Roadside Crosses

through the bushes. He wore a gray sweatshirt with the hood pulled up.
    “Maybe the neighbor’s kid. They’re always curious about people moving in. Wondering if we have kids their age. I was.”
    Lily wasn’t saying anything. He could sense her discomfort, as she stood with her narrow hips cocked, frowning eyes framed by blond hair flecked with moving-carton-cardboard dust.
    Time for the chivalry part.
    Hawken walked into the kitchen and pulled open the back door. The visitor was gone.
    He stepped out farther, then heard his wife call, “Honey!”
    Alarmed, Hawken turned and sped back inside.
    Lily, still on the ladder, was pointing out another window. The visitor had moved into the side yard—definitely on their property now, though still obscured by plantings.
    “Damnit. Who the hell is he?”
    He glanced at the phone but decided not to call 911. What if it was the neighbor or the neighbor’s son?That would pretty much ruin any chance for a friendship forever.
    When he looked back the figure was gone.
    Lily climbed off the ladder. “Where is he? He just vanished. Fast.”
    “No idea.”
    They gazed out the windows, scanning.
    No sign of him.
    This was far spookier, not being able to see him.
    “I think we should—”
    Hawken’s voice stopped with a gasp as Lily cried, “A gun—he’s got a gun, Don!” She was staring out a front window.
    Her husband grabbed his phone, calling to his wife, “The door! Lock it.”
    Lily lunged.
    But she was too late.
    The door was already swinging wide.
    Lily screamed and Don Hawken pulled her to the floor beneath him, in a noble but, he understood, useless gesture to save the life of his bride.

Chapter 27
    OURS OF OPERA . . .
    Sitting in Kathryn Dance’s office, alone now, Jonathan Boling was cruising through Travis Brigham’s computer, in a frantic pursuit of the meaning of the code.
    ours of opera . . .
    He was sitting forward, typing fast, thinking that if Dance had been here, the kinesics expert within her could have drawn some fast conclusions from his posture and the focus of his eyes: He was a dog scenting prey.
    Jon Boling was on to something.
    Dance and the others were out at the moment, setting up surveillance. Boling had remained in her office to prowl through the boy’s computer. He’d found a clue and was now trying to locate more data that would let him crack the code.
    ours of opera . . .
    What did it mean?
    A curious aspect of computers is that these crazy plastic and metal boxes contain ghosts. A computer hard drive is like a network of secret passages and corridors, leading farther and farther into the architectureof computer memory. It’s possible—with considerable difficulty—to exorcise these hallways and rid them of the ghosts of data past, but usually most bits of information we’ve created or acquired remain forever, invisible and fragmented.
    Boling was now wandering these hallways, using a program one of his students had hacked together, reading the scraps of data lodged in obscure places, like the wisps of souls inhabiting a haunted house.
    Thinking of ghosts put him in mind of the DVD Kathryn Dance’s son had lent him last night. Ghost in the Shell. He reflected on the nice time he’d had at her house, how much he’d enjoyed meeting her friends and family. The children especially. Maggie was adorable and funny and would, he knew without a doubt, become a woman every bit as formidable as her mother. Wes was more laid-back. He was easy to talk to and brilliant. Boling often speculated about what his own children would have been like if he’d settled down with Cassie.
    He thought of her now, hoped she was enjoying her life in China.
    Recalled the weeks prior to her leaving.
    And withdrew his generous wishes about contentment in Asia.
    Then Boling put thoughts of Cassandra aside, and concentrated on his ghost hunt in the computer. He was getting close to something important in that shred of binary code that translated into the English letters ours of opera.
    Boling’s puzzle-loving mind, which could often be counted on to come up with curious leaps of logic and insight, automatically concluded that those wordswere fragments of “hours of operation.” Travis had looked at that phrase online just before he’d vanished. The implication of this was that perhaps, just perhaps, these words referred to a location the boy was interested in.
    But computers don’t store related data in the same place. The code for “ours