Page 11 of The Chain House

“I was in his class last semester.”

“History major?”

“Not really,” she said. “I graduated from SCAD a year ago, in Savannah. I’m an artist.”

“No shit.”

“No shit,” she said. “Does that surprise you?”

“No. Just that I almost went there myself. You like it?”

“Loved it,” she said. “But I’m home now.”

“And taking random history classes?”

“Creeping, more like.” She swallowed more beer. “You know what you want to do with your life, Sam?”

“Make films.”

“I mean, like, really?”

“You sound like my dad.”

“Well, I don’t totally know what I want to do,” she said. “But honestly, I love history. I was considering getting another useless degree, so I started scrolling through the history program at U of L. I came across your dad’s professor photo and …”

“And?”

“I recognized him. I know him, Sam,” she said. “From somewhere.”

The way she said somewhere made Sam think she had an idea where that somewhere was, but she was maybe feeling him out and so didn’t verbalize it.

“So you joined his class because you think you know him … from somewhere?”

She took another drink of her beer. “Have you read the Mallard Malone novels?”

A cold chill went up Sam’s spine. He watched her, wondered where this was coming from, and so soon on the heels of seeing the complete series in his father’s house. “I’ve read Long Pale Moon,” he said. “And then the next two, I can’t remember the titles.”

“So you’ve read up to The Pandemonium Flux?”

“Sure.”

She laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“I questioned your dad after class one day.”

“About?”

“I asked him if he was Mallard Malone.”

Sam nearly spat out his beer.

“Why’s that so funny?”

“If you truly knew my father, you wouldn’t have to ask,” he said. “But why in the world would you think he might be Mallard Malone?”

“I don’t know,” she said, appearing defeated by something that weighed on her. “In hindsight, it was stupid. I was drawing correlations between how he spoke of Nazi Germany in class to modern-day cults. And how he wrote about it in his book.”