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39.

There was a picture of my father staring at me when I got to work on Monday morning. Someone had printed out the Bombaster police sketch and pinned it to a dartboard hanging on a wall directly across from my desk. Above his face, the word BOMBASTARD was scrawled in thick black Sharpie.

I tried to circumnavigate the group that had congregated by the dartboard, but Janus caught me by my arm, and pulled me over. “Here,” he said, and handed me a dart. “Give it a go. George in Engineering is giving a buck to everyone who gets him right between the eyes.”

Art Department Amy impaled my father’s chin and turned with her fingers parted in victorious V ’s. “I saw on the news that they’re offering a hundred grand reward for information leading to his capture,” she said. “I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before someone gives him up.”

Janus closed one eye and let a dart sail. It hit my father’s earlobe and then hung there, like a particularly dangerous earring. “I hope they give that asshole the electric chair.”

“The electric chair?” I echoed faintly.

“Lethal injection is fine by me, too.” He flung another dart, catching my father dead center in his forehead, and let out a whoop .

I stared at my father’s portrait, his sunglass lenses peppered with tiny holes. The image looked so little like my father and yet, behind those mirrored lenses, I could still somehow feel his presence. His eyes on me, judging me. His traitorous daughter.

My father had taught me how to throw a hunting knife when I was nine years old. I could knock a chipmunk out of a tree, if I wanted to. Instead, I flung my dart with a feeble flop of the wrist. It hit the edge of the paper and clattered impotently to the floor as the group around the dartboard groaned in dismay.

“Give it another go?” Janus said, holding out the dart. I shook my head as I made my way to my chair.

I booted up my computer and sat there as the monitor flickered to life, my mood soured. I hadn’t considered the fact that my father might be killed if I turned him in. I recalled, queasily, the promise that I’d made to myself in the throes of my Friday night high. If this was what karma was going to demand of me, it didn’t seem in the least bit fair. Anyway, what a silly notion—that goodness and virtue would be rewarded by some invisible spirit force? My father would have mocked me for even considering the idea.

I stared at my screen, trying to reconcile the monster in the police sketch with the man in the cipher pages that I’d taken from my father’s desk. I’d spent all Sunday parsing my way through my father’s coded scribblings, letter by tedious letter, and I’d barely made a dent. The pages were a memoir of some sort, apparently written expressly for me, and I read them with a pit in my stomach. Here, in this strange second-person voice, I found the insights into my father that I’d always craved, the stories he’d avoided telling me. The genesis of his pathologies opened up for me like a flower exposing its stamen, revealing the unloved little boy who would become my father.

I couldn’t possibly betray him, not now that I was finally understanding him.

I shifted my chair so that my father’s face was no longer in my line of sight.

“I got you a muffin.” I looked up and saw Lionel standing at my desk, a paper pastry bag in his hands. His breath was labored, his glasses fogged, as if he’d just run up four flights of stairs.

“Blueberry?”

“I pegged you as a chocolate chip girl. Was I wrong?”

“Not at all.”

I took the bag and bit into the muffin. We smiled at each other, in the awkward way you do when you have too much to say and no particular words to articulate any of it. “Hi,” Lionel said softly.

“Hi,” I said back, through chocolate teeth.

Brianna, sitting a few feet away from us, lifted her eyes from her screen. “Lionel, I need Esme to finish some production scheduling for me so can you please take your puppy dog eyes somewhere else? If you guys want to moon over each other, do it on your own time.”

Lionel turned even redder than he already was. “Sorry. How about lunch?”

I shook my head. “Not today. I’ve got an errand to run.”

—

To get to the Kaboom offices, I had to first walk through South Park, an ovoid patch of lawn where the local tech workers spent their lunch hours eating burritos and smoking cigarettes by a play structure that children never seemed to use. On a rare warm day, it was hard to spot the grass amid the sprawl of pale-faced programmers, who looked like they’d been bleached by the sun.

Kaboom took up most of a new office tower near the on-ramp to the Bay Bridge. The lobby was full of amoeba-shaped plastic furniture that didn’t look particularly comfortable. A young male receptionist was manning the front desk, but since I didn’t have an appointment—and it seemed unlikely that I’d be allowed to meet Nicholas Redkin without one—I decided that my best bet was to walk right in like I belonged there. Signal wasn’t the only dot-com hiring people faster than anyone could track.

I cruised left past the receptionist and down the hall, and found myself in some sort of rec room, with foosball and Ping-Pong tables, a row of vintage arcade games, and a wall full of candy in glass jars. The room was mostly empty, except for a group of twenty-somethings with bleary eyes who were sitting in beanbags in the corner, huddled over their laptops. None of them were Nicholas Redkin, so I continuedon.

I wandered left and right, down one hallway and into a room with a maze of cubicles; and then down another into another with disorientingly identical cubicles. Big neon signs lit up the walls with comic book slogans: KABOOM! but also BLAM! and ZONK! and POW! What did Kaboom do? Its website had said something about peer-to-peer e-commerce systems, which meant absolutely nothing to me. But apparently it was quite profitable—or had, at least, generated a lot of investor excitement—because all the furniture was brand-new and there were hundreds of young people spread throughout the halls.

I must have wandered for twenty minutes, growing more and more anxious that someone would notice that I’d been walking circuits around their office. With each lap, the likelihood that I would somehow encounter Nicholas Redkin seemed more remote. Who was to say that he was even in the building?

