I reached down and picked up another photograph off the floor. This one was of a slender blond girl I didn’t recognize. In the photograph, she was naked, and she stared at whoever was taking the picture with a steady, unabashed gaze. Her body was marked up all over with red permanent marker with derogatory words and descriptions. Parts of her were circled and labeled: her nose, which someone had marked “beak,” her stomach, which someone had marked “fat.” The time stamp for this one was months earlier: September 22, 1990.
Through the wall, I heard the phone ring in the front office and the receptionist answer.
“Hindsberg and Thornton Investigations,” she said. “Oh, hello, Peter. How was your flight? Hmm. Okay, let me see if I can find it for you. Let me transfer the call. One moment.”
Next to me, the phone on Peter Hindsberg’s desk rang and I jumped.
I heard Greyson’s voice through the wall next, loud and panicky, as if he were trying to alert me to the fact that I was about to be discovered.
“Um, real quick, can you show me where your restroom is?” he asked. “I really have to go. Like, I HAVE TO GO NOW. Sorry, it’s these burritos I had this morning. They didn’t really agree with me.”
Shit. I closed the cabinet drawer and dropped to my knees, trying to gather all of the photos that had spilled and put them back in the file.
“Oh, is this it?” Greyson asked. “Okay, thanks. Um, the toilet paper looks a little low. Do you have more in the back or something? Sorry, just trying to be prepared—I have this condition and things can get—oh, you keep them here, right under the sink? Jeez, that’s a lot of toilet paper. I bet you have a Costco membership. You know, I’ve been thinking about getting one of those, but I can’t decide between the standard and executive memberships. Which one do you have?”
I had just enough time to slam the folder shut and climb underneath Peter Hindsberg’s desk before I heard the door open. I snapped off the flashlight app on my phone and held my breath.
“Standard, I think,” the receptionist said, flipping on the office light.
“Standard, eh?” Greyson said. I could tell by the sound of his voice that he had come closer and was standing in the doorway. He hesitated a moment, probably sweeping the room with his eyes, looking for me.
I saw the receptionist from the waist down as she walked around behind the desk and I scooted farther back into the desk’s kneehole hugging my legs to my chest.
“I’m sorry, I have to get this,” the receptionist said.
“Sure, sure,” Greyson said. “I’ll, uh, just go take care of my business then.”
I heard the bathroom door across the hall close and then the receptionist leaned over the desk and picked up the phone.
“Now, where did you say you’d left it?” she asked.
I swallowed and tried to quiet the sound of my breathing. I was painfully aware of the loud thumping of my heart in my ears, of the sound my breath made as I drew it in through my nose and then let it out again. Was my breathing always this loud?
Then, I saw it—a stray photograph. It was about an inch from the toe of the receptionist’s right shoe. If she looked down and saw it, my cover was blown. Maybe I could lean forward very slowly, reach out my hand, and grab it before she could see it. But what if that drew her attention?
“Sure, I’ll get this out today,” she said. “Take care. And tell Nancy to use sunscreen this time. We don’t want a repeat of the Florida Keys trip.”
The receptionist laughed and set the phone down and I sat very still, staring at that photograph. I willed her not to look down. Don’t see it, don’t see it, don’t see it, I thought.
She seemed to stand there for an immeasurably long moment, and then she moved away from the desk. The light went out and I heard the door close behind her. I exhaled loudly and grabbed for the lone photo.
I tucked the file against my chest underneath my jacket and stuffed the photos in my front jacket pockets. I slid out of the office quickly and shut the door behind me quietly. The bathroom door across the hall was still closed and I could see the light on underneath.
As I came around the receptionist’s desk, I kept my hands stuffed in my jacket pockets, praying she wouldn’t notice the bulge there.
“Are you all set, dear?” she asked me, looking up. “Do I need to set a follow-up appointment with Mr. Hindsberg when he gets back?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I got everything I needed.”
“All right then,” she said. “Your friend just went to the restroom.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice, seeming very concerned. “Are you sure he’s quite all right?” she asked.
Before I could answer, I heard the toilet flush and the bathroom door flew open. Greyson came out. He looked relieved when he saw me.
“We should go,” Greyson said. “I’m not feeling well.”
He grabbed me by the arm and steered me toward the door.
“I wouldn’t go in there,” Greyson told the receptionist over his shoulder. “Give it at least half an hour, to be safe.”
And we made a beeline for his car, leaving the startled receptionist in our wake.
Twenty-Four
Alistair Calloway
Summer 1997
Margot opened the door on the first knock. She was wearing sweatpants, her hair up in a loose bun. She had her reading glasses on, which I took to mean she was studying, but when I walked into the apartment, I saw the seating arrangements for our wedding scattered across the kitchen table, not textbooks.
“I just made some tea, do you want some?” Margot asked as she padded into the kitchen.
I had my hands in my pockets, but that was a sign of weakness, of nerves. So, I took them out, folded them across my chest. No, that wasn’t natural either. Shit, what should I do with my hands?
“Alistair?” Margot called from the kitchen.
“Hmm?”
“Tea?” she asked again.
