And Then I Found Out the Truth

by Jennifer Sturman

  I hadn’t really thought about how we’d spend the time between school and dinner, but I guess I assumed there’d be some studying. In spite of how little work I’d been doing, Prescott was a demanding place, and I couldn’t imagine Patience letting her kids shirk their academic responsibilities. But instead Gwyneth picked up a remote control, and with the press of a button the large mirror over the bureau transformed itself into a TV.

  “How about this one?” she asked, scrolling through a list of recorded programs and pausing at something called Kinkajou Kribs.

  I’d thought I’d seen a new side of Gwyneth at lunch, but I was totally unprepared for her love of small mammals. We watched kinkajous, meerkats, Alpine marmots, hoary marmots, and various other creatures cavorting across the screen, and while I admit it was kind of addictive, Gwyneth was entranced. She laughed aloud at the antics of a crested porcupine and cooed over baby two-toed sloths. And the tragedy of it all was that Charley would never believe me without physical proof, and I worried Gwyneth would take it the wrong way if I tried to snap a picture.

  Anyhow, everyone else must have arrived home while we were watching TV, and at precisely half past seven Patience’s voice rang out over the intercom summoning us to dinner. Gwyneth reluctantly pressed another button, the screen turned into a mirror again, and we went down another hallway and into the dining room.

  The first thing I’d learned about Patience was that her favorite adjective was “appropriate,” and in this context it seemed to mean greeting me with an air kiss to each cheek and making sure the butler or manservant or whatever you were supposed to call him didn’t stint on the tilapia or Swiss chard. Meanwhile, Gwyneth — at least, I assumed it had been Gwyneth, because I didn’t know who else would have done it — must have put a word in with the guy, too, because my water glass was filled with the same mixture of vodka and vodka that was her own drink of choice at family dinners. I probably should’ve been touched by this demonstration of cousinly affection, but it only made me more nervous about whatever role she envisioned me playing in her life going forward.

  Especially since the conversation at dinner suggested Grey’s absence from Prescott really might turn permanent.

  “Not a word from you, buster,” Patience snapped when he appeared at the table. This seemed unnecessary — it wasn’t like Grey ever spoke anyway — and hearing her call him “buster” had me reaching for my water to hide the giggling fit it inspired, which led to a choking fit after I’d taken a big gulp and discovered what was actually in my glass. Gwyneth’s expression was blank as she reached over and pounded me on the back.

  “Pass the salt,” said Jeremy from his end of the table.

  “Cordelia, have you heard what my idiot son and his idiot friends have been up to?” Patience asked me. I wasn’t sure how to answer that, but fortunately Patience was fully capable of carrying on a conversation without anyone else’s involvement. “I’ve spent the last forty-eight hours trying to prevent him from being expelled, which would be significantly easier if Prescott’s endowment weren’t larger than the gross domestic product of certain small developing countries and we could buy his way back in. Though our money might be better spent buying his way into a lesser institution. I’m thinking military school would be a superb choice for addressing his character flaws. Perhaps in one of those places like Nebraska or South Dakota where they also have to herd sheep and plow. Do you have any thoughts on military school, Cordelia?”

  I knew what Charley would say, and it had to do with the movie Taps, which she’d made me watch as part of a “Sean Penn: The Early Years” triple feature that also included Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Bad Boys. But I just said, “I’m afraid not, sorry.” And then, in an attempt to make sure the evening wasn’t a complete waste, I tried to change the topic to something I really did want to discuss. “I was wondering, have you talked to Thad Wilcox since he was here last week?”

  Patience wasn’t any happier with Thad than she was with her son. “Hardly,” she said, slicing into her tilapia like she wished it was Thad’s jugular. “After I refused to sign those papers, he stormed out in a most unprofessional manner. I must say, Cordelia, I do not trust that man, and I will not stand silently by as he attempts to usurp your rightful position. He will rue the day he crossed me. I’ve left several messages with his office in Palo Alto, and his assistant says he’s out of the country, but I don’t see how that precludes his returning calls. She claims he’s unreachable, which is preposterous. There’s not a single inch of the planet these days without cellular service or Wi-Fi.”

