Satisfied that they aren’t coming back, he pulls out the key.
Last chance to abort.
He unlocks the door and steps inside.
He heads straight for Caleb’s office, telling himself not to get his hopes up. Caleb took his laptop bag with him, which means he took his laptop. But maybe there’s a hard copy of his outline in here. Or the NDA he signed. Something.
The desktop is uncluttered and uninteresting. It holds a legal pad and pen, a framed wedding photo, and a pack of sticky tabs. The desk has a pencil drawer, two box drawers, and two file drawers. He starts on the left. The top drawer is neatly organized. There’s a pack of notebooks still wrapped in plastic, a box of pens, and a checkbook. The file drawer beneath is divided into two sections: Work holds the Foggy Bottom Prep Employee Handbook, a folder labeled Employment Contract, one folder labeled Exams, and another labeled Lesson Plans. Personal has folders for Taxes, Medical Expenses, Mortgage, Utilities, Budget, and Banking.
He moves to the drawers on the right. The top drawer houses a stapler and a box of staples. Nothing else. The bottom drawer is locked. He rolls open the pencil drawer in search of the key. There’s a pile of paper clips, a few highlighters, a cloth to clean eyeglasses, and a lip balm. No key.
He scans the small room. There’s a bookshelf crammed with novels and few writing reference books. He studies the shelves. The novels aren’t arranged by author name or title. It takes him a minute to realize they’re arranged by literary period. It’s a chronology of the written word. The classics and modern literary fiction are well represented. He recognizes a handful of historical fiction books, a couple traditional mysteries, and two slim volumes of poetry. No romance novels and, curiously, no thrillers.
He turns his attention to the craft books. They have names like On Writing, Bird by Bird, The Spooky Art, and Steering the Craft. And then there’s Writing the Thriller: A Step by Step Checklist. One of these things is not like the others. He takes the checklist book from the shelf and opens it. A small key is taped to the inside cover.
Oh, Caleb.
He removes the key and unlocks the bottom drawer. It’s stuffed to overflowing with folders and notebooks. He snaps a picture of the drawer, then hauls everything out of it, gets comfortable on the floor, and starts working through the materials.
There’s a half-finished draft of a book about an Egyptian god. The notebooks are full of story ideas, themes, snippets of dialogue, and character sketches. There’s a folder labeled Circle House Literary. He scans the documents inside. There’s a representation agreement between Caleb and a literary agent named Biz Linden, and two ghostwriting agreements with attached nondisclosure agreements between Caleb Rye and Archives Press.
Two? He skims the documents. One, dated nine months ago, references a work titled The Payback. The other, dated just this past Monday, the day Henry was born, references a book called The Takedown. He’s already under contract for a second book.
He flips to the signature block. Biz has signed on behalf of the publishing company. This doesn’t seem quite right to him.
He uses the app on his phone to scan each page and upload them to the encrypted folder he shares with Sasha. She’ll be able to interpret these contracts much better than he could hope to.
He returns everything to the Circle House folder and continues to work his way through the remaining documents methodically. He finds a heavily annotated copy of the outline for The Payback and a copy of an outline for The Takedown. He repeats the page by page scan for both documents.
The next folder is full of rejection letters from literary agents, predating his relationship with Biz. He’d been querying a literary fiction novel, not a thriller. The rest of the papers are drafts of esoteric novels and short stories. All very high-brow. The sort of important books people buy in hardcover so they can be seen reading them.
He stuffs everything back into the drawer the way he found it. Then he compares it to the photo on his phone. He switches the order of a tan notebook and a black notebook to match the picture, closes the drawer, and locks it.
After he tapes the key back inside the thriller writing book and returns the volume to the bookshelf, he has a thought.
He goes back to the unlocked file drawer, removes the banking folder. He pages through the past twelve account statements. Emmaline and Caleb live paycheck to paycheck. At the end of most months, their balance is under twenty dollars. They’ve gone negative twice in the past year, but never since the deposit of the first check from Circle House Literary eight months ago. He scans the banking documents and uploads these, too, before returning the folder to its spot in the drawer.
He walks through the rest of the small house, not really searching. He’s looking for anything that seems out of place, like the book in the office. But there’s nothing. He estimates the entire house is fewer than six hundred square feet.
There’s a long counter running along one wall in the galley kitchen where Emmaline must work. Two bins on the floor hold her lesson plans, books, and laptop.
Upstairs, the bedroom is cheerful and tidy. The makeshift nursery is spotless. There’s a European-style washer/dryer tucked into a closet in the bathroom and a clean basket of folded burp clothes and baby clothes beside it.
He’s seen enough. If Emmaline and Caleb are hiding anything that’s not in the locked file drawer, they don’t keep it in their home. He lets himself out, locks the door, and begins the jog back to his place.
Chapter Eighteen
Papers cover the dining room. Sasha printed every page Connelly uploaded to their shared server. Now she organizes them, separating them into neat stacks: The Payback outline, The Takedown outline; the various contracts and agreements; and the bank statements. She adds her research notes on the water supply attack and the blurry picture of Caleb’s pros and cons list, two legal pads and pens, and, because lawyer habits die hard, highlighters in yellow, blue, and pink for color coding information.
Mocha, napping in front of the fireplace, suddenly sits up straight, ears alert, tail thumping. Seconds later, Connelly comes in through the garden door.
He pours a glass of water and drinks it while he takes in the organized chaos spread out on the table.
“What about the kids?”
She shakes her head. “They’re at Yasmin’s, remember? They’ll be there all day. When I dropped them off, the ambassador’s house manager asked me if they have any food sensitivities. Apparently, the cook is preparing a traditional Egyptian dinner for twelve fifth graders.”
“Is it okay that I’m jealous?”
