THE BANDIT QUEEN - Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

Over the course of the next thousand miles, Eden pried more information out of Deakin than he intended to tell her. She’d been right about his age. He really was seventeen but it had been several years since he’d lived what most people would consider a normal life. At one time, he’d lived with a father and a mother and two older brothers in squeaky-clean neighborhood in Dallas. He’d done the things all middle-class boys did. He played soccer, he played baseball, he went to school, he played video games, and he went to a pasteurized church every Sunday. As he grew older, Deakin realized there was something just a little skewed about his family. His mother acted almost exactly like the mothers of all his friends. His father went off to work every morning and did yard work on the weekends. He even coached Deakin’s soccer team. His two brothers were like other big brothers, sometimes mean and nasty and sometimes nice and friendly. But they all four watched every move Deakin made. Deakin never slept over at a friend’s house. He never went to camp by himself. His brothers went with him and stayed in the same cabin, no matter how much trouble it was to arrange. His mother drove him to school every day and picked him up afterwards.
One morning, he’d waked up and looked around his bedroom. He slept on the top bunk and his older brother Travis slept on the bottom bunk. His oldest brother Davis slept on a single bed against the opposite wall. Deakin listened to the breathing of the other two boys and realized he’d never slept in a room by himself. Actually, as he flipped through the mental slides of his past life, he didn’t find one picture that didn’t include at least one other person in his family. After that day, he tried to find time alone but someone followed him everywhere, except the bathroom. At least, he was allowed to shower solo. Someone always checked out the bathroom after he left, but Deakin didn’t know why.
Deakin finally began staying after school every day. He joined clubs and teams. He made friends with some of his teachers and stayed late to help them. Anything to keep from going home. The computer teacher let him loose in the lab every afternoon and Deakin finally learned how to be alone. It was like piloting your very own spaceship and you could invite anyone you wanted to come with you or you could go all by yourself.
When Deakin asked his parents for a computer fast enough and large enough to surf the Internet, tension filled the whole room. “Why do you want a new computer? What’s wrong with the one you have?”
“Travis and Davis are always using it to play games. Anyway, it doesn’t have enough memory or speed for any serious surfing.”
Unspoken messages zipped through air over the dinner table and bounced from his father to his mother to his two brothers and back again and again. Deakin calmly ate his dinner and played like nothing was out of the ordinary. Actually, nothing was out of the ordinary at his house. He continued to play the part of the prisoner and the other four were his jailers. More than anything else, he wanted to know why. What was different about him? Why was he so important? Who thought he was important? This whole family thing was costing someone a bundle of money and Deakin had no answers.
Deakin continued to surf the net on the computers at school until the day he walked into the house and found a large box standing by the front door. His mother followed him into the house and pointed to the box. “It’s for you. Your father and I decided it was time you had one of your own.”
Deakin fell on the box and ripped open the top. Styrofoam peanuts fell like snow as he reached into the box. Then he looked around the living room and realized he had nowhere to put his computer. There was no extra space in his bedroom. His mother stood in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen, wiping her hands over and over on a white dishtowel.
Deakin stared at her without saying a word. She finally jerked her head toward the back of the house and said, “You can set it up in the workroom. We’ll get you a chair somewhere. We’ll have the cable connection put in there but you’ll have to pay the monthly payments for your access service, okay?”
Deakin nodded happily. He didn’t care about the monthly payments. He’d do whatever he had to do to make money. He happily dragged the box to the small room off the laundry room and unpacked his new computer. He set it up on the counter that ran around two sides of the room and plugged in all the cords. His mother found him hours later, sitting on the floor in the middle of a field of styrofoam snow. He had read the operating manual from cover to cover and was now ready to boot up for the first time.
Sometime during the next few weeks, Deakin began his new hobby. He surfed the Internet any time he could. He would have stayed up all night if his parents had let him. As it was, any time they wanted to find him, they only had to look in the workroom. For the first time in his memory, Deakin was left alone. No one watched him when he was sitting in front of the computer.
