“Nah. I liked the guy. He had some swagger, you know?”
“Right. And what do you mean by that, exactly?”
“He was just confident, had a lot of presence.” Hunter pauses. I hear the whir of the treadmill slow as he takes a gulp of water. “It made him easier to listen to when he was teaching.”
“Okay, I get that. Anything else specific that you remember about him?”
“Well, his dad’s a pretty big deal, but you probably already know that.”
“I do know a bit about his dad, yes. He’s in your same line of work, right?”
“Yeah, Professor Bradshaw got me an interview with him for an internship,” Hunter says. This revelation makes me sit up straighter. “It didn’t work out,” Hunter continues, “but I guess that’s another reason I liked the guy. He did me that solid, you know?”
“Uh-huh, and do you remember when that was?”
“Let’s see, that would’ve been second semester my junior year. So, spring 2018 sometime.”
I’m typing rapidly now to keep up.
“Great. And you interviewed directly with Curtis Bradshaw Senior?”
“Yeah, he was down in DC visiting his son, so we just met for coffee on campus.”
“Professor Bradshaw’s father was in DC?”
“Yeah, um, I’m sorry, is this really relevant to your story?”
“Oh, no, not really,” I say, dialing back the eagerness in my voice. “I’d just heard a rumor that they’d had a falling-out, that’s all. So it’s a little surprising to me.”
“Well, if that’s true, it must’ve happened more recently.”
“Yeah, must’ve,” I say. “Well, thanks so much for your time. You’ve been a big help.”
“Sure,” says Hunter. “All off the record, though, right?”
“Yep. Thanks again.”
When I hang up, I scan my notes, taking stock of this new intel. It’s not much, but it’s also not nothing. Now I know that the rift between Curt and his father is fresh. If Curtis Senior was hanging out with his son on campus in the spring of 2018, their falling-out could have happened around the same time that Ellipsis wrote the anonymous messages. What if Curt’s dad found out about the lie? What if it’s something so bad that it made him cut off his own kid?
That would almost certainly make it damning enough to deploy as effective blackmail. I stare at the names on my notepad. Which one of you knows the truth?
The next half-dozen calls all go to voicemail, but I’m gettingcloser to something—I can feel it. I mark those names with a second “X.”
The call after that—to the eighth of the thirteen people who didn’t answer yesterday—picks up. Chloe Nelson is back in school, at the University of Maryland, getting a master’s in education. She also manages the greenhouse at a local nursery, which is where I’ve reached her.
“I do remember Professor Bradshaw,” she tells me, “but not because I was close with him myself. One of my best friends at Georgetown was Dottie Ross. He was sort of a mentor to her.”
I scan my list. Dorothy Ross. One of the three students who I haven’t been able to find online at all. I scribble a note next to her name: “Goes by Dottie.”
“And what’s Dottie up to now?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” says Chloe. “I haven’t talked to her since, um, I guess it was March our senior year, right after spring break.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Can I ask what happened?”
“I wish I could tell you. She just—I don’t know—she just kind of disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
