“Apparently, he never made it home last night.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean he’s missing,” I argued. I set down my sandwich on Wes’s desk, my appetite waning. “I mean, he’s a pretty simple old man. Isn’t it more likely that he went out to a bar and had too much to drink?”
Wes shrugged, chewing thoughtfully. “His wife said he’s never not come home. Even when he’s away for work or whatever, he always calls her every night before she goes to bed. Last night, he didn’t call her.”
“But he called me.”
Wes stopped chewing. “He did? What for?”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” I said. I picked banana peppers off of my sandwich and tossed them onto Wes’s wrapper. For some reason, Stefano never failed to mix up our toppings. “He left me this bizarre voicemail. It kinda sounded like he might’ve crashed his car or something. Did you hear about any car accidents last night?”
“A couple, but none of the reports included O’Connor. What’d he say?”
“Not much,” I admitted. “He texted me too. I spent all morning going through the safe in his office.”
“Uh, why?”
“He asked me to. I didn’t find much. There was no money or anything in it. Just a bunch of papers and a little puzzle box. I thought he was messing with me or something.”
Wes set down his sandwich and brushed off his hands. “Do you still have the text and the voicemail?”
“Yeah.”
I handed over my phone. After Wes read the text and listened to the voicemail, he said, “That’s pretty weird. I’m sure O’Connor’s fine. Most missing people turn up within the next day, but I’ll look into it just in case.”
Despite Wes’s reassuring words, something felt off about the entire situation. Between O’Connor’s kooky messages and his mysterious disappearance, part of me wondered if there was more to the contents of O’Connor’s safe than I had originally realized. I continued my lunch with Wes, trying to concentrate on the idle conversation at hand, but I was too distracted. Eventually, I gave up on filling my stomach and handed the rest of my sandwich over to Wes for him to finish.
“Do you have any of those cardboard storage boxes?” I asked as I collected our trash and threw it into the bin beneath Wes’s desk.
“Yeah, there are a bunch in the back room,” he said, polishing off the rest of my food. “You want one?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“Be right back.”
In a minute or two, Wes returned with one of said boxes beneath his arm. He handed it over. “What do you need it for?”
I took the box and popped off the lid to look inside. It looked big enough for everything I intended to shove into it. I glanced back at Wes and said, “I’m going to go clean out O’Connor’s safe.”
3
I ransacked O’Connor’s safe, emptying it by the armful and dumping every single piece of paper into the storage box, even the tiniest of newspaper clippings. There was even more stuff than I thought. The lid of the cardboard box refused to close completely, papers and file folders peeking out from beneath it. The small wooden puzzle box I tucked safely away in my messenger bag. When I first attempted to lift the box, my lower back protested at the weight. I shifted, bending at the knees instead, and tried again. O’Connor kept a small dolly cart to transport his classroom materials back and forth from his office, so I nabbed that, and soon enough, I was on my way back to the apartment, lugging the dolly and my haul along behind me.
At home, I upended the entire box onto our modest dining room table. Franklin jingled in from the bedroom, curious, and put his nose to the floor to sniff at the files that had fallen off the mountainous pile on the table. When he attempted to make off with one of the outdated newspapers, I flicked his snout and confiscated his prize, glancing down at the headline: “Waverly Student Shines.” Beneath that, there was a picture of a young man in a graduation gown shaking hands with the dean of the university. The caption said, “Donovan Davenport, valedictorian, receives his diploma from Dean John Hastings.” The article itself went on to describe Davenport’s academic success. He’d been on the Dean’s List for all four years of his undergraduate career. I scoffed when I read that, though it was mostly out of jealousy. I’d heard of the Davenports before. They owned several of the banks in the area, which meant that Donovan probably never had to work a day in his life. I, on the other hand, worked part-time all throughout college, unable to afford the luxury of studying nonstop.
O’Connor had gone to the lengths of highlighting certain parts of the article, including Donovan’s full name. The neon-yellow phrases popped out at me, things like “one of very few students to graduate summa cum laude” and “awarded a prestigious internship with a top-tier company.” There was also a quote from Davenport’s father: “We always knew Donovan was going places, and the opportunities that Dean Hastings provides for Waverly students are endless.”
In all my time at Waverly, Dean Hastings had never reached out to me with any kind of opportunity. Apparently, his attention was reserved for some of the wealthier students at Waverly. Donovan’s “prestigious internship” was for a conglomerate business, Lockwood Inc., in the downtown area, just a few blocks away from the police station. From what I could tell, it was a damn good position for a kid straight out of college. When I graduated from my state college, it was only ever a dream to skate right into a full-time, salaried position. Davenport had either worked his ass off in school or gotten lucky.
I tossed the article back on the table and regarded the disorderly pile of crap on the table. Sighing, I sifted through
