All These Beautiful Strangers

by Elizabeth Klehfoth

  “Yeah,” Grace said, nodding. “It just took me a while to figure that out.”

  She turned and gestured at the canvases on the wall.

  “So, what do you think?” she asked, changing the subject.

  I glanced back at the wall. I had only noticed the canvas of Jake at first, but now I realized there was a series of abstract portraits—a middle-aged woman who looked vaguely like Grace (Grace’s mother perhaps?) standing at a kitchen sink; a long-limbed teenage boy skateboarding; a young blond woman on a beach, her shoulders sunburned. Each portrait was in the same bright colors as Jake’s, with the same texture, but they seemed lighter somehow, happier.

  “They’re really something,” I said.

  “You know, I looked back through all these pictures I had of him, trying to find the right one to paint,” Grace said. “I picked my favorite memories—Jake out on the lake in the summer, Jake at the boardwalk, Jake hanging out on my porch. And somehow, they all came out looking like that—no matter how bright the colors I used, somehow the mood stained it. It’s not how he was, but it’s how I remember him now.”

  We were silent for a moment. We both looked at each other. Over Grace’s shoulder, I saw the man she had been talking with earlier looking at us. Something in his stare seemed territorial and not exactly welcoming. He nudged the guy he was talking to and nodded in our direction, like he was asking who I was. I returned my attention to Grace.

  “I don’t want to take you away from your friends,” I said.

  “You’re not,” Grace said.

  “Well, I think your boyfriend isn’t too keen on you talking to me.”

  “My boyfriend?” She turned around to see who I was talking about. “That’s my brother Hank,” Grace said, laughing.

  I felt the tightness in my chest instantly ease and I laughed too.

  “He’s just being protective,” Grace went on. She paused a moment. “I don’t—I’m not seeing anyone at the moment.”

  I nodded and couldn’t quite meet her eyes.

  “Jake mentioned you a lot, you know?” Grace said, looking back at Jake’s portrait. “When he’d talk about Knollwood and his friends there, yours was the name that came up the most.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” Grace said. “He looked up to you.”

  I only nodded. I didn’t know what else to say. I hadn’t talked about Jake with anyone for years. When he’d first passed away, it had been difficult not to talk about Jake, not to think about him. But now, after all this time, the words eluded me.

  “I get that you don’t like to talk about him,” Grace said. “So we don’t have to. But I just have one question first before we never talk about it again. I never got to see Jake at Knollwood—he talked about it all the time, but I never got to go visit, to actually see it. And I always wanted to know what Jake was like at school. Did he seem happy there?”

  “Yes, he seemed happy,” I said.

  “I thought he was,” Grace said. “He always sounded happy.”

  “Everybody liked Jake,” I said. “He was hard not to like, even though you kind of wanted to hate him, because the bastard seemed to be good at everything.”

  Grace chuckled knowingly.

  “He was an ace in the classroom and an ace on the tennis court—definitely gave me a run for my money,” I said.

  “That’s the thing that always got me,” Grace said. “He seemed to be doing so well. But I guess that was all a lie. I never knew how much he was struggling.”

  “Knollwood is a very competitive school,” I said. “All of us struggled from time to time.”

  “He never said anything to you about falling behind?”

  My throat constricted. I didn’t want to talk about this anymore. I opened my mouth to answer her but couldn’t. I simply shook my head.

  “He never said anything to me about it either,” Grace said.

  I had to put an end to this line of questioning before things went too far.

  “I can tell you a lot of things about Jake,” I said. “But if you’re looking for an answer as to why, I don’t have one.”

  Grace was quiet for a moment. “This may be horrible for me to say,” she said, “but it actually makes me feel better to hear you say that. I just—for a long time, I felt like I had failed him by not seeing it. And it’s just comforting to hear, that I wasn’t the only one who didn’t see it coming.”

  I instinctively reached forward and grabbed her hand. She looked surprised by the gesture, but she didn’t draw her hand away.

  “Listen to me, Grace,” I said, slowly and deliberately, because it was important that she heard me. It was important she understood. “What happened to Jake, that wasn’t your fault. You had nothing to do with it.”

  She just looked at me—her eyes wide and searching and so full of loss.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I said again.

  She put her other hand on top of my mine then, and gave it a little squeeze.

  “It wasn’t yours either,” she said back to me.

  I recoiled at her words. I couldn’t stomach them. But she held my hand firmly between her own.

  I cleared my throat and looked away from her.

  “I, um, have to be getting back to the city,” I said, reaching to scratch the back of my neck to free my hand from hers.

  “Do you have to go right now?” Grace asked. She sounded disappointed. “Can you spare half an hour? There’s something I would really like to show you.”

  I looked back at her. She seemed insistent.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Grace broke into a smile. “Okay,” she said back to me.

  In my car, Grace sat in the front passenger seat and gave me directions. A few minutes outside of town, she instructed me to pull over near a thick stand of trees. We parked in the grass near a split elm that lightning had cut nearly clean down the middle. Grace took my hand and led me into the woods. Through a break in the trees, I saw the lake.

  “Langely Lake,” Grace told me.

