Oho. They were looking for somebody, then, and she was suggesting that they’d catch the person as they presented their boarding pass. It was lucky I hadn’t smarted off to this woman, like I had to the ticket agent, or she’d have remembered me for sure.
On the other hand, there was no reason to think that I was the person they were looking for. I mean, was I some kind of a bank robber or mass murderer who had to be stopped from fleeing the country? I was not. And who knew I was leaving? Brooke did, as she had seen my suitcase in the car’s trunk, and I suppose that Janelle did, if Brooke had managed to pound that information into her teeny-tiny brain. How was either of those two going to tell anybody, much less guess under what name I’d be traveling? They weren’t going to, that’s how.
So, it wasn’t me they were looking for. Still—
My eye fell upon Cee Cee, who was chewing on her boarding pass. Why were children so horrible?
“You know my name,” I said, trying hard to sound amiable. “What’s yours?”
“Cee Cee,” she said. “Do you have a dog? I do.”
“No, Cee Cee, I don’t. Say, I have an idea.” I bared my teeth at her. “Why don’t we trade boarding passes? That would be kind of fun, wouldn’t it?”
“No,” she said briefly.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s mine. It’s got my name on it. Lookut.” She poked at it with a fat finger. “It says ‘Cee Cee’ right there. You’re not me. You’re Janelle.”
My temper, never very reliable when dealing with children, began to get the better of me. “Look, kid—”
“Flight eight two fifty-seven is about to begin boarding. Flight eight two fifty-seven nonstop to Richmond, Virginia. Please wait until your boarding group is called,” the gate attendant said over the loudspeaker.
Should I make a break for it? No, the cop would be watching for that. How about if I sat tight until the plane boarded? He’d come and ask me if I was whoever it was that he wanted, and I would say no, I was waiting for a different flight, and then he’d say—
“Would a Miss Janelle Johanssen please come up to the desk at gate twelve C and speak with the agent on duty? Miss Janelle Johanssen.”
Okay, it was me they wanted.
A relative silence fell over the crowd, although people were standing up and shuffling toward the gate entryway, pushing their carry-ons ahead of themselves. Cee Cee stared at me intently. She was obviously aware that they were calling me, and she was waiting for me to respond.
“Families with small children and infants, and passengers with disabilities, will be boarded first. All families with small children, and passengers with disabilities, please come to the gate entrance.”
Well, thank goodness for small mercies. “Good-bye, Cee Cee,” I said, smiling through gritted teeth. Her mother began collecting their various belongings. The baby began to scream again, and the line of passengers flinched, as though she was aiming an automatic weapon in their direction.
The cop was walking through the crowd, looking from face to face.
“Miss Janelle Johanssen,” he said as he walked along. “Miss Janelle Johanssen, please.”
“Hey, mister,” piped up my wicked fairy godmother in piercing tones, reaching out to grab his sleeve. “Here she is. This is Janelle here.”
She pointed her magic wand right at me.
21
“A KANGAROO FARM? YOU’RE JOKING, right?” I demanded, staring from Brooke to Janelle and back again.
“We were just little kids,” said Janelle. She and Brooke looked at each other and snickered.
When they’d first walked into the day room of the juvenile detention center (they said it was a shelter, but they wouldn’t let us leave, so let’s call a spade a spade, shall we?) the two of them had been all hushed and big-eyed, like they’d expected to witness the listless inhabitants assaulting one another with chainsaws, or injecting themselves with heroin in the stairwells. After a few minutes of non-drama they’d relaxed and started acting more normally.
The “shelter” was a house in the country a few miles from Albany, a tiny bit scruffy, surrounded by fields and low fences. It looked kind of like a horse farm, only without any horses. Much nicer than any accommodations I would have been offered in the same situation in LA, and I’d barely squeaked in by a hair. They offered short-term housing for kids under sixteen who’d run into not-too-serious trouble with the law. Janelle was sixteen, and so everybody was used to thinking of me as sixteen, which meant I wouldn’t have been eligible. They figured out who I was without much difficulty, though, because my folks had reported me as missing. Even though the authorities had been looking in the wrong part of the country for me, it didn’t take long before the descriptions matched up.
