“So listen,” I said. I put the flash drive on the table. “The kid who’s been calling your office had this on him. It contains thousands and thousands of phone numbers, and I have this feeling that this might be related to Nora Health.”
Constance picked up the flash drive, her eyes narrowing. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know, exactly. But Aiden’s calls to you—he was saying that he had some kind of information that you needed. A warning, right?”
“What, you think warning me about a data breach? Even though the CRM swore up and down yesterday that there’s no way anything happened.”
“Maybe.”
The security guy brought over our drinks and returned to the bar, watching the room in the mirror behind it just like I had at the St. Clair Club. I felt a little bad that he was left out of the fun.
“So you found the kid, then,” Constance said.
“Sort of. He’s in the hospital. Someone beat the shit out of him. And I think he might have been trying to protect this.” I took the flash drive off the table and put it back into my pocket.
“But all that’s on it is phone numbers?”
“I think so.”
“You can’t do much with just a phone number.”
“No, but think about how distressing it was to you that he found your number in the first place. Maybe there’s another file, a companion document that contains names. Put this information on the dark net and who knows what could happen.”
Constance sipped her drink and looked at me like I was a little bit nuts, which was probably true. I added, “Aiden’s still unconscious. So I can’t talk to him about what the hell happened. Without that piece of the puzzle, everything just looks random. But you’re telling me there’s been no data breach at Nora Health.”
“No.”
“And you’d for sure know if there had been.”
“Yes.”
“On pain of death?”
“That’s a little morbid, but sure.” She lifted two fingers. “Girl Scout’s honor.”
“The Girl Scouts do three fingers.”
She flicked up a third finger. “I was a terrible Girl Scout. I stapled my badges to my sash thing because I hated threading needles. Still do.”
“Same. Not the staples, but the sewing thing. Hey, can I ask you a question?”
“Hit me.”
“I have a friend—she’s obsessed with you. In a good way. She’s young and has never been excited about voting for anyone before.”
Constance’s eyes lit up. “Aw, yeah, that’s the stuff I love hearing about.”
“So this question is from her.”
“Okay.”
“She wanted to know if you’re straight.”
She laughed. “What on earth?”
“Well?”
“Your friend wants to know, or you want to know?”
“Would the answer be the same?”
She rattled the melting ice in her glass, eyes still bright. “You are a fascinating person, Roxane Weary.”
“Just nosy and slightly reckless.”
“Yes, I can tell. So who exactly wants to know if I’m straight?”
Tension fissured across the air between us. Along the edge of her dress’s scooped neckline, her collarbones moved up and down as she took in shallow breaths, and I was suddenly aware of how little space was between my hand and her knee. It would be easy to close that gap. I suddenly realized that I wanted to, but I didn’t. “My friend.”
Constance arched her neck and swallowed carefully. “I’m really sorry I can’t help you more. With the data breach. Attempted data breach.”
She didn’t seem to be upset by the question, but the tone of the conversation had somehow changed—it had ended. I finished my drink and stood up. “Well, good luck at your event tomorrow. Raise those funds.”
Constance lifted her glass and nodded.
CHAPTER 34
I woke up to Nadine’s thin silhouette sitting at the table, drinking coffee in the near dark. In my half-awake, fully hungover state, there was something ghostly about her and for a second I was afraid that she was dead, or I was. Then I realized she was cast in the diffuse glow of my phone on the table in front of her.
“What time is it?” I murmured.
“Four thirty. Someone keeps calling.”
I dragged myself to my feet. At first I didn’t remember choosing to come here last night instead of home. Then it all came back at once—Tom, Blair Andover, Orville, Catherine. Fuck. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
Nadine sipped her coffee. “What if it’s the hospital?”
“That’s exactly why you should’ve woken me up.”
I grabbed the phone off the table and realized she was crying.
Scrolling through the phone, I saw I’d missed three calls from the same local number.
When I called the number back, I realized she was right.
* * *
There was good news and bad news. The good news was that Aiden had been awake and aware of his surroundings. The bad news was that he freaked out, hence the phone calls. By the time we got to the hospital, he’d been sedated and was unconscious again.
“I should have been here,” Nadine kept saying. “In the waiting room, if not right there beside him. I think I should stay from now on. Can you take Katie back to the motel?”
“Sure.” I glanced down at her daughter, who was sleeping awkwardly on a chair in the small waiting area, and terror seized my heart. It was one thing to be alone with this child when her mother was just in the next room, but quite another to be entirely responsible for her care. But it struck me as a good sign that Nadine was willing to be on her own here at the hospital. Nationwide Children’s had good security; each unit had its own access code set by the parent, meaning no one but Nadine or the medical staff would be able to get in. “You’ll call me when he wakes up? Or if you need anything, anything at all?”
She nodded, then surprised me by giving me a quick hug. “Thank you for everything.”
Katie and I walked out to my car in silence. She was clutching a ratty stuffed orca whose name was Lynna. I opened the passenger-side door for her and she rolled her eyes at me.
