And Then I Found Out the Truth

by Jennifer Sturman

  “It’s going to seem boring after you hear the other thing I have to tell you,” he said.

  “What other thing?” I asked, feeling a twinge of apprehension.

  He shifted his weight on the bench and turned to sit facing me rather than side by side, the way we’d been before. And when I saw his expression, the twinge blossomed into something much larger.

  “I know I should have told you this part first,” Quinn said.

  “But then, right when I saw you, I didn’t want to ruin it, and after that I figured you must have been wondering about what’s been happening at school, too, so I thought I might as well get that cleared up, though the reality was I was only putting off telling you the other thing I need to tell you because it’s a lot harder to explain, and it’s also going to sound crazy, and it’s not like I’m sure about any of it, so it’s tempting not to talk about it, especially since there’s a good chance you’re going to hate me when I tell you.”

  “Tell me what already?” I said. Not only was he starting to make Charley seem succinct, he was making me seriously nervous. What could he possibly say that would make me hate him? Was I about to be treated to some details about Quinn that would make Edward Vargas look like one of Dr. Penske’s Cub Scouts?

  But that wasn’t it at all.

  He took another deep breath and exhaled slowly. “It’s my dad. I think he’s involved in what happened to your mother.”

  Twenty-one

  “What?” I managed to say.

  “I know, it’s hard to believe,” said Quinn.

  Of course, Quinn had no way of knowing just how easy it was for me to believe, but that didn’t mean I expected to hear him voicing the same suspicions. And that he had suspicions at all seemed to confirm we’d been right to have them.

  A chill went through me, followed by an ugly sense of resignation. It looked as though our kissing would be forever tainted in my memory by this conversation coming so quickly on its heels.

  Because now not only would I have to act like I hadn’t had my own concerns about Hunter — I mean, it was one thing to decide your own parent’s an evildoer, but it was an entirely different thing for the person you were just kissing to tell you she’d thought so, too — also had a responsibility to pump Quinn for any new information he could offer. And that seemed both unavoidable and wrong in every way.

  “This trip Hunter’s on in Argentina — it doesn’t fit,” Quinn was saying. “Nobody at his office knew, so it can’t be a normal business thing. Meanwhile, Fiona’s freaking out because she thinks he’s having an affair, but I don’t think that’s it, either. Hunter really loves her, and he’d never do anything that would hurt the kids. But he’s definitely in Argentina. He was on the phone the night before he left, setting up a meeting, and I heard him specifically say Buenos Aires and even the name of his hotel there, and he had his professional voice on — he didn’t sound like he was romancing anyone. But it didn’t have to do with his regular work.”

  “Isn’t it sort of a leap from having mysterious meetings in Buenos Aires to being in on the whole conspiracy?” I asked, hoping I didn’t sound as awkward as I felt.

  “That was just the beginning. When everything broke at school, Fiona grounded me, which for her means I’m not even allowed to talk to anyone. She took my laptop and cell phone, and she kept hitting redial on the house phone to check I wasn’t making calls out. But Thursday, while she was picking the kids up from school, I tried the PC in my dad’s home office. I know his log-in information — he’s got a thing for James Bond, and double-O seven works every time — so booting up wasn’t a problem. But even though Fiona thinks Argentina’s in Mexico, she’s strangely tech savvy. She’d changed the password on our Wi-Fi network — I couldn’t get online. But I did find a file named ‘Ross’ on the hard drive.”

  Along with the ugly resignation and awkwardness, I now felt a sense of déjà vu. It had been only a couple of weeks since I’d found the folder labeled ROSS among my mother’s papers, with a copy of her correspondence with EAROFO and a geologic map of the Ross Sea inside. “The same Ross?”

  He nodded. “It was a chart showing the potential oil output from the Ross Sea given different rates of production and also how the profits — hundreds of millions of dollars — would be split among a bunch of different players. Navitaco was on there, along with Perkins Oil and Energex and all of the other EAROFO companies.”

