Harlan Coben - Six Years

The Xbox controllers were lying on it now. I stared down at them, though I didn’t really think the controllers would offer up much information. I wondered what I was looking for. A clue, I guess. Something that would tell me why Benedict would have driven up to that farm/retreat/kidnapper-hideout in Kraftboro, Vermont. What that might be, I didn’t have the slightest.

I started going through the drawers. I searched the ones in the kitchen first. Nothing. I took the spare bedroom next. Nothing. I tried the closet and bureau in the den. More nothing. I headed into the bedroom and tried there. Nothing. Benedict had a desk in there with a computer on it. I checked the drawers underneath it. Nothing.

I found a file drawer. I checked the file cabinet. There were routine bills. There were student papers. There were class schedules. As far as anything truly personal, there was—drum roll, please—nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

I thought about that. Who doesn’t have anything personal in their house? Then again what would you find in my house? More than this, certainly. There would be some old photographs, a few personal letters, something that indicated my past.

Benedict had none of that. So what?

I kept looking. I was hoping to find something that would link Benedict to the Creative Recharge Colony or Vermont or anything really. I tried to sit at his desk. Benedict is a lot smaller than I am, so my knees couldn’t fit under the desk. I leaned forward and hit a key on the computer. The screen lit up. Like most people, Benedict had not shut down his computer. I suddenly realized how old-fashioned my house search had been thus far. No one keeps secrets in their drawers anymore.

We keep them on the computer.

I opened up his Microsoft Office and looked for the most recent documents. The first listed was a Word document called VBMWXY.doc. Strange name. I clicked on it.

The file wouldn’t open. It was password protected.

Whoa.

There was no point in trying to guess the password. I didn’t have a clue. I tried to think of another way around that. Nothing came to mind. The rest of the files under “Recent” were student recommendations. Two were for medical schools, two for law schools, one for business school.

So what was in the password-protected one?

No idea. I clicked on the Mail icon on the bottom. The mail, too, required a password to enter. I looked around the desk for a slip of paper with a password—lots of people did that—but I found nothing. Another dead end.

Now what?

I clicked on his web browser. His Yahoo! news page popped up. Not much to learn here. I clicked the history page and finally hit something approaching pay dirt. Benedict had been on Facebook recently. I clicked the link. A profile for a man named, believe it or not, John Smith, came up. John Smith had no photograph of himself. He had no friends. He had no status reports. His address was listed as New York, NY.

This computer was signed in to this Facebook under the name John Smith.

Hmm. I thought about that. It was a fake account. I know a lot of people have them. A friend of mine uses a music service that goes through Facebook, showing all his friends every song he listens to. He didn’t like that, so he created a dummy account like this one. Now no one can see what songs he likes.

The fact that Benedict had a dummy account meant nothing. What was more interesting though, as I typed his name into the search engine, was that Benedict Edwards didn’t have a real Facebook account. There were two Benedict Edwardses listed in the Facebook directory. One was a musician from Oklahoma City, the other was a dancer from Tampa, Florida. Neither was my Benedict Edwards.

Again, so what? A lot of people don’t have Facebook accounts. I had one set up, but I’ve almost never used it. My profile picture was the yearbook photograph. I accepted friends maybe once a week. I probably had about fifty of them. I had originally signed up because people were sending me links to photographs and the like and the only way I could view them was to sign in to a Facebook account. Other than that, social media in general held very little appeal to me.

So maybe that was what Benedict had done. We were on many of the same e-mail lists. He had probably set up the dummy account so he could view Facebook links.

When I looked down the history page, that theory immediately imploded. The first listing was for a man on Facebook named Kevin Backus. I clicked the link. For a second, I thought that maybe it was another dummy account for Benedict, that Kevin Backus was merely an online pseudonym. But that wasn’t the case. Kevin Backus was just some nondescript guy. He wore sunglasses in his profile picture and posed with his thumb up. I frowned at that.

I racked my brain. Kevin Backus. Neither his name nor his face was familiar.

I hit the “about” page. It was blank. It didn’t list a home, a school, an occupation, any of that. The only thing that had been filled out was “in a relationship.” He was, according to this, in a relationship with a woman named Marie-Anne Cantin.

I rubbed my chin. Marie-Anne Cantin. That name didn’t ring a bell either. So, why had Benedict been on this Kevin Backus’s page? I didn’t know, but I suspected it was hugely important. I could start googling him. I looked again at the name Marie-Anne Cantin. It was typed in blue, meaning that she also had a profile. I only had to click on her name.

That was what I did.

When her page came up—when I saw Marie-Anne Cantin’s profile photograph—I recognized the face almost immediately.

Benedict carried her picture in his wallet.

Oh man. I swallowed, sat back, caught my breath. Now I got it. I could almost feel Benedict’s pain. I had lost the great love of my life. Benedict, it seemed, had done the same. Marie-Anne Cantin was indeed a stunning woman. I would describe her as high-cheekboned, regal, African American except, as I looked closer at her profile, that last part would be inaccurate.

She wasn’t African American. She was, well, African. Marie-Anne Cantin, according to her Facebook page, lived in Ghana.

This fact was, I guess, interesting, albeit in a not-my-business way. Somewhere along the way, Benedict had met this woman. He had fallen in love with her. He carried a torch for her. What that could possibly have to do with his visiting Kraftboro, Vermont . . .

Hold the phone.

Hadn’t I, too, fallen in love with a woman? I, too, still carried a torch for her. And I, too, had been up in Kraftboro, Vermont.

Was Kevin Backus Benedict’s very own Todd Sanderson?

I frowned. That felt like a stretch. And wrong. Still, wrong as it felt, I needed to investigate this. Marie-Anne Cantin was the only lead I had right now. I clicked her “about” link. It was impressive. She had studied economics at Oxford University and had received a law degree at Harvard. She was legal counsel for the United Nations. She both lived in and was from Accra, the capital of Ghana. She was, as I already knew, “in a relationship” with Kevin Backus.

Now what?

I clicked on her pictures, but they were set on private. No way to view them. An idea came to me. I hit the back arrow until I was on Kevin Backus’s page again. His photographs were not set on private. I could see them all. Okay, good. I started clicking through them. I don’t know why. I don’t know what I expected to find.

Kevin Backus had his photographs in various albums. I started with the one simply titled “Happy Times.” There were twenty, twenty-five pictures of either my boy Kevin with his main squeeze, Marie-Anne, or just Marie-Anne alone, obviously snapped by Kevin. They looked happy. Check that. She looked happy. He looked deliriously happy. I pictured Benedict sitting here, clicking through these photographs of the woman he loved with this Kevin guy. I could see the glass of scotch in his hand. I could see the room growing dark. I could see the blue light of the screen bouncing off Benedict’s oversize Ant-Man glasses. I could see a lone tear running down his cheek.