23. Lance
Chapter twenty-three
Lance
There’s a mountain of files on my desk when I come into the office on Thursday, and every one of them feels like a personal insult.
I should be home. I should be in bed with Jonny, who is probably at this exact moment wandering around my apartment in my sweatpants and nothing else, making tea and being gorgeous.
Instead, I’m in a fluorescent-lit office approving budget requests for departments I can’t remember the names of.
I’m halfway through a stack of travel reimbursements when there’s a knock on my open door. Rex Harlow leans against the frame. He’s in his shirtsleeves, no jacket, which I’ve learned is his version of casual.
“Lance! Settling in all right? How’s the workload treating you?”
“Can’t complain, sir. Keeping busy.”
“Good, good. Listen, I wanted to check in. You’ve been here—what, six weeks now?
And I don’t think we’ve really had a chance to talk properly.
Man to man. Outside of budget meetings and all that.
” He straightens and adjusts his cuffs. “How would you feel about lunch at the country club next Monday? They do a wonderful spread, and I think it’s high time we got to know each other. ”
I think of Jonny, barefoot in my kitchen. I could be going home to have lunch, or at least some midday sex, or both, with him. “That sounds great,” I make myself say.
“Excellent. I’ll pencil you in.” He taps the doorframe twice and disappears down the corridor.
I stare at the doorframe for a moment. Then I go for coffee.
Joe is in the break room, leaning against the counter with a mug that reads WORLD’S OKAYEST EMPLOYEE. He doesn’t smile when I come in. He rarely does.
“So, how have things been here while I was away?” I ask, setting up the machine. “How are you?”
“Good, thanks.” He takes a sip. “Listen, I want to give you some advice. Rex is an asshole, but he’s good at his job.
And that lunch thing? It’s a bit of a test. He does it with everybody, and he’s overdue with you.
If you want to move up, you need to speak his language: talk about golf, and your future here will look much brighter.
Believe me. Janet in the third office? I didn’t like her and didn’t give her that little tidbit. ”
“I’m in the third office,” I say.
Joe takes another sip of his coffee and waits for me to make the connection.
“Oh.” I glance at Harlow’s closed door and lean in, dropping my voice. “I’ve never played golf in my life,” I confess.
He goes out to his desk and I hear a drawer opening. He reappears just as I’m putting a pod of Colombian into the machine.
“Read this until you’re fluent,” he says, and hands me a worn book about golf. The cover shows a man mid-swing against an improbably green landscape.
“Thanks. But he’ll know I’m no pro the minute I open my mouth.”
“Tell him you’ve always wanted to learn but were busy being all butch.” He shrugs and sips his coffee.
“Why are you helping me?” I ask.
He cocks his head and looks at me, then beckons me with two fingers back to his desk.
He leans over the monitor and pulls up a picture.
It’s the one from the Fairhaven Excelsior.
“I was fourteen when this picture was on the front page. I come from a conservative Japanese family in a small town in California. Third generation, and still not a thing anybody discussed. It was the first time I’d ever seen real boys in love.
Not acting, not strangers. Real boys.” He sits on his desk and looks at me.
“When you and Jonny came in here together, it hit me where I knew you from. And I thought that if there was any justice in this world, you two would still be together. So, call me a romantic.” He kills the picture from his screen and sits down.
“But do it very quietly or I’ll stab you. ”
I go back to my office with my coffee and the golf book.
I flip through it, scanning the terminology.
Birdie. Bogey. Eagle. The jargon is its own language, and I can see why Rex uses it as a litmus test—if you can’t talk golf, you can’t talk Rex.
I skim the glossary, trying to absorb enough to bluff my way through a Monday lunch.
Albatross: Three under par on a single hole. One of the rarest achievements in golf. Also known as a double eagle.
I stop. I read it again. Albatross.
I set the book down and pull the bank statement photo up on my phone.
The deposit: $20,000 from Albatross Press.
