Page 77 of The Attic on Queen Street
Thomas dutifully stood and pulled out our chairs while Jayne smiled her thanks and said, “You have tea. It’s sweet.”
“Yes, it is,” Thomas said as he sat, his long legs tucking awkwardly beneath the small table.
After greeting everyone and a little bit of chitchat—mostly to warm up Jayne—we all dug into our meals, knowing that once we got started it would be hard to pull our attention away from the delicious baked macaroni and okra soup.
When we’d started to slow down, Thomas pulled out his notepad from his jacket pocket. “So, are you ready for a few updates?”
I wasn’t, because I was considering going back for seconds, but instead I nodded and took a sip of my sweet tea. We all sat forward, watching as Thomas flipped through the pages before pausing at one.
“I visited Lauren’s parents in Florida to interview them in person. They were happy to see me and still very eager to find their daughter.”
“She’s been missing as long as Adrienne has been gone,” Veronica said. “I imagine we’re both feeling the same sort of loss.”
Jayne placed her arm around Adrienne and squeezed.
“It was pretty heartbreaking,” Thomas continued. “Lauren was their only child. They kept her bedroom exactly the same as when she last left it, like they were waiting for her to return at any moment.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small stack of photographs and placed them on the table. “I took these while I was there.”
Jayne studied one of the photos, her eyes narrowing as if she was trying to see more detail. “Are all of those trophies for sailing?”
Thomas nodded. “Lauren’s mother said that her daughter seemed to love sailing from the moment she was born. And that Lauren was always happiest when on a sailboat.”
Jayne pointed to something in the photograph and turned it to show Thomas. “This large one—it looks like the trophy in the yearbook photograph. Is it?”
“Good eye,” Thomas said, making Jayne flush a deep red. “I thought the same thing.”
He pulled out his phone and slid his finger across the screen a few times before turning it around for all of us to see. Veronica handed me a pair of reading glasses.
Thomas continued. “I took a photo of a page of the yearbook so I wouldn’t have to bring the whole thing with me. This is the team photowith the national championship trophy. It’s similar to the one in Lauren’s room, but it’s not the same one. I know because I checked. The actual trophy is supposed to be with all of the other sports trophies at the college in a locked display case.”
“But it’s not,” Veronica said softly.
We all turned to her.
She looked down at her folded hands on the table. “After Adrienne died, I spent a lot of time walking around campus, needing to... to...feelher. As if by seeing the things she’d seen and loved, I could have a part of her back. And I suppose I was also looking for clues, anything that might tell me what it was she had tried so hard to talk to me about before she was killed.”
Veronica picked up the remains of her watery sweet tea and took a sip. “I went to see the trophy because Adrienne had been as proud of it as if she’d actually been hoisting the sails herself. When I couldn’t find it in the case where it was supposed to be, I asked the team coach. He said he’d allowed the captain to bring it home to show to his father, who was apparently critically ill at the time. The captain brought it back to his dorm, but before he could return it to the case, he claims it was stolen from his room.”
“Any idea by whom?” I asked.
Thomas shook his head. “At the time, they thought it was a prank and that it would show up eventually. But it never did.”
Veronica took Thomas’s phone and studied the yearbook photograph. “That boy—the one holding the trophy. I think I remember him. He might have been one of the boys who helped move Adrienne’s things when she and her roommate moved to the bigger dorm room.”
“Charlie Bleekrode,” Thomas said. “Sailing team captain. And Lauren’s boyfriend.”
The three of us turned to Thomas with expectation.
“And with a solid alibi. He was a senior, but he missed graduation to join a crew for a round-the-world sailing trip. He was somewhere around the tip of South America when Adrienne was killed and Lauren disappeared.”
He flipped to another page in his notebook. “Here’s where it gets interesting. I noticed that Lauren’s very extensive CD collection had been kept intact at her parents’ house. She had pretty eclectic taste in music. Everything from classical to reggae and pretty much anything in between. Her favorite, according to her father, was eighties electronica and avant-garde music, especially by a highly acclaimed performance and sound artist named Laurie Anderson. I’d never heard of her before I got involved in this case.”
“Nobody has,” I said.
Jayne shot me the nanny look she gave the children when they weren’t being nice. “She had that one surprise pop hit in the early eighties, I believe. A bit of an earworm, if I’m recalling correctly.”
“ ‘O Superman.’ Once you hear it you can’t forget it. Unfortunately. It’s eight minutes long—and if you can listen to the whole thing, you’re a stronger person than I am. I guess it takes a more... educated ear to appreciate it.” I raised an eyebrow.
Thomas cleared his throat. “Yes, well, her father said that one of the last concerts Lauren went to was in Columbia, at USC, where Anderson was performing.” Thomas paused. “She told her mother that she was going with her new boyfriend. And that ‘O Superman’ was her new favorite song because it reminded her of him.”
