All These Beautiful Strangers

by Elizabeth Klehfoth

  We were both silent. My feelings toward my father were complicated. Part of me felt guilty for outing his secrets so publicly in the Knollwood Chronicle. Especially since I knew now that he hadn’t actively participated in my mother’s murder. The things he’d told me were mostly true. But still, my father wasn’t blameless. He had treated Jake cruelly, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the things Claire claimed about my father were true—that he had been cold toward my mother, that he had physically hurt her. Those last words I’d heard my mother utter to my father still haunted me: Get your hands off me.

  “Do you think they’ll have enough to pursue a case against Margot?” I asked after a while.

  “Well, they’ll have your eyewitness report of what you saw that night by the lake,” my father said. “And some circumstantial physical evidence with the watch and the suitcases. That’s something. The bad news is, by the time they get a search warrant and go to the Southampton house, Margot will have had the opportunity to destroy that evidence.”

  “She can’t,” I said, “because she doesn’t have it anymore. Well, at least, she doesn’t have all of it.”

  “What?” my father asked.

  “I called Greyson yesterday,” I explained. “He drove up yesterday afternoon and got the suitcases. He’s gotten very good at breaking and entering.”

  Shock registered on my father’s face. Then, he laughed. It caught me off guard and I chanced a look at him. He rubbed his chin and was serious again.

  “I wish that you’d confided in me,” he said. “I wish you’d come to me about all this. And when I think why you didn’t,” he said, “it occurs to me that the reason you didn’t was because you didn’t trust me.”

  I stared down at my hands. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. Because he was right. I had doubted him. I had chosen not to trust him. In my darkest moments, I had thought he might be exactly the person that the tabloids made him out to be.

  “But the truth is—I deserve that,” my father said. “For years, I held myself blameless. I told myself Grace had chosen to leave, and I was angry with her—so angry with her. But now I see I was partly responsible. It was my actions as a selfish, spineless teenage boy that killed Jake; my inability years later to be truthful with your mother when she asked me about Jake’s death; and my crass assumptions and callousness toward her that last summer that led her not to confide in me. Without those things, Grace would still be here. I don’t know if I can ever really forgive myself for that, so I don’t know how I can ask you to.”

  I looked up at him. I didn’t know what to say.

  “My whole life, I’ve tried to protect you,” he went on. “Maybe that’s difficult for you to see. I know I didn’t handle everything in the right way. When your mother . . . disappeared, I was broken. Utterly broken and angry. I felt like this raw shell of who I used to be. There was a time when I didn’t feel capable, or worthy, of being your father. And that was why I sent you and your sister away to stay with your uncle. I tried to stay away from you. I thought you were better off without me.”

  “I thought it was because you were angry with me,” I said. “Over what I’d said to Uncle Hank. And that story that came out afterward.”

  My father shook his head. “I wasn’t angry with you, Charlotte,” he said. “I was angry with myself.

  “When I think about the way I behaved that last summer with your mother,” my father said, his voice breaking slightly. “The things I did, the things I said to her, which turned out to be the last words I’d ever speak to her . . .”

  I felt something warm slide down my cheek, and I realized I was crying.

  “And then when everything came out today,” he said. “What you wrote about Margot, about Jake and the part I played that night . . .”

  He trailed off and was silent. He just looked at me, his face, for a moment, unreadable. I noticed the crow’s-feet that peeked out at the edges of his eyes, deeper than I remembered them. The roots of his hair near his temples were tinted gray. For the first time in my life, I realized my father looked old. Tired.

  “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about that day and wish that I had done things differently,” he said. “I’ve wished for a long time that I could be a different type of person, but time and again, I’ve fallen short, lost my way. Today, thanks to you, I finally got to prove to myself that I can be different.

  “I gave the officers out there a statement about what happened that night, with Jake,” he said. “I took the responsibility I should have taken a long time ago.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked. Would my father be prosecuted? Would he go to jail? “What will happen now?”

  “I don’t know,” my father said.

  I wanted to forgive my father, I did. I just wasn’t completely ready to. But I knew that one day, I might be. So, I reached out and held my father’s hand.

