It's Never too Late - By Tara Taylor Quinn Page 0,94
to a chipped rubber stamp! We know who sent the letters.”
“Have you talked to her?”
“Not yet. I’m still in Phoenix, waiting for local backup, but with any luck, this will soon be over. I’ll keep you posted.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
ADDY’S CAR WAS in the driveway when Mark pulled in after class late Thursday morning. He ignored it.
Did he need to call and tell Addy not to come over that night for Abe’s visit? Or would she just know not to show up? She was a lawyer. She’d be up on all of the social norms.
The car was still there half an hour later when he kissed his grandmother on the cheek and headed out the front door on his way to work. He saw it in his peripheral vision. He wasn’t looking. It didn’t matter.
“Mark?”
He stopped. If he’d looked, he’d have seen her sitting on the step just outside her front door. “Yeah?”
“They found what they were looking for,” she said. He wasn’t sure what that had to do with him.
“I don’t know what effect that will have on anything where you’re concerned, but they know that your education is not directly connected to what they were looking for.”
He was sure that made sense to someone.
Shaking his head, he stared at her, raising one eyebrow. It was the best he could do without releasing the flood of disturbing emotions rumbling inside of him.
Why the heck he didn’t just head to his truck he didn’t know.
“I...also want you to know...now that my job here is more or less done...my name isn’t Adele Kennedy.”
She swallowed. He couldn’t care less.
“It’s Adrianna Keller. Adele lied to you, Mark. Adrianna never did.”
Now she was splitting hairs. Or telling him something. Either way, he didn’t care.
He had to get going or be late to work. “Thanks for letting me know,” he said, and continued down the steps and out to his truck without looking back.
* * *
THERE WAS NOTHING for her to do but pack up and go. As eager as she’d been earlier in the week to get out of town and never look back, Addy was having a hard time getting her clothes into suitcases. She had to do the laundry first.
She couldn’t pack up her kitchen stuff until she was sure she wouldn’t need to cook another meal.
Until she connected with Will, she couldn’t know about the exact timing. She was still on his payroll. Depending on how everything played out, he might still need a lawyer.
The sheets on her bed would need to be washed and packed. She wasn’t ready to strip them off the mattress yet. They were one of the few physical reminders she had of Mark.
Addy took a bath instead. A long hot bath.
At two o’clock, Greg called back.
“She’s in custody” were the first words out of the man’s mouth. “Along with her brother. I’m still here, helping with the interrogation, making sure they have everything they need for an airtight case.”
“What does her brother have to do with this?”
“He was the mastermind behind the plan. He figured that she deserved a hundred thousand dollars, at least, for having been denied the same opportunities Susan had been granted at Montford.
“I told her about the spreadsheet you came up with. As soon as she heard that, academically, she was worse off than Susan was, she backed down. And, incidentally, all of the other rejected applicants also had lower test scores than Susan.”
Which didn’t completely let Will off the hook. There were still ten students—eleven including Mark—who’d received the benefits of a Montford education without meeting the entrance qualifications.
“Once we got her downtown and she heard that she was being charged with blackmail and extortion, she changed her story, insisting then that she never intended to follow through on the demands for money.”
“Threatening even without intent to extort money is a crime.”
“Which is what I told her.”
“Does Will know?”
“I called him just before I called you. If you hadn’t caught that situation with Randi and Susan, we likely wouldn’t have been able to stop this girl before she filed a suit,” he said.
“I thought you just said she wasn’t going to follow through on the monetary demands.”
“She’s not now. She was going to, no matter what she claimed after she realized she could do prison time. I saw a check from her brother made out to the courts in the amount of a filing fee on the desk in her living room.”