Tag: novel

Catch up on the previous chapters here

FBI agents who lived in normal neighborhoods probably didn’t have much in the way of extra security, because otherwise they would’ve moved into some sort of gated community, or bought a house behind a high wall, but Hillier’s house was normal, according to Google maps. He accessed that on a library computer that someone left signed in, because even though he didn’t believe in fate, he believed in seizing the moment.

It was a Craftsman house, which meant it looked like every other Craftsman house, and Hillier hadn’t painted it anything interesting, either. Beige and white. Maybe two shades of beige, which was a waste of paint, really. If you couldn’t tell the difference from the end of the block, what was the point?

He didn’t know the neighborhood. It wasn’t a cul-de-sac, so at least it was believable that he could drive past it without completely standing out, but what he really needed was to scope it out almost continuously. Before he got in—he already figured he’d need to get in—he’d have to know the habits of the people who lived there.

Most people were predictable. Predictable, and oblivious. You could follow them—say, back to their dorms—at night, and they just saw some guy out jogging or whatever. They didn’t look for your face, especially if it was the face of a guy who usually went jogging through campus. They just assumed you belonged there as long as you acted like you did.

Private homes were another matter. He could pull up in his van and wear his shirt with the logo and greet whoever opened the door with the wrong name, but then they’d see the logo on his pocket and on the van. Neighbors might notice. Their doorbell cameras would certainly notice. Then Ben would have to keep up the charade long enough to supposedly realize he’d been given the wrong address, and maybe he’d be able to sit in the van on the phone for a while, but all that would get him was the face of the person who answered. It might even be Mrs. Hillier, or what if they still had kids at home?

Okay, back up. Think. He sat in a corner of the library, books spread out around him, and turned a page every so often, but his mind wasn’t on any of this. He just didn’t want to leave without knowing where he was going next, because having an epiphany on the road and needing to pull a U-turn or do anything that would make people stop and notice him was a bad idea. Where to go from here?

After nearly half an hour of flipping pages, Ben saw someone return today’s paper. It wasn’t anything special, but this just proved his line of thinking: movement draws the eye. And then his gaze drifted further to the table with the real estate insert. It was a long shot, but he often pulled into driveways of empty houses, and sometimes the agents forgot, or the new owners weren’t on time. Really, he should’ve looked while he had the computer under someone else’s data, but you couldn’t think of everything at once. He got up and grabbed the insert, hating the feel of the cheap paper and the ink that would come off on his fingers, but this was explicable enough: it was just the deep-clean guy, with too much time on his hands, trying to drum up new business.

A deep-clean guy who’d taught himself how to pick locks for those instances where the new homeowners completely forgot their keys and were just so grateful you were able to get inside and do your thing without having to reschedule or charge extra. But those between-people homes didn’t have all the security he was sure an FBI agent would. Hell, if Ben had bugged his own house …

Especially an FBI agent willing to go rogue for his son and—shit, he’d almost thought daughter-in-law. She couldn’t be, deep in his heart he knew she couldn’t be, but if that was the way she had to get along … to preserve herself … Weren’t FBI agents supposed to fight sex trafficking?

He pulled the little notebook from his pocket and jotted down a couple addresses. They weren’t exactly in the area, but they were close enough he could’ve taken a wrong turn or attempted a shortcut. He’d only be able to go pass the Hillier’s once today, but if anyone ever went back to track his phone—which he’d take with him while he went in the van—they’d be able to trace a wandering route between houses for sale, and stops if they were empty so he could note down the realtor’s number and maybe even actually call them later.

Checking his watch, Ben realized this wouldn’t happen today. He’d have to go home, plan out his drive, and set up one of his button cameras on the proper side of the van to catch a better view of the house than he was liable to get. Of course the best thing would be getting into a house across the street and leaving a camera trained on Hillier’s, so he could start tracking people in and out, but he had to take what he could get. Could he stage an incident and, say, run down the mailbox across the street? In his sedan, maybe. Leave a note, come back later, and replace the post … with a small camera already installed …

Someone would notice. The owner or the mailman would have to notice. A lens in a post would be far too obvious, and he’d have to manage some sort of fancy carpentry to get the battery and the rest inside. At least houses and apartments had places you could hide things—in lamps, behind socket plates, above the panels in dropped ceilings, just to name a few—but the mailbox idea wouldn’t work. And he couldn’t just buy an old used car, wire it up, and park it across the street until it got towed.

Ben gathered up his books and let his thoughts keep chipping away at it. He didn’t mind the bad ideas, because at least they were ideas. You had to encourage your brain to keep working, to keep sending up possibilities, instead of criticizing yourself for being unhelpful. If you did that, the process shut down, and you were left with nothing. Better to let the ideas flow and sort them gently, without scolding yourself, so they kept coming.

And he’d have all night now to let that process unfold. He’d go home, get out his map—his paper book of maps—and start finding locations and planning routes. He’d be his own MapQuest and write things out turn by turn on a piece of paper he could burn later. This wasn’t unusual. Ben didn’t like using his phone for directions, because that meant killing his own personal sense of direction. The more you relied on your gadgets to do things for you—remember things, or know things—the less your brain actually worked.

It was nice to have technology as a backup, but that’s not how people used it these days. They decided their brains didn’t have to work because their phone would know it for them, and that meant they left trails for anyone with the know-how to follow. Ben didn’t particularly like cop shows, but he knew enough to recognize that. So yeah, someone would be able to track his work phone on the cell towers to show that he’d gone from the region with the library to the one where his house was, but … that was it.

If you stuck with your brain most of the time, and pen and paper when it was necessary, you could always burn the paper afterward, and the only one with full access to your brain was yourself. He’d even skimmed some chapters about interrogation back at the library, before putting the books on the return cart, to refresh himself on how to make sure that stayed true.

Of course, you could be your own worst enemy there. You could, for example, decide to turn your diary entries and real-life experiences into a novel, and send that novel out for lots of agents to read—or at least the first 10 pages of that novel—and then revise the whole thing into the version that so many advance readers had read already and the rest of the world would read soon, and realize that some FBI agents had already read it, and that they’d come to some very wrong conclusions that were going to foil your whole plan.

You could do that, and then you ended up back in your den again, pen and paper in hand, as you tried to come up with a way out of it.

---

Initial interview, Lida-Rose Elizabeth Dawson with Officer Melissa Jacobson, May 24, 2019

LD: Mart’s contract says he has to be at school until 3:28, so he was, but then he already had his bag in the car, so he texted me and drove over.

MJ: Okay. And he got to your apartment when?

LD: Like 5:20. Traffic … I was keeping an eye on the time and everything, so it was a little later than I thought, but … Heidi …

MJ: Please continue.

LD: We … she was out in the living room, you know, teasing me. She really likes all the talk shows, so that’s what she had on: Maury, that kind of thing. Which I usually don’t watch, so she’s teasing me, you know? Oh, is this what it takes? But … I mean, I was dressed, and I had my purse and everything, so when he texted me from the parking lot I just … left.

MJ: You left her there in your apartment, on the couch, watching television?

LD: Yeah. She said something like “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” which … it’s classic Heidi. Because she wouldn’t do anything, but she was trying to be funny. Trying to … make a connection.

MJ: So the last time you saw her was approximately 5:20pm this afternoon.

LD: Yeah. Hang on, it’s—yeah, his text was 5:21.

MJ: Right, thank you. So what did you and Martin do then?

LD: Uh. I kissed him, but … Heidi wasn’t supposed to be gone until later, you know? So we got into his car, but we had to figure out where we wanted to go for dinner. Someplace we could hang out long enough, you know? So she’d be gone by the time we got back, and we didn’t have to …

MJ: Sexile Heidi?

LD: Well. She was already leaving. So. Yeah, that was … that was the plan.

MJ: Where did you go?

LD: TGIFriday’s. We kind of—he said he was in the mood for a burger, and we didn’t want to go someplace fancier, you know? Where it’s more expensive and you feel bad about drawing it out, because it’s smaller, and busier, so … TGIFriday’s.

MJ: Did either of you pay with a credit card?

LD: Did …? Yeah, I did. And—here, yeah. The receipt.

MJ: Do you mind if I get a picture of this? Thank you. So now … you went directly back to the apartment after you left the restaurant?

LD: Yes. It was late enough. She should’ve been picked up and on her way. But …

MJ: But?

LD: Well, we usually texted each other about that kind of thing. If we were going somewhere, who we’d be with. You know … just in case …

MJ: Sounds like you were looking out for each other.

LD: I mean.

MJ: Take your time.

LD: We tried. But … she didn’t text me about leaving. I figured maybe she was just happy to be going off with her friends, you know? Hey, have you talked to them?

MJ: I’d like to focus on getting your statement just now.

LD: Right, but … I mean, you have to have a code to get into the building, and I didn’t see anybody hanging around out front or anything.

MJ: Tell me about what happened when you got back to the apartment.

LD: We, uh … we were in a hurry to get inside. We were … making out, and … there wasn’t anyone at the front door, or anyone in the hallway, because we weren’t paying attention and would’ve run into them, so … uh … I opened the apartment door, and there was that nightlight on in the kitchen, because we always just left that plugged in, but that was it, except …

MJ: You’re doing just fine.

LD: I’m not, actually, but okay. I stumbled over something, and I think I swore, and Mart laughed and said he’d better turn the light on before I broke my neck, so he went back to the door, and …

MJ: He turned on the light?

LD: Yeah. It’s right there, and the kitchen light was bright enough for him to see that, and …

MJ: What was it you’d tripped over?

LD: Heidi’s arm. The hand and forearm, together. Still attached to … each other.

MJ: How did you know it was Heidi’s?

LD: She’s got that tattoo. She just got that tattoo. It’s basic. That’s what she calls it: basic. The whole “I am greater than my highs and lows” thing. Like, she calls it basic, but it means something to her.

MJ: What did you do then?

LD: Um. I think I screamed. Mart grabbed me and pulled me back, I think so I wouldn’t throw up on it. The arm. And with the light on … the doors were open into her bedroom and the bathroom. Mine was still shut, my bedroom door, but the other two … there was blood. And … something sticking up out of the tub.

MJ: Who called the police?

LD: Mart did. He pulled me out into the hall, and shut the apartment door so nobody else would see, and he’s the one who called. I just … I was shaking too hard. I collapsed against the wall, across from the door, and just … went down. I don’t think I fainted, but … other people came out, though. To see. Because they’d heard me.

MJ: Did any of them go into the apartment?

LD: No. I think a couple of them tried the door, but it was locked. And my keys were inside. I still had my purse, but my keys were inside.

MJ: Did you stay in the hallway, within sight of your apartment door, until the police showed up?

LD: Yes.

MJ: Did Heidi have a boyfriend?

LD: No. I’ve never known her to date anyone.

MJ: And what about her friends?

LD: The ones picking her up? She said she knew them from high school. I’ve got their names in a text.

MJ: Yes, that’s good, but what about her other friends? People we can ask about her?

LD: Her other …? It’s me, Kelsey, and Ashley. And the other two are dead. God, they’re all dead.

