Chapter 28 Saturday, 13 June 2026
Once Alex and Ami had settled at a table in the dining room, Hannah slipped out from her hiding place beneath the buffet.
The line was moving swiftly now; she’d been eavesdropping for longer than she’d realised.
Good, because if she was going to be able to dissect everything Alex had just said to her sister, she needed to get some food in her belly.
She grabbed a plate and helped herself to an almond croissant, then a bagel, a healthy smear of cream cheese, and two glistening slices of lox.
She eyed the red onions, then piled them on. Fuck it.
She was halfway to Ami’s table, questions for Alex already percolating, when a lone figure caught her eye.
At a two-seater in the corner, a man in a deep brown tux was hunched over a mug of coffee and a chocolate croissant.
He’d draped his jacket over the back of the chair and loosened his tie.
Like Hannah, he wore a pair of Lenox Club slippers.
Paul Harris. She’d caught his eye earlier tonight, when he’d been handing out Acqua Panna and checking on Alice St Clair in the immediate aftermath of Madison’s murder.
Then she’d glimpsed him again in the library, chatting with a few of his fellow teachers.
But this was the first time she’d paid him any real attention.
He’d be thirty-seven or thirty-eight by now, still young, but the ten years that had passed since Hannah’s graduation had been hard on him.
He’d gained weight around his middle and in his face, and he’d allowed the carefully manicured scruff he’d once worn to grow into a full, boxed beard.
It was neatly trimmed, but combined with the weight gain, it had the effect of ageing him well into his forties.
Hannah turned and headed in the direction of his table.
Alex could wait; this might be her best shot at catching her former senior seminar leader alone.
It was hard to imagine Mr Harris, or any Prescott teacher for that matter, poisoning a former student in cold blood, but she couldn’t rule him out.
Madison had undermined and embarrassed him plenty back at Prescott, and he had as much reason to resent her as anyone else on the guest list tonight.
‘May I join you?’ Without waiting for a response, Hannah set her plate on the table.
Mr Harris – it was hard to think of him as Paul, even though they were both adults now – looked up from his coffee.
Close up, Hannah could see the skin beneath his eyes was puffy, his cheeks red.
Maybe he’d recently returned from a beach vacation; maybe it was sunburn.
But Hannah guessed the cause was something more permanent.
She glanced at the hand circling his coffee mug; no ring.
So, Mr Harris was still unmarried, and signs pointed to a possible drinking habit.
Truthfully, as a student at Prescott, she hadn’t spent too much time contemplating her teachers’ lives outside school, or imagining their futures.
Like most teenagers, she’d been too focused on her own.
But Mr Harris had been young and handsome.
In the classroom, he’d projected charisma and authority – the latter only occasionally shaken by Madison.
And she knew he was a writer – one of the few details she could recount about any of her teachers’ personal lives.
If seventeen-year-old Hannah had been asked to place Mr Harris ten years in the future, she would have said he’d be a bestselling novelist by now, probably married to a nonprofit director or gallery curator, probably teaching promising young writers at Sarah Lawrence or Bard, having left Prescott and its drama behind.
None of that seemed to be true. Had she misjudged Mr Harris, or had something gotten in the way of a better future?
He peered up at her. He’d traded his glasses for contacts, which only served to draw attention to the bags beneath his eyes, his ruddy cheeks.
‘Hannah,’ he said finally. He gestured to the empty chair. ‘Please.’
She sat, eyes coming to rest on his untouched croissant. ‘It’s been a night. Hope you don’t mind if I eat.’
‘Please do.’ He nodded at her plate. ‘I don’t seem to have much of an appetite, but don’t let me hold you back.’
She lifted half of her bagel and took a huge bite. While she chewed, she held Mr Harris’s gaze. She wasn’t entirely sure where to begin, but if she sat in silence long enough, he’d solve that problem for her. People didn’t like silence. They wanted to fill it.
‘Has it been since graduation?’ he asked.
There it was. She swallowed, then dabbed at her mouth with a cloth napkin.
Graduation. Madison had openly flirted with him in front of her parents, taking selfies while she leaned over to kiss his cheek, then chattering about making plans for the two of them to get together in the fall, since she’d be staying in the city at Columbia.
Alastair and Charlene DuPont had shocked Hannah with their complete lack of concern for their daughter’s behaviour, as if it was entirely normal for an eighteen-year-old to kiss her young teacher on the cheek and suggest they grab dinner at ‘a cute little tavern I know’.
Out loud, Hannah said, ‘I think so. I don’t really come out for Prescott alumni events. Shouldn’t have broken with tradition tonight.’
Mr Harris chuckled, and for the first time, Hannah saw a flicker of the man she’d once known. Madison had ground him down more than once, but when he hadn’t been the target of her unchecked behaviour, he’d been passionate about teaching, full of youthful energy.
‘Hindsight is 20/20,’ he said. ‘That’s humourist Richard Armour, 1949.’
‘I never knew that.’
‘Mmm. Wish I’d stayed in tonight myself.’
Automatically, Hannah’s gaze drifted across the dining room, through the lounge, and into the hallway where Madison had been found. Where less than nine hours ago, someone had carried out a premeditated plan to end her life.
When she turned back to Mr Harris, his eyes were trained elsewhere – on the stairway leading to the second floor.
A uniformed officer was still stationed at the base of the stairs, and Edward, still tasked with shuttling guests to and from their interminable interviews, hovered nearby.
Otherwise, the stairway was empty. Finding Hannah’s eyes back on him, Mr Harris shifted in his seat and raised his mug to his lips.
He looked uncomfortable, his mind elsewhere.
Time to change that, before her audience with Mr Harris ran out. She could ease into things, or she could be blunt, hope to startle the truth out of him. Hannah leaned in. She’d always preferred Option B.
