Chapter 15
Curt’s voice, eerily calm like it was on his front porch a week ago, sends a chill across my skin. If I stay put, he’ll find me. If I get up and run, he’ll follow.
A third choice—the only real choice—floats into my head, blotting out everything else around it: I am not the one who should be cowering here as if I did something wrong. Even if I were, I don’t have time for this bullshit. I just need to face him.
I push a hand into the rough brick and hoist myself up. The main corridor is only two or three steps away. I take them swiftly, and when I reach the turn, I walk out into the open without hesitation. He’s a few yards down the hall, his stance wide.
“Hi, Curt,” I say nonchalantly.
He narrows his eyes and takes fast, sweeping strides to meet me. “What the fuck are you doing here?” he hisses.
“Jesus, don’t be so dramatic. It’s an open campus. Shouldn’t a tenured professor know that?”
He shoves a finger into my face. “Don’t you fuck with me, you little psychopath. I saw you last night. Outside the house. I know it was you, and I called the cops, just like I said I would.”
I frown at him. “To tell them what, exactly? That you think you maybe, possibly, saw a woman outside on the public sidewalk, who might have, at one point, been interested in buying your house?” I laugh. “I’m sure they rushed right over.”
“You need to listen to me, Margo.” His voice trembles. Is he afraid of me? “If you don’t leave us alone, you’ll regret it—that’s a promise.”
Wonder what he’ll do if I give him just one more tiny push.
“You sound unwell, Curt. If your father still spoke to you, I bet he’d be very concerned, too.”
It was a shot in the dark, but I hit my target. Curt’s nostrils flare as he snatches my wrist.
“What the fuck did you just say?” he growls, his bony fingers digging in.
“Professor Bradshaw!” I shout as loud as I can. “What are you doing?”
The door closest to us swings open. A sixtyish woman with a brown bob steps out, looking alarmed. “Curtis!” she gasps. “What on earth is going on out here? Take your hands off that woman!”
I peek behind her and see rows of students, arranged in tiers like an amphitheater. There must be almost a hundred people in there, all witnesses to Curt coming unhinged.
Curt drops my wrist and backs away. “Elizabeth!” He clears his throat and smiles wanly. “I didn’t realize our discussion had gotten so heated.” He chuckles and looks to me to join in. I do not. “We’ll take this elsewhere. My apologies.”
Elizabeth looks at me. “Are you all right, dear?”
“Um, yes,” I say, lowering my eyes to my Nikes. “I think I’ll just go now. So sorry to have interrupted your class.”
I brush past Curt and hurry down the hallway. Once I make it through the side door where I first came in, I half walk, half jog the rest of the way to the wrought-iron gate at the edge of campus, out into the neighborhood beyond.
I fly down O Street, past historic pastel-hued row houses, around trash bins blocking the narrow sidewalk, till I reach the main drag of Wisconsin Avenue.
As usual, it bustles with people. I melt into the stream of tourists and students and head toward M Street, dropping a pin for a Lyft on the corner.
By the time I get there, the car is only a minute away. I hold my leather tote tightly against my body while I wait, the list of twenty-eight names nestled safely inside.
Ian will be at the office the rest of the day, and I have never been more grateful to have the apartment to myself. I dump the remains of this morning’s French press into a glass—no time to brew a fresh batch—and gulp it down cold as I settle in on the sofa with my laptop.
Twenty-eight names—all of them graduates of a prominent university, which means they’ve almost certainly gone on to the kinds of lives and careers that will make them eminently findable online.
I start from the top, with Peter Abdo—the frat bro—and enjoy a literal LOL when I see that he’s a mortgage broker working for his mom in Tennessee.
All that money on a private education and the guy processes loans in a subdivision outside Nashville.
But the good thing about people in real estate is they usually list their cell numbers on their websites.
Peter picks up right away and I toss him the bait: “I’m Lisa Waters with The Chronicle of Higher Education.
I’m looking into a troubling tip about a Professor Curtis Bradshaw in the economics department at Georgetown, and I wondered if you might’ve known him when you were a student there.
I would be happy to keep this conversation off the record if that makes it easier for you to talk. ”
It’s just enough, I hope, to convince him that I know something—and that he should help me fill in the blanks.
Peter doesn’t hang up, a small victory. He says he took a class with Curt junior year.
“Off the record? He was a dick for sure. Extremely full of himself,” he tells me.
“But I don’t know about anything illegal or, like, sexual, if that’s what you’re driving at.
Maybe it would help if you tell me more about the tip you got? ”
“Unfortunately, I can’t disclose anything further until I get independent corroboration from additional sources,” I explain. “It’s very sensitive—the type of behavior you would remember if you’d known about it. But thank you so much for your time.”
Back when I was a reporter, a lot of my colleagues complained about the cold-calling.
Inevitably, people hang up on you. Sometimes there’s an asshole who tells you to fuck off.
I get why people think it’s uncomfortable.
But I always found it thrilling. Dialing each number always felt like jumping off a mini cliff, not knowing where I’d land.
Until now, I didn’t realize how much I’d missed it.
