Fool's Bluff

by Lee Gregg

  “Wes was just playing. That’s just stuff brothers do. It’s not that big a deal,” Drew said, picking up a photo album.

  “Yeah, it’s not that big a deal until someone’s throat gets slashed.” Without looking at him, she added, “Put that back and sit your skinny butt down over here.”

  “Overdramatic, much?” Drew took a step and stopped in front of the full length mirror, twisting half his body around while he examined his reflection. “My butt’s not that skinny, is it? I’ve been working on my glutes.”

  “Sit, you dork! And I’m not being overdramatic. Those Swiss Army knives are incredibly sharp. I almost cut my finger off once just trying to open up the blade. What if Ben had suddenly woken up and lifted his head? Wesley could have done some real damage!”

  Drew arched an eyebrow and cocked his head. “Yeah. You, a drama queen? Never.” He sat down and looked at the screen. “Alright, alright. What am I doing?”

  “I uploaded half my photos onto that computer and half onto this one. So you go through your half and I’ll go through mine.”

  Drew shook his head as he browsed through the album on the screen. “Two hundred and eighty-seven photos? Are you kidding me? You’re supposed to take your finger off the button after you’ve captured an image.”

  “That’s just from the first night, too,” Penelope said with pride. “Listen, I’m telling you, there is something off with that kid. I mean, how were you and Ben just following him around town while he was pointing a rifle at everyone, anyway? That was so crazy. Even I was speechless, and that doesn’t happen easily.”

  “Oh, ha. Ben took the ammo out of the rifle when Wes wasn’t looking while we were up on the mountain.”

  “Drew, what are you doing? You can’t just scroll through them so quickly. That’s why you’re here using the big screen. Make sure they’re full size before you pass on it.”

  “Alright, alright. Geez. I would’ve packed a toothbrush if I’d known you had this in mind. Anyway, Wes isn’t that bad. He just gets a bit crazy sometimes. He had a super tough childhood and he’s been through a lot. It’s not easy being a small guy, you know.”

  “That boy is not right in the head, Drew. And it’s a good idea to pack a toothbrush with you wherever you go, anyway.”

  “What are you saying?” Drew looked at Penelope with panic in his eyes. He exhaled into a cupped hand and sniffed while he glanced up at her for reassurance.

  “I’m saying that you can only excuse someone’s behavior for so long. Actions have consequences regardless of any deep-rooted issues that may have caused them,” she said, her eyes focused on her screen.

  “I don’t think Wes would actually hurt Ben, despite all the stuff he says. Wes is pretty harmless.”

  “It’s always the people who are closest to you who cut you the deepest.”

  “Whoa. What’s this?” Drew pointed to a photo on his screen.

  Penelope looked over. “That’s exactly what we’re looking for. Good job, Drew. Only two hundred and seventy-two more to go.”

  * * *

  Dan knew the question was coming, that Sam would ask it, and that it would happen today, but still, he wasn’t prepared. A small part of him had hoped that she had missed hearing the Chief mention Aunt Marjorie during the interview, that he would never have to address the issue with Sam. But it was the same part of him that hoped to win the lottery every time he played, which was about once every five or six years when the jackpot was too big to ignore. He knew the chances of things going his way in either situation were about the same. Next to nothing. But still, he had carried a tiny glimmer of hope that maybe luck would be on his side for once. And now that hope was dead.

  He had stolen a glimpse of Sam after the Chief had mentioned Aunt Marjorie, but her face hadn’t given anything away. No look of surprise, no indication of confusion, no sign of interest in the least. Her eyes had stayed on the Chief and her expression had remained neutral. The kid was good, he thought. My kid was good.

  Dan’s realization of his daughter’s adeptness at controlling her emotions left him with mixed feelings of pride and fear. Would she ever use that skill to deceive him? Could she? No, he was being paranoid. He and Elaine knew every detail of Sam’s life. Not because they had demanded it, but because she had chosen to share everything with them. She was still the same little girl who readily confessed to sneaking into Halloween candy hauls before telltale wrappers were found in the trash or chocolate stains around her mouth were even noticed. Dan looked at his baby girl and saw the same tiny human who had taken her first steps right where she was sitting now. Sam was still a child. His child. The one he had sworn to protect at all costs.

