Chapter Eight: The Dump
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The finality of the slammed door echoed through the off-campus Palo Alto apartment covering up the sound of the techno music pulsing through his neighbor’s walls as Blake McKay pondered the rest of his life without Suzanne Toledo. Blake plopped back into his favorite chair, a round soft shocking-orange cushion settled into the middle of a wooden frame, peeled the Pittsburgh Penguins knit cap off of his head, and tried to make sense of what had just happened to his life.
Blake had looked up to and admired Suzanne from the moment they had been paired at Stanford’s freshman orientation. He had been younger than most of the rest of his classmates, starting college just a couple of days after his seventeenth birthday but having already achieved his full stature of 5’6”. At 5’10” and 19 years of age, Suzanne had been even a year older than most of the class having taken time after high school to travel in Europe and Africa before setting into higher education on Leland Stanford’s farm.
“I’ve fallen out of love with you Blake,” Suzanne’s words played on a loop in Blake’s head. “Fallen out of love,” what the fuck did that even mean, he wondered?
Blake had been dumped before but those were silly high school girls who had gone out with him just so he could do their homework and they could say they had been with the smartest and most athletic kid on campus. Suzanne was different. She was no girl. This was a woman he thought had loved him and shared his mutual respect as scholars, geeks, coders, lovers of literature and just plain lovers.
Blake realized he wasn’t embarrassed to be crying as he thought that their lovemaking was anything but plain. The salty taste of tears slid down the back of his throat as he remembered their first time together at her parents’ Mendocino bungalow over that first Thanksgiving break. Dr. and Mrs. Toledo had left early because of an emergency back in Pennsylvania, and for the first time in his life, Blake had discovered sex was something more than just taking and giving pleasure.
Blake grabbed a red team-color mini-towel from the side of his desk and used it to wipe the moisture from his face and then swept it across the wavy blond hair piled like a thick shag carpet on his head ending in a thin ponytail that ended midway between his shoulder blades. His eyes scanned his desktop pausing on the fractal screensaver turning complicated math formulae into beautiful art. His eyes sped over the pile of books that still needed to be organized into his literature thesis, a task that seemed more daunting now knowing Suzanne wouldn’t be there to help.
Then, on the top of the shelf Blake’s eyes locked on his favorite picture of the mother he had never known. The older he grew, the younger she seemed as she stood next to her best friend, Amy Smith. It was the last photo anyone had ever taken of either of these beauties, standing together outside the Lake Tahoe ski resort, arms wrapped around each other, Amy with a mug of coffee in her free hand while his Mom waved to eternity with hers. God, how Blake wished that he could have known this clearly formidable woman. He had often wondered what she would have thought of Suzanne. Now, he wondered what words of comfort she might have for her only son in this hour of his need.
As often happened when he thought about his mother, the tears returned and just for a couple of minutes Blake allowed himself to wallow in his despair. He had earned a few minutes of self-pity, he thought. Suddenly Blake stood, grabbed the Penguins cap, and threw it as hard as he could against the far wall. It bounced off and fell behind his bed. Good, he thought, let my connections to Pittsburgh remain dead forever.
He was so deep in his misery that he didn’t recognize the buzzing against his leg or hear the muffled notes of his latest ringtone. When he did look, he almost didn’t answer. While his mother might have offered words of comfort, he wasn’t sure what to expect from his dad.
“Hey dad,” Blake hoped, just for a moment, that his father would pick up on the lack of enthusiasm in his voice and leave him alone right now. No such luck.
“If it’s not my favorite dude with a ‘tude,” Blake sometimes wondered if Vince and his dad had actually talked that way when they were his age and together at college all those years ago. God, he hoped not. “I’m not interrupting anything hot and heavy between you and Suze, I hope.”
Somehow his dad’s timing could be so off.
“Uh, no dad, it’s all good,” Blake could hear his dad slam a car door and start the ignition. He rolled over on his stomach, stretched his legs, kicked his sneakers off and came as close as he had in a while to out-and-out lying to his father. “I am, uh, a little busy though. What’s up?”
“Of course you are, if you’re serious about trying to graduate in December instead of relaxing and enjoying your full senior year,” Please sweet Jesus, Blake prayed this wasn’t the start of one of his dad’s old college yarns. That he couldn’t handle right now. “You know, it wasn’t until the spring semester of our senior year that Vince and I met Amy and your mom.”
Blake decided to just leave that one alone. The silence grew uncomfortable until a loud truck’s horn poured out of the phone.
“Asshole,” his dad’s voice had lost all of its energy at the close call. “Listen, Blake, I have a project that would be perfect for you and frankly I, well actually Vince and I, really need your help.
The last thing Blake needed right now was one of his dad’s projects. With no help from Suze, getting all of his work done on the literature thesis, an exploration of the evolution of technology in 19th century literary thinking, would be just about impossible as is. Adding that to his coding commitments, his volunteer work mentoring and tutoring reading in East Palo Alto’s public schools, and the band, he would barely have time to sleep between now and the end of the semester.
Given all that, he was just about to say not just no, but hell no to his father, when he processed the last thing his dad had said. Vince needed his help. That changed everything.
“Son, you there?”
“Yeah, hang on a second,” now Blake was trying to figure out how to make it all work and still have time to shower, shave, and brush his teeth. Then it came to him. The whole reason to get out of Stanford a semester early was to take that trip with Suzanne to Europe. Well obviously that wasn’t going to happen now. So why all the rush? It’s funny how making a decision like that both relaxes you and gives you energy. “Okay dad, tell me about it.”
“You are going to find this so fascinating,” his dad had that energy back in his voice. Blake thought it unlikely that his dad’s newest obsession was going to come anywhere close to fascinating. As it turned out, he was wrong about that too.
Blake rolled off the bed, took three steps across the room, then sat at his desk, laptop fired up as his dad told him the whole story, the body on the feather, the business card, the meeting with Vince at Reds, and finally, by the time his father told him about the visit to the Steampunk house, Blake had located the Druthers’ residence on Google Earth and found four different news sources with photos of Clarence’s final resting place.
“Okay dad, how can I help?”
“We need to figure out who was really sending Clarence those e-mails. Vince tried to get Ms. Druthers to let the forensic people go through the system but she’s way too suspicious for that. I talked her into letting you take a look at the system.”
“Can I do it remotely?”
“Maybe eventually but I suspect Clarence has some pretty heavy-duty security in place so you had probably better start out on site,” Blake had already done some cursory searches on Clarence Druthers but aside from a couple of Google references he suspected were red-herrings, nothing. This guy had been good at covering his digital tracks. “Plus kid, you’re going to want to see this place.”
“Yeah, I do,” Blake was already thinking he wished he had known Clarence Druthers in life. Sounds like they had shared interests in 19th Century lit and technology. Hopefully that would come in useful.
“Alright kid, I gotta go,” Blake could hear the changes in the background on the phone as he assumed his dad was pulling off the freeway and into city traffic. “I’m sending you contact info for Sally Druthers right now. Let me know if I can help.”
“Will do,” Blake knew his own voice had grown distant. He was already thinking about the challenges ahead. “And I may need a ride when I get to the city.
“Yeah, there’s some mysterious meeting at the station tonight that I can’t miss. Maybe I can meet you at the Caltrain station in the city tomorrow morning.”
Days later Blake would look back on that day as a true turning point in his life, not just as the end of something but also the beginning. But right that minute he was just happy to have something to think about other than Suzanne Toledo.
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