The Doubt Factory Read online

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  For Anjula

  PROLOGUE

  HE’D BEEN WATCHING HER FOR a long time. Watching how she moved through the still waters of her life. Watching the friends and family who surrounded her. It was like watching a bright tropical fish in an aquarium, bounded on all sides, safe inside the confines. Unaware of the glass walls.

  He could watch her sitting at a coffee shop, intent on something in her e-book reader, drinking the same skinny latte that she always ordered. He knew her street, and he knew her home. He knew her class schedule. Calculus and AP Chem, Honors English. A 3.9 GPA, because some asshole bio teacher had knocked off her perfect score over a triviality of how she formatted her lab notes.

  Smart girl.

  Sharp girl.

  And yet completely unaware.

  It wasn’t her fault. All the fish in her tank were the same. All of them swimming in perfectly controlled waters, bare millimeters from another world that was hostile to them entirely.

  Moses Cruz felt like he’d been watching all of them forever. But Alix Banks he could watch in that aquarium and hours could pass. Fund-raising events, field hockey tournaments, vacations to Saint Barts and Aspen. It was a safe and quiet world she lived in, and she—just like a beautiful neon tetra in a tropical tank—had no idea she was being watched.

  All of her people were like that. Just a bunch of pretty fish in love with themselves and how beautiful they were, in love with their little aquarium castles. All of them thinking that they ran the world. None of them realizing that only a thin pane of glass separated them from disaster.

  And here he was, standing outside, holding a hammer.

  PART 1

  1

  ALIX WAS SITTING IN AP CHEM when she saw him.

  She’d been gazing out the window, letting her eyes wander over the perfectly manicured grounds of Seitz Academy’s academic quad, and as soon as she saw him standing outside, she had the feeling she knew him.

  Familiar.

  That was how she put it later, talking to the cops. He’d seemed familiar. Like someone’s older brother, the one you only glimpsed when he was back from college. Or else the sib whom Seitz wouldn’t let in because of “behavioral match issues.” The one who didn’t attend the school but showed up with Mommy and Daddy at the Seitz Annual Auction anyway because sis was Seitz Material even though he wasn’t. The resentful lone wolf who leaned against the back wall, texting his friends about how fucked up it was that he was stuck killing the night watching his parents get sloppy drunk while they bid on vacations to Saint Martin and find-yourself-in-middle-age pottery classes at Lena Chisolm’s studio/gallery.

  Familiar.

  Like her tongue running the line of her teeth. Never seen, but still, known.

  He was standing outside, staring up at the science building.

  Ms. Liss (never Mrs. and definitely not Miss—Ms. with the z, right?) was passing back AP Chem lab reports. Easy A’s. Even when Liss was putting on the pressure, she never pushed hard enough, so Alix had let the activity of the class fade into the background: students in their lab coats beside their personal sinks and burners, the rustle of papers, Ms. Liss droning on about top-tier colleges (which was code for the Ivy Leagues) and how no one was getting anywhere if they didn’t challenge themselves—and Alix thinking that no one was getting anywhere anytime soon.

  Suspended animation was how she thought of it sometimes. She was just another student in a cohort of students being groomed and sculpted and prepped for the future. She sometimes imagined them all floating in liquid suspension, rows and rows in holding tanks, all of them drifting. Seitz-approved skirts and blazers billowing. School ties drifting with the currents. Hair tangling across blank faces, bubbles rising from silent lips. Tangles and bubbles. Waiting for someone to say that they were finished.

  Other times, she thought of it as being prepped for a race that they were never quite allowed to run. Each Seitz student set up and poised, runners on their starting blocks, ready to take over the world—as soon as their control-freak parents decided to let them get their hands on their trust funds. But no one ever gave them the gun, so they all waited and partied and studied and tested and added extracurriculars like volunteering at the battered women’s shelter in Hartford so they could have “meaningful” material for their college-entrance essays.

  And then she caught sight of him—that loner marooned on Seitz’s emerald lawns—and everything changed.

  For a second, when she first spied him, Alix was almost convinced that she’d conjured him. He was so weirdly recognizable to her that it seemed like he could only have emerged from her own mind. A good-looking black guy in a trench coat. Short little dreadlocks, or maybe cornrows—it was hard to tell from this distance—but cool-looking whatever it was. A little bit gangsta… and he was so unsettlingly familiar to her. Like some kind of music star, some guy out of the Black Eyed Peas who looked better than Will.i.am. Not an Akon, not a Kanye. They were too clean-cut.… But still, somebody famous.

  The more Alix studied him, the more he appeared out of place. He was just standing there, staring up at the science building. Maybe he was lost? Like his sister had been kidnapped and dragged to one of the whitest schools on the East Coast, and he was here to break her out.

  Well, the school wasn’t all white, but pretty close. Alix could think of maybe six kids who were actually black, and two of them were adopted. Of course, there was a solid helping of Asians and Indians because there were so many Wall Street quants who sent their kids to the school, but they were, as one of Alix’s friends put it, “the other white meat.” Which said all you really needed to know about Seitz. If you were Ivy-bound, and headed for money and power, Seitz Academy found that it could hit its diversity targets easily.

