“She knew when it happened?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“He told her.” Andrew cleared his throat. “He always told her, apparently. When he, you know.”
“When he fucked some random woman.”
The rent-a-guard looked over at me. This was no doubt the most interesting temp assignment he’d ever gotten.
“I was going to tell you. I’ve hated having this secret from you, honestly, but I feel like things have been weird between us the last few months.”
“So you just … didn’t.”
“I was going to.”
“When?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does Matt know?”
“No. I don’t think so. I didn’t tell him. I doubt Mom would’ve. You know he never shuts up about anything so I’m sure he would have brought it up already, probably to gloat about him taking the high road.”
“Have you met her?”
“Don’t do this.”
“Andrew.”
“None of this is her fault.”
“Have you met her?”
“No.”
“Have you communicated with her?”
My brother said nothing.
“I can’t believe this,” I muttered.
“We’ve emailed a little bit. She seems nice.”
Nice. My eyes inexplicably filled with tears. “Good, I’m glad Frank got the nice daughter he always wanted. What else do you know about her?”
“She’s a cop. She has a dog named Orville.”
“I feel really fucking blindsided by this information, Andrew.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I can’t believe someone would just blurt it out like that.”
“Unless everybody already knows,” I said, “everybody but me.” As I said it, I wondered if Tom knew, and my stomach turned itself inside out. I wiped my eyes and turned my attention back to the security system. “I can’t talk about this right now.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Great. Really, really great.”
“Rox.”
I hung up and stared at the grainy grey images on the screen. Orville. The flight brother, or the popcorn company? I shook my head as if I could send this new development out of my brain that way. Andrew was right—it wasn’t this Blair Andover’s fault that my father was a pig and my family was living a lie.
That was no one’s fault, and also all of our fault.
I finally got back to yesterday morning on the tape and found, at 10:43 a.m., a figure that could’ve been Aiden—baggy pants and hoodie, head tucked into his chest. He waited at the elevator, went in, then reappeared less than five minutes later and walked out.
I clicked forward a bit to see if he returned but nothing else happened.
I went backward to watch Aiden walking through the lobby again. I couldn’t see the side of his face, so there was no way to tell if he had the cut above his eye at this point. But I noticed that when he reached out to push the elevator-summoning button, he paused for a second and touched his rib cage with his other hand.
I took pictures of the screen, more out of habit than anything else, and pulled my coat on. “I’ll get out of your hair now,” I said.
“I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.” The security guard leaned over the counter to look down at me. “But I couldn’t help but overhear. I just wanted to say, you deserve better, girl. Okay?” He held up a fist for me to bump. I wasn’t sure what else to do so I rapped my knuckles lightly against his.
CHAPTER 33
I wanted a drink, or several. But it wasn’t smart to roll up to the police headquarters reeking of whiskey, so I held off until later when I could really make it count. “I need to ask you something,” I said when I got to Tom’s cubicle. “Please don’t lie to me.”
“I would never lie to you.”
“Yeah, well, lies of omission count. Blair Andover.”
To his credit, he didn’t feign confusion this time. He closed his eyes for a beat. “Yes.”
“You know.”
“I do,” he said slowly. “But—”
“And you never thought to tell me?”
“Let’s go in a room. Okay?”
I nodded and followed him out of his cube and into a conference room. He closed the door behind us and locked it.
“First of all,” he started again, but I shook my head.
“No, first of all, I brought this up to you the other day. And you picked a fight about what an asshole I was being.”
“You’re right.”
“Why didn’t you tell me then?”
“I was surprised. I didn’t know what to say. Especially not over the phone. So I hedged. That was wrong. Roxane, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Until then, I didn’t know that you didn’t know.”
“What are you talking about?”
He ran a hand through his hair. “Frank told me that your mother knew, that she’d always known. I guess I just assumed that the whole family knew.”
“Even though I literally never mentioned it, ever.”
“You think that I should have been like, hey, is this thing I know a family secret or just something you don’t want to talk about?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“And when would I have done that? The night Frank died? The night of the funeral?”
“Some other day in the two-plus years since would’ve been good. Just thinking out loud here.”
“You never told Shelby what you know about her father.”
I winced; he was right. “That’s different. Shelby would be devastated if she knew Joshua isn’t her real father. I’m doing her a favor by keeping that secret. I’m not devastated, Tom, I’m just mad, and here you are saying that not telling me makes perfect fucking sense.”
Tom leaned against the wall, smudging someone’s blue dry-erase marker. “I—I don’t know. I honestly thought you might know.”
“You thought I might.” I paced to the opposite corner of the small conference room and stared at the dingy white wall.
“I thought you might, and I knew it wasn’t my place to bring it up.”
“How’s that?”
“Frank told me in confidence.”
“I swear to god if you mention how you promised—”
“I’m not going to do that. Roxane, look at me.”
“No.”
“I’m sorry. I understand how this feels from your perspective.”
“You can’t possibly. Trust me.”
“I’m trying.”
