She looked off again, fingers plucking at her lip as though in deep thought. I sat up a little straighter, trying to meet her eye.
“You know how they say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree?”
“Yes,” I said.
“That kid tried. Archer Minor wanted to be the apple that fell and rolled away. He wanted to be good. He wanted to escape what he was. Aaron understood that. He tried to help him.”
She took her time adjusting the blanket in her lap.
“So what happened?” I asked.
“Archer was in over his head at Lanford. In high school his father could pressure the teachers. They gave him A’s. I don’t know if he really earned that high SAT score on his résumé. I don’t know how he got past admissions, but academically, that boy was in over his head.”
She stopped again.
“Please go on.”
“There’s no reason,” she said.
Then I remembered something Mrs. Dinsmore had said when I first asked her about Professor Aaron Kleiner.
“There was a cheating scandal, wasn’t there?”
Her body language told me that I’d hit pay dirt.
“Did it involve Archer Minor?” I asked.
She didn’t reply. She didn’t have to.
“Miss Avery?”
“He bought a term paper from a student who’d graduated the year before. The other student had gotten an A on it. Archer just retyped it and handed it in as his own. Didn’t change one single word. He figured there’d be no way Aaron would remember. But Aaron remembers everything.”
I knew the school rules. That sort of cheating was an automatic expulsion at Lanford.
“Did your husband report him?”
“I told him not to. I told him to give Archer a second chance. I didn’t care about the second chance, of course. I just knew.”
“You knew his family would be upset.”
“Aaron reported it anyway.”
“To whom?”
“The chairman of the department.”
My heart sank. “Malcolm Hume?”
“Yes.”
I sat back. “What did Malcolm say?”
“He wanted Aaron to drop it. He said to go home and think about it.”
I thought back to my case with Eban Trainor. He had said something similar to me, hadn’t he? Malcolm Hume. You do not get to be secretary of state without compromise, without cutting deals and negotiating terms and understanding that the world was loaded up with gray.
“I’m very tired, Jake.”
“I don’t understand something.”
“Let it go.”
“Archer Minor was never reported. He graduated summa cum laude.”
“We started getting threatening phone calls. A man visited me. He came into the house when I was in the shower. When I came out, he was just sitting on my bed. He was holding pictures of Natalie and Julie. He didn’t say anything. He just sat on my bed and held the pictures. Then he got up and left. Can you imagine what that was like?”
I thought about Danny Zuker breaking in and sitting on my own bed. “You told your husband?”
“Of course.”
“And?”
She took her time on this one. “I think he finally understood the danger. But it was too late.”
“What did he do?”
“Aaron left. For our sake.”
I nodded, seeing it now. “But you couldn’t tell Natalie that. You couldn’t tell anyone. They’d be in danger. So you told them he ran off. Then you moved away and changed your name.”
“Yes,” she said.
But I was missing something. I was missing a lot, I suspected. There was something that wasn’t adding up here, something niggling at the back of my brain, but I couldn’t see it yet. How, for example, did Natalie come across Archer Minor twenty years later?
“Natalie thought her father abandoned her,” I said.
She just closed her eyes.
“But you said that she wouldn’t let it go.”
“She wouldn’t stop pressing me. She was so sad. I should have never told her that. But what choice did I have? Everything I did, I did to protect my girls. You don’t understand. You don’t understand what a mother has to do sometimes. I needed to protect my girls, you see?”
“I do,” I said.
“And look what happened. Look what I did.” She put her hands to her face and started to sob. The old woman with the walker and tattered bathrobe stopped talking to the wall. Beehive looked like she was readying herself to intervene. “I should have made up some other story. Natalie just kept pressing me, demanding to know what happened to her father. She never stopped.”
I saw it now. “So you eventually told her the truth.”
“It ruined her life, don’t you see? Growing up thinking your father did that to you. She needed closure. I never gave her that. So, yes, I finally told her the truth. I told her that her father loved her. I told her that she didn’t do anything wrong. I told her that he would never, ever, abandon her.”
I nodded along with her words. “So you told her about Archer Minor. That was why she was there that day.”
She didn’t say anything. She just sobbed. Beehive was having no more of this. She was on her way over.
“Where is your husband now, Miss Avery?”
“I don’t know.”
“And Natalie? Where is she?”
“I don’t know that either. But, Jake?”
Beehive was by her side. “I think that’s enough.”
I ignored her. “What, Miss Avery?”
“Let it go. For all our sakes. Don’t be like my husband.”
Chapter 31
When I reached the highway, I flipped on my iPhone. I didn’t think anyone was tracking me but if they were, they’d find me on Route 287 near the Palisades Mall. I didn’t think that would help them very much. I pulled over to the right. There were two more e-mails and three calls from Shanta, each more urgent than the last. That added up to five. In the first two e-mails, she politely asked me to contact her. In the next two, her request was more urgent. In the final, she threw out the big net:
To: Jacob Fisher
From: Shanta Newlin
Jake,
Stop ignoring me. I found an important connection between Natalie Avery and Todd Sanderson.
Shanta
Whoa. I took the Tappan Zee Bridge and pulled over at the first exit. I turned off the iPhone and picked up one of the disposables. I dialed Shanta’s number and waited. She answered on the second ring.