Page 47 of Haunted

“Uh-huh. Sure. Listen. It’s late. I’m tired. Go away, and don’t come back unless you’d like me to take out a restraining order.”

He laughs. “Seriously? A restraining order? Like a little bitch? You know those just make it worse. You think men trained to do what we did get intimidated by a piece of paper?”

“No,” I say. “It makes the people in power notice the pattern. So it can be punished more efficiently.”

“You’ll regret this.”

“I regret a lot of things,” I tell him, and shut the door.

I stand with my back against it and listen to him leave—the heavy tread, the stairwell door, the silence after. My hands aren’t steady. I hold one out in front of me and wait for it to stop, and it takes a while.

I don’t call anyone.

I know exactly where Jonny Bishop is staying. I stood in his aunt’s doorway this afternoon with that box in my arms and a speech in my mouth and I couldn’t do it, and four hours later he told me to fuck off in a parking lot.

Across the street there’s a light on in a second-floor window, and there is not one single thing I can do about any of it tonight.

I put the sketchbooks in the drawer and shut it.

I turn on a light.

Between reliving the scene in the parking lot and shuddering with rage that Nash had come to my door—to my fucking door—I catch maybe forty-five minutes of shut-eye all night. If I hadn’t spent eight years being trained to function on less, under worse, I’d have come apart. As it is, I sit down at my desk and concede that today is going to be a three-cup day.

The only good thing about the Comptroller’s office is that we have real offices, with doors that close. I can hide and nurse my misery in private. The spreadsheets on my screen might as well be in Sanskrit for all the sense they’re making.

After ten, I risk the trip down the corridor to the breakroom. The trick is getting past Joe, our receptionist, who guards the front desk like a dragon guarding a hoard of staplers. Joe is not what you’d call a people person. He’s territorial, prickly, and treats walk-ins like they’ve personally insulted his mother. But he’s decided he likes me, for reasons I haven’t fully decoded, and when Joe likes you, he’s yours. The trick is not to test it.

There’s a man at the desk when I arrive—polite-looking, brown hair, brown eyes, tortoiseshell glasses, wearing a three-piece suit that’s slightly too formal for a Virginia campus. He’s speaking to Joe in what sounds like a slight French accent, and Joe is staring at his screen with the expression of a man whose computer has personally betrayed him.

“The system’s been down since Monday,” Joe says. “We’ve been manually authorizing checks for three days. I can’t confirm anything right now.”

The man takes this with remarkable grace. “No problem at all. I can come back. It’s just that my flight will leave for Portland this evening, and it would be so awkward to do this over the phone.”

“I can pull the paper file,” I offer from the doorway. “Come on back.”

I pull him into my office and he sits across from me. “Just a second,” I say. “It’s been a nightmare. Do you have the receipts?”

“Yes, I have printouts,” he says, pulling them from a briefcase. He hands them over. There is an awkward silence as I scan them.

“Flights from Portland and a stay at the Fairhaven Inn,” I say.

“Yes. I came here for a job interview with the psychology department.” He smiles anxiously.

“How did it go?”

He grimaces. “I just completed the teaching demonstration and I’m all nerves. Can you tell?”

I smile at him. “Good luck.”

“Is it a nice town, Fairhaven?”

“I like it, but I was born and raised here.”

He peers at me and blinks, then cocks his head the way people do when they’re trying to place a face. I know what’s coming. It’s the photo—the one of Parker and me in the gym, plastered all over town for the anniversary.

He opens his mouth, and I brace for aren’t you the guy from the—

“Forgive me,” he says instead. “I’ve been seeing that photograph all over the campus. The posters.” He says it carefully, like he knows it’s a tender place to press. “It’s a strange thing they’ve done—taken the worst hour of two people’s lives and made it public property. The town grieves it as though it happened to them. It didn’t. It happened to you, and to your friend, and neither of you ever agreed to be looked at.” He catches himself, and something sheepish crosses his face. “I’m sorry. That was presumptuous. Occupational hazard.”