---

Chapter Twenty

Pending table of contents

Catch up on the previous chapters here

Thom was apologetic about how Ben’s name got out, at least to the FBI, but practically gleeful that they seemed to think he’d cracked a cold case. Everyone’s going to read it and read it again to figure out if you actually wrote a thriller. I’ll pass it on, but I’m sure they’re going to leak that part. Let the feds decide whether to say anything or stay mum. We’ll work up some more responses for the tour.

Okay so now, wherever she was, she was going to have to read that he’d written a book that made her out to be the killer. That was not at all how this was supposed to go. He was still thinking about her, yes. He put all this time into showing her that he understood her, yes. He thought she was a murderer? God, no.

Thom had always been about riding the publicity, but he also hadn’t actually expected anyone to make the connection. It was a small college, anyway, so the chances of an alum from the proper year picking it up and realizing was slim, but now … now Ben didn’t know what to do.

He’d made his peace with the unknowns of the original plan, or at least he’d told himself he’d made his peace with it. She was probably out there somewhere in a small Midwestern town, but she might not hear about the book in time to make it to one of his events. She might know in time but not be able to travel to an event. She might not hear about him until after it came out, and maybe only after the Netflix deal went through—if they actually made it and didn’t just secure the rights—and it might take a second book. Or she might contact him through his new author website sometime down the road, only after she’d learned about and then read the book. But this? She couldn’t even show up and throw eggs at him at one of his events and scream at him for calling her a murderer without outing herself as said suspected murderer. This … was not good.

Ben wanted to write back to Thom immediately and make sure that, whatever got leaked, it was clear that he didn’t actually think she was a murderer. Except that didn’t make sense, because Rosie and Cal were only characters. It didn’t matter if he, the human author, didn’t intend for his book to be read this way, because you had to let go of your creation when it escaped into the world. What people thought about your book was a reflection of them, not you, and you had to let them see what they saw in the mirror, even if you didn’t see it. That was part of Thom’s lecture to all debut authors.

And, since Rosie was fictional, it didn’t matter if she was the murderer or not. Since all of the characters were fictional, nobody was actually killed. It wasn’t a real crime. Ben shouldn’t worry about it the way he was worrying about it, because instead of helping—or making—him find her, the feds had just ensured he never would.

He was sitting down, so his knees didn’t give out, but he froze. The feds had just ensured he’d never find her. Writing it down would make it feel too true, so he ran it through his head again, giving the words their own specific weight. Trying to figure out if it was true.

Should he have done anything differently? No matter what, he would’ve told someone about his weird interview, because he was a commodity they were selling along with his book. Various lawyers would want to keep their fingers on the pulse, just in case he became a liability. And the average person would reach out and tell someone if something like this happened, just because it was so strange and unique. It was the sort of thing you’d text a friend about—You’ll never freaking guess what just happened—if you had friends.

He didn’t have friends, so he emailed his agent. Thom at least didn’t seem upset that he hadn’t tried contacting him earlier and, say, brought a lawyer to the interview, but he only repeated the same explanation he was helping Ben peddle: sure, the book was vaguely inspired by the events of that year, but the newspaper clippings were just seeds. Everything that grew was his author’s imagination.

Maybe Thom agreed with the idea that Lida-Rose Dawson could’ve been a murderer. Or maybe he just didn’t care, because it was far enough removed from reality that they wouldn’t get hit with libel. It wasn’t Thom’s fault. That much was clear, at least. Thom worked with what he was given, and really, Thom was the reason Ben’s plan had any chance of working in the first place. Thom didn’t reject the query. He asked for more, and then he made the offer, and then he managed to sell it. The plan could’ve failed at any of those points, but Ben had a box full of hardcover copies and the tour schedule. It was happening. It was happening, but now …

The feds were so pissed at one of their own for hiding her that they were going to warn her to have nothing to do with him and his book. Maybe she’d even think that he’d planned it this way and always meant to trap her—for them—after all. Hillier. Goddamned Hillier.

A different stillness settled over him. Earlier it was ice, but now … was it calm?

He couldn’t Google Hillier without leaving a trail, and he didn’t have a phone book—what house still had phone books these days?—but he thought he knew where he could find one. It wouldn’t even be weird for him to go to the library. If he used one of their computers he’d have to sign in with his card number, but if any place had a paper phone book, he’d find one there. He’d look up a couple numbers and write down some of the others, and memorize Hillier’s address, and then …

The thing was, he’d only ever planted his bugs at places where he’d been invited in and left alone. When people paid you to clean, they didn’t usually stick around to watch you do it. There was a record of your presence, sure, but D&L promised background checks, and now Ben had his own business and all the various reassurances that yes, he was who he said he was, and he wasn’t going to steal or destroy property or whatever. Plus he had the van with his business name, logo, and contact information on the side, so he clearly wasn’t sneaking in.  Word of mouth got around, and he even worked clean-up on crime scenes, so he was trustworthy.

Ben had never attempted breaking and entering before. He wasn’t even the kind of guy who loitered. When he parked, it was never at a yellow curb and he always paid the meter or moved before time was up. He didn’t even like going five miles over the speed limit or running yellow lights, which would have made him blend in with everyone else so much better. There was nothing in his past to aid him, no experience with this kind of thing, and yet …

Yet he was planning on stalking an FBI agent. Maybe doing more than stalking. Probably doing more than stalking.

It was unlikely that he’d confront Hillier and get an address out of him just like that. Didn’t they train agents in counter-interrogation techniques alongside interrogation techniques? At the very least Hillier would know everything they told them about being on the question side of the table, and how to control the situation, and what not to let a suspect get away with.

Maybe the library had a book about interrogation for dummies. Ben sure as hell wasn’t going to check one out, but after he consulted the phone book, he could take a stack to a table, page through some things, and then put them on the cart they left so you wouldn’t just reshelve things. They’d be counted as being used, but he didn’t think anyone would be able to tell he was the one who’d pulled them. Okay, he’d wipe them down surreptitiously before he returned them.

At this point, he had to be careful. He figured—hell, he knew—he was willing to do more in this quest than the agents were, because he wasn’t worried about having to keep working for the man. Or holding on to a government job. He’d been fingerprinted, sure, so he had to be wary of that, but they didn’t have his mug shot or anything. Plus he could change his looks fairly easily—he’d had his beard this way for years, but shave it, and cut his hair, or straighten it … all before he even got around to dyeing it … and he wouldn’t be easily recognizable.

Goodwill. He could go to Goodwill and get some different clothes. Some shoes, definitely: used shoes with a wear pattern that didn’t match anything else he owned. God, he was really planning this. Maybe the library was something that could be considered a whim, since it was just information, but once you started playing out counter-forensic measures …

They brought it on themselves. Hillier and any of the feds who got in his way. They all did their part in keeping him away from her.

Ben took another breath, giving himself a chance to see if he really meant to do this, and then nodded and got up to grab his keys.

---

To: MathyMart
From: LidaRoseElizabeth
Sent: May 23, 2019 10:32PM

I am so. Freaking. Glad. You’re coming down tomorrow. Heidi’s not being picked up until after dinner, but the apartment’s ours all weekend, and thank God. I don’t care if the neighbors hear us, but I don’t need her being all judgmental and denying it. She always says it’s just her face, but I’m pretty sure her face reflects her internal monologue.

Less than two weeks and we’re not roommates anymore. Did I tell you she’s actually counting it down? On the calendar in the kitchen, too. She says she made a mistake about which day’s graduation, but I think we all know better. Those numbers don’t really go down to zero—they go down to when she gets to be one again, in an apartment for two, because apparently now she’s figured out how she can afford it.

Whatever. Let her be excited about it. She’s so rarely happy about anything, so I can be gracious and glad she’s excited about me leaving. I mean, we both know I’m looking forward to it, too, but that’s because it’ll be you and me in your tiny apartment and we won’t be able to get away from each other, oh no.

Heidi and I were never going to be best buds, but first winter break was so freaking long and then Kelsey and Ashleigh … the problem, I think, is that Heidi’s not close with anyone, so when her only friends are gone, but they were closer with me, anyway, and when everyone tries to talk to or comfort me instead of her … she feels slighted. Like nobody even saw her relationship with them, except they didn’t, because she plays everything so close to her vest and doesn’t go out. When they hung out with her, it’s because they were over here, where nobody but me saw them, and now she’s upset …

It’s fine. We’re almost done. You’re almost here, and then I’ll officially be there, and Heidi can do what she thinks will make her happy. Do you think it’s possible for some people to just … never be able to be happy? Like, ever. Take her anywhere, give her anything, and it won’t be enough. Dissatisfied is her default setting, except I’m not sure it’s possible to install an after-market happiness button. Maybe she’s just doomed to always be nothing more than okay, usually rating things a two out of five, for the rest of her life.

It’s exhausting living with someone like that. Maybe Sierra didn’t actually find herself in Belize. Maybe she just found something better than spending another minute with Heidi.

God, that makes me sound awful, but some people … they just refuse to see the light, so you’re mad if you try to point it out. And then you basically give up and stop trying, and maybe you even start trying not to see it, so you don’t have to keep ignoring it …

Point is, I think I annoy Heidi as much as she annoys me, and we’ll both be glad to be rid of each other, and then I get to have you, all the time, every night, even if you smell like fast food. I’m sure you’ll find something other than fast food, but if that’s the option, I’ll take it. Do you think that would make good wedding vows? For better or for worse, smelling of cologne or fast food …

Tomorrow can’t come soon enough. XXX. Both kinds.

---

Chapter Nineteen

Pending table of contents

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

Pending table of contents

Catch up on the previous chapters here

Ben paused to chuckle self-deprecatingly. “Sorry. I’ve been practicing for the tour. It’s, uh … it’s not something I really imagined when I started writing.”

Tyler nodded, head still bent over his notes. “It’s fine. Go on?”

“Right, so.” He took another drink of water. “Rosie’s unmoored at the start of the book, and Cal’s there, just trying to offer her some stability, but she rejects it.”

“She rejects him?” Jack suggested.

Ben shook his head. Did both of them read the book, or only Tyler? “She ends up using him. Relying on him, but not giving anything back. And then, at the end … well.” His smile should say something like You already know this part. “She just disappeared.”

“Right, so.” Tyler tapped his pencil on the notepad. “What’s Cal do after?”

He’d practiced the answer to this one, too, and he blinked. “There is no after. The book ends.”

“Right, but.” Tyler smiled a little. “If it were you?”

“But it’s not me. He’s a fictional character in a fictional situation.” Ben shrugged. “Thom suggested I use C as the first initial of my pen name, because it helps blur the line, but there is a line. It was inspired by true events, sure, but I don’t think you can even say it was inspired by real people, because I never met any of them. I had these basic sketches of who they were, but even that didn’t entirely work for the book, once I got going. Cal exists between the first and the last page, but anything else has to be answered by fanfiction.”

“You’re not working on a sequel?” Jack jumped in.

He shook his head.

“Why not?”

“A couple reasons. If your first and second are related, people just expect you to keep writing those same characters forever, and it loses you readers if you don’t. They get upset if you try something new. And I don’t have an idea for the sequel—I don’t know what happens next.” He shrugged again. “When I know, I’ll write it. If I ever know. I kind of think Cal’s just going to be left hanging forever.”

