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“So for right now I’m keeping my distance, if that’s okay with you. I’m standing pretty close to the front door. If I see you start to rise, I hit this button for nine-one-one and run. Do you understand?”

“I’m not with—”

“Do you understand?”

“Of course,” I said. “I won’t move from this seat. But can I ask you a question?”

She gestured for me to go ahead.

“How do you know I don’t have a gun?”

“I’ve been watching since you entered. There’d be no place for you to conceal it in that outfit.”

I nodded. Then I said, “You don’t really believe I’m here to hurt you, do you?”

“I don’t. But like the saying goes, better safe than sorry.”

“I know that story about a wedding in Vermont sounds crazy,” I said.

“It does,” Delia Sanderson said. “And yet, it’s too crazy to be a lie.”

We gave it another moment. Our eyes wandered back to that cottage up on the hill.

“He was such a good man,” Delia Sanderson said. “Todd could have made a fortune in private practice, but he worked almost exclusively for Fresh Start. You know what that is?”

The name was not entirely unfamiliar, but I couldn’t place it. “I’m afraid that I don’t.”

She actually smiled at that. “Wow, you really didn’t do your homework before you came. Fresh Start is the charity Todd founded with some other Lanford graduates. It was his passion.”

I remembered it now. There had been a mention of it in his obituary, though I didn’t know it had any connection to Lanford. “What did Fresh Start do?”

“They operated on cleft palates overseas. They worked on burns and scars and performed various other necessary cosmetic surgeries. The procedures were life-changing. Like the name, they gave people a fresh start. Todd dedicated his life to it. When you said that you saw him in Vermont, I knew that couldn’t be true. He was working in Nigeria.”

“Except,” I said, “he wasn’t.”

“So you’re telling this widow that her husband lied to her.”

“No. I’m telling her that Todd Sanderson was in Vermont on August twenty-eighth, six years ago.”

“Marrying your ex-girlfriend, the artist?”

I didn’t bother replying.

A tear ran down her cheek. “They hurt Todd. Before they killed him. They hurt him badly. Why would someone do something like that?”

“I don’t know.”

She shook her head.

“When you say they hurt him,” I said slowly, “do you mean that they did more than kill him?”

“Yes.”

Again I didn’t know how to ask the question with any sort of sensitivity, so I settled on directness: “How did they hurt him?”

But even before she replied, I thought that maybe I knew the answer.

“With tools,” Delia Sanderson said, a sob coming to her throat. “They cuffed him to a chair and tortured him with tools.”

Chapter 18

When my plane landed back in Boston, there was a message on my new phone from Shanta Newlin. “I heard you got kicked off campus. We should talk.”

I called her back as I walked through the airport terminal. When Shanta picked up, she asked me where I was.

“Logan Airport,” I said.

“Nice trip?”

“Delightful. You said we needed to talk.”

“In person. Come straight to my office from the airport.”

“I’m not welcome on campus,” I said.

“Oh, right, I forgot for a second. Judie’s again? Be there in an hour.”

Shanta was sitting at the corner table when I arrived. She had a drink in front of her. The drink was bright pink and had a pineapple on top. I pointed at it.

“All you’re missing is a little umbrella,” I said.

“What, you figured me as more a scotch-and-soda girl?”

“Minus the soda.”

“Sorry. With me, the fruitier the drink, the better.”

I slid into the chair across from her. Shanta picked up the drink and took a sip from the straw.

“I heard you were involved in a student attack,” she said.

“Are you working for President Tripp now?”

She frowned over her fruity drink. “What happened?”

I told her the whole story—Bob and Otto, the van, the self-defense killing, the escape from the van, the roll down the hill. Her expression didn’t change, but I could see the wheels moving behind her eyes.

“You told the police this?”

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean, sort of?”

“I was pretty drunk. They seem to think I fabricated the bit about being kidnapped and killing a guy.”

She looked at me as though I were perhaps the biggest fool ever to inhabit this planet. “Did you really tell the police that part?”

“At first. Then Benedict reminded me that maybe it wasn’t the best idea to admit to killing a man, even if it was in self-defense.”

“You get your legal advice from Benedict?”

I shrugged. Once again I thought about keeping my mouth shut. I had been warned, hadn’t I? There was also the promise. Shanta sat back and sipped her drink. The waitress came over and asked what I wanted. I pointed at the fruity drink and indicated that I wanted a “virgin” one of those too. I don’t know why. I hate fruity drinks.

“What did you really learn about Natalie?” I asked.

“I told you.”

“Right, nothing, zippo, zilch. So why did you want to see me?”

The portobello sandwich came for her, the turkey BLT on rye for me. “I took the liberty of ordering for you,” she said.

I didn’t touch the sandwich.