  Another chill went through me. The chart he was describing was like our theory translated into cold, hard numbers; its very existence transformed pure speculation to concrete fact.

  My next question was the most difficult one so far, but I knew I had to ask. “Was your dad’s name on the chart, too?”

  “No,” said Quinn. “But it doesn’t matter — that’s not how he operates. He’ll make his money from having inside knowledge of the output levels. And if you’re thinking maybe this isn’t what it looks like, and it doesn’t mean he’s in on the entire thing — trust me, when you’re grounded and you can’t talk to anyone but your infuriated stepmother, a six-year-old girl, an eight-year-old boy, their nanny, and the housekeeper, you have a lot of time to examine the facts from every angle and try to come up with other explanations for how they fit together. But I kept coming back to this: Why would Hunter have that spreadsheet if he’s not part of it?”

  Quinn was right — it was pretty damning.

  We were both quiet for a while, each thinking our separate thoughts. Quinn was staring down at the hall below, but I doubted he really saw anything just then except that spreadsheet with all of its incriminating information. And I only wished there was something I could say or do to make him feel better. I mean, the mess at Prescott was bad enough. Stumbling onto his father’s involvement in a plot that at best was limited to environmental destruction and at worst included attempted murder must have been devastating.

  “So now that I’ve told you, do you?” Quinn said suddenly, breaking the silence.

  “Do I what?” I asked.

  He brought his gaze up to meet mine. “Hate me.” That thought was too foreign to possibly answer with words. So I kissed him instead.

  In the spirit of looking for the silver lining, there no longer seemed to be any reason not to bring Quinn fully up-to-date on the investigation, though I carefully excised the part about us suspecting his father all along. And another silver lining was that Quinn was able to solve one of our immediate problems. He’d spent part of his summer interning in his father’s office, and he still had an active security pass for the building, complete with the barcode, right there in his wallet.

  He dug it out and handed it over. “It’s the least I can do,” he said with a small, unhappy laugh. “In fact, at this point it’s the only thing I can do. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so useless in my life.”

  “This is a huge help,” I tried to assure him. “Now we can find La Morena.”

  He glanced at his watch. “You’d have found her anyway. But if I don’t get the kids home soon, Fiona will probably end up grounding them, too. She’s on a real rampage.”

  So he took my hand and we went to find Bea and Oliver.

  “Dude, I’m starving, and you said we’d order pizza,” said Oliver when we located them at the sea otter diorama.

  “Is Delia coming home with us for dinner?” asked Bea.

  “Quinn’s grounded,” said Oliver. “Grounded people can’t have friends over. And remember, you can’t say anything about Delia meeting us here or Quinn will get in even more trouble.”

  “What’s more trouble than being grounded?” said Bea.

  “I don’t think we want to find out,” said Quinn.

  Quinn hailed a cab for me out on Central Park West, in front of the museum. It was weird saying good-bye when neither of us knew how we were next going to be in touch. The nanny leaving the playroom PC online and unattended had been a fluke, and it wasn’t likely that Fiona would restore Quinn’s phone and computer privileges anytime soon. She wa
s definitely going to be a lot more careful about the whereabouts of her own phone.

  So when he kissed me one final time, the kiss felt less giddy and more serious, like it would have to sustain us for a while.

  But in spite of everything, it had the same impact. The world around me went fuzzy, and by the time it solidified again I was in the taxi and heading downtown.

  Twenty-two

  The rest of the evening was totally anticlimactic. At least, most of it was.

  I borrowed Charley’s scanner and sent an image of Quinn’s ID card to Natalie, but she was busy doing whatever it was she’d decided to do with Edward and I knew she wouldn’t get to it until the next day. Meanwhile, Charley didn’t believe in going out on Saturday nights (“too dull, with the boring married couples having date night”), so we ordered in pizza, because Charley felt that way I could dine with Quinn in spirit, and we also watched Say Anything as we ate, because Charley said it offered striking parallels with my current situation.

