Excite the Man

For their dear causes
Would to the bleeding and the grim alarm
Excite the mortified man.
—Macbeth V.ii

I hadn’t been to sleep yet when Andi called and asked if I was interested in a cup at the Analog. I glanced at the clock on my screen and realized it was after 8:00. After I said yes, I looked at the results of all my research during the night. What I had to report wasn’t happy, but neither did it explain why Melissa would suddenly up and run away without even telling her best friend. I met Andi at the foot of the back stairs in the alley and we walked down to the Analog Café. We’d done this dozens of times in the past, though usually not quite so early in the morning. And never before with her hand held in mine as we walked.

It was a beautiful clear day, though the streets were still wet from last night’s rain. The Space Needle punctuated the view down Thomas with Puget Sound glistening in the background and an amazing clear and crisp view of the Olympic Mountains in the background. I had the feeling this was going to be a good day after all the stress of the week past. One thing for sure was that I had no intentions of going back to CCS this weekend, and probably not Monday either. All through searching for clues about Mel during the night, my brain was processing the clues to the credit card fraud in the background. I was down to four suspects based on who had access to my backpack after the accident. I’d been at CCS two weeks. Phil had been on vacation half that time. We’d had very little interaction. Darlene had been nothing but helpful to me since I started there. She was sweet, loyal to her boss, efficient at what she was doing, and great at covering for me when needed. I’d looked into Jen’s eyes. I saw a degree of raw lust there—maybe even a challenge—but I hadn’t detected any outright malice. She had the same kind of dogged determination to get to the bottom of a puzzle that I had. Then there was Arnie. Position of power. Access to everything in the company. Technically adept. And when it came down to it, I really disliked executives. I was pretty sure I had my villain. I just needed proof.

I was so wrapped up in the pleasant sensations of walking hand in hand with my newfound love that I didn’t even notice the sights that were so commonplace in our neighborhood. I saw people I recognized and we all belonged in our community—like the very cute brunette dressed, like so many people on Capitol Hill, all in black. She wore a brightly colored scarf around her neck and cowboy boots. She cut quite the figure as she bent to fasten the leash of her pug to a chair leg outside while she ran in to get a coffee. I didn’t even notice. Yeah.

“How’s Cali this morning?” I asked Andi.

“Better, I think. She’s still asleep. I popped my head into her room to see if she wanted to come along this morning, but she pulled the covers up over her head. Between the show and her best friend running off, she was pretty exhausted. I cuddled her until she finally fell asleep last night. Afterward, I was wishing someone would cuddle me.” She smiled up at me and I placed a light kiss on her lips just before we ordered our coffees.

“You could have called me.”

“Mmm. I glanced up, but your room was dark. I assumed you were asleep.”

“Not yet,” I said.

“Young love,” Lonnie the barista commented while he waited for us to place our orders. “I wondered when you two would finally get together. What a difference a week makes.” We grinned at him. He was already pulling our shots.

“Do you know everything about everyone in this neighborhood?” I asked.

“Pretty much,” he replied. “It’s our own little soap opera. Do you know how many hearts you’ve broken by finally choosing Andi? There’ve been more tears than coffee on this counter this week.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “How could anyone even know?”

“Well, I certainly don’t gossip about anything, but I do hear things.” Andi was blushing almost scarlet. I looked around the café. Did I just imagine that people’s eyes were turning away from us just as I glanced their way?

“There isn’t even another girl in the same generation in this neighborhood,” I joked casually. “Rule of dating: Half your age plus seven. Minimum.”

“Who was talking about the girls?” Lonnie said, sighing. This time I blushed—I could feel it. We left and took our drinks outside to enjoy the sunny morning. As soon as we were out of the coffee shop, Andi started giggling.

“What?” I asked.

“Pheromones. Now I’m sure of you,” she said cryptically. I raised an eyebrow. I had no idea what she was talking about. “As soon as a man falls in love, he starts exuding an aura that attracts other potential mates. It’s the perceived last chance before the boat sails.”

“Hey,” I said. “This boat has already left the harbor.”

“Hmmm. This boat hasn’t even entered the harbor yet.” That shut me up, but good! We strolled south and ended up watching an early morning soccer game at Cal Anderson Park.

“What did you find out about Mel last night—since I know now you were up all night.”

“It doesn’t look good,” I said softly. This was going to be hard. “I’m suspecting she had assistance.”

“You mean she met someone?”

“Actually, I hope that’s all. She might have just put herself in danger.”

“Kidnapped? But the police…”

“If you have an 11-year-old who disappears, the police will immediately assume kidnapping and put out an amber alert. But if the child is over 15, the first assumption is that she’s a runaway unless you can provide specific evidence that it wasn’t voluntary. The police have a bulletin out on her, but there is no active search or alert. But Mel…”

“I can’t believe that Olivia accused Cali of causing her best friend to run away!” Real anger flared in Andi all at once. I knew she was concerned for Mel, but the fact that her own daughter had been verbally attacked brought out the momma bear in her. I clutched her to me tightly.

