in a conference called Irrelevant.
    If the murderer had been online at the time, he or she could have tracked what Geoff was doing; if he had software like Layne’s, he could have gotten a printout like Skip’s that would have shown the direction Geoff’s mind was taking.
    If he thought Geoff might remember through hypnosis, the need to get him out of the way would have been urgent.
    She remembered the books on hypnotism in Geoff’s room. Perhaps he had learned to hypnotize himself. Or maybe he’d seen a hypnotist or hypnotherapist. Frantically, she looked through the printouts—both Wizard’s and Dee-Dee’s—for any follow-up to the remark. But to no avail—she’d have to ask Layne and Lenore if he’d ever mentioned such a thing.
    And there was someone she could ask about the fight Geoff remembered. Marguerite had had a chance to get over the shock and it was time to see her again—to ask her some slightly harder questions this time.
    But to Skip’s disappointment Cole, her shadow and protector, answered the door.
    “Hi. I’m here to see Marguerite.”
    “1 don’t think that’s a good idea. She’s fragile today.”
    Good,
Skip thought
Maybe the truth’s working its way to the surface.
    She said, “I’m afraid I really have to insist.”
    “Okay.” He sounded dubious. “Come in.”
    Toots stood just inside the door, wagging her tail, not even bothering to bark.
    I’m practically a member of the family.
    The minute she thought it something dark and heavy hovered over her.
    She wished she could name it—could penetrate it and tame it. It was the unhappiness they were all sunk in—even Neetsie, who didn’t live there anymore. It was the accumulation of all the years—starting with Christina Julian, and Windy, the world’s most boring man—of disappointment and failure and eventually violence.
    Marguerite and Geoff and later Neetsie had been born into it, but Cole had been drawn to it, had volunteered for it. On the one hand, it seemed to Skip, he was bent on saving Marguerite, saving them all, and on the other he was as deeply mired in the muck as they were, and part of it was his own muck—his lifelong failure, his inability to achieve his dream.
    She felt the darkness and heaviness as distinctly as if it were a curtain.
    Marguerite entered with her customary drawn look, the one she always seemed to wear at home, and in her customary sweats. She seemed to do a lot of sleeping in the daytime.
    Cole’s arm was around her waist, guiding her. She moved with difficulty, as if she suffered a chronic illness, which was odd, Skip thought, since she hadn’t seemed ill at the funeral. He settled her on the sofa and sat next to her. “You okay, angel?”
    She gave him a long, honeyed look. “Fine.”
    He smiled back at her.
    Even with the damn black cloud, they seemed happy together.
    Skip said, “Do you think we could talk