She grabbed a cup and started to fill it.
“Are you still with Denise?” I asked.
Her body stiffened.
“She used to work at the retreat up the hill too,” I said. “That’s how I knew her.”
I saw Cookie swallow. “We never worked at the retreat.”
“Sure you did. The Creative Recharge, right up the path. Denise would bring in the coffee and your scones.”
She finished pouring the coffee and put it on the counter in front of me. “Look, mister, I have work to do.”
I leaned closer to her. “Natalie loved your scones.”
“So you said.”
“You two used to talk about them all the time.”
“I talk to a lot of people about my scones, okay? I’m sorry I don’t remember you. I probably should have been polite and faked it and been all, ‘Oh sure, you and your scone-loving girlfriend, how you guys doing?’ But I didn’t. Here’s your coffee. Can I get you something else?”
I took out my card with all my phone numbers on it. “If you remember anything . . .”
“Can I get you something else?” she asked, more bite in her voice now.
“No.”
“Then that’s a buck fifty. Have a nice day.”
Chapter 9
I now understand when someone says they feel as though they’re being followed.
How did I know? Intuition maybe. My lizard brain could sense it. I could feel it in almost a physical way. That, plus the same car—a gray Chevy van with a Vermont license plate—had been behind me since I left the town of Kraftboro.
I couldn’t swear to it, but I thought that maybe the driver was wearing a maroon baseball cap.
I wasn’t sure what to do about this. I tried to make out the license plate number, but it was too dark now. If I slowed down, he’d slow down. If I picked up speed, well, you get the drift. An idea came to me. I pulled over at a rest stop to see what the tail would do. I saw the van slow and then drive on. From that point on, I didn’t see the van again.
So maybe he wasn’t following me.
I was about ten minutes away from Lanford when my cell phone rang. I had the phone set up to go through the car Bluetooth—something it took me much too long to figure out—so I could see on the radio screen that it was Shanta Newlin. She had promised to get back to me by the end of the day with Natalie’s address. I answered the call with a press of a button on the steering wheel.
“It’s Shanta,” she said.
“Yeah, I know. I got that caller ID thing up.”
“And I think my years at the FBI make me special,” she said. “Where are you?”
“I’m driving back to Lanford.”
“Back from where?”
“It’s a long story,” I said. “Did you find her address?”
“That’s why I called,” Shanta said. I could hear something in the background—a man’s voice maybe. “I don’t have it yet.”
“Oh?” I said, because what else was I going to say to that. “Is there a problem?”
“I need you to give me until the morning, okay?”
“Sure,” I said. Then I repeated: “Is there a problem?”
There was a pause that lasted a beat too long. “Just give me till morning.” She hung up.
What the hell?
I hadn’t liked the tone. I hadn’t liked the fact that a woman with enormous contacts in the FBI needed until morning to find the address of a random woman. My smartphone dinged, signaling that I was getting a new e- mail. I ignored it. I am not a goody-goody or any of that, but I never text or e-mail and drive. Two years ago, a student at Lanford had been seriously injured while texting and driving. The eighteen-year-old woman in the passenger seat, a freshman in my Rule of Law class, died in the crash. Even before that, even before the wealth of obvious information about the downright stupidity if not criminal negligence in texting while driving, I was not a fan. I like driving. I like the solitude and the music. In spite of my earlier misgivings about technological seclusion, we all need to disconnect more often. I realize that I sound like a grumpy old man, complaining that whenever I see a table of college “friends” sitting together they are inevitably texting with unseen others, searching, always searching, I guess, for something that might be better, a perpetual life hunt for digital greener grass, an attempt to smell roses that are elsewhere at the expense of the ones in front of you, but there are few times that I feel more at peace, more in tune, more Zen, if you will, than when I force myself to unplug.
Right now I was flipping stations, settling on one that played 1st Wave music from the eighties. General Public asked, where is the tenderness? I wondered that too. Where is the tenderness? For that matter, where is Natalie?
I was getting loopy.
I parked in front of my housing—I didn’t call it my house or my apartment because it was and felt like campus housing. Night had fallen, but because we are a college campus, there was plenty of artificial illumination. I checked the new e-mail and saw it was from Mrs. Dinsmore. The subject read:
Here’s the student file you requested
Good work, you sexy beast, I thought. I clicked on the message. It read in its entirety:
How much elaboration do you need on “Here’s the student file you requested”?
Clearly the answer was, none.
My phone’s screen was too small to see the attached file, so I hurried up the walk in order to view it on my laptop. I put my key in the lock, opened the front door, and flipped on the lights. For some reason I expected, I don’t know, to find the place in shambles, as though someone had ransacked the joint, as they say. I had seen too many movies. My apartment remained, at kindest, nondescript.
I rushed over to my computer and jumped on the e-mail. I opened the one from Mrs. Dinsmore and downloaded the attachment. As I mentioned earlier, I saw my student file years ago. It was, I thought, a tad disturbing, reading professors’ comments that had not been shared with me. I guess at some point the school decided that it was too much to store all these old records so they’d scanned them into digital forms.
I started with Todd’s freshman year. There was nothing particularly spectacular there except that Todd was, well, spectacular. Straight A+’s across the board. No freshman got straight A+’s. Professor Charles Powell noted that Todd was “an exceptional student.” Professor Ruth Kugelmass raved, “A special kid.” Even Professor Malcolm Hume, never one easy with praise, commented: “Todd Sanderson is almost supernaturally gifted.” Wow. I found this strange. I had been a good student here, and the only note I’d found in my file was negative. The only ones I’d ever written were negative. If all was okay, the professor just left it alone and let the grade suffice. The rule of thumb in student files seemed to be, “If you have nothing negative to say, don’t say anything at all.”
But not with good ol’ Todd.
First-semester sophomore year followed the same pattern—incredible grades—but then things changed abruptly. Next to second semester was a big “LOA.”
Leave of Absence.
Hmm. I checked for a reason and it only said, “Personal.” That was bizarre. We rarely, if ever, leave it at just that—“Personal” in a student file—because the file is closed and confidential. Or supposed to be. We write openly in here.
So why be so circumspect about Todd’s LOA?
Usually the “personal” reason involves some kind of financial hardship or an illness, either the student’s or a close family member’s, either physical or mental. But those reasons are always listed in the private student files.