“Whatever happened, Cali is not to blame for it,” I reassured her. “You are the best mom in the world and Cali is a great kid. She didn’t lead Mel astray. But the truth is that Mel was acting dangerously online. It’s going to be almost impossible to get her parents to see that. She was very good at keeping an image of perfection at home.”

“What was she doing?”

“I ran various searches and comparisons all night long. In fact, I still have some running. The social network account that she has and that Cali is friends with her on was only one of her accounts. It’s public, and I’m sure her parents monitor it. They are both friends on her profile. Her posts are sweet and controlled. In fact, too controlled. Even Cali has slipped up and posted an occasional profanity on her updates. But Mel never expresses profanity in the way that we know she uses it. Her posts are always upbeat and rah-rah. It got me thinking that this wasn’t her real profile. It took a long time to verify, but I found an account that was marked ‘members only.’ That’s a dangerous sign, but I joined it. She has over 3,000 followers on that account and they are nearly all male.”

“How do you know it is her account?”

“The photographs.”

“Oh God, no! She’s not doing pornography is she?”

“Not openly, if at all. There were enough face shots that I could recognize her clearly. The rest of the pictures were not explicit, but were suggestive. Alluring. Some were even provocative. But none of them likely to get a person thrown into jail for possessing child pornography. She’s been doing this for at least two years.” Revealing this information to Andi was hard. She was the parent of a 17-year-old girl. Hearing what her daughter’s best friend was doing was not going down well.

“Cali… Cali isn’t involved in… Please tell me no, Dag.”

“No. Believe me, once I found out what Mel was into, I did just as extensive a search on Cali. Nothing came up.”

“Thank God! What do we do now?”

“I still don’t have any kind of evidence that suggests that she was kidnapped, so nothing I can turn over to the police. What I need to do is get access to her private email on this forum. I’m doing a search on everything I can come up with as a potential password.”

“How? How can you find a person’s password?”

“I’m using a hackerazzi technique. You’ve read about stars whose cell phones and Twitter accounts were hacked—pictures stolen, personal information given out? Essentially, most people use a password that is easy to remember. It’s usually something that has meaning to them. It could be the name of an old boyfriend, a dog, a favorite movie, an old address, even a private nickname or name of a sibling. Mother’s maiden name is popular. Now that I’ve got several different accounts where Mel has posted social updates, I’m downloading everything she’s said online and have a database searching for specific types of information. I’ll also do a word map to see what she’s said most frequently. Sometimes a password is simply a favorite word or phrase, and that shows up in the word map.”

“Cali’s name?”

“Too short. Passwords on most of these accounts have to be at least seven characters. And I already tried California.”

“You knew?”

“Cali’s full name? Yes. Was it a secret? How did you ever come up with that?”

“I was young, widowed, and desperate. Charles used to say he was the King of Florida. I’d say, today Florida, tomorrow the world. He’d answer, no, tomorrow California.” There was a twinge in my chest. I had to wonder how well rehearsed that story was.

I knew there had been no Charles Marx.

***

For all my efforts, my research between naps the rest of Saturday came up with nothing that worked. Granted, I was pretty tired and suffered periodic headaches, but I hadn’t found an answer yet. I met Andi at 6:00 and we got a bite to eat before going to Cali’s closing performance of “Macbeth.”

Cali got involved with Theater in the City when she was in grade school. According to Andi, she had been a shy, insecure child with no friends. Apparently, Andi grew up much the same way and enrolled her in an acting class on a whim. Cali had blossomed and soon she had acting, dance, and singing classes at the theater and was cast in her first musical as a munchkin in The Wizard of Oz. She was hooked, and had grown into what her friends called a triple threat. She could sing, dance, and act. Mostly, I’d admired her singing voice over the years. I remembered her first impromptu performance for the Faculty Lounge about five years ago when she sang a very campy “Wash that man right out of my hair,” with Mel clowning as a man caught in her hair. The singing was a little hesitant, but the clowning the two did had all of us in the restaurant laughing our heads off. Whenever Cali convinced Mel to join her in one of her performances, Mel was a silent clown. Her own bent was toward sports and she was a very physical girl.

The last time I’d heard Cali sing in a musical, she’d nearly broken my heart as Johanna Barker in “Sweeney Todd.” Her voice was like crystal and filled the auditorium. She was looking forward to studying theater at a major university when she graduated from high school.

Based on what she had been saying for the past week, I was braced for a truly awful, amateurish rendering of Macbeth. What we got was nothing short of stunning. The director had made two choices that made a professional quality production. First, rather than try to get his teen actors to master the English and Scottish dialects, he focused them on cadence and pronunciation. As a result, we could hear the music in Shakespeare’s language and could understand every word that was spoken. Second, with the exception of a couple of seriously older characters—notably the assassinated king and his advisor Ross—the director had interpreted the cast as adolescents who were thrust into their roles without adult supervision. They were ruled by their passions, impulses, and superstitions. They automatically believed everything that everyone said, and as a result stood by while their friend and gang leader turned into a ruthless bully. Setting Macbeth on the streets of the city in a gang war environment, complete with allusions to drug abuse among the cast was a little bit reminiscent of West Side Story, but at the same time it completely made sense to see Macbeth hallucinating a vision of dancing kings when he was sitting in a dark room stoned out of his mind.

