Eleven
I followed my cousins through a set of French doors and out onto the lawn. Summer was almost over, and the air was cooler now that the sun had set, but it still felt comfortable without a jacket or sweater. We skirted a tennis court and a pool before reaching the steep wooden stairs that led down to the beach.
“Thanks for not saying anything,” said Gwyneth at the bottom of the stairs.
“About what?” I asked.
“About the water glass.”
“Oh. No problem.”
“I can show you where they keep the liquor,” she offered.
I probably should’ve been touched, and maybe even flattered, but I was too distracted. I mean, I would’ve already had enough on my mind, between prepping for a Quinn encounter and worrying about whether my purple Calypso dress really worked with my silver ballet flats—or if it mattered, since there was a good chance nobody would notice me with my willowy blond cousin around. But now I was also wondering about Charley’s bizarre reaction to Hunter Riley’s name.
The Rileys’ house was only a few minutes’ walk up the beach, and while it wasn’t as big as my grandparents’ house, it was still huge. And Quinn’s idea of “having some people over” turned out to include at least fifty people at the pool and another fifty on a deck above—not that Quinn was anywhere in sight. Music blasted from hidden speakers, so loud that the deck vibrated with the thump of the bass line.
Grey immediately disappeared, and I let Gwyneth lead me over to a clump of kids. She introduced me around, but it was so noisy that it was hard to catch anybody’s name. Nobody seemed very interested in talking anyway. Mostly people just stood there, sipping drinks from plastic cups.
Half an hour later, I still hadn’t seen any sign of Quinn, and the nervous anticipation from the walk over was starting to evaporate. When I caught myself stifling a yawn, I even started to worry that apathy was contagious and began calculating how much longer I’d have to stay. And at just that moment, someone tapped me on the arm.
A surge of excited panic shot through me, but I told myself to stay calm, smile, and otherwise act like someone whose brain actually functioned. Then I turned around.
But it was only Natalie. “Hi,” she said. Her own smile was so friendly that I almost felt guilty about how disappointed I was to see her and not Quinn.
“What happened?” a guy I’d recognized from Prescott asked her. “Did they cancel SAT prep tonight?”
“Oh, no. That class is only on Tuesdays and Thursdays,” said Natalie, her green eyes innocent. “Sometimes they do extra sessions on Saturday mornings, but not until later in the school year.” Her delivery was so smooth that it took him a second to realize she was mocking him right back.
He sidled away, and Natalie drew me aside. “I’m so glad to see someone normal here,” she confided. “I hate parties. I try to avoid them when I can. The only reason I’m even here is that my college application coach thinks social skills are an important differentiator to admissions officers, so my mom and dad make me practice.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that, but something buzzing in Natalie’s handbag saved me from answering. She dug out an iPhone and checked the screen. “Figures. It’s my parents, making sure that I’m actually here instead of at the library, like last time. Sorry—this will be quick.”
I waited for a bit, but when I realized that her parents were quizzing her on every conversation she’d had so far, I signaled that I’d be back in a few minutes. She flashed me an apologetic look, and I escaped into the house.
There were a ton of people inside, too, but all I wanted just then was solitude. The evening was turning into a total bust. The worst part was that it was still too early to leave, at least if I was trying to prove how well-adjusted I was.
I wandered through the house, eventually finding a deserted sitting room as far away from the party as I could get. Everything was sleek and modern, with a lot of glass and chrome, but in its own way it was just as impersonal as my grandparents’ house. I sank into a chair upholstered in soft dark leather and picked up one of the enormous books on the coffee table, a collection of black-and-white photographs of sharecroppers during the Great Depression. The photos were pretty grim, with face after face staring out bleakly from the pages, but they sort of suited my mood.
As I sat there, the sounds from the party were like a muted soundtrack, the music and the voices blurring together in a low rumble of noise. But after a bit, one of the voices separated itself from the others, and I realized it was coming from an entirely different direction. At first I thought it was a TV, because the voice kept rising and falling like an actor’s does when he’s playing a part. Then I began to make out specific words: Muggle, Hermione, Hedwig, Slytherin.
Somebody nearby was reading aloud from Harry Potter. Which was pretty much the last thing I expected. Especially given that the other reading material available in the house seemed like it had been chosen mostly to match the decor.
I put the book of photos back on the coffee table and followed the voice through another empty room and down a dim hallway. At the end of the hallway, a sliver of yellow light spilled from a partially open door. I could hear the voice clearly now, on the other side of the door, and I knew exactly whose voice it was.
But I still couldn’t figure out why Quinn was hiding out from his own party, not to mention reading out loud while he hid.
My first instinct was to go say hello. In theory, it would be the perfect opportunity to show him I was capable of coherent speech. But I felt funny about it. After all, if he wanted to see people, he wouldn’t be hanging out at the complete other end of the house, would he?
So even though I’d promised myself that I was taking charge of my own destiny, I turned around and quietly returned the way I’d come.
