Searching for Secrets by Elaine Orr Read Free Book Online

Frances.
    "I'll work on these alone. You need to stay here in case they call back." Frances agreed, and Christa gathered the three hard drives and went to her apartment. Ignoring Brandy's pleas for food, she went to her small den and quickly took off the outside case of her computer. She was thankful that her home computer was the same brand, thought a bit newer. She mentally crossed her fingers, hoping that the hard drive in the school computers would fit hers.
    "Yes!" she said. Brandy jumped on the desk and Christa swatted her down. Substituting one of the three hard drives from the school computers for her own wasn't quite as easy as piecing together a preschool puzzle, but it was close.
    She turned on the power switch and waited impatiently as the computer went through its warm-up routine. A quick check of the hard drive showed only the folders for the operating system and the educational software she had added such a short time ago. Christa wasn't sure what she was looking for, so she jotted notes that the total number of folders was 72. Maybe something would make sense later. She rapidly deleted all the programs she had added. Some of them had a child's name attached to a file.
    It was 12:15. There was less than an hour-and-a-half until she was to meet the kidnappers. She started to erase files in the main Windows folder, then remembered that most of them were on the system when she received it. She glanced at that list of 72 folders again. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. "Not that you would know," she said aloud. She decided to print the list of files in the Windows folder.
    It was easier to take out this hard drive and load the second one from school. As she deftly inserted the tiny screws, she wondered what could be so important to these thieves that they would kidnap a little girl in broad daylight. If they hurt Amy, I’ll never forgive myself. She should have realized that the broken window in the school hallway could mean someone had broken into the building yet again. Kurt should have thought of that. But it didn't look as if the pane would be big enough for a person, she reminded herself. I'll think about that later.
    The second hard drive was in place so she again turned the computer on and viewed its folders and files. There were two more files in one of the programs she had loaded, but she quickly figured out that they were Spanish vocabulary words her students had added. Nothing else looked unusual. She repeated the process of listing files and then erasing only the ones she had loaded.
    Her fingers flew as she took out the second drive and inserted the third. It was 12:40 p.m. She was printing the folder list when she glanced at the number of folders. There were 73 on this hard drive. Christa hadn't done anything in the Windows folder on this one. She compared the three lists. Where was the extra folder? There is was. ACCTINFO. It had one file, MNYACCT.EXE. She didn't know enough to try to understand it now, she just had to copy the file.
    She inserted a disk in the CD ROM drive and instructed the computer to copy the file to the disk. That way, she could give them back their hard drive and check the file later. "Zero files copied," it told her. "What!" Christa tried it again. She sat back in her seat, unwilling to accept defeat but knowing that she had lost the battle with the clock.
    "Christa. We have to hurry." Kirk's voice came from the other side of the hall door.
    "Five minutes," she yelled back, her eyes never leaving the screen.
    After another 10 seconds, Christa realized she had to stop. Getting Amy back was far more important than figuring out what the kidnappers wanted. She quickly unscrewed the third hard drive and was rewrapping it in the map of South America when the idea hit her. Her hard drive looked just like these.
    Frantically she reinserted it in the computer. She didn't want to leave her files on it; it had the names of all of her students. Since it was a relatively new computer,