But then, as I was walking down an otherwise quiet hallway, I ran straight into a jug-eared man in his forties, head shaved to disguise his male-pattern baldness, the tails of his button-down shirt flapping over his belly. He was stabbing at the buttons of the tiny cellphone in his hand, which was probably why he didn’t notice me planted like a boulder in his path.

“Mr. Redkin,” I blurted. “Can I have a moment of your time?”

He looked up at me and squinted, trying to place me. “Hi, sorry, I’m on my way out to see Marc at Netscape, go talk to Sabine and she can set up a time.” He kept walking with a sideways step, trying to edge pastme.

I moved again, blocking him. “I just need a minute.” I held out the photograph. “This is you, right?”

He glanced down at the photo in my hand, and then came to an abrupt halt. The irritated expression on his face softened into one of surprise. “Jesus. That’s a walk down memory lane. Our research group at Peninsula. Where did you get this?”

“I found it,” I said. “It’s a long story. I’m wondering if you can tell me about someone from this photo.”

His eyes were riveted on the image; the phone in his hand, half dialed, hung limply in his grip as he peered down at his own youthful face. “Dead,” he said suddenly. “Three of them are dead. Christ, I hadn’t put that together. What a tragedy.” He put a finger out and put it on my father’s picture—it was jarring to me, to see him identified like that—and then Peter’s and Baron’s. Finally he pulled himself out of his reverie and looked up at me. “Which one do you want to know about?”

“My question isn’t actually about anyone in the photo,” I said. “I’m wondering if you might have an idea of who took the photo?”

He lifted his head and scratched one protruding ear, looking baffled. “How would I know that?”

“Could it have been…a woman? Someone’s wife?”

His eyes lit up. “Oh. Of course. That’s why she’s not in the photo with us.”

I hesitated. This was not the answer I expected. “She would have been in the photo?”

“Of course. She was in our working group at Peninsula, the only woman. She was smarter than any of us. Of course some of the guys still asked her to fetch them coffee, which pissed her off to no end. And look at her now. Officially a genius, who else could say that?”

I still hadn’t gotten the answer I was looking for. “Is her name…Theresa?”

He nodded. “Tess. Tess Trevante.”

Tess. I hadn’t considered nicknames. “Trevante? Not Nowak?”

“Both. She remarried a few years after Adam died, now she’s Trevante.”

This name— Trevante —ricocheted through my mind in a strangely familiar way, and then I remembered: the missing blue house in Atherton, the modern monstrosity about to be built in its place. The dog walker had insisted the home belonged to the Trevantes .

My mother had kept the property where I’d been born. She hadn’t given up on my return. I’d been right all along.

Nicholas Redkin was still staring down at the photo, a wistful look in his eyes. I now had the information I needed, but I couldn’t resist the impulse to press my luck. “How did Adam die?”

“A car accident. Their kid died, too. Car went off a cliff into the ocean. It was awful.” The green neon sign in the hallway— KAPOW! —was flickering, giving his face a ghoulish cast. “We always thought…”

A blade inside me twisted. “Thought what?”

“That it was probably suicide. They’d been fighting quite a bit. Adam had been acting unstable, had just quit his job at Peninsula and was talking absolute nonsense about the end of the world. We were all worried about him. There were rumors, too, about her and…” He shook his head. “So the way the accident happened, convertible top down and no seatbelts, at night for God’s sake , almost like he didn’t want his body to be found, like he was sparing Tess something, you know?” He swallowed. “But the kid…I mean. He adored that little girl. So it’s hard to wrap your head around.”

“What did Tess say about it?” Had she held out hope that I was still alive? Did she miss me? Did she keep me front of mind, even now? These were the questions I wanted to ask, but didn’t know how.

“Nothing.” A noisy cluster of twenty-somethings pushed past us in the hallway, but Redkin was still caught up in his memories and didn’t register their presence. “She never talked about them again. She quit Peninsula and went to work for the MIT Media Lab in Boston and was gone for years. Like she’d shut the door on that chapter of her life and was moving on. But that was always just how she was. If you knew her, you’d understand.”

My heart sank. “So she’s on the East Coast?”

“She goes back and forth these days, not sure where she is at this exact moment. We haven’t really stayed in touch. But she’s easy enough to find online. You don’t know who she is?” He looked at me quizzically, finally remembering that he was talking to a stranger. “These are some very specific questions you’re asking, young lady. What was your name again?”

I shook my head, realizing that I couldn’t give him either of my names—Jane Williams or Esme Nowak—without potentially getting myself in trouble. I began slowly backing down the hallway. “I’m sorry to interrupt you,” I said.

“Wait.” He was staring at me now, hard, squinting as if he was trying to identify something in my features. “You look familiar. Do I know you?”

“I don’t think so.” A flicker of panic—was it possible he recognized me from the news? I ducked my head, let my hair swing over my face.

“Do you work here?” He turned to a woman who was walking past us. “Do you know this girl? Does she work here?” The woman glanced at me and shrugged, continuingon.

But I was already halfway down the hall by then. It wasn’t until I got to the doorway that I remembered the other part of my agenda. I turned around, to see him watching me with a strange expression on his face, the phone still sagging, forgotten, in his slack hand. “Peter and Baron were both murdered,” I said. “Did it occur to you that maybe you should be watching out, too? Maybe you should be careful for a while. Don’t open any packages.”

He stared at me, his mouth slightly agape, and I wondered how someone presumably so smart could have missed what felt to me to be so obvious.

“Who are you?” he asked once more, and now there was menace in his voice.

“No one,” I said, and fled.