“You should think about teaching or becoming a life coach,” my agent informed me. “In journalism, you’re untouchable at the moment.”
It was a moment that lasted. Disgraced journalist became cemented to my name like ex-con. I was a “symptom of the sloppy state of American reporting.” A mash-up video of me appeared on YouTube in which I repeated thirty-nine times (my voice Auto-Tuned) terminate with extreme prejudice.
I abandoned the investigation. The night I made that decision, packing my notes away, I was embroiled in the slander lawsuit. Cynthia and Sam had moved out, leaving a silence so total it felt as if I’d undergone surgery without my consent. Though I was alive, I was left with the vague suspicion something was permanently off inside me. It was beyond my reach, some vital nerve twisted, some organ accidentally put back upside down. I felt only rage toward Cordova — neatly concealed behind his lawyers — an anger especially gutting because it was really toward myself, for my own arrogance and stupidity.
Because I knew my downfall was no accident. Cordova, displaying a foresight and intelligence I hadn’t anticipated, had outmaneuvered me. I was down, knocked out, the fight over, a winner declared — before I’d even stepped fully into the ring.
I’d been masterfully set up. John had been the bait. Seeing I was coming after him, Cordova had designed a booby trap using this anonymous caller, knowing, with almost superhuman clairvoyance, the man’s haunting suggestion—there’s something he does to the children—would strike a nerve with me, and then he sat back as I dug my own grave.
And yet if Cordova had been that concerned about my investigation to go to such lengths to get rid of me, what was he actually hiding — something even more explosive?
I’d resolved to let it go, leave it alone, focus instead on getting some semblance of a life back.
But here I was again. I downed the rest of the scotch, grabbed another stack of pages, and within minutes, I found what I’d been looking for.
It was a thin manila envelope. Ashley was scribbled across the front.
I unclasped it, pulling out the contents: a sheet of paper and a CD.
~ ~ ~
5
Years ago, focused on Cordova, I’d barely given this article about outstanding freshmen a second glance. I hadn’t even bothered to listen to the CD.
I tore off the plastic, loaded the CD into my stereo, and pressed play.
There was a long stretch of silence and then: the piano.
The first few bars were high-pitched, insistent, so fast and assured, it seemed inconceivable that the person playing was just fourteen years old. The notes rippled, softened for a moment before stirring up into a furious outburst, like a machine gun exploding sound into the air.
As I listened, the minutes ticked by, and suddenly I became aware of soft footsteps along the wood floors outside my office.
It was Sam. Recently she’d fallen into the habit of waking up in the middle of the night. The knob turned, and my daughter appeared in the doorway, half asleep in a pink nightgown.
“Hi, honey.”
Rubbing her eyes, she only padded over to me. She’d inherited Cynthia’s beauty, including the showstopping blond ringlets straight off a Sistine Chapel angel.
“What are you doing in here?” she asked in a low, serious voice.
“Research.”
She propped her elbows on the desk, doing some strange backward kicking with her foot. She was at that stage where she was always bending, knotting her arms, winding up as if involved in an ongoing game of Twister. She squinted at the Amherst article.
“Who’s that?” she asked.
“Ashley.”
“Who’s Ashley?”
“Someone in trouble.”
She looked at me, concerned. “Did she do something bad?”
“Not that kind of trouble, honey. The kind that’s a mystery.”
“What mystery?”
“Don’t know yet.”
This was our dynamic. Sam launched questions into the air and I scrambled to answer them. Due to Cynthia’s ironclad custody schedule and Sam’s busy life of playdates and ballet, unfortunately I didn’t get to see her very much. The last time was more than three weeks ago for an outing to the Bronx Zoo, during which it was clear she trusted every lowland gorilla in the Congo Forest — including the four-hundred-pound silverback — a hell of a lot more than she trusted me. She had her reasons.
“Come on.” I stood up. “Let’s get you back into bed.”
I held out my hand, but Sam only frowned, an unmistakable look of doubt on her face. She seemed to already know what took me forty-three years to figure out, that even though adults were tall, what we knew about anything, including ourselves, was small. The jig had been up since she was about three. And like an innocent convict who’d simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, Sam was resigned to patiently serve out her sentence (childhood) with her inept wardens (Cynthia and me) until she was on parole.
“How about we go upstairs and find your cloud pajamas?” I asked.
She nodded eagerly, allowing me to escort her down the hall and upstairs, where she sat patiently on her bed as I dug through her closet. The cloud pajamas—blue flannel, covered in cumulus clouds — were the one thing I’d done right. I’d bought them at a hip children’s store in SoHo, they were Sam’s favorite, and sometimes she cried if she couldn’t wear them to bed — forcing Cynthia & Co. to purchase second and even third pairs of the hit pajamas to shore up Sam’s sleeping on their end — what I took to be a small but powerful personal victory.
I went through every inch of Sam’s closet, finally locating them on a back shelf. I dramatically unveiled them — Sam liked when I did a lot of Rudolph Valentino — style silent-film acting. We put them on and then I tucked her in.
“Tighter,” she ordered.
I tucked.
“Want me to leave the light on?” I asked.
She shook her head. She was the one child on earth who wasn’t afraid of the dark.
“Good night, sweetheart.”
“Good night, Scott.”
She’d always called me Scott, never Dad. I could never remember when this started, its origin as impossible to discern as the chicken and the egg.
“I love you more than—how much again?” I asked her.
“The sun plus the moon.” She closed her eyes and seemed to fall instantly, magically, to sleep.
I headed back downstairs. The CD was still playing, the music erratic and wild. I sat at my desk, rereading the Amherst article.
To forget your name for a while, Ashley had said.
She had to mean Cordova.
There’s something he does to the children. What had he done to his own daughter? How had she ended up dead, an apparent suicide, at twenty-four?
I could feel it starting again — the dark undertow toward Cordova. Forget my fury toward him, which still simmered — this was a chance for absolution. If I went after him again and proved he was a predator — what I’d believed in my gut — all I’d lost might come back. Maybe not Cynthia, I couldn’t hope for that, but my career, my reputation, my life.