"Do you still have your fake ID?"

There's a rare moment of silence on the other end of the line as my sister's  brain processes my question.

"Uhm, yeah," she finally says. "But you know that you're legal for pretty much everything now."

"I do. Thanks," I reply, anxious to get to why I'm calling. "This isn't like that. It's more of an undercover thing."

"Ooh, undercover," Lark says and I can now tell that I have her attention. "Now you're talking. What do you need? A little spying? Do you want me to tail someone?"

I like her enthusiasm, but unfortunately it's misplaced and I'm now almost reluctant to reveal the truth. But I can't do this without her, so I take a deep breath and just say it.

"I need you to go to the library and do a little research for me."

The phone goes silent again and I worry I lost her.

"Hey, Lark. Are you still there?" I ask.

"Yeah," she replies with a lot less enthusiasm. "I'm here. But did you just say library and . . . research?"

My sister has never been the bookish kind, but she says the words like they're contagious. I need to turn this around or she'll find some excuse to get out of it.

"Uh-huh. But listen. Last night, I had a very strange . . . I guess you could call it an encounter in one of the oldest buildings on campus. And I need to find out more about its history," I say, blurting it all out in one breath.

"What kind of encounter?" asks Lark, once again focusing on the wrong thing.

I'm glad she can't see me balling my fist in frustration.

"That's not important unless I can somehow tie it to . . . well, anything that you can find. But I'll tell you later, I promise," I say, hoping that this is enough to convince her.

"Okay, but why me? You actually like this type of stuff. Don't you?" she asks, not making any of this easy.

But I guess I deserve the runaround for not letting her stay with me. The poor girl had to get an actual job to support herself. I'm a true monster!

Holding in a snicker at the thought, I instead give her my best attempt at a summary.

"The building has contentious ties to people who are still alive and at the university, and if I start poking around,
some of them might think I'm doing it for the wrong reasons," I say, trying to reveal only as much as necessary.

Lark sighs. "Fine. I'm in. What do you need for me to do?"

"I'll text you a list of names. Start there.  And make sure you use your fake ID when you enter the library and when you sign in at the archives," I say, recalling the usual process. "Most of what I'm looking for is from the late 1800s so unless Packard has digitized it's collection, you'll be looking for either hard copies of documents or, more likely, microfiche."

"Micro what?"

I shake my head. "Fiche. Listen, there are archivists and reference librarians who will be happy to help. You've got this."

"Are you sure you can't do this?" she asks in a last ditch attempt . "You're the expert --"

"I might be new on campus ,but my name will be recognized. No one knows you here, especially with using a fake name," I say.

She pauses. "You're really worried about this, aren't you?" Lark asks, turning serious. "What do you think I'll find that's so dangerous?"

"I don't know," I lie. "But keep this in the down low as much as possible and send me what you find as soon as you can. I'm texting you the names now."

Ending the call, I send my sister the list of everything I remember Galina told me that could be used to find more information about the building.

Duchess Hall on PU campus previously an orphanage/school for girls

Serafina (surname ?) great-great ? ancestor of Clayton Ward

^ Her second husband was ? Packard (widower)

^ His daughter was Annabeth Packard who married William Calhoun

^ He's grandfather to current PU Pres Douglas C.

Knowing that my anxiety over getting information about any of these won't let me focus on anything else until Lark calls me back, I head to campus. I doddle around outside enjoying the nice autumn weather for a bit before I stumble across a showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the student center.

I finish my cone of mango gelato and head inside, realizing too late that this isn't just a simple showing of the cult classic movie. It's the full-blown interactive experience.

This musical-comedy-horror is probably older than my parents and I've seen it several times on some streaming service or another. To call it camp would be an understatement. Loosely parodying Frankenstein, the mad scientist character in this version turns out to be a cross-dressing alien!

While the story is absolutely bananas, the costumes and the music are phenomenal. Still, I'm apprehensive about the tradition of audience participation after seeing the costumed students in the packed auditorium, but I find an empty seat in the back and hope to go unnoticed.

Over the next hour-and-a-half, we sing and dance along with the amateur shadow-cast to crowd favorites like "The Time Warp," but renditions of songs like "Touch Me" and "Planet Hot Dog" are a little too risqué for me and I stay seated for those.

Having nearly forgotten about why I came here to begin with, I'm heading out of the theater when I glance at my phone and see a missed call from Lark from ten minutes earlier. Calling her back, I don't waste time on pleasantries.

"What did you find?"

"Hey to you, too," she says, not appreciating my attempt at streamlining the conversation.

Leaning against the student center's wall inconveniently next to a trash can that reeks of popcorn, I try again. "Sorry. Hey," I say.

"All righty then," Lark says, perking up. "But before I forget, if anyone asks I'm a grad student doing my dissertation on orphanages that were turned into academic buildings."

I furrow my brows at the thought of my sister working on a doctorate. "That is really specific."

She laughs. "That's what the librarian who helped me said. I actually had to promise to send the finished paper to her before she would pull out the micro-whatevers."

"That'll be quite a wait," I say, imagining an eager septuagenarian who smells like old manuscripts, wondering how many years the librarian has left. "But you have me on pins. Spill."

