Chapter 21

  It had been near-perfect late July weather. It was hot but not humid. I had moved the lawn chairs from the dock up the lawn a little, putting them in the shade of the boathouse.

  “I can’t take sitting in the sun when it’s this hot, Danyl. It seems the older I get, the less variation of temperature my body allows. You’ll find out for yourself before you know it. Old age creeps up on you, then it slams you in the face. My best advice is to refuse to get old. Bertrand Russell said the best way to stay young was to stay so busy you don’t have time to notice that you are aging. I’ve always tried to follow that advice. But when you can get a chill from a description of an arctic landscape, or feel parched reading about a march through the desert, or just getting on your feet out of bed makes your knees ache with the tens of thousands of miles you’ve walked on them. Those things are like Doctor Who’s cloister bells. Except I'm no time lord; no regeneration for me. But look, I didn’t drag you down here to complain about old age, even though that is exactly what I have been doing.”

  He smiled kindly at me. Indicating that he was willing to be patient. But he just gave me a quick head nod and let me continue.

  “Danyl, I’ve figured out who the hacker is. I’ve even written an email to my cousin the chief of police, naming the hacker. I put the email on a timer. Every day, I need to reset the timer, or else the email will be sent. That way if the hacker kidnaps me or kills me, well, they will be caught right away.”

  “But I don’t understand, Laura. If you know who the hacker is, why not just call the police and be done with it?"

  “Danyl, I am a very old socialist. I’ve struggled my whole life against capitalists. Now my fellow citizens have, in their collected stupidity, abandoned science for conspiracy theories, vaccines for dewormers, and worst of all, have elected a racist oligarch as the president. I’m tired of fighting for a cause; if the United States is hell-bent on burning itself to the ground, let it. It’s time for Laura to get a little piece of the pie before I shuffle off of this mortal coil.”

  “I’m afraid I still am not following what you are saying.” He did look genuinely confused at this point.

  “What I’m saying is that I took steps to ensure my own safety; if the hacker goes after me or mine in any way, then they’ll be arrested before they can get to the town border. But if they want to get away, that is also fine with me, once I get some cash out of the deal. I’ve been forced to deal with rich capitalists my whole life; most of them are dreadful people. Of course, to them, they are the hero of their own tale. But Roberta, she is about the worst of the worst that I have had to deal with. But the hacker, who thinks he is so smart, is really little more than a script kiddie. I got my first computer in nineteen eighty-two and by eighty-four had set up my first online network, a BBS called Strangeland, where my followers and I could trade pirated computer games and chat about movies and books and how we were going to change the world. All that aside, I want the cash to move somewhere warm year-round, and I don’t mean that cesspool called Florida. I want a tropical island, and you don’t get that kind of money selling books.”

  “I think I see what you are saying; you want to blackmail the hacker to get some money to finance your retirement.”

  “Now you have got it. But the hacker is a total idiot; in the beginning it was all college-level pranks. That went nowhere; the hacker for some reason then pivoted and decided to try and have Roberta incarcerated instead. But do you know what this stupid hacker has failed to do at every turn?”

  He looked interested now. “No, what has he failed to do?”

  There was a nice Freudian slip.

  “He hasn’t taken a single penny of hers, and that is what I need him to do next. Up till now, he’s been like a cat playing with a mouse. Well, playtime is over; it’s time to go in for the kill. So do you understand what I want the hacker to do?”

  “Yes, you want him to go after Roberta’s money. But I don’t see how I can help you; it seems that you have this completely figured out. What do you want from me?”

  "Look, Danyl, I have shown you all of my cards. I think it is only fair that you reciprocate. Let’s talk frankly. I can help you, but only if we are honest with each other. I want you to rob Roberta while the police are watching. But they won’t be able to do a thing, because I have set up a network of VPNs that will bounce you around the globe; even the NSA would take hours, if not days, to find your connection. But you won’t be online for hours; nope, I have all of Roberta’s banking details. Account numbers, passwords, everything. She just unlocked her computer for me to run the first malware scan. You will break into her computer using the njRAT that the flash drive installed for you. But instead of playing pranks or trying to get her arrested. We take her for everything that she has. Except for her house, but she won’t have the cash to pay the property taxes anymore, so even her house won’t be her house for long.”

