“I’ve been trying to figure that out,” I said. “I certainly knew somewhere deep down that I had to stop hacking, and I needed someone who’d hold me accountable.”

  “So you saw me as what, a dominatrix?” Lili’s eyes danced and I knew she was joking—even if only in part.

  “No. More like I admired how much you had accomplished, and I wanted to make myself worthy of you.”

  “That’s sweet,” she said.

  “And when I do get caught up in something, I always have you as an angel on my shoulder, appealing to my best side. Like if I do anything to help Peggy Landsea, I know that I won’t risk anything that would get me in trouble or cause me to lose what I have here with you and Rochester.”

  As if he’d recognized his name, the big golden suddenly jumped up, raced to the front door and started barking. “What’s up with you, dog?”

  I looked out the window and didn’t see anyone there. But a moment later, Rick’s truck came around the corner. How did the dog do that? Did he have extra-sharp hearing or just a sixth sense about the approach of his best friend?

  I opened the gate as Rick got out of the truck, and Rascal didn’t wait to have the other door opened for him – the big black and white dog trampled on his dad and jumped out the driver’s side, racing up to Rochester. The two of them turned on their heels and ran inside, where I could hear their toenails scrabbling up the staircase to the second floor.

  Rick was my age, but his short hair was grayer than mine, and he was slimmer and more fit. We had shared a chemistry class at Pennsbury High during our senior year, and then reconnected after I returned to town, bonding over our divorces. Then he’d adopted Rascal, and our friendship had been cemented through our dogs.

  “Hannah and Eric offered to take Justin to the movies with Nathaniel tonight,” he said, as he walked in. “With sleepover to follow.”

  Hannah was Tamsen’s sister, and I could see she was doing her best to move the relationship between Rick and Tamsen along. “And so you get a sleepover, too.”

  Rick’s grin was broad. “I do.”

  “You have a minute before you have to go? I wanted to ask you a question.”

  “I never like it when you start conversations like that, but sure, Hannah’s not picking up Justin for a half hour, and I don’t want to be hovering at the end of the street like some perv, waiting for the pretty lady to be all alone in her house.”

  “TMI,” I said. I led him in to the living room, where Lili greeted him and said she’d be upstairs making sure the dogs didn’t destroy anything. We could hear them racing around from room to room, jumping on and off the furniture up there.

  I sat on the couch, and Rick slid into the chair across from me. I told him that I’d agreed to help Hunter Thirkell with Peggy’s case. “Did you know Peggy Doyle in high school?” I asked.

  “Different circles,” he said. “I was already thinking about becoming a cop so I tried to stay away from anybody who might belong to FFA.”

  “Future Farmers of America?” Our school district encompassed a lot of rural areas where kids were on their way to take over family farms—though most of those farms had ended up being sold to real estate developers instead of being handed down.

  “No, doofus. Future Felons of America. A joke.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure Peggy will think that’s a howler. Why would you think that? She was a super achiever in high school.”

  “I knew one of her sisters from study hall and she was a wild child. I just assumed Peggy was like that, too.”

  “Peggy was the exact opposite.” I told him about my friendship with Peggy, cemented by foreign travel and college courses. “See, here’s the thing,” I said. “I can’t make that old picture I have of her square with the way people are describing her today. I want to do what I can to help her.”

  Though the case didn’t have anything to do with the Stewart’s Crossing department, Rick was familiar with it because of all the media coverage.

  “He asked me to see if I can get into her last husband’s email account, because he thinks there may be information there that would lead to additional suspects.”

  “Would that help involve your nimble fingers dancing over a keyboard and then taking a dive into the deep web?”

  “No, nothing illegal.” I was impressed by Rick’s analogy. He was usually a much more straightforward thinker. I guessed hanging around with Tamsen, a marketing wizard, was improving his thought processes.

  Or maybe it was me who was doing that for him.