“He could get over her,” Tyler suggested, and shrugged when Ben frowned at him. “Just saying. It’s a possibility.” His grin grew sly. “Gatsby could have been a great man if he’d just gotten over Daisy.”

“Uh.” Back to this, huh? “I thought you said Cal was Nick.”

Tyler waved that away. “You have to have some idea where Rosie went. Book Rosie. The character your narrator’s obsessed with.”

Thom had warned him about this kind of thing, too—readers chasing the happy ending, or at least a more conclusive ending—so he’d been working on his answer. “Cal runs through his ideas in the book.”

“Refresh us.”

Shrugging, he leaned forward to pick up the copy they’d left sitting there where he could see it. Seriously, if Tyler’s wife was an English teacher, didn’t he know the value of returning to the text? “Still looks weird to me like this,” he murmured, flipping pages close to the end. “You want me to read this to you?”

Tyler’s smile was strained. “Go right ahead.”

Because they’d wanted him to say it, in his own words, so they could make a comparison. They shouldn’t have left the actual book within his reach. He cleared his throat and hesitated. “This isn’t the part I’ve been practicing for the tour.”

Jack waved a sort of regal by your leave hand.

Good. He took a slow breath and stopped himself from clearing his throat again, reading: “Part of me isn’t surprised she’s gone. There wasn’t much holding her here—the final weeks of her degree, sure, but what does a piece of paper matter when you’ve lost so much? So much, and so quickly. And the shock of walking in and finding Hailey like that … it’s no wonder she doesn’t want to go back to the apartment.

“I wasn’t enough. Not in the face of all that. God, could anyone be? One line isn’t a safety net, so maybe she fell right on through. She’s just gone, a pebble dropped into a dark pond without a ripple, and I’ll spend my whole life wondering whether, if I were brave enough, I could find her.” He closed the book and looked at them expectantly.

Tyler nodded at it. “There’s some stuff after that. A, what do you call it, epilogue.”

He nodded back. There was.

“What’s in the epilogue?” Jack asked.

Was that a real question because he hadn’t read it, or another attempt to get Ben to slip up? “It’s just a brief glimpse at Cal’s life a few months later. He gets called in to that apartment to fix a leak and wishes he could’ve fixed everything else before it broke irreparably.” He paused, then decided to add it: “He means Rosie, not the apartment.” Did that earn him a smirk from Tyler? He thought it had.

“So he thinks she’s broken.”

That was blunt. “I suppose so.”

“But that’s all you’ve got?” Jack pressed. “Rosie, broken Rosie, fell through the cracks?”

Ben considered it—honestly considered it—and nodded. “Yeah. I think she did.”

“People don’t do that in real life,” Tyler argued, like he was explaining to him and placating Jack at the same time. “They need money, or they reach out to old friends and family, or their fake ID gets flagged …”

“You said Lida-Rose Dawson did.” He tried not to smirk. “So. Looks like sometimes people do.”

Jack scoffed and rolled his eyes.

“But that’s what you said,” he persisted. “Nobody’s heard of her since right after, right? So … she fell through the cracks.”

“She didn’t fall,” Jack spat. “She had help from someone right here in this building just because she’d duped him and his son. Who’s in the same situation, by the way. Nobody’s heard from him, either, so—”

“Jack—”

“— she could’ve killed him, too, for all we know,” Jack finished. “Except we can’t say anything about it, because then it’s slander, but hey, maybe you can use it in your next book.”

Tyler cleared his throat and straightened some papers, but Ben wasn’t sure if that was because Tyler was actually upset with what his partner said, how much he’d revealed, or if this was all part of some act. “If Rosie was going to turn up somewhere else, where would that be?”

Ben gestured at the book. “I’m sorry, guys, but that’s all there is. She’s gone, he hasn’t seen her by the time the epilogue rolls around, and that’s it. The book ends. All books end. If there was more, I would’ve written more, but she just fell through.”

“That doesn’t happen in real life!” Jack shouted so loudly that Ben jumped. The blond agent slammed both fists down on the table and got up, storming from the room.

“Uh.” Tyler pushed his chair back and stumbled to his feet. “Just, uh—wait a minute okay?” he requested, taking off after his partner.

A minute, huh? He checked his watch, then looked around the room. There wasn’t a mirror anywhere, and he didn’t see any telltale lenses. He was a bit of an expert on those, so he knew where to look, and what to look for. Their folder was still on the table, and he committed the nearly-random arrangement of the papers to memory before pulling it closer and turning things right-side up.

How much warning would he have before they came back? If it was just one of them, he’d probably be quiet, but if it was both of them … they might be arguing. Loud and angry. That could give him enough time to—

Shit, they were serious. And no wonder they’d jumped all over him for the bus driver and the neighbor—they were in here, too, along with notes about Dawson’s alibi. Which was recorded as her alleged alibi. His heartbeat was too loud in his ears for him to have any hope of hearing them return, but his eyes skimmed for a name. Hillier. They said the agent’s last name was Hillier, so if he could get the boyfriend’s name—

Voices in the hallway. Fuck. At least he’d kept the papers in their same order so he didn’t have to try to shuffle them as he turned them around, tugging one out the way it had been, and he sat quickly with the ARC of his book, opened to one of the sticky notes and frowning as he pretended like he’d just noted which part was marked.

“Listen, we want to thank you,” Tyler said as he swept the notes together and into the folder without even looking at them. “And if there’s anything else … look, I know we’ve got what Cal thinks, but …”

Snorting, Jack held out his hand for the book, snapped it shut, and left the room.

Tyler sighed as he looked after his partner. “Sorry. This … it’s worse because it’s one of us, you know? Here, I’ll walk you out.”

The agent didn’t take him all the way out—he held out his card when the elevator doors opened on the ground floor—but that was all right. It helped a bit that he didn’t stand there and watch Ben leave, to see if he shuddered or needed a deep breath or who knew what.

He held the shakes off until he was parked in his own garage again and just waited, riding it out, before even trying to head inside.

---

To: MathyMart
From: LidaRoseElizabeth
Sent: April 12, 2019 3:05AM

Okay I know you don’t like it when I say this, but I’m thinking it, and I just need you to not dismiss it just so you don’t have to listen to me say it, okay? That’s two okays in a sentence, but there you go. I know this whole thing is very much not okay, and I’m not okay, but I need to be able to tell you what the brain weasels are doing, because they don’t just go away. Maybe I can pen them up and put them someplace you won’t see them, but that doesn’t mean they disappear.

What if it’s me? What if I’m cursed? What if the worst thing you can do is go for the whole rest of your life with me? I’m serious. I’m not thinking voodoo or magic or something, but … what if I just attract broken people?

That’s a thing, right? And it’s not just karma or something about the energy we put out into the world, but seriously. What if the sort of person I am attracts the sorts of people who are destructive and make dangerous choices and maybe die from them because that’s part of who I am, deep inside?

My dad was drunk the night my parents died. Did I ever tell you that? The roads weren’t good anyway, and he was just over the limit, but that’s still drunk. Maybe they still would’ve crashed if he’d been sober, but that’s a question we’ll never have an answer to. There’s no parallel universe where things happened slightly differently and I grew up with my parents instead of Gran and I have more than three albums of photos and this limited number of fading memories, and maybe it’s not the drinking thing, but the orphaned thing.

And look, honestly, up until this year I thought your life was just freaking perfect. You’ve got the family, you’ve got the money, your parents still like each other, you don’t have student loans and you didn’t even need those scholarships … You dismiss a lot of things because you’ve never had to worry about them, and then you didn’t even want to tell me how you’re feeling, about all the pressure, because I guess I hide it well, too. But you’ve been honest with me, and I need to be honest with you, even if you don’t want to hear it. Maybe especially if you don’t want to hear it.

What if it’s me?

---

Chapter Seventeen

Pending table of contents

Catch up on the previous chapters here

Ben thought it looked like a conference room, but he’d never been interrogated before, so maybe it wasn’t actually a conference room. They didn’t hustle him into it, exactly, but they seemed on edge until the door was closed. There were a couple other people—agents, he assumed—who looked at them a bit curiously, then all reacted the same way: their eyes got big and they very clearly feigned nonchalance.

Her boyfriend’s dad still worked here, huh? Maybe her boyfriend’s dad killed her. Or, maybe, this boyfriend—she’d had a boyfriend?—killed her, and the dad was covering it up. Could Ben make it work? The boyfriend wouldn’t have killed the roommate thinking it was her, the way some of the theories were running, but …

There was a coffee pot and a mini fridge in here, so it probably wasn’t an interrogation room. Jack got the coffee going and nodded down at the fridge. “Help yourself. You mind if we record this?”

He was pretty sure he wasn’t allowed to mind. “Maybe I should call my agent?” he suggested, making sure he sounded uncertain. “If I’m talking about the book. I don’t … well. I don’t know how this goes.”

There was a knock on the door and Tyler went to open it, but only just enough to accept the delivery of some legal tablets and a copy of Since You Went Away.

A clearly worn copy. Ben felt the pride swell up in his chest, ready to burst, even though the people reading it had combed through it so closely for a killer.

“I think you’re fine,” Tyler offered, holding the book up as his evidence. “It’s already out there, right? They’re not changing anything in it at this late date.”

That was true, but he hesitated a moment longer anyway before opening the fridge—he didn’t actually want anything—and pulling out a tiny bottle of water. It would give him something to fiddle with, anyway, and anyone in his position would be nervous. They were accusing him of having written a love letter to a murderess, after all. He even took the chair Tyler gestured to, which of course put him across from the agent and with his back to the coffee pot so they’d have to circle him for a refill and make him decide whether to turn and face them or let them just lurk back there.

When he’d started that sentence about calling someone, Tyler had winced. He thought the last word was going to be lawyer. Jack didn’t have such a tell. It was a good thing to note.

They settled in across from him, trying for casual with a slight underpinning of urgency, and it helped him relax. Maybe guilty people fell for their act, but it was all too clear to him.

Jack slurped some of his coffee and opened a thin manila folder. “You’re born and raised in Kalamazoo, right?”

He nodded.

“Went into the workforce right after high school … D&L Janitorial … started your own business in late 2019 … how’d that work through COVID?”

Ben let the smirk linger for a moment because that was the right reaction: show the natural one, then realize it wasn’t the socially acceptable one. “I felt like I was fleecing some of those people. They’d invite me in, hide out in a room, and have me deep clean the entire place.”

“And now they call you for crime scenes,” Tyler mused. “You must’ve seen some things.”

The wince could stay longer. “I don’t really like to think about it. The stuff that can happen around here. But, yeah, that’s me. I took over for Dirk when he retired, so … it was kind of a ready-made spot to step into.”

Baseline. They were getting his baseline. It was supposed to make him relax so they could see what he looked like when he told the truth and compare it to how he acted later, when he answered the big questions. So this was the time to fake his tells: start peeling the label off the water bottle and stop himself. Let his leg jiggle. Rub at his mouth. Nothing too extreme, because he hadn’t thought to start any of this back at his house, but hey, they were his usual nervous tics. He’d probably done them anyway, without thinking, just because two strangers in suits had shown up at his door.

“And you live alone?” Tyler asked, and why the hell did that matter?

