Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(99)
When Miriam finally returned, standing in the open door, the snow melting in her hair, she said it was Jeremy. Jeremy had been arrested.
“Only Jeremy?”
“Only him.”
“How is that possible?”
“Feds received an anonymous tip from a scrambled cell. He was the only one in the safe house when they arrived.”
“It was Puck,” Claire said. “It had to be.”
“Puck is dead.” She closed the door behind her and leaned against it.
Claire asked what she was going to do, and Miriam said there was nothing to do—Jeremy had gotten himself into this mess—and then she locked the door with finality.
This was the beginning of Miriam’s reluctance to share. Whereas before, Claire had felt like a pupil, Miriam now treated her like a pampered niece. In the months that followed—after they visited several credit unions and banks to withdraw and redeposit money, after they moved into an apartment in the Hawthorne district of Portland, after Miriam secured her admission to William Archer, after they browsed Powell’s Books and shopped at REI and ate barbecued pork kebabs from the Korean carts and hiked Forest Park and stood in the rain at the memorial erected at Pioneer Courthouse Square—whenever Claire would ask questions, Miriam would shrug them off and say, “Don’t worry about it.” Claire would wake sometimes in the middle of the night and catch Miriam staring out the window or scrolling through websites about the courthouse square bombing and know from the stiffness of her spine that the kidnapping had changed something between them.
These months were a gift, the gift of normalcy, and that gift would expire as soon as they said good-bye at the train station. Then Miriam would begin hunting.
Little did she know she would become the hunted.
Claire is not worried about Jeremy. She is worried about Miriam. His indictment—along with the discovery of Reprobus in the old newspaper photos—has simply fed into this almost cyclonic gathering panic Claire feels. The sense that things are coming together and at the same time spinning out of control.
Enough f*cking around. She needs answers.
Night has fallen. The clouds are low. In the distance she can see the yellow lights of Missoula reflecting off the overcast sky. Reprobus holds his office hours late. She goes to Carver Hall and spots the yellow square of his office and stands below it until it goes dark.
A minute later, she spots him at the entrance, easing himself down the steps, then walking along the sidewalk with the hunched mosey of an old man with plenty of vigor still in him. Many of the faculty and staff live in Missoula, but Reprobus talks often about his morning stroll to the office, which means he lives in Campustown, the small village of university-owned property available for staff and faculty housing.
She tries to keep fifty yards between them but panics every time he disappears behind a building or into an island of trees. She takes off her boots and jogs with them in her hands. His footsteps clunk along the pavement, but hers barely whisper. She comes around a corner and finds him stopped in the path ten yards before her. She panics—and then sees a spark of flame, a puff of smoke. He continues walking and she follows, pleasuring in the smell of cherry tobacco from his pipe. Security lamps and streetlights throw puddles of light that she avoids, sticking to the shadows.
She could simply call out to him. But what would she say? Did you know my father? She needs to be certain. A pixilated image from several decades ago can only tell her so much.
His house is one of many of the same design, all boxy cardboard-brown split-levels built in the seventies with a small square patch of lawn in back and a smaller square patch in front. She hides behind some hedges across the street and watches the windows of his house brighten with light—and waits another hour for them to go dark—and another hour after that before she tests the back door and finds it unlocked.
The antique clock ticking on the wall makes her think of a bomb, and she feels like she is racing to defuse it, her hands careful but her heart hurried when she opens and closes the drawers of his desk, rifles through the papers and tries to read them in the dim moonlight streaming in the windows.
After an hour, she feels beside herself, ready to give up. Since she doesn’t know what she is looking for, she forces herself to go through everything. Receipts, tax reports dating back twenty years, instruction manuals—a lawnmower, a microwave, a laptop, a fax machine.
A laptop. Reprobus was a professed Luddite who refused to exchange email with students, so she hadn’t been surprised to find his office desk topped by an old typewriter. But here was the instruction manual for an HP Pavilion, along with the Costco receipt, dated two years ago. She searches the office again—and then the living room—and finds nothing. It must be either in his university office or upstairs.
All this time she has kept her backpack on, not wanting to set it down and forget it. The weight of it, combined with the reek of pipe tobacco and mothballs, is bringing on a headache. The stairway is next to the kitchen and she goes to stand at the base of it. Out of the corner of her eye she sees a flickering blue light. The laptop—plugged in and resting on the counter. The phone cord snakes from the wall and into the machine. Dial-up.
She slowly opens the laptop and the processor whirs and the screen blinks twice and comes to life. He is too trusting or lazy or incompetent to password-protect. She guesses she won’t be as lucky with his email, though. The taskbar carries an icon for Outlook and she clicks on it and it loads and a password request pops up. Her frustration passes a second later as she sees all of the email stacked up in his inbox and the three thousand messages listed in his trash bin. His security settings are minimal. By opting out of the password request, she can’t download any new messages, but she has access to everything archived.