Sliver Of Truth

My father had just been through a federal investigation. Anything incriminating on this computer would have been found by the authorities or deleted. Probably. I shamelessly began searching through Word files, scanning his “Household,” “Speeches,” and correspondence folders. He wasn’t a very computer-savvy guy, my father, so there weren’t many documents. It took me only about twenty minutes to go through everything and to find nothing but the most innocuous stuff: a letter to a painter who’d taken their money and left his work unfinished in the kitchen, a speech he gave on the signs of child abuse to which physicians must be vigilant (I doubt anyone’s been asking him to make that speech lately), a list including various organizing tasks around the house.

Next I scanned his e-mail. The usual slew of spam popped up when I opened his Outlook box. The cure for erectile dysfunction, hot nude girls, and an international lottery win vied for my attention. I searched through his sent mail, his recently received mail, and his recycle bin. Everything was empty, wiped clean, not one e-mail saved. I found this strange. I thought about my own e-mail box. I was compelled to save nearly everything I sent and everything I received, cataloged by person and purpose. It seemed odd that he’d save nothing; he was an even bigger pack rat than I was. Maybe that federal investigation had left him feeling skittish.

I started to feel as if I was wasting time, when I remembered something Jake had taught me. Your computer remembers every website you’ve visited. The websites you visit send a little message to your computer called a cookie and your computer saves that cookie to identify itself the next time you visit that site. There’s also a log on your computer that shows all the websites you’ve visited in the last week or few days, depending on how your computer is set.

I visited the cookies file and saw a bunch of them from places like amazon.com and Home Depot, some investment and news websites. Nothing unusual or interesting. I went to the log of visited sites and, at first, nothing caught my eye there, either. Then I ran across a site that seemed a little odd, just a collection of seemingly random numbers, letter, and symbols. As I scrolled down I noticed that he’d visited the site ten times in the last week and a half. The log was set to delete any listings more than two weeks old, so past that, I didn’t know. But it seemed safe to assume he was visiting this site nearly every day.

I cut and pasted the address into the Web browser and waited for the site to pop up. When it did, it was just a blank page filling the screen with a bright red glare, so bright it actually hurt my eyes. I waited for some type of intro or log-in prompts to pop up. Nothing. Just that bright red screen with no images and no text. Something about it was unsettling. It was the color of danger.

I dragged the cursor over it and double-clicked in various places but nothing happened. After a few minutes of staring at the red blankness, I felt my chest constrict in my frustration. I knew I was looking at something important but I couldn’t figure out what it meant. My impatience blossomed into a childish anger and I fought a sudden overwhelming urge to put my fist through the screen. I gripped the edge of the desk until my inner tantrum passed. I released a breath I hadn’t even realized I was holding and wrote down the mysterious URL on a piece of scrap paper, which I shoved in my pocket. I deleted all the junk e-mails that had downloaded during my visit and turned off the computer. (I had the urge to go to the kitchen, get some Windex, and wipe down the desk, the keyboard, and anything else I had touched-but that was just me being weird.)