The Ones We Trust

by Kimberly Belle

  Her name whips a lightning bolt up my spine, sticks the breath in my lungs. I know I shouldn’t be listening, but I can’t seem to move. I lean my upper body closer to the doorway, tilt my head so I can better hear.

  “I’m not talking about the investigation, and you know it.”

  “Look, Tom. You and I want the same thing here, and that’s for that family to back down. Where we disagree is how to go about getting there. But you’re no longer in charge here.” There’s a long, long pause, then Chris’s voice, darker now. “I am.”

  The silence that spins out lasts forever. It’s the kind of silence that wraps around you like a shroud, the kind that turns the air thick and solid, the kind that makes you want to hear the answer as much as you dread it. I hold my breath and lean in, straining to hear what comes next.

  Finally, it comes in the form of Rose’s high-pitched squeal from right behind me. “Everybody’s outside, silly!”

  And then, before either my father or Uncle Chris can respond or come storming around the corner, I latch on to Rose’s hand and drag her out the door.

  * * *

  Rose and I emerge onto a stone terrace that could be on the cover of a Frontgate brochure. Designer wicker couches, teak dining tables, cushioned chaise longues in front of a rolling lawn as perfectly manicured as any golf course. Pretty, but with not even the slightest nod to the family who lives here.

  Mom greets me as if she hasn’t seen me in months, as if I didn’t just meet her for coffee this past Thursday morning.

  “Abigail!” she says, pushing a kiss on my cheek and strangling me in a hug. “How are you, dear?”

  Margaret Wolff is the storybook version of a mother. The kind of mom who alphabetizes recipe cards and embroiders Christmas stockings and can whip up hot, hearty meals on a moment’s notice. While my father climbed the army’s ranks, collecting pins and adding stars to his sleeves, she stayed at home with me and Mike, packing our lunches and drilling us for spelling bees. Whenever I picture her, she always looks as she does now, in simple makeup, sensible shoes and a cheerful, frilly apron.

  She releases me, and I dole out hugs to the rest of the family. My brother, Mike, hovering at the edge of the terrace with a Heineken and his orthodontist’s smile, toothy and white. His wife, Betsy, stretched out in an Adirondack chair nearby. Their son, Tommie, dressed in a diaper and onesie and waving an empty bubble container in a fist. Chris’s wife, Susan, my godmother, who gives Mom a run for her money when it comes to enthusiastic hellos.

  By the time I’ve made my rounds, Dad and Uncle Chris are coming out the terrace door, and neither of them look particularly happy. Their knowing gazes land on me, lighting me up inside like a bonfire...or maybe that’s my own guilt at getting caught red-handed, eavesdropping on their conversation.

  Uncle Chris breaks away from my father and comes across the terrace with a wide grin. “How’s my girl?” He tucks me under an arm and drops a kiss on my temple. “Isn’t it time for another one of our monthly lunches?”

  “Way past. But you canceled the last two times.”

  “Sorry, sugar. But things have been a little hectic, as I’m sure you know, with the Armstrong case.”

  All around us, everyone has gone back to their conversations. Mom and Aunt Susan are exchanging recipes, Mike and Betsy are bickering about whose turn it is to change the baby’s diaper, Rose is sweet-talking Tommie into a bite of his cookie. Only my father is silent. His gaze is pinned to mine as if I might be concealing an IED. It’s more than just anger at the eavesdropping. It’s as if he’s searching for something in my answer.

  I keep it as innocuous as possible. “I’ll bet,” I say, returning my gaze to Uncle Chris, and that’s that.

  The party progresses the way most four-year-olds’ birthday parties do, with half-eaten hamburgers and puddles of spilled milk and more cake than any person should ever eat in one sitting. Dad barely says a word. Even worse, he spends most of every minute pumping a muscle in his jaw and glaring across the table at the man he always claimed was the brother he never had. Yet I can’t find even an ounce of affection between them now, only animosity. Whatever I walked into in that hallway is much bigger than the few sentences I overheard. There’s an electricity that crackles the air between them, and it soldiers every hair on my arms to attention.

