The name of the college is a pinch in my side. “Why?”
“He said he was rummaging through his office on campus, looking for some old files.”
The pinch morphs into a jab. “His office? But he’s retired. And he’s moving.”
Eric scoffs. “Apparently they’ve given him a couple months to pack everything up. You know—the same way he’s so busy packing up his house.”
I study the side of his face. Sarcasm is always strange on Eric. Like a shirt he’s borrowed from somebody else. He’s glaring at his shoes, squinting with a bitterness I only see when he speaks of Ted, but when he meets my gaze, his eyes become earnest again.
“Are you okay?” he asks. “You seem… shaken up.”
I scratch my wrist. Scratch the ghost of ropes. “I remembered something. Or at least I think I did.”
“Really? What?”
“This game we used to play. Astrid and me. It was like pool, only with marbles. And I think I remember what the basement looked like. I can see parts of it, anyway.”
Eric’s shoulders straighten. “That’s great,” he says. Then he scans the room, and when his eyes land on my bookshelf, he grabs an old notebook from the bottom, opens to a fresh page.
“Do you have something to write with?” he asks.
“Um, yeah. I think so.” I reach for my purse on the floor, rummage through it until I pluck out a pen. Eric hands me the notebook.
“Can you draw the basement?” he asks. “What you remember, anyway?”
I stare at him for a few seconds, but he raises his eyebrows, gestures toward the page with a hurrying wave of his hand.
“Okay,” I say, beginning to sketch. “But why?”
“You know Jim from the hospital?” he asks. I nod as I sketch the bottom of the stairs, careful to draw the last step as a trapezoid instead of a rectangle. “His wife’s a P.I. I’m gonna ask her to look into all this. If the police won’t believe you yet, fine, but we need someone to investigate.”
I draw the perimeter of the basement as best as I can see it through the shadows of my memory, the shadows of that room. “Wow,” I say. “Thank you.”
“Of course, Bird,” Eric says. “We need to figure this out. And Ted’s no help. The way he talks, I just— I have a feeling there’s something he’s not telling us.”
My hand freezes on the page. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s like he’s…” Eric pauses to choose his words. “Holding something back. Protecting someone maybe?”
My pulse flicks. “Who would he protect? He doesn’t care about anyone enough for that.”
When I say it, I mean acquaintances. People in Cedar. Friends, even—of which he has very few. But there’s something about the sentence that sticks in my throat. It’s like the sharp edge of a chip, scraping as it’s swallowed.
“Unless you mean Brennan,” I say quickly.
Eric scoffs. “I’m pretty sure Brennan would be the last person Ted would ever want to protect.”
“Maybe not,” I say. “They were friends once, you know. Back in grad school. Before Brennan supposedly sold out. Maybe Ted’s been putting together the same pieces that I have. Maybe he thinks like I do—that Brennan might have done it, and he feels, like, an old impulse to look out for him or something.”
Eric shakes his head. “I think that’s a stretch, Bird. And I don’t know, maybe he’s being cagey because, deep down, he knows he did something terrible to you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“How you were gone for an entire week, and they never even looked for you.”
“They thought I was at Kyla’s.”
“Right,” Eric says. “But they never checked. Which is completely insane behavior for a parent.”
I open my mouth to find I can’t speak. Can’t formulate a defense of my father, other than the one that’s buried so deep in my bones, it sinks into the marrow: Ted never learned the right way for a parent to behave.
Growing up, he had to lie to his teachers. It probably went something like this: My cousin and I were roughhousing. He accidentally punched me. Or this: I wasn’t watching where I was going. Walked straight into an open cabinet. He probably didn’t think anyone would believe him. His principal was friends with Saul Brierley. They probably saw Saul the way the rest of the town did, as a man who volunteered to rig the lights for the school musical every year. Who