  But there was that black guy standing outside, looking in. Cool. Old-school aviator shades. Army jacket kind of trench. Looking like he could stand out on the grass all day long, watching Alix and her classmates.

  Was he a new student? It was hard to guess his age from this distance, but she thought he could be the right age for a senior.

  Just then, Mr. Mulroy came into view, striding with purpose.

  From the man’s attitude, Alix could tell the Seitz headmaster didn’t think the black guy belonged on his lawn. Mulroy moved into the stranger’s space. Alix could see the man’s lips moving, telling the stranger he wasn’t at the right school.

  Move along.

  Mulroy pointed off campus, his body language loaded with authority—arm out and rigid, finger pointing—ordering the intruder back wherever he’d come from, back to wherever black kids came from when they weren’t here on a scholarship or given a pass via Nigerian oil money into Seitz’s manicured world.

  Mulroy made another sharp gesture of authority. Alix had seen him do the same with new students who he nailed smoking. She’d watched them cringe and gather up their backpacks as the headmaster herded them into Weller House’s admin offices for their sentencing. Mulroy was used to making rebellious rich kids believe he was in charge. He was good at it.

  The black guy was still staring up at the school, nodding as if he were paying attention to the headmaster’s words. But he wasn’t moving to go at all. Mulroy said something else
.

  The stranger glanced over, taking in the man for the first time. Tall, Alix realized. He was at least as tall as the headmaster—

  The stranger buried a fist into Mulroy’s gut.

  Mulroy doubled over.

  What the—?

  Alix pressed against the glass, staring, trying to make sense of what she’d just witnessed. Had she really just seen Mulroy get punched? It had been so fast, and yet there the headmaster was, clutching his gut and gagging, looking like he was trying to throw up. The black guy was bracing him up now, patting the headmaster on the back. Patting him like a baby. Soothing.

  The headmaster sank to his knees. The stranger gently let the headmaster down and laid the man on the grass.

  Mulroy rolled onto his back, still clutching his belly. The stranger crouched beside him, seeming to say something as he laid his hand on the older man’s chest.

  “Holy shit,” Alix whispered. Gaining her senses, she turned to the rest of the class. “Someone just beat the shit out of Mr. Mulroy!”

  Everyone rushed for the windows. The intruder had straightened. He looked up at them as everyone crowded against the glass for a view. A strange, isolated figure standing over the laid-out body of his victim. They all stared down at him, and he stared back. A frozen moment, everyone taking stock of one another—and then the guy smiled, and his smile was radiant.

  He didn’t seem bothered at all that the headmaster was sprawled at his feet, nor that he had the entire class as witnesses. He looked completely at home.

  Still smiling, the stranger gave them a lazy salute and strode off. He didn’t even bother to run.

  Mulroy was trying to get up, but he was having a hard time of it. Alix was dimly aware of Ms. Liss calling security, using the hotline number they were supposed to use if there was ever a campus shooter. Her voice kept cracking.

  “We should help him!” someone said, and everyone made a rush for the door. But Liss shouted at them all to get back to their seats, and then she was back on the phone, trying to give instructions to security. “He’s right outside Widener Hall!” she was saying over and over again.

  The guy who had hit Mulroy had already ambled out of sight. All that was left were Mulroy lying in the grass and Alix trying to make sense of what she’d witnessed.

  It had been utterly unlike any school fight she’d ever seen. Nothing like the silly strutting matches where two dudebros started shouting at each other, and then maybe pushed each other a little, and then maybe danced around playing as if they were serious—with neither of them doing much—until maybe, finally, the shame and gathering spectator pressure forced them to throw an actual punch.

  Those fights almost immediately ended up as a tangle on the floor, with a couple of red-faced guys squirming and grunting and swearing, tearing at each other’s clothes and trying out their wrestling holds and not doing much damage one way or the other, except that the school ended up having discussions about conflict resolution for a week.

  This had been different, though. No warnings and no threats. The black guy had just turned and put his fist into Mulroy’s gut, and Mulroy was done. No second round, nothing. The boy—the more she thought about it, the more Alix thought he really was student age—had just destroyed Mulroy.

  Ms. Liss was still speaking urgently into the phone, but now Alix spied the school’s security team dashing across the quad from Weller House. Too late, of course. They’d probably been eating doughnuts and watching South Park reruns behind their desks when Liss’s call came in.

  Cynthia Yang was leaning over Alix’s shoulder, watching the slow-moving campus cops.

  “If there’s ever a school shooting, we’re toast.” Cynthia snorted. “Look at that reaction time.”

  “Seriously,” Emil chimed in. “My dad’s security could get here faster, and they’re across town.”

  Emil’s dad was some kind of diplomat. He was always reminding people how important his dad was, which was seriously annoying, but Alix had to admit Emil was right. She’d seen that security detail once when they’d partied at Emil’s summer house in the Hamptons, and those guys had definitely been more on top of it than Seitz Academy’s rent-a-cops.