  “It sounds like a wonderful plan. Why do you even need the hacker? Couldn't you just rob her yourself? If you set up security like that and you already have all of her details, why even share with the hacker? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “When she gets taken for everything, Danyl, the police are going to have exactly two suspects. The original hacker and I—my cousin knows my criminal history. When I was in college, my socialist ideals led me to a cybercrime that I was eventually arrested for, not because I made a mistake—no, I was betrayed by a backstabbing comrade. So I can’t have anything to do with the actual theft, plus the hacker needs me to get the police to turn on the laptop and hook it back up to the internet. Right now it is locked in an evidence locker in the Lake Placid police department. I’ll lie to my cousin; he knows nothing about computers. I’ll tell him I know how to catch a hacker. He’ll be standing there watching you commit the robbery. I’ll have the perfect alibi. I was standing next to the chief of police while the crime took place. The hacker now has all of the money, so he thinks he can cut me out. But of course if the hacker doesn’t give me my sixty percent of the hundreds of millions of dollars, I’ll just turn them in to the police. After they are extradited, they will spend the rest of their lives in prison, and Roberta will have her money back. But if the hacker actually does pay me when he is safely back in Canada, then he is safe from me forever, because he has as much on me as I have on him.”

  “Two questions, Laura: one, why would the hacker give you sixty percent, and two, why are you even telling me any of this? I could go to the police right now and report everything that you just told me.”

  “The hacker will gratefully give me sixty percent because I am the brains behind the banking information and because I will burn him if he fails to deliver. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. I was betrayed once before, never again. If I burn the hacker, then yes, I will go to prison, but that is one advantage of being old. Consequences just don’t last as long. If I go to prison in a year, I’ll be dead within ten; the hacker, meanwhile, has thirty or forty years to rot in a United States prison. Nowhere near as nice as a nice Canadian jail. In answer to your second question, why am I telling you all this when you could go to the police and report me right away? Well, that’s simple, isn’t it? You’re the stupid prankster hacker, and if you go to the police, it’s your word against my word. Mapleman420.”

  His mouth dropped open before he tried to recover and deny it. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  “What I’m talking about is how big an idiot you are. You come into my store and tell me Reddit recommends Penetration Testing by Weidman. So I did a search on DuckDuckGo and found your post in hacking tutorials. I get that you are proud to be Canadian, but you outed yourself in the /r/HackingTutorials subreddit. Then you announced in another thread that you got locked out and couldn’t get back in, and you didn’t think the host machine would allow you to socially engineer her again. This time the sub told you to buy The Hardware Hacker by Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang, which describes perfectly how to write a script for a USB to download and install njRAT in the background, with no user intervention. Then you skipped me this time and went straight to Willow on Urge and bought the book from her. First, you should have done all of this online. Second, you should have downloaded PDFs from Anna’s Archive. Then the books wouldn’t be traceable to you. Windows allows multiple displays; just hook your laptop up to a monitor or even a TV and put the book up on the monitor. Then you have all the advantages of a paper book. The book is open and viewable without blocking the screen that you are using to hack with. You’ll give me sixty percent because you have no idea what you are doing. So can you stop wasting time trying to convince me that you are not the hacker? Frankly, you just don’t have the brains for it. I am way older and way smarter than you are. Throw in my eidetic memory, and it’s like a high school bully picking on a kindergartner.”

  He just sat there with his mouth agape. I trust I hadn’t insulted him too much. I felt like to get him to do what I wanted him to do, I had to bully him. But I haven’t gotten anything out of him yet. I had the circumstantial evidence, and if August got a search warrant right now, his laptop would incriminate him. But does August have enough for a judge to give him a search warrant? Danyl really was very much a script kiddie. He could follow instructions; that was about the limit of his creativity. He was a writer; I hope he was more creative with his fiction than he was with his hacking.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Finally he spoke, “Fifty-fifty or no deal.”

  “There is something I want to know before we proceed with any negotiations, Danyl. Why did you suddenly pivot from targeting Roberta’s company to framing her? I don’t see any profit in it. I know you didn’t attack Niall; he took the overdose himself. He as much as admitted that to me.”

  Of course Niall hadn’t done that, but I want that story out there as far as I can spread it. “So why the frame job?”

  “This was never about money for me, Laura. Or it was about money, but not for my profit. No, my family has a very rich and twisted history. My grandfather Schroeder was about as patriotic an American as could be. As soon as World War II broke out, he went in to sign up for the military but was rejected because of a heart condition. So made to sit out the war, he decided he could help in other ways. Did you know that in the late eighteen hundreds, there was an iron mine here in Essex County? It’s fine if you didn't; hardly anyone knows about this but the mine, the Tahawus mine. Back in the early nineteen forties, my grandfather discovered large deposits of ilmenite where the former iron mine was. Ilmenite is titanium ore. With the US just entering the war, the military needed all the titanium they could get their hands on.

