There was a long silence.
“Yes,” she said at last. “Yes, that’s what I meant.”
16
I COULD NOT SPARE ATTENTION for Brooke’s worries about what I did or did not remember regarding some childhood pact she claimed she had shared with her cousin. I was confident that I could win her back with a little attention, some girlish chitchat in our rooms that evening, and some enthusiastic praise for her part in the day’s activities. I had seen her in the company of a thin, bespectacled boy earlier in the day, so that might be a fruitful subject of conversation. Perhaps there was a fledgling romance under way? Luckily the boy was not attractive enough to tempt me, so I didn’t have to worry about restraining my acquisitive instincts. Brooke was welcome to him.
However, our cozy nighttime chat was not to be. When we got home, both of us exhausted from the excitements of the day, she was unusually silent and thoughtful, and soon after a late dinner, she retired to her room. When I tapped on the door, there was a long silence, and then Brooke’s voice, sounding pretend-groggy.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Morgan, but I was asleep. I’m awfully tired. Can whatever it is wait until morning?”
I looked with raised eyebrows at the line of light showing underneath her door. My cousin Brooke was not a practiced deceiver. “Sure,” I said. All the more time for me to count my earnings, I thought.
I had a long soak in the hot tub and emerged refreshed and relaxed and glowing with well-being. I went to my room and, after locking the door, spread the day’s takings over the bed. When I had counted it over several times, I added it to the rest of my stash. I had a total of $5,364 secreted in various pockets of Janelle’s otherwise-empty suitcase—a satisfying sum, though hardly enough to set me up for life. But no matter; I was certain I would always be able to raise enough money for my needs, wherever my life might lead me.
I patted the money affectionately and locked it up. I went to the kitchen to make myself a hot drink that would coax me into the deep sleep I craved as the fitting end to a perfect day. On my way back to my bedroom I noticed that Brooke’s light was still on. I paused and listened at the door.
I heard the faint slap of something being laid out on the surface of her desk. Could she be playing solitaire, with a pack of real, as opposed to virtual, cards? Oh well. I’d have thought her tablet would have been handier to play on than an actual deck of cards, but that was her lookout. I continued on to my room.
There I sipped my cocoa and stretched luxuriously. I fell asleep with a smile on my face and the sound of remembered applause in my ears.
Brooke was up and dressed by the time I woke, so no opportunity for cousinly confidences then, either.
“Morgan, dear, I hope you won’t mind, but Brooke and I thought we’d have a little mother-daughter day today, just the two of us,” said Aunt Antonia as I joined them at the breakfast table. “I know you must be exhausted after all your work in the past few weeks, and I’m sure you have lots of homework to do. Your teachers will be expecting you to make up some of the material you’ve missed because of the benefit.” She smiled. “Your uncle Karl will be here if you need anything.”
“No he won’t,” said Uncle Karl, pausing in tapping out a text on his phone. “I’ve got to go in to the Ravena office. There’s a backlog of paperwork that I need to finish up, and we’ve got a new load of pickups being delivered this afternoon. Count me out for the day.”
“Oh,” said Aunt Antonia, disconcerted. “Well, perhaps you’d better come with Brooke and me after all, then. I’m sorry—I don’t want you to feel left out, or stuck alone at home here.”
I waved this off. “No, no,” I said, smiling benevolently on them both. “You two go and have a good time together. I guess you don’t get much time for the two of you, with me hanging around.”
This remark produced a flurry of pleas from both mother and daughter to accompany them.
“Thank you,” I said. “But you’re right, Aunt Antonia. I have a lot of schoolwork to make up. Honest, I’m better off staying at home.”
In the end it took me a good two hours, and several more refusals to join them, to get them out of the house. This was one of Mrs. Barnes’s regular days off, so she left too, and the house was empty except for me. I realized that, with the exception of yesterday morning when everybody had been at Hidden Hollow, this had never happened in the two and a half months that I had lived here.
