Chapter 25 Nicola
CONNOR’S ROOM is a testament to cleanliness and organization.
Every paper looks like it’s been straightened on his desk with a T-square, every pencil lined up, their tips perfectly parallel and equidistant.
Even his sheets have been tucked in at the corners with military precision—their edges so tight, they’re strangling the mattress.
I head straight for his desk and ease the top drawer open, careful not to jostle the items inside.
I have a feeling he’d be able to tell if anything were out of place.
Inside is his wallet. I thumb open the clasp.
Staring back at me is a picture of a man, stockier than Connor but with the same dark hair.
He has a lumberjack beard. Had—I’m assuming this must be his brother, the one who died by suicide.
I might not care for Connor, but I know what it’s like to blame yourself for someone’s death. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
Flipping the photo reveals another on the back.
Greer, at a cocktail party, wearing a sparkly bandeau paired with a men’s boxy blazer and pants.
She’s holding a champagne glass in one hand, toasting the camera.
Connor stands next to her in a tailored suit, hair slicked back.
I stare at her waist, at the way his fingers press into the thin strip of exposed flesh there, holding her tight.
It doesn’t mean anything, I remind myself. There’s no need to get upset. And then, before I do something I’ll regret, I snap the wallet shut.
Middle drawer. Nothing but a few sheets of paper—a confirmation email from Puget Sound First Coaches, the arrival and departure times for all the flights.
Zach’s was scheduled to arrive hours before mine; could he have somehow figured that out?
Could he have changed his flight so we’d be on the same connection?
Just thinking about how carefully he might’ve planned this makes me sick.
I’m about to close this drawer, too, when I notice something metal stuffed into the back corner. I pry it out with my fingernails—its long, delicate chain and, at the end, polished gemstone.
A feeling of déjà vu washes over me; I’m both here and not here.
Part of me is back at home, in the upstairs bathroom.
From behind the locked door, the television hisses with the nightly news.
“Do you know where your children are?” the PSA announcer asks, but I can barely make out the words over the thundering of blood in my ears.
I shake my head to clear it. This necklace seems familiar, but I can’t tell why. I should put it back, but instead, for reasons I don’t completely understand, I tuck it into my pocket.
Footsteps cross in front of the door—the others, on their way back from breakfast. Connor won’t be upstairs for much longer. I should get out of here while I still can. But that final drawer looms in the corner of my vision. Nausea settles, heavy in my gut, as I pull it open.
Nothing.
Well, not nothing—the broken tablet’s in there, along with some spare cables, but nothing related to me.
A relieved breath rushes out of me. He doesn’t have them after all; of course he doesn’t.
They were probably thrown in the trash years ago.
I close the final drawer and am about to leave the room when I remember what he said during the meeting.
He lied about having found the notebooks under Zach’s mattress, probably because he never asked Hannah where they were actually hidden.
Why under the mattress?
I dig my fingers under the corner of his and haul it upward. An envelope addressed to Connor lies, unassuming, on the box spring. I pull it free before letting the mattress bounce back down. The handwriting on the front is messy, but I recognize the name above the return address:
Justin Billings.
My former classmate from Cooper Union—the audiovisual artist who always tried hitting on Claire during our studio classes.
How the fuck does Connor know him? My fingers fumble over the clasp, but eventually, it opens—and then my hand dips inside the envelope, paper scratching against my knuckles, and I’m pulling them out.
The photos. The ones Claire took of me in college.
The top one’s crumpled, white creases spiderwebbing across its glossy surface.
Unsurprising; these photos are almost twenty years old.
I ignore the contents of the images, focusing instead on their bent corners and water damage.
Where has he been storing them for all this time?
Tucked away in the attic, probably, somewhere his family wouldn’t be able to find them.
He wouldn’t want his children getting ahold of his old pornography stash.
That’s what these photos are: not fine art, but slick, sweaty pornography with all the dirtiest bits spread out, right there in the open, for everyone to see.
I flip through, trying to inventory them without actually looking at them.
It’s like attempting to view an eclipse without looking directly at the sun.
The keypad gives a shrill beep. I almost drop the photos.
Three more beeps follow in quick succession. I look for somewhere to hide, but before I can vanish under the bed or into the closet, there’s a sharp click, and the door swings open.
Connor and I stare at each other. He clocks the open envelope on the mattress, the photos in my hands, before closing the door behind him. It clicks shut, and my heart jumps in response.
“What are you doing in here?”
“Why do you have these? How did you get them?” I counter.
He double-checks the door handle, turns it a couple times, as if making sure it still locks.
Then he reverts his attention to me. He looks again at the photos in my hand, then sighs deeply.
“Believe me, I had no idea what they were when they were sent to me, and I haven’t told anyone about them since. No one’s seen them except me.”
None of this makes any sense. “Why would Justin have sent these to you?”
“When preproduction started on To Catch a Killer, Greer hired me to research anyone connected with the case. Claire Tenenbaum was visiting you at the time of her death, so I decided to look into your background. I reached out to a Cooper Union alumni group, asked if anyone remembered you from school. Justin Billings offered to send me a package I might find interesting for the right price.”
“You paid for these?” That makes it feel about a thousand times worse.
“Yes, but since he didn’t know about the show, it was a fraction of what any reporter would’ve been willing to lay out a few months down the line.”
“These are the only copies, then?”
“That’s what he told me. And I believe him. If he’d made duplicates, he would’ve sold them off the moment To Catch a Killer became a success.”
I suppose I should feel grateful that Connor got his hands on them before anyone else could. But the fact that he’s looked through them, that he’s seen me like… that, makes me want to sink into the floorboards.
“What are you going to do with them?” I ask. “I mean, why didn’t you put them through a paper shredder as soon as you realized what they were? Why bring them here?”