  “Hunter says that as Carl Landsea’s heir, Peggy has the authority to look at anything he left behind, and she can delegate that to Hunter, her attorney. In turn, he authorizes me, and it’s all legit.”

  I leaned forward. “Have you ever hear of a motorcycle gang called Levitt’s Angels?”

  “I’m a cop. Of course I have.” Rick frowned. “When you snoop into motorcycle gangs, you’re getting into some dangerous shit, Steve. I know from past experience you never listen to my advice, but tread carefully, okay?”

  “I listen to you,” I protested.

  “And then you end up doing what you want anyway.” He sighed deeply. “So here’s the quick take on the Angels, who of course are no angels at all.”

  “Irony,” I said.

  “College professor.”

  “Hey, I yam who I yam,” I said, quoting the Popeye cartoons we had both loved as kids. “So how devilish are they?”

  “They’re not as bad as some of the other biker dudes they hang around with, the Hell’s Angels, the Pagans and the Outlaws. Those dudes are into murder, extortion and arson—anything criminal they can make money on. The Levitts are not exactly law-abiding, but they the worst thing I’ve heard about them is that last year they had a big bust-up with a branch of the Warlords outside a dive bar off of US 1 in Northeast Philly.”

  Rochester and Rascal came over and nuzzled him, one on each side. “The bar got trashed and there were arrests for drunk and disorderly conduct,” he continued, “but surprisingly, no one was willing to say what the fight was about. Rumor had it, though, that the Warlords thought the Levitts were breaching walls into their territory. Since then the Levitts have been keeping a low profile. Though individual members may have records or ongoing cases, and I don’t know of any open investigations against the group as a whole right now.”

  Rochester got tired of sharing Rick’s attention and came over to me, and Rascal slumped on the floor in front of his dad.

  “Can you suggest anyone I can talk to about them?” I asked. “A cop from another area?” Rochester nuzzled my leg and I scratched behind his ear.

  “No. And that would be N, O. I’m not going to enable you.”

  More psych language. It must be catching.

  I held up my hands. “No worries. I’m not doing anything that could get me in trouble.”

  “Yeah, right. Like I said before, just tread carefully.”

  He left a short while later, and when the dogs went upstairs to Lili, I pulled out the folder Hunter had given me and began to read the articles he’d printed, most of which centered on that big fight between the two gangs that Rick had mentioned.

  The tone of the articles from the Courier-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer was inflammatory, beginning with background on the Warlords, who were as bad as Rick had said, if not worse. Members were suspected of involvement with drug dealing, trafficking in stolen goods, and coercing immigrant women from Eastern Europe into prostitution.

  Some of the material was almost silly. One article speculated that a rise in tax on soda in Philadelphia had led to the Warlords getting involved in smuggling untaxed carbonated beverages into the city. I thought of the black cherry wishniak I’d bought at Lorenzo’s and wondered if all the proper taxes had been paid on it.

  The Levitts, on the other hand, got little ink, because the reporters dismissed them as a group of wannabes who’d gotten on the wrong side of the real bad guys. And after a few days without anything new, the story died out.

  And yet Rick had believed that the bar brawl had been because the Angels were trying to snatch some illegal dollars away from the Warlords. I’d trust him over a headline-seeking reporter, which meant I had to tread carefully.

  All Hunter had been able to dig up was that collection of articles. But then, he didn’t have my internet skills, and I turned to my laptop. I found a number of small mentions of the group, mostly in lists of outlaw biker gangs, and by digging through some databases I reached through Eastern’s college library, I found one in-depth article from several years back.

  According to the author, a reporter for a crime-focused website, the club’s growth and development was closely tied to that of Levittown. Motorcycle clubs, I learned, had their roots in the immediate post-World War II era of American society. Members rode cruiser motorcycles, particularly Harley-Davidsons and choppers, and they were fueled by a set of ideals that celebrated freedom, nonconformity to mainstream culture and loyalty to the biker group.