  It took them a few days of digging up the yard at the Daltons’ Southampton house before they found what remained of my mother in Margot’s kitchen garden. In the end, they found only bits of her, pieces of bone. I don’t know what exactly I expected them to find of her after all this time—something discernibly her, something to hold on to, something I recognized? When they showed me the bone fragments, worn smooth and pale white by the ravages of time, I held them in the soft palm of my hand, and I felt nothing but their coldness. Here she was—I held her in my hand, all of the parts of her that remained, and I didn’t recognize her at all.

  I suppose, in some ways, that was only fitting. My mother had loomed large in my life. She was such an inextricable part of who I was, of who I would become. And yet, I had played only a small part in hers. Before I even existed, she had been many different things to many different people. If my investigation into my mother’s past had taught me anything, it was that no one can really understand the whole of a person. In many ways, my mother, my father—the people I was closest to, the people who meant the most to me—were strangers. Beautiful strangers.

  We laid my mother to rest in the spring in the Calloway family plot in Greenwich. My father bought her a rose-colored tombstone on which they had engraved:

  Grace Elizabeth Calloway

  1974–2007

  Beloved Wife and Mother

  What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters

  compared with what lies within us.

  Epilogue

  Charlie Calloway

  September 2020

  “There’s a spot,” I say, pointing to a section of empty curb three houses down from my grandparents’ house. Their driveway is already full—I see my uncle Lonnie and aunt Caroline’s minivan and my uncle Hank’s rusted truck. We’re the last ones here because we stopped at the train station to pick up Seraphina after driving up from the city. She’s in her final year at Reynolds.

  “Got it,” Greyson says as he pulls into it and puts the car in park.

  We unload our trays of food—I picked up a tray of cookies at the store, Greyson made his famous pulled pork, and Seraphina brought a box of cupcakes with her from Reading.

  We don’t knock; we just go straight in. As usual, my grandparents’ house is full of people and noise. We call out a communal hello as we come through the door. I spot my grandma and give her a hug.

  “I brought Grandpa’s favorite cookies,” I say, handing her the plastic tray.

  “You spoil him,” Grandma says, taking the cookies and retreating to the kitchen.

  “There you guys are,” Claire calls out as she enters the living room, beer in hand.

  Greyson leans down to give her a kiss on the cheek. “Hey, Mom,” he says.

  “How’s NYU?” Claire asks me.

  “It’s great,” I say.

  “Meet any cute boys?” Claire teases.

  Greyson puts his arm around me and pulls me close as I laugh. “Hey now, none of that,” he says, planting a kiss in my hair.

  After my article about the A’s came out at Knollwoo
d, I spent the remainder of my junior year at Reynolds with my sister, and when I graduated the following year, I decided to take some time off to do Outward Bound. While my friends were starting college (Drew at Wellesley, Stevie at Berkeley, and Yael at Columbia), I was backpacking across the border lakes region of Minnesota and Canada and kayaking Lake Superior. It wasn’t something I had ever imagined myself doing, but it taught me to harness a strength I had only just begun to realize I had. When I came back, I turned down the Wharton School at UPenn and enrolled in the documentary film program at NYU. Again, not a path I could have imagined for myself only a year before, but the right one. With everything that had happened with my mother, I realized how important the stories that we tell about one another are. The stories we tell can change the way we see one another, can even change the way we see the world. I wanted to tell those stories; I needed to tell them.

  I started classes a few weeks ago. I’m renting an apartment in Greenwich Village with Greyson.

  After my father’s testimony regarding Jake’s death, he and the other A’s who had been there that night were convicted of negligent homicide in a suit brought against them by the state. Afterward, Jake’s family brought a civil case against them, which was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. My father served one year at the state penitentiary and is currently serving his probation. He was forced to step down as president of the Calloway Group, but I know he’s been in negotiations with Uncle Teddy and my grandfather about coming back in some way, serving as a consultant, perhaps, though I doubt they’ll let him have a seat on the board. Seraphina and I made a few trips up to the state penitentiary to see him while he was there. We talk occasionally, but building a new relationship with my father on the foundation of all that has happened in the last two years, all that I now know, is going to be a long and slow process. I’m still not sure what it will look like in the end.

  Margot’s case regarding my mother’s murder garnered a lot of media attention. Seraphina and I both had to endure the reporters and the tabloids on campus until the verdict came out. In the end, Margot was convicted of first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

  I grab a plate of food from the kitchen and make my way into the den to watch the game. I spot Uncle Hank on the couch, sitting next to my cousin Patrick, and I give him a little wave. Uncle Hank nods back at me.

