“There wasn’t anything when I looked at first,” he said. “Mail came late that day. I was literally about to walk down the Hill and leave that night when I had to check one more time. And there it was.”
I stared down at the acceptance letter, and then back at Fritz. “You weren’t stressed about getting into college, were you?” I said slowly. “You were planning to leave the whole time.”
Fritz closed his eyes as if in prayer. “You have to understand, it didn’t seem real, running away,” he said. “It was like a game I played with myself, seeing how far I could plan. I didn’t want to leave, but I didn’t feel like I had a choice. I couldn’t tell anyone.” He opened his eyes to look at me. “I couldn’t tell you.” He shook his head, sighed. “You knew I was upset, that I couldn’t sleep. Everyone else was freaking out about college, so it was easy to let everyone think that I was, too.”
“But you could have gone to college,” I said. I held up his acceptance letter. “You . . . We could have gone together. You’d have been out of your father’s house. You wouldn’t have had to see your uncle again . . .”
Gently, Fritz took the letter out of my hand, refolded it, and replaced it in his wallet. “I keep it to remind me of that,” he said. “But I couldn’t have gone, Matthias. Not without them. They both went to UVA, they would have come to visit, professors would have said, ‘Oh, aren’t you Wat Davenport’s nephew?’ I just—I needed to get away. In fact, you helped me do it.” He looked at me, the honesty and pain in his face so raw, I was transfixed. “When you told me you had cheated, I—I felt betrayed. It hurt. But it was the final push I needed to go. And I had to go. I almost shot my uncle. If I hadn’t run away, I guarantee I would have gone to get that gun again. And I might have shot myself, too. So I had to leave. And the only way to do that was to leave you and my sister and my mother and . . . everything. I’m sorry.”
You think sadness is a feeling that you experience on a continuum, that even though it can be slight or strong, it is essentially a fixed emotional state. But what I felt then was a grief that swelled around me, isolating me from the rest of the world even as it seemed to encompass me, Fritz, that rodeo lot, the sky itself, and the distant stars beyond. I felt caught in a tidal grip of loss and despair almost too great for tears, and all I could do was bow my head before it.
“Me, too,” I muttered, wiping my eyes. “I’m sorry, Fritz.”
We sat there in the awkward silence.
“So,” Fritz said, as if we had just discovered that we were standing in a chilly rodeo lot in Wyoming. “Now what?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
NorthPoint’s headquarters in Arlington was a sleek, black chrome-and-glass structure that looked as if an award-winning architect had mated a bunker with a modern art museum. The glass entrance doors were massive and yet opened at a touch, swinging silently inward. The atrium was an immense, open space—even the sound of my shoes striking the marble floor was swallowed up in the emptiness. I approached a curved information desk that looked like a bridge console from Star Trek. A corporate blond fembot behind the desk smiled. “May I help you?” she asked politely.
“Frank Davenport,” I said.
Not a flicker of doubt. “Do you have an appointment?”
“He’ll want to see me.” As she drew breath to speak, undoubtedly to deny me access, I said, “It’s about his son, Fritz.”
A security guard in blazer and gray flannels, standing impassively behind the fembot’s shoulder, gave me his full attention. I ignored him.
“Your name, sir?” the fembot asked, touching two screens on her console.
I told her and then looked across the atrium at a waterfall, its sound somewhere between a gentle rain and a rushing brook. The security guard continued to gaze at me. I winked at him, considered winking at the fembot, and then decided against it—she was pressing two fingertips to her jaw and talking quietly into an earphone, her glance flickering over me once.