  Levittown was the very definition of conformity back when it was built. There were only six original house models, from the Country Clubber to the Jubilee, and the meandering streets were confusing. My father used to tell a joke about a guy who lived in Levittown, who parked in the wrong driveway, went into the wrong house and had dinner with the wrong family, because the houses all looked alike and the neighborhoods were so cookie-cutter.

  At least that’s the version he told when I was a kid. As I grew up, he expanded it to add that the guy made love to the wrong wife, too.

  I could see how someone who was rebelling against the conformity of Levittown would be drawn to such a group. Levitt’s Angels were a smaller group than many, and for a couple of decades they’d focused on small-time crime like protection and prostitution. Several of the members had been arrested for smash-and-grab thefts at small computer stores, though none of them had gotten prison time, and Carl Landsea’s name wasn’t among those who were charged.

  That was all I could find. My hands were poised over the keyboard as I thought about where to look next, and I remembered what Rick had said about taking a dive into the deep web.

  I often heard cyber guys compare the Internet to an iceberg. Only about ten percent of all networked material is accessible through search engines and web crawlers. Techies call that the surface web.

  Material like your bank account information, email folders, corporate intranets and so on—anything that you need a password to access–is called the deep web. These don’t show up in a search engine, and you wouldn’t want them to.

  There is another part of that submerged iceberg, called the dark web. And that’s where criminals lurk, selling consumer information, trafficking in drugs, sharing kiddie porn and so on. It’s not illegal to sniff around there, but because most people who were there were in search of illicit materials or connections, I had to tread carefully. I didn’t want my computer’s unique IP address to pop up in some police search and cause authorities to come looking at me. Even though I wasn’t doing anything wrong, I had skirted the law in the past and I didn’t want to invite scrutiny of my habits.

  I had sworn to Rick and Lili that I would resist the urge to hack just because I could, and because I was determined not to jeopardize the new life I’d found with Lili and Rochester. Besides, Hunter could only use information I found legitimately in his defense of Peggy.

  So instead of hacking, I’d talk to Peggy. Surely she knew that her husband was no angel, even though I didn’t think she and Carl had been married when he was arrested the last time. Hunter had already given me permission to access Carl’s email account, but I needed Peggy to share details with me that would help me figure out his password legitimately, like his childhood addresses and phone numbers and other words or numbers that had personal meaning to him.

  If she’d see me, that is.

  5 – Starting Over

  Saturday morning, after taking the dogs on a long walk around River Bend, I was in the middle of fixing French toast for Lili and me for breakfast when Rick showed up. It didn’t take much to convince him to stick around and join us. Maybe it was the company, but more likely it was the smell of the cinnamon and the rich challah bread.

  “Kids get up so damn early,” he complained as he slid into a chair at our kitchen table. Lili passed him the carton of orange juice, and I handed him a glass. “It was eight o’clock and Hannah called to give Tamsen a heads-up that Justin was ready to come home.”

  “Any idea when you’re going to let Justin know you and his mom are getting serious?”

  He shrugged. “If it was up to me, I’d have said something already. But Tamsen’s understandably concerned. I’m already his football coach and she’s afraid that if he gets too close to me, and we break up, it’ll hit him hard.”

  “Kids are resilient,” I said. “Look at Peggy Doyle. She grew up in the slums, lost her father, then bounced back to be a great student in high school, work her way into that trip to France.”

  “I don’t think I want to point out the Black Widow of Birch Valley as a role model for Justin,” Rick said.

  “Enough negative talk at breakfast,” Lili said. “What did you and Tamsen do last night...I mean, beyond the obvious.”

  “We got a last minute reservation at Le Canal,” he said. It was a fancy French restaurant upriver in New Hope where we’d all gone on occasion.

  “Good choice,” Lili said. “It was pretty clear night last night, wasn’t it?”

  “It was. Lots of stars out. We walked along the towpath after dinner for a while, just holding hands.”

