Prologue
“Encrypted,” Maggie sang syllable by syllable as she skipped past the bald tires strewn across the Tidwells’ yard. “Knackered,” she exclaimed to the rusted hubcaps dotting the patches of weeds in front of the Martinez home. “Pneumatic,” she trilled to oranges hanging heavy on the branches as she bounded to Lucy’s house.
Maggie had devised this new word challenge while her mother was droning on and on about grounding her for . . . who knew what this time? She had challenged herself to come up with three nine-letter words with “n” as the second letter. The day before, she had rearranged as many six-letter words as she could into new ones. The day before that, she’d focused on coming up with a five-syllable word for each letter of the alphabet. Word games, tried-and-true escapes.
When Lucy’s trailer came into view, Maggie picked up the pace. Every morning, the two best friends strolled together to Jefferson Junior High School, located at the end of a potholed dead-end street in Nowheresville Cypress Havens, Florida, where, the girls agreed, all roads were dead ends. Moseying along with Lucy—giggling, gawking, gossiping—was Maggie’s favorite time of day. No one bullied her. No one picked a fight. No one made her feel less than—sneering as they called her “Brainiac Bitch.”
As Maggie giant-stepped closer to Lucy’s, she slowed, looked all around, then stopped. Lucy wasn’t waiting at the curb. Lucy wasn’t anywhere. Not a day went by when Lucy wasn’t sitting there. Not one. Ever.
Maggie’s eyes darted across the weedy patch of front yard. Maybe Lucy was hiding behind the frangipani and would leap out to scare her.
She didn’t.
Maggie walked up to the screen door and knocked. Maybe Lucy would pop her head out and yell, “Boo!”
Maggie stood on tiptoes and peered in. The big comfy chair was pushed off to one side. Broken glass littered the floor. The TV screen was smashed. Heel marks trailed across the room.
Maggie banged on the door. “Lucy?” She waited. “Lucy!”
No answer.
She turned the handle and stepped inside. A jagged line of blood stretched from her feet to Lucy’s room. Lucy’s necklace with the three charms—a cowboy boot with rhinestones, a cowboy hat, and the letter L—lay next to the overturned chair, its silver chain broken. Maggie wore the exact same one, only her charm was engraved with an M. They had exchanged these gifts and sworn BFF status when they turned fourteen in January. Neither had taken hers off since.
“Lucy!” Maggie screamed. She crept her way down the hall toward her best friend’s room. “Lucy?” She put her hand on the closed door and gave it a push.
One
Maggie was mentally diagramming each sentence Professor Ditmire spoke. She couldn’t help herself.
He imitated Brando perfectly.
The Language of Film was Maggie’s favorite grad school class at Rosedale, located in the piddling town of Hyacinth, Florida, some forty miles up CR 187 from her home in the even more inconsequential boondocks of Cypress Havens, population 3,598 and dwindling. Ditmire’s seamlessly sprinkled cinematic allusions from Kubrick to Kaufman to the Coens never failed to remind her how words can surprise and inspire, inflict and wound. Plus, the professor’s course was a much-needed respite from all the rape-bind-torture-kill of forensics. And it didn’t hurt that he was easy on the eyes:
tall, buff
casually disheveled
strong jaw
light stubble
piercing blue eyes
Maggie had to smile whenever she saw the gaggle of girls fidgeting and fussing as they hung out after class to ask him a question—messing with their hair, wriggling in their jeans, reapplying lip gloss. See me! Choose me!
Not her. No fucking way.
“Terry Malloy’s philosophy,” Ditmire continued, “is expressed in one exquisitely formed sentence. ‘Do it to him before he does it to you.’”
Maggie automatically diagrammed the words Brando’s character spoke, using her favored Reed-Kellogg system:
Placing words in precise positions on the horizontal, diagonal, dotted, and pedestaled lines took laser focus as well as expertise—and Maggie was a master. Ms. Barker, her seventh-grade teacher and a throwback to the age of the Stegosaurus, told the students that they would go nowhere and be no one if they couldn’t take sentences apart, analyze them, and put them back together again. Eager to be someone and go somewhere, Maggie embraced this visualization technique like a treasured lover—word patterns hopscotching across the mental screen of her mind.