  “Sam, you’re too young to fully understand the situation. You need to know that my first priority is to protect my family. I’ve always tried to keep you and your mom safe.” He drew a deep breath and watched his daughter closely. Maybe, just maybe, this would be enough.

  “You say that I’ve changed since the shooting, but I’m not the only one. You’re never around anymore. You can’t be working all the time, otherwise you wouldn’t be telling Chief Constable Joe that you’re visiting some relative who doesn’t exist. What are you doing?”

  Dan let out the breath he was holding. There was no avoiding it now, he thought. He would have to come clean with his daughter and the best way to do it would be to just rip the band-aid off.

  “Aunt Marjorie is my mom’s sister and she is very sick. I was in Vancouver to visit her and to talk with Shelly.”

  Dan saw his daughter’s eyes narrow as she cocked her head abruptly in confusion. “What? Who’s Shelly?”

  “Shelly is my sister. She is a couple of years older than me. She’s married with one child. I have a brother, Patrick. He’s the oldest, not married, no kids. My parents really are gone, but some of my mom’s siblings are alive.”

  He watched the faint lines between Sam’s eyebrows grow into deep creases. “But…that doesn’t…you said that you didn’t have any family?”

  “Sam, I’m not close with them. Before this, I hadn’t spoken to any of them for almost twenty years. It was just easier to tell people that I didn’t have family than to explain why I never spoke to mine.”

  “But why? What happened?”

  Dan hesitated. “This isn’t easy for me to talk about. It’s part of my history, but I just...I wish it could just stay in my past. Do you know what I mean? At the time, I felt that it was better for me, and then better for your mom and you, to stay away from them. It just wasn’t a healthy family dynamic.”

  He felt the tension in the room relax as Sam’s face softened. Good, he thought. She was being receptive, which meant she would also be less demanding. He hoped that it meant that this conversation was nearing its end.

  “What exactly does that mean, Dad?”

  “Sam,” he said, trying to stop frustration from creeping into his voice, “I’d really rather not get into it too much.” He gave her a stern look as if to say “we’re done here” and felt a pang of disappointment as he watched her press her lips together. She wasn’t done yet.

  “I think you owe me a better explanation than that, Dad. They’re my relatives too, and I think I deserve to know why I’ve never known about them. I mean, I get it. It must have been painful, but if it’s been, like, twenty years then hasn’t it been—” Sam stopped herself mid-sentence, as though she had thought better of what she was going to ask. She took a second to collect her thoughts and when she spoke again her tone was much softer. “If it’s your history, it’s my history too and I should know about it, don’t you think?”

  Dan drew a deep breath and let out a long, heavy sigh. He didn’t respond right away. He couldn’t. Images of his childhood flashed through his mind, taking him back to memories that tormented him and made him feel like a helpless child again. He could hear his mother’s and father’s voices, loud, cold, irritated, impatient, like they were right there in his living room: “Oh my God. Are you crying again,�
� “Why can’t you just get along,” “Boys will be boys,” “What is wrong with you,” “Get over it,” “It’s not that bad,” “Nobody cares.” The voices and their words triggered memories that he hadn’t thought about for years. But now they seemed fresh, like they had just happened days ago. He saw the bruises, tasted the iron from the blood in his mouth, felt the stabbing pains, smelled the saltwater of the Pacific Ocean from the highest point on the Lions Gate Bridge.

  A lump formed in Dan’s throat and he couldn’t bring himself to look Sam in the eye. He cleared his throat and swallowed, trying to push the lump down enough to get the words out. “Let’s just say, for a long time, I didn’t feel safe in my home. See this?” He combed his fingers through his hair and stopped an inch past his left temple. His fingers lingered there a second before they came together and pulled the hair back, revealing a long scar line where no hair would ever grow again. “Seven stitches. I’ve had two cracked ribs, one broken arm and more than a few black eyes. Some of those happened before I was ten.”