“I wanted to return them to you. Not to embarrass you, but because if these were my photos, I’d be worried that they were still out there somewhere. I thought having them back might give you some peace of mind.”
I’ve read about what happens to teachers when photos like this are posted online—how, regardless of how long ago they were taken, regardless of whether the teacher wanted them made public, they inevitably ruin their careers.
Not like my career hasn’t already been ruined, but these photos, combined with my disastrous turn on reality television, would eliminate any hope of me ever returning to the classroom.
“Back in college, these photos were passed around. I had no idea who ended up with them.”
“You can have them back,” he says, hands up, as if to say they’re all mine now. “But I have a few questions I’d like you to answer first.”
I don’t want to answer his questions, but then again, I broke into his room and rifled through his personal belongings. I probably owe him that. “Fine, what?”
“Who took those photos?”
“I did.” No way am I telling him about my relationship with Claire. “The camera was on a timer. No one was ever meant to see them.”
To be honest, I forgot all about them until an engineering major approached me in the lecture hall, asking if the girl in the photos was me.
He had to flip through a few—close-ups of breasts and genitals—before I realized what they were.
The boy, who had all the freshly scrubbed appeal of a Neutrogena commercial, watched the mortification spread across my face.
I was operating on autopilot when I turned to him and shook my head no.
“That’s not you?”
I shook my head again, even though we both knew I was lying.
“It’s okay if it is. My friends and I”—here, he gestured to his buddies who were cracking up on the sidelines—“we’re into it.”
One of them snorted loud enough to make everyone in the lecture hall turn his way.
The boy stepped closer, crossing the line into my personal space. My breath quickened. “What do you think? Maybe you and I could try to re-create these”—he shook the photos—“after class?”
That’s what finally sent me running to the bathroom.
I kept my eyes locked over my shoulder the entire time, waiting to see if they’d follow, if they’d trap me in one of the stalls and take what they wanted.
And I wouldn’t be able to stop them. Just like I couldn’t stop those photos from spreading across campus.
“How did Justin get them?” Connor asks, pulling me back to the present.
“We used to invite classmates over to our apartment all the time. He must’ve gone through my desk.”
He nods but doesn’t look convinced. Does he know I’m lying?
“I overheard you talking to Steffani that first night, on the balcony,” he says.
It’s such an abrupt change in topic, it catches me off guard. “Really?”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing much. Just that she wanted her father arrested for what he’d done.” And that she suspected Greer of knowing hers was a murderer the entire time. “Why do you want to know?”
“It just occurred to me.” He tilts his head, as if trying to view me from a slightly different angle. “You were the last one to see her.”
I don’t like where this conversation’s headed. Sliding the photos back into the envelope, I say, “I think I’m going back upstairs to my room.” I hurry toward the door, but as I pass him, he grabs ahold of the envelope. Shocked, I stop mid-stride, both of us gripping opposite ends. “Let go.”
He doesn’t.
“Let go,” I repeat. “They’re my photos.”
“Technically, they’re mine. I paid for them.”
How dare he? “They were stolen from me.”
“And you can have them back, but in light of everything that’s happened this weekend, I’m going to hold on to them a little longer.”
“Why? Nothing in here has anything to do with Zach.”
“Maybe, maybe not, but you’re still going to leave them with me until the end of the retreat.”
“No, I’m not.” I pull as hard as I can on the envelope, but his grip remains firm.
“Don’t make me do this,” he says, in the same tone I employ with misbehaving students, and then, when I make no move to release the envelope, he reaches over and begins prying my fingers loose.
He’s strong, much stronger than I am, and no matter how hard I try to hold on, my fingers are horrifyingly, inescapably, ripped free.
“You’ll get them back when we leave,” he reminds me, but the damage has already been done.
I feel just as small, just as helpless, as I did in the lecture hall when those boys presented me with evidence of my own inferiority.
I flee, the same way I did back then, into the foyer.
I should go back upstairs, like I said I would, but the lodge seems to be constricting around me, crushing the air out of my lungs.
I shove open the front door and jog down the patio steps.
The damp chill instantly makes me feel better.
Drifting over to the firepit, I slump down on one of the surrounding logs.
Zach must’ve found those photos. It would explain why he recorded the keypad code in my notebook—because he planned on returning later and stealing them.
Grabbing a nearby stick, I start chipping away at the charred remnants of our bonfire.
Connor promised he’d return the photos at the end of the retreat; all I have to do is wait.
They’ll be safely back in my possession, and I’ll know, without a doubt, that no one can ever leak them to the press.
But why should I have to wait? Why does he think he has the right to keep them?
A blackened log crumbles, and that’s when I notice that something has slipped halfway under the rock circle.
I pinch it between my fingers and pull it out.
A driver’s license.
Most of it has been burned away by the fire, and the picture isn’t visible anymore, but I’m able to read the small piece that’s left:
ARNOSTI
STEFFANI M.
218 HOLLOW BIRCH ROAD
GARLAND, MAINE 04939
How did this get in here? Steffani couldn’t have thrown it in; she was ushered upstairs by Connor right after she arrived. So, someone else burned it after the bonfire, but why? Because they were trying to destroy evidence?
My hand immediately tunnels into my pocket.
I pull out the necklace, each link in the chain slowly coming loose. It looked familiar back in his room, but now I remember where I’ve seen it before: on the balcony, our first night at the lodge. Steffani was wearing this very same necklace.
What was it doing in Connor’s desk drawer?
We all assumed Steffani drove off in the middle of the night, but what if her disappearance was something much more sinister? We found only one body in the lake, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t more out there.
I need to get back inside. I need to tell Greer about this before I’m the next to disappear.