So. That being the case, what should I do next? Never mind homework. Janelle, that home-wrecker, was likely to make her existence known in a week or so, and I would be booted out of here. Let her worry about my/our grades.
I remembered my intention to search Uncle Karl’s desk when I had the opportunity. There wasn’t going to be a better time than today. Yes, and what had Brooke been up to last night? If it’d been a series of games of solitaire, I ought to be able to find a deck of cards in her room. I smiled, anticipating a peaceful day nosing around in other people’s business.
Brooke’s room first, as this would probably be a quick job. I doubted that I would find much of interest secreted in her underwear drawer, so if I found some playing cards, I would be done.
She did have some modest jewelry—a gold bracelet and a ruby ring—of which I made a mental note. The few other items were costume pieces, pretty enough, but worthless. Her clothes were familiar to me by now: utilitarian T-shirts, sweaters, and jeans. I found a sketchbook with some halfway decent drawings by her and some sick-making poetry, also by her. Books, a few stuffed animals, and a doll from childhood days. Her computer revealed that she had done research on sites relating to homework, horses, and popular music. I uncovered no drugs, dirty magazines, trashy novels, or occult pentacles marked on the floor. Dead boring, in fact. If I had been looking for something with which to blackmail Brooke, I would have been pretty disappointed. There was no dark side to Brooke.
There was no deck of cards, either.
What there was in the top drawer of her desk was an envelope of photographs. It contained about twenty pictures of two little blond girls. In some photos they held hands, or fed pellets to a goat, or posed next to a miniature donkey. Aha. A petting zoo.
I sat down at the desk and laid the pictures down one by one. Yes, they made the slight slapping noise I had heard the night before. This was what Brooke had been doing; she had been examining photos of herself and her cousin from nine years ago, back when Janelle had come to visit.
You rarely see this format for photos anymore, but a decade ago there were still diehards who took photos with non-digital cameras, hence the envelope of pictures from a facility that processed film.
I looked at them carefully. It took some consideration before I could decide which girl was Brooke and which was Janelle, but eventually I got them sorted out. The problem was that, while I had been a fragile little wisp of a girl at that age, the two cousins were already, at seven years old, big-boned and slightly chubby. They looked almost identical. In a lot of the pictures Janelle was holding a plastic horse—she was horse-mad back then too, I guess.
The images gave no clue as to what the mysterious “pact” might have been, although one did show their clasped hands, each with a thin red cut on the index finger. Brooke had brought the subject up more as a joke than anything else, I thought. It could not have had any real significance, though she didn’t like that I didn’t recall it.
Why had Brooke been brooding over these last night? The fact that her cousin used to be a bit chunkier than she was today proved nothing. People change.
I shrugged and put the pictures back into the envelope and replaced them in her desk drawer. It couldn’t possibly matter, as, sad to say, I was on my way out of here.
I moved on to Uncle Karl and Aunt Antonia’s bedroom. Here I found much nicer jewelry, some of which might bring a reasonable amount on eBay or at a pawnshop. The trouble with selling my ill-gotten goods online was that you need a fixed address to ship from, and I might not have one of those for a while. I
knew about pawnshops from LA but hadn’t seen any here. Mostly they didn’t want to do business with a kid like me, so you had to find one with a compliant owner. Still, jewelry was always good—it didn’t take up much room, even when you were traveling. And I liked looking at it, especially seeing the gold against my skin, the way it caught the light. I tried on a few pieces and found it rather difficult to take them back off again. I did it, though; I put them back neatly in the jewelry cabinet. No point in getting kicked out before I was ready to go.
I tried on some of Aunt Antonia’s clothes, too. These were also a lot better than Brooke’s, although pretty conservative. I rooted around in the closet and found a nice little Prada handbag—something she must have used only on occasion, since it was wrapped in tissue paper. This I decided to put into Janelle’s suitcase, as Aunt was unlikely to miss it right away. On second thought I went back for a Chanel jacket at the back of the closet, still in plastic from the dry cleaner. It fit me perfectly.
