“I don’t work for a newspaper.”
“Oh, that’s right,” the Smart One says, holding up her phone. “Parallax magazine. I Googled you.”
“Yeah, well,” Ellen says, deciding she might as well get started here. “Whatever. But listen. Speaking of newspapers, do any of you guys actually read the Chronicle?”
This is greeted with a collective hoot of derision. Bulldozing through it, Ellen adds, “‘The Eyeball’? Caligula? Ever hear of those? It’s a… column.”
But from two years ago, she suddenly remembers.
So pretty unlikely.
This is confirmed by a few head shakes and some murmuring.
“Julian Robert Coady?” she tries, throwing it out there.
A silence follows, and then, “That’s weird.”
This from a girl standing at the back. She’s short and pale, gothy, impossibly young-looking.
“Why so?”
“Well,” the girl says, not making eye contact with Ellen, “I just got this text from a friend of mine, Alicia? It seems you’re not the only one around here asking questions today.”
Everyone turns and looks at her, waiting for more.
“Well?” Geek Girl says. “Spill it, Morticia.”
Morticia flips her one and then says, in a conspiratorial whisper, “Lizzie Bishop’s old man is here. He’s looking for her, and… no one can find her.”
“What?”
“Everyone’s talking about it. Texting, tweeting.”
There’s a collective grab for phones.
Ellen stands there, watching them all juice in. She gives it a few moments. After the first couple of message tones, she says, “So, what has this Lizzie what’s-it got to do with… Julian Robert Coady?”
The Smart One looks up from her phone. “Lizzie’s going out with Coady’s brother, a guy called Alex.” She pauses, consulting her device again. “And no one can find him either.”
Ellen’s heart skips a beat.
Alex… and Julian. Two brothers? One of them a radical-minded student at Atherton from a couple of years back, the other one still at Atherton, but currently missing?
Caligula and ath900?
The Atherton T-shirt?
She stands back now, swaying slightly from side to side, looking on as the girls work their phones, foreheads all screwed up in concentration, fingers hopping and dancing like they’re in some demented jazz ensemble.
So this story, the shooting of Wall Street bankers? Has she just fucking cracked it? That’s the way it seems, but she has to keep her nerve here. Because what she’s got is still based on speculation. She needs to go one more round and come up with some concrete evidence.
There is a fresh wave of message tones.
“My friend Trish?” Geek Girl says, looking up from her phone. “She spoke with Sally Peake. That’s the RA in Lizzie’s house. She says they’ve been gone since last Friday.”
Ellen nods along. Each new thing.
“But apparently,” the Smart One says, “Lizzie did tell her roommate she was going, and that’s why no red flag was raised.”
“So… do we know where they went?”
A pause, and then a ripple of shaking heads.
Ellen considers this for a moment. “The girl, Lizzie,” she says. “Her dad. Is he still here?”
Morticia gets on the case, clickety-click.
“So,” Geek Girl says, “you going to put us on the payroll?”
Ellen smiles. “I just might. You guys have been a real help.”
“Wow.”
“What?”
“She smiles.”
A moment later, Morticia’s phone makes its pinging sound. As she’s reading the message, she raises her arm and points. “He’s over that way,” she says. “Other side of the VLA. In front of the Admin Building. Talking to someone. They’ve been there for over half an hour.”
Ellen leans forward. “And under surveillance the whole time? Jesus, have you guys thought of applying for jobs with the NSA?”
“Not too much happens around here,” the Smart One says. “This is an event.”
A couple of minutes later, Geek Girl and Morticia accompany Ellen as far as the front of the Science Building, where they meet another girl, a Morticia clone, who points out Lizzie Bishop’s father.
He’s about fifty yards away, on a tree-lined pathway between the Admin Building and the parking lot. From here he looks mid-forties or so. He’s slim, medium height, and casually dressed. He’s talking to an older man. The older man is holding a leather satchel and has an academic look to him.
“Anyone know his name?”
“I think it’s Frank,” the new girl says.
“And the guy he’s talking to?”
“Don’t know,” Geek Girl says. “I’ve seen him around. He’s an associate professor of… something.”
“Something? Nice. Is that what you’re studying?”
“I’ve taken courses in it.”
The Morticias trade eye rolls.
A little more time passes, and they just stand there, the four of them-in silence now-watching the two men.
“Okay,” Ellen eventually says, glancing around. “You know what? Why don’t I take it from here?”
Geek Girl pouts. “We’re being dismissed?”
“The next phase of the operation might be a little delicate. I don’t want to scare him off.”
But as she’s saying this, Frank Bishop and the associate professor of something shake hands and separate. Bishop heads for the parking lot.
By the time Ellen gets halfway there, he’s already in his car and driving away.
Ellen then veers left and heads for her own car.
As she’s reaching for the door, she looks back over at the Science Building. Geek Girl is still standing there.
They exchange nods.
Ellen then gets into the car and follows Frank Bishop out onto the main road that leads back into the town of Atherton.
Frank orders a Stoli on the rocks. He’s driving, but he really needs a drink.
Just the one should do it.
As with the search for a diner earlier, he’s ended up having to settle for considerably less than he hoped for. This place, the Smokehouse Tavern, is the only bar he could find on Main Street. He knows from his previous trips to Atherton that there are a couple of big sports bars over on Railroad Avenue, but he’d never be seen dead in either of those, and besides, he figured there might be a more mood-appropriate dive bar here on Main, an old-school joint with sawdust on the floor and a faint smell of puke in the air.
Turns out there isn’t.
Instead, it’s the bland, musty Smokehouse, a place that makes Dave’s Bar & Grill back at the mall look like the Stork Club.
It’ll do, though. It’s almost empty, and the barman isn’t a talker.
Actually, middle of the afternoon now and Frank doesn’t feel too bad. At least he’s coming away with something, a plausible scenario, Lizzie and Alex on the road, off the grid, Bonnie and Clyde-ing it around for a few days-but without the bank robberies, or the erectile dysfunction.
He tried Lizzie’s phone again, and of course there was no answer, so he’s decided he’s going to find a motel room and stick around until tomorrow, wait for her to show up. He’s not going to be pissed off or anything. He just wants to look at her and make sure she’s okay. Tell her he loves her. Tell her to answer her fucking phone once in a while.
Then he’ll be out of here.
There’s another reason he doesn’t feel too bad. That encounter he had just now with Leland Bryce. Frank found it pretty refreshing, because what they talked about, and almost exclusively, was architecture. Now an associate professor at Atherton, Bryce used to teach at Columbia, and Frank took some of his courses. It was weird bumping into him again after all these years, and in these circumstances, but apart from mentioning he has a daughter at Atherton, Frank didn’t say anything at all about what was going on. Instead, they reminisced about Columbia for a bit and then got into a thing about the latest addition to the lower Manhattan skyline, F. T. Keizer’s controversial new residential tower, 220 Hanson Street. Not yet complete, and already the subject of extensive litigation, 220 Hanson has notoriously divided architectural opinion in the city. It’s been in the news a lot, and Frank has read about it, extensively, but he was still sort of surprised to find that he had an actual opinion on the matter-as if he’d somehow forfeited the right to have one of those by losing his job.