  I doubted Patience had ever stood silently by as anything occurred, but I was much less concerned than she was about being usurped since I knew T.K. would fix it all when she returned. No, mostly I was stuck on the part about Thad being out of the country and unreachable.

  Because it wasn’t true that every inch of the planet had cellular service and Wi-Fi. For example, I knew for a fact there were parts of Chilean Patagonia where the communications infrastructure was completely primitive.

  “Did Thad’s assistant happen to at least say which continent —” I was asking Patience when the butler guy leaned down to whisper something in her ear.

  If she was surprised by what he said, it was impossible to tell, because the top half of her face stayed perfectly immobile — thanks to her dermatologist, Patience couldn’t have moved her eyebrows even if she’d wanted to. “Have her brought up and shown into the small sitting room,” she told him.

  Then she turned back to the table. “How odd. Fiona Riley is here.”

  There were eight million people in New York City, but in certain ways it functioned like a tiny little village. So it wasn’t a shock to learn that Patience and Fiona were close enough to drop in on each other unexpectedly — they’d probably hung out at a ton of Prescott parents’ events over the years, not to mention the whole Upper East Side benefit/Pilates/Bergdorf’s circuit.

  It also wasn’t a shock to discover that the only person in the Truesdale-Babbitt household who seemed to care about family dinner was Patience, because as soon as she left the dining room Jeremy and Grey vanished, too.

  I was thinking this meant an early reprieve for me, and I was already planning what I’d do in the taxi on the way home. First, I needed to let Rafe and Charley know Thad might be trying to retrace T.K.'s footsteps himself. Then I’d take advantage of Fiona’s absence from home to try calling Quinn. One of the many things I’d been hoping was that she’d taken away his phone and computer privileges, which would explain the continued radio silence on his end.

  But as I moved to follow Jeremy and Grey out of the dining room, Gwyneth silently gestured for me to wait. I opened my mouth to protest — a person can watch just so much Animal Planet — but she shook her head, holding a finger to her lips. Then, as soon as we were alone, she grabbed my arm and led me through the swinging door into the kitchen, through a pantry, down another hallway, and into a supply closet, closing the door after us.

  “Wh —” I started to ask.

  “Shh,” she whispered. “Listen.”

  And when I did, I could hear Patience and Fiona as clearly as if they were in the closet with us. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could make out a thin glimmer of light shining through a register grate set in the wall. The sitting room must have been right on the other side, and the voices were traveling through the grate along with the lamplight.

  “— sorry to intrude,” Fiona was saying. The acid that had been in her voice when she’d spoken to me was gone, and her words came out in a high-pitched, stressed-out rush. “I would’ve called but Bea and Oliver always manage to overhear anything that happens in the house and then I think I lost my cell phone — I can’t find it anywhere, I must have left it in another handbag or maybe at the trainer’s — you know I wouldn’t have just shown up with no notice if I weren’t at my wits’ end.”

  “So Quinn’s been implicated in the gambling venture?” said Patience, sounding extra
crisp next to Fiona’s near hysteria.

  “Not officially, not yet. Francis Seton says he’s certain Quinn knows more than he’s letting on, but Quinn won’t admit it and he also won’t deny it — he only says he’s not at liberty to comment, like a lawyer told him to say that, and I can’t convince him to cooperate. He refuses to listen to me. I’m only his stepmother, after all — I can’t force him to do anything — and he still has issues after everything that happened with Paula, not that she’d be any help in a situation like this.”

  “But why are you dealing with it at all?” asked Patience. “Why isn’t Hunter handling everything?”

