The Never List

avoiding eye contact with us, he slipped down the hall back into his own office. Adele didn’t even glance back at him.
    She was calm and cool, her face, as ever, a mask. She politely offered us a seat. I took the chair in front of her desk. Christine and Tracy scrunched in next to each other on the small love seat in the corner.
    Adele folded her hands in front of her on the desk and leaned forward.
    “I thought we were meeting later. Is everything okay?”
    “Adele,” I began, “I wanted you to meet Christine.”
    Adele looked over at her in awe.
    “Yes, that Christine,” I said. “So here we are. A complete set.”
    I studied her face carefully to try to determine if it was all an act. If she’d delivered those letters, she knew perfectly well who Christine was and where she’d been for the past two days.
    “Well,” she said, shaking her head with astonishment, “I have to say I’m really happy to see you all here together. Safe and sound. After all you’ve been through.” She paused. “So what really happened out there today? They aren’t—they aren’t releasing much information to the press.”
    “We don’t know much more than you.”
    She stared at me. She must have known that wasn’t entirely true. She changed tack.
    “I see. Well, in any event, maybe the three of you will consider participating in our victimological study, especially now that you’re all together again.”
    I knew I’d better steer us away from that topic before she could go any further. I had a feeling the word victimological would not sit well with Tracy.
    “It looks like you and David Stiller have a—a very different relationship from what we thought.”
    “Oh, that,” she said tonelessly. “Just reconstructing a scene for a conference presentation.”
    I didn’t believe that for a second but decided to move on.
    “Adele, do you know whether Jack Derber had a connection to Noah Philben?”
    Her face was still for a moment. “Well, only what they said on the news: that his wife is a member of Noah’s church.”
    “I mean something from … before. All those years ago. You’ve known Jack a long time. Did he know Noah Philben before prison?”
    Adele looked straight ahead and blinked twice slowly, as if only her eyes would tell us anything, in code. Her lashes, in a thick coat of mascara, fluttered. She looked away, straightening some papers on her desk. I thought her smooth gears might slip for just a moment; then she seemed to gain control of herself, and she looked back at us, indecipherable as ever.
    “How would I know? Jack and I were not friends . We were working on research projects together. I wouldn’t know with whom he associated outside the university, except the people I’ve since met at The Vault.”
    With this she sat back and folded her hands carefully in her lap. I waited for her to look away, maybe to shift uncomfortably. But she didn’t. She sat perfectly still.
    I could tell that, if she had delivered those letters, we would never get her to admit it. Adele wasn’t going to fall apart like Helen Watson. Maybe because she had more to hide.
    I tried to imagine what was going on in her mind. This woman was all discipline, but there had to be something that would breakher. I couldn’t believe she was all power and control and ambition. I had to do something. Something big.
    There was only one way left to push her. One place where I knew even she couldn’t hold on to that composure. I had to get her out of her element. Make her face the past she seemed to brush aside.
    But I knew it would push us as well. To go back there. Yet we all somehow knew it was the one inevitable place we had to go. The place we knew was calling us home, ready to tell us what we needed to know. Nothing could be more terrifying to me. Nothing. But I reminded myself that I had to be stronger now. I was following Tracy’s advice. We all had to plunge in. With or without Adele, we had to go back there. We had to test ourselves. Test Jack Derber.
    “Okay, we’re leaving.” I stood up. Tracy and Christine looked at me questioningly but stood up in tandem, prepared to see where I was taking this.
    “We’re going to his house,” I said decisively. Much more decisively than I felt. Tracy and Christine looked stunned.
    Even Adele blanched. “Why would you do that? You can’t get in there. Isn’t it all locked down by the police?” Her surprise seemed genuine, and I began to doubt whether she was