Presently, two more security guards arrived. “This way, sir,” said one of them, gesturing to a nearby wall of elevators. They escorted me into an open elevator and remained with me as we rode up. Then the elevator came to a stop, and the door opened to reveal a semicircular waiting room with another fembot—this one a redhead—behind a round leather-paneled reception desk. “Mr. Glass,” she said, and she stood, tall and elegant as a porcelain vase. “Right this way.” She led me past the desk and into a short corridor with muted lighting and oil paintings—probably the originals—that I knew I could find in an art history textbook. The two security guards continued to flank us like an honor guard. At the end was a set of doors that towered over us, like the gates to some corporate Valhalla. The redhead turned the handle on one door, opened it inward, and extended her hand toward the doorway, palm turned upward as if serving something exquisite. “Please, go in,” she said. I glanced behind me at the two security guards, who clearly were following me no farther. I nodded to them and stepped through the doorway, the redhead pulling the door shut behind me.
The office was the size of an aircraft hangar. Fully half the back wall, which curved outward, seemed to be glass, although it was dimmed somehow to a smoky color that filtered the sunlight. The floor was dark, polished wood. Before me were various armchairs, side tables, a couch, and a desk that anchored an enormous oriental rug. To the left was a conference table with leather-backed chairs, the wall behind it taken up by what looked like the world’s largest flatscreen. Behind me on either side of the massive doors were built-in mahogany shelves holding thick red and blue binders. The ceiling was high, and recessed lights washed the room in a soft glow.
Mr. Davenport was seated at his desk, writing. A lamp cast a brighter circle of light upon his desk, and he bent over his writing as if to shield it from the light. I stood there, watching him hunched over his papers, his pen moving as if it were a blade with which he was parrying an unseen foe.
“One minute, Matthias,” he said without looking up.
I reached for the pen I had in my shirt pocket, unclipped it, and with an underhand motion tossed it onto his desk. It landed with a satisfyingly noisy clatter, right on the piece of paper on which Davenport was writing. Then it rolled toward the edge of the desk, stopped only by Davenport’s free hand. He put down his own pen and picked mine up, examined it, and then looked at me. The bags under his eyes were dark as charcoal.
“I gave you this pen,” he said, a rasp in his voice. “For Christmas, when you were in school.”
“I know about your brother,” I said. Bitterly I heard the slight tremble in my own voice, but I kept going. “I know what he did to Fritz. He molested his own nephew. Your son. And you buried it when you found out. Your own goddamn son.”
I expected Davenport to react with a wide-eyed look of shock, or indignation, in any event something contemptuous and loud and threatening. Instead, he placed the Montblanc on the desktop in front of him and looked at me out of those dark, unsettling eyes. “Whom did you speak to, my brother or Fritz?” he asked calmly.
A bit unnerved by his poise, I pushed on. “Both of them, actually,” I said. “But it was Fritz who told me what Wat had done. What you did.”
“What I did,” Davenport echoed. He continued to stare at me. I was struck by how much older he looked than when I had last seen him, in my dorm room ten years ago. His face was thinner, the skin worn and blotched like pages in a dog-eared paperback, notes inked in the margins, passages of text underlined. “You have no idea what I have done.”
Anger rose in my head like blood. “I know you drove your son away, that you—”
He cut across my words. “Why are you here, Matthias?”
The blunt query stopped me in my tracks. I contemplated the question and then said, “Because I wanted you to know that I know. I wanted you to know that I spoke to Fritz. I saw him. And he told me why he left, why he ran away from Blackburne, from me, everything. Because you put your fucking company ahead of your own child. You got the FB
I to back off, you bribed policemen, all because of this.” I waved my arm to encompass his office and NorthPoint in general. “It’s pathetic.”
Annoyingly, Davenport looked unmoved by my self-righteous rant. “You want me to be evil, the cruel, uncaring father,” he said. “A monster. That would be easier to understand.” He stood up, walked around the desk until he was facing me. I almost took a step back but held my ground. “I’ve done things you could call monstrous,” he said. “I’ve designed and made things that were used to kill other people in the name of peace and security. I’ve helped to stop wars and to start them. I’ve aided the United States government in protecting our country from terrorist attacks. What I didn’t do was protect my own family.”
