The Merchant of Menace

year.“
    “Who got dumped?“ Shelley asked bluntly.
    “Oh, I dumped him. I wasn’t entirely stupid. I found out that he was—well, ‘wicked’ sounds melodramatic, but he was wicked. Or sociopathic. He was always bragging about the things he’d put over on people. That made me uncomfortable, but I told myself it was just made up. Jokes, you know, to see how I’d react. I always just laughed it off. Then one day he said something about how silly it was for me to be paying college fees. Told me he could hack into the university computer and show my tuition as paid. This was in the early days of computers. He didn’t have his own, but had access to one in a science lab. He proceeded to explain that he’d only paid his first-semester tuition and had gotten his education for free since then.”
    Sharon fiddled with the ancient cigarette pack for a minute before continuing. “And he’d fooled around with his grades, too. Given himself straight A’s and credit for courses he hadn’t even taken. I was young and stupid and thought I could get through to him about why this was wrong, wrong, wrong. But he kept talking. Told me about some of the other students he’d ‘fixed.’ That was the word he used. He’d created his own ‘enemies’ list—people he imagined had crossed him in some way. He’d done the opposite with them. Lowered their grades, deleted courses. That’s when I knew I had to get away from him.“
    “Were any of the neighbors on the ‘enemy’ list?“ Shelley asked.
    “I don’t know. It was so long ago and he only mentioned first names. When their grades came out, I’m sure it was just blamed on some kind of mysterious computer error anyway,“ Sharon said.
    “Not if he bragged to other people as well as you,“ Jane said.
    “Still, I can’t imagine anyone holding a grudge over a grade for fifteen years or more and then killing someone over it, can you?“
    “No, I guess not. So you divorced him?”
    Sharon nodded. “But I got several notarized printouts of my college transcript first,“ she said with a smile. I was getting smarter by the minute. I used those to apply to other schools so that it wouldn’t show on my record where I’d asked for copies to go, then I filed the divorce papers and left him.“
    “Is that when you came here?“ Jane asked.
    “No, I finished my undergraduate courses in Vermont and got my law degree in Massachusetts. Then I got a job here. I wasn’t deliberately moving around, it just worked out that way. But what I didn’t realize is that he was sort of stalking me. I don’t think the word was in common use then, but that’s what he was doing. One day about three years ago, he turned up on my doorstep. I’d worked with a firm that had a branch in Kentucky and somehow he spotted my name in the property records.“
    “Did he threaten you?“ Shelley asked.
    “Oh, no. Not directly. Just said he’d changed, turned his ‘curiosity,’ as he called it, to good ends—exposing graft and corruption and dishonesty. And that he thought I’d like him better now and we might as well get back together. He’d followed me to Chicago and gotten a job with a local television station so we could be together.”
    She shuddered at the memory.
    “What did you do?“ Jane asked.
    “Nothing for a while. I’d put on a bit of weight, gotten rather stuffy and dull and I thought he’d give up and go away. But he didn’t. He called every day. I got frightened.“
    “Of course you did. Did you call the police?“
    “Yes, but it didn’t do much good.“ The cellophane wrapper on the cigarette pack was in shreds now. “He’d made no overt threats, didn’t break into my house or anything like that. He wasn’t a clear danger to me from their viewpoint, only a nuisance. And I suppose, in a way, they were right. I don’t honestly think he’d have committed any physical violence. Just psychological and financial. Every time I booted up my computer at work, I could imagine him hunched over his, tapping into my life and the life of my clients. At least some good came of it,“ she said with a smile. “I insisted that the law firm get the most ‘hacker-proof’ computer system we could find.“
    “Why did you come to the caroling party then?“ Shelley asked. “Surely you’d heard that there was a possibility that he’d turn up there.“
    “Because Julie told me that he wasn’t coming after all. And besides, I thought I’d gotten rid of him,“ Sharon