Whoa. Maybe I hadn’t given April enough credit. She knew my family’s secret, and still she was standing here talking to me? And I’d always thought that Jude’s interest in April was based purely on rebounding from his emotions—but if he’d been in contact with her since he left, then maybe I’d been wrong about their relationship. But the most important part of that thought was that April had been in contact with Jude.
“So you have talked to Jude since he’s left?” I asked.
April used her finger to roll the bead around in the palm of her hand.
“I know you care about him, April. I care about him, too. I think he’s in trouble, and all I want to do is bring him home.”
“He has a new home,” April said. “He told me that he found a new home, and a new family who wouldn’t turn their backs on him the way you did. But the way he talked about them … I don’t know, Grace. They sound dangerous. Not like a real family at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were involved in what happened at Day’s Market.”
I put my hand over my mouth. What had my brother gotten himself into?
April placed the bead carefully on the table and then looked up at me. “I knew he was in the city, but I honestly didn’t think he’d come here.”
“So you’ve known all along where Jude is, and you haven’t told anyone? Do you know how hard my dad’s been looking for him?”
“I haven’t known all along,” she said. “He sends me emails every once in a while. I can’t respond to them or anything. My messages just bounce right back.”
I nodded. I used to send a daily email to Jude at his school address, asking him to come home, but I gave up after a while when my messages kept bouncing back to me. “And he told you where he is?”
“No, he never said anything about his location. But I think I’ve traced him.”
My eyebrows went up involuntarily. “You know how to trace emails?”
“No. But I do know how to trace blog comments. Check this out.” April sat on her desk chair and wiggled her computer mouse. Her screen came to life and she logged on to the Internet. “In addition to the emails, I started to get some random, anonymous comments on my blog a couple of months ago. After a while I figured out it was Jude.”
“Your blog?” Jude had been hiding from everyone in his family, yet he’d had time to comment on April’s blog? I didn’t even know she had a blog.
“I design jewelry”—April pointed at the stuff on her desk—“and sell it on a blog.” She pointed at her computer. There was a blog pulled up on the screen with pink swirls around a banner that said APRIL SHOWERS JEWELRY and then pictures of rings, necklaces, and bracelets.
“I didn’t know.” But now that I thought about it, whenever I saw April lately, it seemed she had a new necklace or bracelet. They were beautiful. “I guess that kind of happens when somebody stops talking to you.”
April shrugged. “Anyway, like I said, I started getting these anonymous comments on my blog, and they all seemed like they were from the same person. Like when I posted a pic of this necklace.” She clicked on a picture of a tree-shaped pendant. It was the same necklace she wore now. “I got this comment.” She scrolled down a bit and hovered the cursor over the comment. “I don’t know how this could be from anyone other than Jude. It’s the last thing I’ve heard from him.”
I leaned over her shoulder and read the comment.
Anonymous said:
Beautiful. This looks just like the walnut tree outside my old house. Sometimes I wish I could see it again from the porch swing where we used to sit together. But that won’t ever happen again, will it? Not after what they did to me.
My heart tightened in my chest, and I looked away from the words. The first two lines had sounded so much like the old Jude, but the rest stung too much to read again.
“I don’t know if you noticed, but that comment had a time stamp of three a.m. on September twenty-fifth. Three weeks ago.” I heard the click of a mouse and when I looked back at the screen, she was on a new website. “This is my stat counter. It shows where my blog visitors come from.” She clicked on something else, and it pulled up a list of times and dates and locations. “You can see from this that the only person who visited my blog at three a.m. on September twenty-fifth was located in the city.”
“Wow, that’s really possible to see?” I fingered my moonstone necklace. It always pulsed with a warm vibration. To me, it meant hope. But then I let go of the pendant and sighed. “But Jude could still be anywhere. The city’s a big place.”
“Ah, but it gets better than that. I can drill it down even more and actually see the IP address of the visitor and the server he’s using.”
“Seriously?” Apparently, there was a lot I didn’t know about April these days. She used to have zero interest in computers, and now she was talking about tracing IP addresses and servers? “How did you learn to do all this?”
“You know Avery Nagamatsu—Miya’s older brother? The one who’s studying to be a software programmer?”
I nodded.
“I went with him to a couple of frat parties over the summer to make it look like he had a girlfriend. And in exchange, he helped me set up a blog for my jewelry business and showed me how to do all this so I could see where my customers were coming from. But it has its added benefits for tracking down rogue boyfriends.”
“Huh.” Well, I’d always known the girl had gumption.
April made a few more clicks with her mouse. “Usually, the server name is too vague to really tell me anything, but Jude’s just happens to belong to a business.”
April pointed at a name on the screen. I almost gasped when I saw it.
“ ‘The Depot,’ ” I read out loud. “Do you know what that is?”
“I’ve been asking around,” she said. “I couldn’t find out anything at first. Not even anything on the Internet that wasn’t in a locked forum. But then I was at that old movie theater in Apple Valley with Miya and Claire the other night. And you know that stoner-looking guy who works at the concessions stand—the one who always wears those gamer hats?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I was buying some popcorn when I heard that kid going on about some new club he was dying to play at—a place called The Depot.”