All These Beautiful Strangers

by Elizabeth Klehfoth

“Yeah,” I said.

  “It is over, isn’t it?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer him.

  “Charlie?”

  “It’s just—what if he really is sorry?” I asked. “I know that sounds stupid, but what if he got upset the other day and just made a mistake? What if it was never about the game, and he just said that to hurt me in the moment? If I’m being honest, I haven’t always been very nice to him, either.”

  “You’re right,” Greyson said. “You are sounding really stupid right now.”

  I glared at him. What right did he have to talk to me like that? And really, what did he know about Dalton?

  What if Dalton really did care about me, and we were good together, and I let him go? What if I had something good here, and I was letting it slip through my fingers because my pride was hurt?

  “Maybe this was a bad idea, you coming here,” I said. “Maybe you’re confused about what we’re doing here.”

  “And just what is it that you think I’m confused about exactly?” Greyson asked.

  “Me,” I said. “This. Us. I don’t—I don’t have feelings for you,” I said.

  Greyson scoffed. He looked as if I had slapped him. “Charlie—I don’t—” He stopped. “I came here because you’re my friend. And because you seemed like you really needed someone. That’s all. But you’re right. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea.”

  He picked up his bag and started throwing his things into it.

  “You’re leaving?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer. He zipped up his bag and set the files he had brought over on the edge of my desk.

  “Greyson?”

  “I hope you find what you’re looking for, Charlie,” he said. “I really do.”

  Thirty-Four

  Grace Calloway

  August 1, 2007

  The letter, if you could really call it that, had only two words on it. In thickly drawn, all-capital letters, it read: I KNOW.

  Inside the envelope with no return address were the photographs. Pictures of me and Peter at Hal’s Diner off the interstate, a place I’d carefully chosen because I knew no one would see us there. Only, I was wrong. Someone had seen us. Or rather, someone had been following us. And not only had they caught us together, but they knew. They knew about the case that I was trying to build against them. They knew that I had those pictures that placed them with Jake on the night of his death.

  After my conversation with Margot, I realized I didn’t have enough concrete evidence to turn to the police and start making accusations. So, I’d called Peter and enlisted his help. I’d reconnected with Peter at the beginning of the summer when he’d come out to the house to take some photographs for a workers’ comp claim he was investigating that involved one of our landscapers. It was a pleasant surprise to see him—I hadn’t seen Peter since high school. We’d been on the swim team together. He’d been a shy but inquisitive kid, the kind who observed more than he ever let on, so it didn’t surprise me that he’d chosen a career that involved solving puzzles for a living. We’d spoken about his line of work. He’d told me he had studied criminal justice in college and had his private investigator license, that he was planning to start his own investigation firm and was beginning to take on his own cases. When I realized I couldn’t turn to Alistair for answers, Peter was the first person I called.

  But Margot must have told someone about the photographs I’d shown her. I wondered which one of them was following me, or if it was more than one. Threats weren’t really Margot’s thing. She’d been so forthcoming, so fearless, at the restaurant. But I knew some of the others were capable of it—thinly veiled threats aimed not just at me, but at my children.

  Because the pictures weren’t just of me and Peter. They were of Charlotte and Seraphina. And on the very last one, a close-up of Charlotte, there was a word written on the back: STOP.

  When I got that letter, I called my mother to come over to watch the girls while I went out. I told her I was going to the gym. I dressed in workout shorts and tennis shoes, an empty duffel bag thrown over my shoulder. I went to the bank instead. I emptied out our safety-deposit boxes. Alistair had cash stowed away in a dozen different safety-deposit boxes at half a dozen banks. He called it our rainy-day fund. In case of an emergency, he said. But now, this would be my rainy-day fund. Mine, and Seraphina and Charlotte’s. We would get out of there, and we wouldn’t look back.

  By the time I returned to the house, it was early evening. My mother’s car wasn’t in the driveway, but Alistair’s was.

  “Hello?” I called when I opened the front door.

  “There you are,” he said.

  I turned to see Alistair standing in the living room, a glass of scotch in his hand.

  My heart skipped a nervous beat in my chest when I saw him. I readjusted the strap of my gym bag on my shoulder. It was heavy now, full of money, and the strap cut into my skin.

  “I didn’t know you’d be here,” I said, trying to keep my voice level, calm, as I closed the door behind me. He usually came to the lake house on weekends; it was only Wednesday. I tried to give him a smile but my face felt stiff. “Where are the girls?” I asked.

  “I sent them home with your mother for a little sleepover,” he said. “I told Alice we needed some time together, since I’ve been working so much. She didn’t seem to mind.”

  Something hard dropped into the pit of my stomach. I’d have to spend the entire night in this house alone with Alistair?

  “That was nice of her,” I said, trying not to sound disappointed. “I don’t have anything ready for dinner, but maybe we can go out? I just need to shower.”

  I headed for the stairs up to our bedroom, a quick escape, but no sooner was my foot on the first step than he stopped me.

  “Grace.”

  I paused, my foot frozen on the step.

  “Come here,” he said.

  He knows about the money.