Baseline questions. They were just establishing his baseline. “Yeah.” He tried a smile. “Ladies don’t exactly flock to you when you drive the clean-up van.”

“No family?”

“No. Ma died a couple years back.” This was usually where he added something like It wasn’t COVID, but that would be oversharing. It was a recognized stress reaction, and he wasn’t supposed to be overly stressed just now. That would come in a minute. Did they think he didn’t know how this went?

“So you were with D&L in 2018 and most of 2019.”

Here we go. “Yes?”

“D&L cleaned between renters at the Sussex Apartments.”

He nodded. “Yeah, sure. I cleaned there a lot.”

“Including numbers 12 and 17.”

This called for a blink. “Sure. I picked places I know. It’s another trick—like the faces?” Except he didn’t name the apartment complex in the book. He didn’t use the real name, and he hadn’t made up a name. It was just the place where Rosie lived, so the name didn’t matter, because there wasn’t another apartment complex and no need to make a distinction.

Jack nodded, even though he’d been speaking to Tyler and telling Tyler about the faces. “It’s the right numbers, though. Ellie Dawson and Heidi Phillips were in 12, and Trevor Laitila and his girlfriend were in 17.”

He shrugged and nodded. “Yeah, sure. The numbers must’ve been in the articles or on the news, and they stuck, because I knew them. They make sense, anyway. First-floor apartments, small building …”

Tyler flipped a page in the folder they seemed to be sharing and bingo, there was the exact article about Heidi that listed her apartment number.

They’d had a hell of a time renting that unit out ever since. As far as Ben knew, it was empty right now, even though they’d done a complete renovation on it. It wasn’t haunted—he didn’t believe in ghosts—but people just couldn’t walk into 12 without thinking about what happened there, like it was the Overlook’s 237. It didn’t matter that this wasn’t the same furniture, or the same carpet, or the same bathtub, or that nothing was still in the place the old ones had been. He was also pretty sure those unlucky enough to end up in 10 or 14 also freaked themselves out with auditory hallucinations, even though nobody had reported hearing anything on the evening of May 24. Whoever killed Heidi Phillips was a ghost.

Unless it was her own roommate, who’d slipped in quietly and unnoticed because she was simply supposed to be there.

“Did you follow the case when it was happening?” Jack asked.

Ben nodded. “You couldn’t really get away from the first one. The Morgan girl. They really kept hammering it on the news, you know? Beautiful college co-ed, how’d she fall so low?”

“They held that candlelight vigil,” Tyler reminded them. “We’ve got footage, actually. Dawson’s there, with Fisher and Phillips.”

He shook his head and shifted. “You don’t actually think Lida-Rose Dawson … killed them?”

“I’m afraid we do.” Jack shrugged to show that no, he wasn’t actually sorry about it.

“But why not put out a warrant?” he pressed. “Track her down that way.”

Jack snorted and slouched casually. “Because she’s disappeared. There’s no record of her past June 2019, so she’s hidden deep. The last thing we want to do is cause a country-wide panic and send lynch mobs after totally innocent women who look a bit like her—”

“And give her a warning so she can flee,” Tyler put in.

“— so it’s fallen to the wayside.” He waited a beat. “Plus Hillier’s muzzled it. He doesn’t want us digging for her, so he’s decided she’s presumed dead and all but closed the case.”

Hillier. That was a slip. Her boyfriend’s last name was Hillier. “How do you know she’s not dead?”

Tyler sighed. “We don’t. But, if she’s still out there …”

“Why don’t you start at the beginning?” Jack suggested. “Why’d you pick this case for a romance novel?”

“It’s not a romance,” he corrected, because that was something he knew had to become habit. “People pick up a romance, they expect a happy ending. It’s romantic, but not a romance.”

Jack just gestured for him to go on.

“Well …” He opened the little bottle and finally took a sip. “It was everywhere when it happened. My mom really fixated on it. She didn’t live with me—I don’t think I could’ve stood that—but she started getting worried, even though they weren’t actually anything like her. You know?”

Jack and Tyler both nodded, so he steadied himself with a breath and prepared to go on.

---

To: MathyMart
From: LidaRoseElizabeth
Sent: March 19, 2019 2:14PM

This is your warning that, as soon as I see you tomorrow, I’m handcuffing you to that bed and you’re not getting away until I’m done with you.

To: LidaRoseElizabeth
From: MathyMart
Sent: March 19, 2019 3:19PM

Well now. Glad I didn’t read that until all the students left. You don’t NEED the handcuffs, but I’m not saying no.

To: MathyMart
From: LidaRoseElizabeth
Sent: March 19, 2019 3:23PM

You’re not supposed to have your phone out in class and I know you sure as hell don’t check this email on your school computer. XXX

To: LidaRoseElizabeth
From: MathyMart
Sent: March 19, 2019 3:28PM

Are those kisses or is that the rating for tomorrow night’s activities? About to get in the car and head home. Call at 7?

To: MathyMart
From: LidaRoseElizabeth
Sent: March 19, 2019 3:31PM

It can be both. Drive safe. Talk at 7.

---

Chapter Sixteen

Pending table of contents

Catch up on the previous chapters here

Ben had never actually thought to look up FBI offices in Michigan. He supposed that, in the back of his mind, he figured there was one in Lansing, and that was it. This wasn’t the time to Google it and educate himself, since first the agents waited for him to get ready—what was a man supposed to do to get ready, ye gods?—and then brunet, oh so friendly, offered to ride shotgun so he’d know where to go.

Brunet was named Tyler. “Because of the novel,” he confided—appeared to confide—as he buckled in. “Not the movie. I’m not that young.”

An FBI agent younger than Fight Club. Was that even possible? Besides, the movie was only three years behind the book, so if this agent—this kid—thought that three years made that much of a difference, he was that young. Maybe younger. Ben grunted to show he’d heard, but this wasn’t a junior high sleepover, and they weren’t seventh grade girls. If Tyler wanted to keep up a one-sided truth or dare and keep picking truth, that was on him.

“You know the main character doesn’t even have a name?” Tyler shook his head a little. “Most people don’t realize that. They remember Tyler Durden, which is how it’s supposed to go, but then they all stop and get a weird look and ask hey, do you remember the name of the character Edward Norton plays? Except nobody does, because he doesn’t have one.”

He really preferred Tyler around Jack, because at least that Tyler wasn’t babbling.

“I just think it’s interesting. Naming. I mean, I know it’s not the same,” he continued with a deep nod, either not looking at Ben at all or pretending not to. “My wife and I are trying for kids, so the name thing’s come up a lot. And that’s just one—you had to name a whole book of characters.”

Right. He did. Did FBI agents routinely read books? And not just books—advance reader copies. Someone had to have gotten their hands on one of them, the stuff they sent to bloggers and big names, not FBI agents. BookTokers, not G-men. Why were Feds called G-men?

“I suppose it’s easier,” Tyler mused, because he wouldn’t shut up, “when you start with a template. All the names—you didn’t change them much.”

He took a slow breath and concentrated on checking his mirrors. “I wasn’t ever going to mention it. Thom knows.” And he was sure they knew who Thom was. “If anybody asked about it, the similarities, I’d say yeah, sure, I was here when the murders happened, but … look, the thing is, some authors use movie stars. Others just Google it—blonde woman in her twenties, guy with black hair in his forties, whatever. You find a picture, and it starts off being a picture of someone else, but the more you work on it …” He was saying you too much. He sounded like a nervous first-time speaker trying to remember all the lines he was supposed to parrot. Maybe that was okay. “Years ago, when I started working on this, they were Kelsey and Ashleigh and Heidi, sort of. Maybe even mostly. But they were the newspaper versions, and the people I shifted them to be in my head … they’re my characters, because they’re not anything like the real people. You know?”

“Can’t say I do,” Tyler said pleasantly.

Shit, it was just a nervous tick.

“Sounds like the sort of writing process talk they’d eat up on campus.”

He wasn’t sure if it was a smile that flicked over his face because he quashed it so fast. “I’m not the kind of guy they invite to college campuses.”

“Maybe we need more books by guys like you.”

This was not like any male bonding he’d ever negotiated before. “You read it?”

“I did, yeah. My wife’s totally green. Man, if she knew C. J. O’Connell’s a local … Turn left here.”

Honestly it felt like taking his driver’s test again: check the mirror, flick the blinker, and keep an egg between his foot and the brake pedal.

“Cal, though,” Tyler said abruptly, almost making Ben flinch as he waited for a gap in the traffic. “You made him up completely.”

There was no good response to that. At this point, he was just lucky he wasn’t sweating. Yet.

“I read a review … I think it was on Goodreads … someone said Rosie’s the main character of the story, but you can’t tell it from her point of view, because … hell, I’ll have to find it again. Something about the mystique, maybe, so Cal’s the narrator. Sort of like how Nick narrates Gatsby.”

He tried not to clear his throat. “Nick narrates Gatsby because Gatsby dies.”

Tyler laughed, and it might have been real. A surprise reaction instead of one that was carefully calculated. “Don’t let my wife hear you. That’s what she calls a half-points answer: technically true, but barely on the dart board. Nick’s the narrator because he’s just enough on the outside to be fascinated with Gatsby, hear all the truth about him, and ignore it anyway.”

“Yeah? Is that what you wrote in your own paper in high school?”

This chortle was Tyler fully under control. “In high school, I wrote papers that sounded a lot like SparkNotes.”

SparkNotes. Were SparkNotes even around when Ben was in high school? Cliffs Notes, sure, but SparkNotes felt new.

And Tyler was positioning himself: not the expert, but married to the expert. Whom he was trying to impregnate. Hopeful family man who didn’t know the first thing about writing and would listen wide-eyed to Ben describe his whole process. Anything to keep him talking.

“Yeah, my wife gives me the same look.”

Maybe Tyler didn’t even have a wife. Maybe she got assigned whatever occupation would help him most in the moment. Maybe he wasn’t even married. Maybe he was gay. What was the worst-case scenario here?

“But the thing is, I read Gatsby again recently, and I have to say, you’ve got a lot of the same vibe. They didn’t host those giant parties, maybe, but that apartment was still a hub. Cal meets her casually, he’s still kind of peripheral … there are all these people around her, this whole network, but it doesn’t seem like anyone really knows her. Right?”

He nodded. That was the safest answer, especially when he wasn’t entirely sure of the truth.

“And he’s … well. The thing is …” Tyler shifted for the first time, like he’d suddenly realized the seat wasn’t entirely comfortable. “Cal never actually confesses his feelings for Rosie. He’s not really clear on them. Nick, now … he never says anything to Gatsby, because he’s too passive. You know? Everyone’s cheating, Nick doesn’t try to stop any of it … so he’s not going to tell another man what he’s thinking, right? 1920s, that’s not going to happen. But then!” He held up a finger. “Chapter Seven plays out, someone’s dead, and Nick’s got to confront who Gatsby really is.”

“Gatsby didn’t kill Myrtle.” Except Tyler was trying to draw comparisons between Gatsby and Rosie, so which character was he defending?

“No, but he was willing to say he did, to cover for Daisy.” The agent shook his head slowly. “He was blinded by his obsession, and Nick?”