  “Dad!” Sam gasped. Dan saw her eyes, already swollen from crying earlier, start to water again.

  “Scars look bad, but the body heals,” Dan said, trying to offer a bit of comfort to his daughter.

  As painful as it was to tell his story, a deeper ache tore at his heart when he saw the horrified look on Sam’s face. Exposing her to domestic violence in her own family was not something he had ever planned to do.

  Sam’s eyes had grown large and round and she spoke with both gentleness and timidity. “Was it...your dad?”

  “My brother. Once because he thought I had stolen his toy. Once because I was doing my homework on the coffee table when he decided to make up a new rule that only applied to me. Other times…who knows? He just did what he wanted. Dad was never around, Mom was too busy or too stressed. When they were around, they just dismissed it.” Dan let out a small huff of amusement as another dismissive phrase he had heard too many times came to mind. “They’d say, ‘That’s what brothers do, they fight.’ As though we were equally at fault and it didn’t matter that he was five years older, bigger, stronger and always put in charge.”

  “Did he hurt your sister too?”

  Dan shook his head. “They’re close. Good friends. She always stayed neutral, like Switzerland. She may not have been the bully, and my parents may not have been the ones to cause the scars, but, well, inaction can be just as bad as action. Sometimes it’s the injuries that don’t leave a mark that cause the most damage.”

  He thought about how stressed and unhappy his parents always seemed to be. He remembered feeling like a burden when he complained, feeling betrayed when the complaints were ignored, feeling alone in the world. And he didn’t want his daughter to think of him the same way his family had thought of him. He wasn’t a loser. And he wasn’t a child either. He was an adult now and he could see his family as flawed individuals.

  “Maybe inaction was just easier for everyone, life wasn’t easy for any of us back then. It’s disappointing how things turned out. I learned to avoid my brother and that meant I had to avoid virtually everyone else, because he was always around. At parties, reunions, funerals. When we were in our twenties, we tried to reconcile. He approached me and apologized for his behavior when he was younger. But it didn’t take long for him to show his true stripes again. That’s when I decided to move here and cut everyone off for good. I chose my health over my family because I came to realize that having both wasn’t possible.”

  Sam’s contemplative silence seemed louder than the television ad that was blaring at twice the volume of the program.

  “But Dad, why did you go to Vancouver now? What’s changed?”

  “Sam, I don’t know how my sister found me, but she did. Told me about Aunt Marjorie. It was just something I had to do. I always liked her.”

  “Dad—” Sam started, but he cut her off.

  “Listen Sam, let’s finish dinner before it sits out too long. We can’t afford to waste it.” He forced himself to take a bite, but Kenji’s special sushi had somehow lost all its flavor.

  Dan hoped that Sam would be satisfied with their conversation, but he suspected that she had more questions. And he would have no choice but to tell her the truth. He knew that he couldn’t keep his secrets forever, that she was going to find out soon enough. But today was not that day. Childhood memories were still flashing through his mind, haunting him as they used to do when he was younger, and it would take a little while before he would be able to clear his head of them once again.

  Dan and Sam finished their dinner facing the television screen, allowing the sound from the speakers to do its job.

  23

  Sam rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and blinked several times, trying to focus on the view outside of Glacier Surge’s main window facing the Ice Bridge. She had had a hard time getting to sleep after her emotional chat with her dad, and at 3am, she finally gave up and went for a long, slow walk with her dog through the trails. Still half asleep, she hadn’t noticed that Penelope had walked into the cafe and was now sitting beside her.

  “Hey, sister! You have got to see what Drew and I found!”

  “Did you find more?”

  “Seven more since we chatted, but some are better than others. Something, maybe, from Drew’s video, but it’s like, super shaky-cam footage, so don’t expect National Geographic front page material.”