I did a quick tour through Mrs. Barnes’s bedroom and was pleasantly surprised to find a sizeable diamond ring in a jewelry box. Nice going, Mrs. Barnes!
The thought of Mrs. Barnes and her ever-ready dusting cloth reminded me. I went back to each of the rooms I had visited and polished every surface I’d touched, along with a lot of other ones, just in case. I didn’t want any signs of my presence once I’d gone and they started looking for me.
Now for Uncle Karl’s office. Actually, both Aunt and Uncle had home offices, but Aunt’s was less used and had fewer papers and files. Obviously she kept most of her work at work, while Uncle Karl hauled stuff back and forth and had duplicates in both places. Aunt’s office did contain papers with some spicy details about a few of her clients, though, so I copied several files and hid them in the suitcase.
I sat down once again at Uncle Karl’s desk. Today it was pristine, without even a mote of dust to mar the walnut finish. I began opening drawers. The usual office supplies on the right, paid bills, user manuals, information about insurance and personal cars, etc., below. On the left were a small drawer and a larger one, likely fitted up for hanging file folders. Both were locked.
Hmm.
Uncle Karl would have the key on his chain. But Uncle Karl was a careful person. What if he lost the key? Undoubtedly he would have another copy somewhere. It would be a small key, I thought, smaller than a door key, more like one for a suitcase. I suddenly recalled the key rack in the mudroom, a piece of board with hooks screwed into it, where random keys were kept.
I went to check. Extra house keys, keys to some of the neighbors’ houses (interesting), keys to the lawn tractor and the ATV. There were a few unlabeled small keys, which I tried in the lock. None fit.
I went back to the master bedroom. I hadn’t paid much attention to Uncle Karl’s closet and bureau earlier, but now I did look, and thoroughly.
I know I can be rather conceited, so I will force myself here to admit that it was pure luck that I found it. I was pulling out a drawer in the bureau when it hit a point where it would come no further. Of course, this might have been due to good carpentry, a stop installed to prevent the drawer from falling out onto the floor. In fact, I was simply annoyed that it was resisting me, and I gave it a vicious yank. It came out, with an accompanying clink as something came loose from its underside.
In the end I had to pull the lower drawers out to their furthest extent and then snake my arm into a thin space in order to grope around underneath to find the item that had fallen, but at last I managed to pinch it between the tips of my middle finger and forefinger.
As I had expected, it was a small key. I sat looking at it, thinking, My goodness, but that’s a lot of trouble to hide a key that protects perfectly innocent business dealings!
An hour later I was beginning to understand. I am only an unsophisticated fifteen-year-old girl with no knowledge of the Internal Revenue Service or finance or anything technical like that, but it seemed to me that Uncle Karl might be being a little deceitful in his relations with the United States government.
There were several sets of records written in pencil on ledger paper—the kind that is ruled into columns—with cryptic initialed notes at the heads to indicate what each row of figures represented. Let me think: Why would a modern businessman need records on paper locked in his desk, when he had a staff of bookkeepers, each in possession of a computer loaded with the latest financial software?
The advantage of paper is that if one wants to destroy it, it burns, while digital information is never lost beyond recall. Did I understand exactly what the numbers before me meant? No, I did not. But it was easy to guess that it was something he did not want generally known. After some thought, I took two pages, one that was labeled “SAC,” and one “SFA,” which I thought might represent this year’s sales at his two biggest dealerships. These pages I put into the suitcase with the other things I had taken. Even if he discovered that they were missing, he couldn’t start a big hunt for them without having to explain what they were.
Also in the suitcase I placed, with the utmost, loving care, an envelope containing ten thousand dollars. Yes, $10,000. That was what I found in the upper locked drawer, along with a sizeable stash of pain pills. I replaced the envelope of cash with a similar-looking envelope stuffed with play money left over from the benefit horse race, and left the pill bottles alone. Now that I had the key, there was no point in letting him know I had been in his desk. With any luck he would not immediately notice the lack of two sheets of paper and the exchange of play money for real dollars, but if he was in the habit of taking the pills, it was likely he would spot the fact that they had disappeared.
