Page 127 of Worst Nanny Ever
He squeezes past us and pulls something out from behindthe porch. It’s some kind of metal box, one side filled with at least two dozen green tennis balls, and to my shock, when he flips a switch, the device starts moving around on hinged legs. A few seconds later, it spits a tennis ball.
“Did you make that?”
“Yeah,” he says dismissively, as if it’s no big deal. “That’s my hobby. I make things.”
Everyonemakes things. I like to make messes. Not very many people make ball-throwing robots. But I let it go. Right now, I’m more interested in what he found.
“That issocool,” Ollie says, watching the robot with fascination.
Eugene makes ahmphsound under his breath as he steps aside and waves us in. We enter the house, followed by Cormac, who shuts the door.
“You haven’t introduced yourself, Cormac,” Eugene says gruffly, as if he still thinks he needs to teach his son manners.
An image pops into my head of Travis doing that when Ollie’s thirty, and I smile.
Will I be there laughing at him?
I’m surprised by the tug of longing in my chest.
Iwantto be there. I don’t know what the future will look like, or how we’ll get there—Travis and I have been living firmly in the present for the last few days—but I’d like us to have one.
“Uh, yeah, I’m Cormac,” the curly-haired guy says, smiling at us. “You must be Hannah and Ollie.”
“Yeah,” Ollie says. “Can I check out your other creations?”
Eugene surprises me by saying, “How about I show you, young man? And Cormac can talk to Hannah for a minute.”
I’m grateful he doesn’t want to keep me in suspense. I don’t want to keep him in suspense either, so I say, “Our mutual friend is excited to see you again.”
“Wonderful,” he says with a broad smile.
The house is tidy, with a big sectional couch by the door and a TV across from it. Cormac leads me past it, down a short hallway, past a room with a bright red guitar displayed on the wall, and into an office with two computer screens and a swiveling desk chair. He sits on the singular chair, seeming unaware that I’m awkwardly standing behind it.
“All of this suspense is killing me,” I admit.
“Well,” Cormac says, swiveling to look at me. “First…” He glances at the door. “Would you mind shutting that?”
I do, and he continues in a hushed voice. “I wanted to thank you for helping my dad. He’s been fighting off a pretty bad depression, but everything seems to have changed now that he’s hanging out with you and your friends. I owe you one, Hannah.”
People are offering me favors left and right lately. I smile at him. “Seems to me we’re already square if you figured out who was posting those messages.”
He nods. “But I’ll still owe you one. Because your favor only took me half an hour.”
That makes me feel pretty inadequate, since I spent way more than half an hour trying to research the problem, but he clearly knows what he’s doing. “Thank you.”
He nods again, then moves on, saying, “There were half a dozen identical posts across different discussion boards, all posted by the same username over a span of three days in mid-October. October twelve to fifteenth. They were all deleted on Saturday evening, but they had already been cached.
I gasp, because I’d only known about two posts. The one found by Alice and the one that had attracted the more aggressive Ships fans. The timeline also suggests means it wasn’t Rachel.
“I’m pretty sure I know who did this,” Cormac continues, pushing his glasses up.
“How?” I ask eagerly. “Was it the photos? Did you strip the metadata? Oooh, or figure out the IP address?”
He smiles. “That wouldn’t have told me much. You can only get within ten to fifty miles of the physical location if you have the IP address.”
Well, that’s disappointing…and possibly reassuring.
“Then how?”
