by Linda Keir
He didn’t resume until they had their coffees and had found a quiet table where they couldn’t be overheard by staff or students.
“And now our daughter Cassidy—”
“—is in Wayne Kelly’s journalism seminar,” Scanlon interrupted, finishing with a sympathetic sigh.
“I know there’s been some tension between Kelly and the administration. I have two concerns. One is that I don’t understand how someone like Curtis Royal could have become an employee of Glenlake. Aren’t there background checks? And two, Cassidy and the other students seem to think Curtis Royal could be innocent.”
“Even if he is found innocent, he’ll never work a day here again,” Scanlon assured him. “But aside from that, I’m not sure what I can do for you. The prosecution will play out, and I imagine he’ll be found guilty.”
“I don’t want to meddle,” said Ian—words that always signaled the exact opposite, no matter who spoke them, and certainly Scanlon knew the same thing. “But I promised Cassidy I would do whatever I could to ensure the wrong man wasn’t convicted. If I could see your records on Royal so I could ease her mind, you’d be doing me a huge favor.”
The relief on Scanlon’s face was visible. “Well, obviously the police and the prosecutor already have all of that, but I think we can arrange it.”
“And if you could tell Kelly to stop the innocence crusade, that’d be great, too.”
Ian had chosen the moment perfectly. Scanlon looked like he’d bitten into a lemon.
“The board feels the same way,” he said. “And I’ve spoken to Wayne about it. He says his only allegiance is to the truth.”
“But you’re his employer.”
“The . . . ah . . . problem is that he only owes us his allegiance for a few more months. And as a journalist, he has a platform.”
Scanlon gave a pained smile, as if he were picturing the pile of headlines in his office.
Ian didn’t want to betray Cassidy’s confidence but felt he had no choice. “Do you think it would help matters if you knew one of his students made an unsupervised visit to the county jail?”
It was gratifying to see Scanlon pale ever so slightly.
“Two students, actually,” added Ian. “And one of them was my daughter.”
Andi was already at work and had managed to distract herself with page proofs for a book on the historic homes of Kansas City when Ian texted.
Just met with Scanlon. He’s collecting a few things for me. Heading home soon. All is well. XO
The words All is well warmed her, almost as though she’d heard Ian speak them aloud. She set aside the proofs and opened Google Drive to take a last look at the photos. Just to be sure there was nothing else.
A new file, titled Miranda Darrow Interview, had been added since last night.
She opened the interview.
It had been conducted by the ubiquitous Liz Wright, whose investigative zeal paled only slightly in comparison to Cassidy’s.
Subject: Miranda Darrow
Connection: Widow of former headmaster Lincoln Darrow
Tools used to locate Mrs. Darrow: Glenlake records, internet search, conversation with staff who knew her.
The following is my typed transcript of our phone conversation, which took place two days before Curtis Royal was formally charged. (Note: Sorry for the delay in uploading, but I had an exam in AP Physics and a massive Shakespeare paper I had to get done first! Liz)
LW: Hello, Mrs. Darrow.
MD: Call me Miranda. I haven’t been Mrs. Darrow since I remarried nine years ago.
LW: Oops. My bad.
MM: No need to apologize. I loved being Mrs. Darrow, but now I’m Miranda Malone.
LW: I know from school records that Mr. Darrow passed away in 2009.
MM: He had a heart attack. We kissed good night, and by morning our too-brief time together was over.
LW: I’m sorry.
MM: I was, too. He was a great guy, but he was almost twenty-five years older when I married him, so what are you going to do?
Andi hadn’t thought about it at the time, but the age gap between young, sexy Miranda Darrow and Headmaster Darrow was nearly the same as between her and Dallas.
MM: The hardest part was that he died in the headmaster’s house, so I ended up husbandless and homeless in short order.
LW: Glenlake kicked you out?