  She gestured at a thick oak near the water’s edge. There were several long boards lying flat in the arc of the tree where the trunk had split. Smaller boards had been nailed to the face of the trunk as a makeshift ladder.

  “We built that, Jake and me, when we were kids,” Grace said. “It was our special place. No one else knew about it. I know it doesn’t look like much now, but it was something to us.”

  Grace climbed the makeshift ladder into the tree house and I followed her. We sat on the boards with our legs dangling below us, over the water.

  “The first time I ever saw you was in this tree house,” Grace said. “Jake laid his yearbook out right here on these boards that first summer he was home. He pointed to your photo and told me your name. You looked like such a snotty little asshole in your school blazer I couldn’t believe it when Jake told me you were friends.”

  I laughed. “It’s not my fault,” I said. “Everybody had to wear those blazers. We all looked liked pretentious dicks.”

  “Trust me, it wasn’t the blazer,” Grace said. “It was you. You had this look like you just knew you were better than everyone.”

  “Well, I’ve always made an excellent first impression,” I said. “Funny enough, the first time I saw you was in a photograph, too. I think I mentioned it when we first met—there was this picture of you with an ice cream cone that Jake kept on his desk.”

  “Ah, yes,” Grace said. “The one where I have ice cream smeared across my face? See, I make a great first impression, too.” She bumped her shoulder against mine and looked out at the lake. “I thought you were a pretentious jerk and you thought I was some heathen who hadn’t mastered the art of eating.”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t think that at all.”

  “Oh yeah?” Grace said. “Then what did you think?”

  “I thought—I thought, you looked like happiness,” I said. I didn’t know how to put into words the way I’d felt when I saw her picture—the way s
omething inside of me had shifted. “Not that you looked happy, though you did, but that you were happiness personified. I thought, I have to meet that girl.”

  There was a painfully long moment before Grace turned her gaze away from the lake and looked at me. There were so many things I felt that I should tell her. Instead, I took her into my arms and kissed her. She didn’t pull away. Instead, she kissed me back.

  She tugged on the collar of my shirt, pulling me down with her onto the boards of the makeshift tree house, and my hands were in her hair, unbuttoning her blouse, skimming the hem of her skirt.

  Afterward, I took her hand in mine, and Grace leaned her head against my shoulder and together we stared out over the lake and watched the sun disappear into the trees on the other side, like the flame of a candle flickering out.

  Part Three

  Twenty-Three

  Charlie Calloway

  2017

  He wasn’t just a nameless man in a photograph anymore. I knew his name, his occupation, his whereabouts. Peter Hindsberg. He was a private investigator, one half of Hindsberg & Thornton Investigations, which he ran with his partner, Ron Thornton. Their website listed an address for their office near the outlet mall across town. In their short bios, I read that Peter Hindsberg had served as an insurance fraud investigator for Hartco Insurance for several years before starting his own investigation firm with his longtime friend Ron Thornton, a former police officer in Stamford. A quick Google search didn’t reveal much further information, aside from an engagement announcement in the Hillsborough Chronicle from 2004 between Peter and a Miss Lucy Hale, a pretty brunette who taught kindergarten at a local elementary school.

  “Do you think your mom thought your dad was cheating or something?” Greyson asked, leaning over my shoulder to get a better view of his computer screen as I scrolled.

  “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  Greyson pointed to a spot on the screen. “Just looking at the list of services here.”

  I scanned it. Under surveillance, background checks, missing persons, civil and criminal research, pre-litigation, legal preparation, and subpoena service, there were listed: cheating spouses, alimony, and child custody.

  “Or is it possible your mom was thinking about divorce?” Greyson asked. “Maybe she wanted to get all her ducks in a row before going through with it?”

  I bit my lip. I couldn’t help but remember what Eugenia had told me—how unhappy my mother had been, how withdrawn. And what Claire had said: Alistair Calloway isn’t a man you just leave. The last time I had seen my parents together, they were fighting. My mother had screamed at my father not to touch her. What if my mother had told my father she wanted a divorce, or what if my father had found out somehow that my mother was planning to leave him? What if that was the reason for their fight?

  I picked up the landline on Greyson’s desk and started dialing.

  “What are you doing?” Greyson asked.

  I held up a hand to silence him. The phone was ringing on the other end.

  “Hindsberg and Thornton Investigations,” a woman’s voice said. “How may I help you?”

  I opened my mouth to say something and then froze. I hung up the phone.

  “What was that?” Greyson asked.

  “I think I need to go see him,” I said.

  “Peter Hindsberg?” Greyson asked. “What are you going to say?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I have to find out exactly what he was doing for my mother.”

  “All right,” Greyson said. “I’ll drive you.”

  The offices of Hindsberg & Thornton Investigations were in an unkempt office complex across the street from a Rite Aid. Inside, the reception area was empty. I went up to the middle-aged woman sitting behind the front desk with Greyson close behind me.

  “Can I help you?” the woman asked. I could tell from her voice that she was the same woman who had answered the phone earlier when I called.

  “I’m here to see Peter Hindsberg,” I said.