I stared at him. If he was going to play the pity card, I might hit him in the face. “I just told you I spoke to your son who’s been missing for ten years,” I said. “Don’t you even want to know if he’s all right?”
Davenport picked up a tablet from the conference table next to us. “I know he’s all right,” he said. He woke up the tablet, tapped it. On the wall behind the conference table, the flatscreen flickered briefly and then displayed a digital outline of the United States. Red dots lay scattered across the map, principally in the western half in a ragged line from Texas to Montana, a few dots farther west in Utah and Nevada, some to the east in Nebraska and Minnesota. An arrow pointer appeared on the screen, glided over top of a red dot in Wichita, Kansas. A window popped up to the side of the red dot: September 2009. The arrow moved south to Houston: December 2009, November 2010. Fort Morgan, Colorado: February 2011. More cities, more dates, a month or so in between cities and towns. Several had multiple dates going back to 2006. Then I noticed that one dot on the map was bright green: Jackson Hole. I stared at Davenport. He moved the arrow onto Jackson Hole, clicked it. May 2009, May 2010, May 2011. He clicked the most recent date, and a photograph blossomed like a digital flower: a blond-haired Fritz leaning against a fence post, hands in the pockets of his jeans, along with two other men, one wearing a dark cowboy hat. The man in the hat was George, the rodeo clown who’d had the melting makeup face. In the photograph, George was laughing, and Fritz was looking at him with that slight, lopsided smile that was so familiar it hurt, a sharp pang of loss and remorse.
“I know where my son is,” Davenport said. “I’ve known for a long time.” He put the tablet down on the conference table and looked directly at me. “My father fought in World War Two. He came back from the Pacific a bona fide war hero. He saved thirteen crewmen from burning to death on his destroyer after a kamikaze hit it. That was his moment in the sun. When he came back home, the sun went behind a cloud. For the rest of his life, he felt he was owed something for his service, more than the already significant amount that was due to him. People grew tired of buying him drinks, tired of hearing his war stories. He never had a steady career after the navy. He failed to provide a steady home for me and my brother. I swore that I would never do that to my own family, and so I built NorthPoint.” Davenport turned away from me and looked at the photograph of Fritz on the flatscreen. “And because I was afraid of losing my company, because I lost sight of the reason for which I worked all my life, which is so ironic it’s obscene, I drove my own son away, possibly for good, and I have lived with that ever since. I will live with it for the rest of my life. So I am reduced to spying on him. It’s what I have instead of a relationship with him.”
Somehow I was able to find my voice. “But you could . . . You could go to him, you could talk—”
“It’s been ten years, Matthias,” he said quietly, still looking at the picture on the flatscreen, a digitized Fritz hovering over the conference table with his sideways smile. “He knows where I am. If he can bring himself to forgive, he’ll come to me.” He glanced at me, saw my look of incredulity. “If I went to him,” he said, “tracked him down to whatever backwater motel or rodeo lot he was living in this month and showed up on his doorstep, what do you think he would do? He’s been running from me and my brother for a decade. In time he’ll come back. On his own terms.”
“Does Abby know?” I managed. “Or his mother?”
“No,” he said. “They believe he is dead. Which, for all intents and purposes, he is.”
“Legally declared dead,” I said.
He inclined his head. “It allowed my wife and daughter to mourn him so they could achieve some kind of closure.”
“That’s not the only reason,” I said. Davenport looked at me with his dark eyes. “There was a trust, wasn’t there? From Fritz’s other grandfather, your wife’s father. All in Fritz’s name. Your son told me. How much did you get? Six, seven million?”
Davenport continued to look at me like a snake sizing up a boy with a stick. “Enough to cover some . . . indiscretions that my brother made,” he finally said.
“NorthPoint cleared a billion dollars last year,” I said. “Your pocket change could pay off any ‘indiscretions’ of Wat’s. You had to rob your own son?”
“My family lives comfortably,” Davenport continued in that same calm, even tone. “But most of my personal wealth is tied up with this company. Using monies from the trust fund was more discreet than cutting a corporate check.”
