Mudd Yoder, just about any Moorehaven student could tell you, was the founder of the North Atlantic Oil Company and moved to be the chair of the board of directors when he became a U.S. senator for the state of Massachusetts. In addition to its headquarters in Boston, the oil company had established an office in Maine as one of its outposts for Arctic oil exploration.

With the help of the house speaker and senate majority leaders at the time, Maine had attracted a number of oil and gas companies, who sought to take advantage of new wells in Canadian and Danish portions of Arctic waters. At Moorehaven, North Atlantic Oil Company, along with oil exploration parts manufacturer Kessler Industries, was the lead sponsor of the school’s oil and gas club, which also helped students gain internship experience at oil and gas or investment banking firms.

Mudd Yoder, Harvey also learned, was a good friend of Aaron Douglas. According to one Haven Maven article on Douglas, shortly after he was fired from Moorehaven, Douglas brought his successor, Nut McGillicuddy, over to the Yoder residence for dinner.

“I tried to make a pleasant evening of it,” Senator Yoder said in an email interview, “but I was sick at heart, and angry too, for it was the Kilpatricks [sic] that brot [sic] about the [Evader Academy] fiasco.” Of the Kilpatrick family, Mudd Yoder said, “I have never forgiven them.”

Senator Yoder was also the father of Prescott Yoder, currently running for Vice President of the Moorehaven student assembly. Harvey found that Mudd Yoder actually went to great lengths to get his son a place in the political body, even before this current campaign. Stories from the previous year claimed that Mudd Yoder pressed the parents of every other student in the assembly, including the father of the assembly’s student secretary. Mudd demanded that the secretary’s dad find a place in the organization for Prescott. “Senator,” the father was reported in the Haven Maven as saying, “I’m trying. We’re all trying.”

The senator’s tactics ultimately paid off when Prescott Yoder was made finance co-chair for the student assembly’s treasury council. He’d work under the Student Treasurer to tally and distribute the assembly’s funds. This was just one step toward the role he would ultimately aim to fulfill: class Vice President.

The job now was to find if there was any link between the Yoder family and the Kilpatrick incident. So far, they had one distinct tie, via Dean Candy’s mom, who had been asked to defend Twill in court, had he not been shot by Jimmy Diamond.

Given the high social status of Prescott Yoder at the school, it wouldn’t be difficult to learn about his circle of friends. Yoder was known to frequent Agee Hall on weekends, where the fourth-year students would drink and socialize. The dorm was made up of quads: four two-bed rooms encircling a living area and kitchen. Each quad occupied an individual floor of the five-story building.

This naturally made for a fruitful party environment and, because most of the residents were the children of influential parents, the dorm’s resident advisors conveniently found other places to be most weekends or would otherwise stay in their rooms studying.

After school one afternoon, Harvey and Kinzly decided to do a bit of stalking and see if anyone could provide any useful information about Yoder. The first floor Green Quad was typically the lowest rung on the ladder, in terms of social status. Standing in a light, but cold drizzle, the two student detectives knocked on the door to the quad entrance and were greeted by a scrawny first year in his boxers and a white undershirt. He gave a meager “hello” before the pair inquired about Yoder.

“I don’t know anything about him, but you could ask one of my quad-mates,” he supplied, indicating the dimly lit dorm behind him. The pair entered the common area, which was littered in notebooks and empty beer cans. “Hey, Don!” the kid shouted. “These dudes want to ask you something.” While they waited, the boy said, “He’s a second year, so he might know more than I do.”

A voice came from behind the door of a closed bedroom, “Be right out!”

Three old couches formed a semi-rectangle in the middle of the room. Two boys sitting in front of Kinzly and Harvey were watching a video on one of their laptops. Coincidentally, it looked to be footage of the most recent and last debate for student assembly Vice President between Prescott Yoder and Bernadette Ryan, running mates of Seagram Black and Walter Monroe respectively. Ryan began the clip:

“There’s legitimate reason for the CMT to be in existence, and that’s to gather information for our security,” Ryan was saying. “But when I see the CMT doing things like they’re doing at Launderie Academy—supporting discreet hazing—no, I don’t support that kind of activity. The CMT is meant to protect our student assembly; not to subvert other schools.”

