“We were all in the same geography class our freshman year,” Maddison’s dad explained. Maddison was staring at him and there was a weird rushing noise in her ears. Hopefully it wasn’t shock, if she passed out now it would be embarrassing. That, and her dad would probably try to explain how he knew Chris and Carrie’s Aunt Elsie while Maddison was out cold so he never actually had to tell her anything.
“I was assigned to room with Ryan, and we’d met Griffin at orientation, and he had a math class with Elsie, and then Ryan made friends with Wyzowski and just turned up with him one day, and nobody ever knew where they met,” Maddison’s dad explained, waving a hand as if to indicate that that part wasn’t important.
“The tables in the geography lecture hall seated five comfortably—they were supposed to be able to seat six—and the rest is history,” he went on. “We were inseparable for the next three-and-a-half years. We were planning to go into fields that were . . . I guess you might say . . . complementary? History, geology, archives, and oceanography all play into each other, especially if you spend your free time treasure hunting. And Elsie was—kind of terrifying,” her dad said. “She had the most incredible mind. She loved puzzles and she’d practiced all kinds until she could look at a collection of separate objects and tell you three different ways you could fit them together. She was the one who started the whole search for the San Telmo,” he explained. “It was this little sidebar in our geography textbooks and I’d been interested in the history behind it. We were sitting over lunch talking about it one day and suddenly Elsie said, ‘Well, why hasn’t anyone ever looked into the lee side of Archer’s Grove?’ and all of a sudden the theory became practice.” He had a faraway look in his eyes. Maddison was afraid to breathe too loudly for fear she’d break the spell.
Chris and Carrie hadn’t talked about their aunt that much. They had both known her all their lives, so Maddison supposed that there was little for them to discuss, and the loss was still too fresh for either of Maddison’s friends to feel like sharing. Maddison had known that Elsie Kingsolver was a much-loved woman, but she’d always been a plot point rather than a character in her own right. And now she turned out to have been a major player in Maddison’s family history, too.
“Sometimes, I think Elsie saw how the five of us fit together better than anyone else,” Maddison’s dad added. He picked up a snow globe from Mr. Lyndon’s desk and turned it over. “And then, Ryan went missing and suddenly none of my other friends would talk to me,” he said, watching the white flakes swirl around. “And the police were asking me all these leading questions and only the police chief overseeing the case seemed to think I was telling the truth when I said I hadn’t done anything.”
“Except act like an idiot teenager,” Mr. Lyndon said.
“Well, what was I supposed to do, develop psychic abilities and report Ryan missing before he left?”
“Mention the San Telmo before today?”
“There was nothing to connect the San Telmo with Ryan disappearing!” Maddison’s dad protested. “And there had been arguments between all of us the week before, it was right before finals and we were . . . hormonal.”
“What does that mean?” Maddison asked, and then got a very good idea when her dad covered his face with his hands and blushed. Mr. Lyndon raised an amused eyebrow.
“Elsie had started dating a guy and I didn’t like him,” her dad admitted.
“Did you like her?” Maddison asked. “What?” she added when her dad looked horrified. “It’s an important question, lovers’ spats are practically the first thing they check for when someone goes missing!”
“Valid point,” Mr. Lyndon said. Maddison preened.
“I actually didn’t,” Maddison’s dad said. “We were really good friends for a really long time, and we both thought about it, but in the end—I saw fireworks when I met your mother. I was never in love with Elsie Kingsolver in the same way.”
“But you still dragged us to her funeral,” Maddison said. “Without explaining anything to me or—actually, did you ever tell Mom this?”
“I had to tell your mom, she wanted to know why I was so interested in taking her name when we got married,” her dad explained. “I very nearly didn’t get into any graduate program at all because of Ryan’s disappearance. My grades suffered and I had to explain to every school where I interviewed why I was the subject of an ongoing police investigation—and yes,” he said to Mr. Lyndon, “I know that you did everything you could to stop that and that it wasn’t legal for the schools to be getting letters about me, but that didn’t matter to the vultures. I was getting anonymous phone calls too. A bunch of people thought I did something to Ryan.”
“I never understood that,” Mr. Lyndon added. “There was no more evidence that you did it than there was that the Wyzowski kid did it, but for some reason everyone assumed we were going to arrest you. I even had to have words with a couple of the local cops on the subject of blabbing to reporters.”