“I’m too small to sit in the front seat. Do you want the airbag to decapitate me?”
She climbed in behind me instead.
“Why do I have to go with you?”
I navigated the Range Rover through the maze of the parking garage. “Your mom wants to stay with your brother.”
“But why can’t I stay with her too?”
“Like you said, you’re too small. They don’t allow kids under twelve to visit.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Hey, I don’t make the rules.”
“Where are we going?”
“Back to the motel.”
“I don’t like it there. It smells like cigarillos.”
I laughed. “What do you know about cigarillos?”
“I know they stink. Can we go to your house?”
“No.”
“Why?”
The city streets at this hour were empty. I rubbed my eyes at the traffic signal at Broad and Washington and held back a yawn. “It’s not kid-friendly there.”
“I don’t think that stinky motel is kid-friendly either. I heard people doing it through the wall.”
“Doing what— Oh,” I said. “Um, they were probably just watching TV.”
“They were doing it. TV doesn’t sound like that. Unless it’s the sex kind. But even that sounds different. My dad used to watch porns in our basement. So I know.”
I looked at her in the rearview mirror. “I’m really sorry you had to hear that, Katie.”
She had moved on already. “Do you have a husband?”
“No.”
“What about your dad?”
“He died.”
“My dad died too.”
“I know.”
“What happened to your dad?”
“He was a policeman. He got hurt while he was working and he died.”
“Wow.”
We sat in silence at Broad and Gould, two fatherless girls in the middle of the night.
“What about your mom?”
“What about her?”
“Can we go to her house?”
“What? No, she’s sleeping.”
“I bet she isn’t. Moms always get up early.”
“No.”
“I don’t want to go back to that place. Please?”
I looked at her in the mirror again. She was hamming it up now, leaning forward with her hands clasped. “Pleeeeease.”
I sighed. “If you promise not to tell Nadine I almost let you get decapitated.”
* * *
The little girl was right; my mother was awake. She answered the door in a long cotton housecoat printed with a vaguely global pattern of golds and reds and blues. “This is Katie,” I said. “Katie, this is my mom, Genevieve.”
“Hi Katie, it’s nice to meet you.”
“Do you have any blueberry muffins? Because I love to have blueberry muffins for breakfast.”
“I bet I could make some, honey, come on in.”
My mother went into the kitchen and Katie curled up on the sofa and immediately fell asleep.
“I’m really sorry about this,” I said to my mother. “I put her and her mom up at a motel and she told me she heard people having sex through the wall and I just, I don’t know.”
“Sit.” She pointed at the small dining room table. “I’ll make some tea to go with these muffins.”
“You don’t have to make muffins. She’s fast asleep already.”
“From what I recall, she’s not the only little girl who likes a blueberry muffin for breakfast, right?”
She had her back to me, bustling around the kitchen in that efficient, soundless way she always had. I slouched down in my chair and looked up at the ceiling, at the peaks of its smudged-paint texture. The ceiling fan above the table that hadn’t worked in twenty years. In so many ways the house was stuck in time. I felt like a teenager whenever I came here, both defiant and also not in control of my own life.
Was adult me really any different?
The microwave dinged and my mother retrieved a mug of hot water. “I have Lipton or Tetley.”
“Surprise me.”
She freed a tea bag from its little paper sleeve and dunked it in the water. “Andrew told me you already got a surprise this week.”
I looked up. My mother’s face was open, honest. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, and her hair, icy blond and usually hair-sprayed into an impenetrable shield, was soft and fluffy and held back from her face with a wide headband. She added, “He said you were pretty upset.”
The tea wasn’t done steeping yet, but I took a long sip for something to do. “We don’t have to talk about this right now.”
“If not now, when? I never have you in this house, alone, all sleepy like this, with your walls down.”
“Walls?”
My mother went at the muffin batter with a wooden spoon and kept her eyes on mine.
I said, “We don’t have to talk about it ever. Clearly you didn’t want me to know. So let’s pretend I don’t.”
“Is that really what you want?”
“What I want is to not bring up something that’s painful or embarrassing.”
“Embarrassing? Roxie, I’m not embarrassed. Your father, he’s the one who maybe could’ve been embarrassed. He wasn’t, though. Nothing he did could ever embarrass him.”
It was the harshest thing I’d ever heard my mother say about Frank. “Why did you stay?”
She began pouring the batter into an old muffin pan. “I had what I wanted. My three children.”
“But you could have found someone else. A better husband. You could have found a Rafe twenty years ago.”
“I loved your father. Screwups and all. I had what I wanted, and I was not about to give it up. I grew up without a father. I didn’t want that for you and your brothers.”
“But he could be so awful sometimes,” I whispered.
“He was who he was.”
“He got worse as time went on. Meaner. Drunker.”
“I loved your father,” she said again. “Is that so hard to believe?”
I supposed it wasn’t. I’d played Catherine’s little games for years, always willing to overlook the problems because when it was good, it was really good, and each time it got bad, the good times erased my memory.
