Pros and Cons by Jenna Black Page B

arouse that level of suspicion without there being at least some kernel of truth. Heather was in danger, and I was the only person who had a legitimate chance of helping her.
    I headed out of the house not long after sunrise, slipping away before anyone else was up. It was still too early to hit the library, so I took my laptop to a nearby Starbucks and killed time there, drinking more coffee than was strictly good for me.
    I was the first visitor in the library that morning, standing at the ready when the doors opened. Reading about Fowler and his history had ramped up my sense of urgency, and I was eager to get to work.
    The librarian directed me to the fifth-floor archives, where there was a complete collection of Georgetown yearbooks. I grabbed the books from what I figured were the most likely years that Doug had graduated—assuming Linda had been right when she thought she recognized him. And assuming he had graduated. Then I sat cross-legged in the aisle and started flipping through the photos of the graduating classes, my photo of Doug on the floor in front of me for easy reference.
    The job was tedious as all hell, and I grumbled under my breath in annoyance that the yearbooks hadn’t been digitized and made searchable. I examined photo after photo, trying to find a younger version of Doug’s face among all those smiling twenty-somethings. A couple of times, I caught sight of faces that might have been familiar, but when I looked at them more closely, I felt certain they weren’t Doug. I’d started out with a stack of three yearbooks, and when none of them yielded results, I pulled down four more. I was getting stiff from sitting on the floor but preferred that to having to tromp back and forth from a more comfortable seat.
    After four hours of searching photos with meticulous care, I’d still found no sign of Doug, and it was looking like either Linda had been mistaken, or Doug had never graduated. My morning coffee had worn off, my eyes were dry and burning, and my butt was numb because I was still sitting on the floor. I stretched and groaned as I stood to put the latest set of yearbooks back on the shelf. It seemed like a dead end, and yet my instincts had led me here for a reason.
    Gritting my teeth, I reached for the first yearbook I’d looked at, planning to go through them all again, but as I was flipping through the book to get to the first page of pictures, something else caught my eye: a list of graduates who had declined to send in pictures for the yearbook. I considered smacking myself in the head for not having thought to check those lists sooner. Douglas isn’t the most common name in the world, so if I could compile a list of all the Douglases who hadn’t been pictured in the yearbooks, I would probably have a manageable number of names to research.
    There were no unpictured graduates with the first name Doug or Douglas in the book I was holding. However, there were two people with the surname Douglas, one Lucy and one Elliott. Obviously, Lucy wasn’t a candidate, but I figured I might as well take a chance and look for Elliott.
    I hadn’t thought to bring my laptop into the library with me, but I did have my phone. I looked up Elliott Douglas from Georgetown on Facebook and was quickly rewarded with some hits, the first of which showed a lovely thumbnail photo of a man who was unquestionably Heather’s Doug.
    â€œGotcha!” I said under my breath, thinking to myself that con men probably shouldn’t put up public Facebook profiles but feeling glad that this one had.
    I had found Doug—or at least, I now knew his real name. The question still remained: what was I going to do about it?

    Elliott Douglas turned out to have a very . . . colorful history. As far as I could tell, he lived a fairly ordinary middle-class life as a kid, and he’d graduated from Georgetown with the always-useful degree in English. It was after college that