Uncle Karl played poker the last Friday night of every month. I supposed the envelope of cash was meant to fund this activity. Pretty high stakes, but I thought he was a natural gambler, and, I mean, what of it? He could afford it. I’d have to leave here before his next poker night, or else replace it.
Several hours later Uncle returned, satisfied with the new shipment of pickup trucks, and retired to his office. I waited, in my usual state of alert serenity, hoping that he would not notice anything to concern him, but ready to respond if he did. Nothing happened, and at five o’clock Aunt Antonia and Brooke came home, chattering about the movie they had seen, the clothing they had purchased, and the lunch they had consumed. Uncle Karl appeared and took his evening glass of sherry with Aunt Antonia before our informal meal of salad and soup. Mrs. Barnes was still on her day off, so we were roughing it.
“And have you had a productive day today, Morgan?” Aunt Antonia inquired graciously.
“Oh yes, Aunt, thank you, very productive,” I said as I helped myself to more clam chowder.
17
IF I’D BEEN SMART, I would have crammed all the valuables I could fit into my suitcase and called a cab to take me to the airport while the family been out for the day on Sunday. I know that. I just couldn’t do it. I wanted to savor the accolades when I went back to school on Monday after my successful charity benefit. I wanted to make sure Helena knew that Brett had come to my event instead of hanging out with her on Saturday. I wanted to pick up the cash from the collection boxes around town.
Since I couldn’t bring myself to leave on Sunday or Monday, I should have left on Tuesday. By Tuesday I had been praised and petted to my heart’s content, thanked Brett for his support right in front of Helena and her friends, and emptied the boxes down to the last Canadian nickel. Yet I didn’t go.
I went to school and home again, ate wonderful meals and luxuriated in the hot tub and snuggled up in my big, soft bed each night. I took to carrying a little microfiber dust rag around in my jeans pocket and polishing places where I had probably left fingerprints, and where that good housekeeper Mrs. Barnes might not have cleaned lately—the back and underside of my chair in the dining room, the door of my bedroom closet, the flush on the toilet in my private bathroom.
Every time the phone rang, I waited to hear that it was Janelle on the
other line, or her friends or neighbors, or even her parents. If either Aunt Antonia or Uncle Karl answered, she would probably not identify herself right away, according to my instructions. Yet that didn’t help me much—she’d only ask for Brooke. Unless I answered the phone every single time it rang, a phone call from Janelle meant the end of my life in the Styles household.
At last I was forced to make a decision. Friday night was Uncle Karl’s poker game. If I hadn’t left by then, I would have to switch the envelope of real money in my suitcase with the fake in his desk drawer, or he’d discover the substitution. Still, I didn’t want to go yet. What if he won a lot of money at the game? That would make my departure much sweeter. True, he also might lose a lot of money, but I ignored that possibility. Uncle Karl was a winner, not a loser—I was sure of it.
No more stalling; I would leave on Saturday. The whole family, me included, was scheduled to go over to Granny’s house for a tea party with the neighbors, and then we were all supposed to go out to dinner together. If I faked sick and stayed home, that would give me most of Saturday to make my getaway.
Friday evening came, and Uncle Karl went off to meet his pals for a night of cards and single malt whiskey.
“Good luck,” I said as he emerged from his office thrusting the envelope, gorged with cash, into the inner pocket of his jacket. “I hope you win lots and lots tonight.”
He laughed, touched by my obvious sincerity. “With those good wishes, I can’t miss, Morgan. Thanks!”
Aunt Antonia didn’t wish him luck; she didn’t approve of his poker games. Neither did Brooke. He and I, gamblers both, exchanged surreptitious smiles over the heads of the two puritans. He was gambling on cards; I was gambling on him. If I had been related to him, I’d have said we shared some genes in common, what with our risky behavior and the whiff of dishonesty that hovered over his business dealings.
Don't You Trust Me? Page 12