Quentin tried not to make eye contact with the face on his screen. “Hello to you too.” He reached for his pocket. “I lost my sunglasses.”
“Aw, the ones Dean gave you?” She sounded genuinely upset.
“I’ll find them. I’m sure they’re around.”
Summer said, “I hope so.”
“I know you do.”
“So what happened yesterday? Did you ever talk to Robin?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“She had no idea who the Inland Empire Killers were.”
“Are you sure?”
Quentin thought back to his phone conversation with Robin Diamond, which had taken place a million years ago on the previous day. It had been just a few hours past his arrival on a red-eye flight. He’d managed to get thirty minutes of fitful, Klonopin-aided sleep at his Newark airport hotel, and if anything, it had made him feel more exhausted than he’d been in the first place. He probably should have waited until he’d had some real rest before contacting Robin. But back then—when he was taking his first skipping steps onto that yellow brick road of questions-yet-to-be-answered—Quentin had been excited and hopeful and therefore short on patience. Like her parents, Robin Diamond had an unlisted phone number and home address, and Quentin did not want to think aboutClosureor Robin Diamond or her parents, especially her parents. Her father... “I’m positive.”
“Okay, no worries,” Summer said. “I’m going to go back to Duarte and try and get George to reconsider going on record.”
“Do you think there’s any hope in that?”
She smiled. It tracked weirdly on his screen, a slow-motion grimace, an image out of a dream. “There’s hope in everything, Q.”
He cleared his throat. “Listen,” he said. “I don’t think there’s a real story here.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“But the postcard from New York...”
“Lots of students loved Mrs. Brixton. That postcard could have been from anyone.”
“Come on. You don’t believe that.”
“I don’t know what I believe.”
“Quentin, the ticket stub—”
“Do you know what I was just doing, Summer? I was reading Hamish Garrison’s obituary.”
“What? Why?”
“I found it here at the library. All these years, researching murderers and their victims, I never bothered tracking down my own origin story. I rely on my mother—the most unreliable source on the planet. If I was interviewing her for a podcast, I’d fact-check every word out of her mouth. But here she tells me this random British guy was my dad, and I believe her without question. Isn’t that strange?”
“This conversation is what’s strange.”
“I mean it, Summer. What if Hamish Garrison being my father is just a lie I’ve been living with all these years? The same way Pollard’s been living with the idea that April Cooper is still alive.”
“Hey, Q...” That tinge of worry in her voice. He closed his eyes.
“Or, hell... I don’t know. Maybe Robin Diamond is the one who’s been living with a lie. Maybe her mother really was a murderer, and she’ll never know it. What difference does it make? We all believe whatever bullshit we want to, don’t we? We suck up whatever pretty stories we can, just to help us get through the day without throwing ourselves in front of a train.”
He opened his eyes to Summer’s face in his hand—a mask of concern, eyes bigger than ever. For an awful moment, he wanted to break the screen.