Deakin’s isolation had a very curious effect on his family. Since the constant observation of Deakin was the sole reason these five people lived together, Deakin’s absence left them without anything to do. Cracks and fissures developed in the happy family fiction and arguments flared up at the slightest word. Screaming, yelling, and slamming doors became the order of the day. Deakin withdrew from them all and shut the door to his computer room. There he found all the silence he’d ever craved and never felt lonely. The flickering screen in front of his eyes was constantly changing and constantly interesting. The sounds of the world around him receded as he concentrated on the images in front of him.
Deakin played games and talked with people in chat rooms. First they talked about the games and then slowly moved into more personal waters. As he asked and answered questions in the chat rooms, he realized just how strange his life had been and he began to wonder why. From the first nebulous questions to the definite belief in his bizarre situation took only a few months. He slowly asked his new acquaintances questions that would help him find answers and stored these answers away in password-protected files. The more he learned, the more he realized that someone had been messing with his computer while he was at school. Even after he tried to set up an overriding password for entry to any program or file, he felt someone had been snooping around. He began to leave traps in the room, papers laid out over the keyboard or leaving the mouse unplugged, small things like that. Sometimes, he was positive someone had snooped and other times he was undecided. He didn’t know what to do and had no one to turn to for help.
One night the argument between his “parents” became so loud and so violent the neighbors called the police. After that, his “parents” and his “brothers” quit speaking to each other. Deakin began surfing for answers and then trying to wipe everything from his hard drive before he shut down for the night. His searches took him to websites that offered to investigate the background of any person or offered to find some missing person. He would have used these sites but he had no way to pay for their services.
He now needed information about his so-called parents and a credit card number. He sneaked around and finally liberated his mother’s billfold from her purse. He scanned in her driver’s license, her social security card, all her credit cards, and even her insurance card. After a few more days, he took his father’s wallet from the top of the dresser and scanned in all his cards and identification. Now, he needed anything he could find out about his brothers. He finally found their immunization records and noted down their Social Security numbers and full names. Now he was ready to find out about these people he lived with.
The first website turned him down when he filled in his correct age on the information page. He soon learned to lie about his age and to make up stories about why he wanted to know about these people. After a short time, he realized the story didn’t even matter. The only important thing was the ability to pay.
After trying three different search agencies, Deakin was almost ready to quit. These three agencies had found nothing. They couldn’t find birth certificates for his parents and brothers. His father didn’t even work where Deakin had been told he did. The phone number Deakin had dutifully written down on all his school forms led nowhere. It was an unlisted number and was answered by a machine twenty-four hours a day.
The fourth agency Deakin contacted seemed much more interested in the puzzle he presented them and began from a different direction. The agency started by searching for Deakin. This time a little information surfaced. They matched his Social Security number with someone named Deakin Alex Kimbrough which did not match Deakin’s last name of Williams. From there, the agency found a birth certificate in the Kimbrough name in Los Angeles. He’d been born on the correct day to Alexander David Kimbrough and Helena Rimchova Kimbrough who lived in Los Angeles.
Deakin stared at the information scrolling down his monitor screen. A few small tears slid down his cheeks as he wondered why Alexander and Helena had gone away and left him with these other people. Then he quickly printed out the information and typed in a request for a search for these two new names. He was nervous and inattentive at school for the next few days. He wanted the information so badly he couldn’t even sit still in class. Finally, one of his teachers sent him to the counseling office. Deakin lied his way out by using the excuse of peer pressure to try smoking and drinking. The counselor gave him several pamphlets on the dangers of drugs and sent him back to class.
Deakin hurried home that afternoon and checked his monitor for information. This time, he really had mail. He had copies of death certificates for both his parents but there hadn’t been any newspaper stories about the accident that had killed them. There hadn’t been obituaries printed in the newspaper and no adoptions for a boy named Deakin in the county of Los Angeles.
Deakin made a quick decision and loaded all his detective files onto two different floppy disks along with the identification information about his “family.” Then he wiped out everything on his hard drive. He’d talked with lots of people on the Internet and he did the best he could to cloud his intentions. Then he ate dinner for the last time with these four strangers and went to bed. In the early hours of the morning, he stole out of his bed and tiptoed downstairs. He’d packed his backpack earlier while the rest of the family watched television. He slid out the back door, locked it behind him, and walked away without any regrets. He didn’t know how he was going to do it, but he would make it to Los Angeles and find out about his real parents.