To my surprise, Vivienne picks up right away. “Did you find her?” she asks without saying hello.
“No. But now I also need to find someone else.” I feel a twinge of guilt. This is the kind of call I could be making to Wilson.Except I know she’d refuse to help me freelance this way. In fact, she might even send someone to get me. “He might know something about what happened to my mom. Can you get into Yale’s alumni records? I know he went there like thirty years ago. I need a current address, so I can try to talk to him.”
“Yale?Please,in my sleep. Give me his name and a five-year window of his graduation. Shouldn’t take long.”
Vivienne calls me back in less than ten minutes. “They don’t haveanycurrent records on this guy. He didn’t graduate, never came back after the holidays his sophomore year. From what I could see in his academic file, there wasn’t any obvious reason. Good grades, no disciplinary issues, tuition paid in full. You want his last address in New Haven? It was off campus. Maybe they know something there. But, I mean, this was thirty years ago …”
“I’ll take it—thanks.”
Half an hour later, I’m standing across the street from a run-down house about a mile east of the campus. It’s small and cream-colored, with a sloped front porch that gives the impression that the house is slowly melting into the ground. The neighborhood is deserted, the house next door boarded up, another one nearby partially destroyed by fire.
I jump when a dog barks behind me, hurling its enormous, angry, white-spotted body against the flimsy chain-link fence separating us.
“Jesus,” I mutter as I run across the street. The front stairs are so lopsided, I lose my footing, and the railing nearly gives way when I grab on to it to steady myself.
“Who the fuck’s there?” There’s a huge bald man standing at one of the porch windows. I can’t see his face through the torn screen, but it’s clear he’s not happy.
I dig out one of the twenties I specifically brought for this purpose and wave it in the air, like a dog treat. I already have the sense I am doing this wrong.
“I’m trying to find somebody who used to live here.”
“Who?” he shouts, but his tone has softened the tiniest bit. It’s got to be the money.
“Reed Harding? It was, um, a long time ago. Maybe before you—”
“I’ve lived in this house my whole life and I was born in ’81. Before that, my parents lived here, and before that, my grandparents.”
The man disappears for a minute, and I think maybe I’ve lost him. But then he appears at the front door. He’s even bigger than I realized. He motions me to approach with his massive mittlike hands. I inch closer. Not near enough that he could easily grab me, but still way too close for comfort.
“Yes?” I do a pretty good job keeping my voice steady.
“Give me the damn money,” he says, like I’m the total idiot I appear to be.
“Oh, okay.” I toss the twenty at the door and spring away.
He opens the door, picks the money up off the ground, inspects it.
“Now who is it you’re looking for?”
“He was a Yale student and he—”
“Oh, you mean the apartment. We rented that out to students. Still do.”
“Reed Harding was a student at Yale in 1992,” I offer tentatively. “The school records say he was living here in this house and then left school around Christmas of 1992.”
“Christmasof 1992?” he asks. “Wait a fucking second. I remember that asswipe. He screwed us out of half our presents, including my Reggie Jackson baseball card! I’d been waiting a hundred years for that thing.”
“I need to find out where he is now. I need to talk to him.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“I know it was a long time—”
“He’s fucking dead.”
“Dead?”
“Yup—that’s how he killed Christmas. The asshole bled out on our steps middle of the night on Christmas Eve. So there my mom was all freaking about that, and my dad worried about losing a tenant and the money and all that crap. Us kids were the real ones that got screwed.”
