Chapter 16 #2
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 getting closer 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?”
My pulse quickens. I turn the volume on my phone up a couple notches.
“Yeah, we woke up one day—me and our other roommates—and she’d packed up and left. We only had a couple months left to go before graduation, it was really bizarre.” Chloe sighs on the other end of the line. “Sorry, I know this isn’t why you called, it’s just no one’s asked me about her in a while.”
“No, no, if she and Professor Bradshaw were really that close, this could be helpful,” I say, struggling to wrap my mind around this new information. “I’m just not sure I totally understand…”
“I still don’t really understand it myself,” says Chloe.
I’m trying to think of an articulate follow-up question, but none of this is making sense.
“So she was just … gone?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure she left on her own? How do you know something didn’t happen to her?”
My head swims. What, exactly, is Curt capable of?
“Oh yeah, we talked about calling the police,” says Chloe, “but later that morning, she Venmoed her rent for the rest of the year. We were shocked she had that much cash. She included a message—something about just needing a break. I texted her constantly for weeks afterward, but I never heard back. I was really hurt by it.”
“That must’ve been really hard,” I say, as another new email appears at the top of my inbox. That makes an even thirty unread. I close out the window so I’m not distracted. “And you really have no idea why?”
“None. I mean, she’d been acting a little out of character, like, partying harder than she did typically. But we were in the home stretch, you know? I guess I thought she was finally letting herself have some fun. She’d always taken school so seriously.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. She never missed a class, studied harder than anyone, you know the type. I think it had to do with being the first one in her family to go to college.”
“That’s impressive.” (I do know the type.)
“Her plan was to work at the Treasury Department for a couple years, then go back to school for a PhD. I figured she’d be the Fed chair one day.”
“Huh,” I say. “Seems even weirder, then, that she’d go MIA.”
“Right,” says Chloe. “I still look for her online sometimes, but I’ve never found anything. My best guess is she’s back in Florida somewhere, since that’s where she’s from.”
“Hm, okay,” I say. “But if we could just backtrack a little bit—what did you say her relationship with Professor Bradshaw was like?”
“Oh, they were close. He got her an internship the summer after sophomore year at his dad’s firm. He was basically a mentor to her.”
“Did you ever talk to Professor Bradshaw about where Dottie might have gone?”
“Now that you mention it, yeah, I did send him an email about it.”
My fingers hover over my keyboard, waiting for her to say more. I notice I’ve been leaving sweaty prints behind as I type.
“And what did he say?” I nudge.
“Just that he didn’t know anything, but he’d let me know if she got in touch.”
“But that was the last time you heard from him?”
“Yeah.”
“How did Dottie and Professor Bradshaw become so close in the first place?”
“Well, like I said, she was just a star. Every class I had with her, she was always the one raising her hand, asking the brilliant questions, debating the professors. We had one class with Bradshaw together, and a lot of us didn’t like him much, but she got along great with him.
If he wasn’t gay, I’m sure we all would’ve wondered about it, you know?
But I think he just thought she had a lot of potential.
He just kind of took her under his wing. ”
“Do you know if they were still that close when she left?”
“I assumed they were, but I guess I don’t know that for sure,” says Chloe.
“You calling does have me wondering if maybe something went wrong between them. I mean, if you’re saying you have some kind of dirt on Bradshaw…
” Chloe’s voice trails off. I resist the impulse to fill the silence.
“Do you think Dottie could’ve known about it?
Can you tell me anything else about what it is? ”
“I’m sorry, not at this point,” I say. “But I’d like to try asking Dottie about it myself. Do you still have her contact info?”
“I can give you what I have, though I doubt any of it will work.”
Chloe reads off a cell number and a Gmail address. She asks me to let her know if I have any success. I promise that I will.
Before we hang up, she adds one thing: “If you find out that Bradshaw had something to do with Dottie disappearing, you can put on the record that I always thought he was a prick.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I’ll do that.”
My hands tremble with adrenaline. I quickly read back through my notes from this morning’s calls. Then I open the email from nobody.noone97 and the screenshot of the review saved to my desktop. I type up a list of my findings so far:
Curt and his dad were on good terms as recently as the spring of 2018, and maybe later.
They no longer seem to be speaking.
The messages from Ellipsis and nobody.noone are from January 2019.
Dottie Ross, one of Curt’s favorite students, disappeared in March 2019.
I read through it silently; then I recite it out loud—a trick I sometimes used when I was a reporter to help things make more sense.
“The messages from Ellipsis and nobody, dot, no one…”
“Dottie Ross, one of Curt’s favorite students…”
I look at the screenshotted review:
…
DO NOT TRUST CURTIS brADSHAW.
Then I say it out loud for the first time: “Dot, dot, dot. Do not trust Curtis Bradshaw.”
An ellipsis read aloud is dot, dot, dot.
Nobody. Dot. No one.
Dot.
Dottie.
Dot. Dottie.
Dot means Dottie?
Dot means Dottie! Fuck yes! I knew I could crack this.
Whatever happened between them, she clearly wanted Curt to know it was her sending the messages.
All I have to do now is find Dorothy Ross.