  “How?” I said. “The Ione Skye character’s father cheated on his taxes. He didn’t try to have the John Cusack character’s mother killed.”

  “You’re missing the point, which is love conquers all, even the felonious indiscretions of one’s parents,” said Charley. And then she shushed me, because John Cusack was standing outside Ione Skye’s window, playing “In Your Eyes” on an old-fashioned boom box.

  Anyhow, John Cusack and Ione Skye were flying off to England and the credits were starting to roll when someone buzzed from downstairs.

  “Are you expecting a visitor?” asked Charley.

  “No, are you?”

  “Not unless someone’s cleverly designed an ice cream delivery service that anticipates one’s needs before one has them,” she said, going over to the intercom. “Hello?”

  It turned out that the person downstairs did, in fact, have a relationship with mobile ice cream vendors. “Oh, yes, hello. It is I. Zere is ze party in ze flat above mine — I cannot sleep, and ze sleeplessness is very bad for my art. But I no longer have ze key. Vill you ring me in, please?”

  It took a strange blend of oblivious confidence for Dieter to present himself at our door like that. Even Charley was at a momentary loss for words, which was saying a lot.

  But she buzzed him in anyway, and as we listened to the elevator creaking up from the ground floor, she turned to me. “When I give the signal, you create a distraction and I’ll hit him from behind.”

  I didn’t think she was really serious, but I couldn’t help but notice the way she was scanning the room for blunt objects.

  “I hope you’re proud of yourself,” Charley said to Dieter as the elevator doors slid open.

  It was pouring out, and Dieter looked like a drowned hamster. He’d remembered his scarf, but I guessed he’d forgotten his umbrella. “Vat do you mean?” he asked. He seemed genuinely confused.

  “What do I mean?” said Charley, incredulous. And then she exploded. “WHAT DO I MEAN?”

  Dieter took a step backward. I did, too. Charley wasn’t scary often, which made it extra scary when she was.

  “Have you listened to none of my messages?” she demanded.

  “Ze voice mail, it is for ze corporate drone. Not ze cineaste,” he said.

  “Well, Mr. Cineaste, you’ve turned our lives into an episode of America’s Most Wanted, except the wrong way around since we’re the good guys,” she said. “And I couldn’t care less about myself, but Delia has been entrusted, however unwisely, to my care by her mother, and I am responsible for her well-being. Somebody’s already tried to kill her once on my watch. Why didn’t you just put up maps showing the route here or promise a reward for whoever offs her first?”

  “A map vould not achieve ze desired aesthetic effect, and a revard is so overtly commercial,” said Dieter, wounded. “My concept is far superior.”

  “Your concept? What concept?” asked Charley.

  Dieter drew himself up to his full height. “It is ze brilliant cultural experiment. I have harnessed ze power of visual media to mobilize ze power of ze masses, transforming ze entire city into Delia’s bodyguard. How can she come to harm ven everyvone looks after her?”

  He actually had a point, in his own convoluted way.

  I thought about what Carolina had said, about the posters being yellow — the color of caution. It made a lot more sense now.

  And I had to admit, I sort of liked the idea of eight million people standing guard.

  It was good to get that straightened out, though I was pretty sure the loft would no longer be Dieter’s go-to place for peace and quiet. And that was Saturday night, and Sunday it was like the sun never came up, the weather was so gloomy and wet.

  The morning dragged by, and then Charley tried to convince me to join her for lunch and a gallery show with a friend, but I was too distracted. Instead, I stayed at the loft, eating leftover pizza and waiting for Natalie to call. I was hoping she’d be able to crack open the security firm’s intranet sooner rather than later so I could figure out my next move — I knew exactly how Quinn felt when he’d talked about feeling useless.

  A little before three P.M., my phone finally rang and I snatched it up. “Natalie?”

