Keepsake (29 page)

Kate nodded. “But I never saw an actual manuscript or a book or papers or anything. I mean, I never saw a printout
or anything. She read to me directly from her computer screen.”

April opened her mouth and closed it again. She felt like an idiot. No wonder they hadn’t found the book. They were looking
for a large, bulky manuscript instead of a file or a bunch of files on a computer.

“What?” said Kate, munching again.

“Nothing.” Once again her computer illiteracy was coming back to haunt her. One of these days she was going to have to learn
to use one of the bloody things. “I’ve been stupid, that’s all.”

Kate nodded, as if adults being stupid was far too common an event to bother commenting on.

However, not all adults were stupid, April reminded herself. The police must have thought about the possibilities connected
with the computer age. She’d been told that the police had examined all the computers at the office, and she remembered that
Blackthorn had commented on Rina’s not having a computer here at the apartment.

“Which computer screen are you talking about? The one in her office at Power Perspectives?”

“Her laptop,” said Kate. “Mostly, when I saw Gran working, she worked on that.”

“I didn’t know she had a laptop. It’s not here or at work. Do you suppose Armand’s got it?”

Kate’s face had gone red. “I liked the laptop a lot,” she said slowly. “She used to let me use it whenever I wanted to.” Her
eyes darted away and she began to gnaw on her bottom lip. “I figured she’d have wanted me to have it. I mean, she knew how
much I wanted to be a writer. So I— I didn’t think there’d be any harm if I just kinda borrowed it.”

Oh, wow, thought April. Rina had owned a laptop computer.
And Kate, who’d had the run of this apartment both before and after her murder, had taken it.

The missing manuscript was in the hands of a child.

“It was wrong, wasn’t it?” Kate said a few minutes later. She looked and sounded stricken. “I should have asked before taking
the laptop. It’s like, stealing, isn’t it?”

“I’m sure you’re right that your grandmother would have wanted you to have it,” April said quickly. “But you should have told
somebody, yes. It might be important, depending on what files are on it. Where is the computer?”

“Oh, well that part’s easy.” Kate vanished into the hallway and returned with her backpack. “It’s right here. I take it with
me everywhere, in case I need to write something down that I don’t want to forget.”

She opened the heavy backpack and pulled out a slim boxlike machine. “This is it.”

April laughed, partly with delight and partly with relief. Was the mystery about to be solved?

“I haven’t erased anything from the hard disk. Want me to find the files for you? I’m a whizz with computers.”

April wasn’t sure if they should be doing this at all—she should probably phone the police, or certainly Rob, but—

“The battery’s low,” Kate said as she tried to boot up the laptop. “You gotta recharge it pretty often. Never mind, we’ll
use the AC.” She rooted around again in the backpack and pulled out a cord with a power pack attached to it. While she attached
it to the computer, April plugged the other end into the wall outlet.

The little machine began to whirr. “Okay, now we’re cooking,” said Kate.

As April watched, the machine beeped once then flashed a series of paragraphs and graphics across its silvery screen. Kate’s
fingers flew over the keyboard, producing colorful new screens and cute little pictographs.

“Well, I don’t see it,” she said after a couple of minutes. “There’s not much stuff here in Gran’s files. No games or anything.
Well, except Solitaire—that comes automatically with Windows. Nothing really fun or challenging, though. I’ve got some great
games on the big 486 at home.”

“Anything to do with computers is challenging to me,” April said wryly.

Kate was concentrating on the screen. “It’s a nice machine, though. Not as fast as a desktop of course, but it’s got a color
monitor, which is cool. Most laptops don’t.”

April nodded. She was leaning over Kate’s shoulder, trying to figure out what she was doing.

“See, I’m in the file manager. I’m looking for the files to her book, but they aren’t in here.”

“How do you know?”

“I remember the filename. She was calling it Memories. You know, like Memories One, Memories Two, and so on. Probably had
a new file for every chapter. There ought to be lots of files here, but there aren’t any. At least none with that name.”

“Maybe she changed the name to something else.”

