Influenced

by Eva Robinson

  Ciara snatched her paper off the desk, staring at it. “A freaking cat sweater.”

  Thirty-Seven

  “Moonlight Sonata” played in the background, the sound coming from the living room. Something about that song scratched at the walls of Hannah’s memory.

  But it was hard to hear the music now, because she heard the high-pitched screeching in her mind that meant she was losing control.

  Guilt was pulling her under.

  “Why did you take a picture of me?” Hannah asked. “I don’t want people to know we came back here. If we’re going to tell the police about dragging Peter to the pond, let’s tell them directly. And let’s get some clarity. I don’t even know what happened.”

  Rowan clutched her phone tight. “Maybe I’ll post it. Maybe not. Maybe you should tell me everything now, starting with Tom. Did you push him because he rejected you?”

  “No.” When she closed her eyes, Hannah remembered standing next to Tom. She had been on the edge of the bridge, overlooking the Charles. She wasn’t sure why she’d lied at the time and said he’d fallen by accident. She supposed she wanted to put some distance between herself and what had really happened. “Why are we talking about him?”

  “I want to know if you’re a killer.”

  Hannah opened her eyes again. “We were at the winter formal at the Charles Hotel. Tom was trashed. You were trashed. I was at the dance by myself, since I had no other options. I thought I’d talk to Tom about the books we both liked. I’d spent the week reading all the Herman Hesse I could find and coming up with these brilliant ideas about Gnosticism and Jung… In case you’re wondering, yes, I realize how stupid this sounds at this point. But I was seventeen.

  “Anyway, he had no interest in talking to me, because he was watching you the whole night. He didn’t want to talk about Herman Hesse. He wanted the beautiful girl he was in love with. Then he left, kind of stumbled out without even putting on his jacket. So I followed him to see if he was okay.”

  “You thought it was your chance to make a move.”

  A little blossom of guilt bloomed. She should have called someone for help—his parents, the police. She’d been hoping for a romantic moment. “Yes. Maybe I hoped it was my chance. So I followed him, all through Harvard Square. And I finally caught up with him by the bridge over the Charles. I started telling him all my thoughts about the books I’d read. I was trying to tell him about the book Demian, and he just kept yelling, ‘What are you talking about, Hannah?’ And I thought he would see that I was the one for him. But I wasn’t. Why are we talking about this now?”

  Rowan took a step closer, her eyes gleaming in the moonlight. “Because someone is threatening to kill me, and I want to know if it’s you.”

  “Of course it’s not me! And I didn’t push Tom. He climbed up on that stone railing, and I climbed up next to him. I told him he didn’t need to be heartbroken, because he could have me. Again, I realize how dumb this sounds now. But he was so drunk, and I did it all so wrong.” The old pain slid through Hannah’s bones. “He’d never been mean to me before. But he just kind of laughed, and he said, ‘I’d rather die than be with you.’ He didn’t fall. He jumped. He was that desperate to get away from me. Well, that’s what I thought for a long time, that it was all about me. But he was also a drunk and impulsive teenager who wasn’t able to think through what he was doing. I definitely could have handled it better. But I didn’t push him. And I didn’t take your laptop, or Arabella’s.”

  The secret wasn’t that she pushed him. It was that she was repulsive.

  Rowan stared at Hannah, arms folded. Something like guilt shone in her eyes, wet with tears. “And that was it? The only reason the police were focused on you was because of those rumors?”

  “That, and someone turned on Arabella’s laptop in my apartment building after it was stolen. But it wasn’t me! The only criminal thing I’ve done is the bullshit test reports I’ve been writing.”

  “That’s not criminal. It’s normal.”

  “Well, Peter was right. I never should have been a part of it.”

  “Don’t worry about that right now.” Rowan looked over her shoulder. “Hannah, I’m getting death threats, and I have no idea who they’re coming from. They’re saying if I expose the truth, they’ll kill me. I’ll be next, like Peter. But I need to let it out, because they’ll find out anyway. There are so many people watching me. And I’m rotting. I’m decaying. Do you understand?”

