All These Beautiful Strangers

by Elizabeth Klehfoth

  The Daltons had one of those annoying grandiose doorbells that went on forever and echoed throughout the whole house. I froze where I was in the dark. I knew I couldn’t risk running back up to my room right now—not when Margot would no doubt be making her way down those very stairs to answer the door. I got on my hands and knees and crawled behind a couch to hide.

  The doorbell rang again, followed by several loud, thunderous knocks, as if someone were pounding on the front door with their fists.

  Who would be visiting at this hour and making such a commotion? It was nearly two in the morning.

  I heard footsteps coming down the stairs and then caught the flicker of a light being turned on in the back hall. Margot rounded the hall into the den, and I held my breath as she passed me on the floor, praying she wouldn’t see me there behind the couch. She had on a cream terry-cloth robe, her hair loose around her shoulders. She passed into the sitting room and when she turned into the foyer, I lost sight of her. I heard her pull the front door open.

  “I don’t know what the hell kind of stunt you’re trying to pull here.”

  It was a man who was yelling. I heard the voice echo through the walls, a deep, rumbling bellow.

  Next came Margot’s voice, some reply that was too muted for me to hear. I got up and padded into the sitting room, closer to the foyer, so I could make out what they were saying to each other.

  “—not trying to pull anything. I didn’t know she didn’t tell you. But, really, if you could take a moment to calm down,” Margot said.

  Was it Dalton’s father at the door? He was supposed to arrive sometime today. But what could he have to be so pissed about?

  “Where the hell is she? I want to see her this instant, Margot, I swear to god.”

  My heart stopped. It wasn’t Dalton’s father—it was mine.

  I heard his heavy footsteps plodding into the foyer and up the front grand staircase and I froze. What was my father doing here? How did he know where I was?

  “Charlotte?” he yelled. “Charlotte!”

  I walked numbly into the foyer and was about to call out to my father, who had just reached the second-floor landing, when I saw Dalton standing there in his pajamas, hair all mussed from sleeping.

  “What’s going on?” Dalton asked, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

  “You!” my father yelled, coming at Dalton with his finger shaking and his face darkening three different shades of red.

  “Alistair!” Margot shouted, bolting up the stairs.

  “I’ve heard all about the stunt you tried to pull,” my father said, stopping just short of Dalton, but still pointing at him and shaking. “You’re going to stay the hell away from my daughter. You won’t text her, or call her, or come near her. And if you so much as touch a hair on her head, I’ll rip your fucking arm off.”

  “Dad,” I said. “Stop.”

  At the sound of my voice, my father halted and he turned on the landing and looked down at me at the base of the stairs. For a second, his anger seemed to drain from his face, and he looked relieved.

  But then, just as quickly, the anger was back. Possibly even amplified.

  “Charlotte, get your things,” he said. “We’re leaving.”

  “It doesn’t have to be this way, Alistair,” Margot said.

  “I’ll be in the car,” my father said, ignoring her. “You have five minutes, Charlotte, and then I’m coming back in here, and nobody is going to like the things I’ll do.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  My father turned and barreled past Margot and me down the stairs. A second later I heard the front door slam shut behind me.

  “What just happened?” Dalton asked.

  “I may not have been one hundred percent upfront with my dad about where I was spending Thanksgiving,” I said.

  “You better get your things,” Margot said rather icily. “Best not to keep your father waiting. Royce, if I could see you for a moment downstairs?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Dalton said.

  I mouthed I’m sorry to Dalton behind Margot’s back and then walked to my room to get dressed. I pulled on the same jeans and sweater I had worn the day before because they were still lying on the floor where I had discarded them yesterday. I went about hastily packing, throwing all of my things into my suitcase as quickly as I could.

  I didn’t get to say goodbye to Dalton. Neither he nor Margot was anywhere in sight when I dragged my suitcase downstairs. But I didn’t have time to go looking for them, so I took my things and left.

  My father’s car was idling in the front drive. He got out to put my suitcase in the trunk and then held the front passenger door open for me. He slammed it behind me when I got in.

  We drove in silence for the first several minutes. I opened my phone and saw that I had fifty missed calls from Greyson and dozens of text messages. I had forgotten to take him off of “Do Not Disturb” mode. I opened the text messages. The earliest ones were a frenzy of panic.

  Greyson: [8:05 p.m.] Charlie, where r u?

  Greyson: [8:12 p.m.] R u ok?

  Greyson: [8:56 p.m.] Seriously, answer my calls plz

  Greyson: [9:30 p.m.] Pick up

  Greyson: [10:03 p.m.] I’m really worried

  The ones in the middle became vaguely threatening.

  Greyson: [10:03 p.m.] I’m going to call your dad if you don’t answer so I can get dickweed’s address

  And the later ones became just plain stupid.

  Greyson: [11:45 p.m.] I didn’t have your dad’s number so I went down to his place in the city

  Greyson: [11:47 p.m.] He’s really mad. He’s coming to get you

  Greyson: [11:48 p.m.] I told him about Dalton and the board of conquests

  Greyson: [11:48 p.m.] I’m sry. Don’t hate me.