The tricky part about these cold calls is that I want to do everything I can to avoid leaving a voicemail. I need to catch people in the moment—gauge their honest reactions, then keep them talking.
I mark an “X” next to the name of each person who doesn’t pick up, a signal to try them again later.
By mid-afternoon, I’ve managed to have a dozen real live conversations.
One perk of the pandemic, I’m learning, is that a lot more people list their personal numbers on their work bios or set up their office phones to connect directly to their cells.
I get hold of consultants at McKinsey, researchers at think tanks, financial analysts at defense contractors, all working from their couches on a Wednesday like me.
Many echo Peter Abdo’s assessment: Curt is “an egomaniac.” He “loves the sound of his own voice.” He “probably hoped we’d get the answers wrong when he called on us, so he could explain them himself.” A few say they didn’t know him, or that they have nothing to share, and quickly end the call.
A couple are downright chatty. One woman with a thick southern drawl, Charlotte Boone, barely remembers Curt but happens to have just started a side hustle selling a skincare line that’s all the rage on Instagram.
She’d like to mail me some samples and give me a new-customer discount code. I hang up on her mid-sentence.
When I’m done, I have thirteen names with an “X” next to them, and three people who I haven’t been able to track down yet: Kirk McAvoy, Dorothy Ross, and Eric Thorson.
They’re probably the “finding myself” types.
You know the ones. They backpack around Southeast Asia and fuck in the mud at Burning Man, all without a worry in the world because Daddy’s credit card is connected to their Apple Pay.
I’ll circle back to them if I can’t turn up any other leads. They all have to be on the internet somewhere—it’ll just take persistence. And first thing tomorrow, I’ll try again with the thirteen who didn’t pick up (it would look weird to call them back any sooner).
All that coffee on an empty stomach is only making me more anxious. I really wish I’d found something more today. But I have to believe this will work. One of these kids has to have the damning intel I need to make the dream house mine. This is my destiny—I’m so close, I can feel it.
I could use a distraction, and it’s after five which means Natalie has left for work by now.
I scarf down a granola bar, throw my hoodie and sneakers back on, and head upstairs to get Fritter.
He greets me as usual, with his thumping tail and request for a belly scratch.
I snap on his harness and take him outside into a pleasant spring evening, the sun tinting the few remaining rain clouds pinkish-purple.
Fritter leads us south, away from the hum of U Street, into the neighborhood.
We pass century-old row houses that are a lot like the one Ian and I used to own—small, but tidy, with roommates sharing beers on the stoop, or young families out front, playing in postage-stamp yards.
Fritter is great with little kids. A couple of them run up to their low, wrought-iron fences and stick their hands through.
He sniffs at them gently—the very best boy.
When we reach the corner, he takes me to the right.
This street feels grander. The row houses are a story taller and Victorian in style, with bay windows and fancy trim work.
One of these would cost about the same as the dream house, which makes absolutely no sense to me.
Why would anyone spend that much to share walls with their neighbors and get woken up by ambulances in the middle of the night?
As if to make my point, Fritter noses a partially eaten sandwich, bloated in a dingy rain puddle. “Leave it,” I tell him, and of course he does. But this wouldn’t be a problem in Grovemont, where the sidewalks are perfect and the dogs mostly run free in their own backyards anyway.
Fritter and I weave back to our building.
I can tell he’s hungry for dinner because he barely pauses to sniff anything on the way.
When we walk into the apartment, I dry his wet paws with the towel I store for him in a basket by the door.
I grab the bag of kibble from under the sink and set up his food and water bowls in the kitchen.
He’s munching happily when Ian walks in.
“Hey, babe.” He leans down to kiss me, then lights up when he sees Fritter. “Hey, buddy! You hanging with us tonight?”
Ian squats down to give him a scratch. I expect Fritter to ignore him because usually nothing can get between him and a meal.
But he stops chewing and looks up. He pulls away slightly, so he can sniff Ian’s hand, then he sniffs further up Ian’s arm and moves frantically to his leg.
He repeats the same frenzied investigation on the other side.
“Whoa, bud,” Ian says, ruffling the top of Fritter’s head.
“That’s weird. Did you sit on an extra gross bus seat or something?” I remember that Ian didn’t ride his bike today since rain was in the forecast.
“No idea,” he says, extracting an open bottle of wine from the fridge and pouring us both a glass. Fritter returns to his chomping. “How was work?”
“Oh, fine, nothing too exciting,” I say, trying to think of some detail to layer in that’ll make the lie more believable.
“Actually, one cool thing did happen. We had a follow-up call this afternoon with the team at Mythos Group—you know, the company that owns The Bexley?—and they couldn’t stop raving about all the press that came from the party.
Jordana’s pretty sure they’re going to sign a monthly retainer. ”
Jordana.
Shit.
I never called her back.
“That’s incredible. Congrats!” Ian clinks his glass against mine. “See? Maybe you’ll get promoted again, and then we’ll be able to buy an even nicer house than Curt and Jack’s.”
Or maybe I’ll lose my job and we’ll be prisoners here forever.
I take a generous swallow of my wine, heat rising through me like mercury in a thermometer.
“Yeah,” I say, “I’m sure it’ll all work out just like it’s supposed to.”