  Finally, when Tommie’s sugar high crashes into a sticky, sweaty meltdown, Mom takes him inside for a nap, and Rose and I escape with her tea set and a pitcher of lemonade to the castle playhouse at the back of the yard, nestled at the base of a big oak tree.

  “I have a secret,” Rose tells me in an ironic twist. Another secret, this time from the four-year-old. Apparently, folks in this family learn early. “I’m asking Santa for a dog.”

  Rose and I are seated cross-legged on the grass, the tea set spread out between us. Outside the plastic castle, the early-October sun is still beating down, but thanks to the playhouse’s position in the shade and a cross breeze blowing through the half-shuttered windows, inside the air holds the cool nip of fall.

  I laugh and hand her a miniature teacup, delicately balanced on a miniature saucer. “You already have a dog.”

  “I want a littler one.” Rose chugs her lemonade, then holds out her cup for a refill. “Jenny Kilkelly has one that’ll fit in a shoe. That’s the kind I want.”

  For the next few minutes, Rose fills me in on every kid in her pre-K class, as well as a few of what I suspect are imaginary friends. Olivia threw up on Sam’s brand-new sneakers in the car-pool lane. Noah wants to be a girl for Halloween. Bridget and Bella, who are apparently identical twins, wear matching bows in their hair every day. Joseph has learned how to fly.

  “Fly?” I say. “As in, flapping his wings like a bird?”

  She gives me a don’t-be-dumb look. “No, silly. In an airplane. His dad taught him how.”

  “Oh.” Schooled by a prekindergartener.

  But Rose has already moved on, and to a girl by the name of Annie, who is going to live with her mother and brand-new father in Omaha, when my father’s voice booms from outside the castle roof. “Knock, knock.”

  Rose springs to a stand and throws open the plastic shutters. “Grandpa! Want to come inside for some tea?” She leans her head out and lowers her voice to a shout-whisper. “It’s not really tea. It’s lemonade.”

  “Thank you, sugar, but I wanted to talk to Abigail for a minute. How ’bout you run up to the house and see what Nana’s up to?”

  She shrugs as if she couldn’t care either way, then takes off for the house, announcing loud enough for all of Bethesda to hear, “Nana, I gotta pee!”

  As soon as she’s gone, I crawl across the grass and wedge my adult-sized body out the kid-sized door. “Is this about what happened in the hallway? Because I didn’t mean to overhear. I was walking out and—”

  “Not exactly,” he says, cutting me off with a palm in the air. The sun hangs high in the sky above his head, backlighting him like an apparition, making him look even more stony-faced than I see he still is. “What I need to know is why you’re calling meetings with the Armstrongs.”

  At first I think I must have heard him wrong. After all, it’s not as if I’ve told anyone other than Mandy and Victoria that I’ve had contact with either of the Armstrongs, and neither of them would pass the information on to my father.

  I unfold myself, brushing the grass off my jeans. “Are you spying on me?”

  “Answer the question, Abigail. Are you or are you not writing about the Armstrong case?”

  By glossing over my question, my father has unwittingly also answered it. He’s been spying, all right, though I’m not sure if it’s on me or the Armstrongs. Dad may have retired four months into the investigation, but that doesn’t mean he’s not still involved—though, involved enough to spy on his own daughter? The idea seems as impossible to me
as unicorns or counting to infinity or eating only one french fry.

  “Whatever my conversations have been with the Armstrongs, they have nothing to do with you.”

  “Of course they have to do with me. My department is under investigation because of Jean Armstrong. Where’s your loyalty?”

  His condescending tone lights a fire under my temper. “Funny you should mention that word, because loyalty is exactly why I’m talking to the Armstrongs. One of the seven reasons why, actually, and I’m sure you can guess the other six.”