MM: They needed it for the next headmaster, which is understandable. And all’s well that ends well. I met and married my current husband and even managed to have a baby girl before I was too old to be a mom. Thom’s a successful rancher, and I was blessed to be able to trade the safe boarding school world for the thrill of life out west. I guess safe is a relative term, given what happened to Dallas Walker.
LW: Did you know him at Glenlake?
MM: There was no missing that guy.
LW: Why is that?
MM: His swagger. His smile. He really thought he was all that.
LW: In some of the interviews we’ve conducted, people have told us he had a tendency to be flirtatious.
MM: [Laughs] It was a lot more than a tendency.
LW: Was he flirtatious with you?
MM: Are you asking if Dallas Walker put the moves on me?
LW: Umm . . . I guess so?
MM: Let me put it this way, I used to call him Wanton Walker because he was so obvious about his ulterior motives.
Dimwit Barbie clearly wasn’t as dull as Dallas had claimed.
LW: Was your husband—I mean your late husband, Mr. Darrow, jealous of the attention you got from Dallas Walker?
MM: [Laughs again, loudly] Linc knew Dallas wasn’t my type. He was amused by it.
LW: So you didn’t reciprocate any of the feelings Dallas Walker may have had for you?
MM: That guy had nothing to offer but sweet talk and a short shelf life. That’s what I thought happened: He loved Glenlake until he got bored with the scenery. [Pause] Or, maybe I should say, he discovered it was too rugged for him, if you know what I mean.
LW: I don’t think so?
Andi knew only too well.
MM: He was nice looking, rakish, and not teacher-like at all. That can be a treacherous combination—especially for someone young and impressionable.
LW: Like a student?
MM: There was definitely talk about the distracting effect he was having on some of the girls. The staff was worried about one of them in particular.
The room started to spin.
LW: Worried how?
MM: That she was unstable, and interaction with Dallas, positive or negative, could make her worse.
LW: Do you remember who the girl was?
MM: It’s been a lot of years, and it was just passing talk. [Pause] I’m not great with names, but I might recognize it if I heard it.
LW: Georgina?
MM: Her, I remember. Fiery with the hair to match, and definitely one of the ones we were watching, but not the girl I’m thinking of.
LW: Crystal? Lola? Kate?
MM: I feel like it ended in a vowel sound. Like Candy, or Kelly, or Emily . . .
Andi felt like she might pass out.
LW: Sylvie?
MM: Hmm. Sylvie . . . That definitely might be it.
Sylvie?
And possibly Georgina?
Georgina’s flirtation with Dallas had always been a point of contention, but Andi wasn’t about to broach that topic until she’d rooted through all the contact information on the class Google Drive and googled Sylvie Montgomery first.
Unfortunately, the search offered the same stale results: Sylvie had a Facebook page that had last been updated five years ago, when she’d been living in Taos and working part-time at a “mineral gallery.” Short of paying for one of those online searches that guaranteed she’d be shocked by what she found—probably the same white-pages search she’d already done—there was nothing else Andi could think of to try.
Much like Dallas, Sylvie had all but vanished.
Sylvie had been a troubled girl plagued by insecurity and eating disorders, and given that she’d gone after every guy Andi had ever smiled at, it was no surprise that she might also have made a play for Dallas. She’d joined the Cue Sports Society after Ian had stopped going. Did that mean she’d known about Andi and Dallas?
And if she knew, did that mean other people besides Ian knew, too?
Or had Miranda Whatever-her-new-last-name-was confused Andi with Sylvie? If so, that meant there’d been rumors about Andi and Dallas among the staff.
Which also led her back to Georgina, if only for Sylvie’s contact info.
Andi’s fingers trembled as she opened the contacts on her phone.
“I was starting to think Ian had chopped you into bits and buried you in the backyard,” Georgina said by way of hello.
“I’ve been swamped with work on a book I have coming out in the fall.”
“You can make it up to me by meeting for lunch. I’m so craving a cheeseburger.”