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “Brooke, you’re telling me that as a seven-year-old child, you wanted to raise kangaroos and slaughter them for meat?”
“No! Not for meat! Eew!” She stared at me like I was some kind of monster. Well, why else would you raise kangaroos? She seemed to realize this, as she gave a little shamefaced laugh. “I don’t know. We wanted a farm with lots of kangaroos hopping around, and we swore a blood pact that when we were grown up, we’d really do it. Like Janelle said, we were just little kids. But you remember it, don’t you, Janelle?”
“Like yesterday,” she said, holding up her index finger and smiling at her cousin. “Blood and spit together, they bind you for all eternity.” Brooke smiled back at her and linked her index finger with Janelle’s.
I rolled my eyes. A kangaroo farm had been my undoing. That was why she had gotten so suspicious and decided that I was not who I said I was. That was why she had come back home ahead of her parents, snooping around where she had no business. And told the new boyfriend, whose father was . . . you guessed it—the state trooper who picked me up at the airport.
Would you believe that those two girls found a sledgehammer and managed to break a tiny little window in the basement and then crawl out of it? It was Brooke’s doing, naturally. If it’d been Janelle on her own, she wouldn’t have been discovered until the Luttrells went down there for their holiday decorations and found her skeleton propped in the corner festooned with spiderwebs like a sinister Christmas tree. However, unfortunately Brooke had been there, and when I had gone to look for the suitcase, I could have seen the smashed glass all over the place if only I had used my eyes. By the time I was back at the airport looking at the departure board, the cops were already there, making inquiries about me.
When they caught up to me, all I had on my person was the ten thousand dollars in my money belt and a few hundred in my wallet. The immediate assumption was, of course, that I had stolen the money from somewhere, even though I told the trooper that I’d won it fair and square.
“It was the day of the racehorse benefit,” I explained. “I met somebody there—a bookie, I guess he was—and I placed a bet on an outsider at the Breeders’ Cup race. Actually, I placed several bets.”
“What were the names of the horses?” the father of Brooke’s boyfriend wanted to know.
“I don’t remember all of them,” I said, “only the one that paid out really big. Durn Tootin’, that was the name of the outsider.”
I was right, of course, and he’d find out soon enough when he checked. I had met a bookie that day—or stood next to him, anyway—and I’d heard him talking about the horse, and the upset in the race, resulting in his having to pay out a large sum to a single bettor.
My calm and cheerful manner was beginning to get the trooper down. We stared at each other for a moment in silence. He was actually kind of good-looking, I decided. Maybe Brooke’s boyfriend would be too, once he’d gotten some meat on his bones. Of course, it could be that I was more attracted to older men than to adolescent boys. Teenage boys are too self-centered.
“What was the bookie’s name?” the nice-looking trooper asked.
I widened my eyes. “I have no idea,” I said. “I’d never mad
e a bet on a horse before. I didn’t know how it was done, but it seemed like it would be fun to try—especially since I’d been so involved in this charity for retired racehorses.”
“So you handed over a wad of money to a strange man at a public event. Precisely how much did you wager, by the way?”
“Seventy-five dollars,” I replied promptly, having heard this piece of information as well. “It wasn’t as simple as that, though. I had to pick several horses to win or place—I don’t remember exactly. It was complicated. But I was lucky.” I smiled at him with girlish candor. “I’m kind of a risk-taker by nature, I guess, but I’m lucky, too.”
“And where did the seventy-five dollars come from?”
“Oh, it was mine. My parents gave me some traveling cash.”
He went on questioning me, but there was no proof that my story wasn’t true. I was banking on my belief that Uncle Karl wouldn’t want either Aunt Antonia or the IRS to know how much money he’d been betting in his poker games, and he would therefore not demand it back. So far, so good; I hadn’t heard a peep out of him about his money.