And now, almost a decade later, she was still at it, despite having learned the more sophisticated parse tree, the system studied in most linguistics classes. Today’s diagramming served a different purpose than it did back then. Today, it was her version of om. No friggin’ way she’d ever do yoga.
“We’ve seen how Malloy’s word choices and syntax reveal key details about dock workers and organized crime in the fifties,” the professor continued. “His sentences are that evocative. Keeping that in mind, jot down as many common greetings as you can that reveal something specific about a speaker’s demographics. Emphasis on specific. Hey you!” he yelled. Everyone looked up. “That’s a freebie.” Ditmire’s eyes twinkled as he scanned the room. “Email me your lists before you leave.”
Maggie had already typed “Yo!” “Wassup” and “Pardon me, ma’am” before he’d even finished speaking. She kept going: “Howdy.” “Sup.” “Hi y’all.” “How’s your mom’n’em.” “Namas . . .”
“Miss Moore?”
Maggie jerked.
“Sorry. Sorry to spook you,” the professor said as he sat down next to her in the last row. “Great concentration you’ve got there.”
Maggie looked around. The class had emptied. She quickly dropped her head, hoping to hide the hot flush she felt crawling up her neck and spreading across her cheeks. She nervously twisted a jet-black corkscrew curl.
“Something’s come up that I need to discuss with you,” he began. “Can you meet me in my office in a few?”
Maggie’s head nodded bobble-like.
“It’s in Fanworth. You know, last building at the end of the quad. Fourth floor, 401.”
As she watched the professor walk away, Maggie realized she hadn’t uttered a word. In fact, she’d never spoken to the professor since she’d started at Rosedale a year and a half ago. This was the first class she’d taken with the esteemed man, whose accomplishments were legendary: archivist at the Museum of Motion Pictures; film critic both in print and on radio; author of the acclaimed From Here to Infinity: A Brief History of Film.
But why did he want to speak to her? Had someone reported her for . . . smoking
in the stairwell? Scoring weed in the parking lot? Passing answers to some dude during midterms? She bit her lower lip until it hurt.
After cramming her books and computer in her backpack, Maggie raced across campus to Fanworth. Breathing heavily from having bounded up the four flights, she plunked down on the top step and took out her sentence diagramming notebook. A moment of calm—before the storm. She concentrated on finishing the first line of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Once completed, it would be her fiftieth first line, bringing her halfway to her goal.
Although entire theses had been written on the analysis of that one sentence alone, Maggie chose to interpret it literally. She imagined a fully rigged ship with three tall masts sailing far out on the horizon carrying tiny scraps of paper detailing every person’s greatest wish, including her own. However, as lovely as that image was, she feared that hers, in spite of it having been written succinctly, precisely, and from her heart, would be “mocked to death by Time,” as Hurston had suggested some were.
After placing the adverbial prepositional phrase, on board, below the verb, have, she put her book away and calmly strolled down the long, deserted hall to Room 401. She knocked.
“Come in, please.”
Seeing the professor standing next to his desk, Maggie automatically added new details to the ones she’d already made:
fixed, serious gaze
knitted brow
arms across chest
By now, cataloging physical and emotional details of everyone was automatic. “By observing quickly and astutely,” her forensics professors had drilled into the students’ heads, “you’ll be able to make key deductions and educated guesses about the person in question.” Of course, this technique was crucial in crime-solving, not so much in everyday encounters, but Maggie couldn’t always separate the two. She’d finally understood what it meant to see the world through the lens of one’s profession. “If all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
Ditmire pointed to one of the two chairs in front of his desk. A poster of Pulp Fiction was on the wall. Of course, Maggie thought. That movie had arguably the best dialogue of any film. “Does he look like a bitch?” Maggie quoted to herself. “No! Then why’re you trying to fuck him like a bitch?” and “English, motherfucker. Do you speak it?” and “Because you are a character doesn’t mean you have character” and—
“Sit, please,” he said lowering himself into a large chair behind his desk.