  “Hunter!” said Fiona, her voice rising another two octaves. “Hunter’s supposed to be in Argentina, and usually he’d be on the first plane back if anything happened to one of the kids, but he hasn’t responded to a single message. And when I tried to reach him through his secretary, she said he’d told her he was on vacation. I’ve never been so humiliated in my life — now his entire office knows I have no idea where my husband is. And even if he is in Argentina, he lied about it being a business trip, and if he lied about that, then I’m not sure I want to know what else he’s lied about.”

  Fiona’s voice caught, and I could almost picture her pretty face crumpling, though it was possible she went to Patience’s dermatologist, too, in which case it wouldn’t crumple at all.

  “Why don’t we get you some hot tea? Or I have a better idea — how about a nice, stiff drink?” suggested Patience, in a more soothing tone than I’d ever heard her use before, though it seemed like if she was going to use it on anyone, she might have started with her theoretically orphaned niece.

  Then their voices faded away as they left the room together.

  Fourteen

  Gwyneth and I returned to her bedroom without discussing what we’d heard, and she didn’t show any interest in rehashing it in private, either. Before I’d even picked up my jacket and book bag she was tuned in to Animal Planet and rapt all over again, though she might have waved as I left. A couple of her fingers seemed to flutter.

  I didn’t run into anyone else as I left the apartment. From behind one closed door I could hear a baseball game on TV, and from another I could hear a murmur of voices that must have been Patience and Fiona. I probably should’ve stopped to say thank you and good-bye to Patience, but I had no desire to encounter Fiona in the flesh. Instead I let myself out and took the elevator down to the lobby.

  Outside it had started to rain, and the doorman hailed a taxi for me, holding his umbrella over us both for the short distance from building to curb. The cabdriver was on his headset, speaking in Caribbean-accented French and barely pausing long enough for me to give him Charley’s address before returning to his conversation. I didn’t mind — I wanted some time to myself to put my thoughts in order.

  But first I had a couple of pressing items to take care of, beginning with Thad. I quickly composed a text and shot it off to Charley and Rafe:

  Simon might be visiting Madge’s neighbor

  We hadn’t bothered to create a code name for Chile, and I hoped that “neighbor” would be self-explanatory, since Chile bordered Argentina on the map. But while I was pretty sure Rafe would know what I meant, sometimes Charley could come up with bizarre answers to basic questions.

  Next I tried Quinn’s house. But Fiona must have switched off the Rileys’ home phone, because it didn’t even ring before a voice mail announcement came on. And after the previous night’s conversation, I wasn’t about to leave a recording for the entire household to hear.

  With all of that done, or at least partially done and partially attempted in an incredibly unsatisfying manner, I leaned back against the seat and tried to sort through everything I’d learned, not that I really knew where to begin or what to make of anything.

  For starters there was Thad, out of the country and unreachable. If he was a normal person, that could mean a million different things, but this was a guy I’d never seen without his BlackBerry — he probably slept with it on his pillow and called it a secret pet name, like Pookie or Shnookums. Nor was he the type to suddenly drop everything for a nice holiday in a location so remote it lacked decent cellular service. It was impossible not to worry that he’d somehow found out that T.K. was still alive and had picked up her trail in Patagonia.

  And I knew that trail would lead to Argentina, which brought me to Hunter, who was already there. After what I’d heard from Fiona, I couldn’t think he might be on a harmless business trip — if it was business, his office would have known about it. As a general rule, people who were up to good things didn’t deliberately mislead everyone in their lives about where they were going and why they were going there, even if they did take those people to Chuck E. Cheese before they left. So this latest revelation was less than reassuring.

  And thinking about Hunter and his lies only kept bringing me back to Quinn and whatever it was he wasn’t saying. No matter how I tried to spin it, his whole situation sounded bleak. And while I knew I was supposed to be keeping my eye on the ball and starring in my own movie and not obsessing, what Fiona had said about Quinn’s mother, Paula, made my heart go out to him completely.

