32
“Let’s go back to Watergate,” Professor Potts said.
A ticktock clock mumbled quietly to itself on the shelf of his office as Stevie settled into the old wooden wheeled chair
across from him.
She had been back at Ellingham for two days, just enough time to arrive, unpack, and follow up with the investigator in the
Melissa Long case, who was astonished to get Stevie’s call. Someone from their department was already on the road and driving
to Ellingham to pick up the voice recorder and scarf, which were locked up in Larry’s office in a sealed container.
That being taken care of, Stevie spent the rest of the time listening to audiobooks and podcasts, reciting dates and names
to herself. The journalists. The criminals. The politicians. Her brain worked now—things stayed in place and clicked together.
“Start wherever you like,” Professor Potts said. “I’ll stop and ask questions along the way.”
“Okay.” Stevie shifted forward in her chair, planting her sneakered feet squarely in front of her. “Frank Wills was a guard at the Watergate complex. On June seventeenth, 1972, he was doing his rounds and found a piece of duct tape covering the bolt on one of the doors. . . .”
She proceeded through the story, walking the exhibit in her mind. She could see the logbook, the recorder, the bugging devices.
It was all clear now, with a bright silver thread running through the events. She was able to answer every question except
one.
Professor Potts rolled a pen between his fingers and considered her from across the desk.
“Pretty good recall on all the facts. A few mistakes, but overall pretty good. But what is Watergate about? What’s the key
lesson?”
The key lesson in this story of sabotage, payoffs, burglaries, break-ins, and interference with the political process? Of
lying and cheating? Of corruption? Some people did terrible things, even murder, to cover other things. Dean wanted to cover
up his theft and grifting, and someone ended up dead because of it. Sophie hadn’t done anything wrong, but was over a barrel
and ended up killing someone by accident because she was trying to protect someone else.
“The lesson,” Stevie said after a long moment, “is that the crime may not get you, but the cover-up probably will.”
She emerged, bleary-eyed but satisfied, into a pale January afternoon.
January was a strange time, more or less as dark as the month preceding it, but the days were minutes longer, the focus toward the sun.
She had gotten an eighty. No phantom black cab circled in her head.
She made her way across the Ellingham campus to the dining hall without taking any strange paths or shortcuts, wearing the sweater Janelle had made for her, and over it, the red vinyl vintage coat she had inherited.
It wasn’t really made for this kind of cold, but with the new sweater underneath, it did the job for short periods.
It was her coat. The one she felt right in.
She had had no contact with David since the other night in the East Village. She had, however, followed his socials. Two days
ago, the day she left New York and arrived back in Vermont, he had posted a picture of his hand holding a coffee in front
of a coffee place window with the phrase OUR FLAVOR WILL brING YOU BACK and his remark: You are not the boss of me, coffee place.
Stevie had not commented. There was no need. What she did need was lunch, so she hurried toward the dining hall, where a fire
was going in the big fireplace and the air was full of the clatter of silverware and the sound of a hundred Ellingham students
all freshly back for the new semester, catching up and talking about new projects and classes.
Stevie accepted a grilled cheese and walked over to where Vi and Janelle were already at a table examining a spreadsheet of
their schedules.
“How did it go?” Vi asked.
“Eighty.”
“That’s good!” Janelle said with just a crinkle of fakery. Janelle didn’t get eighties, but she knew other people did, and she definitely knew an eighty was preferable to a twenty.
“They got it,” Nate said, sliding in next to Stevie with his maple barbecue burger (an Ellingham specialty).
“Who got what?” Stevie said. “Did they want it? Is it curable?”
“My editor,” he said, not bothering to reward her with a side-eye for such a weak effort. “Got my book. She’s back in the
office. She just sent me an email saying she has the file.”
“Oh my God,” Janelle said. “What? Did they love it? They loved it. Oh my God.”
“They said they looked forward to reading it,” Nate said, dipping a fry into a cup of golden yellow maple mustard sauce. (Very
much a hat on a hat situation considering the burger already had maple in the sauce, but Ellingham was committed to this bit.
The school motto should have been: SOME LEARNING, MOSTLY MAPLE SYRUP, but in Latin, to make it classy.)
“That’s it? Don’t they . . . freak out? Or . . .”
“They haven’t read it yet,” Nate said with a shrug. “They just got it.”
