I miss Lanford, of course. I miss my old life. Benedict and I still stay in touch, even though we shouldn’t. We use an e-mail drop box and never hit the send button. We created an e-mail account with AOL (old-school). We write each other messages and just leave them in the draft section. Periodically we go in and check it.

The big news in Benedict’s life is that the drug cartel that was after him is gone. They were wiped out in some kind of turf battle. In short, he is free at last to return to Marie-Anne, but when he last checked her Facebook status, it had changed from “in a relationship” to “married.” There were photographs of her wedding to Kevin all over both their Facebook pages.

I’m urging him to tell her the truth anyway. He says he won’t. He says he doesn’t want to mess up her life.

But life is messy, I told him.

Deep thought, right?

The rest of the pieces of the puzzle have finally come together for me. It took a long while. One of the Minor henchmen that Jed shot survived. His testimony confirmed what I had suspected. The bank robbers known as the Invisibles broke into the Canal Street bank. In Todd Sanderson’s box, there were both last wills and testaments and passports. The Invisibles had taken the passports, figuring that they could be resold on the black market. One of them recognized Natalie’s name—the Minors were still actively looking for her, even after six years—and reported it to them. The box was in Todd Sanderson’s name, so Danny Zuker and Otto Devereaux paid him a visit.

You know where it went from there. Or you know most of it.

But a lot of things didn’t add up. I had raised one with Danny Zuker right before his life ended: Why were the Minors so consumed with finding Natalie? She had made it pretty clear that she wouldn’t testify. Why stir that up, flush her out, when the end result could very well be her running back to the police? I had at one point surmised that it was really Danny Zuker behind it all, that he had killed Archer Minor and wanted to make sure that the one person who could tell Maxwell Minor that fact was dead. But that didn’t really add up either, especially when I saw the befuddlement on his face when I accused him of the crime.

“You don’t have a clue, do you?”

That was what Danny Zuker had said. He’d been right. But I’d slowly started putting it together, especially when I started to wonder about the central question left here, the incident that started it all:

Where was Natalie’s father?

I figured out the answer to that almost a year ago. Two days before they sent me to New Mexico, I visited Natalie’s mother again at the Hyde Park Assisted Living facility. I wore a cheesy disguise. (Now my disguise is simpler: I’ve shaved my head. Gone are the unruly professorial locks of my youth. My dome gleams. If I wore a gold earring, you’d mistake me for Mr. Clean.)

“I need the truth this time,” I said to Sylvia Avery.

“I told you.”

I could see people needing new identities and vanishing because they’d been accused of pedophilia or had upset members of a drug cartel or had been battered by brutal husbands or had witnessed a mob hit. But I didn’t see why a man involved in a college cheating scandal would have to vanish for life—even now, even after Archer Minor was dead.

“Natalie’s dad never ran away, did he?”

She didn’t reply.

“He was murdered,” I said.

Sylvia Avery seemed too weak to protest anymore. She sat there, still as a stone.

“You told Natalie that her father would never, ever, abandon her.”

“He wouldn’t,” she said. “He loved her so. He loved Julie too. And me. Aaron was such a good man.”

“Too good,” I said. “Always seeing just the black-and-white.”

“Yes.”

“When I told you that Archer Minor was dead, you said, ‘Good riddance.’ Was he the one who killed your husband?”

She lowered her head.

“There’s no one who can hurt any of you anymore,” I said, which was only partially true. “Did Archer Minor kill your husband, or was it someone his father sent?”

And then she said it: “It was Archer himself.”

I nodded. I had figured that.

“He came to the house with a gun,” Sylvia said. “He demanded that Aaron give him the papers that proved he’d cheated. You see, he really did want to escape his father’s shadow and if word got out he cheated . . .”

“He’d be exactly like his father.”

“Yes. I begged Aaron to listen to him. He wouldn’t. He thought Archer was bluffing. So Archer put the gun against Aaron’s head and . . .” She closed her eyes. “He smiled when he did it. That’s what I remember most. Archer Minor was smiling. He told me to give him the papers or I’d be next. I gave them to him, of course. Then two men came by. Men who worked for his father. They took Aaron’s body away. Then one of the men sat me down. He said if I ever told anyone about this, they’d do horrible things to my girls. They wouldn’t just kill them, he said. They’d do horrible things to them first. He kept stressing that. He told me to say that Aaron ran off. So I did. I kept the lie up for all those years to protect my girls. You understand that, don’t you?”

“I do,” I said sadly.

“I had to make my poor Aaron be the bad guy. So his daughters wouldn’t keep asking about him.”

“But Natalie wouldn’t buy it.”

“She kept pressing.”

“And like you said, the lie had darkened her. The idea that her father had abandoned her.”

“That’s a horrible thing for a young girl to think. I should have come up with another way. But what?”

“So she pressed and she pressed,” I said.

“She wouldn’t leave it alone. She headed back to Lanford and talked to Professor Hume.”

“But Hume didn’t know either.”

“No. But she kept asking questions.”

“And that could have gotten her in trouble.”

“Yes.”

“So you decided to tell her the truth. Her father hadn’t run away with a coed. He hadn’t run away because he was afraid of the Minors. You finally told her the full story—that Archer Minor had murdered her father in cold blood while smiling.”

Sylvia Avery didn’t nod. She didn’t have to. I said good-bye then and left.

So now I knew why Natalie was in that high-rise late that night. Now I knew why Natalie had gone to visit Archer Minor when no one else would be around. Now I knew why Maxwell Minor never stopped looking for Natalie. He isn’t worried about her testifying.