  I didn’t know how he could possibly know, but he did. I could hear it in his voice.

  I half turned to face him, my foot still on the step.

  He doesn’t know, I told myself. Just be calm. Make an excuse. Get upstairs. And hide it.

  “Yes?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.

  “Come. Here,” he repeated. “I’m not going to ask again.”

  I readjusted the strap of my gym bag on my shoulder and walked over to him, trying to hold his steady gaze.

  He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know. He can’t know. How could he know?

  I stopped in front of him, so close he could reach out and grab the duffel if he wanted to. I placed a protective hand on top of it.

  “Do you really think we’re not going to talk about what you’ve done?” he asked. “That we’re just going to pretend like nothing happened?”

  I could smell the alcohol on his breath. I saw the darkness in his eyes—the way the light went out of them. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

  The Alistair I knew was softhearted and sweet-tempered. True, we had grown aloof and distant from one another in recent years, but he was a kind and gentle father to our daughters—the man who kissed the skinned palm of Charlotte’s hand when she fell off her bicycle, the man who sang “Splish Splash” to Seraphina at tub time, to her infinite delight and amusement. But I knew others saw a different side of him. He was a wolf in the boardroom; he had teeth, a formidable bite that outranked his bark. I felt it in the way others reacted when he came into a room—the stiffening in their shoulders, the slight intake of breath before they spoke, the subservient way they nodded their heads as he talked—as if they were steeling themselves for the onslaught. Now, for the first time in our marriage, I saw Alistair the way others must have seen him. And it terrified me.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, but my voice sounded small and mousy, weak. Even I didn’t trust what it said.

  For a moment, his face was perfectly still, and then, in a flash, it became a twisted mask of pain.<
br />
  He threw his glass of scotch against the wall behind me. There was a pop as the glass broke, and then a thousand tiny pieces shattered around us. I flinched.

  “Alistair—” I said, in shock.

  He grabbed the hair at the nape of my neck and yanked my head back.

  I screamed as the white-hot electric pain tore through my scalp and I dropped the bag.

  “Peter Hindsberg,” he said.

  He knew. He knew about the private investigator. He knew about the money. He knew everything. But how?

  “Show me every place you defiled our marriage,” Alistair said. “Was it here, in this room?”

  He tugged on my hair and turned my head toward the dining room.

  “Or maybe there, on that table?” he asked.

  “You’re hurting me,” I said. Tears stung my eyes.

  And I scrambled to make sense of it. Peter? He thought that Peter and I had—?

  He tugged me a few paces to our right and pushed my face down hard into the couch cushions. My nose flattened against the rough gingham fabric. I couldn’t breathe.

  “Or maybe here, on this couch?” he asked.

  Then he ripped me up from the couch and turned me around to face him, his hands on my shoulders. I gasped for breath and clambered back away from him, out of his grasp.

  “I didn’t,” I coughed, my throat raw. “I didn’t. I didn’t. I swear I didn’t.”

  I lost my balance and I fell. My shoulder hit against the side of a bookcase and sang with pain. I crumpled onto the floor, sobbing. My vision blurred. I clamped my hand to my injured shoulder. When I drew it back, I saw blood.

  When I looked over at Alistair, he was crouching, his hands to his temples.

  “Why did you do this?” he asked, again and again, under his breath. “Why?”

  And I didn’t know who he was talking to—me or himself.

  When he looked up at me through his hands, I saw that he was crying.

  When I woke in the morning in our bed, there was a dull ache in my shoulder. I opened my eyes and looked down at the bandages Claire had given me last night in her kitchen, her boys fast asleep upstairs.

  “I fell,” I had told her over and over again. “I fell.”

  But I knew she knew.

  She had driven me home after, had insisted she stay the night on the downstairs sofa, even though Alistair’s car was gone from the driveway and there wasn’t a trace of him in the house.

  My head was still groggy with painkillers. It was difficult to make out a coherent thought.

  Someone rattled the door handle to my room. I had locked it the night before—a small part of me was afraid that he would try to return in the night. I cowered back in my bed, pulling the covers more tightly over me.

  Go away, I wanted to say, but the words got caught in my throat.

  “Mommy?” a voice called out.

  It was Charlotte. Charlotte. Charlotte. Charlotte. Poor, precious Charlotte. I had to get up. I had to go to her. But I couldn’t bring myself to move.

  Thirty-Five

  Charlie Calloway

  2017

  Hanging out with Dalton again was easier than I thought it’d be. At the very least, it felt good to know I had someone who was there for me, especially when so many people had bailed. Things with Stevie and Yael were tense, and Drew was gone, and I wasn’t talking to Greyson. So I fell in with Dalton and Leo and their friends again. I sat at their table for lunch and dinner. We hung out together on the weekends. And Dalton and I spent most of our evenings together in the library or in one of our rooms until curfew studying.

  “You know, I really don’t like the idea of not seeing you for a whole week,” Dalton said as he walked me back to my room one evening. He had his arm around me and pulled me close. It was November, and a light snow dusted campus. “You could come home with me for Thanksgiving break, you know,” he said. “Meet the whole Dalton clan. And my mom’s always asking about you. I’m sure she’d love to spend more time with you.”