While they waited, Harvey messaged Hack Klein to see if he was familiar with any connection between Prescott Yoder, or his parents, with Donovan Lanning or anyone else in his network.

Lean, tall and gregarious, Yoder was somehow one of the most popular second-year students at the boarding school, yet also one of the least interesting.

The academy lacked a dress code, but Prescott somehow managed to invent one for himself, donning drab olive-colored wool pants to match his drab olive skin. He typically wore white polo shirts with collars that featured a thin red stripe at the edges. A yacht boy claiming ownership of his parents’ yacht(s).

His jokes were poorly timed, though seemingly rehearsed, and he had set talking points for just about any issue, giving him something to say regardless of the topic. His arguments often sounded strong on the surface. The tone communicated a sense of confidence, even bravado. After careful dissection, however, it was obvious that the opinion therein was mostly mainstream dogma that the political right accepted as conventional wisdom.

All of it was what you’d get if you took the now deceased Josh Kilpatrick and put him through a filter made of yellow storm glass: contrived, dull and thick. Regardless of one’s own opinions about his take on the world, Kilpatrick’s perspective on politics was candidly inspired by having experienced and thoroughly dwelled on life in all of its messy and beautiful glory. It had an internal coherence that was tied together by principle, no matter how naive, rather than a strategic rhetorical edifice, like Yoder’s.

Yet, somehow, Yoder had managed to make his way to vice president of the student assembly alongside Seagram Black, an actor with a theater focus and equally questionable principles.

The video continued.

“I think I just heard Ms. Ryan say that she would do away with all discreet risk management and information awareness,” a morose Yoder replied. “And if so, that has very serious ramifications. This is serious business. Let me help you with some clarification, Ms. Ryan, about Launderie Academy. At Launderie, you had a wanton tyrant controlling the student assembly. The students reached out to us for aid. As a sister school in the Great Schools Association, we simply couldn’t stand by and let them suffer.”

“Let me just say, first of all, that I almost resent, Mr. Yoder, your patronizing attitude, that you have to teach me about Great Schools policy,” Ryan asserted to widespread applause. “I have been a student at Moorehaven Academy for three years. I was there when the students were detained at Launderie. Secondly, please don’t categorize my answers either. Leave the interpretation of my answers to the students of Moorehaven who are watching this debate.”

A tall, freshly shaven boy in a button-down shirt came out of a closed bedroom.

“Hi,” he said, reaching out and shaking their hands. “Don Jackson. Sorry about the mess. These first years don’t know what it means to have a clean house.”

“We’re trying to learn a bit about Prescott Yoder.”

“Ah, yep. Running for Vice President with Seagram Black. Top of his class, a model leader in the community, volunteers time on weekends.”

“Yeah, we know all that,” Kinzly said.

“What are you trying to learn, then?”

Kinzly looked over at Harvey.

“Let me ask you if any of these names sound like friends of Prescott’s,” Harvey asked.

“Shoot,” Jackson replied.

“James Leonard Twill.”

“The murderer?” Jackson asked.

“Uh, yeah,” Harvey answered.

He laughed, “God no. He wouldn’t be caught dead with a kid like that.”

“Donovan Lanning.”

“As a matter of fact, that kid Donovan was hanging around here a lot. Not sure I ever saw him with Yoder, but I didn’t get a chance to hang out around the older kids all that much. I tell you what. If you check upstairs, you might be able to figure that out. Let me take you.”

Jackson led Harvey and Kinzly into a dingy stairwell and up to the top floor of the building, then knocked on a solid blue door. The door opened just wide enough for the dress-for-the-job-you-want fourth year who answered to block the view of the powder blue room that lay behind him.