  A muscle ticks in the general’s jaw. Dad knows I’m referring to the seven army values, the same ones he drilled into me from the moment I could talk, and he doesn’t like that I’m throwing them back in his face now. “Stop playing around here, darlin’, and tell me about your conversation with the Armstrongs. Because I can only assume you didn’t get together to talk about nutritional supplements for seniors or swap health care reform stories.”

  Dad’s sarcasm doesn’t mitigate his message. He sees my contact with any of the Armstrongs as a personal betrayal, just as I suspected he would. Sure, I felt a tiny ping of guilt when I passed Ricky’s name on to the Armstrongs, but it was nothing compared to the one I would have felt if I’d sat on that transcript.

  But still. Ricky Hernandez is sort of a gray area. I decide to gloss over him for now and give my father a very brief summary of the conversation’s conclusion instead. “Jean asked me to help her write Zach’s story.”

  Dad makes a face as if he just bit down on a sour apple. “And? What’d you tell her?”

  “I take it you’ve met her.”

  He nods, one sharp dip of his chin.

  “Then you know what a mighty woman she is.”

  He dunks his chin again.

  “Did you know she’s set up a foundation in Zach’s name, and that she’s raised and donated over a million dollars to other military families in the past year alone?”

  I read all sorts of things in his hesitation but mostly impatience. “I know more than I care to know about Jean Armstrong. Spit it out, darlin’. What are you trying to say?”

  “I’m trying to explain to you why I told her I’d think about it.”

  “Because she’s philanthropic?”

  “No. Because she’s likable. I like her. Jean Armstrong knew who I was before I walked through her door. She knew you were my father, she knew my writing, and she still picked me. How awesome is that? She wants me to help her write what I’d imagine is the single most momentous project of her life. Beyond the fact I was supremely flattered, she sparked something inside me. Something that makes me think I might want to write again, Dad. Something positive and good and important.”

  “Maybe or for sure?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  My father clamps down on his lips, watching me for a long, drawn-out moment. In the military, walking away from duty for any reason is a serious offense, and though he’s never said as much out loud in the years since Chelsea, I know he never agreed with my decision to walk away from mine. So on the one hand, while he might be thrilled in theory at my step back into the sunshine, that doesn’t mean he’s not going to try to talk me into another subject matter.

  “Believe me when I say you do not want to get mixed up in this matter. And that’s not the general talking, that’s your father. Stay away from the Armstrongs. You do not want to open that Pandora’s box.”

  “Why not?”

  He shakes his head. “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Is it because the Armstrongs’ allegations are true? Have they hit a nerve?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that, either.”

  “Okay, then. What can you tell me?”

  “I can tell you that as of today, there are 6,717 other American mothers who’ve lost a son or daughter in the war on terror. Other mothers who’ve been torn apart by grief and have somehow figured out how to put themselves back together without starting a federal investigation. Write about one of them.”

  “That’s basically telling me nothing.”

  “Then how about this—the Armstrongs are off-limits, Abigail. You are not to talk to them, you are not to visit them at their house or place of business, and you are most certainly not to write about them. Not one word. And that’s an order.”

  His tone is forceful, unrelenting, and his words ambush me. I hold his glare and my breath, trying to rein in my temper. Last time I checked, I was not one of his subordinates, but his thirty-two-year-old daughter. I pay my own way, I make my own decisions, and I don’t take orders from anyone but my boss. Especially ones as questionable as the one my father just gave me.

  Because, in ordering me to stay away from the Armstrongs, he’s also telling me there’s more to their story. More he knows, more they don’t, and more he doesn’t want anyone, including me, to find out. Much more.

  Ricky Hernandez rips through my mind, and not for the first time I wonder who he is, where he is, what he saw. Because if anything, this conversation with my father has convinced me that Ricky is as big a lead as I thought he was. Instead of talking me out of Zach’s story, my father seems to be doing exactly the opposite.

  “Sorry, Dad. I’m still thinking about it.”

  My father fixes me with a stare stony enough to make the thundercloud on his face settle onto my chest, pushing down like an elephant-sized weight. I hold my breath and his gaze until, without another word, he turns and marches off toward the house.

