you about but I did need to reassure you that everyone was fine I think it would be better for you to call up Carrie and spend an hour or six letting her tell you what happened That is when she’s worked off the adrenaline enough to call What I actually need to do he said settling himself in Maddison’s desk chair and again sidestepping Maddison’s frantic demands for answers because why would Carrie need to work off the adrenaline Was everyone running on frenetic adrenaline right now except for Maddison who was going to be in a minute or two if she didn’t get some answers I need to tell you a little bit about my past Maddison’s dad said Maddison fumbled the cereal bowl directly into her trashcan Maddison hadn’t gotten into ghosts and aliens and Bigfoot because her dad was a historian That just 10
made for an easy excuse She’d gotten into the stuff at the age of eleven because her public library kept the books on the CIA and the history of intelligence agencies right next to the books on ghosts and ghosts were well ghosts were safe as strange as that sounded or at least safer than what Maddison had actually been worried about at that age Maddison had really been trying to determine if her dad had been in witness protection By the time she was eleven Maddison had known that her dad was hiding something from her Kevin McRae had a carefully concealed blank spot in his past one a lot of people didn’t ever seem to notice He would happily share family history and early childhood memories his wedding photo was proudly displayed on his desk and he was still in contact with his parents but nobody knew anything about Kevin McRae from age eighteen to twenty-two This was coincidentally the age during which he ought to have been getting his bachelor’s degree from college and that must have been what he was doing because he had then gotten a 11
doctorate and gone on to teach And yet not even Dr McRae’s students could tell his daughter with much certainty where he had gone to school the general impression seemed to be that he’d studied abroad There were other things that puzzled Maddison For one McRae was her mother’s family name which her father had taken when they married For another her father’s oldest friendship was with a retired police detective named Gregory Lyndon who was thirty years older than Maddison’s dad and lived halfway across the country And then there was her dad’s very strange behavior over the past months which had probably started the year before when the Edgewater Maritime Archive started a project with the Archer’s Grove State Park They had wanted to preserve and map out some old ruins in the local state park and had asked Maddison’s dad to consult with them on the old Spanish mission hidden somewhere in the park Maddison’s dad loved getting his hands dirty He regularly regularly volunteered at state and national parks and was a well-regarded expert on the subject of Spanish mission 12
churches He would even have been paid for his work and yet he had refused outright There was something in her dad’s past that cast a long dark shadow over his present and Maddison was becoming increasingly certain that whatever the secret was it had roots in Archer’s Grove You want to tell me about your past she repeated in case she hadn’t heard right But there weren’t a lot of words that sounded like past so unless her dad really wanted to talk about his pants or his pest or his pasta That was stretching it You don’t Maddison’s father started to say and then the corner of his mouth quirked up I was going to say that you don’t have to sound so surprised surprised he said But to be brutally fair you do have a right to be surprised Maddison had never truly thought that pretending to be interested in ghosts would keep her dad from figuring figuring out what she was really worried about and they’d been in a slightly uncomfortable unspoken truce for years Maddison made it very clear that she knew her 13