That wasn’t surprising, but the odd thing was, nobody had said anything about the suitcase full of money, jewelry, and confidential documents. The other odd thing was that Brooke and Janelle had shown up here at the shelter to see me. They didn’t seem that mad either. Oh, Janelle was a bit frosty, but not Brooke. They weren’t much banged up, not from the fall down the stairs or from climbing out of the basement window. So I had been right: neither had suffered real damage as a result of my actions. Just a little friendly roughhousing—nothing to make a fuss over.
Brooke gave Janelle a significant look.
“Oh, right,” Janelle said. She stood up. “Well, Morgan, it’s been weird. I do want you to know that, whatever Brooke thinks, I think you’re a real bad seed. So don’t bother trying to contact me in the future. I know your name, I know what you look like, I know what your voice on the phone sounds like, and I know where your parents live. No calls, texts, e-mails, or in-person contact, ’kay? So, bye.”
I smiled and inclined my head, graciously acknowledging her request. She was right; there was nothing more to be gained from pursuing that acquaintance. She picked up her purse and glared at me, annoyed that I remained cool and in control. A staff member walking through the room mistakenly decided to add a note of chummy cheer to the proceedings.
“Wow,” gushed the female warder, “you three girls could be triplets—blond hair, blue eyes, everything. Are you sisters?”
“No, we’re cousins,” Brooke corrected her. Then she blushed. “I mean . . .”
Janelle pointed at Brooke. “We’re cousins. That one”—she pointed at me—“is our evil twin.”
“Janelle!”
“Hey, you’re welcome to your opinion, Brooke. That’s mine. I’ll see you outside in a minute.”
“Good-bye, Janelle,” I said, my voice pleasant, even though I was a bit annoyed that the staff member had failed to notice that the two real cousins outweighed me by twenty-five pounds apiece, at least.
I turned to look at Brooke. She was looking thoughtful, with a deep crease forming between her eyebrows. If she didn’t watch out, one of these days that crease wasn’t going to go away. I waited to hear whatever it was she wanted to say to me in private.
She took a deep breath.
“I found the suitcase.”
I nodded; I had guessed that.
“I put everything back.”
“I see,” I said, and thought about this information. That meant that only Brooke knew the full extent of my activities during my time in Albany. No wonder I had heard nothing about the suitcase.
“It wasn’t easy. I kind of had to guess about some of the charities. There was just so much money,” she said, her eyes widening in wonder as she remembered the experience of disemboweling the suitcase. “It was everywhere, in the pockets, in the zippered section, in the lining.”
I nodded, also remembering. Yes, that suitcase had reminded me of a roast chicken à la Mrs. Barnes: stuffed to bursting with goodies, and then an herb butter applied under the skin to enrich the flavor. I sighed.
Brooke continued, the knot of concentration still creasing her brow, “If anybody questions the way I divvied it up, I’ll take the blame. I’ll say that you left the money with me and I got it mixed up.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Do you mean why did I put it back, or why would I take the blame?”
“Either. Both.” Once again I found myself staring at Brooke, totally mystified. Right when I thought I had normal, feeling, empathic humanity figured out, Brooke would do something that stumped me.
“Because—” She took another deep breath. “Because I don’t understand you, and I really, really want to.”
Well, that made two of us.
I shook my head, signaling noncomprehension.
“Oh, sorry. I’m explaining this wrong. It’s hard to do, because it’s kind of embarrassing.”
I considered this. What did Brooke have to feel embarrassed about? I was never embarrassed, myself, so it was difficult for me to guess.
“I want to give you another chance. I want you not to have a felony conviction on your record. Did you know that stealing”—she actually reddened when she said the word “stealing,” as if it were an obscenity—“anything over a thousand dollars is a felony? It’s grand larceny. I looked it up.” She regarded me with a long sorrowful gaze, as though I had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Well, of course I knew it was a felony. People get mad when you take their money away from them. The more money you take, the madder they get.
“Why is that embarrassing?” I asked.
