all that work, as if the darkening room could bear witness to the words written in it. But the Henshaw ancestors aren’t talking, the books on the shelves stand like mute guards, the thick, old-fashioned blotter on the desk absorbs ink spills and secrets alike. There’s no laptop or computer in sight because Harmon doesn’t use one. He writes his letters and papers by hand and gives them to the school secretary—or me—to type up.
When I work with a student on a paper, they often send it to me by email and I make corrections and comments in an electronic file. And I always ask my students to submit an electronic copy of their paper to Turnitin so I can check for plagiarism.
I can always tell if a paper is plagiarized, Harmon says.
But I can’t. Maybe it’s because I’ve told too many lies over the years to spot them in others. But at least if a student loses a paper—their hard drives are always crashing; they never back up anything—I have a copy on my computer.
“I wrote comments on her drafts and she took the drafts home with her. I didn’t think I needed a record of our work together.” Cold has seeped into his voice along with the dark creeping over the room. Harmon hates having to explain himself almost as much as he hates modern technology.
“I just thought . . . it’s a shame . . . what was the paper on anyway? I mean, I know she was writing about Cora Rockwell but neither of you ever said much about it . . .”
“Lila was afraid someone else would steal her idea,” Harmon replies curtly. “She’d found something interesting in the records while researching Cora Rockwell. Several girls in the late 1950s gave birth at the Refuge ten or more months after they were admitted.”
“Ten months?”
“In other words they got pregnant at Haywood. Lila believed there was a guard, or teacher, or janitor—someone—who was assaulting the girls at Haywood.”
“Assaulting?” I hear Noor Saberian’s voice—Call it what it is.
“Okay, raping. Some of those girls also went missing afterward and then there was that girl who went missing from the school in 1963. Lila thought that disappearance might have been connected to the pregnant girls. She was looking into employees who worked at the Refuge and later at Haywood when it became a school. She thought she’d found a source who could help.”
“What source?” I ask a bit too eagerly. If Lila had gotten involved with some stranger perhaps that was who killed her. And if it were a stranger I wouldn’t have to choose between protecting Rudy or Harmon.
“She wouldn’t say. She was very secretive about it—and then I stopped hearing from her. I figured she was too busy exploring her source, but now . . . Now I wonder if she hadn’t pursued that source and perhaps run into trouble in the process.”
“Did you tell Kevin Bantree that?”
Harmon laughs, the first lightening of his mood since I came into the study. “Officer Bantree was singularly unimpressed by the details of historical research. He seemed skeptical that the paper existed in the first place.”
He raises one eyebrow and shifts his leg so that it rubs against mine. “He did seem interested in the alibi you had given me and asked why I hadn’t mentioned you joining me in the guest room. Of course I told him it was none of his damned business. I’m chagrined to admit, by the way, that I don’t recall that middle-of-the-night tryst you told Kevin about.”
I blush, embarrassed to think that Kevin Bantree must have conveyed this detail to Harmon or, worse, to Morris. To hide my face I slide down into his lap and into the warm circle of his arms, where I always feel safe. This is my husband, I tell myself, he would never do anything untoward with an underage girl. Why would he when he has me? Harmon has pointed to the most logical third possibility: that someone else other than Harmon, and other than Rudy, hurt Lila. Someone she met while trying to find out what happened to those missing girls.
Chapter Thirteen
I’m relieved when Rudy texts to say he’s spending the night in the dorm. Harmon and I need a quiet evening alone. We haven’t had enough of those since Lila and Rudy started hanging out at the house.
I heat up a beef stew that’s been languishing in the freezer during Lila’s vegan regime, open a bottle of