The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave (bill gates books to read .txt) 📗

sip of my champagne. I took a sip, and laughed too. I couldn’t help it. I was happy. I was just… happy.

“Turns out you have a little while to decide,” he said.

“Like the rest of our lives?” I said.

“I hope longer than that,” he said.

If You Marry the Prom King…

Seventy-three names, fifty of them men.

One of them is potentially Owen.

We walk quickly across campus toward the main research library, which Cheryl tells us is most likely to house the school yearbooks. If we can get our hands on the yearbooks from the years Owen was at UT, that could be the key to getting through this list as quickly as possible. The yearbooks will offer not just student names, but they’ll offer photographs too. They’ll potentially have a photograph of a young Owen, if he did anything at school besides fail math.

We head inside the Perry-Castañeda Library, which is enormous—six stories of books and maps and cards and computer labs—and head to the research librarian’s desk. She informs us that we will need to put a request in at the archives to get the hard copies of the school yearbooks from that far back, but we can access the archive on a library computer.

We go to the second-floor computer lab, which is mostly empty, and sit at two computers in the corner. I pull up Owen’s freshman and sophomore yearbooks on one computer. And Bailey pulls up his junior and senior years. And, side by side, we begin looking up students from Cookman’s class one at a time, hitting the roster alphabetically. Our first candidate: John Abbot from Baltimore, Maryland. I find him in one grainy photograph with the ski club. He doesn’t look much like Owen in the photograph—thick glasses, full beard—but it is hard to rule him out completely just based on that one photograph. We find too many potential hits when we google just his name, but when I cross-reference with skiing, I find that John Abbot (Baltimore native, UT-Austin grad) now lives in Aspen with his partner and their two kids.

We are able to rule out the next few male students on the list much more easily: one is five feet tall and has curly red hair; another is six foot four and a professional ballet dancer who resides in Paris; one is living in Honolulu, Hawaii, and running for state senate.

We are on the Es when my phone rings. HOME comes up on the caller ID. For a second, I imagine that it’s Owen. Owen is back at the house, and calling to tell us that he has worked everything out, and we need to come home immediately. So he can explain the parts that don’t make sense. Where he has been, who he was before I knew him. Why he has left these things out.

But it isn’t Owen on the phone. It’s Jules.

Jules is responding to the text I’d sent her at the hotel bar, asking her to head to the house, asking her to find the piggy bank.

“I’m in Bailey’s room,” she says when I pick up.

“Was anyone outside?” I say.

“I don’t think so. I didn’t see anyone strange in the parking lot, and there wasn’t anyone on the docks.”

“Would you close the blinds while you’re there?”

“Already done,” she said.

I look over at Bailey, hoping she’s too busy with the yearbooks to pay close attention. But I clock her eyeing me, waiting to see what this phone call is about. Maybe hoping, against hope, this is going to be the call that gets her back to her father.

“And you were right,” Jules says. “It does say Lady Paul on the side.”

She doesn’t say what it is, of course. She doesn’t say it’s a piggy bank that she is at our house to retrieve—Bailey’s piggy bank—though it would sound pretty innocuous if she did say that out loud.

I hadn’t imagined it. The small note on the bottom of the last page of Owen’s will, listing the conservator, L. Paul. It was also the name on the side of the blue piggy bank in Bailey’s room—LADY PAUL, written in black, beneath the bow. The same blue piggy bank Owen had taken when we evacuated, the one I found him with at the hotel bar in the middle of the night. I chocked it up to his being sentimental. But I was wrong. He had taken the piggy bank because it was something he needed to keep safe.

“But there is a bit of an issue,” Jules says. “I can’t open it.”

“What do you mean you can’t open it?” I say. “Just smash it with a hammer.”

“No, you don’t understand, there’s a safe inside the piggy bank,” she says. “And the thing’s made of steel. I’m going to have to find someone who can crack a safe. Any ideas?”

“Not off the top of my head,” I say.

“K, I’ll deal with it,” Jules says, “but have you checked your newsfeed? They indicted Jordan Maverick.”

Jordan is the COO of The Shop, Avett’s number two and Owen’s counterpart on the business side of the firm. He was newly divorced and had been spending a little bit of time at our place. I invited Jules over for dinner, hoping they’d hit it off. They didn’t. She thought he was boring. I thought there were worse things to be—or maybe I just didn’t see him that way.

“For the record,” she says. “No more setups.”

“Understood,” I say.

At a different moment this would have been all the encouragement I needed to ask her about her colleague Max, to make a joke about whether he was the other reason she wasn’t interested in setups. But, in this moment, all it does is remind me that Max has an inside source. One that can potentially help us in regard to Owen.

“Has Max heard anything beyond Jordan?” I ask. “Has he heard anything about Owen?”

Bailey tilts her head, toward me.

“Not specifically,” she says. “But his source over at the FBI did say