The Innocent

He stopped. Packing a suitcase. A stupid and histrionic move. Cut it out.

Olivia would be home tomorrow.

And if she wasn’t?

No use thinking about it. She would be home. It would all come together, one way or the other, in a few hours.

But he was no longer above snooping. He started in Olivia’s drawers. He barely hated himself for doing it. That voice on the phone had set him off. Best-case scenario now: Olivia was hiding something from him. He might as well find out what.

But he found nothing.

Not in the drawers, not in the closets. He thought about other possible hiding spots when he remembered something.

The computer.

He headed upstairs and hit the power switch. The computer booted up, came to life. It seemed to take an inordinate amount of time. Matt’s right leg started shaking up and down. He put his palm on the knee to slow it down.

They’d finally gotten a cable modem—dial-ups going the way of the Betamax—and he was on the Web in seconds. He knew Olivia’s password, though he had never dreamed of using it like this. He logged onto her e-mail and scanned the messages. The new stuff held no surprises. He tried the old mail.

The directory was empty.

He tried looking under her “Sent Mail” folder. Same thing—everything had been deleted. He tried the section called “Deleted Mail.” It too had been cleaned out. He checked through the browser’s “History,” hoping to see where Olivia had last surfed. That, too, had been erased.

Matt sat back and drew an obvious conclusion: Olivia had been covering her tracks. And the obvious follow-up question was: Why?

There was one more area to check: the cookies.

People often erased their surfing history or their mailbox, but the cookies were something different. If Olivia had wiped out the cookies, Matt would automatically know something had gone awry. His Yahoo! home page wouldn’t automatically come up, for instance. Amazon wouldn’t know who he was. A person trying to cover their tracks would not want that.

Clearing out the cookies would be too noticeable.

He went through Explorer and found the folder that held the Web’s cookies. There were tons of them. He clicked the date button, thereby putting them in date order, the most recent at the top. His eyes ran down them. Most of them he recognized—Google, OfficeMax, Shutterfly—but there were two unfamiliar domains. He wrote them down, minimized the Explorer window, went back to the Web.

He typed in the first address and hit return. It was for the Nevada Sun News—a newspaper that required you to sign up in order to access the archives. The paper’s home office was in Las Vegas. He checked the “personal profile.” Olivia had signed up using a fake name and e-mail address. No surprise there. They both did that, to prevent spam and protect privacy.

But what had she been looking up?

There was no way to tell.

Strange, maybe, but the second Web address was far more so.

It took a while for the Web to recognize what he’d typed in. The address bounced from one spot to another before finally landing on something called:

Stripper-Fandom.com.

Matt frowned. There was a warning on the home page that nobody under the age of eighteen should continue. That didn’t bode well. He clicked the enter icon. The pictures that appeared were, as one might expect, provocative. Stripper-Fandom was an “appreciation” site for . . .

. . . for female strippers?

Matt shook his head. There were countless thumbnails of topless women. He clicked one. There were biographies listed for each girl:

Bunny’s career as an exotic dancer started in Atlantic City, but with her impressive dance moves and slinky costumes, she quickly rose to stardom and moved to Vegas. “I love it out here! And I love rich men!” Bunny’s specialty is wearing bunny ears and doing a hop-dance using the pole . . .

Matt clicked the link. An e-mail address came up, in case you wanted to write Bunny and request rates for a “private audience.” It actually said that—private audience. Like Bunny was the pope.

What the hell was going on here?

Matt searched through the stripper fan site until he could take no more. Nothing jumped out at him. Nothing fell into place. He just felt more confused. Maybe the site meant nothing at all. Most of the strippers were from the Vegas area. Maybe Olivia had gotten there by clicking an advertising link at that Nevada newspaper. Maybe the link wasn’t even marked as a stripper site and just led there.

But why was she on a Nevada newspaper site in the first place? Why had she erased all her e-mails?

No answer.

Matt thought about Charles Talley. He Googled the name. Nothing interesting came up. He shut down the browser and moved back downstairs, that whisper from the phone call still echoing in his head, shredding all reason:

“Hey, guess what I’m doing to your wife right now?”

Time to get some air. Air and something more potent.

He headed outside and started for South Orange Avenue. From the Garden State Parkway, you couldn’t miss the giant brown beer bottle rising up and dominating the skyline. But when you traveled this section of the GSP, the other thing you noticed—maybe even more than the old water tank—was the sprawling cemetery on both sides of the road. The parkway cut smack through the middle of a burial ground. You were encased left and right by unending rows of weather-beaten gravestones. But the effect of driving through was not so much splitting a cemetery in half as much as zipping it together, of making something whole. And there, in the not-so-far distance, this strange giant beer bottle stood, high in the air, a silent sentinel guarding or maybe mocking the buried inhabitants.

The damage to the brewery was somewhat mystifying. Every window was only partially broken, not fully smashed, as if someone had taken the time to throw one rock and only one rock at every single window in the twelve-story structure. Shards lay everywhere. Every opening was a yawning, jangled threat. The combination of erosion and pride, the strong skeleton against the missing-teeth shattered-eye look from the broken glass, gave the place a strange downtrodden-warrior bearing.

Soon they would tear the old factory down and build an upscale mall. Just what Jersey needed, he thought—another mall.

Matt turned down the alley and headed for the faded red door. The tavern did not have a name on it. There was one window with a Pabst Blue Ribbon neon sign in it. Like the brewery—like this city?—the sign no longer lit up.

Matt opened the door, forcing sunlight into a place bathed in darkness. The men—there was only one woman here right now and she’d hit you if you called her a lady—blinked like bats who’d had a flashlight shined on them. There was no jukebox playing, no music at all. The conversations were kept as low as the lights.