“I’d appreciate it.”

“Meanwhile, I have a report.” She reached into her bag. “Some progress, and some theories.”

“You went to Pittsburgh.”

“I did. The reporter who broke the story about your parentage relocated there several years ago. He works for a gossip online site.”

“You don’t think he’s behind this?”

“No, and he’s been interviewed since you’ve started receiving the poems. The attack in Georgetown, Jonathan Bennett’s death generated a lot of media attention. Prior to that, your mother, and by connection you, generated some, primarily positive, but some negative, of course. Nothing’s ever all.”

“And some people criticized her for being unmarried, alluded she was promiscuous—which is a tame term for some of it—because she wouldn’t name the father.” Adrian closed her tablet, set it aside. “I didn’t know any of that at the time. After the story broke, after Georgetown, some of those went after her a lot harder. Ugly stuff in some corners. I didn’t know that either because she brought me here, had me stay here until that had died down or away.”

Calm and steady now, Adrian drank some wine. “She shielded me, in her way, and pushed back, pushed harder in her career. Nothing was going to stop her. I resented that once. Now I can admire it.”

“Stories cropped up again, from time to time. This particular reporter, Dennis Browne, tried reviving it, as it had given him a temporary career boost.”

“I know, but those were easier to ignore. She’s such a force, and she just refused to discuss it in interviews. Or really at all. When Lina Rizzo locks a door, it’s all but impossible to break it down.”

“I agree with you, which is why I went to Pittsburgh. She’d locked the door on your biological father, but someone breached it. How and why? I don’t like questions without answers. Is it old, settled business, or is it not? I wanted to find out.”

“And did you? Find out?”

“It’s a lot of years to protect a source, especially when that source has not only dried up but is no longer viable. And I can take angles the police can’t. He’s twice divorced, with three child support payments. His income is, we’ll say, severely diminished. And he likes his bourbon.”

Understanding, Adrian smiled a little. “You bribed him.”

“I did, with your mother’s permission, as she’s paying the freight. A thousand dollars—I had permission to go to five, but he was a cheap date—the thousand opened him up. The bottle of Maker’s Mark made him positively loquacious.”

Since it was there, Rachael spread a little cheese on a paper-thin cracker. “God, this is good. What is it?”

“Rustico with red pepper.”

“Amazing. So after the money and a couple shots of bourbon, I got the whole story. His source was Catherine Bennett.”

“I … I don’t understand.”

“His wife knew about Bennett’s predilection for attractive young coeds. She’d looked the other way, preserving their lifestyle, her family, their standing in the university, the community. But she learned about you. He’d fathered a child, and that, it seems, shook her foundation. From what I can piece together, rather than confronting him, risking divorce, she began to self-medicate—or upped her self-medication. She popped Valium, Xanax, and other drugs to get through it, but there you were, you and your mother. Yoga Baby on the cusp—maybe just over it—of becoming a household brand. She could tolerate the affairs, but not the in-your-face reminder he’d fathered a child outside of the world she’d so carefully maintained.”

“She broke the story,” Adrian mused. “He blamed my mother, me—never himself—but it was his wife who ruined him.”

“She would be the victim, as she saw it. And he’d pay for humiliating her. Your mother would pay. You’d pay. An angry impulse or calculated, I can’t tell you for certain. But she went to Browne. She had names, dates, she gave him names of other women—and he followed up with them, got the pattern. At the time, Bennett was having an affair with another student. A twenty-year-old. Maybe that broke Catherine, I can’t say. But you and your mother were her targets, and the headline. A college professor diddling students—not enough to rattle anyone really, other than those involved. The same professor fathering a child outside his marriage with a woman who’d launched her career with that child? His ticket, Browne thought, to the big time.”

“So rather than leaving him, she decided to destroy us, and him.”

“Hell hath no fury, especially when that fury’s simmered more than a decade. But you and your mother weren’t destroyed. You survived, you thrived. And Jonathan Bennett? Not just destroyed, dead. Dead after attacking a child, two women and a child, his own biological child. So instead of being a stoic, heartbroken victim, she was the wife of a serial philanderer, a vicious, violent drunk, a child abuser. And that light shined back on her, harsh.”

“You think she’s behind this? She’s sending the poems?”

“No, because she died, suicide by pills, nearly fourteen years ago. But you have two half siblings.”

“Oh my God.” She had to stand, to walk, to hug her arms tight.

“Nikki, age thirty-seven; Jonathan Junior, age thirty-four. Do you need a break?”

“No. No. Keep going.”

“I haven’t been able to interview either of them as yet. Junior’s off the grid, and has been for about ten years, when he took his inheritance—considerable, as his mother’s parents were wealthy—and basically vanished. I’m working on that. Nikki is a consultant. She travels to clients to devise business plans, revise current ones, streamline expenses, maximize profits. She’s worked for Ardaro Consultants for fifteen years. She’s in high demand.”

“She travels.”

“Often and country wide.”

“Omaha. The last one was Omaha.”

“She’s scheduled for San Diego, Sante Fe, and Billings on this trip, due to return to her home in Georgetown late next week. I intend to have a chat with her. She has no criminal record, she’s never married, has no children. She lives, apparently alone, in the house where she and her brother grew up. The house her mother’s money bought. She’s described as quiet, hardworking, pleasant. She has no close friends I could find, nor any enemies.”

“Keeps to herself. Isn’t that what they always say?”

“They often do. The brother has a few minor bumps. Drunk and disorderly, DUIs, a couple of assaults, which were dropped. No marriages, no children. He listed the Georgetown house as his residence until ten—nearly eleven years ago. He’s described as unfriendly, unsociable. He’s had a series of jobs, nothing stuck for more than a year, usually less. He did have some friends, and one, a recovering alcoholic, told me that back in the day, he always talked about building a cabin in the woods, maybe by a river or lake, and telling the world to get fucked. He may have done just that. I’m working on it.”

Adrian sat again. “I have to say I don’t think of the Bennetts as half siblings.”

“You’re entitled.”