“Anyway,” Maddison’s dad said hurriedly, “I had a heck of a time moving on from the whole mess, and when I met your mother in our first year of graduate school I told her before our first date. She’s always known.”
Maddison sighed.
“I was trying to put the whole thing in the past,” her dad said. “The last thing I wanted was for someone to make your life a nightmare because they remembered my part in a disappearance years ago. So, I didn’t tell you, and I didn’t see anyone from school for eighteen years, and as far as we were all concerned it was over. Nobody even contacted me, except for one letter from Elsie right after you were born, wishing me luck. And then . . . ” He paused. “Then Elsie sent me a letter. A postcard, really. It had a picture of a Spanish galleon on the front and ‘It’s starting again’ written on the back in an old keyword cypher we used to use.” Maddison gasped. “And two days later I found out,” her dad said, “that she was dead.”
“Was her name the key?” Maddison asked.
“That was her favorite,” her dad agreed. “And then . . . well you know the rest . . . ”
Maddison did, sort of. Her dad’s story explained so much—the paranoia, the insistence on going to the funeral, the moving across the state and taking a new job at the drop of a hat, the weird avoidance of Professor Griffin, even the stalking of Chris and Carrie. It just also all seemed so pointless.
“You know, we wasted a heck of a lot of time in the beginning, wondering if you were out to kill everybody,” Maddison said, and her dad choked. “No, really,” Maddison said, warming to her subject. “You kept following Chris and Carrie around and being creepily nosey! I had a screaming fight with Chris because he was absolutely convinced you were going to murder him in his sleep and I still don’t think he trusts you at all. And what was the deal with following Carrie around and taking pictures of her?”
“Wait, what?” Her dad looked now more confused than guilty, which Maddison felt was an annoying response to a legitimate complaint.
“Taking pictures of your teenage daughter’s friends without asking either girl for permission is a very suspicious thing to do, Kevin,” Mr. Lyndon added.
“I agree,” Maddison’s dad said, looking puzzled. “But I haven’t actually done anything like that.”
Oh, this was ridiculous. “I saw the picture,” Maddison said. “It fell out of one of your folders in the study when I was trying to find your glasses.” Her dad continued to look bewildered. “Here, look,” Maddison said, and pulled the picture of the picture up on her phone. “See?”
“Oh,” her dad said. “That’s not—Maddison, that isn’t a picture of Carrie.”
Maddison looked from her dad to the picture and back again, letting her incredulity show on her face.
“Has anybody ever mentioned to Carrie how very much she looks like her aunt did at that age?” Maddison’s dad asked in a slightly strained voice.
“This is Elsie?” Maddison asked.
“Carrie really looks like her aunt,” her dad said.
“The Kingsolver case?” Detective Hermann said. “Yeah, what about it?” He’d been about to head home. It was six o’clock and the police station was switching over to night shift, and Detective Hermann had been hard at work since seven in the morning with exactly one break, during which someone had accidentally walked off with his chips. He’d tracked them down to Detective Barrie, who hadn’t even realized they were in her bag and returned them in perfect condition, but that was the biggest success Detective Hermann had had all day.
The convenience store robber had struck again, there had been another flare-up of the graffiti artist who kept bothering the park service, and no progress had been made at all in the Kingsolver case. The murder of Elsie Kingsolver—if, as Detective Hermann still had to convince some people, it truly was a murder—had been stuck ever since the suspiciously convenient suspect had committed a completely out-of-character suicide. So when the two federal agents came in asking for him, he was only too happy to help.
“I’m Agent Michelle Grey, this is Forrest Holland,” the woman with the slightly more commanding presence said, shaking hands with the detective. Her partner shook hands and then wandered off to stand guard over the fax machine. “He’s expecting DNA- and dental-record confirmation,” she explained. “We’re sorry to keep you through dinner, but we came by earlier today and missed you. We wanted your take on the Kingsolver case.”
“I just don’t see what I can tell you,” Detective Hermann explained. “It was initially classified as a hit-and-run, until we caught someone trying to kill her niece and nephew. I had to call in a favor just to keep the case open when the guy committed suicide in a holding cell.”
“And there’s the niece and nephew again,” Agent Grey sighed. “Oh, I hate being right.”