Graveland: A Novel (19 page)

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.

Nevertheless, this felt like the first grown-up interaction he’d engaged in for quite a while, and as a result he left the campus feeling a good deal less anxious.

But he still needs this drink. And might actually need a second. It’s not as if one adult conversation is going to solve all, or indeed any, of his problems.

He takes a sip of Stoli. As he’s putting the glass down, he looks into the mirror behind the bar and sees movement—someone emerging from the shadows of the Smokehouse Tavern’s dimly lit vestibule area.

It’s a woman. She’s fortyish, small and slim, with short, dark hair. She’s dressed all in black—in jeans, a T-shirt, and a jacket.

She approaches the bar and pulls out a stool three along from where Frank is sitting. She lays car keys and a phone down in front of her.

The barman comes up from the far end where he was stacking some glasses and looks at her, eyebrows raised interrogatively.

“Club soda, please.”

She sits down, picks the phone up, and starts … whatever, texting, tweeting.

He takes another sip from his drink.

The barman places a glass of club soda with ice and lemon in front of the woman and wanders off.

There is silence for a while, the thick silence of a slow-moving, aimless afternoon.

Then, “Frank … isn’t it?”

He turns. “Sorry?”

“Frank Bishop, right?”

The woman is looking directly at him. He’s puzzled. Does he know her? Is he supposed to recognize her?

“I’m sorry … have we met?”

“No.” She shakes her head. “Someone pointed you out to me. Back there … on the campus. One of the students.”

Frank shifts on his stool and turns, studying the woman’s face for a moment. She has smooth, pale skin and dark, penetrating green eyes.

Then something occurs to him.

“Did you
follow
me here?”

She nods. “Yes, I’m sorry. But I needed to talk to you. My name is Ellen Dorsey. I’m a journalist.”

Frank swallows, a hundred things racing through his head at once, but principally,
What the fuck
 …
a journalist
?

This is also—he’s now aware—what the look on his face is saying, and it seems to make her uncomfortable, maybe even a little uncertain. As the seconds pass, he keeps staring at her. It’s as though she’s weighing something and needs more time. But he doesn’t feel like giving her any.

“Come on,” he says, “you’ve got something to tell me? What
is
it?”

She wipes away an invisible speck of dust from the bar before looking at him. “I’m not sure how to say this, Frank, but I think your daughter might be in serious trouble.”

*   *   *

Not exactly how she planned it.

But in the few moments she was sitting there, the reality of the situation, the complexity of it, overwhelmed her. If she thinks about it now, even for a second, one thing is clear. This man in front of her isn’t just a source, a provider of the next link in a chain of information.

He’s involved.

She remembers talking about this to Jimmy Gilroy, about how you get involved—when a story goes a certain way, when you get out of the house and meet people, look them in the eye. It can all get a bit knotty. Ambivalence creeps in.

She looks him in the eye now.

He says, “I
beg
your pardon?”

Ellen adjusts herself on the stool. “I’m still working on it, okay, but I’ve been investigating something, a story, and a certain name has come up, Julian Robert Coady. The thing is, I think the guy your daughter is involved with, Alex, might be this guy’s brother.”

Bishop’s eyes screw up as he tries to process this. In his obvious bewilderment and desperation he does his best to formulate another question, but all he can manage is “Story?
What
story?”

Ellen takes a breath and pauses. She can’t get straight into it, can she? Not without some prepping. And besides, it’s beginning to feel a little flimsy to her—a T-shirt, a comment made on a radio show?

What is she doing?

“I’ll get to that,” she says, “but … do you have any idea where they are now? Lizzie and Alex?”

“No.” This isn’t quite shouted, but it’s close. “That’s why I came up here. I can’t reach her. She’s not answering her phone.” He raises his left hand, holds it up for a moment, almost threateningly, and then, in frustration, slaps his thigh with it, and really hard. “It’s been almost a
week
.”

“Right.”

It’s sudden, but the sense hits her now—ineluctable, inarguable—that this is over. The situation has reached critical mass. There’s simply no way she can contain it, or hold out for more. “Look,” she says, “I may have it wrong, I may be putting two and two together here and getting five, but…” She exhales and looks down at the bar, at her keys, at her phone.

How to say this.

“What?”

She looks up at him again. “These recent shootings in Manhattan? The Wall Street guys? It’s my belief that Julian Robert Coady is … involved. Actually maybe both him
and
his brother.”

“What the
fuck
?”

This he does shout. The barman turns, looks over, but Ellen raises a hand to keep him at bay.

“Look,” she says, half in a whisper now, “I’ve only literally just put this together myself. It’s still circumstantial, but…”

A pale Frank Bishop stares at her for a second. Then, as though he’s forgotten something, he turns to the bar, picks up his glass, drains it, and puts it down again.

He turns back to face her.

“What did you say your name was?”

A tremor in his voice.

“Ellen Dorsey.”

“Well, Ellen, you’re going to have to explain all of this to me, and you’d better make it fast, because my head is just about ready to explode.”

So she does. She explains it to him, quickly and efficiently. No point doing it any other way. But passing the story on like this also means it’ll very soon be out of her hands. Because really, in the circumstances, what does she think Frank Bishop is going to do with it?

“Jesus Christ.”

His voice is calm now, quiet. He reaches into his jacket pocket and takes out his cell phone. He holds it up.

“I—I have to call … Lizzie’s mother.”

He gets off the stool and takes a few steps away from the bar. There is a slowness to his movements, an exaggerated steadiness, a concentration, as though he is drunk and trying not to show it. He’s actually in good shape, and handsome, sort of, with tight-cropped, graying hair. But he has a weary look to him as well, tired eyes, tired posture.

When he is far enough away, Ellen turns to her own phone and checks for messages, e-mails, tweets. Then she uses some of the coordinates she gathered back at that table in the Cabbage Patch for a quick data sweep through the Atherton social mediasphere.

With one eye on Bishop, who’s managing to keep his voice under control—though not his body language,
that’s
becoming increasingly agitated—she worms her way through half a dozen Twitter accounts.

It’s all anyone is talking about. A localized micro trend. Lizzie Bishop, her old man, that journalist.

Alex Coady.

Those two guys this morning.

Ellen stops, rereads that one.