  Hannah stared. “You’re what?”

  “I’m decaying. It’s like I’m already dead. There are these vines in my head, and they’re festering. They’re rotten and they’ve eaten me alive. And the only way I can get rid of them is to tell everyone the truth about everything. And then… then I can be alive again.”

  Rowan seemed to be having a full-blown psychotic episode, and a jolt of panic shot through Hannah. “Rowan, when was the last time you slept?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  The glass door slid open behind Hannah, and she turned.

  A pit opened in her stomach as she took in Luke and Stella standing there, so close to each other, arm in arm.

  She felt as if the earth were tilting. That was where she’d heard “Moonlight Sonata” recently.

  In the background of her call with Luke.

  Thirty-Eight

  Michael pulled up Luke Kerr’s website, searching for his publication history. Luke was directly tied to Arabella, and maybe to whichever woman had stolen her laptop. But for some reason, their publications weren’t listed on his site. When he googled their names together, he found only a cached website listed.

  He stole a glance at Ciara, who was frowning at the screen and muttering, “Stella Campbell,” to herself. In the warm office lights, her hair was a deep, fiery bronze.

  She nodded at the screen. “I have Stella’s class schedule up here. And she’s not teaching at the times Red Sox Lady went into the building. That leaves her schedule open for theft and poisoning. What are you finding about Luke?”

  “He deleted their paper from his website.” Michael rubbed his eyes. “It doesn’t look like it ever went through the full publication process. It was called A Foucauldian Discourse Analytic Approach to Constructions of Morality and Discipline in the American Education System. Preprint only.”

  “What’s it about?” asked Ciara.

  “I honestly have no idea. But the interesting thing is that it was deleted. Hang on.” He started searching other cached versions of Luke’s site, finding that each one had different lists of publications. “Okay. I see he has something like twelve first-author papers per year. He’s churning them out, then changing the papers listed on his site.”

  “Is that number unusual?”

  “He’s writing a lot. Most professors might publish maybe once a year? His are all going into the same journal that publishes preprints. It means they haven’t gone through the peer review process. But why is he deleting them? And why not finish the process? I mean, it’s bizarre. One out of ten get published in peer-reviewed journals.”

  He searched for another of the preprints: A Discourse Analytic Comparison of the Moral Rationale of the Iraq War in the U.S. and U.K.

  But when he navigated to the journal itself, he found it had been pulled down also. “This journal he uses—PsychJ—allows these early drafts to get published. Luke seems to be cranking out papers, putting them up for preprint, then deleting them again. I have no idea why.”

  “Arabella thought she’d uncovered a conspiracy. Adam thought she was paranoid. But what if she had?”

  “Yes, but what kind of conspiracy is this? What would he get out of it? It’s not helping his career.”

  “Who else is on the papers?”

  Michael scanned the names on the paper he’d written with Arabella and plucked one of them at random. Iona Schaeffer—an uncommon enough name that he’d be able to find the right result, fast. Immediately, The Musket came up, the Lexington H
igh School newspaper. Iona Schaeffer was currently listed as the managing editor. “He published with someone who’s a junior in high school. Doesn’t that seem strange?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Michael swallowed hard, then started entering one name after another from the papers, growing increasingly baffled. “Hang on. Apart from Arabella, they’re all high school students. This is completely bizarre. What does a high school student have to offer? Why not grad students?”

  Ciara’s eyes widened. “Oh!”

  “What?”

  She leaned over him, pointing at the screen. “That’s an easy way to make money, isn’t it? For a high school student, that’s their ticket into the Ivy League. When half your graduating year is in AP classes, when everyone’s paid for SAT prep to inflate their scores, what are you going to do to stand out? You spend your summer vacation writing papers with a professor at Harvard. You put that in your college application essay, and boom. Suddenly you stand out.”

  “How much money do you think he could get for that?”