Janelle nodded in comprehension but looked dismayed at the lack of fanfare.
“Gotta go,” Stevie said, finishing up her sandwich. “Work to do.”
She had a new luxury—not being the subject of unspoken conversations, or spoken ones, for that matter.
So if she said she had to go and do work, she was believed.
Which was funny, because she was lying. She was not going to work.
She was going to the Great House, where Larry was waiting for her at his desk by the front door.
Together, they walked across the massive hall, through to the kitchen, and out the back door to the staff parking lot.
“Thanks for taking me,” Stevie said.
“Well,” Larry said, “I have some things to pick up in town, and I’m intrigued by your new policy of honesty. At this point,
it’s better to know where you are than to try to stop you from going.”
“It’s a whole new me,” Stevie said.
“That would be something. You were only in New York for two weeks and look what happened. You lead an interesting life, Stevie.
Trouble comes looking for you.”
“Well,” she said as she climbed into the Ellingham Security SUV, “maybe it’s time I learned how to hide.”
They pulled onto the back path around the campus and went down the steep drive through the woods, down to the road that led
to the highway and Burlington. They spent the ride listening to Dolly Parton singing about a coat of many colors, Stevie looking
out the window at the rough walls of stone that lined the highway, the warnings of falling rocks, the empty promises of a
moose. Murder always found her. Moose never did.
“Have you ever seen a moose around here?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“Why haven’t I?”
“They don’t tend to show up on school property.”
“I want to,” she said. “That’s what I want to do before I leave here. I want to see a moose.”
“Well, there’s a lot of them in the Northeast Kingdom. You can see them where the snow melts, or in wetlands. Hikers tend
to see them.”
“Guess I’ll join the hiking club. Do we have a hiking club?”
Larry glanced over at her and shook his head.
“Then I’ll start moose club. Mickey Moose.”
“Anything that keeps you out of trouble for the next five months,” he said.
“Oh, don’t worry. I have a plan.”
“Don’t say that,” Larry said. “I’m an old man and I don’t sleep well as it is.”
Larry dropped Stevie off in downtown Burlington at the end of College Street. Stevie climbed out of the SUV. The red jacket
wasn’t much, but Janelle’s sweater was a marvel of knitting engineering, if a little itchy.
“I’ll see you here in two hours,” he said. “On the dot. The dot.”
“Dot,” Stevie repeated. “Got it.”
She walked along the closed-to-traffic Church Street shopping district.
The bare trees that lined the pedestrian mall were dripping with white lights that were illuminated in the early afternoon sun, adding an icy glitter to the path.
Every chalked sidewalk sign welcomed students back to the University of Vermont.
Every window and shopfront was dressed. The sidewalk racks were stuffed with fleeces and hoodies to ward off the cold.
The chocolate shop promised love. The boot store promised snow.
The touristy store promised that yes, dammit, there would be maple syrup.
She kept going, away from the shops and cafés and into the old houses of Burlington, the quieter street fronts, toward the
wide lawn that fronted the great redbrick building at the center of the campus. Whoever had made that building loved arches
more than anything else—every window was capped with one, and then those were grouped and capped with a larger one, and some
of those were grouped and capped yet again. The door alone had five, each one smaller than the last, drawing you in. That
was the point, and it worked. The building sucked you toward it, a beautiful trap.
Right now, it was working backward, spilling students toward the green.
It was 3:15.
3:16.
3:17.
Stevie saw him, mixed in with the flow of people, headphones on. She moved toward him, taking long strides across the browned
and muddy remnants of the lawn. When he caught sight of her, his whole face changed, melting in surprise.
“How the hell did you know I was going to be here?”
Well, that had been the other thing she had been doing since her arrival back in Vermont—a little bit of detection just for
herself. Because this was her mystery, and this time, there was no death at the end.
She held up her phone, which was open to his post.
“In England, they spell flavor with a u. There’s no u in this. I was working on a joke about how there’s no you, like you and I, but there is a u in us and . . .”
“I see where your head’s at.” He nodded. “But how . . .”
“So you were in the United States. I looked up the slogan and coffee shops and found it was for a coffee place here in Burlington,
which meant University of Vermont. Made sense. Since you were starting your first semester here in the second semester of
the year, I looked up core classes. You’d have to take ones that had sections that most people already took in the fall, so