The Golden Heart Society

By the time we got back to headquarters, Vera Castellano had turned the briefing room into a war.

She had been there all night. I knew it before I had crossed the threshold; one learns to read a room by its smell, and this one smelled of burnt coffee and paper dust and a human being who has not slept. The long table was buried. There were file boxes on it, and file boxes under it, and open ledgers stacked three deep, and sheets of paper spread in drifts across the floor, so that she had made a kind of path between them, a narrow trodden channel like a deer track in snow. The whiteboard was covered in her small, fierce, upright hand. Two computer screens glowed at the end of the table, and a third, on a chair, showed a column of numbers scrolling slowly to nowhere.

She stood in the middle of it, with a marker in her fist.

She had not changed her suit. It was the gray one, creased now at the knees and the elbows. Her hair had come half out of its knot, and a strand of it hung beside her cheek. There were dark smudges under her eyes, like thumbprints. But the eyes themselves were bright and hard, with the dry feverish glitter of a person who has gone past tiredness into some other country.

"Sit down," she said.

She did not look at me.

…

I sat.

Leo took a chair at the end of the table. Ryder, who had come in behind us, slid into a corner and opened his laptop. Hannah Frost, whom I had not expected, stood by the window with her arms folded and an expression of fixed neutrality. A handful of detectives had drifted in and leaned along the wall. The door was shut.

"I've been through everything," said Vera.

She went to the whiteboard and tapped it with the marker.

"Everyone's been asking the wrong question. We've been asking, who would want these people dead? Which is a hell of a long list, because they were pieces of garbage and had been for years. So I asked a different one." She turned. "What do they have in common? Before they were any of this. Before the money, and the girls, and the show."

"And?" said Leo.

"I went back to the beginning. Birth certificates. School records. I was up till six." She picked a sheet of paper from the table. "Fifteen years ago, Arnold Kowalski was eighteen. Daisy Mallory was eighteen. Kaylee Rhodes was eighteen. Dominic Hargrove was eighteen. They were all seniors at the same school."

A small murmur went round the wall.

"Which school?" I said.

"Aldridge Academy." She laid the page on the table. "It's in Radnor, on the Main Line. The most expensive prep school in Pennsylvania. Tuition's sixty thousand a year. The alumni include two senators, a Supreme Court justice and half the board of the Federal Reserve. It's got a Latin motto and a football stadium."

"The four of them all went there?" said Leo.

"On the same floor of the same dorm." She smiled, without humor. "And that's not the half of it. The fifth name. Paul Hensley."

"The teacher."

"He taught history. He was also the faculty adviser to a student organization." She picked up a second sheet, a photocopy of something old and smudged. "Called the Golden Heart Society."

…

She put it on the projector.

The picture swam up out of the dark on the wall of the briefing room, slightly crooked and enormously magnified. It was a page from a school yearbook. It had the glossy, over-colored sheen of a decade and a half ago. ALDRIDGE ACADEMY, CLASS OF. A scatter of small boxed photographs, a headline in curling silver script: Clubs & Activities. And at the center, taking up half the page, a group portrait.

I knew them at once.

They had been posed on the steps of a handsome brick building, under an arch of ivy. There were five. In the center, a tall fair beautiful boy in a navy blazer, with a gold crest on the pocket: Dominic Hargrove, eighteen, with his hair falling over his forehead and the smile of a young god. On his left, a heavyset dark-haired boy with a long white scar beginning, even then, to run from the corner of his eye, a scar still new and pink. On his right, a thin girl with sharp bright eyes and a painted mouth, in a red dress. Beside her a freckled laughing girl with her hair in two long ropes of tawny curl. Behind them all, a half-pace back, a lean sandy man in his thirties, wearing a tweed jacket and a pleasant expression, with one hand on Dominic's shoulder.

Above their heads, tied between the pillars, hung a banner. It was made of gold cloth, with the letters stitched on in white. I read it aloud.

"Golden Hearts Give Back."

Nobody spoke.

"Charity club," said Vera. "Founded in their senior year. They raised money. They ran drives. They organized what the yearbook calls 'enrichment visits' to local children's homes. It was the kind of thing every rich kid did, to put on a college application. Dominic Hargrove was the president."

"Charming," said Leo, thickly.

"There are two pages on it. I've got the whole thing." She tapped a key, and the picture changed. A second photograph: five young people in garden gloves, smiling, carrying cardboard boxes toward a van. A third: Dominic with an enormous cardboard check made out to a charity. A fourth: all five at a long banquet table, arm in arm, laughing. They all looked so glad to be alive. They looked like an advertisement for the future.

I found that I disliked them intensely.

