Harlan Coben - Live Wire

Myron had grown up in an era in which people blamed their parents for all their problems. Many were whiners, pure and simple, not willing to look in the mirror and get a grip. The Blame Generation, finding fault with everyone and everything but ourselves. But Suzze T’s situation was different. He had seen the torment, seen the years of struggle, trying to rebel against everything tennis, wanting to quit but also loving the actual game. The court became both her torture chamber and her one place of escape, and it was hard to reconcile that. Eventually, almost inevitably, it led to drugs and self-destructive behavior until finally even Suzze, who could have played the blame game with a fair amount of legitimacy, looked in the mirror and found her answer.

Myron sat and paged through a tennis magazine. Five minutes later, the kids started filing off the court. The smiles fled as they left the pressure-air confines of the bubble, their heads held down by their mothers’ forceful gazes. Suzze came out after them. A mother stopped her, but Suzze kept it short. Without breaking stride, she walked past Myron and gestured for him to follow. Moving target, Myron thought. Harder for a parent to nab.

She headed into her office and closed the door after Myron.

“This isn’t working,” Suzze said.

“What’s not?”

“The academy.”

“Looks like a pretty good crowd to me,” Myron said.

Suzze collapsed into her desk chair. “I came in with what I thought would be a great concept-a tennis academy for top players that would also let them breathe and live and become more well-rounded. I argued the obvious-that such a setting would make them better-adjusted, happier people-but I also argued that in the long run, it would make them better tennis players.”

“And?”

“Well, who knows what the long run means? But the truth is, my concept isn’t working. They aren’t better players. The kids who are single-minded and have no interest in art or theater or music or friends-those kids become the best players. The kids who just want to beat your brains in, destroy you, show no mercy-those are the ones who win.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“You don’t?”

Myron said nothing.

“And the parents see it too. Their kids are happier here. They won’t burn out as fast, but the better players are leaving for the intense boot camps.”

“That’s short-term thinking,” Myron said.

“Maybe. But if they burn out when they’re twenty-five, well, that’s late in a career anyway. They need to win now. We get that, don’t we, Myron? We were both blessed athletically, but if you don’t have that killer instinct-the part of you that makes you a great competitor if not a great human being-it is hard to be an elite.”

“So are you saying we were like that?” Myron asked.

“No, I had my mom.”

“And me?”

Suzze smiled. “I remember seeing you play at Duke in the NCAA finals. The expression on your face… you’d rather die than lose.”

For a moment neither of them spoke. Myron stared at tennis trophies, the shiny trinkets that represented Suzze’s success. Finally Suzze said, “Did you really see Kitty last night?”

“Yes.”

“How about your brother?”

Myron shook his head. “Brad may have been there, but I didn’t see him.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

Myron shifted in his seat. “You think Kitty posted that ‘Not His’?”

“I’m raising the possibility.”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions yet. You said you had something you wanted to show me. About Kitty.”

“Right.” She started gnawing on her lip, something Myron hadn’t seen her do in years. He waited, gave her a little time and space. “So yesterday after we talked, I started checking around.”

“Checking around for what?”

“I don’t know, Myron,” she said, a little impatience sneaking in. “Something, a clue, whatever.”

“Okay.”

Suzze started typing on her computer. “So I started looking at my own Facebook page, where that lie was posted. You know anything about how people fan you?”

“I assume they just sign up.”

“Right. So I decided to sort of do what you suggested. I started looking for old boyfriends or tennis rivals or fired musicians-someone who might want to harm us.”

“And?”

Suzze was still typing. “And I started going through the people who’d signed up recently for the fan page. I mean, I now have forty-five thousand followers. So it took some time. But eventually…”

She clicked the mouse and waited. “Okay, here. I stumbled across this profile from someone who signed up three weeks ago. I thought it was pretty odd, especially in light of what you told me about last night.”

She gestured toward Myron, who stood and circled around to see what was on the screen. When he saw the name in bold on the top of the profile page, he wasn’t really all that surprised.

Kitty Hammer Bolitar.

Kitty Hammer Bolitar.

Back in the privacy of his office, Myron took a closer look at the Facebook page. No question about it when he saw the profile photo: It was his sister-in-law. Older, sure. A little more weathered. The cuteness from her tennis days had hardened a bit, but her face still had that perky-pretty thing going on. He stared at her for a moment and tried to quell the hatred that naturally rose to the surface whenever he thought of her.

Kitty Hammer Bolitar.

Esperanza came in and sat next to him without a word. Some would assume that Myron would want to be alone. Esperanza knew better. She looked at the screen.

“Our first client,” she said.

“Yep,” Myron said. “Did you see her at the club last night?”

“Nope. I heard you call her name, but by the time I turned, she was gone.”

Myron checked the wall posts. Sparse. Some people playing Mafia Wars or Farmville or quizzes. Myron saw that Kitty had forty-three friends. “First thing,” he said. “Let’s print out a list of her friends, see if there is anybody we know.”

“Okay.”

Myron hit a photo album icon called “Brad and Kitty-A Love Story.” Then he started looking through the photographs, Esperanza at his side. For a long time, neither spoke. Myron just clicked, looked, clicked. A life. That was what he was seeing. He had made fun of these social networks and didn’t get them and thought of all the strange, even quasi-perverse stuff about the whole thing, but what he was seeing here, what he was watching go by, click by click, was nothing less than a life, or in this case, two.

His brother’s and Kitty’s.

Myron watched Brad and Kitty age. There were photographs on a sand dune in Namibia, canyoning in Catalonia, sightseeing on Easter Island, helping the natives in Cusco, cliff-diving in Italy, backpacking in Tasmania, doing an archeological dig in Tibet. In some photographs, like the ones with the hilltop villagers in Myanmar, Kitty and Brad sported native garb. In others they wore cargo shorts and tees. Backpacks were almost always present. Brad and Kitty often posed cheek to cheek, one smile almost touching the other. Brad’s hair remained a constant curly dark mess, at times getting long and unruly enough to mistake for a Rastafarian’s. He hadn’t changed much, his brother. Myron studied his brother’s nose and saw that it was a little more crooked now-or maybe that was projecting.

Kitty had lost weight. There was something both wiry and brittle about her physique now. Myron kept clicking. The truth was-a truth he should be happy about-Brad and Kitty glowed in every shot.

As if reading his mind Esperanza said, “They look damn happy.”

“Yep.”

“But they’re vacation pictures. You can’t tell anything from them.”