“I can’t get away today,” she lied. “But soon.”
“I hate consuming that many calories alone. But be that way if you must.”
“Hey, I have a question,” Andi said. “Did you ever track down Sylvie Montgomery?”
“Funny you should ask,” Georgina told her. “Tommy said someone named S. M. Katz sent him a Facebook friend request a while back. The profile photo was a waterfall, so he assumed it was some kind of a scam, but I told him he should have looked into it. I mean, S. M. Katz could be Sylvie Montgomery Katz. If she got married, maybe she set up a new profile. It would be just like her to do that instead of updating her info.”
“And did he?”
“Not sure. We started talking about the place he has in Sanibel, and I told him we go to Captiva all the time and—”
“Let me guess. You made a plan to meet up there over spring break?”
Georgina giggled. “With kids and spouses, of course.”
“Of course,” Andi repeated. “Be careful.”
“It’s not like that,” Georgina said, not at all convincingly. “But I’ll text Tommy. If he didn’t delete the friend request, maybe we can find out if S. M. Katz is really Sylvie.”
“Thanks,” Andi said, feeling dubious about giving her an excuse to communicate with her long-lost beau.
“My pleasure,” Georgina said happily. “Why the interest in Sylvie?”
Andi knew her friend too well to feed her a No reason, I just thought about her the other day, so she’d called with a diversionary tactic at the ready.
“The other night, Ian admitted that he and Sylvie hooked up during senior year,” she lied. “While we were on that break.”
Georgina paused for half a second and said, “Then I guess it doesn’t matter if I told you I totally caught them in the act. Doing it.”
“Why would it matter?” she said, feeling wounded and unable to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. That Georgina had been able to keep such a big secret for so many years bothered her almost as much as the secret itself.
“Sorry, girlfriend. But you were both getting things out of your systems, right?”
“Speaking of which,” Andi said, taking a breath in advance of the question she had avoided asking for all these years. “Cassidy told me a bit of gossip.”
“Do tell,” Georgina said, because of course.
“You remember Miranda Darrow, right?”
“Who could forget Headmaster Darrow’s bombshell trophy wife?”
“I guess the journalism class interviewed her. She said she used to call Dallas Wanton Walker because he was always coming on to her. Other women, too.”
“Like who?” Georgina asked, her voice rising in pitch.
“She didn’t say.” Andi forced the next words out. “But I always wondered whether he’d made a pass at you after the poetry slam.”
Georgina was uncharacteristically silent.
“Georgina?”
“I . . . I never told anyone about that.”
“What?” Andi asked, her face burning.
“When he walked me back to my dorm that night, he tried to kiss me. I think.”
“You think?”
“It definitely seemed like he was leaning in to do it, but I dodged him.”
“Oh my god,” Andi heard herself say.
“I know, right?” Georgina said. “What a perv.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me, or—”
“One of the kids investigating?” Georgina asked. “Because I wanted to believe I was imagining it all these years. I mean, he might have been cute, but how gross would that have been?”
“Very,” Andi managed.
“Speaking of which, I never could believe that Ian actually went for Sylvie,” Georgina went on. “She was such a total bone wreck back then.”
“That she was,” Andi said, trying not to think of the bone wreck that was once Dallas Walker and the circumstances leading up to it. “And she basically threw herself at him, and any other guy I ever looked at sideways.”
Had she gone after Dallas, or had she, like Georgina, been smart enough to see him for what he truly was?
“So you wanted to look up Sylvie and satisfy yourself that she’s still a sad little mouse, someone to pity and not fear.”
“Something like that.”
“I’ll let you know what Tommy says.”
As soon as they hung up, Andi tried, with no success, to lose herself in some copyediting.
Georgina texted her back within minutes.
S. M. Katz IS Sylvie! She married the owner of that weird store she was working at in Taos and they moved to some rich hippie enclave outside Santa Cruz. Apparently, Katz has cash. Then again, maybe it’s hers.