“Frank’s dead.” I spun around. “I’m right here.”
“I know that.”
We stared at each other. His warm brown eyes were worried and sad and a little angry all at once.
I said, “Are there any other Weary family secrets that he told you?”
“No.”
“How can I believe that?”
He didn’t say anything. Maybe I was being unfair to him, or maybe I wasn’t. I couldn’t tell anymore what a normal relationship was like. A normal job, a normal life. “I feel betrayed, and I never would have expected that from you. But I guess that’s why it’s called a betrayal. If you saw it coming, it wouldn’t hurt.”
“What can I do?” He closed the gap between us and took my hand.
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
“Don’t say that.”
He brought my hand to his mouth and now I closed my eyes, remembering the night of my father’s funeral, the two of us sitting in the car, the raw conversation slit open between us, everything out on the table. Or so I thought.
Maybe I was wrong about everything.
Maybe I had always been wrong about everything.
“I need to go.”
“Don’t, please.”
“Tom.”
“Please.” He held my forearm to his chest. “If you need to be angry at me, be angry. But please don’t use this as an excuse to blow everything up.”
“An excuse?”
/> “Not an excuse. A reason. I know you’re always looking for a reason.”
I yanked my hand away and opened the door. “I have to go.”
* * *
I was already out on the sidewalk when I realized that I had left my jacket somewhere inside. Maybe in the conference room, or maybe on Tom’s desk. I couldn’t bear the thought of going back for it now. Besides, righteous indignation had warmed my blood and even though the wind gusted along the river, I wasn’t cold. The coat would keep. Even the hundred-odd bucks in cash from the tow pound were safe enough, there in police possession.
Besides, I had an idea.
* * *
“I don’t know if I can do this,” Nadine said on the way over to the juvenile detention center.
“You can. All you have to do is go in and ask for his belongings.”
“What if they ask why?”
“They won’t.”
“What if they do?”
I hit my turn signal so hard I was surprised that it didn’t snap off in my hand. “You just say that you’re his mother and show your ID. That’s all.”
I’d already tried doing it myself, but not even my new friend Helen Pickett could help me get past the rule that possessions could only be released to a legal guardian. So here we were.
“What do you think he has?”
“I don’t know. But I think he got himself arrested in order to hide something in a safe place.”
I’d gone a few mental rounds about this between the police station, the JDC, and the motel. Maybe Aiden was trying to get away from whoever had beat the crap out of him—which is what I had thought originally—but if that were the case, why clam up as soon as he got arrested? Why not tell someone that he needed help? I supposed he could have decided that Greg O’Neil was untrustworthy, but by the time he got to Helen Pickett’s office, he could have fessed up, given his name. He had to be incredibly uncomfortable, all that time he spent in the squad car and holding cell. Instead, he kept quiet until the moment he officially entered the system and his possessions were secured before he gave in to the pain.
“I don’t want to go in there by myself.”
I nodded. “Okay. We’ll go in together.”
Thirty minutes later, we were back in the car with an envelope. I ripped it open to reveal a piece of cardboard, the contents of Aiden’s pockets suspended under shrink wrap. “Why do they do it this way?”
I pointed at Aiden’s name scrawled in the corner. “So no one can say something was stolen later.”
There wasn’t much to see—just my business card, its edges dirty, and a five-gigabyte red flash drive.
* * *
I sat at the small table in Nadine’s motel room with Kez and Novotny, staring at the contents of the flash drive: a single .csv file that contained some fourteen thousand phone numbers.
That was it.
“Now what?” Novotny said.
I rubbed the place between my eyebrows. “I have no idea.”
Kez reached into the bag of Cheetos on the table behind my MacBook. “We could call them? Not all of them. But like a random sample. See what they have in common.”
“That’s a good idea. Except people can have lots of different things in common. We might call a hundred people who drive Fords, but that doesn’t mean it has anything to do with Fords.”
“Maybe it has to do with Fords.” Novotny poured another round of grocery-store whiskey into our plastic motel cups. “Detroit, and all.”
“They don’t make anything in Detroit anymore.”
“Let’s look at these area codes,” I said. “I see a lot of 614s. But there are also a lot of 330—that’s the Cleveland area.”
Kez pointed at my screen, leaving an orange residue behind. “So is 440.”
“317, that’s Indianapolis,” Novotny said. “Watch it, Cheeto Hands.”
I got out a sheet of paper and started making a list while the two of them bickered. The contrast between them was amusing—Kez with her labret piercing and her green and purple hair pulled back into severe French-braid pigtails, Novotny with his shock of white hair and old-man cardigan—but they were deeply fond of each other. I liked to think it had something to do with me, but it probably didn’t.
I sorted the data in ascending order, a task my old computer needed a moment to parse.
“Okay. We have 312, which is Chicago.” I wrote this down and scrolled. “A lot in Chicago. 313 is Detroit. 317, Indy. 330, Cleveland. 412 is Pittsburgh. 419, that’s northwest Ohio. 440, Cleveland. 502 is what, Kez?”