  I’ve been dismissed.

  11

  Maria’s convertible comes roaring out of her condo’s garage, and I hit the start button on my Prius.

  So far, Ben’s intel has been spot-on. Maria has upgraded not only her bustline but her entire life. She’s traded in her Honda for a fancy BMW convertible, a sporty hardtop with every option imaginable. She lives in a two-story condo on the twenty-second floor in The Mansion, one of Baltimore’s swankiest high-rises on the waterfront in Locust Point. And she drapes her new curves in the latest fashion, designer dresses and red-soled heels and calfskin bags that cost three times more than I make in a month.

  She goes by Maria Davidson now, though even with the new name, it wasn’t very hard for me to find her. All I needed was her old cell phone number and a fleeting memory of her telling me she moved here from Detroit. Everyone leaves a digital trail. You just have to know where to look.

  For days now I’ve been trailing her as she goes about her business, and it’s been every bit as thrilling as it sounds. I’ve followed her to the grocery store, to the nail salon, to CVS and the mall and Starbucks, everywhere but to an office. Never to an office. As far as I can tell, Maria Davidson is not employed...at least not in the conventional definition of the term.

  I pull into late-morning traffic and trail a good three or four cars behind Maria’s BMW, keeping a careful watch as she zips in and out of lanes. She takes a left up the ramp to 95, then merges onto the beltway heading west. I follow for another half hour, until we’ve looped all the way around to the northern end and exit in Pikesville. We weave past businesses and restaurants, schools and synagogues. A doctor’s appointment? Another shopping spree? I grip the wheel a little more tightly and keep a close eye on her back bumper.

  We take a left onto a tree-lined street, and then another into a complex called Sunnybrook Springs. The place screams assisted living, from the clusters of squat buildings to the wide doors and easy-access ramps to the folks milling about the manicured grounds. Maria pulls into a lot on the far side of the grounds, climbs out of her car with a bouquet of flowers and heads across the pavement to a brick building that, anywhere else, would look like a two-story block of apartments. The plaque to the right of the building tells me it’s Sunnybrook’s Villa, and judging by the measures Maria has to take to make it through the double doors, it’s highly s
ecured.

  I back my Prius into a spot at the far end of the lot with a clear view of both the door and Maria’s dark and silent BMW, and reach for my phone.

  Floyd picks up on the third ring and greets me with, “You little minx.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You could have warned me what I was getting into. Good thing I wasn’t in public when I pulled up that clip. Imagine what the lunch crowd at Panera would have thought.”

  I smile at what I know is a joke. Floyd isn’t stupid. He wouldn’t work anywhere but at home, on his own highly secured, impenetrably firewalled network. He’s thorough, too. I figured it was only a matter of time before he found the clip. “Does this mean her money is connected to the videos?”

  “Well, seeing as she hasn’t shared a penny of that income with Uncle Sam, I think that’s a safe assumption. But again, at this point, it’s just an assumption. Oh, and her name’s not Duncan. Your girl was born Maria Elizabeth Daniels and hails from Toledo, Ohio.”

  I frown. “I thought she was from Detroit.” In fact, I found at least three different addresses when I went looking for her there, which tells me that if nothing else, she lived there for a while. Toledo’s not too far down the road from Detroit, but still. What other lies did she feed me? What else have I missed?

  “Anything else?” I say.

  “You can’t rush genius, hon. I’ll call you when I call you.”

  * * *

  While Mandy’s superpower is stopping traffic, mine is the ability to talk myself through any door. It’s a skill I honed in my time as a journalist, this innate ability I have to read a complete stranger, to be so attuned to their sensibilities that I know what to say, how to act, what cards to play to make me seem just the right mix of friendly and sympathetic. Sometimes getting invited inside is as simple as slipping them a crisp bill, but more often than not, it’s about gaining their trust, about making whoever’s on the other side of that door think you’re one of them.