Did she tell Tommy all this in a chat? Andi texted back.
He just accepted her friend request and saw her updated information. I sent her a DM.
“Shit,” Andi said aloud, wishing she’d thought through Georgina’s involvement to its inevitable conclusion. What did you say?
Georgina responded by sending a copy of the message:
Hi Sylvie!
Your ears must have been burning when you sent Tommy Harkins that Facebook request . . . Andi Bloom Copeland (she and Ian have been married for TWO DECADES!) and I were just talking about you! How are you? What have you been doing since we graduated? I’m sure you’ve heard by now that Dallas Walker’s body was found in Lake Loomis! Can you believe it? The theories about what happened have stopped now that one of the locals has been charged with his murder, but boy were they creative! Even more so than the ones we made up way back when about where he’d gone. Anyhoo, I hope you’ll accept my friend request. It’ll be great to catch up!
XO,
Georgina
P.S. You should call Andi. I know she’d love to catch up with you, too!
She’d included Andi’s cell phone number at the bottom.
Scanlon had told Ian the records request would take an hour, maybe more, so he drove back into town, had an early lunch at an overpriced and underwhelming Chinese restaurant, the decor unchanged since his student days, using the weak Wi-Fi signal to check his work emails on his laptop.
He considered writing one to Simon Bloom: WELCOME ABOARD, BUSINESS PARTNER. Or to Preston: FRAUD IS A BREACH OF CONTRACT. Or maybe, he thought, he should introduce them. They’d probably get along, and they both had a stake in his business.
After seventy-five minutes, he went back to campus. In the distance, knots of students moved between buildings, practically vibrating with cheerful energy. For a long moment, he felt like a mournful ghost, remembering exactly how carefree those few short years had been.
He entered the building and saw Sharon Lysander coming toward him, coat on as if she were headed to lunch.
“I thought I saw you earlier,” she said, stopping to shake hands.
“You were on the phone, and I didn’t want to interrupt,” he told her.
“Well, I’m glad I caught you. Acceptance lett
ers are in the mail, and it is my distinct honor to tell you the envelopes for Whitney and Owen Copeland contain very good news.”
Ian smiled, not sure how to react. He’d never been much for fist pumping, whooping, or public displays of emotion. Andi called it the Copeland chill. Depending on her tone, it could sound like a compliment or a cancer.
“Thank you,” he said. “That’s wonderful to hear.”
Lysander tucked a strand of chestnut hair behind her ear, and he couldn’t help but notice a quarter inch of gray at the roots. Did she hope to outlast Scanlon, make one last bid for his seat?
“I’m sure it was a foregone conclusion,” she told him.
“They are wonderful children and excellent students, but we took nothing for granted.”
“I hope we’ll see you again soon, Mr. Copeland,” she said, heading toward the doors.
In the basement, Mrs. Franti greeted him at the counter, if greeted was the way to describe the calm, subterranean regard with which she beheld him. It struck him as odd that the Records Department was the only place in Glenlake where staffers stood behind a counter. It was as if they were service workers. Or guards keeping watch over a short, stout wall.
“Headmaster Scanlon said you’d have a packet for me?” said Ian, pleasantly but firmly, putting weight on the title.
“Ready and waiting,” she said, barely glancing down as she lifted it from under the counter.
Was it just his imagination, or did she leave her hand on the buff-colored envelope a moment longer than necessary? An involuntary proprietary gesture.
“Thank you,” he said, breaking eye contact and turning to leave.
What she said next stopped him in his tracks.
“You’re very welcome. How is your wife feeling?”
“Excuse me?”
“The poor dear must really be suffering with that stomach issue of hers.”
Ian forced a nod.
“I felt bad I couldn’t help her more with the old records she was looking for when she was here late last fall. I hope she was able to get the information she needed to figure out what’s been going on.”
