“Where were you?” Dolly asked.

“At school.”

“Why?”

“Just some work I wanted to catch up on.”

“My e-mail still isn’t working.”

“I’ll take another look at it.”

Dolly stood up. “Do you want some tea?”

“That would be nice, thanks.”

She kissed his cheek. Joe sat at the computer. He waited until she was out of the room, then he signed into his account. He was about to check his e-mails when something on his home page caught his eye.

“Lead photos” from the news circulated on his front page. There was international news, followed by local news, sports and then entertainment. It was the local news picture that had caught his eye. The picture was gone now, replaced with something about the New York Knicks.

Joe hit the back arrow and found the picture again.

It was a photograph of a man with his two little girls. He recognized one of them. She wasn’t one of his students, but she went to his school. Or at least she looked like a girl who did. He clicked on the story. The headline read:

LOCAL WOMAN MISSING

He saw the name Reba Cordova. He knew her. She had been on the school library committee where Joe had been faculty liaison. She was vice president of the HSA and he remembered her smiling face at the back door when the children were let out.

She was missing?

Then he read the part beneath that, about the possible connection to a corpse recently found in Newark. He read the name of the murder victim and felt the breath squeeze out of him.

Oh dear Lord, what had he done?

Joe Lewiston ran to the bathroom and threw up. Then he grabbed his phone and dialed Nash’s number.

34

FIRST Ron Hill made sure that neither Betsy nor the twins were home. Then he headed up to his dead boy’s bedroom.

He didn’t want anyone to know.

Ron leaned against the doorway. He stared at the bed as though that might conjure up the image of his son-that he could look so hard that a figure would eventually materialize and it would be Spencer and he’d be lying on his back and he’d be staring at the ceiling the way he did, silent and with small tears in his eyes.

Why hadn’t they seen it?

You look back and you know the kid was always a little morose, always a little too sad, too even. You don’t want him labeled with words like manic depression. He’s just a kid after all, and you figure that he will outgrow it. But now, with the wonder of hindsight, how often had he walked past this room and the door was closed and Ron would open it without knocking-this was his house, damnit, he didn’t have to knock-and Spencer would just be lying on that bed with tears in his eyes and he’d look straight up and Ron would ask, “Is everything okay?” and he’d say, “Sure, Dad,” and Ron would close the door and that would be the end?

Some father.

He blamed himself. He blamed himself for what he missed in his son’s behavior. He blamed himself for leaving the pills and vodka where his son could so easily grab them. But mostly he blamed himself for what he’d been thinking.

Maybe it had been a midlife crisis. Ron didn’t think so. He thought that was too convenient, too easy an out. The truth was, Ron hated this life. He hated his job. He hated coming home to this house and the kids not listening to him and the constant noise and running to Home Depot to get more lightbulbs and worrying about the gas bill and saving for the college fund and, God, he so wanted to escape. How had he gotten trapped in this life anyhow? How do so many men? He wanted a cabin in the woods and he loved being alone and just that, just being deep in the forest where no cell phone could reach him, just the way he could find an opening in the trees and raise his face up to the sun and feel it.

So he wished this life away and longed to escape, and pow, God answered his prayers by killing his son.

He dreaded being here, in this house, this coffin. Betsy would never move on. There was a disconnect between him and the twins. A man stays out of obligation, but why? What’s the point? You sacrifice your happiness in the thin hope that it will make the next generation happier. But does that come with a guarantee-I remain unhappy but my kids will be more fulfilled? What a load of crap. Had it worked for Spencer?

He flashed back to the days after Spencer’s death. He had come in here not so much to pack things away but to go through them. It helped. He didn’t know why. He was drawn to sifting through his son’s stuff, as if getting to know him now would make a difference. Betsy had walked in and threw a fit. So he stopped and never said a word about what he found-and though he would continue to try to reach Betsy, though he’d hunt and search and beckon, the woman he fell in love with was gone. She might have left a long time ago-he wasn’t sure anymore-but whatever had remained had been buried in that damn box with Spencer.

The sound of the back door startled him. He hadn’t heard the car pull up. He hurried toward the stairs and saw Betsy. He saw the look on her face and said, “What happened?”

“Spencer killed himself,” she said.

Ron just stood there, not sure how to reply to that one.

“I wanted there to be more,” she said.

He nodded. “I know.”

“We’ll always wonder about what we could have done to save him. But maybe, I don’t know, maybe there was nothing. Maybe we missed stuff, but maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. And I hate thinking that because I don’t want to let us off the hook-and then I think, well, I don’t even care about hooks or blame or any of that. I just want to go back to another day. You know? Just another chance and maybe if we could change just one thing, the smallest thing, like if we took a left out of the driveway instead of a right or if we painted the house yellow instead of blue, anything, it would have all been different.”

He waited for her to say more. When she didn’t, he asked, “What happened, Betsy?”

“I just saw Adam Baye.”

“Where?”

“In the backyard. Where they used to play.”

“What did he say?”

She told him about the fight, about the calls, about how Adam blamed himself. Ron tried to process it.

“Over a girl?”

“Yes,” she said.

But Ron knew that it was far more complicated than that.

Betsy turned away.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I have to tell Tia.”

TIA and Mike decided to split the load.

Mo met them at the house. He and Mike drove back toward the Bronx while Tia took to the computer. Mike filled Mo in on what had happened. Mo drove without asking for elaboration. When Mike was done, Mo simply asked, “That instant message. From CeeJay8115.”

“What about it?”

Mo kept driving.

“Mo?”

“I don’t know. But there is no way that there’s eight thousand one hundred and fourteen other CeeJays out there.”

“So?”

“So numbers are never random,” Mo said. “They always mean something. It is just a matter of figuring out what.”

Mike should have known. Mo was something of an idiot savant when it came to numbers. That had been his ticket to Dartmouth- perfect math SAT scores and off-the-charts arithmetical testing.

“Any thoughts on what it could mean?”

Mo shook his head. “Not yet.” Then: “So what next?”

“I need to make a call.”

Mike dialed the number for Club Jaguar. He was surprised when Rosemary McDevitt herself answered the phone.

“It’s Mike Baye.”

“Yeah, I figured. We’re closed today, but I was expecting your call.”

“We need to talk.”

“Indeed we do,” Rosemary said. “You know where I’m at. Get here as fast as you can.”

TIA checked Adam’s e-mail, but again there was nothing relevant coming in. His friends Clark and Olivia were still sending messages, each somewhat more urgent, but still nothing from DJ Huff. That worried Tia.