Мэри Эндрюс - The Newcomer

It was slow work. She was running the dryer over the elephant’s head when she felt something hard and solid beneath the plush fur covering. She switched off the dryer and examined Ellie closer. Part of the toy’s leatherette collar formed a headdress that mimicked the kind worn by circus elephants. Several of the brass studs that decorated the headdress had been lost over the years, but now, she realized, there was something hard beneath the hole left by a missing brass stud located squarely between the elephant’s eyes.

Letty fetched her eyebrow tweezers from the bathroom and poked at the hole. There was definitely something there, metal or maybe plastic?

“What you doin’, Letty?” Maya asked.

“I’m, uh, fixing Ellie. She’s got a boo-boo right here on her head,” Letty said.

The rain continued all day. Her plans for grocery shopping followed by a beach day with Maya were put on hold. Instead, they sat on the floor of the motel room and had a peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich pretend picnic, followed by watching what seemed like endless episodes of Nick Jr. shows.

At four, Maya yawned and put herself down for a nap.

As soon as she was convinced her niece was sleeping, Letty picked up the still-soggy elephant. She probed again at the object beneath the plush, then retrieved a pair of nail scissors from the bathroom. Working slowly, she moved aside the leatherette harness, then carefully cut a slit in the fabric just large enough to insert her fingers through to extract the object.

The hidden object was small, maybe an inch square, and made of black plastic with what appeared to be a tiny lens in the center.

“My God,” Letty breathed, turning the object over in the palm of her hand. Ellie, it seemed, had a secret. And it was yet another of Tanya’s secrets, hidden in plain sight.

She glanced over at the bed.

Ellie had been Maya’s constant companion since the day she’d received it as a birthday gift. The elephant went wherever Maya went. Always.

“Oh Tanya,” Letty thought, placing the camera aside. “What have you done now?” After some thought, she texted Isabelle.

Are you busy?

Isabelle’s response was immediate.

No! So freaking bored. What’s up?

I could use some electronics tech support. And a needle and thread.

Isabelle texted back a series of question marks and a wink emoji.

I’m not so good with tech, but I’ll call my friend Sierra. Total computer nerd.

Thanks, Letty texted. She put the phone down and waited. Ten minutes passed.

Sierra’s coming over. See you in fifteen.

23

ISABELLE’S FRIEND ARRIVED ON A lime-green Vespa scooter. She shook the rain off her helmet and left it on the chair in the breezeway.

“Hey, Letty, this is Sierra,” Isabelle said, ushering the girl into the room.

Sierra was a slight-figured African American girl with enormous dark eyes hidden behind steel-rimmed granny glasses with pink-tinted lenses and hair that had been dyed fuchsia and cropped close to her skull. She wore an oversize army fatigue jacket and had a shiny vinyl backpack slung over one shoulder.

She didn’t look old enough to ride a Vespa, or drive a car, Letty thought, but her opinion of the teenager soon changed.

Sierra held the plastic object in the palm of her hand and looked up at Letty.

“It’s a nanny cam,” she said. “Where’d you find it?”

Letty nodded toward Maya, who was now stretched out on the bed watching PAW Patrol with Isabelle, the still-damp and newly mended Ellie tightly tucked beneath her arm.

“It was in Maya’s stuffed elephant,” Letty said quietly.

“Genius!” Sierra exclaimed. “Who put it there?”

“Maya’s mom. My late sister.”

“Oh, man. Sorry. Isabelle told me the little girl’s mama was dead. So she was spying on someone? Like, literally the nanny?”

“No,” Letty said. She checked to see if Maya was listening, but the child was still enraptured by her favorite television program. “More likely Tanya was spying on her ex. They were fighting over custody of Maya, and things had taken a nasty turn. I’m sure she was trying to get the goods on him.”

“So, she didn’t tell you the nanny cam was there?”

“I had no idea. My sister … liked to have secrets. Any idea how it works?”

Sierra held the camera inches from her nose. “Okay, so the brand name is TriCommCo. I’ll have to look them up to see the specs for this camera, but I can tell you most of these things are usually motion and sound activated. Battery operated. Some of ’em have a little flash card, but this one looks like maybe it’s Wi-Fi enabled.”

“Do you think the camera could have been ruined when Ellie got left out in the rain last night?”

“Only one way to find out,” Sierra said.

“So … where does the video, or whatever you call it, end up?”

Sierra gave Letty the exasperated look every teenager gives any technically challenged person over the age of twenty. “It’s uploaded. Like, to the cloud, or a phone or a laptop.”

“And how would I retrieve it?”

“You’d have to hack into her account. And you’d need your sister’s phone or laptop. And the username and password.”

“Sierra can hack anything,” Isabelle said proudly. “She hacked into our school’s database to figure out who had the highest GPA.”

“I didn’t change anybody’s grades or anything illegal like that. I just wanted to know, in case our dipshit administration named one of the cool kids valedictorian,” Sierra said. “It wasn’t me, obviously. I only made a B in AP English.”

“And she hacked her boyfriend’s phone…”

“Ex,” Sierra said.

“… and figured out he was out there on Tinder trolling for cougars,” Isabelle said.

Sierra allowed herself a small smirk. “Busted!” She looked over at Letty, whose expression answered her next question. “So, you don’t have her phone?”

“No,” Letty said, her shoulders slumping.

“Hmm.”

Sierra sat down at the postage stamp–size table, unzipped her backpack, and brought out a slim silver laptop. “You’ve got Wi-Fi here, right?”

Letty nodded and told her the name of the network— “‘MURMURING SURF,’ all caps”—and the password.

Sierra’s slender fingers danced over the keyboard with lightning speed. “A lot of people don’t bother to come up with a unique username for all their apps and devices. Big mistake, but it happens. Worse than that, lots of times they just leave the factory-set default password on their device. Like, a password that’s 1–2–3. How dumb can you get?”

As dumb as me, Letty thought, silently vowing to change the password on every app and device she owned.

“Okay,” Sierra said. “I’m on the TriCommCo website.” She held the nanny cam next to the laptop. “Looks like this is their most-expensive-model camera, which isn’t great news, because the cheapest cameras are usually the ones with the worst security lapses. We need to log on to her TrimComm website and they will ask for verification from her email. Tell me your sister’s email address.”

“It was Tanyaterrible, all one word, at gmail dot com,” Letty said.

Sierra snickered as she typed. “Okay. Let’s try obvious passwords in email first. How do you spell the little girl’s name? And what’s her birthday?”

Letty spelled out the name. “M-A-Y-A. And her birthday is 09–23–2014.”

“Nope,” Sierra said a moment later. “Too easy. Give me all the clues you can think of. Your sister’s birthday, her phone number, street address, nickname?”

“Our grandmother called her Terrible Tanya, that’s where her email address came from,” Letty said. She supplied three combinations of the other ideas the girl requested, but nothing worked.