  “That sounds lovely and romantic.”

  There was something in her tone that made me think romance might be lacking in our own relationship. “I’ll bet we can see stars at Wildwood Crest,” I said, reminding her of our upcoming getaway.

  “You sure can,” Rick said, jumping to my defense.

  “Assuming Steve actually makes it to the shore,” Lili said. “Instead of staying back here tilting at windmills and websites.”

  “Come on. This vacation was my idea. I am totally looking forward to spending a lot of quality time with you.”

  “We’ll see,” she said darkly.

  Rick finished his French toast and summoned Rascal to his truck. Then Lili left soon after for a mani-pedi appointment with one of her friends from the Eastern faculty, and I piled Rochester into my aged BMW sedan for the trip over to Peggy Landsea’s. He had a talent for getting people to like him, and if Peggy was going to be reluctant to talk to me, maybe Rochester could woo her over.

  Despite the word “town” in its name, Levittown isn’t actually a town. Instead, it’s a cluster of forty-one different neighborhoods sprawled over four different municipalities and three school districts. Each of the divisions has a name, from Appletree Hill to Yellowwood, and within that community all the streets begin with the same letter. For some developments, such as Quincy Hollow and Upper Orchard, that was a good thing—if someone lived on Quaint or Quail, you knew where you were going in the twenty-two square miles of developments.

  Fortunately, I already knew that Bark Road was in Birch Valley, otherwise I might have wondered if it was in the other “B” neighborhood, Blue Ridge. Most of the neighborhoods had that kind of pastoral name, referencing plants like violet, forsythia and juniper, and natural features like hollow, brook and orchard.

  The reality was grimmer. There were no orange trees in Orangewood, no ponds in Elderberry Pond. Just an endless maze of houses and yards, most of them customized far away from the original structures with carports, faux-stone facades and attached mother-in-law suites.

  Birch Valley looked like most of the Levittown neighborhoods I’d visited. Lawns strewn with kids’ toys, driveways jammed with every kind of car from old beaters to brand-new Mercedes. Bark Road was a long, curving street of single-story and split-level homes, and even if I hadn’t known the address I could have picked out Peggy’s—it was the one with the weedy yard, peeling paint and broken window shutter.

  I parked in the driveway behind a battered old Nissan compact in the carport. Rochester followed me out my door, and immediately made a beeline for a dying magnolia tree, where he peed copiously.

  The woman who appeared at the screen door looked older than I expected, but I recognized her anyway. She had a few more lines on her forehead and there was some gray in her hair but underneath I saw the girl I’d known.

  “Steve?” she said, and I could tell her voice had hoarsened over the years, and sounded like she’d had her share of tobacco and alcohol along the way.

  “In the flesh,” I said. “And this is Rochester. Can we come in?”

  She shook her head. “I told Hunter I didn’t want to talk to you.”

  “Why not? I know I didn’t keep up with you after I went to college. I’m sorry, but you know, that’s a two-way street. You had my parents’ address and phone number and I never heard from you either.”

  “I was so envious of you,” she said, fiddling with a loose hair that refused to stay tucked behind her ear. “Going to a real college, while I was stuck at BC3. Can you blame me for not wanting to hear about how great your life was going?”

  “Well, it didn’t work out that well,” I said. “One failed marriage, a year in the California penal system, and then two years back here on probation.”

  Peggy’s mouth opened in surprise. “You went to prison? But you were so smart.”

  “Yeah, too smart for my own good is what my probation officer used to say.”

  I could see Peggy wavering.

  “I served my time for computer hacking, in case Hunter didn’t share that with you. So I know something about computers and retrieving deleted emails. You were kind to me when we were kids, Peggy. Let me do something for you in return.”

  She frowned, and then looked down at Rochester, sitting on his butt so politely waiting to be invited in. “You used to have a poodle when we were kids, didn’t you?” Peggy said. “I guess you upsized.”