Outside, the party hadn’t gotten any less crowded or loud. If anything, it was gathering strength. Somebody had started a drinking game involving croquet mallets and tequila shots, and somebody else had started a drinking game involving badminton racquets and empty beer cans. I didn’t see Grey anywhere, but I was just in time to spot Gwyneth heading toward the beach with one of the guys she’d been talking to before.
“There you are,” said Natalie, coming up beside me. “I was thinking of organizing a search-and-rescue mission.”
“What?” I asked, startled. Of course, Natalie had no way of knowing how much time I’d been spending lately thinking about the same thing.
“A search-and-rescue mission. You know, like when hikers don’t come back or a plane goes down or a ship sinks—” She stopped short, and a look of horror spread across her face. “Oh. Oh, no. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
“It’s okay.”
“See, this is why I need to practice my social skills. I’m always saying the wrong thing.”
“Really, it’s fine.”
“Do you—do you want to talk about it?” she asked gingerly.
I had to laugh. She was trying not to wince, but she wasn’t doing a very good job. When I’d first met Natalie, she’d reminded me of Erin and Justin. Now she reminded me of T.K., who would rather shave her head than talk about feelings.
“No,” I told her. “All I want is to find my mother.”
“But—you mean, you think she’s still alive?”
I nodded. “I know she is.”
“What makes you think so?” she asked.
I examined her expression carefully. If she thought I was crazy, she was hiding it better than she’d hid the wince, and she sounded genuinely curious.
So I told her everything. After all, it wasn’t like Natalie was tight with Patience or Charley or my cousins—I didn’t have to worry that she’d give me away. I even told her about the bloggers and the sixteen-second voice mail. It was a relief to get it all out.
She didn’t skip a beat. “Have you tried to trace the voice mail? Assuming it was a wireless call, whoever initiated it had to be in range of a site base station, and th
e signal would be transmitted from there to the nearest landline network for transfer to the fiber backbone, where it would bounce from point to point before being relayed to the tower that ultimately delivered the data stream to your handset, leaving a record throughout the switching system. You just need to know how to access it.”
I’d been lost pretty much since she asked if I’d traced the call. So I just focused on the last thing she’d said. “Do you know how to access it?” I asked. “The switching backbone thingie?”
“I could try to hack into it.”
“Really?”
“Sure. It shouldn’t be hard. I’ll just need to download some data from your phone.”
She was completely serious. And if it meant tracing the call, I was happy to give her all the data she wanted. I’d even be happy to practice social skills with her.
Twelve
We both agreed that we’d put in enough time at the party to please her parents and my aunts, so we went around to the street out front, where Natalie had parked her car. Most people keep CDs and maps and stuff like that in their glove compartments, but she pulled a memory stick out of hers and used it to transfer the data she needed from my phone.
“I like doing this kind of thing,” she said, waving away my thanks like I was the one doing her a favor. “It’s fun. And I’ll let you know as soon as I figure anything out.” I thought she had strange ideas about fun, but I wasn’t going to complain.
She dropped me off on her own way home, and Charley appeared as soon as I let myself in through the massive front door. “Well?” she asked, dragging me into the kitchen and pulling a carton of brownie caramel crunch from an industrialsized freezer. “How was it?”
Given how she’d acted at dinner, I was worried that the only reason she’d waited up was to warn me off Quinn, but when I told her how little I’d accomplished on that front, she seemed nearly as disappointed as I was. And she didn’t know what to make of Harry Potter, either.
“But look on the bright side,” she said. “At least he wasn’t drunk and hitting on every girl in sight.”
“Is that what his father’s like? Hunter? Is that why you don’t like him?” I asked.
“Who told you I don’t like Hunter Riley?” she asked.
“You did, at dinner. Maybe not in those exact words, but you made it sort of obvious how you felt.”
She started to protest, but she gave it up pretty quickly. “You’re right,” she admitted. “I don’t like him. And I didn’t realize when you were talking about Quinn that he was Hunter’s son.”
“So what’s so awful about Hunter Riley?”
“You really want to know?”
“Is it worse than finding out that my ancestors were mountain-destroying labor exploiters?”
“That’s good,” she said, impressed. “I’ve never heard it put so succinctly.”
“I’m waiting,” I reminded her.
She sighed and put down her spoon. “The reason I don’t like Hunter is because he completely destroyed the life of Quinn’s mother, Paula, who also happened to be a friend of mine, because sometimes the world is just too small.”
“How did he destroy her life?”
“For one, he started fooling around while they were still married, and he didn’t even try to be subtle about it. Then, about ten years ago, when their marriage officially hit the rocks and they were getting divorced, he sued her for custody of their kid.”
“Their kid being Quinn?”
“Their kid being Quinn,” she agreed.
“The cheating thing was bad, but what was so wrong with wanting custody?”
“Hunter completely smeared Paula to get it. He’d made a fortune with his hedge fund—even with the whole financial crisis he’s still been raking it in—and he hired the sharkiest, most expensive lawyers in town to rip her to shreds. They ended up having a very nasty, very public custody battle, during which he said she was mentally unstable and an unfit mother and a lot of other things that you don’t exactly want being said about you all over Page Six.”
