Page 99 of An Academy for Liars

Lennon—stunned, shaking—got back into the car.

They drove home in silence. Dante retired to his bedroom and Lennon to hers. But come morning, Dante was gone, back to Drayton. He left a note on the dining room table:I was called back to campus. I’ll be home in the evening. We’ll talk then. Breakfast is in the fridge.

Lennon crumpled the note and tossed it into the trash. After the events of last night, she had no appetite, no energy to do much of anything really except sit, listless, in front of the TV, thinking over all that had occurred last night at Eileen’s, the apparition of that boy with the slashed throat who had spawned in the middle of the road.

The phone rang. And kept ringing.

Lennon let it go to voicemail twice before, on the third call, she sprang up from the couch, frustrated, to answer it. “Dante isn’t in right now—”

“It’s me,” said Carly. “I’m in Savannah, in the bar of the Clark hotel. I have a flight out at eight tonight, so we have to meet quickly. When can you come?”

“Why are you here?”

“I did some digging on your boyfriend,” she said, and Lennon could tell both from her tone and her spontaneous flight to Savannah that whatever she’d dug up had been bad.

“I thought I told you to drop that—”

“You did,” said Carly, “and that’s precisely what prompted me to start sniffing around. You’re a terrible judge of character. Always have been. So I need you to come here now. Faster than now, preferably. Trust me when I say you’ll want to see this.”

“Give me fifteen minutes.”

“Make it five if you can,” said Carly, and she hung up.

Lennon got dressed, shut the door of her bedroom—paranoid even though Dante said he wouldn’t be home until the evening—and called an elevator to Savannah. Apart from visiting Eileen’s, Lennon had rarely left Dante’s house since she’d first arrived there at the beginning of the summer, and she found it so strange and dizzying to be out in the world again, with all of its noise and traffic, the trolley buses packed to capacity with tourists, the flocks of pigeons, and people thumbing texts into their phones.

Walking through Savannah, Lennon found that she no longer knew how to make her way through the world. She’d forgotten simple things, things she would’ve thought indelible, like how to move with a crowd of people, how to blend in. Now she felt as though gazes trailed her as she made her way through the streets. As if the people flooding the sidewalk along with her sensed—bristling—that she was not like them. And she felt the creeping paranoia that she was about to be outed or attacked or otherwise ostracized.

Lennon was relieved when she spotted the Clark Hotel. Inside she found Carly at the bar, nursing a martini and carefully avoiding eye contact with the guy who was chatting her up. Lennon willed the man away as she approached, a mental tug that pulled him—in a sharp and wooden movement—from the stool he sat on. He lurched out the door without paying his tab, oblivious to the bartender, who called after him as he went.

Lennon sat down on that same stool. “What did you find?”

“Hello to you too,” said Carly, gazing after the man with a furrowed brow. “What did you do to that man?”

“What do you mean, what did I do?”

“He left so abruptly.”

“And how does that have anything to do with me? I’ve never even seen him before.”

Carly narrowed her eyes. “You need to get better at gaslighting if you plan on making a habit of lying to everyone all the time.” She reached into a stiff leather tote bag resting on the stool to her left and produced a laptop. “I found something on your Dante.”

“He’s not my anything.” Not anymore.

“I would certainly hope not.” Carly opened a file on her laptop that looked like a cross between a spreadsheet and a PowerPoint presentation, complete with a photo of Dante, a professional-looking headshot, like what you’d expect to see on a university’s landing page. But as she scrolled lower, there were other photos too—grainy clippings of newspaper articles that blurred as Carly scrolled past them, and at the bottom of one page, a small baby picture. “It was tough, at first, to find anything on him. Our database at the firm is extensive, but it almost seemed like someone had wiped or locked every known record relating to him. What little I managed to scrounge up was almost entirely derived from secondhand sources, so bear with me.”

Lennon glanced down the bar to make sure no one was listening. Nodded for her to continue.

“The man you now know to be Dante was born in Harlem, New York, to a Loucille, or Lou, Fredericks. But he had a different last name before. I wish I could give it to you, but it’s been redacted from every file I can find.”

“Redacted? How is a name redacted?”

“I don’t know,” said Carly. “But what I do know is that everythingI gathered on him, I had to find by going backward. I started with who he is and tracked back to who he was. Somewhere along the way, it’s like he lost his name. He was Dante…and then as I went back in time he simply wasn’t. In every prison record, every file, every article, every letter and birth certificate, all I could find to identify him by was a blank space where his first name should’ve been.”

“What? That doesn’t even make any sense—”

“Let me finish,” said Carly. “We don’t have a lot of time, I have a flight at eight, and I think you’ll want to hear this. The father, Martin Fredericks, was out of the picture. CPS removed Dante from his mother’s home at age five—”

“Why?”

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