Catch up on the previous chapters here
Ben thanked God he’d been alone on the job today. These whole house deals were annoying, but it could’ve been worse. It was between owners, so there wasn’t any furniture to negotiate, and nobody living there. Just him and his thoughts, and boy, did he have thoughts. Now that he was home, he figured he should try to get them in some sort of order.
Hillier was Nathan J. Hillier, 56, which meant he’d had his kids in his twenties. Late twenties, maybe, and maybe the boyfriend was his oldest kid, but the boyfriend couldn’t be much older than she was. Right? And this year she’d turn 27. So the math …
He was focused on the math because he couldn’t crack the rest of it.
Nathan J. Hillier didn’t have social media. He supposed that made sense, if you were connected to the FBI and maybe had a special in front of your agent. That wasn’t confirmed. There was just a listing on the website of the people who worked at the Portage location, and Nathan J. Hillier was on it.
Facebook showed him plenty of Hilliers, but even if they were in the area, there was nothing to say they were the right bunch. He couldn’t even be sure that any photos Google pulled for him were the right guy, or related to the right guy, and buying someone’s records could be traced. If Hillier’s own underlings were afraid of him, then Ben couldn’t leave a trail that showed he was trying to track down the names of Hillier’s children. The son—the boyfriend—wouldn’t be on any recent records, anyway, but Ben could at least get a freaking name for the guy and stop calling him the boyfriend like it was an honorable title.
How long had they been together? Maybe it was nothing, and walking in on the dead roommate instigated a trauma bond, which might be ironic but certainly wasn’t funny. Why was she living in an apartment with another woman if she had a boyfriend? That certainly looked like it couldn’t actually be serious, so maybe it was okay.
Except Jack was highly pissed off at Hillier, because Hillier was the reason she was missing and they couldn’t find her. Maybe Hillier was the reason she was dead, but hadn’t they said something about his son being gone, too? So that didn’t make much sense. If Hillier smuggled her away, then she was still alive, and still with his son. The boyfriend.
There couldn’t be a boyfriend. That wasn’t how this worked. Had he ever caught a man’s voice on tape? The problem was he’d never had a chance to go and put a bug in the bedroom—either bedroom—and the one in the main room only recorded when it caught something. She couldn’t have a boyfriend.
It was such a humongous thing to miss. That was why Cal made sense as a character: there was a gap. Who the hell dated someone who didn’t even live in the same city?
He couldn’t have, even if his dad was local. She just hadn’t been gone enough. Most times, if there was something social, it was having friends over for study groups and distraction. She went home—a couple hours away—for breaks, sure, and maybe she saw him then, but looking for a Hillier who used to live back there in 2018-2019 was also likely fruitless. The Internet, after a couple less than useful searches, told Ben that there were maybe 2,500 Hilliers in the United States, so it could have been a lot worse. Plus searching her hometown, or at least a 50-mile radius around it, in that timeline would mean it was still the guy’s last name. If he tried searching right now …
God, he’d never considered this sort of FBI connection. He knew her parents were dead and her only family was the grandmother who’d raised her after the accident. Only child of only children, just her and the grandma against the world, the way it was just him and his mom for most of his childhood. It was something he thought they’d bonded over, but … a boyfriend.
If he made up a new Gmail account and used the free two weeks on Ancestry.com, would it be worth it? Would it give him anything useful? Even a list of possible names for the boyfriend. It was more than nothing, and even if it wasn’t a helpful something …
He swept the notebook off his desk in disgust, unable to look at the sex scene now.
Ben didn’t consider himself unrealistic. He didn’t think she was a virgin, or that she’d never even kissed anyone. He just hadn’t known about the boyfriend.
Standing straight up, he took a deep breath, expanding his chest and holding it for a slow count of five before letting it out again. Then he did it twice more, and it seemed to help. A little. Enough for him to pick up the notebook, close it with all the pages more or less flat, and stick it properly in the drawer. Then he sat down in the chair and took another breath, because brains needed oxygen. He’d think better if he took this time, and maybe it would help get his heart rate back down, too.
Maybe they’d lied.
Okay, good. That was a thought he could get a grip on. Something he could put on his desk and unpack. Maybe they’d lied. Right. About what?
He opened up the desk drawer again and pulled out one of the legal tablets and his favorite pen. It was gel ink and made thick, bold lines that meant he didn’t have to press down too hard and cramp his hand. It also didn’t bleed through the page the way some of the felt-tip pens did, which was a problem if you were eco-conscious and wanted to use both sides of the paper. It was time to make a list, to draw those thoughts out of his head and put them in writing so he could pin them down.
All right, go: the things they told him.
She’s a suspected murderer. He paused, then added a caret and the word serial. Still his pen hesitated, because it wasn’t just her three classmates, was it? He didn’t want to, but he made himself add 5 in parentheses, because they’d latched onto that, too: the bus driver and the annoying neighbor. What had they said? That he was an undiscovered profiler? Shit.
Her boyfriend’s dad’s in the FBI and maybe helped them disappear. That neatly got around the issue of having to write She had a boyfriend while still conveying that information. And it helped, because he could add more: He didn’t do it legally, and the other agents at the office are pissed about it. Good. Oh, and His name’s Nathan J. Hillier.
Hmmm. That was imprecise. Technically they’d only told Ben the man’s last name, so he crossed off Nathan J. It was good to be accurate so he didn’t accidentally introduce falsehoods into his personal narrative.
Okay, what else? Just the facts.