  Ugh, Greyson had gone to my dad? He had told him about Dalton? What an idiot.

  “Don’t ever lie to me, Charlotte,” my father said, finally breaking the silence between us. “Don’t ever lie to me again.”

  “That’s funny,” I said. “I thought lying was a Calloway family trait.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Jake Griffin,” I said. “You told me you barely knew him.”

  My father stopped the car. He pulled over onto the side of the road and put the car into park.

  “Is that why you didn’t want me around Margot?” I asked. “Because I was asking questions about Jake, and you were scared she would give me answers? You didn’t want me to know the truth?”

  “What exactly did Margot tell you?”

  “She told me everything,” I lied.

  “It was an accident,” my father said. “We all thought he was dead. He wasn’t breathing.”

  I turned my head and stared out the glass at the snow dusting the road and the countryside. I couldn’t risk my father’s seeing the shock that I felt registering on my face. What was an accident exactly?

  “Everyone was looking to me, to tell them what to do, to fix it. We were scared. We were just kids,” my father said. “And then Margot, Margot came up with this idea. To make it look like Jake had—had killed himself. To throw his body over the Ledge and just make it look like a suicide. To forge a note about the exam he had stolen and leave it in his dorm room.”

  “So you did it?” I asked. “You threw him into the water?”

  “Is that what she told you?” my father asked. He looked at me and then away.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “He was too heavy for Margot to lift him by herself,” my father said. “She needed someone to help her. She kept saying it was the right thing, that it was the only way to save ourselves, that he was dead anyway, and so why did we have to throw our futures away with him?

  “I told her I would take him. I’d drive him to the hospital in Falls Church, and I’d leave his body where somebody would find him right away. But she said that was too risky. That there’d be too many questions. That it could lead back to us. She sa
id we needed to make it so that nobody would come looking for us, for answers. And so Matthew York, he helped her do it. It wasn’t until later that we found out that he wasn’t dead when we threw him in.”

  It took me a moment to realize what my father was saying. He and his friends had killed Jake Griffin.

  “I was weak,” my father said, finally looking at me. “In the worst possible way, I was weak. I was too weak to help Margot do it, and I was too weak to try and stop her.”

  I don’t know what made me do it, but I reached over and covered my father’s hand with my own.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I’ve never told anyone that before,” he said.

  “Not even Mom?” I asked.

  My father looked like I had sucker-punched him. I felt him pull away from me, and I drew back my hand. “Your mother?” he asked.

  Now was the time. I could bring up the case file, the photographs, the suitcases. I could ask him for the truth.

  “Did she know about Jake?” I asked instead. “Did she know what really happened to him?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Yes,” my father said finally. “But I wasn’t the one to tell her. She found out that last summer that she was with us. She came across some old photographs while developing film. She interrogated Margot about it, and Margot told her everything.”

  That was why my father was so adamant that I stay away from Margot—because she had told my mother the truth about Jake, and he hadn’t wanted her to tell me, too.

  “Your mother hired an investigator,” my father said. “She was trying to find evidence, build a case. I didn’t know until after she was gone. I thought . . . I thought she was having an affair. When she disappeared, I went to his house to confront him. I thought maybe, maybe they had run off together. That’s when he told me the true nature of their relationship. When my PI discovered the bank tapes—the money missing from the safety-deposit boxes—I knew she’d run off, and why. She’d discovered what I’d done, what I was. She couldn’t stand to be with me anymore. And she wanted to hurt me, in the most irrevocable way she could.”

  I sat there for a moment, in stunned silence. But she hadn’t just left him. She had left me, too. And Seraphina. And Claire. And Grandma and Grandpa Fairchild, and Uncle Hank. Why would she leave all of us behind, without a word, without a thought, without a backward glance?

  “Claire said—” I started. I took a deep breath. I didn’t know exactly how to say this. “Claire told me you and Mom got in a fight the week before she left. That Mom got hurt.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my father clench his fists.

  “We were arguing and your mother fell,” my father said. “I didn’t touch her. I would never . . . I would never hurt her.”

  Is that true? I couldn’t help but ask myself. Could my mother have been scared of my father? Could that fear have kept her silent and hidden all these years? I couldn’t help but think of my mother’s last words to my father: Get your hands off me.

  We sat in silence for a while, and then my father asked, “What made you ask about your mother?”

  I contemplated telling him everything—about the photographs Uncle Hank had found underneath the floorboards at the lake house, about the case file I had stolen from Peter Hindsberg’s office. Maybe everything my father said was true. In many ways, it all added up—everything clicked neatly into place. Maybe my mother really had left us, just as I’d believed all these years.

  But I couldn’t get those suitcases I’d seen in Margot’s basement out of my mind. Maybe it was just a stupid coincidence. Maybe I was being crazy.

  “No reason,” I said. “It’s just . . . the holidays. I always think about her more this time of year, I guess. Thanksgiving was her favorite.”

  I paused.

  “Do you ever . . . do you ever think about her?” I asked. It was the first time I had asked my father this since I was a little girl.

  At first, he didn’t answer. He put the car into gear and pulled back onto the road. But after a while, he nodded, almost imperceptibly, and I knew he had heard me.