  “No,” said a girl, and though the voice wasn’t distinctive, I knew exactly who it was from the way she stretched the single syllable into a languorous four or five.

  “Oh,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment. “Hi, Gwyneth. How are you?”

  “Fine.”

  This was followed by a long silence. In the background, a male narrator was describing the mating rituals of the black-footed ferret, and I could picture my cousin staring at the TV, her mouth slightly open and her eyes slightly glazed.

  “Are you having a nice weekend?” I said eventually, speaking extra loudly in case Gwyneth had forgotten about me and no longer had the phone against her ear.

  But she was still there. “Uh-huh,” she said.

  And then there was another long silence. I’d thought conversation with Gwyneth was challenging in person — trying to talk to her on the phone was like an extreme sport, but only in terms of the degree of difficulty and not because of any adrenaline rush.

  “Well, thanks for calling,” I finally said. “I guess I’ll see you in school tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” she said. And she hung up.

  So that was a false alarm. But when the phone rang again, a half hour later, I was positive that this time it really would be Natalie and she’d have La Morena’s identity all figured out.

  “Natalie?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Oh. Hi, Gwyneth. What’s up?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  There was yet another long silence. But just as I was gearing up to get off the phone again, she spoke. “Quinn’s missing.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Quinn’s missing'?”

  “Fiona Riley just called my mom. Quinn disappeared between dinner last night and brunch this morning.”

  I probably should have been more surprised, but on some subconscious level I must have been expecting this. I mean, I’d seen the state he was in the previous day — it was pretty obvious Fiona’s communications ban and everything else about being grounded was starting to wear on him. And if Quinn was gone, I also knew it had to be on purpose. People weren’t abducted from buildings like his — nobody could make it up to the penthouse without first conquering an army of doormen and elevator attendants.

  No, Quinn had clearly escaped. Now I was only wondering where he was — I would’ve hoped he’d come straight to me, but it sounded like he’d been on the lam for several hours at least, and I hadn’t heard from him.

  “Did he leave a note or anything?” I asked.

  But I was talking to a dead phone. Gwyneth had already hung up.

  I started dialing her number to call her back, but before I’d even hit SEND somebody buzzed the door from the street. I dropped the phone and dashed over to the intercom.

 
I pushed the button for the speaker. “Quinn?”

  “No, it is not the Romeo. Now, why are you not unlocking the door? It is raining, and my shoes will be destruido.”

  I buzzed Carolina in.

  “Ay, dios!” she cried as she stepped into the loft. “The rain, it does not stop.”

  She was dressed in a pale pink Hello Kitty rain slicker, complete with a matching Hello Kitty rain hat and umbrella.

  “Can I get you anything?” I asked, assuming this was a purely social call. “We’re out of Yoo-hoo, but we have leftover pizza.”

  “There is no time for the snacks,” she said. “We must hurry, before the auntie returns.”

  She made a beeline for my room and pulled my roller bag out from under the bed, leaving it unzipped on the floor. Then she began grabbing items from my dresser and tossing them into the bag. Her hands moved with certainty as she sorted through my clothes, like she already knew the exact contents of my wardrobe, which she probably did.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I pack the suitcase for you.”

  “But — why? Are we going somewhere?”

  “I cannot go. I am the guest yoga instructor this week. You are the one who is going, and you know where it is you go. The Romeo, he is there already, sí?”

  And then it came to me. “Quinn’s in Buenos Aires.”

  “Por supuesto. Where is your pasaporte? I know you are having one, from when you go to India with the papa. Ah, here it is,” she said, opening the drawer of my desk.

  Now that I thought about it, it was pretty obvious. Of course Quinn would want to find out for himself once and for all what his father was up to, and he was never going to be able to do that while he was under house arrest in New York.

  And my immediate reaction was envy — while I sat around waiting for Natalie to hack Web sites and Rafe to report back on his findings, Quinn had gone ahead and done something. He truly was starring in his own movie.