Kez turned her Cheeto hands to her phone. “Louisville.”
“Loo-a-ville,” Novotny corrected.
“What’d I say?”
“Louie-ville.”
I ignored them and kept going. “513, Cincinnati. 614 is here. 615, what is that?”
“Nashville.”
I wrote that down too. “And 740 and 937 are kind of the rest of Ohio. Did we miss any?”
“Probably, that’s a long fuckin’ list.”
“But, these are, what, all cities in the Midwest. Ish.”
The three of us looked at each other.
“How long would it take to make fourteen thousand phone calls?” I said.
Kez picked up her phone again. “Average of maybe fifteen seconds per call?”
“That’s speedy, but sure.”
She tapped at the screen. “Fifty-eight hours.”
I finished my whiskey and nudged my cup forward. “Hit me.”
Novotny poured.
Nobody said anything for a while, because there was nothing to say.
Finally, Kez stood up and went over to the sink and washed her hands. “Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe there’s nothing to figure out. Nadine and Katie are safe here. Aiden’s getting medical care. We don’t have a client. For all we know Rebecca tripped over her shoelaces.” Kez caught my eye. “Something’s wrong. Do you want to talk about it or nah?”
“I thought I was hiding it so well.”
“You’re lingering over the actual worst whiskey I’ve ever tasted. Clearly something is wrong.”
I looked at the swill in my cup. “It is pretty bad. Where’d it even come from?”
“The office,” she said, “the motel office, not yours. I know your liquor cabinet does not contain, what is this.” She squinted in the dark at the label. “Bird Dog?”
“Orville,” I muttered. “Christ, what a mess.”
“What’s a mess?”
“Everything.”
Kez raised her plastic cup in a toast. “Chin, chin. But look, we’re trying to solve for y here. Maybe there is no why.”
“There’s always a why.”
I sighed. “That can’t be true. Creedle was planning something, and Aiden was onto it. It has something to do with Nora, with passports.”
“Birth control and international travel?”
I didn’t have an answer to that, but I pointed at the endless spreadsheet on my screen. “Maybe these are members’ phone numbers.”
Kez and Novotny looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
“Hear me out,” I said. “These numbers are all in major metropolitan areas in the Midwest. Nora’s service area is the Midwest. There’s bound to be a higher concentration of women using an app to order birth control in metropolitan areas, right?”
“Okay, I see where you’re going with this.” Kez came back over to the table and stood with her hands on her hips. “But suppose you’re right. What’s the plan? A bunch of phone numbers without names doesn’t really do much.”
“Well, it would be a pretty big data breach. I know they’ve had some attempts recently.”
Kez plopped down in her chair. “I’ll be mad if it’s about a damn data breach, Roxane.”
I tried Constance Archer-Nash’s cell phone and was glad when she picked up. “How sure are you, really. About the data breach.”
“Attempted data breach.”
“I take that as, very sure.”
“Yes.”
“Then again, would you tell me otherwise?”
A pause. “You sound serious now.”
“I am.”
“Are you still in Toledo?”
“No, I’m back at home.”
“Really? I’m in Columbus for the night. We could have that drink and talk about what’s on your mind.”
I made a copy of the list and put the flash drive in my pocket and asked Novotny for a ride to the Short North, since he was heading north anyway and I intended to continue drowning my sorrows at the Hilton.
“Anything I can do, honey?” he said once we were in his car, a big, dark red Caddy.
“You knew my dad,” I said. “Ever hear about him and some intelligence bureau woman named Lenore?”
“What?”
“Is that a genuine no, or are you playing with me?”
“I don’t know a Lenore anybody. Now, I remember Frank and various women, sure. Is that what you’re upset about?”
There was something weirdly reassuring about the fact that he just said it, a statement of fact. “I’m fine. Really.”
“You’re not going to do anything crazy, are you?”
“Like what?”
“Like what, she says, all innocent, like she’s never done anything crazy in her life.”
I smiled in the dark as Novotny slowed to a stop across the street from the hotel. “I know you hate doing this, but—text me when you get home safe, okay?”
“Sure thing.”
The first floor of the Hilton was crowded with people in pink T-shirts that said WOW VOLUNTEERS. I avoided them and headed for the enclosed spiral staircase that led up to the bar on the second floor, but Constance flagged me down from her perch on one of the low, silvery couches in the lobby. “It’s overrun by this group, whatever it is,” she said. “There’s a bar up the street, divey little place?”
“Char Bar?”
“That’s the one. Do you mind chatting there?”
As we walked the short block south, I noticed a serious guy in all black trailing about ten feet behind us—the body man, I assumed.
Constance caught me looking. “I know it’s ridiculous, I know I’m not Hillary Clinton—nor do I want to be. But people are unpredictable, you know?”
We went into the bar and sat at a small round table at the back. “Two whiskeys, rocks,” Constance told the security guy, and he nodded and perched on a barstool to wait for the drinks.
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