“Sure. Maybe. Let’s pull up a few and see. We gotta go into her word processor, like this, see? Or we could just view it from
DOS, but the text won’t be formatted that way.”

“If you say so,” April said.

“You really don’t know how to use a computer? That’s awesome. I thought everybody could use Windows, at least. It’s easy.
Want me to teach you?”

“Yes, but not right now. The most important thing at the moment is to find her autobiography.”

“This all looks like correspondence. Letters and stuff. See the things that say ‘ltr’ as the filename extension? People often
use that for letters. Or ‘let’ or maybe the date.”

She pressed some keys and the text of a short letter showed up on the screen. April could see from the inside address that
it was to a woman in Arkansas whose name she did not recognize. It seemed to be in reply to a fan letter or something—just
the usual “seize your power” sort of stuff.

“Boring,” said Kate. She called up several other letters, but none looked particularly interesting. Still, thought April,
she would have to learn to use the machine well enough to read through them all individually, in case there was anything in
Rina’s private correspondence that might prove helpful.

“Let me try some of the other directories,” Kate said. “But she doesn’t have much on here. There’s a personal subdirectory—shall
I go into that? It sounds familiar—this may have been where the book was stored.”

“Yes, let’s see what’s in it.”

“Hmm. This is weird,” said Kate a moment later. “The directory’s empty. Except for the two base files that always get created
when you make a directory.”

“Can you make a directory and not use it?” April asked.

“Sure. You can also use it, then delete the files. I’m gonna try something, okay?”

“You know what you’re doing here, Kate. I don’t.”

“There should be a utility here that will undelete a file if it hasn’t already been written over. That’s just in case you
erase something by mistake. Okay, so I’m going to
try and undelete files with the names Memories One, Memories Two, and so on. Maybe they’re still here.”

The computer whirred again. Kate tried several combinations then shook her head. “Nope. That’s too bad. Acourse it still doesn’t
prove that they weren’t ever here. She could have written over them herself and then deleted those files, which would have
been an extra security precaution.”

“But wouldn’t that erase all her work?”

“She would have backed it up, though. You know, on floppies? Portable computer diskettes, that is. You know the kind I mean.”

“Those flexible thin things,” April said.

“Yeah, well in a laptop we use the three-and-a-half-inch square ones. That reminds me, I forgot to check the A-drive. It would
be funny, wouldn’t it, if the backup diskette was here all the time. I never use the A-drive. That’s stupid, by the way—everyone
should back up their work on a floppy.”

She pressed a button on the side of the computer and probed around with her fingers. “Nope. No floppy.” She looked up at April.
“But that’s where the book is, I’ll bet. If it’s not on here and it’s not printed out in a hard copy form, then it’s probably
stored on a backup diskette.”

“Why would somebody write a book on a computer then erase it and store it on a floppy?”

“So somebody couldn’t do exactly what we’re doing now. It’s a lot easier to hide a diskette than a computer. I know it was
on here. That I’m sure of. I’ll bet if you find the diskette you’ll find the missing manuscript. And maybe Gran’s murderer
as well.”

April hugged her. “You may be right.”

“I’ll bet it’s here someplace, hidden. Or if not here, maybe in Gran’s office. Can I help you look for it?” The
girl clenched her fingers into fists. “I want to get the guy who did it—I really do.”

“I understand how you feel. But I’d feel a lot better if I knew you were out of it. Safe, I mean.”

She looked up at April with huge round eyes. “You think they’ll try to kill us?”

“Not you, of course not. Not me, either, I hope.”

Kate tightened her grip. “Be careful, okay?”

“I intend to be. Now let’s call your father, okay? He must be worried about you.”

“Let him worry,” Kate growled.

“April thinks she knows why Gran was murdered,” Kate announced to her father and Daisy Tulane the next morning at breakfast.

Her father made a face as he buttered his toast. “So does everybody.”

“It’s important to discover the motive,” Kate went on. “You have to analyze the mind of the killer and unlock his—or her—heart.”

“Aren’t you a little young to be thinking about murder, Katey, honey?” Daisy said.

“She’s obsessed with the subject,” her father said apologetically to Daisy. “My daughter, the new Sherlock Holmes.”