You may say, “Why should you care, Morgan, so long as she does give you another chance?” But I, too, wanted to understand. The more I understood about people like Brooke, the better prepared I would be in the future, assuming I ever ran into a weirdo like her again.
She blushed again and avoided my eye. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s like I’m setting myself up as judge and jury over you. I don’t want you to think that I believe I’m perfect. Because I’m not,” she said earnestly, as though I’d been arguing with her.
“I see,” I lied. I did not see. She found herself in a position where her trust, and the trust of her family, had been violated. A guest in her home had lied, cheated, and stolen from her. She had done nothing wrong, but she felt embarrassed that I might be under the impression that she thought that she was perfect.
Furthermore, I had told her right to her face—well, okay, to the other side of a basement door—that I was one of the cold. I suppose she didn’t understand what I meant by it. Besides, I think she needed to believe that, deep down, everyone is just like her.
Mentally I threw my hands up into the air in defeat. I would never understand Brooke.
But now what? What was the best way for me to behave at the moment?
I sighed. It was probably time for me to imitate pathetic Francea and blub about how sorry I was and how I would never do it again. But I did have to be careful. Brooke wasn’t stupid. Or, yeah, sure, she was about some things, but not about everything.
The strange thing was, even though Janelle was a complete dodo, she was smarter in some ways than Brooke. Janelle knew me for what I was.
“Thank you, Brooke,” I said, my eyes lowered. That seemed safe enough. Should I pretend not to know about the felony thing? No, better not.
“I got—I know I got crazy there,” I said. “It was just—I don’t know if you’ll understand—but it was so easy.” As I’ve said, when I lie, I tell as much truth as I can. And maybe I did get a little crazy. For sure it had been easy.
Brooke nodded sagely. “I guess your family—they’re, well, they’re not super well-off, are they? I mean—” She scrambled to retract this possible criticism. “Of course they’re not poor, or anything . . .”
“Compared with the Styles family, they are,” I said.
Again, nothing but the truth.
“Yes, and I could see that you liked nice things. It’s easy for me. I could pretty much have anything I wanted, so far as clothes and stuff goes, but I’m not interested. I can understand that that might be kind of annoying.”
Yep, very true. I said nothing, but stared at my hands in my lap.
“And it’s obvious that you are incredibly smart and talented. It seems so awful to have your potential blighted that way. Mom and Dad and Grandma feel that way too. Well . . .” She paused, doubtful for a moment. “Daddy not quite so much, I guess. For some reason Daddy is madder than the rest of us. It’s odd, because usually he’s not—well, not sensitive that way, like Mom and I are.”
Ha. I hid a smile. I knew why Uncle Karl was so ticked off. Not only was I walking off with the lion’s share of his poker money, but the rest of it had been inadvertently donated to various charities.
“Oh! And um . . . and this is really embarrassing, but I kind of have to ask . . .”
Now what was embarrassing Brooke?
“Did you, uh, find a super-big diamond ring in Mrs. Barnes’s drawer? Because I assumed it was Mom’s, but mom noticed it in with her jewelry and said it wasn’t hers. And I’m afraid that Mrs. Barnes thinks the ring getting in with my mother’s things had something to do with you, so she’s kind of mad too.”
I nodded.
“She—she says that she always kind of wondered about you. I feel terrible that it never occurred to me that it might be her ring. Well, I’m sorry I screwed up. I don’t pay much attention to jewelry.”
I was about to say “That’s all right” but realized in time that it wouldn’t be appropriate.
It was funny. Aunt Antonia might have been expected, given her job, to have guessed what I was, yet even with her inside knowledge she hadn’t spotted me. But it turned out that Mrs. Barnes, a cook and housekeeper, had been keeping a wary eye on me. A sudden image of a little blue car running a red light as I drove away in Uncle Karl’s Corvette flashed across my mind. I suppose she’d spotted me behind the wheel and wanted to know what was up. Well, well, what a cunning creature Mrs. Barnes was turning out to be!
Don't You Trust Me? Page 16