And Then Everything Unraveled

by Jennifer Sturman

  I was now officially lost. I had no idea what the stuff in the Ross folder was supposed to mean, or if I should even care about any of it. And there weren’t any more folders to go through. So I booted up T.K.’s laptop, thinking that maybe I’d find the source file for the drawing or mentions of Melvin P. Stern or EAROFO on her hard drive that would clue me in.

  The laptop was password-protected, and you’d think that someone like T.K., who ran a technology company, would know better than to choose something so easily guessed, but all I had to do was type C-o-r-d-e-l-i-a to log in. And that’s when things got seriously strange:

  The entire hard drive had been wiped clean.

  There were no e-mails—not even in the Sent or Deleted or Junk Mail folders. There were no appointments on her Outlook calendar or Tasks on her To Do list. There were no memos or spreadsheets or PowerPoint slides. There weren’t even any photos or music or videos in her media files.

  Only the applications were left. Everything else was gone, like she’d never used the computer at all, like it wasn’t even hers. But I knew it was hers because I’d seen her using it hundreds of times. And who else would’ve chosen my name as a password?

  The only trace of T.K. I could find was when I tried the Web browser. All of the bookmarks had been erased, too, but when I clicked on the History menu, a list of the sites she’d visited most recently appeared. Of course, every single link led me to information about something called the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, so this wasn’t exactly helpful. I already knew that T.K. was all about environmental protection, and the fact that she’d been heading to Antarctica wasn’t much of a secret, either.

  The obvious question was, who had gone to all the trouble to erase the files? And the answer there was nearly as obvious. Nora wouldn’t have done it, and I definitely didn’t do it. And the only other person who’d been in the house before I left was Thad.

  But just because I knew who’d done it didn’t mean I understood why he’d done it. And knowing that he’d done it was enough to demolish what little trust I’d had in him in the first place.

  I was wondering what happens to a laptop if you drop it from a fifth-floor window when Natalie called. And I really hoped she had some encouraging news, because between the Ross file and the empty hard drive, not to mention a junk-food hangover from my excursion with Charley the previous day, I was feeling pretty grim.

  “Hi,” I said. “How are you?”

  “Do you know anything about Patagonia?” asked Natalie.

  I’d already figured out that she wasn’t big on small talk, but this still seemed like a complete non sequitur, and it didn’t help that I couldn’t read her expression over the phone. “Uh, sure,” I said. “I have a bunch of their stuff for surfing. It’s supposed to be really eco-friendly.”

  “Not that Patagonia—I’m talking about the place in South America that they named the brand after. That’s where the call originated. In a province called Aisén, which is in the Chilean part of Patagonia.”

  She was waiting for me to say something, but suddenly all I could think of was the Chilean sea bass we’d had for dinner in Southampton. “Is that good?”

  “It’s awesome,” said Natalie, and now I could hear the triumph in her voice. “Because Aisén? It’s practically next door to where your mom’s ship disappeared!”

  Fifteen

  Of course, by next door, Natalie meant about 2,500 miles from where the Polar Star had sent its SOS, give or take a few hundred miles. And this was almost the same as the distance between Charley’s apartment and our house in California, which I wouldn’t describe as next door, either. But as land went, Aisén was one of the closest places to Antarctica that wasn’t actually Antarctica.

  We didn’t get a chance to talk through what it all meant, though, before Charley came home armed with takeout and DVDs. But we hastily arranged an emergency meeting for the next morning. And when we met on the front steps before school started, Natalie was just as excited as I was about her discovery.

  As she put it, “The odds against a coincidence of this magnitude are statistically insurmountable. It’s not like you know anyone but your mother who’s recently been within a twenty-five-hundred-mile radius of that particular spot, and especially not anyone who has your number and would feel compelled to reach you.”

  Meanwhile, all she had to do was pull up the Wikipedia entry for Aisén on her iPhone to show me why there’d only been static on the message, and why I hadn’t heard from T.K. again.

  The place sounded like something from one of T.K.’s old Outward Bound brochures. It was nearly the size of New York State, but with only a tiny fraction of the population, and it was almost entirely covered by mountains and ice fields. If she didn’t have to worry about me and her company and the ozone layer and all of the other stuff she liked to worry about, T.K. would probably be having a fabulous time, eating lichen and scaling glaciers. There weren’t even roads for the most part, let alone a high-quality telecommunications infrastructure.

  “Which means it’s too remote for her to get a decent connection,” I said.

  “And maybe she can’t charge her phone, either,” said Natalie. “Her battery must be dead by now.”

  “So all we need to do is figure out exactly where she is in Aisén and get her out of there,” I said, my mind racing ahead.

  “Except that’s not going to be easy,” said Natalie. “You can’t just call up the Chilean authorities and expect them to launch a massive search effort.”

  She had a good point. What was convincing evidence to a couple of high-school students in Manhattan would probably seem less convincing to the Aisén police department, assuming there was such a thing. It wasn’t like the least-populous region in Chile was exactly in the running for the next CSI franchise.