Kate scowled at him. He thought she was fooling around. He didn’t believe that she actually
knew
anything.

“I love a good mystery myself,” Daisy said. “Didn’t April Harrington used to own one of those murder mystery bookstores? I’ll
bet she’s the budding detective.”

“She just doesn’t want to be murdered like her mother was,” Kate said impatiently. “That’s, like, a pretty good reason for
wanting to solve a crime.”

“Lord alive, why should anybody murder April?” asked Daisy. As usual, she wasn’t eating. No matter what kind of food was offered
her, it had too many calories. But she didn’t look anorexic, Kate had decided. Her boobs were too big.

“Because she knows too much,” said Kate. She put a big forkful of blueberry pancakes generously covered with maple syrup into
her mouth. She noticed that Daisy watched every move. Eat your heart out, lady, she thought. “The main motives for murder
are greed, lust, and keeping somebody from talking to the police. April’s smart. She’s finding out a lot of stuff about her
mother. Even more than the police, she wants to nail the killer.”

“You’re being overly dramatic, as usual, Katherine,” her father said.

And you’re being insulting as usual, Dad, she wanted to say, but bit it back. It had been so exciting to help April look for
Gran’s manuscript last night! For the first time, she’d felt as if she really might be able to help unmask the murderer.

“Gran was working on this book about her life. But before she could finish it, she was shot. Now the book has, like, disappeared.
We think somebody killed her to prevent that book from ever being published.”

Daisy and her father exchanged a quick glance. Kate dug into her pancakes again and waited. They were both paying attention.
She loved it when they stopped cooing to each other and listened to her.

“She wrote a lot of books,” said Daisy. She fiddled with her spoon. “What was so special about this one?”

“This was an autobiography, not one of those self-help
things. It was about her. Her life, her past, all that stuff. And it told stuff about her clients—maybe some stuff that nobody
wanted told.” She looked at her father and added defiantly, “Nobody knew what had happened to the manuscript. But April and
I have pretty much figured it out.”

“You have this manuscript?” her father demanded.

“Well, no, not yet,” she said quickly. “But I think April does. Or at least, she will have it soon if she doesn’t already.
I gave her this idea, you see, and—” She broke off, wondering if she’d said too much. April had told her not to tell anybody
about the missing computer diskette. Especially since they didn’t even know for sure that there
was
a missing diskette.

At first, Kate had been convinced that Gran had hidden it somewhere in her apartment. That must have been why the place had
been burgled and searched. The killer, too, must know about the diskette—or at least about the manuscript.

But she and April had gone through the place one more time last night, without success. The Sixty-second Street apartment
was all straight-edged and contemporary and there simply weren’t too many good hiding places.

This morning, though, Kate had had a new idea. She was trying to think up an excuse to search Grandfather’s place as well.
Gran had spent some time with her husband, after all, and in that huge, fancy townhouse she might have had more nooks and
crannies to hide something in. Especially something as small and thin as a 3-½-inch diskette.

“I haven’t seen Granddad for a while,” she said now, changing the subject, to her father’s obvious relief. “D’you think he’d
mind if I dropped over to visit him this afternoon?”

“What a nice thought, Katey,” Daisy said. “He must be
lonely with Rina gone. Why don’t you call your father?” she suggested to Christian. “Maybe you could invite him to dinner.”

“Actually, I’d rather go to his place,” Kate said. Then she thought that sounded rude, so she added, “It’s a neat old apartment,
built in the Roaring Twenties, or sometime when people were really rich. I could go over there and you two could, like, be
alone.”

That got their attention.

Adults were really disgusting, Kate thought.

When Daisy Tulane returned to Dallas the following evening, she was exhausted and demoralized. Her campaign director had faxed
her the latest opinion polls. Instead of gaining in the standings against the two middle-aged white males who were running
against her in the primary election, she was losing ground. Voters were always suspicious of a woman candidate, especially
in the South.

Maybe seizing her own power wasn’t going to work, after all. Maybe none of the masquerades would work, not even the one she
was indulging in with Christian.