Andy had so far been stymied in her computer searches. Three nights spent in three different motels with the laptop propped open on her belly had resulted in nothing more than an angry red rectangle of skin on her stomach.
The easiest route to finding shit on people was always Facebook. The night Andy had left Austin, she’d created a fake account in the name of Stefan Salvatore and used the Texas Longhorns’ logo as her profile photo. Unsurprisingly, Paula Kunde was not on the social media site. ProfRatings.com let Andy use her Facebook credentials to log in as a user. She went onto Paula’s review page with its cumulative half-star rating. She sent dozens of private messages to Paula’s most vocal critics, the texts all saying the same thing:
DUDE!!! Kunde in FEDERAL PEN 20 yrs?!?!?! MUST HAVE DEETS!!! Bitch won’t change my grade!!!
Andy hadn’t heard back much more than Fuck that fucking bitch I hope you kill her, but she knew that eventually, someone would get bored and do the kind of deep dive that took knowing the number off your parents’ credit card.
A toddler screamed on the other side of the McDonald’s.
Andy watched his mother carry him toward the bathroom. She wondered if she had ever been to this McDonald’s with her mother. Laura hadn’t just pulled Chicago, Illinois, out of her ass for Jerry Randall’s birth and death place.
Right?
Andy slurped the last of the milkshake. Now was not the time to dive into the silly string of her mother’s lies. She studied the scrap of paper at her elbow. The second that Andy was safe enough outside of Austin, she had pulled over to the side of the road and scribbled down everything she could remember about her conversation with Paula Kunde.
—Twenty years in Danbury?
—QuellCorp?
—Knew Hoodie, but not Mike?
—31 years—interesting math?
—Laura full of the worst type of bullshit?
—Shotgun? What made her change her mind—Clara Bellamy???
Andy had started with the easiest searches first. The Danbury Federal Penitentiary’s records were accessible through the BOP.gov inmate locator, but Paula Kunde was not listed on the site. Nor was she listed on the UC-Berkeley, Stanford or West Connecticut University alumni pages. The obvious explanation was that Paula had at some point gotten married and, patriarchal constructs aside, changed her last name.
I know how marriage works.
Andy had already checked marriage and divorce records in Austin, then in surrounding counties, then done the same in Western Connecticut and Berkeley County and Palo Alto, then Andy had decided that she was wasting her time because Paula could’ve flown to Vegas and gotten hitched and actually, why did Andy believe that a shotgun-wielding lunatic had told her the truth about being in prison in the first place?
Snitch and two dimes were basically in every prison show ever. All it took was saying them with attitude, which Paula Kunde had plenty of.
Regardless, the BOP search was a dead end.
Andy tapped her fingers on the table as she studied the list. She tried to think back to the conversation inside of Paula’s kitchen. There had been a definite before and after. Before, meaning when Paula was talking to her, and after, meaning when she’d gone to fetch her shotgun and told Andy to get the hell out.
Andy couldn’t think of what she’d said wrong. They had been talking about Laura, and how she was full of bullshit—the worst type of bullshit—
And then Paula had told Andy to wait and then threatened to shoot her.
Andy could only shake her head, because it still didn’t make sense.
Even more puzzling was the after-after, because Paula hadn’t given up Clara Bellamy’s name until after Andy had kicked the shit out of Mike. Andy could take it at face value and assume that Paula had been impressed by the violence, but something told her she was on the wrong track. Paula was fucking smart. You didn’t go to Stanford if you were an idiot. She had played Andy like a fiddle from the moment she’d opened the front door. She was very likely playing Andy even now, but trying to figure out a maniac’s end game was far beyond Andy’s deductive skills.
She looked back at her notes, focusing on the item that still niggled most at her brain:
—31 years—interesting math?
Had Paula gone to prison thirty-one years ago while a pregnant Laura ran off with nearly one million bucks and a fake ID to live her fabulous life on the beach for thirty-one years until suddenly the diner video appeared on the national news, pointing the bad guys to her location?
Hoodie had strangled both Laura and Paula, so obviously both women had information that someone else wanted.
The mysterious they who could track Andy’s emails and phone calls?
Andy returned to the laptop and tried QuellCorp.com again, because all she could do now was go back and see if she’d missed anything the last twenty times she had looked at the website.
The splash page offered a Ken Burns-effect photo slowly zooming onto a young, multicultural group of lab-coated scientists staring intently at a beaker full of glowing liquid. Violins played in the background like Leonardo da Vinci had just discovered the cure for herpes.
Andy muted the sound.
She was familiar with the pharmaceutical company the same way everybody was familiar with Band-Aids. QuellCorp made everything from baby wipes to erectile dysfunction pills. The only information Andy could find under HISTORY was that a guy named Douglas Paul Queller had founded the company in the 1920s, then his descendants had sold out in the 1980s, then by the early 2000s QuellCorp had basically swallowed the world, because that’s what evil corporations did.
They could certainly be an evil corporation. That was the plot of almost every sci-fi movie Andy had seen, from Avatar to all of the Terminators.
She closed the QuellCorp page and pulled up the wiki for Clara Bellamy.
If it was strange that Laura knew Paula Kunde, it was downright shocking that Paula Kunde knew a woman like Clara Bellamy. She had been a prima ballerina, which according to another wiki page was an honor only bestowed on a handful of women. Clara had danced for George Balanchine, a choreographer whose name even Andy recognized. Clara had toured the world. Danced on the most celebrated stages. Been at the top of her field. Then a horrific knee injury had forced her to retire.
Because Andy had had nothing better to do after driving all day, she had seen almost every video of Clara Bellamy that YouTube had to offer. There were countless performances and interviews with all kinds of famous people, but Andy’s favorite was from what she believed was the first T chaikovsky Festival ever staged by the New York City Ballet.
Since Andy was a theater nerd, the foremost thing she’d noticed about the video was that the set was spectacular, with weird translucent tubes in the background that made everything look like it was encased in ice. She had assumed that it would be boring to watch tiny women spinning on their toes to old-people music, but there was something almost hummingbird-like about Clara Bellamy that made her impossible to look away from. For a woman Andy had never heard of, Clara had been extraordinarily famous. Newsweek and Time had both featured her on the cover. She was constantly showing up in the New York Times Magazine or highlighted in the New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” section.
That was where Andy’s searches had hit a wall. Or, to be more exact, a pay wall. She was only allowed a certain number of articles on a lot of the websites, so she had to be careful about what she clicked on. It wasn’t like she could just pull out a credit card and buy more access.
As far as she could tell, Clara had disappeared from public life around 1983. The last photo in the Times showed the woman with her head down, tissue held to her nose, as she left George Balanchine’s funeral.