Page 72 of The Last Housewife

He reached for my hand, but I pulled away. “Sure. Tell the girl stuck in a dead-end town, with her back against the wall, not to grasp at a lifeline. You know, your ideas aren’t wrong, Jamie. They’re just really fucking insulated. And get out of those clothes already. Your hands are like ice.”

He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he rose, grabbed clothes from his suitcase, and disappeared into the bathroom. After a minute, the shower started. When he came back, I was half-asleep, my hand resting in the middle of the bed, near where he’d lain. Jamie climbed back in and pulled the covers over both of us. I felt him reach over, fingers closing over mine, and then his hand stilled. I heard him take a deep breath. After that, I must’ve fallen asleep.

Chapter Twenty-Three

“I have news.” Jamie threw himself into the passenger seat and slammed the door. After four days of silence, I’d received another anonymous text, this one instructing me to 145 Murray Street, New York, New York. We were on our way to the city.

“How?” I kept my eyes on the road as we slid out of the motel parking lot. “I’ve been with you every minute these last few days.”

“Dougie just called on my way back from the bathroom. The guy on my staff who’s good with computers,” he explained, off my blank look.

“All this time, our fate’s been in the hands of a man named Dougie?”

Jamie slid on his sunglasses. “I see you experimenting with humor, and I’ve got to say, I don’t like it directed at me and my innocent friends.”

I smiled. “What did Dougie say?”

Jamie wrestled with his pocket and pulled out a small notepad.

“You keep that thing on you all the time?”

“Journalist lesson number one: Always be prepared. Like a Boy Scout.” His face grew grave. “Actually, this is serious. I shouldn’t joke.”

“What is it?” I felt a weight settle over my shoulders.

“I had Dougie look into Reginald Carruthers. He became president of Whitney in 2016, just two years after you graduated. Before that, he was the provost.”

“I never saw him on campus.”

“I’m sure you didn’t. Provost is an executive job. All the deans reported to him.”

It clicked. “The dean of students. He was her boss.”

“Exactly. Now, unless she put something in an email where Dougie can find it, there’s probably no record of whether she told him what you told her. But I can’t imagine two students coming to her with a bombshell story like yours, and her not informing her boss.”

I shook my head, shifting left to follow the highway signs. “Which means she probably told Carruthers—a man who would one day become a Pater—about what Don did.”

“Maybe he already knew Don,” Jamie said. “And that’s why nothing ever came of you reporting it. Maybe Carruthers tipped Don off that you’d spilled and it was time for him to skip town.”

I gripped the steering wheel tighter. “Either way, it can’t be a coincidence.”

“There’s more, and this part’s worse. Before Carruthers was provost, he was a religious studies professor.”

I remembered Eve’s Punishment. “That tracks.”

“For the last three years, he’s taught a class every fall semester. It’s highly unusual for a college president to also teach. Whitney made a big splash about it when it was announced, saying Carruthers was going back into the classroom because students loved him. But Dougie found emails from the college marketing director, and it’s clear Carruthers was the one pushing for it.”

“Why would you go back to teaching if you’d become the president of a college?”

“Maybe if you were looking for an excuse to interact with students one-on-one.”

My head snapped in his direction, road be damned. “Meaning?”

“I had Dougie access the enrollment lists for Carruthers’s classes and compare them against my list of missing women.”

My heart pounded. “How many?”

“Two of the girls on the missing persons list were once Carruthers’s students.”