"Okay, so there wasn't a lot on the orphanage that I could find, which you can't really get mad it me for given how long ago it was supposedly built," Lark begins and I can feel my heart sink. But she quickly continues. "Duchess Hall was, however, named after Serafina, Duchess of Varduz, so you were right about her involvement."

Things are looking up. "Go on," I urge as a group of students in full Rocky Horror getup walks past me.

"There were a lot of newspaper articles about Annabeth Packard, though, who seemed to be very popular at the time. I didn't have a chance to read through all of it, but I have scanned copies of everything that I'll send over to you in a minute."

"Nice," I say, knowing what my evening will be spent doing. "Anything else?"

"You probably know that Duchess Hall nearly burned down in 1928," Lark says, sounding like she's picking off facts from a notebook. "I went as far as the 1940s, but my back started hurting and—"

"You did great," I say, thankful that she got any new intel at all. "Send me what you have and we'll take it from there."

Lark must have had everything queued up already because no sooner do I end the call do my notifications start pinging. One-by-one, the PDF documents start arriving in my Dropbox account.

"Bingo," I whisper to myself, ready to click on the first link when someone stops next to me and casts a shadow on my screen.

"Hello, Dr. Milligan."

I look up at the aloof greeting, expecting to see one of my students, but I'm surprised to find Clayton standing in front of me. Dressed in jeans and a hoodie with PACK U and a wolf silhouette on it, no wonder I mistook him for a coed. He's even sipping soda through a straw from a large cup in his hand.

"Erm, hello, Dean Ward," I say, mirroring his formality as a student performer in Magenta's maid costume walks by. "What . . . what are you doing here?"

Clayton motions after the girl. "I'm here to support my students," he says before leaning a little closer as if he's about to tell me a secret. "Plus, I love this show. Wouldn't miss it for the world. You?"

I'm a little irked that he happens to like something that I like, so I'm less forthcoming. "I had some time to kill," I say, anxious to go home and dive into Lark's find, but also getting a weird rush from seeing Clayton in such a casual setting.

Feeling a warmth creeping into my cheeks at the thought, I self-consciously tuck a lock of my hair behind my ear and attempt an escape. "Sorry to run, but I have to go."

"I can give you a ride," he says after me.

Stopping, I turn just enough to reply. "Oh, no. It's fine. I can walk."

But Clayton points toward the glass doors at the entry. "Have you looked outside lately? It's pouring."

Sure enough, while we'd been watching the show, it had begun to rain and now it was coming down in buckets. And while it went against my better judgement to accept Clayton's offer, I also wasn't keen on getting soaked to the bone.

Only when we're sitting in his SUV do I notice that someone is missing.

"Carlos have the afternoon off?" I ask, recalling how in our last ride in this car Clayton's butler did the driving, while today he's behind the wheel.

"The man has a life too, you know," he says, starting the car and pulling away from the curb. Apparently 'fire lane - no parking' restrictions don't apply to Clayton Ward. And I bet they also don't apply to Douglas Calhoun.

Thinking about Calhoun reminds me of Lark's documents again and I glance at my phone. The links have stopped coming, but there are more than a dozen, which are sure to provide me with some new information.

I can't resist peeking into one just to see what it is. An old newspaper article with a black and white photograph of a charred building and tiny text fills my screen. I'm going to need my computer to read any of this, but curiosity is getting the better of me and I click into another document.

This one looks like it came from a women's magazine and most of the page is covered with an advertisement for washing powder using post-World War II imagery. I'm about to close this one too when something in the column of text on the side catches my eye.

"Holy moly," I whisper, bringing the screen closer to see if I'm reading it correctly.

"What is it?" Clayton who'd been ignoring me as much as I'd been ignoring him during the drive snaps his head toward me.

Instead of answering right away, I dig into my jacket pocket and pull out a folded piece of paper. It's the flyer I had found on my door earlier for Juliette Kaczmarek's search fundraiser.

"So you know of Annabeth Packard, right?" I ask rhetorically since Clayton is obviously familiar with the woman whose legacy in founding this university he's fighting.

"What have you been looking into, Barlow?" he asks while side-eyeing me.

"That's irrelevant. What might be very relevant is that Annabeth's son married a woman called Catherine Cox. She hosted lavish parties and was known in social circles at the time as Cece, according to an article here in a Woman's Day magazine from 1946. Did you know any of that?"

Clayton shakes his head as he comes to a stop sign. "No. Why would I know anything about Annabeth's daughter-in-law," he says, looking at me.

"No reason," I say, holding up the creased flyer so he can see the writing on it. "Other than if you had, you might have made this connection. See Jules' parents name there? What jumps out at you?"

I watch as Clayton's expression goes from apathetic to shocked.

"Her mother . . . Cate Cox-Kaczmarek," he whispers. "You mean . . . ?"

I nod. "Yeah, I do. It's a long shot, but unless it's a heck of a coincidence, your missing student might very well be related to Cece Cox through her maternal line," I say proudly. "And if she is, then that means that she's directly related to Cece's son: Douglas Calhoun himself!"