“No, thanks,” I said.
Get it together, I told myself. I just had to say it, straight and simple, and get it over with: Grace and I were married.
We had married at a courthouse outside New Haven on Friday. The judge and his secretary were the only witnesses to our vows. Grace wore a pale yellow sundress and flip-flops, her hair loose around her shoulders.
Afterward, we sat on the empty, moonlit beach and went swimming in the ocean in the clothes we had on. Back in our hotel room, we laid our wet clothes on the heater to dry and climbed under the bedsheets to get warm. I tented the covers over us and kissed my wife. Grace’s hair was still wet and it clung to her forehead and the sides of her face, but as she stared up at me through her lashes, I thought she had never looked more beautiful. I knew I would remember that moment until the day I died.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Margot said as she came out of the kitchen with her mug of tea. She sat at the table. “These seating charts are giving me a migraine.”
Now, I had to do it now.
I sat down next to her.
“Margot,” I said, “I need to tell you something.”
She blew on her tea to cool it and took a sip. “What’s up?” she asked.
“For the past few weeks, I’ve been seeing someone else,” I said.
“You’ve been seeing someone else?” Margot repeated slowly, as if she wasn’t sure she had heard me right.
“Yes.”
“Does this person have a name?” Margot asked.
I sighed and didn’t answer.
“Do I know her?” Margot asked. “Please tell me you’re not cliché enough to be fucking your secretary.”
“It’s Grace Fairchild,” I said reluctantly.
“Who?” Margot asked.
Margot’s mind was like a steel trap—she remembered dates and names easily, when she felt they were important enough to remember. But Grace clearly had not made an impression.
“You’ve met her several times,” I said. “She used to date Teddy.”
�
�You’re fucking your brother’s ex-girlfriend?” Margot laughed.
I didn’t respond.
“That little Virgin Mary?” Margot asked. “Well, I guess she was a little more Mary Magdalene than I gave her credit for.”
“I ran into Grace at this gallery I attended a couple months ago,” I said. “Neither of us meant for this to happen, but it did.”
I didn’t mention that Grace was pregnant. I didn’t know whether that would infuriate Margot more, or if it would help her see how impossible it was for us to be together.
“So do you feel better now?” Margot asked.
“Feel better?” I asked.
“Now that you’ve gotten your little indiscretion off your conscience?” she said. “Can we move on?” She took a sip of her tea. “Don’t expect me to be so cavalier about future infidelities,” she said. “But I get it. You’re under a lot of pressure with the wedding coming up, and you needed to let off some steam. Okay, fine. But you won’t always get a free pass.”
She looked down at the seating arrangements spread out on the table in front of her.
“I could really use your help with some of this,” she said. “Was it your aunt Veronica who isn’t speaking to your second cousin Harold? Your mother mentioned there was some bad blood on that side of the family. So, I was thinking about putting Cousin Harold at table eight with your family from Cambridge, and sticking Aunt Veronica at table eleven with the Bridgeport cousins.”
“Margot,” I said softly. Shit, this was going to be harder than I’d thought. “There’s not going to be a wedding,” I said.
She looked up at me. I had her attention now.
“What do you mean there’s not going to be a wedding?” she asked.
“I’m not telling you about me and Grace because it’s over,” I said. “I’m telling you, because, well, the wedding’s off.”
“I don’t understand,” Margot said.
“Grace and I, we got married this past weekend,” I said. “I wasn’t golfing all weekend with my father like I told you. I was with Grace.”
Margot didn’t say anything. She stared down at her mug of tea.
I was quiet for a moment. I didn’t know what to say, sitting there with Margot amid all the reminders of our upcoming nuptials.
Margot bit her lip and subconsciously fingered the band of her engagement ring like she often did when she was deep in thought. My eye caught on my grandmother’s canary diamond on her finger. That was going to be the other difficult part about all of this. I knew it was the gentlemanly thing to let the jilted fiancée keep the ring in the event the groom called off the wedding. But the ring was a family heirloom.
“You don’t need to worry about anything,” I said after a while. “I’ll take care of the cancellations—the venues, the guests, all of it. You don’t need to do anything.”
“That’s noble of you,” Margot said dryly.
“But,” I said. Christ, this was hard. “Well, there is one thing.”
“What?” Margot asked. “What could you possibly want from me?”
I let out my breath slowly.
“I need my grandmother’s ring back,” I said.
What made this a hundred times worse was that the broken engagement would change Margot’s financial prospects drastically. It would have made me feel the tiniest bit better if, at the very least, I could have left her with something that would ease that burden.
“I could get it appraised,” I said. “I can give you whatever the value is.”
Margot scoffed. “I don’t need your handouts, Alistair,” she said, prideful. She twisted the ring off her finger and set it on the table between us. “You and I, it was never about the money.”
I let the ring and that lie sit there between us, and I felt the weight of both. Margot and I had never been about the money exactly. I knew it had been more than that. It had been about my family, the Calloway name, which I wore like a brand. It had been about our shared ambitions and what we could accomplish together. But the money was always a part of it.