“Morning, Don. What’s up?”

“Hey, Brian. These kids are looking for information about Prescott Yoder.”

“Yeah, we don’t really gossip about fellow Haven Mavens, current students or alumni.”

“It’s actually for—what did you say this was for again?” Everyone turned to look at Harvey.

“It’s for—“ suddenly, Harvey became aware of his anxiety and drew a complete blank. The group stared at him expectantly. Harvey began to stutter before he was able to summon creative energy once again.

“I’m a protege of his father, Mudd,” the energy within him now said confidently. “To be honest, Mudd has been worried about him and worried he was hanging around with a bad crowd here.” The fourth year looked thoroughly uncomfortable at this point. “But I definitely understand where you’re coming from. I’ll just give Mudd a call and let him know. What was your last name again? Brian…”

The fourth year shifted his weight. “Hey, if it’s for Mudd Yoder, well sure. I don’t see what harm a couple of names could do.”

“Great. Mudd will be extremely grateful for your help, Brian—“

“Lafferty.”

Harvey asked, “So, did you ever see Prescott hanging around with Donovan Lanning?”

“The racing kid? Yeah, all the time. Prescott and Donovan Lanning would hang out here every weekend, drinking Johnny Walker Black, vaping and talking into the morning.”

“Do you know what they talked about?”

“No idea. Wasn’t exactly polite to eavesdrop. Also wasn’t easy to do without them noticing,” the kid laughed nervously.

“Thanks,” Harvey said. “Brian, what’s your number? I’m sure Mudd will want to call you to thank you.”

Lafferty smiled proudly, if awkwardly, and supplied his digits. This time, it was Kinzly’s turn to do the admiring.

***

They had now connected Prescott Yoder with Donovan Lanning, cementing him into the larger Twill narrative. Obviously, it still wasn’t enough to attach him or his dad so tenuously to the assassination.

Harvey and Kinzly separated to attend their respective classes with a plan to meet at the library in the afternoon.

About midday, Kinzly sent Harvey a text reading: “Dude. Can I tell Mo what we’re up to? She works in Technical Services and she’s telling me they can access metadata from email records all across campus. I pinky swear, you can trust her.”

“Are you kidding? I don’t even know her! NO,” Harvey texted back. The thought of word getting around about Harvey’s insane conspiracy theory caused his gut to toss and turn.

Almost instantly, Kinzly replied, “She is like a sister. She has the utmost integrity. If she fucks up, I’ll quit school and move to England. You know how much I fucking hate England.”

Harvey weighed the trust and affection he had for Kinzly, along with the ability to see what sorts of emails were coming from the people in the Twill universe, against the fear that word might get out about their investigation. His internal struggle was reminiscent of the lockpicking session in Custodial Services. Except hacking emails was no minor offense and, coupled with breaking into the filing cabinet, he was no longer looking at expulsion. He could end up in a probationary facility or worse.

However, the investigation was actually starting to make some serious progress. This was no longer some juvenile guessing game. It could clear a suspected murderer of his name. More importantly, if he were to prove that other Moorehaven students had framed Twill, it was possible that actual justice could be served.

“Sure. Tell her. See if she can find any emails coming from Donovan Lanning, Prescott Yoder, or Twill.”

***

By the time they met at the library, their group had grown to three and one of them had PDFs of metadata on Moorehaven students that could probably land them in jail.

“Oh my god, Mo. I can’t believe you managed to do this,” Harvey said.

“Kinzly is like a sibling. I’d do anything for them. They said you needed it, so I got it,” Mo said in her monotonous voice, smiling. “Plus, I download this shit all the time,” she laughed.

“Where did you learn to do this? Coding camp?” Harvey wondered. He realized that, since they had gotten drunk together, he felt a lot less tension in talking to her. Maybe it was something about a mutual exposure of their vulnerability. Maybe it was a bonding over the shared experience of inebriation.