Ben managed to keep his lips from opening. Cal’s not obsessed didn’t escape.

“I guess what I’m wondering is—turn in here—if Cal maybe doesn’t commit to telling Rosie he loves her because he’s got some suspicions. You know? If you tapped into that, and you know …”

That was complete and utter bullshit. “I’m sorry, man, but it really sounds like you guys are grasping at straws.”

Tyler chuckled his dangerous chuckle again. “Or maybe you missed your true calling and should’ve been a profiler. Any spot up here.”

He licked his lips before he caught himself. “I thought profilers only worked serial killers.”

“The three girls, right?” Tyler shrugged as he unclipped his seatbelt. “That’s enough, even without the other two.”

Shit. A ball of ice replaced his stomach. “… other two?” Was that hesitation too long?

The agent nodded. “Yeah, the bus driver and the neighbor. They’re not in your files?”

“The …” Solved. Those were solved. It was the bus driver’s boyfriend, who was a druggie loser, and the neighbor borrowed money from the wrong people who took his life when they couldn’t get it back.

“Yeah. It’s amazing, really.” Tyler opened the door and looked over at him before he got out. “You zoomed right in on them. Connected them right back to Rosie. The subconscious …” He shook his head in admiration. “Yours is working overtime.”

Okay, and the subtext? He fumbled for his own seatbelt and nearly lost his footing on the dry pavement, and he clicked the fob twice because he couldn’t remember if he’d locked the doors, causing the horn to honk and tell the world he’d hit it twice. Did they honestly think he was brilliant, some sort of self-trained Will Graham, and Rosie was a murderer?

Jack held the door for them, looking around and almost twitching, like someone put a spider down his collar and was ready to send a snake after it. “He’s not supposed to be in today,” he said cryptically as Tyler went to the elevator and pressed a button.

Ben frowned.

“Boyfriend’s dad,” Tyler supplied, gesturing for him to get on the elevator first.

“Wait, he …?”

“Still works here?” Jack finished with a deep nod. “Nothing’s proved, right? Except for the fact that, any time this comes up, he shuts it down. Sweeps it back under the rug.”

He nodded slowly, trying not to retreat into his own head, but, what, she had a long-distance boyfriend, and it was his dad who turned out to be their handler? So it wasn’t witness protection, after all? It was a kidnapping disguised as a favor?

The FBI didn’t know where she was, either. Maybe it was even worse than he’d imagined.

---

To: MathyMart
From: LidaRoseElizabeth
Sent: February 22, 2019 9:21AM

I’m not sure they should’ve canceled classes today. I know why they did, but that means we’re just separated and drifting. Callie texted to tell me the line for the counselors is ridiculously long, and everybody’s crying, so even if I wanted to talk to someone I’d have to wait, and cry in front of them, and I know it’s not the pity Olympics, but Kelsey and I go back to first grade. Even the other two from our high school didn’t know her that long.

She’s the one who grew up on a llama farm before they moved and who puked on the blocks and whose mom was all gung-ho about Brownies and survival stuff. There was one winter camping weekend thing we did where Mrs. Morgan found a pile of snow, stuck wooden dowels all over it, and had us dig out the middle as a snow cave. All the other grownups are like oh, no, don’t go digging tunnels and stuff in the snowbanks because they’ll cave in on you, and she’s all psh, you have to dig smart. The dowels showed you how far to hollow it out so it’d stay standing.

Neither of us kept up with scouts, but we had classes together. We were in band. And then we ended up here, not really together but I still see her more than Kate and Jessie. And now …

I keep going over how it doesn’t make any sense, because it doesn’t. Kelsey still lives on campus. She’s still trapped in the K bubble. If I hadn’t ended up with Heidi, then I probably would’ve taken her up on the offer for sharing a double. But she’s got that single, and she doesn’t even have a car on campus because parking’s such a pain. That’s why I’d pick her up for Meijer runs: shopping, but also just to get her off campus.

So it makes no. Freaking. Sense. That she was out Wednesday night. There’s no angle to make it work unless she was lured or kidnapped, but there’s no security camera footage of anything, and they also said she was drunk. Kelsey, who never drinks. Some of the others tease her about it, but I think it’s family-related. Her mom knew the cool outdoor survival stuff, but there was always a distance with her dad.

I’m doing the same thing the papers are: speculating. Except they don’t know her, so they think they’ve got it all figured out. Of course it was a stupid drunk college student, out in the bad part of town, looking for a drug deal. It makes so much sense that way, and then of course it’s Kelsey’s fault.

She wouldn’t do this. There’s no way she’d do this, except I’m just being difficult, because clearly she did, and the police are already annoyed with me for making it more of an issue than it already is. They just tell me they’re on it, and they won’t give me updates if I call because I’m not family.

It’s supposed to be comforting, I think, that it didn’t happen on campus. “One of us” died, but it wasn’t “one of us” who killed her. I keep hearing people mention oh, have you ever looked at that one memorial bench near the chapel? It’s for Maggie Wardle, whose name I didn’t even know until now, because her ex-boyfriend killed her on campus in a murder-suicide. So. We’re supposed to be grateful Kelsey’s not that.

This isn’t what senior year’s supposed to be, is it? I know yours wasn’t exactly a bed of roses, but it wasn’t this.

I should try to do some homework. God, that feels like such a joke. Gran’s trying to convince me not to come home this weekend, but I don’t know if that’s the right choice.

To: LidaRoseElizabeth
From: MathyMart
Sent: February 22, 2019 12:03 PM

Babe: hop in your car. You’ve got a key. I’ll see you at my apartment after work. If you want to come home, then come on home.

---

Chapter Fifteen

Pending table of contents

Catch up on the previous chapters here

A knock on the door jerked him out of his reverie. It was his first sex scene, and he was deep—heh—into it, to the point where he nearly felt every inch of her skin and heard her sigh. It would need work, because he wasn’t the sort of guy who usually read this stuff and had all the proper vocabulary at the ready, but it wasn’t exactly something he could shake off, either. At least his phone was right there so he could scope out the view from the doorbell camera, because maybe it was just a package.

Shit. Two men in dark suits. If he didn’t answer, they’d check the garage—van on one side, sedan on the other—and then start circling the house, peering in windows. That, for some reason, wasn’t trespassing. The problem was how you had to be home to tell people to get off your property, or else they’d put on their puppy eyes and say they were just worried about you. It was a wellness check until you told them to go the fuck away, but that would mean showing them he was home, after all.

Sighing, he decided to leave his notebook open, the pencil—mechanical, and almost out of lead—next to it as he stood up, slid his phone into his hip pocket, and tried to think cool, calming thoughts. This wasn’t the time to think about her, or about the scene he’d just been writing, although part of him was far less inclined to simply let that go. Would they notice? Probably. He was a single man who lived alone and wasn’t often seen out with friends, so why not scope out his den for some porn if they got half a chance? The problem was balancing exactly how much of a chance he should give them.

He reached the door just as one of them knocked again and opened it up with a carefully practiced expression: a little distracted because he’d just been pulled from his work, but concerned enough about what, exactly, brought these two strangers to his stoop.

“Bentley Beckett?” the one on the left asked. They were nearly twins: chiseled jaws, hairlines just starting to recede, that one blond and his partner brunet.

He blinked, because the script called for it. “Ben to my friends. Who—?”

They held up their IDs in unison, making them synchronized swimmers as well as almost-twins.

“Uh.” Ben blinked again, eyebrows raised. “What’s going on?”

“Likely nothing, Mr. Beckett,” the brunet assured him, tucking his ID away again. “But I wonder if we could come in?”

Good cop? Not that there really were any good cops. He calculated the risks and rewards as quickly as he could, but he thought that the blond might have noticed him doing it before he nodded and opened the door wider for them to come inside.

“Mr. Beckett,” the brunet—seriously, they flashed those IDs too quickly for him to catch their names—repeated, lowering his head a little like this was serious personal business. “We’re here to confirm that you’re the author of the book Since You’ve Been Gone, published under the pseudonym C. J. O’Connell.”

He jerked back. “What?” Ben was a man caught in his lie, of course, but it was an accepted lie. Even the biggest names published under a pseudonym now and then. “You’re not supposed to—” He deliberately swallowed the rest of that sentence, too, and it worked, because the blond looked smug: Gotcha.

“We presented your agency with a warrant,” the brunet explained, and yes, he was at least soothing cop, if not good cop. “They resisted and ran it by legal, but we got the warrant, and they gave us your name.”

“Mr. Beckett, do you know where Lida-Rose Dawson is?” the blond rapped.

Uh. What?

“Lida-Rose Elizabeth Dawson,” he repeated. “Informally known as Ellie. From her initials, I guess. Because a lot of people are interested in finding her.”

This was not how he’d imagined it. “I’m sorry?” Shit, what did they know? What did they think they knew? What did they want him to give away? Every blink, every glance … they’d read into it. Into all of it. And he could review his own footage later, trying to judge his performance, but what was he supposed to do now?

“Mr. Beckett, she’s wanted for questioning in the murder of her roommate,” the brunet explained. “The inspiration for the final murder in your book, right?”

“Uh.” Okay, this, at least, was expected. Ben gestured back into the house. “You want to look at my research? Because it’s all newspaper stuff, so …”

“Could we?” the brunet asked while his partner nearly shouldered him out of the way in his own house. Eminent domain, gentlemen.

He—Bentley Brooks Beckett, and seriously, Ma, why?—followed along, offering, “My den’s the room on the right,” in case the FBI agent couldn’t tell the difference between a den and a laundry. In case the FBI agent chose to make a mistake and stumble around like Ben had a body hidden back there.

Ben couldn’t turn around and watch both of the agents at the same time, but he saw the way the blond swept his eyes over the stuff hung in the hallway—some photos of him and Ma at different ages, some thrift store paintings—and he figured the brunet was doing it, too. Scoping him out. Figuring out the king from his castle. They would’ve clocked his clothes, too: jeans and a chambray shirt, leather belt clearly old and well-worn, work boots that clomped on the bare wood floor. His hair, in need of a cut, and his beard, trimmed just the way he liked, which would mean something to them. All of it would mean something to them because they wanted it to mean something to them. They had a story, so their report would include the details that supported it and ignore anything that tried to tell a different one.

“Yeah, so …” Ben sidestepped the blond agent to open the lower desk drawer and pull out one of those expanding folder things, although it wasn’t expanded very far. “Those three college girls, right?”

“We’re interested in the fourth,” blond told him, taking the folder anyway and opening it to pull out the contents. “The one who didn’t die.”

“Rosie,” brunet supplied. “In your book, she’s the one you call Rosie.”

He grimaced and shrugged. “I’m not good with names. I guess I didn’t change it very much.” There was a lot he hadn’t changed very much, thanks, but why were they here after her? Did that mean that she wasn’t in witness protection, after all? That she’d disappeared, but without help? Shit, had she been out there on her own all this time? Without some group of them acting as her support system while keeping him away from her?

Blond ignored the notebook on his desk and fanned the printouts of the newspaper articles dealing with the deaths of Kelsey Morgan, Ashleigh Fisher, and Heidi Phillips. Two were drunk when they died, one in a bad part of town and one in her own car—operating heavy machinery after imbibing, tsk tsk—and the third had been safe at home, but clearly she’d invited the wrong person in to join her.

