The Never List (9 page)

“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
New York Post
, that he was guilty. The more she began to see Wall Street as an insiders’ club, with its own code of ethics that was very different from what Christine would have ever imagined, had she ever bothered to imagine it before. And what’s more, it was dawning on her slowly that her father’s illegal activities were par for the course for him and his business associates. And every time he saw her eyes open wide with that realization, he’d tell her to relax, that this is just the way business is done.

But Christine couldn’t accept that. Standing on her balcony at night overlooking the placid interior courtyard of their building, she’d cry quietly to herself, understanding that the comfortable lifestyle she’d always taken for granted was built on fraud and dishonesty. She couldn’t look at their beautifully appointed apartment, their luxury SUV, or her closet full of designer clothes without thinking about the dirty money that had bought them.

At brunch on Sundays at the Cosmopolitan Club, she sat with her mother in the crowded sunken ballroom, with its sparkling chandeliers, glistening silver service, and clinking crystal. Wearing the pale blue sweater set that matched her eyes, she gazed out at the elegant diners around her, all of them, she knew, listed members of the Social Register. Now she bristled at the way their practiced fingers effortlessly balanced the finest of china teacups and their frosted pink lips poised to form polite, tepid conversation. They presented themselves as so entitled, as if all this luxury were their natural right, but she wondered if they’d all gotten there the same way.

Nevertheless, she had her pride. Each weekday she’d set out for Brearley with her head held high, not saying a word to anyone about her suspicions. She looked straight ahead, unblinking, when she walked past the reporters massed outside their building each morning. But in secret she’d lock herself in her room after school and read the damning newspaper articles they wrote, her eyes burning with tears as she saw the truth printed there in black and white for the world to see.

In the end, as Christine would have anticipated had she had an inkling of how money really worked, her father made it through the experience relatively unscathed. His company paid a hefty fine to the SEC, and his high-priced lawyers managed to find a lower-level employee to serve as a scapegoat, thereby keeping him out of jail. The press coverage eventually died down, and her parents’ lives returned to normal, everything snapping automatically back into place. This sort of thing happened often enough in their social circles to be considered a minor nuisance, part of the game of business. A blip. An annoyance. A harmless setback.

But by then it was too late. Christine knew the truth, and she couldn’t move past it.

After struggling for weeks with the moral implications of her situation,
she made a decision. She had less than a year left at home, and after that she would turn her back on this privileged life. She would start from scratch and make her own way in the world. She would never touch her trust fund or take a dime of her eventual inheritance. She’d pack up all her sweater sets and become someone new.

Christine was proud of her resolution and would lie awake in bed at night thinking what it would mean for her. She knew it would be hard. Painfully hard. She knew that she was giving up a lifetime of comfort in exchange for hard work and uncertainty. But it felt good.

She decided to make it a smooth transition, for her parents’ sake. She maintained the facade of the perfect daughter right up until it was time to leave for college, living exactly as she had before, joining the Junior League, attending the Gold and Silver Ball, standing at her parents’ side demurely, shaking hands when asked, saying please and thank you, and smiling at appropriate intervals.

They never noticed the change brewing inside her.

When it came time for college, her parents naturally expected Christine to continue the family tradition and go to Yale. But even Yale felt tainted to her. Instead, Christine was determined to make her move. She closed her eyes and drew a line on a map far in the other direction from New York City. She landed on Oregon. It seemed about right to Christine—as far as possible from Park Avenue as she could get without landing in the Pacific Ocean.

Her mother was horrified that her daughter would be at school in a state where no one they knew even had a vacation home. But somehow Christine managed to prevail and even got a full tuition scholarship to the University of Oregon, thanks to the wonders of the Brearley exmissions office. Though her parents relented, they must have secretly hoped that after one semester she’d realize her mistake and transfer to the hallowed halls of Yale, where she belonged.

Once at school in Oregon, however, Christine felt enormous relief. She was exhilarated being on her own. She had managed to extricate herself gracefully from her protected world, and now she was embarking on a journey of total reinvention.