  “He’s not in.”

  “Well, when will he be back?” I asked.

  “A week from Monday,” the woman said. She glanced back at her computer screen. I could see in the reflection in her glasses that she was playing solitaire. “He just left for Jamaica. Family cruise.”

  This. Was. Not. Happening.

  “Well, I really need to speak to him,” I said. “It’s important.”

  The woman glanced back up at me. “Are you a client?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I need to talk to him about my case. It’s urgent.”

  “Name?” the woman asked, her fingers poised over her keyboard. I realized then that she was going to look me up in the system, and that she would quickly see I wasn’t there.

  “What I meant is, I’m a new client,” I said. “I need to find someone, and when I spoke to Mr. Hindsberg over the phone the other week, he said he could help me. Maybe I could just get his cell number?”

  “Mr. Thornton is handling all of Mr. Hindsberg’s caseload while he’s on vacation,” the woman said. “If it’s really urgent, I could see if he has a few minutes to meet with you.”

  “Sure,” I said, glancing behind me at the empty waiting room. “Yeah, that would be great. Thank you.”

  “One moment,” the woman said. She pushed back her chair and stood and disappeared down the short hall behind her.

  “What are you doing?” Greyson whispered.

  “I need you to distract her,” I whispered back.

  “Distract her?”

  “Like make conversation,” I said. “Keep her occupied.”

  “Charlie, what’s going on?” he asked.

  In the distance, I heard a curt knock on a door and then low, indistinct voices.

  “I have a plan,” I said. “Just trust me.”

  I didn’t have time to say any more, because the receptionist had returned to her desk. “Mr. Thornton will see you now,” the woman said. She sat and gave a little nod at the hallway behind her. “Second door on your right.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I gave Greyson a subtle wink as I left him at the receptionist’s desk and turned down the hallway. There were three doors along the hallway, one on the left and two on the right. The receptionist had left the second one on the right slightly ajar. The other doors were closed.

  “So, are you a Huskies fan?” I heard Greyson ask the receptionist behind me. “Big into basketball?”

  Face palm. What was I thinking relying on Greyson’s social skills for a reliable distraction?

  “No,” the woman said.

  “Football?”

  “No.”

  I glanced behind me to be sure the receptionist wasn’t looking my way. She wasn’t. I grabbed the handle to the first door on the right, praying it wasn’t locked. It twisted in my palm. So far, so good. I opened it as quietly as I could and peeked inside. It was dark but I caught my reflection in the mirror above the counter. Bathroom. Not what I was looking for. I closed the door and continued down the short hall.

  I stopped in front of the door on the left. With one more glance behind me to make sure the receptionist wasn’t looking, I pushed the door open as quietly as I could. It was dark because the shades were drawn on the far window, but there were a desk, a couch, and a couple of filing cabinets. Peter’s office. Score. I slipped inside and closed the door quietly behind me.

  I grabbed my phone from my back pocket and turned on my flashlight. I surveyed the filing cabinets, which were arranged along the right wall a little ways behind the desk. The first set of drawers was labeled with business items: “Accounting,” “Bank Records,” “Contracts,” “Permits and Licenses.” I moved on to the second cabinet. This one contained client files arranged alphabetically. The cabinet on top read “Clients: A–C.” Bingo. I reached out and tugged on the handle, but it was locked. Crap.

  I looked around me for something to pick the lock with, trying to remember everything I could from all those
tutorials Drew had watched on YouTube in preparation for her first A’s ticket. From what I remembered, I’d need two large paper clips—one to use as the pick and the other to put tension on the lock. I rummaged around Peter Hindsberg’s desk and found a pair of paper clips in his wire mesh desktop organizer. I unfolded the clips and fashioned a small hook at the end of the clip I would use as the tension wrench. Then I stuck the tension wrench into the bottom of the lock and turned it to the right slightly, applying pressure in the direction the lock should go. I held it there and inserted the pick into the top of the lock, raking the pins until they set. It took me several tries to get all of the pins set, and then I felt the lock give and I was able to turn it with my other paper clip. I was in.

  I eased the drawer open slowly and held my phone light close as I searched through the files. There were at least a hundred files packed tightly together in the drawer, some fat and some thin. I skimmed through the A’s and the B’s, searching for the beginning of the C’s. Then, near the back, I found it: “Calloway, Grace.”

  The file was light. It contained a few pieces of yellow legal pad paper, full of chicken-scratch notes, and a smaller envelope. I opened it, and dozens of photographs slid out onto the floor of the office. I picked one up, shone the light of my phone on it, and gasped.

  It was my father.

  He was just a teenager in the photograph; his face still had the roundness of a boy’s. He had a beer in one hand and his other arm was slung around the shoulder of a boy I recognized. Jake Griffin.

  It was nighttime and the picture was dark. The red time stamp in the bottom right corner of the photograph read, 9:32 p.m. December 21, 1990. In the picture, Jake beamed at the camera and held up his own beer in salute to whoever was taking the picture. A girl stood on Jake’s other side, posed to give him a kiss on the cheek. I recognized Matthew York, one of my father’s friends, standing to my father’s right.