From Bad to Cursed

“Hold on,” I said, directing the browser to another website. I typed in the domain name where the error message had been posted, and the registry information popped up.

ADMINISTRATIVE CONTACT:

123 N0NE 0F YOUR BUS1NESS STREET

N0WHERE, USA

…And a fake phone number.

“Oh, now we have all the answers,” Kasey sighed, flopping onto the bed.

I stared at the administrative contact name. It was just a bunch of letters, numbers, and symbols, but something about it was familiar. All of the Os were zeroes. And the i in business was a one.

“It’s leet.” I wrote l337 on Kasey’s notebook. “L-e-e-t. One of the guys in the Doom Squad thought he was some mastermind hacker. He wrote everything that way.”

I went back to the search engine and typed in ZEERGONATER.

A list of results popped up—Zeergonater’s postings on various Internet forums, mostly about urban legends and conspiracies, with a good dose of video game chat thrown in besides.

“This doesn’t help us,” Kasey said. “It’s not like he posted his real name anywhere.”

“Yeah, but…he had to slip up sometime,” I said. I read through some of the postings. Zeergonater had a chip on his shoulder the size of San Francisco, and he seemed hyperaware of covering his tracks, staying anonymous.

Finally, we found a clue. On a post he made about why he chose to live where he lived, Zeergonater wrote that in the span of three hours he could be skiing, surfing, or camping—plus, there was no sales tax.

“Oregon,” Kasey said.

“What makes you think that?” I asked.

“No sales tax,” she said. “Mountains. Ocean. Forests.”

Searching for O’Doyles in Oregon still left us with hundreds of results.

“Go back to the thing about skiing,” Kasey said.

I clicked back through the history and scrolled down to Zeergonater’s second entry in the thread, where he’d posted a picture of his prized snow skis.

“Look,” Kasey said, pointing at the screen. Lightly etched in the red paint of each ski were three letters: LBO.

I scrolled down the phone directory listings.

Lance B. O’Doyle. And a phone number. I grabbed my cell phone and dialed.

“Hello?”

“Hello, is this Lance?”

A pause. “Maybe.”

“I have a question for you. About a person named Aralt.”

“I told you people to leave me alone!” he snapped. “I took down the stupid webpage. It was just a genealogy thing I did for my grandmother!”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “I don’t care about the page or why you took it down.”

He paused. “Then…how do you know about Aralt?”

“I just heard about him somewhere. I’m curious.”

“Ha,” he said. “Haven’t you ever heard that curiosity killed the cat? Listen, little girl. You don’t want to get messed up with Aralt. There are people out there who can—and will—wipe the floor with you.”

I’m going to be honest. It sounded a little melodramatic to me. “Please,” I said. “I’ll never bother you again. Just tell me what you know about Aralt.”

“Oh, I know you’ll never bother me again,” he said. “You’ll never find me again.”

But he hadn’t refused to answer my questions.

“Your website said something about County Kildare?” I said. “Ireland, right? Is that where he’s from?”

He sighed. “The O’Doyles—my ancestors—were one of the best families in the county, even though they weren’t titled. Titles aren’t everything.”

There was a defensive edge to his voice that told me I’d better turn on the flattery. “No, of course not.”

“Aralt Edmund Faulkner was the Duke of Weymouth. He lucked into the title after his uncle died at sea. He was a playboy—he’d make women fall in love with him, then break their hearts and leave them ruined. And it was a bad thing to be a ruined woman back then. A few of them killed themselves. So his family basically shipped him off to Ireland to keep him out of trouble.”

“Sounds like a jerk,” I dared to say.

“Yeah, well, when he messed with the O’Doyles, he went too far,” Lance said, and I heard a note of pride in his voice. “My great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was Captain Desmond O’Doyle, an officer in the Royal Navy. He came home after a long campaign to find his wife five months pregnant with another man’s child.”

“Aralt’s?” I asked.

“Bingo,” Lance said. “She was so overcome with shame that she threw herself off a bridge.”

“That’s terrible.”

“So Desmond challenged Aralt to a duel, which of course Aralt lost, because he was a lazy playboy. And even as he lay on his deathbed, another young woman he’d seduced was with him, weeping and professing her love.”

“Who was that?”

“Some peasant. Maybe a traveler—like a gypsy? She disappeared after he died, but legend says she took his heart with her so he would always be hers.”

Um, ew. “And what about the book?” I asked. “The libris exanimus?”

“The what?”

I decided to change the subject. “Who made you take down your website?”

“I don’t know who they are,” he said. “They’re cowards. They hid behind a pair of lawyers who did everything but break my kneecaps.”

“But why?” I asked.

“Who knows? They aren’t descendants—the line died with the Duke, I’m happy to say. I mean, out of twenty pages of history, I had one that mentioned Aralt Faulkner, and they sicced their lawyers on me like a couple of junkyard dogs.” He paused. “Now. How did you find me?”

As I answered his question, I heard clicking keys in the background. By the time we were off the phone, the Internet postings and picture of the skis would be long gone.

“Now, listen,” he said. “I’m not kidding, little girl. You don’t want to mess with these people.”

Kasey tugged on my sleeve. She flipped back through her notebook to the page marked OUIJA BOARD. Under EXANIM was written ELSPETH.

“Um, one more question—was Desmond’s wife’s name Elspeth, by any chance?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “It was Radha.”

I shook my head at my sister.

“Was anybody named that?” Kasey whispered.

“What was that? Who’s there?” Lance asked. “Who’s listening?”

“Nobody,” I said. “Just my little sister.”

“Okay,” Lance said. “Now listen up, Dora the Explorer. If you dig any deeper on Aralt, you’re going to get in way over your head. Why don’t you and your little sister go find some dolls to play with?”

The line went dead.

“Dolls,” I said. “Right.”

“He’s a little uptight,” Kasey said.

“We know who Aralt was,” Megan said. “That’s pretty good for one day.”

It didn’t seem all that good to me. “Knowing he was a womanizer doesn’t help us. It just reinforces the whole ‘lusty’ thing.”

“And the gypsy—that’s something.” Megan went to my mother’s dresser and stared dreamily at herself in the mirror. “It’s kind of romantic, don’t you think?”

“Which part?” I asked. “That he left a trail of ruined women, or that they killed themselves to erase the shame of falling for the wrong guy?”

She drew back, looking offended. “I’m not saying I want it to happen to me. I’m just saying, to love someone so much you’d give up everything for them is…”

“It’s sick,” Kasey said. “Sorry.”

Megan lifted her nose snootily. “We’ll have to agree to disagree.”

It wasn’t that I approved of the way Megan was defending Aralt. But when you loved someone—really loved them—was it really so wrong to want to give up everything for their sake?

You know, objectively speaking.

I’d never thought about it before. I studied the computer screen.

Kasey closed out of the browser. “I’m with Megan,” she said. “I think that might be enough for today.”

I was about to reply when we heard the rumbling of the garage door.