I did the math. “So Quinn was what—seven or eight when this happened?”
“Something like that, which brings me to the worst part. Hunter got Quinn to testify against his mother.”
“How? I mean, what could a seven-year-old have to say?”
“Whatever his father told him to say, I imagine.”
“That must have been awful.” I was thinking of Quinn, but Charley assumed I was talking about Paula.
“She was absolutely devastated. After she lost the custody battle, she moved to the West Coast, to Los Angeles or Seattle or someplace like that. I haven’t heard from her since.”
She picked up the now-empty carton of ice cream and moved to throw it away, but then she hesitated, like she wasn’t sure whether she should say what she was about to say.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s just—I know it’s none of my business, and it’s all ancient history, and I’m the last person to blame the son for the sins of the father, especially given the Reggies, and this isn’t to say that Quinn isn’t a wonderful guy, but now that we both know more about him—ugh, I don’t know how to say this.”
I’d never heard her sound so awkward. “Say what, already?” I asked.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is proceed with caution. Okay?”
She looked at me intently. “Okay,” I said. “But, just to keep things in perspective, he’s said two sentences to me and I’ve said one word to him. I don’t think he even knows my name. So I don’t know how much caution I really need.”
This made her laugh. “Well, it never hurts to be prepared.”
I forgot to close the curtains, so I was up soon after dawn the next morning. The sky was hazy, like it couldn’t decide what kind of day it wanted to become, but the sun glowed brightly enough through the haze to fill the room with light.
I could hear the waves rolling up onto the sand, and from the window I could even make out a distant figure with a surfboard. I hurriedly put on my bathing suit and an old shirt of my dad’s that I used as a cover-up and headed downstairs. Then I let myself out through the same French doors as the night before and took the same path down to the beach, leaving my flip-flops at the bottom of the stairs.
Almost without thinking, I turned in the direction of the surfer I’d seen through the window. Since I didn’t have my board, I couldn’t surf myself, but at least I could get a vicarious thrill from watching somebody else. But once I got closer, I realized that the lone surfer in the distance was actually a guy with two young kids, and he was teaching them how to surf.
I took off my cover-up, spread it on the sand, and sat down to watch. They were far enough away that I couldn’t hear more than the occasional cry of success, but I could see when one of the kids managed to stay upright on the board for a second or two, and I found myself smiling whenever that happened. I knew exactly how those first fleeting moments felt, and the kids’ instructor cheering them on reminded me of my dad when he was teaching me.
It’s not like I avoid thinking about my dad, but I try not to do it too much. For the first couple of years after he died, seeing or hearing something that unexpectedly triggered a memory could make me miss him so much it physically hurt.
That still happened sometimes, but there was something about this specific memory that wasn’t painful—just purely sweet. When I closed my eyes, it was almost as good as if he’d been sitting next to me.
It was maybe a couple of minutes after that when the kids started shrieking.
Before I even had time to think, I was up and running. By the time I reached them, they’d dashed up onto the beach, so at least I knew they weren’t drowning, but they were screaming and pointing at something in the water.
“What’s wrong?” I panted to the kids, a boy and a girl in matching wet suits.
But as soon as I saw what they were pointing at, I figured out the problem. An enormous jellyfish bobbed lazily in the water,
while farther out their instructor was paddling the surfboard toward shore. The haze had burned off and the sun was low in the sky behind him, so all I could see was his silhouette, but it was still clear that he was on a collision course with the pinkish blob.
The kids’ words came out in a babbled, overlapping rush:
“The board got away from us—”
“And the undertow washed it really far out—”
“And he swam to get it—”
“And then we saw the jellyfish—”
“So we ran—”
“But what if it stings him—”
“He can’t hear us—”
“On the count of three,” I said. “We all yell ‘jellyfish’ as loud as we can, okay?”
I counted to three and we yelled, but the guy paddling the board just cupped an ear with his hand and shook his head. Between the surf and the wind, we couldn’t make ourselves understood.
It’s not like it was a shark, and jellyfish stings aren’t exactly fatal—at least, most aren’t—but they can still be pretty dangerous, especially if the person getting stung turns out to be allergic. And this jellyfish was seriously huge.
Before I could talk myself out of doing anything stupid, I grabbed a stick of driftwood from the beach and rushed into the water. I didn’t have a specific plan—everything happened in a lot less time than it takes to describe it—mostly I was just hoping that the stick was longer than the jellyfish’s tentacles.
The surf had picked up, and I ducked under one wave and then another, keeping my eye on the big blob rocking to and fro as the water pulled it along. I stopped about six or seven feet away, treading water with my legs and one arm while stretching my other arm out as far as it would go to extending the stick toward the jellyfish. I held my breath as it made contact.
Beneath the water’s surface, there was a flash of movement as the tentacles lashed out in response to the foreign touch, and my body instinctively flinched. But I lodged the stick’s end against the jellyfish and started pushing it down the shore, kicking my legs as hard as I could to keep the undertow from dragging us both closer to the guy on the surfboard.
And Then Everything Unraveled Page 7