unsmiling, at 7:25; an hour and a half later, Emma was gone, too, on her way down the steps with Marni, crying bitterly that she didn’t want toleave mommy, a performance she hadn’t put on in many months.
Susan settled heavily into a kitchen chair, ran a hand through her greasy hair, and laid her palms flat on the table. “Let’s get some shit
done
,” she told herself. “Forget all this haunted-house BS and get some shit
done.
” There was a friend of hers from college, Kerry Feigue, who talked like that: brash, hyperconfident, unapologetic. Susan liked to conjure up an internal version of Kerry at times like this, when she could use a swift internal kick in the pants. She opened her MacBook at the kitchen table and let her hands hover over the keys. Alex had asked her, a few days ago, to order a new nonstick frying pan to replace one scratched in the move; she could go to Amazon.com, read customer reviews for ten minutes, and buy one. She’d also been meaning to follow up on the first couple suggestions that Vanessa, Shawn’s mom, had given her for local preschools.
Instead, she Googled “bedbugs” and clicked on the first search result, a site called BedbugDemolition.com. The site was chaotic and unstructured, with one page titled “Sleep Tight,” one called “Ask the (Sort of) Expert,” and one just called “Pictures! Pictures! Pictures!” The webpage was amateurish in its design, studded with arbitrarily bolded paragraphs and bristling with blinking pop-up ads for exterminators and cleaning services.
Susan clicked, almost at random, on a link that said “Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know about Bedbugs But Were Afraid to Ask” and quickly scanned the bulleted list, which looked like it’d been written by a hyperactive elementary school student doing a report: “Bedbugs are
parasites
, which means they live off the blood of a host—that’s you!” “Every bedbug begins life as a ‘stage one’ and molts its exoskeleton
five times
before achieving full maturity as a ‘stage five’!” “Bedbugs can live
for more than a year
between feedings!”
“Great,” Susan muttered. A couple more clicks, and she was engrossed in a fierce debate, ranging over many posts, about whether bedbugs bore a detectable odor: some people were saying no; others were saying that a colony smelled faintly of lemon or lemon-scented candles. One person argued passionately that bedbugs smelled of raspberries and cilantro, a smell that “gets much stronger before/during blood meals!”
Susan went back to the previous page, found the link that boasted “Pictures! Pictures! Pictures!” and clicked on it. She began to scroll down and immediately stopped—the first picture, posted by someone identifying themselves only as “[email protected],” featured a row of three bites, each one red and raised, with a white dot in the center.
“Oh, crap,” said Susan. “Oh,
crap.
” She reached up and scratched idly at the top of her left cheekbone, just below her eye. Then she clicked the tab for Google on her bookmarks bar and did a search for “Jessica Spender.”
It was, at it turned out, a fairly common name. There was a Jessica Spender in Joliet, Illinois, who owned a pastry shop, but the picture showed a heavy middle-aged lady in a ruffled apron. Another Jessica Spender was in Detroit, quoted three times in a
Free Press
article about the ongoing struggle to rebeautify that city’s beleaguered downtown. This Jessica Spender was twenty-seven years old, which sounded like the right age, but she was a lifelong resident of Detroit, not to mention black. There was a seventeen-year-old Jessica Spender in a high school in South Bend, a newborn Jessica Spender in a Babble article about jaundice, and on and on and on.
Susan tapped her chin and then tried “Jessie Spender” instead. This time, the first result was a Facebook page for someone namedJess Spender—and this lead, at last, seemed promising. It
Susan settled heavily into a kitchen chair, ran a hand through her greasy hair, and laid her palms flat on the table. “Let’s get some shit
done
,” she told herself. “Forget all this haunted-house BS and get some shit
done.
” There was a friend of hers from college, Kerry Feigue, who talked like that: brash, hyperconfident, unapologetic. Susan liked to conjure up an internal version of Kerry at times like this, when she could use a swift internal kick in the pants. She opened her MacBook at the kitchen table and let her hands hover over the keys. Alex had asked her, a few days ago, to order a new nonstick frying pan to replace one scratched in the move; she could go to Amazon.com, read customer reviews for ten minutes, and buy one. She’d also been meaning to follow up on the first couple suggestions that Vanessa, Shawn’s mom, had given her for local preschools.
Instead, she Googled “bedbugs” and clicked on the first search result, a site called BedbugDemolition.com. The site was chaotic and unstructured, with one page titled “Sleep Tight,” one called “Ask the (Sort of) Expert,” and one just called “Pictures! Pictures! Pictures!” The webpage was amateurish in its design, studded with arbitrarily bolded paragraphs and bristling with blinking pop-up ads for exterminators and cleaning services.
Susan clicked, almost at random, on a link that said “Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know about Bedbugs But Were Afraid to Ask” and quickly scanned the bulleted list, which looked like it’d been written by a hyperactive elementary school student doing a report: “Bedbugs are
parasites
, which means they live off the blood of a host—that’s you!” “Every bedbug begins life as a ‘stage one’ and molts its exoskeleton
five times
before achieving full maturity as a ‘stage five’!” “Bedbugs can live
for more than a year
between feedings!”
“Great,” Susan muttered. A couple more clicks, and she was engrossed in a fierce debate, ranging over many posts, about whether bedbugs bore a detectable odor: some people were saying no; others were saying that a colony smelled faintly of lemon or lemon-scented candles. One person argued passionately that bedbugs smelled of raspberries and cilantro, a smell that “gets much stronger before/during blood meals!”
Susan went back to the previous page, found the link that boasted “Pictures! Pictures! Pictures!” and clicked on it. She began to scroll down and immediately stopped—the first picture, posted by someone identifying themselves only as “[email protected],” featured a row of three bites, each one red and raised, with a white dot in the center.
“Oh, crap,” said Susan. “Oh,
crap.
” She reached up and scratched idly at the top of her left cheekbone, just below her eye. Then she clicked the tab for Google on her bookmarks bar and did a search for “Jessica Spender.”
It was, at it turned out, a fairly common name. There was a Jessica Spender in Joliet, Illinois, who owned a pastry shop, but the picture showed a heavy middle-aged lady in a ruffled apron. Another Jessica Spender was in Detroit, quoted three times in a
Free Press
article about the ongoing struggle to rebeautify that city’s beleaguered downtown. This Jessica Spender was twenty-seven years old, which sounded like the right age, but she was a lifelong resident of Detroit, not to mention black. There was a seventeen-year-old Jessica Spender in a high school in South Bend, a newborn Jessica Spender in a Babble article about jaundice, and on and on and on.
Susan tapped her chin and then tried “Jessie Spender” instead. This time, the first result was a Facebook page for someone namedJess Spender—and this lead, at last, seemed promising. It
Similar Books