  “Your mom?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Dalton said, kissing my hair. “Guess she’s a big fan of yours. Not that I can blame her.”

  “I don’t think my father would like that very much,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Just because he’d miss me,” I lied. “I haven’t seen him since that dinner we had in the city.”

  I had never mentioned my father’s phone call to Dalton, how my father had warned me to stay away from Margot, to stay away from him. My father had sounded so angry over the phone, so commanding. But why? Margot had been engaged to my father at one point, and obviously something had happened to end their relationship. But surely a bad breakup over two decades ago wouldn’t cause my father to act as dramatically as he had. My father’s demand that I stay away from Margot had to be related to something else. Maybe Margot knew something my father didn’t want me to know. Margot had been at school with my father and Jake. She had been an A. She had known my mother, somehow. It suddenly occurred to me that if anyone knew how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together, it was Margot. And maybe, just maybe, she would be willing to tell me.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay?”

  “Okay to Thanksgiving,” I said. “I’ll come home with you.”

  “Really?” he asked.

  “Really,” I said.

  He didn’t ask what had changed my mind and I didn’t tell him. Instead, he leaned down and kissed me, and I kissed him back.

  The Daltons had an oceanfront mansion in Southampton on three acres of land. The family gathering was small for the holidays, because Dalton was an only child, and half of Dalton’s family was British and didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. So, it would be just Dalton, his parents, and Margot’s sister Regina, her husband, and their three kids, the oldest of whom was ten. Dalton’s father wasn’t coming in from the city until Thursday for Thanksgiving dinner.

  I had told my father I was spending Thanksgiving with Drew and her family, and he was disinterested enough in my life not to follow up or ask for anything pertaining to proof.

  Dalton’s little cousins were obsessed with him and spent most of their time following him around, begging for wrestling matches or for him to play games with them. So we spent most of our time entertaining them, while I searched for a moment to get Margot alone and ask her my questions.

  “How about a game of Hide and Seek?” Dalton proposed one evening after dinner. His cousins squealed with delight and immediately started to argue over who would have to hide first.

  “I’ll do it,” I said, raising my hand and standing from the couch. “I’ll go first.” I could feel a headache coming on, and I really couldn’t take any more of their squabbling. Besides, a few minutes of peace and quiet by myself sounded all too tempting. If I could find a really good hiding spot, curl up, and fall asleep for a half hour, that would be heaven. “But close your eyes,” I instructed the cousins. “Close your eyes and count down from one hundred.”

  They put their hands over their eyes and started counting loudly. “One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight . . .”

  I pointed at Dalton. “You too. Close those eyes, mister.”

  He smiled at me and made a big show of putting his hands over his eyes, and I turned and darted out of the living room.

  The house was huge, with eight bedrooms and four and a half baths. There were a million different places to hide. I darted through the kitchen, where the adults were standing around the marble island, glasses of red wine in hand.

  “We’re playing Hide and Seek,” I whispered, putting my finger over my lips. “You never saw me.”

  Margot laughed and put a finger over her lips. “Saw who?” she whispered.

  I ran into the den next. I opened a door I thought was a closet but found a set of stairs instead. Perfect. The basement. I turned on the flashlight on my phone and started down the stairs, shutting the door quietly behind me.

  It was pitch-black and clutt
ered with old furniture, covered in sheets, and piles and piles of boxes. It smelled slightly of mildew. I was working my way through the labyrinth when I hit my shin on something hard.

  “Ouch,” I muttered into the darkness.

  I turned the flashlight of my phone on the sharp, boxy edge I had walked into. The light revealed a pair of dusty old suitcases.

  At that moment, the overhead light to the basement flickered on. I heard Dalton at the head of the stairs. I should have turned the light on my phone off and ducked down for cover, but I couldn’t move. Something about the suitcases had caught my eye. It was the print—a faded brown paisley. My mother had had a pair just like them once.

  “You down here, Charlie?” Dalton called.

  I could hear his footsteps coming down the staircase, but I couldn’t see him. My view of the stairs was blocked by a refrigerator-sized box. I reached out and ran my finger along the label on the face of the luggage—Burberry.

  I dropped my phone and took a step back. Yes, these suitcases were just like the ones my mother had owned, the ones that she had taken with her when she left.

  I felt like I was falling, falling, falling, as my heart hammered away in my chest and my breath grew shallow and my head rushed to make sense of it all.

  It was just a coincidence, I told myself. Hundreds of people had the same luggage as my mother. It was just a coincidence that Margot had the same old set of luggage in her basement. These weren’t those suitcases. They didn’t belong to my mother.

  Only . . . only, what if they did? I remembered my mother’s luggage had a rip in the inner lining. If I opened the suitcase up, and there was the same rip . . .

  I reached toward the suitcases again, but something hard pinned my arms to my sides. It was Dalton. He had found me, and he had me in a viselike grip, his arms around me like a steel cage.

  “Got you,” he said.

  Thirty-Six

  Alistair Calloway

  August 4, 2007