“For a long time I decided that it had nothing to do with me,” she continued. “His other women, this child.”
“Did he spend time with them?”
“No. He provided, financially. I made him do that. And he saw them occasionally, Lenore and Blair.”
The way she said the names, they sounded so normal.
“Once or twice a year. Lenore had a whole life of her own.”
“Did you know her?”
My mother nodded. “I met her. Back when your father worked in narcotics. She was there too.”
“Did you ever meet the girl?”
“No.”
“Did you ever want to?”
“No, goodness, no. I can see why you kids might want to connect with her now—I never really thought about that before, but now that Frank’s gone, she’s pretty much the only part of his family you have left.”
“I don’t want to connect with her.”
“Then don’t.”
“But,” I said, and then I wasn’t sure what else to say.
My mother slid the muffin pan into the oven and set the timer. “I’m not saying that I didn’t make mistakes. With your father. With you kids, especially with you, honey. I know he made things hard for you. But you don’t have to let any of it make things hard for you now.”
She sat down at the table with me, in the place where my father used to sit, and she reached out and smoothed my hair away from my face. “You look so tired.”
I closed my eyes. I was tired, but lack of sleep had nothing to do with it. “Yeah.”
“Why don’t you go lie down upstairs for a little bit? While it’s quiet—your brothers are coming over later to work on the sidewalk for me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course. I can handle a single sleeping child.”
* * *
I slept like the dead in my childhood bedroom and woke up to my phone vibrating against my hipbone. “He’s been in and out,” Nadine said in a voice thick with tears. “He’s very agitated. He keeps saying something about a can.”
“A can?”
“Yes, I don’t know what it means.”
I had an idea about that. “Constance Can.”
“What?”
“I’ll be right over.” I sat up and looked through the blinds on the window next to the bed; outside, there was full daylight. “I’m at my mother’s house with Katie. Do you want me to bring her, or can she stay here?”
“How is she?”
I went halfway down the steps and found Katie and my mother in front of the television, watching The Little Mermaid with rapt attention.
“I think she’ll have a better time here than sitting in a hospital waiting room.”
“Please thank your mother for me.”
I told her I would.
In the bathroom I splashed cold water on my face and combed my hair with my fingers and thought about why Aiden would be agitated about Constance right now. Why he would have a list of phone numbers on a flash drive that he must’ve felt duty-bound to protect. I called her but—unsurprisingly—she didn’t answer.
I found a bottle of Listerine under the sink, and while I was swishing, I pulled up Constance Archer-Nash’s website to see about her event today. Columbus Young Democrats, 12pm, Columbus Athenaeum.
* * *
“It’s a two-thousand-dollar-a-head fundraiser,” Mariella Zervos said to me on the phone. “Not a public event. And besides, she has her o
wn security detail. I am not worried about this.”
I was stuck on 71, which was a midday parking lot. “But isn’t this exactly the kind of thing you’re supposed to worry about?”
“The threat being the delirious mutterings of a kid who was recently arrested for, what was it again? Assaulting a police officer?”
I inhaled slowly and shot lasers from my eyes into the rear window of the car in front of me, though they were in the same boat as I was. At least as far as the traffic jam was concerned. “Disorderly conduct,” I said, “but you’re not listening to me. What if all of this is connected? The explosion at my office building, the Keystone Fellowship. The pastor, Joel Creedle, has tried to make a scene at her events before. There’s a video of it on YouTube if you need proof. And it’s not out of the question that right-to-lifers would resort to murder. It’s happened before.”
It was clear that Zervos had stopped listening as soon as I said YouTube. “I know you don’t think much of hunches, but maybe you could make an exception to avoid blowing up a few hundred people?”
“Would you please stop saying that?”
“Would you please listen to me? I know you aren’t one for wild hunches but this could be serious.”
“The Athenaeum is secure. You can count on it. I’m looking at this list you sent me right now and it just looks like a bunch of phone numbers.”
I resisted the urge to punch the steering wheel. “Yes, and I think that’s exactly what I wrote in my email. I know it’s a list of phone numbers. But why would Aiden be so desperate to protect it?”
“That’s your extrapolation, that he was trying to protect it. For all you know, he’s the one who was planning something, and it’s our good luck that you have the list, not him.” Then she cleared her throat. “I’ll look into it, okay?”
“When, on the first of never?”
“Funny,” Zervos said.
“I hope you’re right and I’m not.”
I didn’t think she found me funny at all.
* * *
Traffic crept past North Broadway before stopping dead just north of Weber Road. I turned on the radio seeking an update; it advised that traffic was all snarled up on 71 owing to an overturned semi and a confluence of big afternoon events around the city. The car in front of me was a ratty silver Tercel with a Columbus State parking pass that had expired in 2012. After a while of not moving, the owner got out and sat on the stubby little trunk and kept looking up at me, which I did not appreciate. But what could anybody do about anything? I plugged my phone into the charger and called Constance again, and this time she answered.
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