  My granddad told Roberta he needed to raise money to buy the nearly worthless land and to get the mine producing titanium for the war effort. While my grandfather’s attorney searched for the old owners, my grandfather bought the equipment needed to mine and smelt the ore and get it to the military as swiftly as possible. But the attorney who was doing the title search was bribed by the Dalgaards. He found the owners and the Dalgaards and purchased the land. My grandfather had lots of valuable mining equipment but nowhere to mine. So the Dalgaards offered him pennies on the dollar for his mining equipment.

  But my grandfather refused, and the Dalgaards sued in federal court. Claimed my grandfather was hampering the war effort on purpose because his father, my great-grandfather Schroeder, had been an immigrant from Germany. The Dalgaards then accused him of being a Nazi. The court sided with the Dalgaards and seized everything that my family owned and gave it to the Dalgaard family in order to get the mining operation started as quickly as possible. My family, betrayed by the very country that they were trying to support, emigrated in disgrace to Canada. The war made the Dalgaard family much richer and destroyed our families' lives.

  So Laura, you maybe want to get rich off of the Dalgaards; I just wanted some payback. So at first I was just trying to wreck her show. I know it was small-minded of me, but there was literally nothing else I could do to them. So I took my cheap shot; I admit it. But when I realized that if I could get Roberta sent to prison, that would be more like cosmic justice than any kind of crime. So no, I won’t help you steal money from them. They are a terrible family and deserve to lose it, but I won’t become a thief; I don’t want to stoop to their level. So no, I won’t help you. I’m sorry. Even if you turn me in," he looked defeated.

  And I felt terrible. “I’m sorry, Danyl. I already turned you in. The police have been here the whole time.”

  August came out of the boathouse and cuffed Danyl. He smiled gravely at me, just giving me a brief nod of his head. As if to say, I wish I didn’t have to arrest him either. I’m pretty sure the most serious charge is going to be obstructing justice. Maybe the ADA would listen to the tape and offer him a good plea bargain. For my part, I really did feel bad about it. I was having a great time until he told me how the rich family had cheated and abused the poor one. Well, if the prosecution calls me as a witness, they will regret it.

  ***

  There was one good thing to come out of this. With Danyl arrested, they either had to bring back the last baker voted off, or they could just shut down production entirely. I walked back to the tent to inform the director that Danyl had been arrested. I saw Tyler in the crowd who were waiting for the next segment of the bake-off to begin filming. I waved Tyler through security and brought him into the tent. I really didn’t want to speak to Roberta. So I brought Tyler over to the judges' table, where Amy and the mayor were seated.

  “August just arrested Danyl for hacking, so the sabotage is officially over. But you are down a baker. So I called in Tyler here, as he was the last person voted out, so he logically should be Danyl’s replacement. Don’t you think?”

  “Yes, I do, Laura, and if Roberta doesn’t, then I’ll just resign right now. I feel like doing it anyway, and this would give me the perfect excuse. What about you, Mayor?"

  "Yes, I agree, Tyler should be the replacement without a doubt.”

  “Well, there you go, Tyler; your Paris patisserie dreams are still alive. You are going to do great.”

  Roberta didn’t even blink when they said that Tyler would be replacing Danyl. To her they weren’t people, just pieces to be moved around on her reality TV board game. There was only one more challenge, and then someone else would be booted off the show. Roberta took her spot center stage and announced this week’s challenge, ‘Angel Food Cake.’ She gave them one and a half hours to complete the challenge.

  I went into the store to see if I could help out. I’ve spent the whole time this bake-off has been going on concentrating on their problems and ignoring the store. So I went in, and Lucy had a couple more laptops being scanned. A very old man stood at the counter, and he was arguing with Lucy.

  “But why can’t you run a scan on my machine?" the old man shouted.

  "Because, sir, we’d need the rest of it." Lucy seemed exasperated.

  I wondered how long the old man had been arguing with her, then I noticed the Gateway PC at his feet. It was old; Gateway had disappeared in the late two thousands. So it was probably running Windows Vista, which has been out of support for at least ten to fifteen years.