“Yeah, right. They never taught me this stuff,” she said, suggesting she actually had been to a coding summer camp. “No, I learned it from the dark web.”

“But how did you know how to get on the dark web?”

“Uh, I looked it up on the regular web.”

Harvey suddenly felt stupid.

“I tried to ask my older brother, but he wouldn’t tell me, so I was like ‘fuck it, I bet this shit’s online somewhere,’” Mo continued. “I haven’t asked him for shit since.”

“Have you ever gotten in trouble?” Harvey asked.

“Once, last year in middle school I got caught phishing my teacher’s email account, but my parents cleared things over with her and I promised not to do it again.”

“Did you stop doing it?”

“To her? Yeah,” Mo laughed sardonically. She pulled out her phone and began swiping through the documents.

“What do you want to do with it?” Kinzly asked. “I mean, it’s not like the emails themselves. It’s just the metadata.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Harvey nodded. “The Wilson Committee has sections of this stuff. I want to see if any of the metadata from those guys matches anything in the report.”

Harvey walked the group over to an isolated table. There, the three Moorehaven students poured through pages of IPs, time stamps and email addresses shared across their various devices, when they were approached by a nebbish Hack Klein.

“Hey, Harvey. Don’t mean to interrupt. Got your text. Can I talk to you for a sec?” Klein asked.

“Is this Hack Klein?” Kinzly asked Harvey. Klein checked his surroundings nervously.

“Looks like Donovan Lanning really gave you a wallop,” Kinzly added, pointing to the scratch on the side of his head.

“What? Harvey, what’d you tell her about me?”

“Everything,” Kinzly answered, Hack Klein looking increasingly concerned.

“You told all of these people?” Before Harvey could get a word in, Hack continued. “This isn’t good. This is not good. I told you who we’re dealing with here. This is dangerous stuff and, if word gets out, I mean I’m not the only one who could get it. We’re all in trouble.”

“Hack, you can trust them,” Harvey said. Mustering confidence, “I trust them.”

Hack looked at the three students sitting around the large, polished mahogany table below the flickering neon lights of the P.D. Scott Library. He raised a clammy hand to his facial wound to feel it throb. Something within Hack that he wouldn’t have been able to describe led him to pull out a chair at the table and sit down. It was an inexplicable decision that would impact Hack Klein for the rest of his life.

“Right now, we’re making progress tying Prescott Yoder to Donovan Lanning,” Harvey continued.

“Well, then you’re gonna love this,” Hack interrupted, sliding his phone over to Harvey.

“What is this?” He stretched his fingers on the touchscreen to zoom in.

“It’s an article from a school newspaper in Montclair, New Jersey,” Hack explained. “Look at the picture.”

In the haunted image, Harvey saw three young, white students conspicuously standing around a line of mostly students of color. The headline read: “Voting Day: Who Will Be Homecoming King and Queen?” Upon closer inspection, Harvey recognized one boy as James Leonard Twill, or at least someone who looked very much like him, standing in line to, it would seem, vote for homecoming king and queen. Standing in the background, leaning against a pair of auditorium doors were Donovan Lanning and Prescott Yoder. They made an unmistakable, odd pair, with Yoder tall, gelled hair and carefully selected wardrobe of linen pants, subdued button-down shirt, standing next to Lanning, drawn-on eyebrows, red mop and worn Yale sweatshirt and jeans. The two together looked like grotesque gargoyles passing themselves off for human, while Twill was somewhere between a lost soul and a non-entity altogether.

“Is this them setting up JLT? ” Kinzly asked, leaning over Harvey’s shoulder.

“You mean making Twill look more shiftless? More unstable. Moving around, constantly transferring schools, switching jobs,” Harvey thought aloud. “Yeah, maybe. God knows. It could be something completely off our radar. Regardless, it puts Yoder directly next to Twill and Lanning.”

As Hack, Kinzly and Harvey continued brainstorming about what exactly the three Moorehaven students were doing at a seemingly random school in Jersey, Mo let out an uncharacteristically high-pitched yelp, “Oh my god. I found something.”

