She went into the living room, opened her computer, and tapped in ninthcircle.com. In all honesty she had neither the time nor the energy for it, but she had promised Esther she would try. The home page with the numerous small pictures came up on her screen, and she leaned in to study them more closely. One looked more like a child, not a doll, a child without clothes on. She browsed on and saw yet another picture of a naked body. This time the little figure was holding a grown-up’s hand. You could see a tattooed arm reaching into the picture. Sara’s throat tightened. Something was seriously wrong here.

The page didn’t offer any contact information if she wasn’t logged in. That in itself was unusual if not downright suspicious. Could she hack the log-in? Bulletproof Security plug-ins were notoriously difficult, and it might be a little over the top to do a brute-force attack on the users’ encrypted passwords. Maybe she would luck out and find that the server hosting the home page hadn’t been updated in a while and therefore would be vulnerable to unauthorized access attempts.

Sara decided to go with a social-engineering attack, and clicked through to the name of the page’s host and opened a chat with their customer service, where she pretended to be the page owner. She provided one of her anonymous Gmail accounts and claimed she had been having problems with 500 internal server error messages and the .htaccess file. An automated message informed her that she would receive a response within two minutes.

She leaned back in her uncomfortable dining room chair and looked over at her eldest daughter. Amina was reading the copy of Through the Looking-Glass that Jeppe’s mother had insisted on loaning them. She was growing up way too fast, and Sara watched her with a double ache in her heart: one for the passage of time, and the other for the oh-so-difficult love.

A chime from her computer drew her attention back to the screen. She read the response from Bill, who probably wrote her from a call center somewhere in Pakistan and was likely also someone other than who he pretended to be. Even his first response told her that she knew more than he did. After four messages back and forth she got him to reset the password so she could create a new one.

She was in.

The landing page had a black background and was decorated with a laughing mask that sat propped up against a lit candelabra. Here she found a few concrete facts: The forum had just over ten thousand users who all used pseudonyms like PiedPiper and Jupiterseagle. The users were active on the page, both posting things and commenting. There was buying and selling, discussions about pictures and specific artifacts like masks and stuffed birds. At first glance it looked like an art forum with a Gothic, almost macabre style.