Ben shifted, rubbing at his left arm because of course he’d be anxious about two feds dropping in on him like this. “I mean, they’re inspiration for the book, yeah,” he offered in the silence, “but the people in my head aren’t anything like the real ones were. Inspired, you know? But not …” He trailed off, because this was a good time to trail off.

Blond held up the paper-clipped stack—if a half-dozen sheets constituted a stack—of articles about Heidi Phillips. “In your book, the roommate’s out to dinner with a friend when the murder happens.”

He blinked. “In the …? It’s fiction. It’s—look, I didn’t date Lida-Rose Dawson.”

“And she wasn’t out with ‘a friend’ that night.” He tried to level his gaze at Ben, but Ben had two inches on him. “Her alibi was her boyfriend. Long-distance, and he just happened to show up that night and say oh, no, Ellie couldn’t have done it because she was with me all evening.”

“Until they both walked in and found the body,” brunet agreed. “Together. Or so they said.”

Shit, what? “What?”

“Yeah, that part didn’t make the papers,” brunet added almost comfortingly.

It looked like he’d have to learn their names.

“It didn’t make the papers because the boyfriend’s dad happened to be one of us,” blond snapped. “So they helped cover for her. The boyfriend and the dad.”

“Jack—”

The blond—Jack—slashed a hand through the air, ignoring his partner and focusing on Ben. “She disappeared. Ellie. We’re pretty sure her boyfriend’s dad orchestrated it, off the books, and we’ve been trying to find her ever since. So when we get wind that there’s this book coming out, and it’s going to be big, and it looks like the author had some inside knowledge about the person we’d like to question for Phillips’ murder …”

Seriously, there had to be a better reaction other than blinking, but he just couldn’t think of one. “Uh. It’s fiction.”

“Well, then, you’ve got quite the imagination, don’t you, Ben?”

He didn’t, actually. That was part of the problem with the second book. “I don’t … you’re saying that the … the sort of general case I used as a, I don’t know, plot backbone for my book means you … you think I’ve written a book where the main character falls in love with a murderer?”

“Possibly a serial killer,” Jack said, once again overriding his partner. “The other two women? She knew them, too. They were over at her apartment all the time that year.”

“The … the one killed on Elm and the one who crashed her car?”

Jack clucked his tongue and shook his head. “Should’ve done some more research there, Ben. Fisher’s car was tampered with.”

“They kept that out of the papers,” the brunet said quietly.

“Sure, so the real killer might slip up and mention it, but …” Jack dropped the printouts on the desk, scowling when they weren’t heavy enough to make a satisfying sound. “The real killer pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes and ran off, didn’t she?”

“Mr. Beckett, the reason everyone’s in a frenzy about your book is that you seem to have some sort of insight into Miss Dawson.” It seemed that the brunet’s usual volume was quiet, which Ben realized could easily be mistaken for calm. Or friendly. “Would you at all be willing to come with us into the office and tell us about your process?”

He licked his lips.

“You’re the first possible thread we’ve found to pull on this thing in years, so if you could help us find her … get our questions answered …” The brunet shrugged. “For Miss Phillips. For all of them.”

He ran a hand over his hair—at least it wasn’t a blink—and sighed. “I was writing, but … you’re talking right now?”

“If you wouldn’t mind.”

He minded. He minded a whole lot. But this thing went both ways. They wanted to know what he knew about her, right? He could say the same thing about them.

They let the silence drag on this time, and he sighed, lifting his hands and letting them fall to slap his thighs. “Sure. Okay. I don’t think this is going to help at all, but …”

Jack smiled tightly. “Thank you. We’ll caravan on over.”

Right. Okay.

This definitely wasn’t an eventuality he’d planned for.

---

To: MathyMart
From: LidaRoseElizabeth
Sent: January 11, 2019 10:48PM

I know I’ve got class tomorrow, but I can’t sleep. You should be in bed so you won’t get this until the morning, and even then I don’t want you wasting time worrying about it. I know you’ve got enough going on, and in case you need it in writing, I’m glad you told me. I worry about you, you know? That’s what you do when you love someone.

The TL;DR is that Trevor from 17 hasn’t been parking in my spot anymore because he’s been dead for weeks.

Now for the part you don’t have to read. Hell, I might even delete it. Sometimes just writing it out helps.

Is this like normal as you grow up? The more people you meet, the more are going to die. Right? But we’re not talking people who were old or sick. Margaret was killed by her boyfriend, for crying out loud, and that’s not okay. That’s not normal. Right? Most guys aren’t like that. Can’t be like that.

Right?

Or is this me being young and naïve and all the things Gran keeps telling me not to be, using the voice that means she doesn’t think I am, but maybe I am, after all? Like when she just got fixated on how I only did the single semester in Rome so I’d be home for your graduation, and that was the only reason. Because I’m still too young to make decisions like that? I don’t know. Fuck, I’m rambling.

Trevor’s been dead in a snowbank probably since the last time he parked in my freaking spot. I guess not many people hike that trail this time of year, or maybe he was found off the trail—there aren’t many details, but this is the second person I know who’s been murdered in months, and that’s absolutely not normal.

I should’ve just taken the single on campus. Or even a double. I didn’t have to save Heidi’s ass, and that’s not exactly paradise, either. We’re cordial, and we’ve managed not to go off on each other, but if she tries to tell me I haven’t done my share of the freaking chore list when we both know which one of us steps up and fills in when it’s not her week, and which one just sits there on her ass and goes “Well it’s your job this week,” I might just storm out. Leave her hanging.

God I’m distracted. In a mood. Everything’s going wrong, so everything seems like it’s going wrong, and I just don’t know what I’m doing here, but I’m too close to the finish line to back out now. I’m counting down the days because I’m done with this part of my life, you know? I’m ready to stop transitioning from high school to real life and just start living real life.

If you’ve read this far, I want you to know something else, too: I don’t care if Erin and Liza and whoever else keep telling you that the first year’s the worst and you need to come back for a second year and it’ll be so much better. If you don’t want to teach after this year, then don’t. No one’s going to make you sign that contract. We’ll work it out, because that’s pretty much the only non-negotiable here: the future is us. I want you happy, and if that means riding into battle against your mentor and your principal and whoever else, fine. I’ll get my sword.

I love you and I wish you were here. This whole long-distance thing really sucks.

E

---

Chapter Fourteen

Pending table of contents

Catch up on the previous chapters here

He often thought about hiring someone to clean his house, maybe once every other week to take care of the dusting and the vacuuming and those chores that didn’t need to be done every day but still needed to be done. What stopped him most times was the thought that he’d have to let someone in, perhaps with her own key, and he wouldn’t always know what she was up to if he was out. The laptop was password-protected and didn’t contain his most personal documents, but those were in his desk. He could lock that room, but then he’d still have to clean it himself, anyway, and just ask Bluebeard: locking a room was the surest way to make sure someone forced her way inside.

The second reason was the fact that he didn’t want to have to endure all the chuckles. They all thought of the irony—oh, the guy with the cleaning service wants to hire someone to clean his own house—and not the fact that most people came home from work and got to do something other than work. Besides, he was expensive. Paying someone to do it technically cost less than taking the time to do it himself.

He was past the usual everyday or every week sort of cleaning, anyway. If someone was desperate, he’d take a job cleaning an apartment between tenants, but he didn’t do that if it was just the normal wear-and-tear. His specialty was deep cleaning, the kind of thing where people didn’t have the supplies on hand, or maybe you couldn’t even get them at Meijer.

Crime scenes. A number of his jobs were crime scenes, after the tape came down and the scene was released but before the family or the landlord was comfortable coming back in.

Landlords were better than family members. He knew just how hard to push to up the price but keep the job. Families were harder, because usually they were grieving, which either meant they were too lost to know if he asked for too much or they felt the world owed them.

Maybe the world did. He could certainly relate to the feeling that things were sometimes entirely unfair, and that other people—bad people—had too many good things happen to them. It defied that deep-seated sense of balance. And yes, he knew what it was like to have someone taken away from you, without notice. Without the chance to even say anything. So sometimes he bent, but never too much.

People talked, and if they heard you were an old softy at heart …

He lived alone and couldn’t remember the last time he’d had anyone over. FedEx and UPS didn’t count, especially since they never got past the entryway. Sometimes they’d open the front door, if he was home, and stick a package inside if the weather was iffy. That was fine. He had cameras on all the doors, anyway. There was the one on the doorbell, the popular kind everyone seemed to have these days—everyone practically had to have these days if you didn’t want kids stealing your packages—but the others were his usual: the kind that so many people overlooked.

Okay, there were some drawbacks to not being the guy cleaning out apartments between renters, but what was he looking for? He’d already found her. Found her, lost her, and now he was looking for her again, this time looking for a very specific her instead of this nebulous, perfect idea of her.

A very specific her that people were making sure stayed far, far away from him. There was a whole group on that side, with all kinds of specialties and expertise and degrees to make that end of the seesaw plant itself on the ground. If he tried asking outright, going around and saying her name, then all was lost. They’d vaporize him and she wouldn’t even know it. She’d just be stuck there, waiting for him, and he’d never come.

The book tour was just about finalized. He was coming.

He couldn’t be absolutely positive she’d know about it, but everyone was raving about the book. Since You Went Away—what a stupid title. They were trying to make him into the next Wally Lamb, stealing song lines for titles, but whatever. That was fine. Wally Lamb was big. Oprah’s book club big. The bigger the book got, the more likely she’d see it, no matter how small of a town she lived in.

It was that patience thing again. He had to wait, and keep his own spirits up even if he didn’t see her on this tour. There might have to be another book—hell, he’d already started working on another book—and another tour, to give her time to find it and realize and make plans to show up. He didn’t know how short a leash they had her on, after all, so she might not even be up to date on world events.

That wasn’t a topic he liked to dwell on. What about the COVID lockdowns? Had she been alone, with maybe only a single agent as her lifeline? Did they use that international event to make her world even smaller? And what about after? Did they squish her down in a box, a single room, and make sure she never wanted to leave it?

It was the doom thinking getting to him again. The need to plan for the worst-case scenario so he had a reaction at the ready. It didn’t matter that he so rarely had to use such a plan—the point was that having one made him feel better. It calmed him, and centered him, to make sure he wouldn’t have to think if the worst actually happened. He was prepared for it, so anything else would be easy.

Well. The worst would be if she were dead. That was something he didn’t like to think about because, if that were true, it was all pointless. There was no coming back. No getting her back. Just … nothing. If she were locked up, someone’s prisoner, he could get her out. Find her—somehow, find her—and get her out, but if she were dead …

Death was the end. You couldn’t just turn the page on that, forgive and forget and whatever else they might have to do once they finally reunited.

It was possible she thought he didn’t want her anymore. It was possible—another idea that was hard to grasp, not that he ever really tried—that she’d given up on him and moved on. Sure, he’d been there for her and helped her, stepping up the way no one else had, but then … this gap. They took her away, some nebulous they, and he couldn’t find her. He could watch out for her and protect her, but he couldn’t find her.