  The bell rang, and the various other students lingering on the steps began heading inside. We joined them, agreeing to continue the discussion when we met up again in physics. “I’m sure we’ll think of something,” Natalie assured me.

  But before first period was even over, I’d already decided for myself what I needed to do. The next step was perfectly clear.

  And in a city like New York, with more than eight million people to choose from, how hard could it be to find a private detective with the skills and contacts to get things done in Chile?

  I was so eager to get online and start researching private detectives that I was tempted to cut out of school early. But Prescott was big on taking attendance, and for all I knew, Patience had some sort of alarm system rigged up to alert her the moment I left campus.

  And, if I was being completely honest, the truth was that I didn’t want to miss drama. Mr. Dudley was back, and the class was meeting for the first time that afternoon. And while it might not help with the SATs, T.K. herself always says that you shouldn’t draw conclusions without a “robust and rigorously tested fact base.”

  So I suffered through the endless day, even though it felt like somebody had spiked the coffee in the faculty lounge with sedatives. The teachers all seemed to be moving in slow motion, like they knew I was in a hurry and were trying to torment me. But finally last period arrived.

  The kids who gathered on the stage in the auditorium were an even mix of juniors and seniors. I was sort of surprised to see Gwyneth there, given that I’d always thought drama required at least some degree of facial movement. But as soon as the teacher walked in, it made more sense. So did the fact that girls outnumbered boys in the class at least two to one.

  Mr. Dudley was probably close to thirty, but he was still so ridiculously good-looking that it was jarring to see him there, with us, rather than up on a movie screen or in the pages of a magazine. It was also pretty obvious that Gwyneth wasn’t the only one who was more interested in the teacher than what he taught.

  But he didn’t seem to notice that he was being worshiped. “Let’s get started, people,” he said, clapping his hands to call the class to order.
He had everyone sit in a semicircle on the stage, and then he welcomed us to “the magical world of theater,” which he described as “a noble offering, a gift that brings transparency to opacity, bridges cognitive dissonance, and creates community via communication.”

  I wasn’t convinced that even he understood what all of that was supposed to mean, and he spoke with a phony-sounding British accent as he paced back and forth before us. With every word, I grew more convinced that his accent was fake, but Gwyneth didn’t seem to mind. She almost had an expression.

  After he’d finished his introduction and launched us on a series of breathing exercises, something caught his attention offstage. “No need to be shy,” he called. “Come join us in channeling the muse.” Seriously. That’s what he said.

  I was wondering what Dieter would think of Mr. Dudley when Quinn slid into the spot right between Gwyneth and me. We were supposed to have our eyes closed, but even if I hadn’t peeked, the way every other sense suddenly snapped into high alert would’ve told me exactly who it was.

  This was the first I’d seen of him since Saturday, though I had to admit to doing some reliving of that morning over and over again in my head. And we were all supposed to be concentrating on exhaling from our solar plexus, assuming we knew where that was, so it wasn’t exactly a good time to turn to Quinn and explain why I’d fled from him on the beach. But it felt incredibly awkward sitting next to him, not saying anything to each other and with the memory of my impromptu exit sort of hanging there in the air.

  Little did I know just how much more awkward things were about to get.

  We finished the breathing exercises, and Mr. Dudley began detailing his plans for the semester. “Next week, each of you will be performing before the class in scenes I’ve culled from some of the most important works in the theatrical canon. Please note that this performance will count for a significant percent of your final grade. And people, be warned that I demand the highest standards of professionalism—there will be no tolerance for the dilettantish or the jejune.”

  “Did he really just say jejune?” Quinn said in a low voice.

  Mr. Dudley had been facing away from us, but his hearing must have been incredibly sharp. He whipped his head around and fixed Quinn with a glare that he probably thought was piercing. He consulted a list of students on a clipboard. “Mr. Riley, correct?”

  “Yes, sir. Quinn Riley.”

  “And you are?” Now he was looking at me.

  “Delia Truesdale,” I answered.

  He ran his finger down his list. “Ah, yes. Here you are. Cordelia Truesdale. Someone in your family must be a King Lear fan.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. Besides the extreme sports, Ash had been totally into Shakespeare, but I wasn’t going to explain about Ash to Mr. Dudley.

  He struck a pose. “‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!’” Then he sighed. “But she wasn’t thankless, was she? Poor misunderstood Cordelia.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said again. Mostly I was trying not to cringe.

  “Well, Cordelia, since you and Mr. Riley are apparently keen to start rehearsing lines, you can be the first to perform for the class. Next”—he checked his calendar—“Monday. That gives you a full week to prepare.” Then he consulted another list on his clipboard. “Hmm. Now which one shall it be? The Bard, perhaps? It only seems fitting.”

  Given the nonstop randomness that seemed to be the rest of my life, I probably should’ve expected what would happen next.

  “Ah,” he said, tapping his finger against one of the items on his list. “This will be perfect for you, Cordelia. Not Lear—too challenging for the novice thespian, of course. But Juliet. And you, Mr. Riley—you’ll be her Romeo.”

