AllFreeNovel
Share Us
My cabbie sets his radio to a local news station. I listen as a reporter quietly updates us on Donald Trump, a failed uterus transplant, and then new details about the multi-university hack. My heart jumps. I lean forward to hear.
“Analysts haven’t yet been able to trace the hacker who stole hundreds of thousands of e-mails linked to those working at and attending Aldrich University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island; and Princeton University in New Jersey,” the reporter says. “Alfred Manning, who has been Aldrich University’s president for more than fifteen years, has reported that an IT task force has been working around the clock to fix the breach. Other presidents have weighed in as well, saying their security teams are taking similar measures.”
My shoulders tense. Scandals are starting to leak right and left—at all the colleges, but I only tune into the ones about Aldrich. A professor at Aldrich’s medical school actually doesn’t have a medical degree. The head of the history department is selling cocaine out of his office. A few players on the school’s prestigious basketball team are paying kids to take their tests.
Lives are crumbling. I listen as the reporter floats a few theories of who might have done it: A kid who’d been rejected from every Ivy he applied to. ISIS. North Korea.
The driver continues down 376, and soon enough we cross through the Fort Pitt Tunnel and drive toward the steep embankment to Blue Hill, the neighborhood where I grew up.Home sweet home—or not. Dread and shame rise inside me. I come back to Pittsburgh only when it would be ridiculously inappropriate not to—Christmases, the birth of my sister’s daughters, Kit’s first husband’s funeral, her weddings—otherwise, I stay far, far away.
We drive past the neighborhood’s main drag, which is peppered with trendy boutiques and yoga studios. I can list the stately order ofhomes before my parents’ by heart: first the Queen Anne Victorian with turrets and third-floor decks, then the Arts and Crafts splendor with stained glass, then the marble monolith that looks like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the end of Logan Street is the house I know best: a huge, stately colonial of brick and slate standing on a freshly mown lot. My parents bought the place in the 1970s using every scrap of savings—this was long before my dad made bank at Aldrich. “It’s the kind of house one sacrifices for,” my mom said. “As soon as I saw it, I knew we’d make wonderful memories here.”
I can still hear her voice all these years later. She’s one of the reasons I find it so hard to come back. Every landmark I pass, every bend in the road—it still makes me think of how she was taken too soon. My mother never visited LA—she never even knew I’d chosen to move there. This means I can pass through the city untouched by her memory, not suddenly and unexpectedly plunged into sadness.
Two news vans are parked in front of the house. As my cab slows, two reporters step toward us. “Holy shit,” my driver says.
I toss him some crumpled-up twenties and wrench the sliding door open. Popping flashbulbs assault me. I hitch my carry-on over my shoulder and jog toward the house. The reporters jog alongside me.
“Excuse me?” a male reporter with a microphone asks. “Do you have a comment about the murder?”
“Do you know Kit Manning-Strasser?” cries another voice. “Is it true she found Greg’s body?”
“Do you think she did it?” someone shouts. “Because of the e-mails?”
The front door is unlocked, so I wrench it open and hurry inside, slamming it behind me. Someone rings the bell. “Dude,” I shout to the closed door. “It’s not even sevenA.M.!”
I bolt the lock. Then I turn and look at the house. The foyer still smells like it did when Kit and I were kids: leather, dust, furniture polish. There’s the notch on the railing where Kit chipped her tooth when we’d been flying kites down the hallway. There’s the spotagainst the radiator where I sat for what seemed like days after I found out that a drunk driver killed my mother. I shut my eyes. This is too much.
I hear a creak. I can smell my father’s Old Spice before I see him. “Willa,” he says as he walks forward from the kitchen, his arms outstretched, his eyes sad. “Thank you for coming.”
He looks even thinner than he was at Christmas, when he’d started a juice cleanse to “lose the whiskey belly.” His sandy hair, normally so groomed—Dad is one of those men who used to take longer to get ready for an event than my mother—is Einstein-crazy around his face. I step closer to him, and he pulls me in for a hug. I feel the same as I always do—like we are distant islands, not really familiar to one another anymore.
“Where’s Kit?” I ask, pulling back.
“Still asleep.”
I nod. I can’t fathom what Kit’s day was like yesterday—hospitals, morgues, police stations, funeral homes. She can’t go to her own house on Hazel because it’s crawling with forensics people. I bet she took something to knock herself out last night. I would have.
“So I’m supposed to be at the college—this hack thing.” My dad pinches the bridge of his nose. “You heard?”
“Of course. Hacks are our bread and butter at work.”
“Kitty didn’t do this, you know.”
I fix my gaze on a knot in the stair finial. At first, I think my dad means my sister didn’t do the hack, but then I realize—he means she didn’t kill Greg. “Iknow that,” I say.
“We need to keep her safe right now. Away from the gossip. And whoeverdiddo this? He’s still out there.”
That tagline would definitely bump Aldrich University up a spot on theUS News & World ReportBest Colleges ranking:Come for the e-mail hack, stay for the serial killing!I sigh. “Go to campus, Dad. They probably need you.”
“Are you sure?” His eyes are concerned. Unsteady.
I nod. “I’ve got Kit. It’s fine.” Then I scrutinize his thin face. “You look terrible. Are you sleeping enough?”
“Of course.”
“Eating enough?”
But then we’re interrupted. “Aunt Willa?” says a shocked voice.