‘Did you and Madison keep up your relationship after graduation?’
His mug hit the table with a thunk, and he coughed into a napkin.
‘Excuse me,’ he said after a moment. ‘Wrong pipe.’
Hannah met his gaze, quietly watching as he took a minute to catch his breath.
‘What was that?’ he asked after a moment.
‘You and Madison,’ she repeated. ‘At graduation, it was clear she wanted to keep in touch. Did you maintain a relationship?’
Mr Harris let out a long sigh. ‘There was no relationship after Prescott. Madison had no sense of boundaries, and unfortunately, she had almost no parental guidance whatsoever. I felt a lot of sympathy for her, believe it or not. She was troubled, but it wasn’t entirely her fault.’
Good answer. Compassionate, teacherly. Hannah took another, smaller, bite of her bagel. A server was coming around, and she flagged him down for a mug of coffee. Maybe she was barking up the wrong tree, but she wasn’t ready to give up quite yet. When the server had gone, she tried again.
‘That’s very generous of you. It’s no secret that Madison made your life difficult during senior year.’
Mr Harris tore off a corner of his croissant, but let it drop to his plate. Again, his eyes darted around the club.
‘She tried her best. But if I grew to resent every student who came into my classroom with too much privilege and an entitled attitude, I wouldn’t have lasted two years at Prescott.
Believe it or not, there were Madison DuPonts before her and after.
I’ve gotten better at maintaining my boundaries as the years have gone by. That comes with experience.’
Hannah nodded. Again, an eminently reasonable response.
Either Mr Harris had nothing to hide, or he was a skilled actor.
Her use of the word ‘relationship’ had made him uncomfortable, but he definitely didn’t sound like a man so consumed by a decade-old grudge that he’d plan a former student’s murder, then carry it out at a public event.
‘What about you?’ he asked before she could formulate a question. ‘Did you and Madison maintain a relationship?’
Hannah shook her head, biting back a smile. Smart, turning it around on her. Assuming he was innocent, Mr Harris probably suspected her right along with everyone else here tonight.
‘Not even close. By graduation, Madison wanted nothing to do with me. Which was for the best.’ Her coffee arrived, and she doused it with sugar, then took a grateful sip.
‘You stayed in the city as well,’ he said. ‘At NYU, if I remember correctly?’
She nodded, struck by the sudden urge to call Grace.
It had taken her best friend two whole years to forgive Hannah for abandoning their plans, but then Grace had joined her for a summer in the city when they were nineteen, and they’d slowly gotten their friendship back on track.
Now, they talked when they could, mostly at odd hours between Grace’s long shifts as a resident at the Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh.
‘Journalism,’ Hannah said. ‘Class of 2021.’
Mr Harris smiled. ‘That’s right. A writer.’
‘You were working on a novel,’ she said quickly, before he could ask about her article. She needed to steer the focus back to him. There was still something she needed to figure out.
His face darkened. ‘Yes, that. Still a work in progress. Good writing takes time.’
She took another sip of coffee, then turned to her croissant. Many literary writers took a decade or more to write a book, that was true. But the look that had crossed his face…
Something occurred to her then. Was it possible…? ‘Before coming to Prescott, you went to graduate school?’
He nodded. ‘Straight out of undergrad. Couldn’t get enough of school.’
‘I’ve been thinking about applying to graduate writing programmes myself. Where did you go?’
‘Columbia. MFA in Writing, class of 2013.’
Slowly, Hannah raised her mug to her lips. ‘I’ve heard that’s a great programme. I’ll look into it.’
She had, honestly, considered getting a master’s at some point.
She’d done enough casual research to know that creative writing programme faculty typically taught both graduate and undergraduate courses.
And in 2016, Mr Harris had been a recent Columbia graduate – and Madison an applicant to a school for which she was academically unqualified. But somehow, she’d gotten in.
Maybe she’d been asking the wrong questions – not that she expected Mr Harris to confess if she asked the right ones.
The question wasn’t if he and Madison had kept up a relationship after graduation, but rather if he and Madison had been in a relationship while she was a student at Prescott.
She drew in a sharp breath. Had all Madison’s flirting and casual mockery been covering up something very real?
Had he failed to discipline her because they were sleeping together?
Madison never dated. She’d made it well known that she was only interested in older men.
And it had always remained a mystery how she’d gotten into the elite creative writing programme at Columbia – where Mr Harris would have known everyone on faculty.
Her pulse spiked. This wasn’t exactly motive for murder, but it could be something. She needed to—
‘I’ve read a few of your articles,’ he said. ‘MFA or not, you’ll do well.’ Then he stood abruptly, attention shifting across the room. ‘Excuse me.’
‘I—’ Hannah began to say, but his back was to her. He headed swiftly towards the restrooms. Gone.
Shit. Almost certainly, she’d been onto something.
If she could have just kept him talking…
But – Mr Harris despised Madison. Maybe despise was too strong a word, but without a doubt he’d been embarrassed by her, frustrated on more than one occasion.
She’d witnessed it. Was it possible that it had all been a ruse, hiding the fact that he was sleeping with her?
Or was it exactly as it had appeared ten years ago, and anything more salacious had been the work of her thoughts running wild?
Suddenly her shiny theory lost some of its lustre.
She knocked back the rest of her coffee.
Focus, Hannah. The truth was there, just out of reach.
If there had been anything going on between Madison and Mr Harris at school, Elle was the person most likely to know about it.
Slowly, Hannah surveyed the room. Where are you, Elle Harrington? Ah – sitting at the bar, finally alone.
She rose. This time, she wouldn’t stand down. Elle Harrington was going to have to get over herself and talk to her.