plaintive and pleading. His back is to me as I enter the dining room. He’s seated on one side of the table. Kevin Bantree, Officer Gough, and Harmon are lined up on the other like a firing squad.
“What’s going on?” I demand. “Shouldn’t there be a lawyer present?” I look at Harmon. “Why are you letting him talk to the police without a lawyer?”
“Hold on, Tess,” Harmon says. “I think you should get your facts straight before you charge on in.”
This is something Harmon often says to his students. Right now it feels patronizing. “An accused’s right to a lawyer is a fact,” I counter.
“I think you should stop and listen to your husband,” Kevin Bantree says. “No one has accused Rudy of anything. He called me to share some information.”
I look down at Rudy. He doesn’t look at me. I notice that the table is covered with papers. Copies of newspaper articles with the now familiar photograph of Noreen Bagley and copies of lined handwritten pages that I recognize as Cora Rockwell’s diary.
“What’s all this?” I ask.
“Rudy was just telling us,” Harmon says with the exaggerated patience he uses for a tardy student. “If you sit down I’m sure he’ll be happy to go over it again for you.”
I sit down next to Rudy, aligning myself with him. I want to ask about Luther but instead I say, “What did you find, Rudy?”
He drags the photo of Noreen Bagley over without looking up at me. “Lila was writing her paper about one of the girls who came to Haywood when it was still a refuge for so-called fallen girls. She had this idea that a lot of the girls who got sent there weren’t even pregnant, they were just . . . you know . . .” His cheeks turn red. Maybe that’s why he won’t look at me. He’s embarrassed to be talking about sex in front of his mother.
“Promiscuous?” I supply.
Rudy nods, turning redder. “Yeah, she said it didn’t even have to be like the girls were sluts or anything just, like, they flirted or wore sexy clothes or talked back . . . like how they put girls away in those Irish Laundromats.”
“The Magdalene Laundries,” I supply.
“Why don’t we let Rudy tell the story,” Harmon says. “He’s been doing an excellent job.”
Rudy astonishes me by giving Harmon a grateful look and then, still not looking at me, goes on, “Yeah, so what Lila noticed was some of these girls had babies after they’d been at the Refuge for more than nine months, which meant they weren’t pregnant when they got there. Lila thought that maybe someone at the refuge was raping these girls. Then some of these girls disappeared. No one made much of a fuss about them disappearing because they were just . . . you know, bad girls and everyone assumed they must’ve just run away or something. But then Lila read about a girl named Noreen Bagley who went missing after Haywood became a school. People did make a fuss about her. Lila had this idea that maybe the same person who had been raping those girls also killed Noreen Bagley. So she looked at the records to see which employees were there while the girls were getting pregnant and when Noreen Bagley went missing, and she found three people: a janitor, a groundskeeper, and the matron of the Refuge, who became the headmistress of the school. Lila found a site online dedicated to the lost girls and that led her to a museum in Portland that belonged to the headmistress, Cora Rockwell. So she went down there and found Cora Rockwell’s diary. She was really excited about it but when she came back she wouldn’t talk about it. I . . . I think she was upset about something she found out.”
I notice that Rudy doesn’t mention the fight he had with Lila about the librarian. Or that Lila had stopped talking to him.
“So after what happened . . . after Lila died, I thought maybe she’d found out something bad about someone, like who had raped those girls back then and killed Noreen Bagley.”
“Anyone old enough to assault a girl in the 1950s would be pretty old by now,” Kevin says.
“Yeah, exactly,” Rudy says. “Here, look . . .” He sifts through the pages until he finds one with a big marker circle around a couple of sentences. “It says here that Mr. Haywood put his nephew in charge of picking