  Quinn’s parents split up when he was seven, and there’d been an ugly custody battle, with Hunter saying a lot of things about Paula being an unfit mother and mentally unstable. Paula had pretty much disappeared from Quinn’s life after that, but he still felt guilty about how he hadn’t been able to protect her, even though he’d only been a little kid at the time.

  And now he was going through something awful, and it was hard not to think that in a way, with his mother out of commission and his father up to no good, he was more of an orphan at that moment than I’d ever been.

  Even though it was well past rush hour, traffic was heavy, and the rain made it worse. The wet pavement reflected the brake lights of the cars in front of us as the taxi crawled south on Park Avenue, and thick fog shrouded the tops of the office towers in midtown.

  We reached Union Square just as a signal turned red, and as we sat waiting for it to change, my eyes landed on the enormous digital clock mounted on a building on the south end of the square, its numbers glowing yellow-orange against the dark of the facade. As clocks went, it was a complicated version. On the left it counted up the hours and minutes and seconds that had elapsed since midnight, and on the right it counted down the hours and minutes and seconds remaining until the next midnight. The digits came together in the middle in a blur of neon milliseconds.

  But watching the time flash by, I realized it wasn’t yet six o’clock on the West Coast, and there might be a very easy way to answer at least one of my questions.

  I’d been relying on Patience to get a handle on what was going on with Thad. And that had been okay when I’d thought Thad was safely behind his desk in California. But the circumstances had changed — I needed information now. I also had access to people at T.K.'s company in a way Patience never would, because so many of them had watched me grow up. Somebody there would be able to tell me what Thad was up to, and I knew exactly where to start.

  Brett Fitzgerald was my mother’s assistant, and her extension was programmed into my phone. With a pang I realized it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder what had happened to her in the wake of T.K.'s disappearance — it wasn’t as bad as spacing on Erin’s birthday, but Brett had been part of my life since I was a toddler. I just hoped she hadn’t left the company now that T.K. was gone.

  And for once I was in luck, because she was still at the same extension, and she answered right away.

  “Delia!” she cried. “I was just thinking about you, baby. How’re you doing?”

  Brett might have been one of the people who’d watched me grow up, but she still called me “baby,” though that was probably only fair since she’d also made sure that T.K. had been present for every major event in my life, from my kindergarten graduation to the day I’d finally gotten my braces off. And I felt another pang when I
heard the concern in her tone. Like most people from home, she expected me to be in a delicate state, since in theory I’d recently lost my mother. It wasn’t like I could let her know what was really going on, either, which just made the guilt multiply.

  But as soon as I could steer the conversation away from me and back to Brett, I almost forgot about the guilt, because it turned out that with my mother gone, Brett had been reassigned to another executive, and that executive was Thad. Not that she was happy about it.

  “He actually keeps track of how long I take for lunch with a stopwatch. A stopwatch! And when I’m back in fifty-nine minutes, I don’t hear about being early, but a second over sixty minutes and it’s like I’ve been out selling company secrets. We’re all relieved on the days when he’s not in the office.”

  Which was the perfect opening. “Is he there now?” I asked, even though I knew he wasn’t.

  “No, thank God for small favors. He’s been gone for over a week. First he was in New York — you saw him there, right? — and instead of coming back here, he suddenly calls demanding I clear his calendar and book him on the next flight to Santiago.”

  On some level, that was precisely what I’d been expecting to hear, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a shock. “Santiago as in Chile?” I asked, just to be sure.

  “Uh-huh. And then Mr. I-Can’t-Last-Five-Minutes-Without-Checking-Messages goes completely off the grid before calling this afternoon and yelling about how he needs to get on the next flight from Santiago to Buenos Aires.”

  Brett kept talking, about how TrueTech didn’t have any customers in Chile or Argentina so she couldn’t understand Thad’s sudden interest in the region. Of course, she didn’t know the whole story. Not that I did, either, but I knew enough of it to wonder if now would be a good time to start seriously panicking.