Other than the poster, the walls were bare.
“Your midterm paper,” he began, “was outstanding. The best I’ve seen in all the years I’ve been here.”
“Oh!” Maggie hadn’t expected that, but then quickly figured it was a warm-up for what was to come, something like, “I noticed you were handing answers to someone sitting . . . I saw you pass . . .” Her palms were sweating.
“Specifically, the section on accents and dialect in Fargo.”
Maggie rubbed her hands along her jeans. Niceties out of the way, here it comes.
“Okay, I’ll get right
to it.” Ditmire folded his hands on his desk and leaned forward. “Last evening, a detective Silas Jackson called. He’s from up by Olemeda.”
Maggie’s leg started bouncing.
“The call was directed to me since, as you may know, I’m the Academic Affairs Coordinator. Calls to any graduate department come to me first.”
Maggie ripped some skin off her cuticle.
“Seems they’ve got a cyberstalker on their hands. The person’s been texting threats to a twenty-three-year-old woman. She’d been ignoring them, but they got so disturbing she finally contacted her local precinct. That’s when Detective Jackson got in touch and asked for our help.”
“And you think I might—” Maggie managed.
“Yes. I’m thinking you might be able to help the detective solve this.”
Maggie stared at him, speechless—and let out a huge sigh. She continued looking at him, saying nothing.
“You with me here?” he asked.
Nodding furiously, Maggie finally said, “You betcha.”
The professor chuckled in recognition of the Fargoism. Then, checking his notes, he added, “Jackson’s boss asked him to call us. Seems Chief Josiah Murray had seen a show on the Unabomber and learned that word analysis helped bring the guy down. He asked Jackson to follow up at Rosedale, hoping someone here might do the same. Guess our forensics department garners some attention in this neck of the woods.”
“Kaczynski’s manifesto gave him away,” Maggie blurted.
“I did follow the case some, but I’m not recalling the specifics.”
“It was his word choice, but also his incorrect use of an idiom that—”
Maggie stopped. It was either feast or famine. Verbal diarrhea, or as she preferred to label it, furor loquendi—or mum. The latter in response to her mandate never to toot her own horn, to know when to hold ’em, to know when to shut the fuck up. Echoes of Brainiac Bitch were never far away.
“Which idiom?” the professor asked.
Maggie scrutinized his face. His eyes were wide open. He was looking directly at her. His chin was tucked slightly. His eyebrows were raised. All that? Interested. Curious.
“Eat your cake and have it too,” Maggie said. “It was the reversal of the verbs in the idiom.” She heard her voice rise at the end of the sentence, a reaction to not wanting to look too brainy. However, she swallowed hard and decided to go on. “It probably sealed his fate.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, that exact faulty phrasing showed up several times in Kaczynski’s other writings.” Maggie looked down. Her left thumb cuticle was bleeding. She wrapped her other hand tightly around it. A thumbiquet. Her very own neologism.
“Fascinating. Go on. Go on.”
Furor loquendi be damned. “Plus, his use of the terms ‘negro’ and ‘broad’ helped linguists estimate his age. On top of all that, the person who had written the manifesto and Kaczynski both had used several uncommon words in their writings, like ‘chimerical,’ ‘cool-headed logicians,’ and ‘anomic.’ I mean, how many times have you used any of them? Chimerical? I mean, come on. I don’t even know if I’m pronouncing it right.”
Ditmire chucked. “Clearly, you’re up on all this.”
