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

“What does that mean?” I ask.

Except I can guess what that means. It means Owen probably thought he was out of the woods. He probably thought any contingency plan he needed to create could be put on the backburner again. It means that when Jules called Owen and said they were coming in, he couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe that this close to being safe, he was about to be caught.

“Max is texting me,” Jules says. “I’ll call you after I find a safecracker, okay?”

“I bet those are some words you thought you’d never say.”

She laughs. “No kidding.”

I say goodbye and turn to Bailey. “That was Jules,” I say. “I’m having her look into something at the house.”

She nods. She doesn’t ask if I have anything to report on her father. She knows I’d tell her if I did.

“Any progress?” I say.

“I’m on H,” she says. “No hits yet.”

“H is progress.”

“Yeah. Unless he’s not on the list.”

My phone rings again. I think it’s going to be Jules calling back, but the number is one I don’t recognize—one with a 512 area code. Texas.

“Who’s that?” she says.

I shake my head that I don’t know. Then I accept the call. The woman on the other end of the line is already talking to me. She is midway through a sentence that, apparently, she thought I was there to hear.

“Scrimmages,” she says. “We should have accounted for them too. The scrimmages.”

“Who’s this?”

“It’s Elenor McGovern,” she says. “From the Episcopal church. And I think I may have found an answer for you about the wedding your stepdaughter attended. Sophie, one of our longtime parishioners, has a son who plays football for UT-Austin. She never misses a game. She was in here earlier, helping with the new member breakfast, and it occurred to me she might be the person to ask if I’d missed something. And she said that during the summer, the Longhorns have a series of intrasquad scrimmages.”

My breath catches in my throat. “And they’re held in the stadium?” I say. “Just like the regular season games?”

“Just like the regular season games. Usually with a fairly packed crowd. People go as if it’s an actual game,” she says. “I’m not much of a football fan so that didn’t occur to me, at first.”

“It occurred to you to ask her, that’s pretty great,” I say.

“Well, maybe. And this part certainly is. I did a cross-check for you on the dates of the scrimmages during the time we were open. We had one wedding that lines up with the final scrimmage of the 2008 season. One wedding that your stepdaughter might have been at. Do you have a pen? You should write this down.”

Elenor is proud of herself, and she should be. She may have found a link to Owen—to what Owen had been doing in Austin that weekend, so long after graduation. And to why Bailey was with him.

“I’m writing it down,” I say.

“It was the Reyes and Smith wedding,” she says. “I have all the information on the wedding here. The ceremony took place at noon. And the reception was held off-site. It doesn’t specify where.”

“Elenor, this is amazing. I don’t even know how to thank you for this.”

“You’re so welcome,” she says.

I reach across Bailey to pick up the printout of Cookman’s class. There it is. No Reyes. But one Smith.

Katherine. Katherine Smith. I point to her name and Bailey starts typing quickly, searching for the yearbook index. KATHERINE SMITH coming up. SMITH, KATHERINE. Ten page numbers by her name.

Maybe they were friends—or she had been Owen’s girlfriend, the one that Professor Cookman remembered. And Owen had been in town for Katherine’s wedding. He had brought his family back to help his old friend celebrate. Maybe if I could find her, she could shed light on who Owen used to be.

“Was her first name Katherine, Elenor?”

“No, not Katherine. Let me see. Bride’s first name is Andrea,” Elenor says. “And… yes, there we are. Andrea Reyes and Charlie Smith.”

I feel deflated that it wasn’t Katherine herself, but maybe she is related to Charlie somehow. This could certainly still be the connection. But before I can repeat that to Bailey, she turns to a page featuring the debate society and President Katherine “Kate” Smith.

And the photograph comes up.

It’s a group photograph of the entire debate team. They are sitting on barstools in a small, old-school bar, more like a cocktail lounge than a traditional pub: wooden rafters, a long brick wall, bourbon bottles lined up like presents. Lanterns line the bar top, backlighting those bottles, backlighting the dark wine bottles above them.

The caption under the photograph reads: DEBATE TEAM PRESIDENT KATHERINE SMITH CELEBRATES WINNING THE STATE CHAMPIONSHIP AT HER FAMILY’S BAR, THE NEVER DRY, WITH TEAMMATES FROM (L) TO (R)…

“No way!” Bailey says. “That could be the bar. Where the wedding was.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I didn’t say anything, but last night when we were at Magnolia Cafe, and you were asking me all those questions, I remembered being at a bar for the wedding,” she says. “Or, more like, some sort of small restaurant. But then I figured it was late and I was just grasping for something… anything… so I let it go. I didn’t even mention it. But this place in the photo, this Never Dry bar, looks like the bar.”

I cover the phone’s mouthpiece, and look down at Bailey, who is pointing with fever, almost in disbelief. She points to a record player in the corner, a weird kind of proof.

“I’m not kidding,” she says. “That’s the bar. I recognize it.”

“There are a million bars that look like that.”

“I know. But there are two things I remember about Austin,” she said. “And that bar is one of them.”

Which is when Bailey makes the photograph bigger. The debate team faces growing less blurry, Katherine’s face becoming delineated. Easy to see.

We both go silent. The bar doesn’t matter anymore. Owen doesn’t even matter, exactly.

All that matters is