  The campus cops finally made it to Mulroy. He was on his feet now, though bent over and gasping, and he shook off their help. Alix didn’t need to hear the words to know what Mulroy was saying as he pointed off campus. “Go get the guy who beat the hell out of me!” Or something like that.

  From where Alix was standing, she knew they’d fail. The puncher was long gone.

  A few hours later Alix heard from Cynthia that, sure enough, they hadn’t found the guy. He’d just evaporated.

  “Poof!” Cynthia said. “Like smoke.”

  “Like smoke,” Alix echoed.

  “I heard he was from the low-income housing over on the east side,” Sophie said.

  “I heard he’s an escaped convict,” Tyler said, plopping down beside them. “Some kind of ax murderer.”

  They all kept chattering and speculating, but Alix wasn’t paying attention. She couldn’t stop playing the incident over in her head. A shattering of Seitz’s model perfection that wasn’t supposed to happen, like a bum crapping in the reflecting pool near her father’s offices in DC, or a runway model with lipstick smeared across her face in a jagged red slash.

  As soon as the rent-a-cops had started questioning the students, descriptions of the intruder had started falling apart: He was tall, he was short, he had dreads, he had braids. Someone said he had a rainbow knitted Rasta beret, someone else said he had a gold-and-diamond grill—it quickly turned into a strange jumble of conflicting stereotypes that had nothing to do with the guy Alix had seen.

  For Alix, he remained fixed in her mind, unchanged by the shifting stories of her peers. He stayed with her through Honors English and then followed her out to the track. And even though she ran until her lungs were fire and her legs were rubber, she couldn’t shake the image of him.

  She could play the entire event back in her mind as if in slow motion. She could still see the stranger’s green army trench billowing around him as he squatted beside the headmaster. She could still see the guy laying his hand on Mulroy’s chest, soothing him.

  She could see him looking up at the class. She could see him smile.

  And the memory of his smile started her running again, pushing against her pounding heart and her ragged breath and her aching legs. Pushing against the memory of the stranger, because she could swear that when he looked up, he hadn’t cared about all the AP Chem students crowding around and staring from the windows. He hadn’t been looking at any of them.

  He’d been staring directly at her.

  He’d been smiling at her.

  And she still couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d seen him before. Familiar and frightening at the same time. Like the smell of an electrical storm looming on the horizon, ozone and moisture and winds and promise, swirling down after a long time dry.

  2

  AT DINNER, ALIX’S YOUNGER BROTHER, Jonah, wouldn’t quit talking about the strange event. “He completely pounded Mulroy. It was like some kind of MMA takedown.”

  “You weren’t even there,” Alix said. “He just hit him, and Mulroy keeled over.”

  “One hit, though, right?” Jonah mimed a punch that almost knocked his water glass off the table. He caught it just in time. “Epic!”

  “Jonah,” Mom said. “Please?”

  Mom had put candles on the table and laid out a tablecloth. Dinner was supposed to be a family ritual, the entire Banks clan gathered and undistracted for a whole half hour, instead of grabbing something out of the fridge and separating into different rooms to play on iPads and computers or watch TV.

  Mom had been on a kick for family time lately, but she was fighting an uphill battle. Dad had once again brought his tablet to the table, just to reply to one quick emergency e-mail, he said, and so everyone was engaged in the conversation while he claimed to listen: Alix, Jonah, t
heir mother, and half of Mr. Banks, workaholic extraordinaire.

  For Mom, it counted as a win; Alix’s mother took what she could get, when she could get it.

  Alix’s friend Cynthia was always asking what made the relationship work considering that Alix’s father was never paying attention and her mother always seemed a little isolated in the project of raising her family. Alix had never really thought about it until that moment. It was just the way things were. Dad worked in public relations and made the money for the family. Mom did Pilates and book clubs and fund-raisers, and tried to gather everyone together for meals. They mostly got along. It wasn’t like in Sophie’s house, where you could practically hear her mom and dad chewing glass every time they said anything to each other.

  “Nobody caught the guy,” Alix said. “He just walked away. They called security, and the police and Mr. Mulroy went out looking for him.” She took a bite of Caesar salad. “Nothing.”

  “I don’t like the town around there,” her mother said. “They should have security at the gates.”

  “The town around there?” Alix rolled her eyes. “Why don’t you just say you don’t trust those people, Mom?”

  “That’s not what I said,” Mom said. “Strangers shouldn’t just be able to wander onto campus. They should have a guard at the gate, at least.”

  “Fortress Seitz,” Jonah said, pushing a crouton onto his fork with a finger. “Maybe we can put in gun turrets, too. Then we can feel really secure. Put up some barbwire, right? Fifty cals and barbwire. Oh wait, don’t we call that prison?”

  Mom gave him a sharp look. “Don’t be smart. That’s not what we’re talking about. Seitz is hardly a prison, no matter how much you pretend.”

  “You only say that because you don’t have to go,” Jonah said.

  Mom gave him an exasperated look. “Someone just walked onto campus and assaulted the headmaster. I’d think even you’d admit there’s a problem. What if that had been a student? Don’t you think that’s a problem, at least?”