…

"The thing about charity," said Hannah Frost.

We all turned. She had not spoken before. She stood against the window, a slim figure with her white-blonde hair gleaming in the pale light, and her voice was dry and rather flat.

"The thing about it is, you can see how it looks from outside. It looks lovely. A bunch of beautiful kids give up their weekends to help the poor." She lifted a shoulder. "And the poor are very grateful. And everyone takes pictures. And the pictures go on the application. And the application is stamped accepted." She looked at the yearbook. "I went to a school like that. We called it 'service hours.' It was a transaction. You went, you helped, you got your hours. It never occurred to us to wonder what it was like to be on the other side of the camera."

"Hannah," said Leo.

"I'm only saying." She looked away. "I'm not defending anyone. I just—I know what it looks like."

I filed that away. I do not know why. There was something in the stillness of her face as she said it, a faint tight line at the corner of the mouth, that made me wish to ask her a question I did not yet have the words for.

I let it go.

…

"Where?" I said.

Vera looked at me, for the first time that morning.

It was a brief look. Her eyes met mine for perhaps a second, and slid away. But there was something in them I had not seen there before, a kind of hard, clear, remote respect, like the look one gives a stranger who has just pulled a child from a river.

"Where what?"

"Where did they go? On these 'enrichment visits.' To which children's homes?"

"I'm getting there." She changed the slide. "There's a list. Seven institutions, over two years. A Catholic orphanage in Northeast. A shelter for runaways on Girard. A state facility in Bucks. Four of them they went to once or twice, for a photograph. But there's one place they kept coming back to."

She turned and tapped the board.

"Fourteen times in eighteen months. More than all the others put together. The last entry in the log is dated the twenty-third of October, fifteen years ago. After that, nothing. The visits stop. The club's disbanded the following spring. There's a note in the school archive, from Mr. Hensley, saying that 'the members felt that their work had reached a natural conclusion.'" Her mouth thinned. "And then they all go off to college, and none of them ever mentions it again."

"The name," I said.

"Ryder."

Ryder's fingers moved on the keyboard.

…

I had expected something grand. I think we all had. I had expected, I suppose, the name of a hospital, or a famous charity, some great institution of which the five of them might be ashamed. But what appeared on the screen, in plain red letters on a white ground, was so small and so ordinary that for a moment I felt cheated.

SUNFLOWER HOUSE.

GERMANTOWN.

I read it twice.

It sounded like a place for children. It sounded like a place where one might find a rocking horse, and a tin of crayons, and a woman with a kind voice. It had the plain, faded, rather brave sound of an institution that had been founded by someone's grandmother in the days when people still believed in sunflowers.

"It was a children's home," said Vera. "Quaker. Run by a charitable trust. Founded in nineteen-oh-six. It had about forty beds. It took in orphans and strays, kids the state didn't want." She was reading from a sheet. "Closed twelve years ago. Funding collapsed, building condemned. The trust's dissolved. The property's held by a shell company that hasn't paid its taxes in a decade."

"Why this one?" said Leo.

"I don't know."

"Why'd they keep going back?"

"I don't know, Captain." She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, briefly, and I saw how thin her wrists were. "I only know that fifteen years ago five people from Aldridge Academy went to a children's home in Germantown fourteen times, and in the past nine months four of them have died, and the fifth is sitting in a walnut study on Chestnut Hill rolling a cigar. And I know I can't prove anything."

She dropped her hands.

"There's one more thing," she said.

…

It was a small thing. She said it almost carelessly, as one mentions a stone in one's shoe.

"Magnus Kane's files. The three cases. You remember they were sealed."

"Yes," said Leo.

"I went looking for the order. It was in a basement. It took me two hours." She took a folded sheet from her breast pocket, and held it up. "A standard non-disclosure seal. Signed by an administrative officer. Under the authority of the Office of the Commissioner."

My skin prickled.

"The date," I said.

"The date's the sixth of April." Her voice did not alter. "Dr. Kane submitted his final report to the Medical Examiner on the thirtieth of March. He died on the Schuylkill bridge on the ninth of April. Between those dates, on the sixth, somebody in the Commissioner's office sealed three open files. Six days."

She looked at me.

I looked back.

I did not say a word. I took out the small black notebook I keep in my breast pocket and the steel pen from beside it, and I wrote, in a neat clear hand, the number 6. I wrote it twice. I put a ring round it. The point of the pen made a small dry scratch on the paper, and the sound of it in that silent room was louder than speech.

"Leo," I said. I did not look up. "Get the car."

"Where are we going?"

"Germantown."

On the wall, behind Vera's head, the red words burned on their white ground like a brand.

SUNFLOWER HOUSE.