Page 49 of The Pacifist
“So?”
“It’s also Anne spelled backward.”
Cole was quiet.
“What if Anne changed her name?”
He groaned. “At this point I wouldn’t put it past her. Is there at least a detailed itinerary so we can see where the drone went exactly and what stops it made?”
I scrolled down the report. Yes, there’s an address and a travel log.”
“What does it say?”
“That the drone had a stop at Nostalgia Park at ten past two a.m. It took off again seventeen minutes later.”
Cole spoke fast, “What about a picture from the drone? They all have cameras. Do you see anything on the report?”
Scrolling all the way down, I frowned. “Sorry, it says the camera was malfunctioning.”
“Huh. That’s convenient for the arsonist. If Anne is behind the fire, then we’ll need some kind of proof to show people how unstable she is. I just saw her give another interview and her stories get more bizarre and disturbing every minute she’s in the spotlight. She talked about the sex club and made it sound like we’re a bunch of perverts.”
I leaned back in my chair. “She must be talking about you then.” It was an attempt at lifting the mood, but my joke didn’t make Cole laugh.
“Let’s keep digging to get to the bottom of this. I’m going to call the staff at Happy Souls. Anne lived there, remember?”
“But that was years ago, Cole. She was a teenager then.”
“I know, but maybe they can tell us something we don’t know.”
“Okay, let me dig around and see if I can find some pictures of the passenger of that drone. If it’s Anne, we’ll need to confront her about it.”
Cole’s growl expressed how I felt about that possibility. Anne was three years younger than me. As a child I had adored her, but she and Cole never got along. She was as headstrong as him and would always challenge his authority in our family. I had loved Anne but never the drama she created. A memory of my asking her to pass me the salad came back to me. We had all been confused when she broke down crying, claiming we were all yelling at her. Confronting her with arson would no doubt be a dramatic affair.
CHAPTER10
Passion
Jonah
I spent my evening calling around and digging through Community Cams, a website that offered access to surveillance cameras in public spaces. The more I watched people go about their lives, Mila’s words about privacy stirred something in me and I was beginning to find it slightly disturbing that we never asserted our right to privacy.
Our whole society was based on the expectation that every citizen conformed and followed the law, and now that my family had been caught breaking the law, I was resenting the level of control that the system had.
The only positive thing was that it came in handy now that I was looking for the arsonist. The address from the traffic registry provided me with a starting point and two hours into my investigation, Cole and I had talked four more times, and we had confirmed three things.
1: Anne hadn’t lived in Happy Souls, a well-known place of reflection, since she was a teenager. Despite the helpful staff and the tranquil surroundings of the place, she had chosen to check out and had never returned.
2: Anne had been the passenger in that drone. We had a picture of her getting into it to prove it.
3: Anne had edited her name in the original booking the morning after the fire.
It was a bit past midnight when I went to bed. “You still reading? I thought you would be asleep by now.”
“It’s this book. I can’t put it down, Jonah.”
Popping a tooth cleaner in my mouth, I undressed down to my briefs, and smiled as I got into my side of the bed. “How far did you get?”
“Chapter seven.”