  Ciara turned back to her own laptop, hammering away on the keyboard. “Five thousand? No, ten thousand, probably. Per student. And I’m sure he wrote them recommendations, as well. I bet it’s a really, really good racket.”

  Michael leaned back in his chair. “You saw what Stella’s place looked like. It’s a bloody mansion, right on the pond.”

  “I’m already searching for her publication history.” Ciara blew a ginger curl out of her eyes and leaned closer to her monitor. “Holy shit. Same. Old cached websites with tons of these preprints that have been deleted.”

  “Enough that they might kill to cover it up?”

  “Think about it. If this came out, their lives would be ruined. Their careers over. It’s fraud, isn’t it? These papers were never meant to be legitimate. People are buying their way into the prestigious universities. It could mean jail time. And I have a feeling it’s just the tip of the iceberg. So, yes, they might kill to cover it up. They have too much to lose.”

  Thirty-Nine

  Hannah stared at Stella. Her blond hair was braided with wildflowers again. Barefoot, she was wearing one of Luke’s cat sweaters over a pair of cut-off shorts. She stood arm in arm with Luke, her expression serene.

  This was who Luke was dating? Why hadn’t he said anything?

  Stella pouted at Rowan. “You’re being much too loud, my love. Should we move inside? We all need to be discreet. We all know that, right?”

  Hannah’s mouth opened and closed, and she pulled her gaze from Stella to Luke. But he wasn’t even looking at her. “Sorry. What? Luke? What are you doing here?”

  His eyebrows rose. “What do you mean? I told you about Stella.”

  She shook her head. “No, you didn’t.”

  He took a step closer to her, then squeezed her shoulder. “You might’ve been very tired when I told you.”

  As if she’d forget. “But… why are you here?”

  “I asked him to come.” Stella was rubbing his bicep now, leaning her head against his. “He always helps me think clearly when there’s something difficult going on. And after your brownie incident, I thought we could use his help.”

  “Where’s Nora?” asked Hannah, her panic rising. Something was very wrong here. “I thought you were looking after her.”

  Luke held out his hands like he was trying to calm a wild beast. “Hannah, relax. She’s with my mother in Arlington. Everyone take a deep breath. Let’s not lose our heads. You’ve been struggling a lot lately, and that’s how all this happened in the first place.”

  “How all what happened?”

  Luke’s eyes shone with sympathy. “You know, the carelessness with the peanut butter. You’ve just been taking on too much.”

  He and Stella were really certain that it was Hannah, weren’t they?

  Hannah couldn’t take a deep breath, couldn’t get enough air. Luke was lying—he’d never mentioned Stella to her before.

  “Okay, I’m taking a deep breath.” Hannah felt tears prick her eyes. “But you know what? I still don’t understand how I passed out that night. Maybe you all get blackout drunk regularly, but I do not. I’ve never blacked out before. Ever. And I woke up, and suddenly I’m being told I killed someone. And you’re all so certain—but he could have eaten anything. And why did no one notice that he was dying, by the way? Why did we all pass out completely like that? It’s strange.”

  Stella shrugged. “It happens to everyone sometimes. And obviously, if you’re as overtired, as you always are, it’s not that unusual.”

  The dismissal of Hannah’s concerns came too fast. Stella wasn’t even curious. She wasn’t curious because she already knew what had happened.

  Hannah looked to Luke, expecting her Luke to come back to her, the one who made sense. But his gaze was locked on Rowan. “We’re all going to take a deep breath, right, Rowan? No one needs to be hasty and post anything online. Because you’ll ruin your life, and ours.”

  “My life is already ruined, genius,” Rowan shot back. “They already think I’m guilty. Their voices live in my head. And they know I’m already rotting.”

  He cocked his head. “Rowan, you’ve had a big shock, I know. And the stress of it has gotten to you. That’s why I don’t want you to make any rash decisions.” He held out his hand. “Why don’t you give me your phone so you don’t do anything impulsive.”