Tyler thinks it’s like Gatsby. Maybe that wasn’t as helpful, because it wasn’t really about her, but it was something to ponder. Dart board/points. It made him think yes, Tyler had a wife—or someone in his life—who was an English teacher, because who thought like that usually? He had to have gotten it somewhere. Cal = Nick, Rosie = Gatsby, unless Cal = Gatsby. So clearly Tyler wasn’t a professional literary critic. After a moment Ben even added Fight Club, because that’s how Tyler explained his own first name, and it had to mean something. Guys didn’t just mention Fight Club unless they felt a certain way about it. Mostly it meant they missed Palahniuk’s point completely.
Jack = most visibly angry at Hillier. Ben was rather proud of that visibly. All of it could be an act, sure, but he figured they were approaching him the same way. Even—especially—if it was an act, there was a purpose behind it. An intention. They wanted him to … what, exactly? That was the point of this list. He needed to figure out what they expected him to do next and then decide whether he was going to do it or not.
The obvious thing was that he was supposed to track down Hillier’s son and get from him to her, but how was he supposed to do that if the freaking FBI agents couldn’t? He wasn’t going to be able to break a closed-court name change, so he carefully set the pen down and controlled his breathing.
They told him she had a boyfriend. That was the big thing. There wasn’t a boyfriend in the book, and they at least suspected he wasn’t telling the entire truth about never having met her and not knowing her. But they figured he hadn’t known enough, and maybe they were right.
They wanted him mad, haring off and …
And.
They thought he could find her. They assumed a connection, and that they could manipulate him into going to her.
Leading them to her.
They wanted her because they thought she was the answer to the unsolved murders. Two of them were known unsolved murders, and one looked like a car crash, but they wanted her for all of them and two more besides. Plus they were mad at Hillier for taking her away and protecting her, so they’d throw everything they could at her. It wouldn’t be fair.
Maybe they’d kill her. She’d disappeared already, and who better than the FBI to get rid of a body? If Ben took off, if he even knew where she was … God, what if they stuck on him through the tour? He wouldn’t be able to tell her not to signal him. She wouldn’t be obvious about it, anyway, but if they were there … watching …
Ben couldn’t go to her—least of all because he didn’t actually know where she was, and now he knew whom to blame for that—but he had to leave. Didn’t he? They’d just given him this information, and he couldn’t literally sit on it. Could he?
Wait, back up. They assume I’m invested in her as a real person. It didn’t matter that it was the truth, but if he was just C. J. O’Connell, then she wouldn’t actually matter. She was just a name and a newspaper photograph, and …
Well. C. J. O’Connell would pull his laptop closer, open it, find his email, and send a quick message to Thom. Something about how hey, just so you know, the FBI seems to think I’ve uncovered a serial killer—isn’t that wild? And also: can we use this? Leak the fact that Rosie might be a serial killer, and …
This deep breath was different because it wasn’t to calm down. It was preparatory so he could pull the laptop closer and go about composing the message.
Let them follow him and track him. It might hamper how he had to proceed, but that was fine. He wasn’t going to do their work for them.
He wasn’t going to lead them to her.
To: LidaRoseElizabeth
From: MathyMart
Sent: May 14, 2019 9:17PM
I had a long talk with Erin and Liza today and I’m taking a page out of your book: writing it down to get my thoughts in order. I think the TL;DR here is that I’m going to have to get a new email address.
They stressed the same things they’ve been stressing: the first year is hard. It’s not like student teaching, you’re on your own, everything’s new … and if I quit in June, then all that lesson planning and all the rest goes to waste. All my schooling, too. The guilt approach.
I think I had a deal with myself: if either of them told me I needed to stay another year because I’m a good teacher, then I would. Even these kids need you might’ve been enough. But neither of them said I’m a good teacher. They didn’t say anything good, actually. It was all guilt. (Please don’t punch either of them in the nose.)
The problem’s all the mixed messages, you know? Is teaching a job or a calling? If it’s a job, then man, I can find a less-stressful, more personally rewarding one, thanks. I’ll flip burgers happily and not have to take any work home with me. And if it’s a calling, then they missed the mark with all the money talk. The sunk costs.
My family’s going to go after the sunk costs, too. Not college loans, because you know I don’t have any, but all that time going to school to become a math teacher. The goal of my adolescence. I never even thought about anything else and just assumed it would all work out because … well. You pointed it out. Because most of my life just does work out.
Remember our first time? I mean, of course you do. But before, when you gave me that look and told me to stop trying to plan and make it perfect because then I’d just be disappointed? (I wasn’t disappointed, by the way. In case you needed to hear that.) But I keep thinking about it and wondering if I’m doing the same thing. If I thought teaching would be perfect. Challenging, yes, but not … God, not this soul-sucking everyday battle with freaking teenagers who don’t give a shit about me, so why am I letting them get to me?
Liza won’t even change my classes next year. That would defeat the purpose of the sunk costs argument because I’d need new lesson plans if I switched grades, or moved all the way up to high school. Not that I want this group again, so it’s not like I want to go up a single year, but … They didn’t give me any other options. Or any options, really. Just come back next year and do it again and it won’t be this bad.
This is how you get teachers kids hate. And teachers who end up hating kids. And kids who hate math.
I don’t actually have to commit one way or the other until August, but as of right now, I’m officially looking for other jobs. And trying to figure out how to tell my family. They haven’t see it the way you have, so …
I love you. I’ll call you tomorrow.
Chapter Eighteen – coming January 18
Rebecca Frost 