She slid a binder into the center of the table, a small plastic ruler at the top of a page, underlining a string of information. Below the line was her tablet. “These two things are the same. The pic on my tablet: an email from Donovan Lanning to this IP address. Then, in Commission exhibit number 2350, page 335 of Volume V, I found an email sent to the exact same IP address, located in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Under ‘Additional Information’ 1 in the Commission volume was listed ‘Person email [sic] at 9:09 a.m., to Mr. J. Asie.’ The exhibit didn’t identify the emailer. But now we have someone’s name to connect with the IP Lanning emailed.”

“So, Donovan Lanning emailed someone named Asie? I wonder if there’s anything to that. Let’s see if we can find any more info on Asie or his IP address in the report or the stuff Mo got,” Harvey said, now apparently leading a group investigation.

He wondered if he was just feeling comfortable around these kids or if he was confident about the project. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but he was grateful for the reprieve from his general sense of astriction.

***

A couple of hours later Kinzly found Mr. Asie—now spelled Aase—in Commission exhibit number 2266. An Office of Discipline report described him more fully as “JOHN AASE” of Plymouth, Massachusetts. The Office of Discipline report said he had gone with best friend and neighbor “LISA V. MEYERS” on a family trip to Boston, arriving there the night of March 13, 2024—just two days before Kilpatrick’s assassination. They spent the night at Aase’s aunt’s place. The next day, March 14, they visited her cousin’s apartment.

Based on the information they could find; Meyers was your typical upper middle-class student. Her mom was employed with the government nuclear reactor facility in Plymouth and her dad was involved with Army Intelligence.

On the night of March 14, Meyers took Aase to the Daily Grind coffee shop, where she introduced him to Jimmy Diamond and “the three of them sat at a table near the doorway and chatted.” Since Twill’s Andover friend Donovan Lanning had emailed Aase, Harvey wondered if Aase was curious later when Jimmy Diamond, someone he just happened to meet coincidentally, killed Twill days later.

Meyers said she knew Jimmy Diamond from middle school and had grown fond of this kid who would soon become Twill’s murderer. That was all the Wilson Committee needed to hear about that, apparently. The testimony ended there.

There was another mention of a kid named “JOHN WEST,” in the same Committee exhibits volume, but with no further information. No details regarding whether or not he knew Donovan Lanning. No illumination about the timing of his meeting with Jimmy Diamond. The Committee declined to ask any follow-up questions. Mr. Aase, or Mr. West, or whatever his name was, never appeared before the Wilson Committee.

The group of impromptu detectives sat exhausted over a table coated in papers, smartphones and laptops, nearly ready to call it a night. Mo idly opened a messaging app on her phone and suddenly blurted out: “Message center!”

The other three students turned sharply at another one of Mo’s outbursts.

“A what?” Hack asked.

“It’s a message center. It’s this thing that the CIA uses to throw people off a trail, to hide the source of a phone number or email address.”

“Where’d you learn that?” Kinzly asked.

“It was in this book I read in 7th grade about a cover up of the Kennedy assassination.”

While Kinzly and Hack stared at Mo with bewilderment, Harvey continued without a pause.

“So, in this case, the message center was—“

“John West,” Mo answered. “Lisa Meyers and Donovan Lanning were communicating to one another through West.” Mo took out a piece of paper and drew the connections: Lanning emailing West; West and Meyers driving to Lexington on March 13; West and Meyers meeting with Diamond the day before the assassination. “They were trying to throw any investigators off the trail by making it look like West was a key player here, when really he’s just there as a go-between for Lisa Meyers, Donovan Lanning and Jimmy Diamond.”

“That seems like a possibility to me,” Hack Klein offered. “But it seems like more detail is missing here.”

