Chapter 50 LAST ONE OUT
POV: RYDER
He had been on the main floor when they arrived.
He tracked the sound of them through the ceiling—not voices exactly, the building was too solid for that—but the weight of a group of people taking up space together with purpose. Five of them, by his count. He’d been aware of their table for three weeks.
He went back to his notes.
Day twelve.
That was what he’d found. Whitney had the eleven-day gap—the time between last normal contact and disappearance. What she didn’t have yet was what happened on day twelve. He’d uncovered it buried in a property transfer record from 2019, a document that had nothing to do with student enrollment except one of the names matched a name in the school’s financial aid records from the same semester.
The disbursement had been canceled.
Retroactively.
Which meant someone decided, after the fact, that a specific student was no longer enrolled. Not withdrew. Not transferred. Just—retroactively not there.
The student’s name was David Stephens.
He’d been sitting on the information for two days.
Not because he didn’t want to tell her. Because handing over information too fast, before the person had the context to understand it, made it dangerous. Whitney would run at it. Immediately and loudly. And the running would be visible.
He needed her to understand the whole picture before she moved.
He closed the property records and opened his Gazette notes.
The Justin Court variable was still unresolved.
Justin had said, “Library, tomorrow, I’ll find you,” then hadn’t come. Or maybe he came and found the Dawson aftermath instead and made a different call about timing. Ryder gave him three days before deciding Justin was still figuring out if he was going to share whatever he was carrying.
He could wait.
Patience was the resource he kept coming back to.
The Dawson text was closer.
Forty seconds. Two words in response.
He’d been working the timing backward against the faculty and admin schedules he’d quietly mapped since September. He had it narrowed to six possible recipients. Three were faculty. Two were administration. One was a student.
He’d be down to two by the end of the week if the pattern held.
He heard the girls moving above him.
The sound changed—the gathering-up noise, books and bags, the specific buzz of a group getting ready to leave. He didn’t time it. He just heard it, noted it, and kept working.
The main floor was mostly empty now. Dinner hour. The librarian at the desk was doing something on her computer that had nothing to do with library work.
The staircase from the second floor creaked.
One set of footsteps. Then another. Then a pause. Then the rest.
He looked up from his notes when the last one came down.
Annabelle.
She stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked at him.
He looked back.
Neither said a word.
She’d seen something up there. He could tell by the way she held still, the way her eyes worked when she was deciding whether to act on something right away or hold it back.
She decided to hold it.
Nodded once at him.
Walked toward the exit.
He watched her go.
Then he looked up at the second floor landing.
Empty.
Or at least it looked empty, which at Thornfield was a difference that mattered.
He gathered his notes. Capped his pen. Slipped the printed, folded property record into the inside pocket of his jacket where it had been for two days.
He was going to tell Whitney tomorrow.
She was ready.
He’d been watching her get ready for three weeks and she was there.
He just needed five more minutes of patience.
He turned off the reading lamp at his table.
Walked to the exit.
Paused at the door.
Outside, the campus was dark now. The security lights glowed in their yellow circles. Students crossed between buildings. Somewhere out there, the pieces of information waited—in annex folders, phone photos, property records, a notebook in Cameron Hayes’s desk with names in it—waiting for enough people to find enough pieces at the same time.
He pushed the door open.
Stepped out into the dark.
Tomorrow.