I pull up a search on my computer. Albatross Press—a defunct company incorporated in Virginia about thirty years ago.
No books ever published. No editor, no catalog, no submissions page.
It’s not a real publishing house. It’s a name on a piece of paper.
A golfer’s name. An avid golfer’s name.
I feel almost sick. I stand up and go to my door, looking straight down the hallway, past Joe’s desk, to the closed door of the Comptroller General. A man whose office is crammed with golfing memorabilia.
Alice Cadwalader, who ran HR at this university and who told Jonny that his father was prominent, connected to the university, and owned something called the Albatross Press.
I search for the conflict-of-interest paperwork that would be my smoking gun.
It isn’t there. At best, the Press was considered for a university publication about fifteen years ago, before the contract went to somebody else.
I click on the name to find the filing records and they haven’t been digitized.
The trail has run cold from this side. I make a frustrated noise and try another look. It’s also inconclusive.
Angela was a city employee raising two children on a single income. But then Rex Harlow stepped in and paid her twenty grand.
I try to talk myself out of it. Maybe Angela self-published something once—a memoir, a chapbook nobody bought—and Albatross was a real press for exactly one book.
But there are no books. Maybe the name’s a coincidence, some other outfit that happened to like the same word.
But it’s a dead shell, incorporated and abandoned, with Rex’s rarest shot stamped across it.
Maybe he just likes the word. I try every door, and the same thing is waiting behind all of them.
My boss is Jonny’s father. Rex Harlow paid Angela Bishop twenty thousand dollars, and whatever it was for—child support, a settlement, hush money—he has been sitting in that wood-paneled office for the past decade.
And he had to have known. He knew exactly who Jonny was.
He knew when Jonny made the front page of the Excelsior and he did nothing.
And then the second thought, colder than the first. Alice Cadwalader knew.
She ran HR at this university; she knew where the bodies were buried; she sat Jonny down at the edge of a lake to tell him who his father was.
Ten minutes later, someone crushed the back of her skull with a rock.
I’ve been carrying the paternity and the murder around as two separate weights.
What if they were never separate? What if the man fifty feet from my desk didn’t only abandon his son—what if he made sure the one person who could name him never got the chance?
I close the search. I close the golf book. I put my phone facedown on the desk.
I thought leaving the Marines and getting this job was a path to a new future. A steady paycheck, a quiet office, a life built on spreadsheets and order. But now all I can think about is being home with Jonny.
I don’t call Jonny. Not yet. I need to sit with this. I need to be sure. And I need to figure out how to tell the man I love that I think his father could possibly be a murderer.
There’s a knock on the frame of my open door and I come out of my skin.
“Don’t get up.” Rex Harlow has his jacket over his arm, on his way out for the day. “Just confirming Monday. The club does lunch from twelve, so shall we say half past? Joe’ll put it in your calendar.”
I swallow. If he is a murderer, then I need to find out something before I just go crazy. Like, for example, find out where he was on Tuesday morning. “Yes, sir. Looking forward to it.”
I look at him. Really look. The beard, the glasses, the grey, the good tan, the forty-odd extra pounds a man puts on between thirty and sixty. And under all of it, if you know what you’re looking for—and God help me, I do now—there is the shape of a jaw I have had my hands on.
“Something on your mind, Lance?”
“No, sir.” And then, because I have to do something with my hands or he is going to read my whole face, I reach out and lift a stray hair off the shoulder of his jacket. “Beg your pardon. Can’t send you out like that.”
He laughs. “That’s the Corps talking. Never off duty, are you?” He taps the doorframe twice. “Twelve-thirty. Wear something you can walk nine holes in, if the weather holds.”
I wait until I hear the outer door swing shut behind him, and Joe’s keyboard start up again.
Then I take an envelope out of my desk drawer and I put the hair inside it, and I fold the flap over twice. I sit there for a while with my hand flat on top of it.
Then I open a browser and start looking up laboratories while my coffee grows cold.