“For all we know,” Mo ventured, “John West isn’t even a real kid. He’s just a code Lanning and Meyers made up. A message center to cover the fact that they were communicating and working with each other. Then, in the Wilson Committee interviews, Lisa Meyers gave some backstory for this fictional kid.”

After thinking for a minute, Klein offered, “So, Diamond was from Plymouth, right? So was Meyers and, if West is real, then he was, too. And Lanning went to summer camp in Plymouth,” Klein remembered from previous years of friendship with Lanning.

“Holy shit,” Kinzly said thoughtfully. “Plymouth to Plymouth all the way through to Plymouth.”

“So, all we’ve got here is a model of a ‘message center’. We’re going to need more than that to connect these kids together. But this is fucking good enough for tonight. I’m burnt out,” Harvey sighed.

“My brain is fried,” Mo concurred.

“Thanks so much, fam,” Harvey said sincerely. “You had absolutely no reason for helping me and I really appreciate it.”

“What else the fuck are we gonna do?” Kinzly asked. “Homework?”

***

Harvey exited the building through a back door and continued along into the fine red mist. He strolled for several minutes and passed an obscure walkway adjacent to some dumpsters and a driveway beneath an overhang that cast the entire area in shadows. The place was so dark, Harvey almost didn’t notice that, sitting up against a wall on top of a sleeping bag was a human form. Harvey walked up and handed the man a five-dollar bill.

“Thank you. God bless you,” he said, putting the bill away somewhere Harvey couldn’t see.

“No problem. You too,” Harvey replied. As he turned to walk away, he realized that he was behind the quads that Yoder and Lanning met at so frequently. He decided to turn back. “Hey, are you here by this building a lot?”

“Yeah,” the man said with suspicion.

“You haven’t seen any of these kids hanging around before, have you?”

Harvey showed the man photos of James Twill, Donovan Lanning and Prescott Yoder.

“Yeah. That one boy is the kid the news said shot that other kid.”

“Yeah,” Harvey said. “Okay, thanks.”

He turned to be on his way, when the man continued, “I saw him here talking to that other one. Let me see your phone again.” Harvey handed the phone to the man, who looked like he could have been anywhere between 20 and 40. Harvey really had no idea how old anyone was past 18 or so. The guy brought the picture of Prescott Yoder up to his face and squinted.

“I saw these two talking while I was here. If I’m being honest, I’m an addict. No matter how hard I try to quit the stuff, I just keep going back and, well, I’m clean now, but about a year ago—it was January I remember because the news said there was going to be a big snowstorm, and that was when I found this place right here. It was late at night and this black car pulls up and that tall kid,” he pointed his finger back down at the picture of Yoder, “he walked passed me and said how it was a cold night and then walked over there,” he indicated a spot about 10 to 15 feet away.

“Then, about five to 10 minutes later, the other kid, who they say shot the Kilpatrick boy, he shows up. They talk for, I dunno, 10 minutes. The tall one hands the other one a roll of money or something that looked like a roll of money and they go their separate ways.”

Harvey stood stunned.

“Then I got up after I was done shooting the dope and grabbed a piece of bright yellow paper that second boy dropped and rolled my dope up in it.”

Harvey wondered if the paper might have been one of Twill’s Fair Play for Evader flyers.

“Wow,” Harvey said. “I can’t believe my luck. What’s your name? You mind if I write it down?”

“Vern Bowlen,” the man answered.

“Where do you stay at?”

“When there’s room at the shelter in Lawrence, I stay there. Sometimes over at the park by the creek.”

Harvey pulled the remaining cash out of his wallet, totaling $57, and handed it to him. This was all he had budgeted himself for the rest of the week, but Harvey thought he was okay with the decision.

As he walked quietly back to his dorm, he remembered that strange fact he’d picked up early on in the investigation: the ice skating rink. On the day of the Kilpatrick assassination, Donovan Lanning wasn’t going to make it to some race for the auto club because he was going to be ice skating—in Plymouth.

“Plymouth to Plymouth all the way through to Plymouth,” Harvey thought to himself.