That first semester, though, despite her best intentions, she was forced to dip into her trust fund. She took as little as possible, living frugally, determined to repay it as soon as she could. She looked for her first part-time job. She lived on ramen noodles and canned tomato soup. And all the while, slowly and steadily, she turned herself into just another kid on campus, in jeans and a sweatshirt, living in a dorm room with linens from Target.

There in Oregon she was able to return to the blissfully anonymous state of her youth, before all the trouble broke out. No one there seemed to have read the
Wall Street Journal
articles about her father, or at least they didn’t recognize her last name. She never volunteered information about where she’d come from or who she really was. If asked, she said she was from Brooklyn and that her parents owned a retail shop.

It all might have turned out perfectly for Christine had she not developed an interest in psychology in her second year and, in particular, in her brilliant and dynamic psychology professor, Jack Derber. She had enrolled in his class by chance, to satisfy a social science requirement. But after the first day she was hooked.

She would tell us, her voice still bearing traces of that initial awe, how he’d virtually cast a spell over the classroom, how the students would sit rapt with attention, as he made Psych 101 sound like a new religion or at least a profound calling. He was charismatic, in a calm, hypnotic way, his voice soothing everyone into accepting ideas they’d never even considered sane before.

At the start of each class, he’d pace back and forth slowly in the front of the room, his hands clasped behind him, lifted only occasionally to stroke his thick, dark hair, as he formulated his
thoughts. The hall was full—visitors sat cross-legged in the aisles, and faculty from other departments stood in back. Several minicassette recorders had been placed near the podium. In any normal lecture, the students would have spent this time chattering, shuffling papers. But for Professor Jack Derber, they sat in a respectful silence, waiting for his smooth, full lips to speak, for his powerful voice to echo in the air. When he finally began, turning to face the crowd as his penetrating crystal-clear blue eyes squinted out above the tiered stadium seating, his words were inevitably polished, succinct, brilliant. His acolytes took notes furiously, not wanting to miss a thing.

Christine, in particular, was thrilled by him, staying after class to ask questions, working on special projects, meeting with him during office hours. She’d pull all-nighters on papers for that course, struggling to bring her text to life, to do justice to the overpowering phenomenon of his lectures.

He, in turn, had noticed Christine right away. She sat in the front row, and even though she’d worked hard to shed the gloss of her luxurious upbringing, something must have made her stand out. Something that revealed her high pedigree, that showed her exceptional breeding and poise. Something that suggested a certain delicacy of feeling from being cosseted her entire life. Something that he wanted to break.

Jack’s instincts were finely tuned, indeed, and he must have noticed she was trying too hard, that she was flustered in his presence. He must have felt that she was more vulnerable than even the freshmen. Maybe he could see she didn’t fit in with the others, that she was looking for a place in life different from where she’d come. And as a matter of fact, he had just the spot.

So midway through the semester, he offered her a highly coveted position: his research assistant. Christine was elated. Not only would she be working with one of the most admired professors on
campus, but the job’s stipend meant that she could stop taking her trust fund allowance. She would be financially independent for the first time in her life. It was a huge step for her, and she solemnly cashed the first check, proud she’d gotten this far on her own. She almost couldn’t believe it.

It didn’t take that long, however, before Jack decided Christine’s time had come.

Christine had always been too traumatized to tell us the details of how she went from being Jack’s research assistant to being his captive, but there she was before first semester finals, down in that cellar. We had always wondered whether she was the first—whether he had spent months waiting for exactly the right target, and then Christine had come along—or whether it was simply time for him to capture a fresh set of victims.

Either way, she ended up in that cellar, chained to the wall, spending the first hundred and thirty-seven days down there alone in the dark, surely wishing she’d gone to Yale after all.

For that was part of Jack’s vision all along—to watch as she tormented herself with her own profound sense of failure. She hadn’t been able to live on her own in the end. She hadn’t been able to make it outside the protective bubble of the überrich. Once she’d left the rarefied world of the Upper East Side, she had been exposed as weak and defenseless. And she would pay an awfully high price for leaving it.