  Sixteen

  I had to give Mr. Dudley credit for choosing something more original than the balcony scene or the death scene or anything that obvious. But he did manage to select a scene with so much potential for embarrassment that it might as well have been a death scene.

  Act 1, scene 5, to be specific. And in case you’re a bit rusty on your Romeo and Juliet, here’s an excerpt:

  ROMEO

  Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged.

  JULIET

  Then have my lips the sin that they have took.

  ROMEO

  Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again.

  JULIET

  You kiss by the book.

  Yes, that’s right. There was kissing.

  To be clear, it wasn’t like I wasn’t interested in kissing Quinn.

  But I hadn’t expected it to happen in front of an audience.

  The fact was, I hadn’t expected it to happen at all, since the last he’d seen of me was my back as I sprinted away from him. I was starting to miss those days when he still only thought I was a brain-dead mute and hadn’t realized I was also an emotional basket case.

  Mr. Dudley took up so much time assigning scenes and parts and urging us to channel the muse again and saying a lot of other inane things that class ended before any rehearsing could take place.

  Which was just as well, because if I was worried about Quinn thinking I had a split personality, what little interaction we ended up having after the bell rang left me more worried about his split personality.

  The Quinn from the beach, the guy who woke up at dawn to teach Bea and Oliver to surf and who told me about his father and math and his future—that Quinn was nowhere in sight. But Apathy Quinn was back in a major way.

  I was all ready to apologize and explain everything, but here’s the conversation we had instead:

  DELIA

  Uh, hi.

  QUINN

  Hey.

  DELIA

  So, um—

  OFFSTAGE MINION

  Master Q. You coming with?

  QUINN

  Juliet, huh?

  DELIA

  Guess so. Listen, I sort of owe you an ap—

  OFFSTAGE MINION

  Riley? Where are you?

  QUINN

  [To OFFSTAGE MINION]

  Be right there.

  [To DELIA]

  Later, Juliet.

  EXIT QUINN

  And then he was gone, just like in the stairwell and the cafeteria. And definitely not like on the beach.

  I knew I shouldn’t dwell. After all, I had more urgent things to worry about, like rescuing my mother from the Chilean wilderness.

  But not dwelling would have been a whole lot easier if Apathy Quinn and Beach Quinn didn’t have the same gray-green eyes.

  Charley wasn’t home when I got back to the loft after school, but that suited my plans perfectly. I booted up my laptop and started Googling private detectives.

  It turned out that I might have been a bit too confident about how simple it would be to find what I was looking for. I mean, I never would’ve guessed that there were so many licensed professionals who’d like to help me check up on a cheating spouse or fraudulent insurance claims. And if I required armed guards, nanny checks, or litigation support, the world was my oyster.

  But strangely, none of the listings I found said anything like: “Accomplished Spanish-Speaking Private Investigator with Expertise in Remote South American Missing Persons Search Available for Immediate Hire.”

  And even if I ever did find the sort of person I needed, it looked like I might also have been a bit too confident about being able to pay him. Based on the rates I’d seen posted on some of the Web sites, it would definitely cost more money than I could access on my own. A lot more money.

  I did have an allowance from the trust T.K. had set up. It covered basic needs like my phone bill and ice cream and the occasional minor shopping spree, but that was about as far as it went. Even if I cut out all nonessentials, it wouldn’t be anywhere near enough.

  In theory, I was supposed to go to Patience if I wanted to tap into the additional funds from my mother. But asking Patience for cash for this specific purpose would be like ge
tting down on my knees and begging her to commit me to the nearest psychiatric ward. And just about everyone else I knew would have as much of a problem as I did coming up with that much ready cash.

  My only real option was Charley. I was worried about asking her—I’d been so careful to avoid the topic of my mother altogether since I’d overheard her talking to Patience—but I also didn’t have much of a choice. At least, not if I wanted to keep moving things forward.

  The information about the call originating in Chile had made everything seem so obvious and right when I was talking it through with Natalie. I just hoped it would be enough to keep Charley from thinking I’d completely lost it when I explained what I needed and why.

  By the time Charley got home, it was nearly eight. She’d spent the entire day at the post-production facility where they were editing the film, and she was, typically, starving. “I’m thinking spring rolls and pad thai and the lemongrass chicken thing and also maybe some of that beef with the ginger. And you can drink all of the soda you want, and I get to have an enormous martini to erase the ridiculous day I just had.”

  Charley’s favorite Thai restaurant was only a few blocks away. I figured it couldn’t hurt to wait until she had some martini in her before I told her that I still thought T.K. was alive and needed money for a detective, so I sat patiently until she had the drink in hand, complete with the six olives she’d requested. (Charley prefers her vegetables in the form of garnish.)

  But before she’d taken even a single sip, something incredibly strange happened.

  “I was speaking to Patty, and there’s something I need to run by you,” she said.

  That wasn’t the strange part, though the words “I was speaking to Patty” weren’t exactly a promising start.

  “We were discussing how reaching closure can’t be easy when there’s so much uncertainty about what happened to your mom. So there’s someone I’d like you to see.”