Page 37 of Shadowing Her Stalker

Wyatt flashed an apologetic smile. “It’s possible. You’re sure you didn’t give any hint of Cara being here?”

A deep crease of concern appeared between Betsy’s brows, and she bit her lip as she closed her eyes, no doubt scouring her memory for any innocuous little comment. “I’m sure,” she said at last. “She asked when we were going to California to visit again, and I said something vague about maybe over the holidays.”

She flashed a wince of a smile, and Cara reached over to squeeze her hand. “You know I’d love to have you out anytime you can get away.”

Both women looked at Jim, who’d remained laser focused on his food through this whole exchange. Without looking up from his plate, he mumbled, “I did like fresh-squeezed orange juice in the mornings.”

Judging from the radiant smiles breaking across the women’s faces, his confession was as good as a promise. “My lemon tree has started producing too,” Cara informed him.

“No need to gild the lily, sweetheart,” Betsy admonished softly. “We’ll make arrangements for one of the Ford boys to come look after things while we’re gone.”

The ladies spent the rest of the meal extolling the many virtues of California living, only requiring the occasional “Huh” from him and grunts of affirmation from Jim. By the time Cara jumped up to retrieve the ice cream and bowls, the mood was considerably lighter. But the supercomputer in Wyatt’s head hadn’t stopped running probabilities and turning over possibilities.

After they were through eating, Jim said something about needing to make some calls. Wyatt escaped to the dining room and his laptop. A few quick queries gave him the lowdown on the newly consolidated school district and its administration. If he’d grown up anywhere else, he might have marveled at the odds of a cold caller actually connecting with a person who knew Cara and her family, but he was an Arkansan. He knew better. People born and raised in the Natural State either stuck close to home or ran far away.

He’d stuck close.

Cara had gone about as far as she could go, shy of buying a boat.

Grabbing his phone, he fired off a quick text to Emma to let her know about the calls to the school administrator’s office. It wasn’t critical information, but at this stage they were massing every bit of data they could and sifting through them like the tourists who spent days sieving dirt at Crater of Diamonds State Park. At this point they were hoping one of the bits of nothing they unearthed turned out to be a precious gem.

Next, he ran a general search on Cara’s name. Scrolling past results for her website, links to LYYF, a Wikipedia entry and optimized entries for some of the more popular pages on the LYYF website and blog, he found an article in a respected tech journal about the company’s upcoming stock option and the buzz surrounding one of the world’s most popular apps. He skimmed nearly halfway through it before he realized her name had not appeared in the text. He hit the Control and F keys and typed “Beckett” into the pop-up search box.

One result returned.

Holding the arrow-down key, he scanned the screen until he found the highlighted name.

When he spotted it, he stared at his screen in disbelief. Cara, the face and voice of the LYYF app, and her 33 percent ownership, didn’t garner a single mention in the body of the post. He’d found her tagged in the article’s keywords, but nowhere in the lengthy, and somewhat fawning, narrative about the company’s inception and astounding growth.

Skipping back to the top of the article, he checked the byline. The author was someone named Nate Astor.

He searched the site for other articles by the same author and discovered Astor was one of their main contributors. Scrolling through his previous articles, he found two more related to LYYF.

One was a one-on-one interview with Chris Sharpe published the previous spring, and the other was an opinion piece in which he debated the value of creation versus content. About two-thirds of the way through the article, he spotted Cara’s name. Biting the inside of his cheek, he read and reread the man’s hot take. Wyatt found it ironic the reporter, whose job it was to create content for an online magazine, dared to question Cara’s contribution to the LYYF app’s success.

“So much for solidarity, huh, Nate?” he muttered, clicking back to look through more of the man’s work.

Not surprisingly, he found more than one post concerning GamerGate. He grimaced. He’d been in school when a band of misogynist jerks claimed to be on a quest to fight “political correctness” in the online gaming world by harassing, doxing and threatening female media critics and game developers with bodily harm.

“Finding anything good?”

He jumped, reflexively tipping the cover of his laptop down to shield her from his discoveries.

Cara blinked, then let out a bitter huff of a laugh. “Wow. I was kidding, but I guess you did. Was it about me, or were you looking at X-rated websites in front of my mother’s Precious Moments?”

“What?” He glanced over his shoulder when she gestured to the collection of figurines on display in a corner curio cabinet. “Oh. No. You startled me is all.”

“Reading something good?” She sank into the chair adjacent to his, her stare unflinching.

“Went down the GamerGate rabbit hole,” he confessed.

She made an exaggeratedly horrified face. “I didn’t peg you for a misogynist, so you must lean toward masochist.”

“The guy who wrote the article has also done a couple on LYYF,” he explained. Then, angling to face her, he asked, “Does it bother you when they leave you out of the press coverage?”

She opened her mouth, then closed it. He could almost see her swallowing whatever flip answer she kept on hand for this type of question. Rolling her shoulders back, she met his eyes directly. “Yes.”

“Do you ever say anything about it to them?”

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