Her eyes, his lies

Chapter 8

There is a secret world that anyone may enter, but few do. Every day, it passes people by, leaving them none the wiser. It was in this world, in the night, that Jane was in her element.

Once again, the only light in her room came from her computer screen. Once again, an extensively long manifest of people's personal information filled it.

Many assumed hacking involved rapidly pressing buttons on a keyboard while wearing a balaclava. This supposed hacker would, after typing sufficiently long enough, mutter a single "I'm in", before scurrying off to do hacker things in their secret hacker lair.

In truth, it was far more guessing people's password recovery security questions and combing through databases for personal information.

The latter was Jane's least favorite part. And yet, she had once again found herself doing that very thing.

While utilizing a search function would save her plenty of time, she had no idea what it was that she was looking for. She would need to do this by hand.

"Who puts down a pizza restaurant as their emergency number?" Jane wondered to nobody in particular.

Her toy bear, ever the partner in crime, reflected her screen from its plastic eyes.

Much like the bear, Jane's eyes were glazed over from utter boredom.

She stretched her arms overhead, sighing. It had been hours, but she still hadn't found anything. A fruitless search where she wasn't even sure if the fruit existed at all.

She pressed her thumbnail against her teeth, deep in thought.

If Beatrice had ever put someone down as an emergency contact, it would have shown on the list. There was only one emergency contact file in the Alexander High system, and it was kept secure, with only a handful of people that could access it.

Even a technologically-backwards little town like Alexander understood that personal information must be kept private.

The emergency contacts were just that, for emergencies.

In fact, all students were required to list someone down. It was school policy. A precautionary measure to absolve the school of any liability if something happened to the students.

So where was Beatrice's?

Jane double-checked the records she had already cleared, scanning for anything even vaguely pertaining to the Ruth family.

Nothing. Any personal information relating to Beatrice Ruth was missing.

More than missing, it was like a bubble of absolute nothingness surrounded her family. No social media presence. No mentions of her family anywhere in the school records. Beatrice Ruth was the only Ruth in the entire database.

Had this somehow escaped notice of the school administrators? Did they not realize that there were no records of a seventeen year old girl's family, or even her address? Was a teenage girl living on her own even legal?

Or had Beatrice somehow, miraculously, erased it all?

Jane opened the file properties of the manifest, eyes darting across the screen as she scanned it for information. Somewhere in the middle of all that data, Jane found what she had been looking for.

For the second time that night, she smiled.

The file had been modified. Not recently, not even in the past few months, but it had been altered.

A few more clicks and the file's permissions log appeared on her screen.

Asides from the principal's secretary and Jane's own hidden super-user account, there was only one other user that could or would modify the manifest. The school board's joint admin account.