Maybe he simply wasn’t good enough. If he’d been good enough, he would’ve found her.

Everyone wanted to know they were worth fighting for. She was, honestly and truly, but it probably didn’t look that way to her. Wherever she was.

He shook his head and went to sit down at his desk, reaching not for his laptop or the legal pads but a spiral notebook he’d bought at Meijer. The new book. He’d written the first one longhand, so he figured he might as well do that for the second. Even though it wouldn’t need as many drafts before he typed it up.

This one was a love story, too, but he’d make it have a happy ending. Thom didn’t mind that Since You Went Away—God, such a stupid title—didn’t have one, but of course it bugged him. She deserved a happy ending, especially after everything else that happened to her. All the people who’d used her and couldn’t care enough to even look for her. Hell, maybe she’d run because she couldn’t stand any of them anymore. Just because the worst sea lampreys were gone didn’t mean others couldn’t swim up and take their place, so maybe she’d finally put herself first and laid down some boundaries.

That was distressing, because he really should have found her by now if she was escaping the others. The bloodsuckers. Maybe she thought he was tech savvy in a blanket sort of way, instead of knowing his way around some specific pieces. Or that he’d have connections or …

It didn’t matter. He had the first book, and he had to work on this second one. Thom was expecting it, and there’d be buzz on the tour, and Thom was all about leveraging that into an even bigger book deal. He’d need it, because he probably wasn’t going to keep up the business as things moved forward. Especially if moving was in his future.

Moving somewhere closer to her.

He opened the notebook to the page where he’d left off. This woman’s name was Catherine, but that didn’t matter. It was still her, just under a pseudonym, and he wasn’t the first to wonder what was in a name. Skimming the last few lines, he reminded himself where he’d left off: Catherine at home, changed into a nightgown and curled up on the couch, book in hand … and utterly unaware that someone was outside, looking in.

He wasn’t entirely sure who that someone was yet, or how he fit in, but he knew who’d come to Catherine’s rescue, so that was all right. Picking up his pencil, he continued getting a little closer to finding out.

---

To: MathyMart
From: LidaRoseElizabeth
Sent: October 26, 2018 12:07PM

Oh my God. I just saw the paper and now I feel like such a terrible person. You know why Margaret wasn’t there yesterday or today and the whole bus route was even later than usual? Her freaking boyfriend murdered her Wednesday night. They only just found her. She’s in freaking pieces and I was making heartless jokes.

To: LidaRoseElizabeth
From: MathyMart
Sent: October 26, 2018 1:38PM

You are not a terrible person and you’re not heartless. If you weren’t in class I’d call you. I’ll call after school, okay? Take an hour and just talk.

To: MathyMart
From: LidaRoseElizabeth
Sent: October 26, 2018 2:14PM

You have to say I’m not terrible or heartless because otherwise you’re dating someone terrible and heartless. Don’t you have a bunch of grading and lesson planning to do?

To: LidaRoseElizabeth
From: MathyMart
Sent: October 26, 2018 3:24PM

I have to say you’re neither terrible nor heartless because I am bound by the curse of the blue fairy to only speak the truth. And yeah, I’ve got a shit ton to do but they can’t just bleed me dry. One hour. Tell me when you’re calling and you’ve got exactly 60 minutes. I’ll be coming back in tomorrow anyway.

---

Chapter Thirteen

Pending table of contents

Catch up on the previous chapters here

Part Two: The Loneliest Number

He mostly used his laptop for work. It was a write-off that way. Plus he only had the one laptop, unlike his phones. He had his work phone, his personal phone—which was a joke as far as the phone part actually went, because who called him now that Ma was dead?—and a couple more burner phones in case he needed to call someone and it wasn’t business, but he only had the one laptop.

And he was careful with the laptop. He didn’t type anything in it that he didn’t want other people to see, just in case. All his daily thoughts—he didn’t do anything so structured as journaling—were longhand, and he’d written three drafts of the manuscript that way before ever typing it up, going over and over it with a critical eye to make sure he didn’t put anything into the digital realm that he didn’t want other people knowing.

He was a careful and exacting man, and it showed. His agent even pointed it out—This is one of the cleanest manuscripts that’s ever hit my inbox! Thanks, Thom. It was always nice to be appreciated.

He was meticulous, but he couldn’t honestly say he was a patient man. He would wait, if necessary, but he didn’t like waiting. Every minute stood out clearly. Maybe he simply had a better sense of time than most people. He’d tried meditating, multiple times—he was also persistent—but it never seemed to click. Focusing on his breath was just another way of recognizing the way time was passing. It had to pass, since there was simply no other option, but breaths and heartbeats and guided meditation simply filled it instead of removing him from it.

Maybe he didn’t understand meditation, but that wasn’t for a lack of trying. YouTube, online forums, in-person private sessions … none of them broke through. He did all the so-called homework—which was assigned in units of time, by the way—and honestly wanted to succeed, but no dice. He managed to clear his mind of everything but the passing seconds.

It could be worse. At least that was the only thing he couldn’t get rid of when he wanted to. There were times it was good to put thoughts in a box on a shelf and come back to them later, because they’d be too distracting otherwise. And even though his business charged by the job instead of the hour, it was nice to have that comparison ticking away: ahead of schedule, on track, or taking a loss.

A business loss was one he could handle. He could recover from that, especially because he lived frugally and had a nice cushion in the bank. Even nicer since the advance and the book delivery. The bank knew he had the money, but there wasn’t an obvious trail of where it came from. Clearly if he’d deposited a check saying something like for writing the novel Since You Went Away, it would defeat the point of using a pseudonym. They were checks from an agency, but they didn’t even say what kind of agency.

And yes, he’d be showing his face. He hadn’t particularly wanted to, but they’d talked him around, because publicity practically required it. They could hold back the photo for now—he’d said something about how a man in his position didn’t exactly like to be seen as the literary type, especially when words like heart-wrenching and tender got thrown around too—but he’d be out there, doing the readings. Big cities, sure, but he’d also requested small Midwest towns.

He couldn’t be completely positive that she was in witness protection, especially after all this time, but the trail of hits for Lida-Rose Elizabeth Dawson was still cold. As far as he could tell, the last record of her existence—the last time anyone, anywhere, admitted to seeing her—was June 2, 2019. That was another police interview, and then … absolutely nothing.

It had to be witness protection. At the very least, it was a closed-court name change, and that was a bitch. He didn’t have the skills to try to hack it—he’d barely been able to confirm that Lida-Rose Elizabeth Dawson hadn’t changed her name the regular way, with a paper trail—and that wasn’t something he could casually ask someone to do. Mostly because he didn’t have any friends.

Even then it would be too big of a risk. That would leave a trail, in someone’s mind if not on the Internet itself, and he couldn’t have that. Especially not now when his ultimate plan, the Hail Mary long shot, was working.

He’d done a bunch of reading about witness protection, or at least as much as he could access as a normal citizen who wasn’t part of the program itself, and he didn’t think they would’ve put her in a big city. She probably wasn’t in Michigan anymore, but he couldn’t see the FBI footing the bill for New York or Los Angeles. He’d toyed with the idea all the same, since she’d be able to disappear into the masses there—well, as much as someone like her could disappear when she always stood out—but he didn’t think she’d want to go to a city. There was a comfort level involved, and she was Midwest to the core. She’d be somewhere in the Midwest, saying she came from somewhere else in the Midwest, but probably not Michigan, and …

And. He didn’t have much to come after that and.

She wouldn’t be going by her birth name, and she’d avoid anything else that was recognizable about her habits and hobbies, but that was it. And it didn’t help, because how many young women of approximately the correct age in the Midwest didn’t have a deep interest in classical studies? Her height would be the same, and likely her build, because he couldn’t see the FBI starving her or forcing her to gorge, but her hair? It could be any length and any shade. She might even be wearing colored contacts, which was a shame, because her eyes were so gorgeous. You lost a lot of depth with colored contacts, what with eyes being windows to the soul and all, but he did rather like that thought. Wherever she was, she wasn’t sharing her soul, because he wasn’t there to appreciate it.

Would they give her a fake diploma along with her fake name? He doubted it, but again, looking for a woman in the Midwest without a college degree still left a wide swath of the population. There were numerous jobs she could have, especially by now, when she might have worked her way up. Gotten a certification or training or whatever to get out of her entry-level starting place that they forced her into because they’d convinced her they were the good guys.

She didn’t have to be in the Midwest. He knew that in his head, but his gut told him otherwise. She wouldn’t want to go far. Italy had been more than enough, and she hadn’t signed on for the whole year there, either. It was too far from home, from everything she knew and loved.

He’d kept an eye on her grandmother, in case she decided to move or take some strange vacation—strange because that woman hardly ever left her house, much less the city limits—but no joy. He hadn’t even been able to catch any gossip about it, either, and he’d spent so much time bugging hair salons and the yarn store. God, those files were the most boring things to listen to. He could pick out her grandmother’s voice when she came to the knitting group, but nobody even asked her about her granddaughter. They all bragged about their own kids and grandkids and great-grandkids, but nobody even mentioned the only one he cared about.

If she was in witness protection, then her grandmother wouldn’t know where she was. If they did phone calls—he hadn’t figured out how to bug those, so it wasn’t worth the risk of breaking into her house to install anything—those would be secure and probably monitored in real time. He could plant his usual bug, sure, and get her half of the conversation, but that wouldn’t be enough. It would be more of the knit night conversations, and annoying questions he’d love to have the answers to, but unless she talked on speaker phone … and even then …

The book was a long shot, but it had always been a long shot. First he wasn’t sure he could even write one, and then revisions looked like another Everest, and follow that up with the freaking query letter and synopsis … and the rejections … and the whole process of revising once he did get a yes, which didn’t feel like it was worth celebrating because it wasn’t over yet. More revisions, but this time it was suggestions Thom made, which was even better because it skewed reality, and then it went out on sub, and then … finally … there was a contract and a publication date.

A signing tour.

It was a risk, not putting his face out there until the first event, but that was a big city night. New York. It would make the papers, the Internet … and she’d see him. All the buzz meant they were all dying to see him, to learn who, exactly, had written something so tender and insightful, and he’d be inescapable.

That was all she needed, really: to know where and when she could find him that wasn’t Kalamazoo. If it was in her current state, all the better. He wasn’t sure if she’d have to report interstate travel to her handler or whatever you called the guy who dictated the new face she showed the world, but it would be better if she could show up somewhere a short drive away, and see him, and he’d know. Their eyes would meet, and he wouldn’t even have to say a word to her where anyone else could hear. They’d nod, and he’d know she was there, and he’d wait for the sign. The one that said she knew why he’d done it all, that she knew he’d come for her, and the only answer to that was yes.

---

To: MathyMart
From: LidaRoseElizabeth
Sent: September 8, 2018 8:32PM

Mart—

I’m not saying I’m never moving again, because of course I’m moving after graduation, but at that point I think you’d better really really like your apartment. I hate packing, I hate carrying, and I hate trying to pretend like I’m all neat and organized and the sort of person who unpacks right away.

I’m just glad you helped me load up the dang car. I know you wanted to come down and help with the rest, but you’ve already got so much to grade and even more to plan, and you’re totally rocking it, by the way. Those middle schoolers are going to know more math than I do.