  “Hey, that is what is known as cinematic technique to give authenticity to film. My videos are live and free of artifice, unlike some YouTube stars who take hours of footage and end up with thirty seconds of actual video,” Drew said as he made himself comfortable at the table. Sam looked up and eyed him warily. Penelope had filled her in on their conversation and how Drew had so staunchly defended Wesley. How could she trust anyone who would side with Wesley Black?

  Penelope leaned over to Sam to share the screen on her phone. “See? Here’s the video. What do you think? Is that someone — there! Shoot, let me rewind. Okay, there!” Penelope tried to pause the video at the right moment.

  “Hmm.” Sam squinted at the image.

  “Here, take a look at these images P-lo and I picked out,” Drew said as he pulled an envelope from his bag. Sam took the photos and glanced at Drew. He seemed to be sincere, she thought, but maybe he was just a very good spy.

  “Oh hi, guys. Can I get you anything?” The barista had come out from behind the counter and was now diffidently standing two feet away from their table. Her shoulders and neck were rolled forward, making her inches smaller than she actually was and she spoke in a meek voice with her hands clasped nervously in front of her.

  Sam blinked and looked at the slight girl with long, brown hair pulled back into a messy ponytail. “Oh my gosh, hi Cara! I didn’t know you worked here.” Sam hadn’t recognized her. She had gotten used to seeing Cara in cracked, hot-pink ski goggles, a yellow climbing helmet, and a duct tape patched green jacket with the hood pulled over the helmet. Maybe if she’d just focused on the tip of her nose, she would have known it was Cara straight away.

  “Yeah, umm, I just started today,” Cara said before carefully writing down Sam’s request for a hot chocolate and Penelope’s order for a latte.

  “Hi, Cara,” Drew said with a big smile. “How are you? We’re just hanging out here as friends. Samantha and Penelope and I. We’re just friends. And I’ll have anything. Whatever’s easy for you.”

  If Drew was a spy, he wasn’t a very good one, Sam thought. He’d already lost focus on the mission and let himself get distracted by love. Maybe he wasn’t a spy at all, then. Maybe, he could be trusted.

  “Oh, umm, well. I could make you a coffee, or tea, or cocoa, or anything, really, or maybe a nice—” Cara stammered, her face turning pink.

  “He’ll have an espresso,” Penelope interjected. Cara, looking relieved, smiled and scurried away.

  Sam looked back at the images in front of her. “Wow! You can totally make out that there’s a guy in the
background in these pictures. Look at this, that’s some kind of badge or emblem on his jacket.”

  “And it looks like he’s wearing some kind of hat too,” Penelope added. “But there’s something so weird about his eyes. It’s so creepy!”

  “Do you guys know what time each of these photos was taken? Look here, there’s a pot on the stove with dinner in this one, but it’s gone in this one,” Sam said, pointing to some of the photos.

  “Ohhhhh. Yeah. So that means—” Penelope started.

  “That the Creeper was creeping on us for a little while at least,” Drew finished. “That’s what we’re calling him for now. The Creeper.”

  “Good thing you explained that, Drew. Sam would never have been able to crack that secret code.”

  “These images are good. Now we know for sure that someone was lurking in the trees and bushes around our camp. But it’s really hard to make out any features in these printouts or to see whether Drew’s video might have something we can use. I wonder if we can blow it up and enhance it? Maybe adjust the brightness? And it’d also be good to know exactly what time and how long he was watching us. Are we talking minutes or hours?”

  “I’m on it,” Penelope said quickly, typing the directives into her phone. “And you know what? My cousin Claudia, the one I told you about before? She’s getting her PhD at UBC and uses Photoshop all the time to enhance images. So maybe I can ask her for help or maybe she knows someone who could. She came up for the holidays.”

  “That would be amazing, Pips.”

  “Nice, P-lo. Should we be taking this to the police? I mean, they’ll have people who can do this stuff way better than we can,” Drew added.

  Sam’s eyes shot up at Drew from the photo she was examining. He had both eyebrows raised while his mouth was shaped into a downturned smile, like he was asking for Penelope’s approval. He looked sincere. Drew couldn’t be a spy if he actually had a good suggestion that would help solve this case, could he?