  “I never stopped,” he said.

  Thirty-Eight

  Charlie Calloway

  2017

  My third and final ticket for the A’s was waiting in my mailbox when I returned to school. This time, the ticket was in a small white envelope. I opened it in the entrance to Rosewood Hall.

  Item #3: Publish these pictures in the next edition of the Knollwood Chronicle

  I turned the envelope upside down in my palm and slid out the photographs, but I knew what they were even before I saw them. They were the pictures Leo had taken of me with Mr. Andrews. I looked undistinguishable enough—clearly a student in the Knollwood Prep uniform, but the back of my head was to the camera. Mr. Andrews was clear and recognizable, though, and so was our inappropriate embrace.

  What had Mr. Andrews done to incur the wrath of the A’s? I knew it was pointless of me to actually ask. The A’s were determined to take him down, and they were going to use me to do it.

  I slid the photographs back into the envelope and tucked it into my trig textbook. The ticket to get the photographs had seemed like some stupid dare at the time. Something to test how far I was willing to go to prove to the A’s that I belonged, that I deserved to be one of them. But this, this seemed cruel. To destroy a man’s reputation. And if what was in the pictures was real, maybe Mr. Andrews would have deserved it. But what the pictures didn’t show was how I was the one to kiss him, and he was the one to pull away. The pictures were a lie.

  I hugged the textbook to my chest as I set off across campus to class. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it there, the envelope tucked into the pages—holding the third and final ticket, the very last test that stood between me and becoming an A.

  Leo leaned over my shoulder and plucked Plath’s Ariel out of my fingers. I grabbed for it, but he held it out of my reach and leaned back into the pillows stacked on my dorm room bed. He dramatically read aloud the last line of the poem and then laughed.

  “God, I hate this poem,” Leo said. “I know Plath is supposed to be deep, but every time I read this, all I can take away from it is that Plath was fucking her dad.”

  He tossed Ariel next to me on the bed and picked up his Xbox controller. I held the closed book in my hands, ran my fingers across the edge of the pages.

  Since that conversation I’d had with my father during Thanksgiving break, I couldn’t stop thinking about what he and the A’s had done to Jake Griffin. Sure, they had thought he was dead at the time they tossed him over the Ledge. They hadn’t meant to hurt him. But then again, the A’s weren’t completely blameless. They had cared more about themselves—their futures, their own reputations—than they had cared about the well-being of their friend. Because if they had really put Jake first that night, they would have done everything they could to get him help. And at the very least, they could have been honest about what happened and not put Jake’s family and friends through the torment of thinking he had killed himself. Maybe the A’s weren’t murderers, but they were selfish, self-centered, and cruel.

  If I was being honest with myself—painfully honest—I had to wonder, if I had been in my father’s shoes that night at the Ledge with Jake, would I have done anything differently? Because I had been in his shoes already, in a manner of speaking, and I had solidly played everything in my own self-interest. When Auden was framed for a prank he didn’t commit, I let him take the fall and deal with the punishment. Unmasking the A’s didn’t even cross my mind. But I could have done that, and it might have changed things.

  I guess I hadn’t played everything just in my own self-interest. I had been loyal to the A’s. In a way, my father and his friends had done something similar. They had sacrificed Jake to save one another. It hadn’t been an easy choice, and it hadn’t been completely selfish. Maybe there was something noble in that type of loyalty.

  “Say I did something ba
d,” I said. “Like really, really bad.”

  “What type of bad?” Leo asked, eyes still trained on the TV screen, pursing his lips like he always did when he was concentrating really hard. “Like lie-to-your-dad-about-spending-Thanksgiving-with-your-boyfriend bad?”

  “Ha ha,” I said. Leo was still giving me a hard time about that. He was a little pissed I had lied to him about where I was over Thanksgiving break, though he didn’t really have the moral high ground when it came to our being honest with each other.

  “Say I killed someone,” I said. “By accident.”

  “How?” Leo asked.

  “I don’t know . . . specifics aren’t important,” I said.

  “Specifics are important,” Leo said. “Are we talking, like, you accidentally hit someone with your car? Or is this a crime of passion? Like you got in a fight with Dalton and stabbed him to death with the heel of your Louis Vuitton?”

  I sighed. “You choose.”

  “I choose death by Louis Vuitton,” Leo said. “And your secret is safe with me.”

  “But I mean like, seriously,” I said. “This is hypothetical, obviously, but if it weren’t, all joking aside, if you knew I killed someone, you wouldn’t go to the police?”

  “If you accidentally killed someone?” Leo asked. “I don’t know. No, I guess not.”

  “Why not? Shouldn’t I be held accountable?”

  “Family is family,” Leo said, shrugging.

  “So the fact that we’re blood gives me a Get Out of Jail Free card? You wouldn’t feel morally compromised?”

  “Listen, loyalty to the people you love, to your family, is a moral code. If you don’t have loyalty, what do you have?”

  “Family loyalty,” I said. “That’s funny, coming from you.”

  I still wasn’t completely over what Leo had done to me, and I liked to give him a hard time about it.