Chapter 7: Someone Is Watching
I took the phone from Paul's hand.
The number was a string of digits I didn't recognize — no area code I could place, no name attached.
The message had been sent forty-three seconds ago.
"They know we're talking," I said.
"They know we're in this room," Paul said.
Lily stood up and went to the window.
She looked out at the courtyard, then stepped back quickly.
"There's a car," she said.
"Dark blue.
It's been parked across the street since before I came in.
I noticed it when I was sitting in the hall."
I moved to the window and looked out at an angle, keeping to the side of the frame.
A dark blue sedan, engine off, parked facing the school entrance.
The windows were tinted.
I couldn't see the driver.
"Has it moved?" I asked.
"Not once," she said.
I stepped back.
My heart was going faster than I wanted it to.
I thought about the text.
*Stop now.
For Lily's sake.* Not a threat against me or Paul.
Against her.
Against a sixteen-year-old girl who had already lost her father and her home and two years of stability and was standing in my classroom trying to hold herself together.
"We need to make a copy of everything," I said.
"Right now, before we leave this room."
Paul was already pulling the hospital document toward him.
I opened my desk drawer and took out the small scanner I used for student work.
It was slow and old but it worked.
"Lily, the note your father wrote — the photograph on your phone.
Can you send it to me?"
She was already doing it.
My phone buzzed.
I scanned the hospital document.
Paul photographed the business card copy with his phone.
I opened my laptop and sent both files to an email address I used for nothing else — an account I had created years ago under a name that wasn't mine, the kind of small paranoid habit you develop after losing a child and learning that the world is less safe than it appears.
"Is there anything else?" I asked Paul.
"Anything from Raymond that you kept?"
He hesitated.
"Paul."
"There's a USB drive," he said.
"At home.
In the lockbox in the study."
"What's on it?"
"The full report.
Raymond's analysis.
His notes.
Everything."
I stared at him.
"You've had it for eight years."
"Yes."
"And you never told me."
"I was going to.
After Maggie — I put it away and I told myself I would deal with it later and later never came." He looked at Lily, then back at me.
"I'm sorry.
I know that's not enough."
It wasn't enough.
But there wasn't time for that now.
"We need that drive," I said.
"Can you go home and get it?"
"If I leave, they'll see me go."
"Then they'll follow you and not watch the school." I looked at Lily.
"Which means she can leave safely."
Paul looked at the window.
He nodded once.
"Where should I take it?" he asked.
I thought for a moment.
There was one person I trusted completely — had trusted for twenty years — who had the kind of professional connections that might actually matter here.
"Take it to Carol Deming," I said.
"She's still at the DA's office.
She'll know what to do with it."
Paul picked up his jacket.
He paused at the door.
"Ellen." He said my name the way he used to say it before everything got complicated — before grief made us careful with each other.
"I am sorry.
For all of it."
I looked at him for a long moment.
"Go get the drive," I said.
He left.
Through the window I watched the dark blue sedan.
Thirty seconds after Paul's car pulled out of the staff lot, the sedan's engine turned over.
It pulled away from the curb and followed him.
Lily let out a slow breath.
"He did that on purpose," she said.
"To give us a clear path."
"Yes."
She picked up her bag.
Then she stopped.
"Mrs.
Marsh," she said.
"The genetic marker.
The one in the report." She turned to face me.
"Is it the same one I have?"
I looked at her.
At those gray-green eyes.
At the tiny crease beside her mouth.
"I don't know yet," I said.
"But we're going to find out."
She nodded.
She moved toward the door, then stopped again with her hand on the frame.
"My father named me Margaret," she said quietly.
"He never told me why.
He just said it was a name he wanted to honor." She looked back at me.
"I think I understand now."
She walked out.
I stood in the empty classroom for a moment.
The scanner was still warm on my desk.
The hospital document was face-up beside it, Maggie's name visible in the afternoon light coming through the window.
I picked up my phone and called Carol Deming.
She answered on the second ring.
"Ellen.
It's been a while."
"I know," I said.
"Carol, I need your help.
And I need you to not ask me how I got what I'm about to send you."
A pause.
"That's not a great opening," she said.
May you like
"No," I agreed.
"But it gets worse."