And Cali. I don’t know if it was the pain of losing her best friend or if she was truly that gifted an actress. The transition from confident, scheming, adolescent wife of Macbeth to the shell-shocked waif that wandered the battlements crying “Out damn’d spot!” was poignant. Andi clutched my hand and both of us had tears in our eyes.

Theater in the City, being all kids with an occasional adult ringer in an appropriate role, had a ritual of letting the cast meet parents, friends, and well-wishers in the theater lobby after the show as soon as the actors get out of costume. It wasn’t Cali that reached us first, though. It was a bouncing redhead wearing black-rimmed geek glasses with silver filigree running the length of the bows. She was in jeans, a black production t-shirt that said “That Scottish Play” on the back, and a floppy straw hat. She was still wiping some kind of adhesive off her face and I recognized her as the actor who played Siward in the last act. She rushed straight to Andi.

“Hi Mrs. Marx,” she said.

“Hi Alex. Good show!”

“Thank you. Before Cali comes out, I was wondering if it would be okay with you for her to come to my house tonight after the strike party. I’m having some girls over and….” She paused and reconsidered what she was about to say. “We all love Cali and she’s really hurting over Mel running away. We don’t want her to go off alone tonight like she did last night. She belongs with us.”

“Alex, that is so sweet of you. Of course, if she wants to come to your house for the night it’s fine. In fact…,” Andi seemed to consider something for a moment and caught her breath slightly. “In fact, I agree that it’s a good idea for her to be with friends tonight.”

“Yeah. Things just aren’t right without CaliMel.” What was that?

“CaliMel?” I asked, breaking in to the conversation. “Did you call her CaliMel?” The teen turned toward me as if wondering who I was to be breaking into her conversation.

“Oh Alex,” Andi came to the rescue. “You’ve never met my friend, Dag Hamar.” There was an instant look of recognition in Alex’s face. She was a good foot shorter than I was, but I swear that when she turned her attention on me she looked me straight in the eye.

“Oh! You’re the computer geek!”

“Alex!”

“I’m sorry!”

“It’s okay,” I said, laughing. “I can’t honestly think of a better way to describe me.”

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing,” Alex rushed on. “I’m a geek, too!” She held up a hoodie sweatshirt she was carrying and turned the back to face me. Across the shoulders were written the words “Talk nerdy to me.” I laughed.

“Cali said you are trying to find Mel.”

“I’m doing some searches. Which brings me back to my original question, for which I’m sorry I interrupted you. Do you always call her CaliMel?”

“A lot of us do. You never see one without the other unless it’s on stage or on a sports field. We used to joke that when Cali was in a show, Mel took the curtain call and if Mel hit a homer, Cali signed the ball. It’s just not right for them not to be together.”

“Thank you. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do anything about it, but I am trying. You don’t have any ideas about where Mel might have gone do you?”

“No. I really only know Mel through Cali. Now if my robot were as smart as I’m making him out to be, I could just let him solve the problem.”

“Robot?”

“It’s my senior project. I’m writing a one-act, one-woman show in which I carry on a dialog with my artificial intelligence robot. See? I told you I was a geek.” We laughed and I saw Cali approaching.

“I’ll look forward to seeing that,” I said.

“Say, do you know anything about artificial intelligence? Could I use you as a resource?”

“I’m not an authority, but if you have any questions, please feel free to give me a call.” I handed her one of my business cards and she spun around into the arms of a very tall, blonde guy with a ponytail and a voice much deeper than a teenager’s should be. They had a quick hug and were off to visit other parents and friends in the crowded lobby.

Cali was already wrapped in a big hug by her mother. I had to ask myself, whatever happened to teens who kept their chins against their chests and mumbled when they were around adults? These kids—all of them in the theater program—walked with their heads held high and a sense of confidence and accomplishment that just oozed out of them. They looked adults in the eye and spoke clearly and comfortably. They carried on actual, intelligent conversations. I just don’t get kids.

It was my turn to hug Cali and I was a little surprised by the ferocity of her grip. She didn’t let go when she stopped hugging, but wrapped one arm around her mother and pulled all three of us together in her hug. She looked up at the two of us and asked a little fearfully, “Was it okay?”

“Oh Sweety, it was magnificent. I’m so proud of you,” Andi answered immediately. Cali’s eyes shifted to mine as if she was waiting for my assessment before she could relax.

“You lied to me,” I said softly. Her eyes got big. “You told me it was awful and would be a big flop. You told me you didn’t understand Lady Macbeth. You told me it was no big deal.” By this time she was grinning shyly. “I brought earplugs so I wouldn’t have to listen to the butchering of the bard,” I continued. “You didn’t prepare me to be wowed. You didn’t tell me you were such a professional that you could pull off one of Shakespeare’s hardest roles and make it look so natural. The show was great and you were spectacular.” I was rewarded with another death-grip hug that brought the three of us together. The show was great, but I really loved this.

After saying our goodbyes and affirming that Cali had everything she needed to spend the night at Alex’s house, Andi and I left the theater.