“And Wat? What does he know about . . . this?” I indicated the map.
Davenport’s face revealed no hint of what he felt. “Nothing,” he said. “And I intend to keep it that way.” He reached over and touched the tablet, causing the photograph to vanish.
I looked at him and then at the trail of dots on the flatscreen, the chart of his son’s wanderings. He had followed Fritz for years, keeping him under a watchful eye while letting the rest of his family believe Fritz was dead. I had thought Ren Middleton was Machiavellian, but this was a whole different order of magnitude.
“Why are you telling me this?” I said. “I could go tell people what happened, what you did.”
Davenport frowned. “That would be foolish, considering that Fritz doesn’t want to be found. That, as well as the fact that I could bury you if I wished. Really, Matthias, such a crude threat is disappointing.”
Before I could think of a response, Davenport raised a hand toward me as if he were offering something. “I know that you’ve suffered from this. That day in your dorm room, right after Fritz ran away, when I . . . confronted you. Shouted at you. I apologize. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“You shouldn’t have done that,” I repeated. I wanted to laugh, to scream. “Wow,” I managed. “You abandon your son and lie to your family, but you’re apologizing for shouting at me.”
Davenport gave a pained, aching smile. “One must start somewhere,” he said. “A lifetime of secrets and subterfuge renders you rather unsusceptible to regret. It’s a luxury I cannot afford. Do you remember what Polonius says to his son? ‘To thine own self be true.’ As I am—true to my own nature. But I am . . . trying.”
Feeling slightly sickened, I remembered why I was there, the promise I had made to Fritz. I reached my hand into my pocket, pulled out a jump drive, and laid it on the table next to Davenport’s tablet.
Davenport looked at it for several seconds. “What’s on it?” he finally said.
“A video from Fritz,” I said. “For you and your brother.”
Davenport’s eyes were wide. “What does he say?” he asked, and for the first time his voice betrayed the slightest hint of doubt.
“Why don’t you watch it, Mr. Davenport?” I said. “I’ll let you do that in peace.” I turned and walked toward the doors. When I reached them, I glanced back. Davenport was turning the jump drive over in his hands, his expression a blend of eagerness and dread. I walked through the doorway and pulled it shut behind me.
I didn’t need to see the video. I already knew what was on it: a three-minute message from Fritz that included a series of instructions. Now I just needed to wait and see if Frank and Wat Davenport followed them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
An enormous Wel
come Alumni sign hung above the lions, which sat atop columns now bedecked with red and gold streamers. The decorations seemed both festive and foolish, like putting a leather jacket on a wolf. The snarling lion looked ready to rip the streamers to shreds; the other gazed coldly at me, the missing eye conferring a sense of dignity unsullied by the crepe paper looped around its base. “Keep the faith, brother,” I said aloud, and as I drove slowly past the lions, I offered them a casual salute.
It was the end of a cloudless June day, the sunlight softly playing over the green leaves, birds flitting from shadow to shadow. I found myself once again wending my way through those trees, although now the sunlight and recent events made the way less haunted, less freighted by the ghosts of memory.
Just past the trees and the security gate, the athletic fields now served as parking lots, and though it was early yet, several cars sat in rows in front of the soccer goals. A police officer in uniform was directing traffic, his gaze lingering on me as I rolled past him, and I recognized Deputy Smalls. I drove down a short aisle, pulled into a spot, and killed the engine. I supposed that I could just sit there in my car until he was distracted, but this was my alma mater, my class reunion, and so I got out of the car, closed the door, and walked toward him.
“Mr. Glass,” he said, nodding affably as I approached.
“Deputy,” I said, nodding back at him. I felt a little like a cowboy who had been run out of town and was now riding back in, daring the lawman to do something about it. That feeling evaporated in the heat of my embarrassment when Smalls stuck out his hand to shake mine. “Glad to see you made it,” he said.
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