Heidi helped me carry stuff in, but she’s got that bad back. I swear she was going for all the heaviest boxes, anyway, because she hates not being able to help, but the last thing I need is to worry about her making it worse and messing with the first week of classes. She wasn’t even wearing her brace today. She’s just so blasé about it. I don’t want to be Gran here, but the Lord only gives you one spine.

It’s not as bad as she made it out to be. (Heidi in a nutshell.) We’ve got the common living room and kitchen, which has this absolutely teeny table and chair set, and the shared bathroom, and we each have our own room. They’re exactly the same size. The furniture isn’t stuck to the walls like it is in Crissey, but I swear the carpet dents have been there a million years. We’ve got all those strict rules about hanging stuff on the walls, so I haven’t done any of that yet. Mostly I’ve got the boxes in here and my laptop set up on my desk. It took way too long to connect to the Wi-Fi because they’ve got all these security layers in place (who’s going to be sharing national secrets here???) but clearly I’ve got it figured out. Finally.

I don’t know how this is going to go with Heidi tbh. So many people were like oh, sure, room with a mostly-stranger anyway so you don’t ruin a friendship, but it’s still weird that Sierra left right before senior year. Found herself in Belize and all the rest, I guess, but man. I can’t imagine that, you know? Finding something that means packing up and leaving everything you’ve ever known, for a language and culture you don’t know … you know me and my inability to learn proper Italian. Travel, yes, fine, but she’s out there totally alone.

And I’m exhausted. I’m glad I picked Saturday so I have tomorrow to try to … I don’t even know. Stock up my half of the fridge and try to shift back into school mode, I guess. Buckle down and complete this freaking degree and just check the next box to get to the next step. (You, by the way. In case you forgot. The next step is you.)

Love and hugs and lots of kisses, Ellie

---

Chapter Twelve

Pending table of contents

Catch up on the previous chapters here

Adam stepped into the spare bedroom for a phone call, but Nell wasn’t going to get her hopes up. He had more to do than babysit them, the cast-offs from an out of state cold case, and man, was she in a bad mood today. Something was possibly finally happening, but it wasn’t enough. They were closer than ever to figuring out who murdered Margaret and Trevor and Kelsey and Ashleigh and Heidi, names that Nell had almost stopped running in a loop in her subconscious, but close wasn’t actually there.

Her friends were going to push Since You Went Away to the top of the bestseller list, and O’Connell wasn’t even going to be hit with the Son of Sam laws. Nobody cared if you made money off a crime as long as it couldn’t be proved that you were the one who’d committed them.

Kent brought her a glass of room-temperature water and stood there. “Drain it.” That was why it wasn’t cold: hydration without the ice pick. “I mean it,” he added when she sighed. “Chug.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She did not chug it, thanks, but she did manage to drink it all. Nell put the pillow back and adjusted her position on the couch when he returned to the kitchen to refill her drink, putting ice in it this time. “You still glass half fulling this thing?”

Kent looked down at the water, but she didn’t think he’d misinterpreted. “Yeah,” he finally said, but only after he sat down again. “Anything to turn a spotlight on this guy. When we know what he looks like, we can keep an eye out for him. Maybe they can’t get him for what he’s already done, but they can stop him from doing more.”

She nodded at the coffee table. “His ‘more’ is writing a novel.”

“And that’s weird, right?” He grinned a little ruefully. “I mean, I never really liked English class, but even people who did think novels are a lot of work, right? And publishing timelines are slow, so … what, he whipped that up before we even moved here and piled up a stack of rejections?”

“Yeah, for being the kid who didn’t like English, you know a lot more about that whole process than I do. Ask me how long it’d take him to learn to do latte art and I’ve got an answer, but …”

He shrugged. “You were always better at writing things than I was.”

Nell wrinkled her nose because she wasn’t so sure about that, but she’d certainly been required to write more than he had. “So you think he started this right after we left?

“Maybe. Or maybe he’d already written a lot of it. That last part, though … the final little thing that isn’t labeled a chapter but isn’t really an epilogue?”

She nodded.

“That’s where I think he’s the clearest about what he wants.”

Nell took a deep breath and straightjacketed her arms around herself, but she wasn’t a constrictor snake. She couldn’t keep tightening it even as she exhaled. “Me.”

“You,” he agreed.

Except, by that point, she’d been truly gone. She’d still had her purse over her shoulder, at least, but the police took over the entire apartment, so she wouldn’t have been able to take her laptop even if she’d wanted it. It was just Nell, in her date-night outfit, and Kent, who at least hadn’t brought his duffel into the apartment yet, first taking his car to the police station, and then talking to the FBI agents, and then Kent calling his dad.

At the time Nell had thought his dad worked at a bank or as an accountant or something. The suits and the haircut could’ve gone either way.

Kent kissed her temple softly. “Earth to Nell.”

“You’ve reached Nell’s answering service. Leave a message and she’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”

He chuckled and wrapped his arms around her. “I know this can’t possibly be true, but I feel like I’ve been thinking about back then more than I ever have before.”

She licked her lips, but the question was too big. Kent was the one who’d left the most. He was the one who got family photos, and wedding photos, and photos of nieces and nephews he’d never met. Nell leaned back a little, just enough to catch his eye. “Do you regret it?”

Kent nodded once, not as his answer but an acknowledgment that yes, it was indeed the one big question they’d never discussed. “I think mostly I feel guilty. Nell …” He took her hand, frowning a little. “You know I was stuck. That it wasn’t working out, but I was too far in … the fact that I only got to do this, to figure things out without the whole family expectations hanging over me, because so many of your friends were murdered … I regret that part. That the price was so steep. But this?” He raised her hand to his mouth and kissed it gently. “I’m more me today than I’ve ever been. And you still seem to want me around, so …”

“I love you.”

He grinned like it was the first he’d ever heard of it. “I love you, too.” He leaned in to kiss her slowly, the kind of kiss that would have led to far more if there weren’t still an FBI agent in the apartment. Maybe it was the thought of Adam that made him pull back and frown a little down at her. “What about you? Do you miss the person you thought you would’ve been?”

It was his wording more than the question that made her frown and really try to think it through. She chewed on her lip and shook her head slowly. “I think about the only clear thing I had in mind for my future was being married to you. The job … I couldn’t really imagine it.”

“Kids?” he prompted softly.

This head shake was firmer. “I couldn’t really see that happening. It was sort of a vague ‘Yeah, someday’ thing.” And someday was still in the future because neither of them really felt comfortable embarking on that whole experience when there was still someone out there who might try to find Nell again.

A concern that felt a lot more real since Wednesday.

“Okay,” Adam announced as he came out of the back bedroom, as though he needed them to know he was returning, but his quick stride wouldn’t have allowed them much time to stop making out or readjust clothing or anything. Nell straightened up, anyway, because he was both focused and distracted. “We’ve got an author photo of O’Connell. That’s all they’re calling it—an author photo, so they’re not committing to it being the actual guy, but since he’s going to be going on tours and giving readings and all …”

Nell held out both hands for his phone because they were shaking too hard for her to take it with just the one and not drop it, and she pulled it in close and hunched over it like it was a scrying glass and she was a bog witch. Kent leaned in, too, but she barely noticed as she looked at the headshot of a man who wasn’t quite smiling as he looked directly at the camera. He had brown hair, just long enough to hint at curls, and the sort of beard outlining his jaw that meant he still spent time every morning shaving part of his face. His eyes—when she zoomed in to be sure—were also brown, very dark, and it was hard to tell exactly what emotion they betrayed. There were lines at the corners of those eyes, but for some reason she thought they were more from squinting than from smiling. The background was a greenish blur, like he was outside among the trees, and he didn’t have a tie, but he wore a collared shirt, unbuttoned at the top.

Zooming back out again, she tried to take all of it in as though she’d just passed this man on the street. As a quick assessment, he was cold and reserved. He wasn’t the Mona Lisa but a guy who realized a camera was on him and tried to do something with his face that wasn’t simply a blank stare. His mouth hadn’t been caught halfway into or out of a smile, because this man didn’t know how to smile. Even if he formed his mouth into the expected shape, his eyes were simply dead. They weren’t warm brown. They were mud.

“And?” Adam prompted, because apparently even FBI agents trained in interrogation tactics had a limit to how much silence they could take.

Kent shook his head, clearly passing the answer on to Nell.

But she had to shake hers, too. “I have absolutely no idea who this is. I’d say I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

---

from Since You Went Away by C. J. O’Connell (Penguin, 2024)

Duke only calls me after hours if it’s an emergency, but this isn’t the normal kind of emergency. I answer right away, because that’s job security and I’m the most dependable one on the team, and even though my screen tells me it’s one of Duke’s numbers, it doesn’t sound like Duke. “Cal.”

And that’s it. Usually he doesn’t even say hello and it’s just straight to the problem, but that’s it: half my name. “Yeah? I’m here.”

“Cal, there’s been …” A break, and a honk, like he’s blowing his nose. Like he’s crying? “There’s been a murder. In 12.”

My hand goes numb and I almost drop the phone.

“It’s—Cal, I don’t know, okay? One of them was out with a friend, and came home, and the two of them found the other one, and it’s … it’s bad, but I don’t know which one. Okay?”

I can’t feel my lips and tongue, either, but I hear a sort of padded “Rosie had dinner with a friend tonight” come out. There aren’t any sharp corners to the words. They’ve all been filed off. Novocained.

“Okay. Okay, but I also need you to remember that the police have the witnesses, so if you can’t get a hold of her right away …”

My mind keeps replaying the sound bite. There’s been a murder. In 12. There’s been a murder. In 12.

No. Just no. Either way it’s another one, another K senior, and they all know each other, and now Rosie—please God let it be Rosie—is alone and, what, giving testimony? Trying to recall every man who ever looked at Hailey wrong? Listing off her favorite bars so they can check the security footage and trying to remember which dating apps she has on her phone and hoping she’s got some sort of alibi to back up when she left earlier tonight?

Dinner with a friend. She had dinner with a friend, and they went out, so there’s the friend and everyone at the restaurant. I don’t know what restaurant. They dined in somewhere, so it wasn’t something like Burger King, but they hadn’t decided where to go last time I talked to her.

Let it be someplace sit-down, where they laughed with the waitress and left a nice tip, and other diners looked over and admired two friends having a good time, and maybe one of them ordered a drink so they had to show an ID, and maybe they paid with credit cards …

And why is that where my mind’s gone? Rosie didn’t do this. She’d never dream of doing it. But she’s the roommate, so if there isn’t a convenient ex-boyfriend around …

“Are they still there?” I ask without meaning too. “The police and Rosie. Are they still there?”

“I don’t know. I’m not there yet—I just got the call myself, but … Cal …”

He’s not convinced. He called me to tell me someone’s dead and he doesn’t know for sure who it is, but he’s ready for it to be Rosie. He probably only knows Hailey’s name because of the checks every month, but he knows who Rosie is. Why Rosie matters.

He’s called me and he’s not even there yet to see how bad it is.

---

This is the end of Part One.

Chapter Eleven

Pending table of contents