  “Someone took Arabella’s laptop,” said Rowan. “And then Peter’s, then mine. And the two of them are dead already.” She pulled her phone away from him, clinging to it. “It doesn’t matter what I say—people will find out the truth. That I helped hide his body because I was scared it would look bad. It’s always about how I’ll look, isn’t it? But they find out the truth. They’ll find out what I’ve done. They watch every little thing, you know. Every little thing,” she spat.

  Luke held out his hands again, placating. “Is this all about Peter’s bullshit?”

  Hannah gaped at all of them, a pit opening in her stomach. Luke was acting like someone she didn’t quite recognize, and that sharp change of topic had her wondering what the hell he was up to. Peter’s bullshit. Where did that come from?

  Slowly, she started piecing things together. Peter had had some kind of accusations about fraud at Harvard.

  Dread slid over her body like an afternoon shadow.

  The police had said someone turned on Arabella’s laptop at six thirty on a Sunday outside her building—exactly after Luke would have dropped off Nora.

  And why had he really stopped by Stella’s house the night Peter had died? Her mind churned. She’d sensed something was different then, like Luke had wanted something from her. He had held her gaze so long, and she’d thought it was romantic. She’d thought he was trying to draw the conversation out, just to make it last longer.

  Is everyone okay at the party? he’d asked. She’d thought it was a weird question, but had been so pathetically desperate for his approval that she’d convinced herself that he had a crush.

  That long gaze… What if he had been looking to see if she was on her way to passing out already?

  “But it doesn’t happen to everyone sometimes,” said Hannah. “Not everyone passes out. And Luke, you asked me where she lived. When you came here with Nora, you asked me where Stella lived. You were pretending you didn’t know.”

  A line formed between Luke’s eyebrows. “No, I didn’t, Han.”

  That ringing, higher and higher. “It isn’t normal that you never mentioned this.”

  Stella tilted her head, giving her a sympathetic look. “Annie, you really do need to take better care of yourself.”

  “Don’t call me that!” It came out sounding petulant.

  Stella sighed. “Can we all go inside?”

  Ever since the night Peter died, Hannah had been sure it was her fault. They wanted her to think that. Stella had been so insistent that it was the brownies. And what had Luke said the next day? You do seem a little overwrought
, Hannah. You need to be gentle on yourself, though. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes.

  It wasn’t exactly reassuring, because in the nicest possible way, he’d laid the blame on her. He said she’d made a mistake.

  “What did you do, Luke?” asked Hannah. “What was Peter talking about?”

  He looked surprised when he turned to her. “I haven’t done anything different than what you’ve done. Remember that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Families are paying you for extra time on the college boards, aren’t they? You’re contributing to an unequal system. You’re just as much a part of this fraud as I am, so don’t think about getting on your high horse. But we didn’t invent wealth inequality. It’s just how things work.”

  “So, what—you’ve been writing psychological reports like I do? That’s it?”

  He shook his head. “No. But everyone’s trying to get an edge for their family, aren’t they? We’re all trying to get the edge. We live in a screwed-up country. You know that. How do you plan to pay for Nora’s college tuition?”

  Hannah felt like the world had fallen out from under her. “What exactly have you done?”

  Stella rolled her eyes. “Can we skip the drama, please? We’re all in this together. That’s the important thing. We all have something to lose if the truth comes out.”

  “All I did was help other people’s children,” said Luke. “It’s not the crime of the century.”

  But that wasn’t all he’d done, was it?

  Rowan had gone so quiet that Hannah had almost forgotten she was there. And when she turned to look at her friend, she found Rowan typing away on her phone.

  “What are you doing?” asked Hannah. “What are you typing?”

  Rowan stepped forward, gripping her phone like it was her lifeline. “I don’t think you understand. Maybe you all think you can keep your secrets, but I can’t. I’ve already been tried and convicted. I’m already guilty. That’s what they think, isn’t it? And if they think I’m guilty, then I think I’m guilty. And they demand that I confess.”