Margot had always wanted to be a surgeon, an expensive and arduous career choice in itself, but she didn’t plan to stop there. Margot dreamed of opening a center for surgical discovery and research—a facility dedicated to developing and testing new surgical tools and techniques, a place that would bring surgeons, engineers, and innovators together. But a research center like that didn’t happen without a large financial backer, and without a name like mine behind it.
We sat there in silence for a while. There was no crying, no tears, no tantrums, no throwing of hard objects, no vague, irrational threats. But this was Margot—cold, analytical Margot. Of course my life-altering declaration was met with a steely calm.
“Why her?” Margot asked. She had that look on her face, like she was trying to figure out some complicated algorithm. “Why her and not me?”
“Margot—”
“No, I just want to understand,” Margot said. She ran her finger around the edge of her mug. “She’s pretty, sure, but marrying someone for their looks is a poor investment. So it’s got to be something else . . . but what, exactly?”
I sighed. I picked at my loose thumbnail.
“She’s working-class,” Margot went on. “She’s poorly educated, she doesn’t have an ambitious bone in her body, and she’s soft. By every calculation, she’s a poor match for you.”
I knew Margot was wrong; Grace was so much more than that. But sitting there and extolling Grace’s virtues wouldn’t help matters.
“You can’t always rationalize these things,” I said. “You love who you love.”
When I looked up at Margot, she had that look of deep disappointment on her face, one I had seen there once before. It was something like disgust mixed with pity, and I couldn’t help but look away. I had that feeling in the pit of my stomach—a deep, burning, gut-twisting sense of shame.
“Love,” Margot said. “You’re throwing away what we could have had for love?”
I didn’t answer her.
“You’re a fool,” Margot said. “Love is only ever the first act. It doesn’t last forever. And what comes after?”
I reached out and pocketed the ring. “I wish you all the best, Margot,” I said. “I really do.”
As I was leaving, she called my name and I looked back, my hand on the door.
“You and I—we could have built something together,” Margot said. “But you and Grace, you’ll only ruin each other. You’ll see. When it’s too late to do anything about it, you’ll look back at this moment and know that I was right. Every great tragedy started with love.”
Twenty-Five
Charlie Calloway
2017
I snuggled deeper into my red bomber jacket and tried to keep up with Dalton. What to him was a leisurely stride was a brisk pace to me. I had even worn heeled boots to try to alleviate the height difference.
Dalton put his arm around me and leaned into my ear. “Want a coffee?” he asked.
I nodded and we ducked into a crowded coffee shop in the West Village and waited in line. Both of us had been granted overnight passes to attend David Tower’s exhibit and then spend the night with our parents in the city and drive back to Knollwood the following day. We’d left campus early this morning. Dalton drove. We’d stopped briefly outside Hartford for coffee and breakfast sandwiches. It was kind of nice to get away from campus for a while, and I was enjoying being in Dalton’s company. It was a pleasant distraction from my current preoccupation, which lately included a lot of obsessing over the photographs I had found in my mother’s case file.
What were those photographs? Where did they come from? What did they mean? And most importantly, what were they doing there? I had examined the pages torn from a yellow legal pad that had also been in the file, but they contained mostly illegible chicken scratch. I could make out a date at the top: July 14, 2007. That was three weeks before my mother went missing. The only other words I could make out with any certaint
y were “Knollwood” and “Jake Griffin.”
So, three weeks before my mother went missing, Peter Hindsberg had been helping my mother with a case. A case that somehow involved her dead ex-boyfriend who also happened to go to my school with my father.
And then there were those other photographs—the ones Uncle Hank had found underneath the floorboards of my parents’ bedroom at the house on Langely Lake. The photographs of Peter Hindsberg and my mother, and the note that accompanied them: I KNOW. And that one word on the back of my picture: STOP.
Had someone found out about whatever case my mother and Peter Hindsberg had been working on together? If they had found out, and they were threatened enough to send those messages to my mother, what else might they have been threatened enough to do? Maybe my mother had gotten scared and run off. Or maybe she hadn’t had the chance.
A shiver ran down my spine and I shook my head to clear it.
Dalton offered his credit card to the barista and insisted he pay for my coffee. I opened my mouth to object, but Dalton gave me a look that meant he wasn’t going to budge.
“Thank you,” I said instead.
“My pleasure,” he said, smiling.
Anyone looking at us would have thought we were a couple. That Dalton was just a nice, normal boy (which he was) and I was just a nice, normal girl (which I wasn’t).
Ever since we had kissed in Dalton’s room, I had noted a subtle change in the way he treated me. He had become protective, possessive in a way. The boys had started to sit with me, Drew, Yael, and Stevie at dinner. That had rarely happened before, but suddenly, it was like we were part of the group. Sometimes, Dalton would sit next to me, and he’d lean back in his seat and drape his arm casually over the back of my chair. Like we were together. Once, Walker Trefont had made some crack about my lack of coordination on the volleyball court, and Dalton had quickly quipped back about Trefont’s sorry blocking skills in lacrosse. Trefont went red in the ears and didn’t say anything for the rest of the meal. It was like Dalton constantly had my back.
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