He’s prepared to bet that Lizzie’s bedroom is not like this. He looks over. The door is closed.
“Rachel,” he says, turning to her, taking a deep breath, “Sally here told me what you said. Lizzie is away, is that right?”
“Yes, I-”
“I’m not checking up on her or anything. I-”
“No, no, I-”
“I’ve just been worried, that’s all. She hasn’t been returning my calls. Or texts.” He swallows. “Or anything.”
“I understand, Mr. Bishop, of course. She and Alex took off last Friday. It had been planned for a while, or… so it seemed.”
Frank stands there, looking into this girl’s startling blue eyes, uncomfortable in his sudden awareness of her perfume, of the tone of her skin… and he feels a rising sense of how indefensibly ridiculous what he’s about to say will sound.
“Alex?”
“Oh, oh, er… he’s-”
“No, no, I didn’t mean it like that. Please. Alex, Schmalex… whatever. But do you know where they went?”
Before she has a chance to answer he thinks, last Friday. That means that when he spoke to her on Saturday evening she wasn’t here, settling in to finish a paper. She was somewhere else, with someone else, doing something else.
She was lying.
But again, fuck it, that’s not the point. He sounds indefensibly ridiculous to himself now, when the only thing he’s interested in, the only thing he cares about is… is she okay?
Realizing then that Rachel has already answered his question, and that he wasn’t listening, he says, “Sorry?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Bishop,” she repeats, obviously bewildered at having to do so. “Lizzie wouldn’t tell me. I got the impression they just needed some time on their own.” She pauses. “I’m sure she’s fine.”
As Frank turns away, he catches a glimpse of Sally glaring at Rachel.
“Let me try her,” Rachel then offers, but not sounding too hopeful for some reason. As Frank stares at a framed She & Him album cover on the wall, he senses determined phone busyness behind him. After a moment, he hears, “Shit, voicemail,” a pause, and then, in a concerned monotone, “Liz, Rach, call me.”
Frank turns back around.
A century on from two minutes ago, he looks at them both in turn, and says, “Okay, what do we know about this Alex guy?”
On the train to Albany, Ellen does as much background research on Atherton as she can.
A liberal arts college founded in the late 1870s, it was originally built on a twenty-five-acre site in the Sasketchaw Valley a few miles east of Atherton. The college moved to its present, much larger site a mile north of the town when it acquired the former Van Loon family estate in 1953. Most of the buildings currently in use on the campus were constructed in the 1960s, giving the place a curious feel, simultaneously contemporary and dated.
Atherton first admitted women in 1936, and today has a total enrollment of just under two thousand. It offers twenty-five majors leading to arts or science degrees, as well as pre-professional programs in law, medicine, engineering, and IT.
This takes Ellen as far as Yonkers. She then switches her focus to more practical matters.
As a school, Atherton is primarily residential, and most students live on campus. All of its three residence halls have common study areas, pantries, phone and cable connections, and Internet access. Suites are generally single-sex, but gender-neutral accommodation is available in the upper two floors of the third building. As an ex-Cartwright girl, Ellen is familiar with this kind of stuff, most of it, anyway-though she is certainly surprised by one thing, the range of food options available. Atherton’s main dining hall has five different sections, the Globe Café (serving a selection of cuisines from around the world), the Cabbage Patch (salads and vegan), the Spoon (burgers, pizza), the Deli-Zone (sandwiches, wraps), and the Juice Depot.
She looks up from the screen for a moment, and out the window.
Croton-Harmon.
And then back.
Atherton has all the usual other stuff as well, a Student Government Association that liaises with the college administration. It has an official student-run newspaper, the Atherton Chronicle, and a closed-circuit TV station (AthTV) that covers events on campus and in the surrounding area, as well as a highly respected and long-established college radio station (WKNT-92 FM) that broadcasts a mix of musical programming and various innovative talk-show formats.
Poughkeepsie.
In terms of security, Atherton is staffed by twelve full-time and six part-time professionals who are all state-certified security guards. The security staff also receives specialist training in first aid, CPR, conflict resolution, sex-aggression defense techniques, cyber crime, and diversity awareness.
Rhinecliff.
Ellen then spends a bit of time digging into the college’s history, looking out for any tradition of student radicalism, or of anything politically sensitive at all, but there’s really very little there. The late sixties and early seventies saw the usual reactions to Chicago, Kent State, Cambodia, and so on, there were sit-ins and marches, but nothing exceptional. In 2007, a chapter of the recently re-formed SDS was opened at Atherton, but the main focus of activity here seemed to be either teaming up with wider antiwar protest networks or working to change the state education system.
Hudson.
In more recent years, there’s been nothing of any special interest or note-no links beyond the obvious ones to the Occupy movement, and no discernible drift the other way either.
Ellen’s impression is of a fairly insular place, self-satisfied and maybe even a little smug, probably not unlike hundreds of other colleges across the country.
So what the fuck is she doing up here?
As she gets off the train at Albany-Rensselaer, no new answer comes to mind-just the old one: It’s all she’s got.
She picks up the rental car she booked earlier and gets to Atherton in under an hour.
As she approaches the campus, she sees that it does indeed have a slight time-warp feel to it-angular gray concrete buildings, now partially streaked and stained but that must have once seemed futuristic and full of promise. Mitigating this somewhat is the landscaping, the well-kept lawns, flower beds, and trees.
Ellen parks in front of the Administration Building and then has a quick think about how to proceed. Does she announce herself and spin some story about researching a piece on New York colleges, or does she wander around and wait until she gets busted by security?
She decides to wander around.
It takes her about thirty-five minutes to do a complete tour of the campus, stopping occasionally to inspect a building or to check out a sign or notice board.
She doesn’t get busted, and nothing catches her attention.
Except some of the students.
She remembers being a student herself, and vividly-it wasn’t that long ago-but these people here are like a different species. There’s an air of confidence and self-assurance about the place that she’s finding unfamiliar, and not a little strange. The crowd she ran with at Cartwright were all cocky and opinionated, no question about that, but this is not the same thing. This is like a sense of entitlement, or of ownership-and not ownership of property or material things, not even of position or privilege, but just of… their own world.
And its ways, whatever they may be.
Not exactly a formula for political engagement, she thinks, but maybe not a fair assessment either. Because she hasn’t actually spoken to anyone yet.