A large piece of paper with blue diagrams was open on the desk. An architectural drawing. But Gertrude wasn’t taking architecture.
Di examined the blueprint. Printed at the top of the page was “LOW LIBRARY,” where she had just been. There was a diagram of each floor, including the basement. Notes had been written on the paper in black ink in a confident hand.
Administrative center. President’s office.
Career Day, 4/3, Rotunda. Fortune 100 Corps. Several hundred students expected.
On the diagram of the basement, several points had been marked with a red X. Di matched the location of the Xs to the floor above. The Rotunda, where major events were often held.
Including the upcoming Career Fair in a few days.
Dear God.
The door opened behind her. Gertrude came in, carrying several books. She frowned. “You said you’d be gone all afternoon.”
“What is this?” Di held up the blueprint.
“What does it look like?” Gertrude dumped the books on her bed.
“Like a plan to blow up Low Library.”
“We’re planning to blow the armory,” Gertrude said. “You know that.”
“Then what’s this all about?”
Gertrude shrugged. “An intellectual exercise.”
“You’re planning to kill innocent people, aren’t you?”
“Innocent?” Gertrude said. The pupils in her eyes seemed to throb, like they always did when she was angry. “You don’t mean the big corporations that are financing the war machine, do you?” She stepped closer. “Or the bourgeois students who want to go work for them? Are those the innocents you mean?”
Di could smell her breath—cigarettes and something minty. Gertrude took the blueprint from Di and folded it on the creases.
“Who knows about this?” Di asked.
“Just a couple of the anointed. They’re helping me build the bombs. Real whoppers.”
“I think you’ve gone crazy, Gertrude.”
“Bring the war home, baby.”
Di shook her head. “No, Gertrude. The point was to end the war. Not start a new one.”
Gertrude laughed. “You really are a Pollyanna.”
“Well, you’re no Che Guevara.” Di brushed past her to the door.
“Hey, Pollyanna.”
Di turned to face her from the doorway.
“I was right about you,” Gertrude said. “You don’t have what it takes to change the world.”
Di felt a flash of rage. “Is that so, Gertrude?” she said. “That just goes to show how little you really know about me.”
Diana opened her eyes and faced the glaring computer screen. She checked the throwaway phone she had picked up before coming to the library so she could call Aubrey when she was ready. It was after three o’clock.
She knew what she had to do. It was the only way to finally make peace with herself.
She left the cool, dark library and stepped back outside into the sharp, harsh sunlight.
She would make her peace, and then she would tell Aubrey.
She prayed her daughter would understand.
CHAPTER 35
Aubrey put her mother’s box in a drawer of her desk. If there was a connection between Ethan’s kidnapping and either her mother or father, she was at a loss as to how to find it. She hoped her mother was having more success, whatever it was she was doing.
She checked the time. Just after three.
With Jonathan dead, the Tuesday midnight deadline no longer applied, but Ethan had been missing for forty-eight hours. Forty-eight hours away from his mom and dad. She didn’t want to think about how terrified he must be. She needed to try something else.
Her laptop was synced with her iPhone and contained all her photos. She went to the album she had set up for Ethan, hoping there was some clue in the photo that had caught her attention in her mother’s office. Ethan at his grandfather’s apartment making an ugly face while an old woman watched him. As she had told Smolleck, something about the woman was familiar.
She scrolled through Ethan’s baby pictures, photos of him learning how to walk, then the recent ones of him, until she came to the selfie he had taken with the old woman in the background. She checked to see whether the woman was in any other photos. She wasn’t. She “snipped” out the woman’s face and enlarged it. The woman’s hair was short, gray, and curly. She had blue eyes that were a little out of focus, and a long chin. Her lips reminded Aubrey of a 1920s film star, the upper one thin and bowed, the lower full and pouty. Aubrey enlarged the photo further. Above her bowed lip was a small beauty mark. That’s when she noticed what wasn’t in the photo. Wrinkles. The woman wasn’t old. She had the skin of someone around forty. She could have been prematurely gray, or had had a facelift, or maybe something else was going on here.
Aubrey studied the frown on the woman’s face as she looked at Ethan. It was the expression that was familiar, but what did it remind her of?
Something recent.
She went to her e-mails, opened the one from Smolleck with the photos from the carnival, and found the photo of the woman in sunglasses staring in Ethan’s direction. There it was. The same frown.
She “snipped” out the face of the woman at the carnival and put it next to the face of the gray-haired woman. Same bowed lips and prominent chin. Just above the upper lip, in the exact same place, was a tiny mole.
This must be the same woman.
She was about to call Smolleck when a disturbing thought stopped her.
The gray-haired woman had been at her father’s apartment. What had she been doing there, and what was her father’s involvement? Instead of Smolleck, she called her father’s cell phone, impatient as it rang and he didn’t pick up.
“Aubrey?” he said, answering on the fifth ring. He sounded breathless.
“Yes, it’s me. Where are you?”
“At the time-share.”
“I have to ask you something,” she said.
“What is it?”
“There was a woman with gray hair at your house when Ethan visited you a couple of weeks ago. Who was she?”