In Dog's Image by Neil S. Plakcy

Author:Neil S. Plakcy [Plakcy, Neil S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Samwise Books

Chapter 16

Balcony Flight

I was delighted to leave Friar Lake on Thursday at five. Joey had already gone home, so I made sure all the doors were locked and Rochester checked to make sure there were no unfamiliar scents. Then we drove home.

Lili was still out somewhere, so I sat at the dining room table with the new hacker laptop. Before I jumped into a look at Your Online Closet, I did a quick search for Beth Feller, the schizophrenic student I had known as a freshman at Eastern. It took a few tries, but eventually I discovered that she had graduated from Penn State, albeit a few years later than she had been expected to finish at Eastern. She was married and taught elementary school in a small town in coal mining country.

Good for her, I thought. I hoped that we’d find the same good outcome for Jonathan’s sister. I wondered if Rick had made any progress in discovering if she’d made it to Stewart’s Crossing but I resisted calling to bother him. When he needed something from me, he’d get in touch, and I’d get my question answered then.

To get a little exercise before hunching over the laptop, I took Rochester out for a quick walk. He tugged ahead for a while, periodically stopping abruptly to sniff and pee. Then he got very interested in something under one of the trees, and I hurried over to make sure it wasn’t something he shouldn’t be licking or eating.

It was a tiny, wrinkled ball of something, and looking up, I realized it was a nascent crabapple that had fallen off. “That apple didn’t fall far from the tree, did it, Rochester?” I asked.

He barked once, then looked down at the apple, then back up at me. He put his paw on it. Did he want me to throw it for him? Honestly, it looked nasty and I didn’t want to touch it. So I turned back to the house.

When I settled down at the dining room table, I thought about that apple, and the clichéd phrase I’d used to refer to it. I was looking into Jonathan’s sister, and realized I didn’t know much about his background. Could there be a clue to his death there? And even if there wasn’t, could I learn something that might help me as I tried to crack his online password?

I rewarded Rochester for his insight with one of his chew sticks and sat down at the laptop. Jonathan was two years older than Patty, and I found his picture in the online yearbook for Guilderland High. He had hair back then, and large glasses with plastic frames that made him look like a giant ant.

Fortunately, he liked using Facebook, and he had listed much of his background there. He had gone to Cornell, where he majored in Applied Economics and Management and got his degree in 1992. His first job was in a management training program for Sears, and it looked like he rose through the ranks, jumping from store to store.

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