Page 70 of Haunted

Angela was a city employee raising two children on a single income. But then Rex Harlow stepped in and paid her twenty grand.

I try to talk myself out of it. Maybe Angela self-published something once—a memoir, a chapbook nobody bought—and Albatross was a real press for exactly one book. But there are no books. Maybe the name’s a coincidence, some other outfit that happened to like the same word. But it’s a dead shell, incorporated and abandoned, with Rex’s rarest shot stamped across it. Maybe he just likes the word. I try every door, and the same thing is waiting behind all of them.

My boss is Jonny’s father. Rex Harlow paid Angela Bishop twenty thousand dollars, and whatever it was for—child support, a settlement, hush money—he has been sitting in that wood-paneled office for the past decade. And he had to have known. He knew exactly who Jonny was. He knew when Jonny made the front page of the Excelsior and he did nothing.

And then the second thought, colder than the first. Alice Cadwalader knew. She ran HR at this university; she knew where the bodies were buried; she sat Jonny down at the edge of a lake to tell him who his father was. Ten minutes later, someone crushed the back of her skull with a rock. I’ve been carrying the paternity and the murder around as two separate weights. What if they were never separate? What if the man fifty feet from my desk didn’t only abandon his son—what if he made sure the one person who could name him never got the chance?

I close the search. I close the golf book. I put my phone facedown on the desk.

I thought leaving the Marines and getting this job was a path to a new future. A steady paycheck, a quiet office, a life built on spreadsheets and order. But now all I can think about is being home with Jonny.

I don’t call Jonny. Not yet. I need to sit with this. I need to be sure. And I need to figure out how to tell the man I love that I think his father could possibly be a murderer.

There’s a knock on the frame of my open door and I come out of my skin.

“Don’t get up.” Rex Harlow has his jacket over his arm, on his way out for the day. “Just confirming Monday. The club does lunch from twelve, so shall we say half past? Joe’ll put it in your calendar.”

I swallow. If he is a murderer, then I need to find out something before I just go crazy. Like, for example, find out where he was on Tuesday morning. “Yes, sir. Looking forward to it.”

I look at him. Really look. The beard, the glasses, the grey, the good tan, the forty-odd extra pounds a man puts on between thirty and sixty. And under all of it, if you know what you’re looking for—and God help me, I do now—there is the shape of a jaw I have had my hands on.

“Something on your mind, Lance?”

“No, sir.” And then, because I have to do something with my hands or he is going to read my whole face, I reach out and lift a stray hair off the shoulder of his jacket. “Beg your pardon. Can’t send you out like that.”

He laughs. “That’s the Corps talking. Never off duty, are you?” He taps the doorframe twice. “Twelve-thirty. Wear something you can walk nine holes in, if the weather holds.”

I wait until I hear the outer door swing shut behind him, and Joe’s keyboard start up again.

Then I take an envelope out of my desk drawer and I put the hair inside it, and I fold the flap over twice. I sit there for a while with my hand flat on top of it.

Then I open a browser and start looking up laboratories while my coffee grows cold.

Chapter twenty-four

Jonny

Aunt Shelley’s office is on the second floor of the Whitfield Building, which is connected to the administration wing by a covered walkway that cuts through the main lobby. I’ve been through this lobby once before—the day I came to see Lance about the conference ticket—but I was so focused on not being recognized that I walked through it with my head down and my hood up.

Today I’m early for lunch. The lobby is quiet, and I don’t have my hood up. The marble floors and high ceilings give it the hushed atmosphere of a courthouse. There’s a security desk and a row of flags and, on the far wall, a long line of framed portraits in matching gilt frames. Former presidents of the university, I assume. I wander past them without much interest until I reach the end, where a smaller cluster of photographs is grouped under a brass plate that reads OFFICERS OF THE UNIVERSITY.

Provost. Vice Provost. Dean of Students. Comptroller General.

That's Lance's boss, and I'm overcome with curiosity about the person he works for. He is a silver-haired man in a dark suit and a burgundy tie, smiling down out of the frame with the ease of somebody who has had his photograph taken a great many times. The nameplate reads REX HARLOW. I look at him for about as long as anybody looks at a portrait in a lobby, which is not long at all.

And then, with no warning and no reason at all, I am thinking about Elliott. It has been weeks since I really thought about him. Not in passing—not the reflex of “Elliott would have liked that” or “Elliott was afraid of dogs”—but properly. Sat with him. Let myself remember the weight of him on my lap, the way he’d press his face into my neck when he was tired, the particular pitch of his voice when he said my name. He was fourteen years old and he didn’t deserve what happened to him, and I’ve let weeks go by without giving him a single honest thought.

I sit down on the marble bench across from the portraits. The guilt is sudden and total.

My phone buzzes.

Aunt Shelley

Running 5 min late. Wait for me in the lobby?

When she comes through the doors five minutes later, breathless and apologetic, I must still look rattled, because she stops mid-sentence about the parking committee and studies me.

“You look pale. What happened?”