“Did the person who texted Arielle give her a way of checking on whether he really worked at Global?”
“He had to write us anonymously,” Nia said earnestly. “We couldn’t check on him because he was afraid he’d get fired.”
“Nia, these are the typical things that con artists say. If anyone approaches you, or Arielle, again, talk to me, or talk to Diane here. If Arielle had come up with real information about Chaim—about her grandfather—your texter would have used it to hurt him.”
“How do you know?” Nia tried to speak forcefully, but the misery in her eyes told me she knew I was telling the truth.
“Did you ever meet him in person?” I asked.
Nia took a deep breath. “Who we met was the vampire’s victim.”
I took a breath of my own, counting slowly, not wanting to shriek. “Tell me about it.”
“He came up to Ari after school one day. We gave him the brush-off, we looked for the school guard. Maybe we don’t know about con artists, but we’ve been taught since we were two years old about stranger danger, especially Ari, because, you know, how rich her grandpapa is, kidnappers could steal her for ransom.
“But, anyway, the vampire guy, he called out, ‘I know you’re looking for Chaim Salanter’s history,’ so we thought it was the person texting Ari, so we went up to talk to him, and then he said he really needed us to work harder, because they were starting to get suspicious of him at work, and we were like, we’re doing all we can but we don’t know anything, and he said, maybe we should go look in Grandpapa Chaim’s computer. Then Ari said she couldn’t possibly do that, and he said, well, if we gave him Grandpapa Chaim’s passwords, he could do it for us from a remote location.”
“And did you?” My mouth was dry as I asked the question.
“We couldn’t; Ari doesn’t know them. And he said if we loved Grandpapa Chaim we’d be more cooperative.” Nia looked up. “When he said that, we got scared, we just took off and ran home.”
“Why didn’t you tell your mother or Aunt Julia, or even me?” Diane burst out.
“We couldn’t!” Nia said. “You’d tell Grandpapa Chaim and we were scareder of him than anyone.”
I thought of Julia, frantic about her daughter, worried about her father. If Arielle had confided in her mother, Julia might have enlisted Gabe Eycks in helping her dispose of a blackmailer.
“Did he come back again?”
“No, but every day until school ended in June, we were, like, totally scared, we’d leave by a side door, we’d run around with girls we usually didn’t talk to just so we were in a group. And then when he got killed, all we thought was how Carmilla had protected us!”
I didn’t know if I felt more like screaming or smiling at the needle-point poise between childhood and adulthood that made girls caught up in a murder imagine that Carmilla might be real.
“You knew when you saw him in the cemetery that he was the man who tried to blackmail you?”
“We didn’t see his face at the cemetery, it was the next day, when you said his name, and we were so happy we didn’t think about the rest of it.”
“How did you know his name?” I asked.
“I told him he couldn’t talk to us if he didn’t tell us. First he gave this stupid made-up name, like we were so stupid we never heard of Sam Spade, and then he said his name, and we told him we had to see a business card.”
The benefits of having a mother in a high-profile position. I hadn’t known what a business card was when I was twelve.
“But why did you choose the cemetery at all?” I asked.
“Arielle suggested it.” Nia picked at a cuticle. “I mean, I’m not trying to get her in trouble, but we knew if we went to a park, we could get busted for being out after curfew, and the cemetery, it’s abandoned, so no one would see us. It’s where her mom’s grandmother is buried, so we’d been there before, we knew about that tomb that’s built like an old temple, you know, falling down in ruins like in our history books.”
Neither Diane nor I spoke for a minute, then the housekeeper gently told Nia to go finish packing, because the car to the airport would be arriving in less than an hour. As soon as her charge was out of the room, though, she turned to me in worry: the police had to know, Sophy had to know, but did it have to be today?
I looked at her unhappily. “I know that making this public will be another blow to Dr. Durango’s campaign. But we can’t sit on it any longer.”
“Do you think Nia was truthful, about not having seen the man again, I mean? I hate having to ask this, she’s always been a very truthful child, but—” Diane clipped her sentence off without finishing it.