Brad Parks - Eyes of the Innocent

Or, worse, into the possession of a nosy newspaper reporter who knows a document like that would allow him to take that juicy little tidbit-something that would otherwise fall into the category of nasty rumor-and put it in print.

* * *

Sweet Thang started bouncing up and down in her chair like a third grader who has been told she must wait five minutes before going to the bathroom.

“So what now?” she asked. “What now? What now?”

“Well, first, can I compliment you?”

She pretended to think for a moment. “Yes, you may.”

“Great work tracking down this guy.”

“Thank you,” she said, with a smile that would have graded flawless on the diamond clarity scale.

“Okay, onward. You still have that phone number for Akilah’s sister handy?”

“Yeah, right here,” she said, using it as an excuse to wheel her chair next to mine, allowing our knees to brush. The girl was a master at creating incidental contact.

“Bertie said it’s a home number, which turns out to be a nice break for us,” I said, turning to face my terminal. “It means we can do a reverse lookup and see where she lives.”

My computer screen was dark for some reason, so I pressed the power button. As the monitor warmed up and the image snapped into focus, I suddenly remembered why I turned it off in the first place. But, by that point, it was already too late. There on the screen, in brilliant 256-color, 1024-by-768 pixel resolution, was Sweet Thang’s Twitter page.

I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye to see if she had noticed, hoping I could click it away before she got a good look. But no, she was peering at it curiously, head tilted, like it was something she had seen before but couldn’t quite place.

Then I watched as recognition crashed across her face. And it wasn’t a small, gentle-lapping wave. It was one of those tsunamis that wipes an entire Indonesian fishing village off the map.

“Oh. My. Goodness,” she said.

Her blush started from the jawbone, then progressed upward, going from her cheeks all the way to the top of her forehead, filling every available inch of skin in glowing crimson.

“Yeah,” I said, not knowing what to say. “I, uh, sorry about that. I didn’t mean to, uh, you know, leave it on the screen like that.”

Sweet Thang was, for perhaps the first time in her life, stunned to silence.

“I was just sort of wasting time and one click led to another,” I explained. “I didn’t mean to pry. I just…”

I could tell she was rereading the post to check if it was as bad as she remembered. And, of course, it was probably worse.

“I didn’t realize…” she started, then stopped. “I thought you … I didn’t think … You’re not following me or…”

“It’s Twitter,” I said apologetically. “Anyone can read it, even if they’re not one of your followers. Facebook is the one where people need to have permission to see stuff you’ve written.”

“I know, but … I…”

“If it makes you feel better, I didn’t read any of the other ones,” I said.

She buried her face in her hands and moaned softly. “I’m soooo embarrassed,” she said into her palms.

“It’s not a big deal,” I insisted.

“It’s like one of those bad dreams where the entire school has read your diary,” she said.

I decided to skip the lecture about how you have to assume when you type something that it could be read by anyone-one of the great perils of modern Internet living-and instead just said, “Sorry.”

“I think I might die.”

She whirled around and walked away without saying another word. I sneaked a glance to my left and right to see if anyone might have noticed-an intern turning a shade just short of purple might tend to attract attention. Thankfully, it appeared to have been strictly for my benefit.

I returned my focus to the screen and clicked the X on the upper right corner of the window. This time, naturally, it went away immediately.

Then I got back to my reverse lookup. Tamikah’s number was unlisted. But that was hardly a deterrent. Few people are careful enough with their telephone numbers to keep them out of the hands of a reporter who knows what he’s doing. The LexisNexis database has millions of unlisted numbers. Even something as seemingly innocent as voting records is a great place to get numbers-no one thinks about it, but if you fill in the “phone number” blank on the registration form, you’ve just made your digits part of the public record.

So it took about thirty seconds to find where Tamikah-last name Dunwood-now resided. It was an address in South Orange, a street I vaguely recognized as being near Seton Hall University, wedged up against the Newark border.

And while perhaps that made it sound like the Newark girl hadn’t made it very far, that wasn’t the case. Now that East and West Berlin are unified, there are few starker borders in the world than the one between the New Jersey municipalities of South Orange and Newark. Literally, you can be driving through the hood, on a litter-strewn street lined with tenements and bodegas; then you blink, and you’re in suburbia, with neatly trimmed landscaping and seasonally appropriate lawn decoration. Drive maybe half a mile farther and you’re in a historic part of town, dotted with million-dollar houses and fancy imported cars.

Yet the two worlds almost never collide. It’s not about race-South Orange is actually thirty-five percent African-American. It’s about caste. The Newark-South Orange line might as well have a sign that says, “Now entering upper middle class.”

So Tamikah was now a long way from Baxter Terrace. I Googled her address, then clicked on the satellite view. I zoomed in as close as it would go and, I swear, I could see a plastic Santa in one of the neighbors’ yards.

Then I typed the address into our property-tax database. The house was owned by Ryan and Tamikah Dunwood. It was 2,250 square feet, four bedrooms, one and a half baths, set on a 50-by-150 lot, and assessed at a very nonprojectslike $549,500.

And it was soon going to be visited by at least one Eagle-Examiner reporter. Maybe two, if the other one ever recovered from a potentially terminal case of Twitter-induced mortification.

* * *

After a few more minutes of document snooping on Tamikah Dunwood revealed little more of use or interest, I was revisited by Sweet Thang, who returned from her brief sojourn looking refreshed, considerably less flushed, but chastened.

“Let’s not talk about it,” she said quickly.

“Fine with me,” I said, to her visible relief.

I knew, at some point, we would have to deal with the fallout from my accidental discovery. You didn’t just drop a bomb like that into the middle of an acquaintanceship-let’s not call it a relationship-and expect everything to magically reassemble itself as it had been before. There were now bits and pieces of emotional shrapnel all over the place. Cleaning up the mess could take a while.

Still, for the time being, it seemed only pragmatic to ignore the eight-hundred-pound tweet in the room.

“So, moving on,” I said. “It turns out our friend Tamikah lives in South Orange. Would you like to pay her a visit?”

“Does South Orange mean we can take Walter this time?”

“Yes,” I said. “South Orange is definitely a more Walter-friendly kind of atmosphere.”

“I’ll grab my keys.”

“Meet you out front.”

Two minutes later, we were waiting for the elevator, staring at the numbers as they ticked toward our floor, stewing in an uncomfortable conversation lag where neither of us knew what to say. It was awkward, but I discovered there were benefits to having Sweet Thang in sheepish mode: it was much quieter.