Aubrey enlarged her face until it began to get blurry, then she brought it back into focus. The woman had a pronounced chin, was wearing large sunglasses, and had her wild dark hair pulled back from her face. She looked to be around forty and had something above her bowed lip—a mole or a pimple—Aubrey couldn’t tell.
She checked for the woman in the other photos, but couldn’t find her. Then, she noticed something else—a man who didn’t look like someone who went to carnivals. He was in another photo as well. He was large and muscled, with tattoo sleeves covering both arms. Aubrey enlarged the photo. The tattoos appeared to be of intertwining snakes. The man had a scraggly reddish beard, shaved head, and he wore dark glasses. He was probably in his thirties. And while he wasn’t looking at Ethan, it was suspicious that he was in two photos taken at two different places in the carnival. He could have been one of the carnival workers the FBI was checking out, but she’d make sure Smolleck knew about him.
She replied to his message:
Don’t recognize anyone, but check out woman in Photo 6—dark hair, sunglasses and mole above lip—who’s looking in Ethan’s direction. Also bulky, bearded man with tattoo sleeves in Photos 1 and 5. Carny worker?
She hesitated. Smolleck was doing his job, even being responsive to her suggestions. She needed to stop reacting to him as if he were the enemy.
She added: Thanks for forwarding photos, pressed “Send,” and leaned back in her desk chair.
Her eyes settled on her snow globes. Two children pulling a sled, a mother and daughter in a forest of snow-covered fir trees, a family having a snowball fight.
When Aubrey had pressed her father for answers at the time-share, he’d angrily pointed a finger at Mama. She recognized the bullying technique. Her father was hiding something. Why else would he have become so defensive when she’d asked him about politics and Columbia?
Yet, she couldn’t imagine the man who had held her close as he guided her down a ski trail, when she’d been too scared to go by herself, being involved with the kidnapping of his own grandson.
Unless someone else was calling the shots.
And the woman, who had beguiled him from day one, was a likely candidate.
Star Matin.
When Aubrey had first met her, Star had introduced herself, pronouncing her surname like the French word for “morning,” and Aubrey had thought it was spelled “Matanne.” She’d since learned otherwise.
She entered “Star Matin” in Google search and had only a few hits, all having to do with Star’s jewelry business. She followed each link and finally found a write-up in a small magazine called Southern Comfort. The article was an old one, from ten years ago, before Star had become involved with Aubrey’s father.
Star Matin was born a southern belle in Charleston. To please her parents, she wore frilly dresses, learned how to curtsy, and didn’t drink too much at her debutante ball, when what she really wanted to be was a tomboy. She studied art at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, then worked in advertising and marketing before going off on her own and creating her own line of stunning jewelry, The Star Collection, which can be found right here in Buckhead, where for the last ten years, Star has had her own boutique in the upscale shopping mall of Peachtree Shoppes. As Star says, “I always thought I wanted to be a tomboy, but the truth is I love being a girl!”
A puff piece without much content, but it was consistent with what Aubrey knew. She looked for images and found a couple of photos of Star at various events with Aubrey’s father. She returned to her original search and hunted for older links, but there was nothing.
It was time to check into her father’s background. Maybe she’d find some answers to her growing list of questions.
Why hadn’t he taken the polygraph? Why was Smolleck asking about his political views and his time at Columbia University? And had her father known Jonathan in the past?
She would start with what she knew and build out from there.
Her dad had been an undergraduate at Columbia from 1967 to 1971.
Her mother had attended Barnard, its sister school, from 1969 to 1973.
Aubrey went online to see whether she could access either of their college yearbooks, but they were password-protected, so she tried a different tack. She recalled her parents had met in ’69, so she googled “Columbia University 1969” to get a sense of what was happening at that time.
Articles with references to student protests and strikes popped up. She already knew a little about this period—the unpopular Vietnam War, opposition to the draft, racial tensions, the emergence of the hippie culture, and flamboyant drug use.
She clicked on a link to a YouTube video—a documentary made in 1969 of a student strike and university takeover. She watched it, taken aback by the anger of the fist-shaking students that had been captured on the choppy black-and-white film.
Rebellion and activism were completely alien to her experiences as an undergraduate at Brown, and now in graduate school. Her college years had been about getting good grades and studying under respected professors. But these Columbia students, led by a group called SDS, or Students for a Democratic Society, as the narrator explained, were at war against the university’s administration. They claimed that Columbia University was hooked into serving big corporations that were financing the war machine. Companies whose CEOs were either on Columbia’s board of trustees or providing substantial endowments to the university, like Lockheed, General Dynamics, CBS, and Baer Business Machines.
Aubrey paused the documentary. She hadn’t realized there had been a link between Prudence’s family business and Columbia, but it wasn’t a surprise. BBM was one of the most powerful corporations in the country. They probably had their fingers in lots of pies, even back in 1969.