The Never List

around the room again. “You know, all this white is actually pretty stifling.”
    “Wait, wait.” My normal human instincts almost kicked in for a minute, and I lifted my hand to reach out for her, but then I recoiled from the thought of touching flesh, pulling my hand back as though from a fire. I wanted her to stay, but I didn’t want anything that badly.
    “Wait a second—your journal. Your writing. He says to ‘study the teachings.’ Could that be your journal, your work? Or does he mean the Bible?”
    Tracy didn’t stop packing up. She didn’t sit down but rested a knee on the chair for a minute, her hand holding the notebook paused in midair. I waited, fully prepared for her to ignore me and stomp out the door.
    “Not my work,” she said slowly, thinking. “Everything else he refers to is in the past, before … before, well, you know. I don’t believe it’s the Bible—his religious conversion is an obvious farce. He wants to tell us something else. But what about his own ‘teachings’? He was a professor after all. What if he’s talking about his academic work? Something to do with his classes, the university?”
    Tracy sat back down, pondering this idea further. “That’s interesting, actually. I mean, this is really unrelated to the letters,” she said pointedly, “but I just wonder if this has been explored by anyone. It makes some sense if you believe, as I do, that he was testing his own psychological theories on us. We were, after all, regular lab rats, in a medieval scholar kind of way.”
    I felt renewed hope, if only because this idea might lead to something concrete we could do. It was at that point, when I felt hope stirring in me again, that I knew there was no going back for me. I couldn’t rest until I had followed this path to the end. I had to do this.
    I took up her line of thought. “If we’re going back to the university, we need Christine. She was his student, in his own department. She can help us navigate.”
    Tracy laughed. “As if. Christine is not going to have anything to do with us. Literally nothing. She shut that door years ago. I don’t even think we could find her to ask.”
    “Yes, we can.” I remembered what McCordy had said, perhaps indiscreetly.
    “How?”
    “I know where her kid goes to school.”
    Tracy looked up, interested. Her wheels were turning now.
    “It’s Thursday.” I looked at the clock. “School lets out in an hour.”
    “Well, okay then. Let’s meet her at pickup.”

CHAPTER 11
    It was ironic that we were going to find Christine on the Upper East Side, right back where she’d started. After all she’d told us in that cellar, I couldn’t understand why she would have returned to it when, if nothing else, she’d had the chance to start her life over. Maybe after all we’d been through, she decided she just wanted something familiar after all. She didn’t want to take another chance at transforming her life. She’d tried that before, and it had nearly killed her.
    Christine was the only child of a wealthy Manhattan investment banker and his socialite wife. She grew up in the most exclusive of the exclusive prewar Park Avenue buildings, right on top of Carnegie Hill, in a sprawling classic nine co-op apartment that had been handed down from generation to generation. Her family summered in Quogue and went skiing in Aspen during winter breaks.It was a good life, insular and staid, and Christine, a compliant and dreamy child, had passed her early years contentedly, paying no attention to the world outside her tightly protected enclave.
    Until she was sixteen, that is, when everything changed. That was the year Christine figured out how her family maintained its rank in the social and economic hierarchy. The year she learned that all the old money and the gentility that went with it had dwindled away long ago, and that her father had replaced both over time by trading less in high-yield financial instruments than in information. Material, nonpublic information.
    He’d been accused of having an inside track on earnings statements for several blue-chip companies days before their release. And the timing of his trades didn’t look good.
    She believed in her father at first and stood by his side, following the case closely, asking questions, trying to understand the complicated mechanics of sophisticated financial transactions. But the more she learned, the more she began to believe, along with the attorney general and the