  “Sir, I’m the owner; perhaps I can help.”

  “I just want my computer scanned; it said at the library that you do it for free.”

  “Yes, we do, and we will be happy to scan it for you, but I have been using computers for over forty years; could I please give you some advice?"

  “Sure, young lady.” Lucy smiled at that line. But this guy might very well be ninety, and to him I was a hot young chick.

  I picked up his PC and asked him to follow me. I took him into the storage room and placed his PC on the bench, then I dragged out some cables and plugged it into an old monitor and booted it up. It creaked and moaned, but eventually we sat at the Vista desktop. Then, as slowly and patiently as I could, I explained that Windows would no longer work on his machine. But that, I could install for him the very latest of operating systems that would work just great with his computer. That the operating system was free, and if he ever had any issues with it, he was welcome to bring it back, and we would help him out.

  “The operating system is brand new, so of course it’s going to look a little different than your old one did, and some of the software has also changed in the last twenty years. But if you give me an hour or so, we can boot it up, and I’ll give you a tour of your new operating system. But first, do you have any photos or documents, anything you need saved and moved over to the new operating system?"

  “Nope, never did trust the thing; I just use it for the videos.”

  So I thought he'd go look around the store, or maybe go home and come back; instead, he just sat there and watched me like a hawk as I formatted the hard drive and installed Linux Mint. I booted it up and fired up Firefox and went to YouTube and let him go to town. I thought he was going to watch cat videos or something like that. Instead, he searched for some obscure farming videos. Where a farmer spoke to the camera and mainly complained about corporate farming. Then I showed him how to shut it down, boot it up, and get on the internet. It would keep itself updated and told him he was all set.

  “Why would your store do all of this for free? I don’t get it."

  “Because I really like computers, but I really hate corporations. So we have all this perfectly good hardware out here. Why should we make the corporations richer and ourselves poorer? This is my answer to corporate waste. Oh, and people might buy a book while they are here. But they don’t have to unless they find something that they would like to read.”

  ***

  I felt a lot better about life in general after he left. Yes, I had helped send a guy to jail, a person I felt sorry for. Yes, Roberta is a horrible person. But she is also not her grandfather, and she didn’t cheat Danyl’s family. That’s some kind of biblical justice where you punish the kids for the sins of the parents. According to the Bible, Eve sinned, so her kids carried that sin. Well, that is some messed up theology. Danyl never should have subscribed to it.

  I didn’t just send a guy to jail; I also helped an old guy keep an ancient machine chugging away for another five to ten years. The baking challenge was winding down, so I walked back out to see who would go home. I took up my familiar corner post. The tent smelled really good; I was glad that after this bake was over, it wouldn’t be long till supper.

  After the same old silent judging, Roberta got to announce the person going home. I just hoped it wasn’t Tyler, because I had dragged him back, getting his hopes up again. I didn’t want those dreams to be destroyed in the few hours it took to make an angel food cake.

  Roberta, wooden-voiced as usual, said, “We’re sorry to be saying goodbye this week to Lucas Benoit.” She honestly didn’t sound sorry at all.

  No, I didn’t miss the irony that the minister in training had been sent home based on his Angel Food Cake entry. I can be as petty as the next person. That night at dinner the only thing that everyone was talking about was the six new writers moving in in a week and two days after that the Book Fair.

  Lucy stayed for dinner, and we all played the Talisman board game; of course, Amy won. If it was anyone else who won all of the time, I would have accused them of cheating, but Amy would never cheat at a game. That would be like Anais speeding or Pappy going on a shopping spree.

  The baking challenge chugged along without me; I was sick of it, but the final two contestants were Tyler and Jovana. The two of them battled it out for six challenges, and according to Amy, they tied six times. Finally the director had enough of the whole thing and declared the show was over; the match was a draw.

  Roberta stood on the wooden stage and was as wooden herself as ever when she handed Jovana and Tyler each a check for fifty thousand dollars. Tyler signed up for a Paris baking school, and Jovana opened a college fund for her future daughter.

  All three bookstores had made a ton of money, but we were sad when we finally had to hug Willow, Phoebe, and Pappy goodbye. But the new writers were arriving tonight, and Urge and our three friends from Woodstock would be back in three days for the Book Faire. I’m really looking forward to the Faire and I’m sure after all the trouble that we had with the Bake-Off that the Faire will be crime and drama free.

  Coming Soon a Laura Eriksson Mystery Book 6 Songs from the Woods