  As dusk falls, my grandma brings out the frosted cake for my mother. She would be turning forty-six this year. We all gather around the table in the kitchen and sing. Then I lean forward and blow out the candles.

  Later, as Greyson and I head back toward the city after dropping my sister off at the train station, we take the long way out of town, out toward Langely Lake. From the road, I look out at the house my father built for my mother, all those years ago. It sits empty, its doors locked, the windows boarded, looking blindly and forlornly out at the water. My father put it on the market over a year ago, but so far, there haven’t been any buyers. He’s stopped paying to keep up the grounds. Creeping Jenny fills the yard, wool grass grows knee-high, even a handful of dogwood saplings appear here and there. The stone on the house has started to weather, and I can imagine it one day, many years from now, swallowed up by vines and weeds, reclaimed by the woods.

  Acknowledgments

  First, thank you, reader, for giving your time to All These Beautiful Strangers. That is an invaluable gift, and I am full of gratitude.

  Thank you to my wonderful editor, Carrie Feron, who shepherded this book to completion. Thank you for your patience, your guidance, and for always seeming to know exactly what the book needed. I am indebted to you and my whole team at William Morrow/HarperCollins, who showed the book such care, especially Danielle Bartlett, Katherine Turro, Jennifer Hart, Kelly Rudolph, and Julie Paulauski.

  To my agent Suzanne Gluck and the whole WME family—especially Laura Bonner, Matilda Forbes Watson, and Sylvie Rabineau—thank you. You are all rock stars.

  To Anthea Townsend, Naomi Colthurst, Sophia Smith, and the team at Penguin Random House Children’s UK—working with you has been a dream.

  Thank you Brendan Kenney, Bruna Papandrea, Steve Hutensky, and everyone at Made Up Stories for your early enthusiasm and support for the book and for helping it to find its place in the world.

  Many thanks to Aja Pollock for your fine eye for detail and stellar copyediting and to D.P. Lyle for your medical expertise.

  To Tiff, Katy, Lauren, Devonie, Meggie, and Amy—thank you for your friendships, for your excitement through all the highs and for your encouragement through the occasional lows; you’ve made this whole journey so much more fun.

  Thank you, Trevor, for so many things—for your insightful notes and your ingenious plot solutions when I was in a rut, for putting together my author website and for freely lending me your time and talents for my author photos. So much of you is in this. Thank you. Living each day alongside you is a gift.

  Mark, thank you for your provocative and outlandish story ideas, none of which made it into this book, but, maybe the next one.

  To Mom and Dad, who never, not once, voiced any doubts about me becoming a writer, even when I had doubts myself. Thank you for your unwavering love and support and for being the best parents a person could ask for.

  And last, but certainly not least—Annie, thank you for continually asking, “What happens next?” and for your very vocal impatience for receiving the next chapter (and the next, and the next). You were the first reader of All These Beautiful Strangers—and for a long time, the only reader—and you believed in it from the beginning. Thank you. Without you, this book would not exist.

  About the Author

  ELIZABETH KLEHFOTH grew up in Elkhart, Indiana. She received her BFA in creative writing from Chapman University and her MFA in creative writing from Indiana University, where she taught fiction writing and composition. She currently lives in Los Angeles. All These Beautiful Strangers is her first novel.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  all these beautiful strangers. Copyright © 2018 by Elizabeth Klehfoth. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  first edition

  Cover design by Alicia Tatone

  Cover photographs © Patryce Bak/Getty Images (main image); © foxie/Shutterstock (colors)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  Digital Edition JULY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-279672-1

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-279670-7

  About the Publisher

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.

  Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street

  Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

  www.harpercollins.com.au

  Canada

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

  Bay Adelaide Centre, East Tower

  22 Adelaide Street West, 41st Floor

  Toronto, Ontario, M5H 4E3

  www.harpercollins.ca

  India

  HarperCollins India

  A 75, Sector 57

  Noida

  Uttar Pradesh 201 301

  www.harpercollins.co.in

  New Zealand

&
nbsp; HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand

  Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive

  Rosedale 0632

  Auckland, New Zealand

  www.harpercollins.co.nz

  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF, UK

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  195 Broadway

  New York, NY 10007

  www.harpercollins.com