Even more puzzling was the after-after, because Paula hadn’t given up Clara Bellamy’s name until after Andy had kicked the shit out of Mike. Andy could take it at face value and assume that Paula had been impressed by the violence, but something told her she was on the wrong track. Paula was fucking smart. You didn’t go to Stanford if you were an idiot. She had played Andy like a fiddle from the moment she’d opened the front door. She was very likely playing Andy even now, but trying to figure out a maniac’s end game was far beyond Andy’s deductive skills.
She looked back at her notes, focusing on the item that still niggled most at her brain:
—31 years—interesting math?
Had Paula gone to prison thirty-one years ago while a pregnant Laura ran off with nearly one million bucks and a fake ID to live her fabulous life on the beach for thirty-one years until suddenly the diner video appeared on the national news, pointing the bad guys to her location?
Hoodie had strangled both Laura and Paula, so obviously both women had information that someone else wanted.
The mysterious they who could track Andy’s emails and phone calls?
Andy returned to the laptop and tried QuellCorp.com again, because all she could do now was go back and see if she’d missed anything the last twenty times she had looked at the website.
The splash page offered a Ken Burns-effect photo slowly zooming onto a young, multicultural group of lab-coated scientists staring intently at a beaker full of glowing liquid. Violins played in the background like Leonardo da Vinci had just discovered the cure for herpes.
Andy muted the sound.
She was familiar with the pharmaceutical company the same way everybody was familiar with Band-Aids. QuellCorp made everything from baby wipes to erectile dysfunction pills. The only information Andy could find under HISTORY was that a guy named Douglas Paul Queller had founded the company in the 1920s, then his descendants had sold out in the 1980s, then by the early 2000s QuellCorp had basically swallowed the world, because that’s what evil corporations did.
Theycould certainly be an evil corporation. That was the plot of almost every sci-fi movie Andy had seen, from Avatar to all of the Terminators.
She closed the QuellCorp page and pulled up the wiki for Clara Bellamy.
If it was strange that Laura knew Paula Kunde, it was downright shocking that Paula Kunde knew a woman like Clara Bellamy. She had been a prima ballerina, which according to another wiki page was an honor only bestowed on a handful of women. Clara had danced for George Balanchine, a choreographer whose name even Andy recognized. Clara had toured the world. Danced on the most celebrated stages. Been at the top of her field. Then a horrific knee injury had forced her to retire.
Because Andy had had nothing better to do after driving all day, she had seen almost every video of Clara Bellamy that YouTube had to offer. There were countless performances and interviews with all kinds of famous people, but Andy’s favorite was from what she believed was the first T chaikovsky Festival ever staged by the New York City Ballet.
Since Andy was a theater nerd, the foremost thing she’d noticed about the video was that the set was spectacular, with weird translucent tubes in the background that made everything look like it was encased in ice. She had assumed that it would be boring to watch tiny women spinning on their toes to old-people music, but there was something almost hummingbird-like about Clara Bellamy that made her impossible to look away from. For a woman Andy had never heard of, Clara had been extraordinarily famous. Newsweek and Time had both featured her on the cover. She was constantly showing up in the New York Times Magazine or highlighted in the New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” section.
That was where Andy’s searches had hit a wall. Or, to be more exact, a pay wall. She was only allowed a certain number of articles on a lot of the websites, so she had to be careful about what she clicked on. It wasn’t like she could just pull out a credit card and buy more access.
As far as she could tell, Clara had disappeared from public life around 1983. The last photo in the Times showed the woman with her head down, tissue held to her nose, as she left George Balanchine’s funeral.
As with Paula, Andy assumed that Clara Bellamy had been married at some point and changed her name, though why anybody would work so hard to create a famous name, then change it, was hard to fathom. Clara had no Facebook page, but there was a closed appreciation group and a public thinspo one that was grossly obsessed with her weight.
Andy had not been able to locate any marriage or divorce documents for Clara Bellamy in New York, or Chicago’s Cook County or the surrounding areas, but she had found an interesting article in the Chicago Sun Times about a lawsuit that had taken place after Clara’s knee injury.
The prima ballerina had sued a company called EliteDream BodyWear for payment on an endorsement contract. The lawyer who’d represented her was not named in the article, but the accompanying photo showed Clara leaving the courthouse with a lanky, mustachioed man who looked to Andy like the perfect embodiment of a hippie lawyer, or a hipster Millennial trying to look like one. More importantly, when the photographer had clicked the button to take the photo, Hippie Lawyer was looking directly at the camera.
Andy had taken several photography classes at SCAD. She knew how unusual it was to have a candid where someone wasn’t blinking or moving their lips in a weird way. Hippie Lawyer had defied the odds. Both of his eyes were open. His lips were slightly parted. His ridiculously curled handlebar mustache was on center. His silky, long hair rested square on his shoulders. The image was so clear that Andy could even see the tips of his ears sticking out from his hair like tiny pistachios.
Andy had to assume that Hippie Lawyer had not changed that much over the years. A guy who in his thirties took his facial hair grooming cues from Wyatt Earp did not suddenly wake up in his sixties and realize his mistake.
She entered a new search: Chicago+Lawyer+Mustache+Hair.
Within seconds, she was looking at a group called the Funkadelic Fiduciaries, a self-described “hair band.” They played every Wednesday night at a bar called the EZ Inn. Each one had some weird facial hair going on, whether it was devilish Van Dykes or Elvis sideburns, and there were enough man-buns to start an emo colony. Andy zoomed in on each face in the eight-member group and spotted the familiar curl of a handlebar mustache on the drummer.
Andy looked down at his name.
Edwin Van Wees.
She rubbed her eyes. She was tired from driving all day and staring at computer screens all night. It couldn’t be that easy.
She found the old photo from the newspaper to do a comparison. The drummer was a little plumper, a lot less hairy and not as handsome, but she knew that she had the right guy.
Andy looked out the window, taking a moment to acknowledge her good luck. Was finding Edwin, who might know how to find Clara Bellamy, really that easy?
She opened another browser window.