“There’s more,” Maggie said. “The Unabomber also consistently used certain unusual spellings, way-out ones, that rabid researchers discovered were taught only in the Chicago schools for a brief period in the sixties. Wild, right? Words like analyse, spelled with an s. Licence, wrongly ending in ce. Skilful, with only one l. Filfilment, totally wrong.” Maggie stopped long enough to catch her breath. “Kaczynski was born and raised in the Chicago area. Bingo.” She looked at the professor for the first time during her soliloquy. “It’s my passion,” she said. “Sorry if I went on too long.”
“Sorry? Not at all.”
By now, hot and sticky blood from her thumb had seeped into her fist. She pressed her thumb into her jeans.
“You’re exactly who the doctor ordered,” Ditmire said. “Now listen to this. At the end of the conversation, the detective said things had gone all catawampus. Catawampus!”
“So he’s a country boy from the South,” Maggie said, finally relaxing. “A perfect word for the situation. Things have gone haywire. Totally out of control.”
The professor grinned. “I knew that if anyone could help, it’d be someone studying forensic linguistics. So I asked around. All the profs begged off—overwhelmed with record keeping, grading, under too much pressure, whatever. ‘Who would you recommend for a project of this kind?’ I asked.”
Maggie diagrammed his sentence across her inner eyelids . . .
. . . and wondered if she should point out that whom not who would have been a more grammatical choice. She firmly believed in maintaining the distinction between the subjective and objective forms of who and whom. But she knew only too well that whom, in this instance, was falling away. It seemed that descriptivism often trumped prescriptivism. Ms. Barker would be crestfallen.
“And your response is?” he asked.
“Hell yeah!”
The professor laughed, tore a sheet from his notebook, and gave it to Maggie. “Here’s his info. Give him a call ASAP.”
Maggie quickly turned away so the professor wouldn’t see her ear-to-ear grin. The truth? A simple word challenge—an anagram, a ditloid, a timed pangram—would’ve been enough to send her over the moon. But this? Cock-a-hoop.
She slung her backpack over her shoulder, ready to find a quiet place to make the call. “Thank you,” she said as she reached the door.
Don’t forget your manners, her addled mother would scream at her from time to time over some imagined insult from her daughter. “Don’t forget yours,” Maggie always wanted to reply—but didn’t. A heart filled with pity restrained her.
“Before you go,” Ditmire said, “I’m wondering if I could throw something else out there. I’m looking for a research assistant. Based on your stellar record—I checked it out, perfect 4.0—might you be interested?”
Maggie held her breath and counted to five before answering in a restrained and measured way. “I would indeed. I really would.”
“Perfect. So I’m working on second-dialect acquisition. Is that something you’re familiar with?” He walked to the door where Maggie was standing, poised to exit.
“Yes. I think so.”
“Can you tell me, in general, what you know?”
Maggie knew this was not the time not to toot her own horn. Double negative. Positively positive it was the time. “It’s when dialect features are, or are not as the case may be, picked up by people new to a community. It shows to what extent integration is taking place. And that usually indicates a person’s chance of success. In jobs and schools, you know?”
“Exactly,” Ditmire said. “Mostly you’ll be working with the techniques laid out in Dialogue in Films of the Nineties. Are you familiar with it?”
“Sorry, I’ve never read it.”
“No problem. It’s in the library. I teach it in my other film class. I’ll email you a syllabus I’m working on so you can get familiar with—” Ditmire’s cell chimed. It was the theme song from Psycho. “Sorry, gotta go. More academic stuff. To be continued?”
Maggie nodded as she silently recited her favorite Psycho lines: “A boy’s best friend is his mother. It’s not like my mother is a maniac or a raving thing.” Maggie’s mother had been dead for some five years, but Hazel’s raving still haunted her.
“Hope you get your guy,” Ditmire said.
Maggie looked confused. She was in the middle of mentally diagramming
a quote from Pulp Fiction:
Ditmire pointed to the sheet of paper in Maggie’s hand. “The creep,” he said. “The stalker. Hope you catch him.”
“Right,” Maggie said hesitatingly. “Right. Me too.”
Two
Maggie flew out of Fanworth, ...
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