Summer Sons(69)

“Do you have more than this, somewhere else in your files?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” she responded.

The notes she’d handed him were spartan, bland compared to the personal journals. Andrew sat the folder on the desk. Troth’s interest might be ghoulish, but her angle on the whole mess was academic, oblique to his ultimate goal. It was an angle to exploit nonetheless.

“The field notes for his interviews are missing,” Andrew said.

Troth tilted her head and said, “I don’t have those, unfortunately. He provided me summaries where appropriate, not his originals or transcriptions.”

“No, I mean they’re just gone. I’ve dug through everything at home, in his car, and in his carrel. Everyone has mentioned them, but they’re nowhere to be found.”

After two beats of strained silence, with her blank stare pinning him to his stiff seat, Troth crossed the office to close the door. The air conditioner cut off. Andrew drummed his fingertips on the chair arm, watching her as she paused. Her grip rested loose on the door handle, and she cocked her head at him with a considering flat frown.

“And you’ve looked everywhere, you’re sure?” she repeated.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

“He did a full semester’s worth of interviews; there should be at minimum one full notebook. We discussed the interviews in a general sense, and he referenced from them in our meetings, but the originals and the audio recordings should be with his other materials.”

Andrew spread his hands in a gesture of supplication and said, “I was assuming, or maybe hoping, you’d have them.”

The fine wrinkles at the corner of Troth’s mouth lent a severity to her expression. He wouldn’t have wanted that intensity turned on him in a course; he doubted she ever had trouble with boisterous underclassmen. All his leads pointed in the direction of those field excursions, alongside Sam or otherwise; the absent phone with its likely collection of audio recordings and the written notes both were too closely joined to the hallucinatory vision of the corpse posed under the oak tree. Troth clicked across the tile floor in her sensible heels to pull the second guest chair over to his elbow and sit.

“Here.” She flipped the folder open once again between the two of them. Andrew shifted in his seat to face her. “While I don’t have the interviews themselves, my notes reference a handful of them in greater detail.”

She split the stack in half and handed him a pad of ruled Post-Its. The frown was ever-present as she skimmed through the first few pages. Andrew ran his thumb across his own page, unfocused, seeking names or locations instead of her long-form analysis of Eddie’s writing style. At his side, her pen scratched on the Post-Its. He forced himself not to look.

Four pages in he happened upon a paragraph: Rob and Lisa McCormick are an elderly couple who are located close to the boundaries of the Fulton estate and Edward expressed excitement at their agreement to speak with him soon. The majority of his subjects have been in their mid-thirties and are transplants to the area; the McCormicks are older, from a family long established in the region, and are familiar in passing with the Fulton line. He snagged the pen and wrote their names under Troth’s brief notation of Eric Middleton, a name snagged from her own stack of papers.

She checked his note and murmured, “I’m not certain he managed to arrange that meeting, with the couple. You might have better luck.”

Each of them wrote two additional names, six total, before Troth flipped her final page facedown. Light slanted lower through the casement-style windows. Andrew cracked his knuckles. Troth returned to her chair, where she sat heavily and propped her chin on one hand. It was a less manicured gesture than he was growing used to from her. His phone kicked up an incessant vibration in his pocket, ringing, but he ignored it. He stuck the Post-It note to the outside of the file folder.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You’re sure the notes weren’t in his carrel?” she asked.

“Positive.”

“Those locks aren’t particularly secure. I can’t imagine someone breaking in to steal from him, though,” she said.

Andrew balanced the file on one knee. “You said his research was good. And he’d have been talking about it to everyone, probably.”

“An opportunistic researcher…” Her thumb pressed to her thin lips in thought.

Like you, he thought to himself.

“It must be frustrating, and insulting, to be forced to retrace his steps,” she said. “I apologize. I’m hoping there’s an explanation that doesn’t implicate one of our students stooping to theft.”

Troth didn’t rise from behind the desk as Andrew stood. She continued absently tapping her thumbnail on the seam of her frown. He and Troth were both, he justified to himself, using each other for different ends.

“If I’m continuing the work, I’m going to have to piece it together to catch up to where he left things,” he said, aware of the doubling of his words, the implications hiding underneath.

“Indeed you will, or so it seems.” Troth glanced over at him, straightening her posture. “Edward started with a broad approach to local folklore, but he had begun to focus more on stories surrounding the Fultons before our meetings paused for the summer. The last time we spoke was at the dinner party, the day he left his ring behind. I remember his excitement about some recent discovery he’d made, but I never had a chance to find out what that entailed.”