“Oh, Abby.” She sighs. “I envy you. It must be nice to know you’re right so much of the time.”
A knot of anger rises in my chest. “I don’t know I’m right. But I know what’s not right.”
“Do you?” She tilts her head to squint at me. “Take Frank Mitchell as an example. He makes his living selling pornography.” The way she says it, the word has about a hundred syllables.
“Pornography isn’t illegal,” I say.
She raises an eyebrow. “Fine. Sure. But let’s say he has a customer, a normal man, husband and father, who keeps a little porn stash on the sly, nothing serious. And then, let’s say, at some point he says what he’s really after are the younger girls. Much younger. And it turns out this nice, upstanding man, with his nice, upstanding family, has a fetish for schoolgirls.” She says all of this calmly, with immense self-control, as if we’re still talking about plans for the auditorium. All the hairs lift on the back of my neck. “Now let’s say Frank Mitchell sells him a magazine where the girls look much younger than they actually are. But of course they are of age. Paid professionals. The man goes home happy. If he doesn’t, the man will just go out and find the real thing.”
I am so stunned I just stare at her.
She spreads her hands. Innocent. “You see, some people would think Frank Mitchell had done a terrible thing by selling that kind of magazine. But it would still be the right thing.”
“Or,” I say, trying to keep the tremor from my voice, “he could simply call the police.”
“The man would just deny it.” Misha shrugs, as if the point is so obvious it barely needs to be stated. Then: “Should we continue the tour?”
I want nothing more than to run—from Misha, from this cold palace built on Optimal money to save the kids it might be pumping full of poison, from the crazy economy of sacrifice that Misha believes in. But I follow her mutely through another swinging door.
Misha raises the lights and the hallway takes shape in front of us: dark-painted walls, and a row of student photographs framed on both sides, surrounded by constellations of paper stars.
“These are our Optimal Stars,” she says brightly. “The recipients of the Optimal Scholarship. Remember the scholarship program I mentioned? For several years now, we’ve worked with Optimal to grant full or partial scholarships to a handful of students who show academic promise. Most of them struggle with difficult home lives. Some have had disciplinary problems. But the program really turns them around.” She sounds like she’s reciting from a brochure. For all I know, she might be. “The first was Mackenzie Brown. She was a ballroom dancer. Don’t get that much around here.”
She indicates a girl with a beauty-queen smile. Actually, all the girls have beauty-queen smiles—and out of eighteen scholarship recipients, only two are boys. One portrait in particular stops me. The girl looks distractingly like Kaycee: a waterfall of blond hair, wide-spaced blue eyes. According to the little brass nametag, her name is Sophie Nantes.
“Why so many girls?” I can’t help but ask.
“Well, we keep need in mind as much as we do talent,” Misha says. “Plenty of colleges offer their own sports scholarships, but most of the money is for the male teams, so there’s that. And there are more local opportunities for our male students who don’t want to go to college. Farming, construction is making a comeback, entry-level jobs at Optimal. That kind of thing.”
The door at the end of the corridor leads us to the auditorium. “Next year, we’ll mount our first musical production,” she says. Her voice is swallowed by the vast space. Tiers of seats climb into darkness. “And we have forty students already signed up for a two-week music camp in August. Half of them will be playing on donated instruments. Can you imagine? For years, the marching band had to meet in the back parking lot while the cheer team got the cafeteria after school. Now they’ll rehearse here.” She opens her arms to the silent stage. For the first time, she seems happy. Not just happy, but joyful, alive with energy and pride. She turns to me. “And do you know what was here before?”
I shake my head.
“Nothing.” There’s a dark satisfaction in her eyes. “Absolutely nothing at all.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Joe is on me as soon as I walk in the door.
“I’ve been calling you for an hour,” he says. “Where were you?”
I put down my bag, nice and slow. “Good morning to you, too.” I reach for my computer but he’s too fast and snaps it shut.
“You ducked out yesterday, too.” He gives me a funny look. “Do you need a refresher course in teamwork?”
He’s right; I’ve never had a problem sharing strategy with Joe before. But weirdly, I just feel resentful of him for asking. Optimal is mine—my mess, my mystery, my case.
It has to be. Otherwise, the magic won’t work, and finding the truth won’t help me forget what happened.
But Joe is watching me, and there’s no reason to lie. “I took a tour of the community center,” I say. “It seems more and more like Optimal’s determined to buy their way into the town’s good graces.”
“And ours,” Joe says. He pivots and goes to his desk, returning with several binders so stuffed with paper they could double as bludgeons. When he dumps them on my desk, I have to reach for my bag to keep it from skipping straight off the table.
“What is this stuff?” I ask. But as soon as I fan open one of the binders, even before I make sense of the 1099s, I know. “Optimal delivered.”
“They didn’t deliver,” Joe says. “They dumped. Most of it is still boxed up in the basement of the courthouse.”
I stare at him. “There’s more?” Each binder is five inches thick, and packed with data. It will take weeks for us to make a picture of expenditures, even if the whole team did nothing else.
All the humor has vanished from his face. Joe hates mistakes—especially his own. “One hundred and seventeen binders in all. And in no order, from what we can tell.”
“They buried us.”
“They did what we asked them to do,” Joe says, through gritted teeth. He just manages a smile. “But yes, they buried us.”
“And we have no idea where to start,” Flora adds.
Thanks, Flora.
Flipping through pages and pages of expenditure reports and 1099s, I feel increasingly hopeless. Of course it’s our fault. I don’t know what I was expecting. Big red arrows, some helpful Post-its flagging payments to the EPA, maybe a few expenses politely filed under “Bribes.”
—
We spend the day trying to piece a thousand pages of data into some kind of story—or the beginning of one, at least. It’s too hot to think—by noon, it reaches ninety-eight degrees outside—and more and more I get the feeling that the answer I want can’t be found in any numbers.
At six I give up and pack the boxes of documents into the trunk of my car, swearing to myself I’ll look at them later. I’ve promised to see my father for dinner, and although I can’t think of anything I want to do less, I’ve run out of ways to put him off. I swing home to take a shower as cold as I can stand it, soaping hard, as if I can wash away some of the day’s frustration.