The Believer's Daugher - [A Treadwell Academy - 02]

by Caitlyn Duffy

  The final painting was overwhelming. It was the Brooklyn Bridge in rainbow colors, connecting Manhattan to the onion-top towers of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow. Once it was done, we realized that people who didn’t know us wouldn’t realize that it was a statement about our relationship. It would probably be interpreted as some kind of Cold War or terror-inspired art.

  “Let people interpret it as they wish,” Felix shrugged. “That’s the whole purpose of art.”

  Graffiti blogs had already started to post sometimes about the mysterious “F & G” of New York. It was exciting being kind of famous for something other than my parents’ religious activities, even if no one really knew who I was. Being famous but invisible was all the fun of it, and I could tell that Felix was delighted that our work was being noticed.

  The cold spell had ended, and to celebrate the completion of our mural, we had a picnic on the roof of our building. Aaron and I had made a weekend project out of cleaning up the space on our roof, putting down roach traps and leaving lawn chairs up there. Felix and I dragged a blanket up the seventh flight of stairs, dined on grocery-store take-out sushi, and talked for so long about Kandinsky and the abstract art movement in Russia that I fell asleep in his arms beneath the night sky.

  When I woke up, my eyes opened directly to the peach and yellow sky above me. It looked like heaven, and the city was so quiet and the air around us was so balmy that for a few seconds I wondered if I actually was in heaven.

  I felt Felix’s arm shift beneath my head. He was still sound asleep, a child-like smile tilting his lips. I wanted to leave him that way and run down to the apartment to use the bathroom. I planned to return in under five minutes, and slide next to him again, using his bicep for my pillow.

  I crept down the stairwell to our apartment, and opened the door to our apartment as quietly as I could. Even though I hadn’t slept there all night, and it was far earlier than I ever would have woken up on my own, I became acutely aware that something was different about our apartment. There had been some kind of change in the energy.

  Then, as I was coming out of the bathroom, I realized what it was.

  A blond girl was creeping out of Aaron’s room, tiptoeing. She was wearing nothing but one of my t-shirts from Treadwell. She saw me and smiled shyly.

  “You must be Grace,” she said.

  Although I had never seen pictures of her face other than the one on the front page of The New York Times, I figured out immediately that this was Heather. The Heather. Scandalous Heather. I recoiled and almost tripped over my own shoe laces for two reasons.

  First, she was wearing my t-shirt. Gross.

  Second, I had no idea that my brother had been in contact with her at all. I was instantly infuriated that all these months when I had been denied contact with my friends from Treadwell and Mama and Daddy that he had, all along, been talking to the girl who had put us in these strange circumstances.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” she continued, clearly trying to be friendly with me.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, my voice shaky with anger.

  “I came to visit Aaron,” she said, setting one hand gently down upon our kitchen counter. “I wanted to set the record straight about some stuff.”

  This girl’s utter stupidity was blowing my mind. Why had my brother told her where we were? Why had he given her our address? I hadn’t even been so dumb as to give Juliette my mobile phone number or the location of our apartment in case her mom snooped through her stuff. Did Heather’s parents know where she was? Did the paparazzi? This girl’s court case had just made international headlines. And there she was, standing barefoot in our kitchen.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” I told her sternly.

  I thought of Felix, alone on the roof, and suddenly wanted nothing more than to be back up there with him and to come downstairs later and find Heather gone.

  I exhaled loudly to demonstrate my disgust and moved to the front door.

  And there, I found myself looking directly into the barrel of a gun.

  Chapter 18

  Heather had disappeared from her boarding school campus in New Hampshire without saying a word to her parents, roommate, or teacher. Her parents, back in Connecticut, immediately called the FBI to find her. Her dad was some kind of Republican big deal, so they wasted no time in tracking her down. Unlike me and Aaron, Heather was hardly a mastermind at running away. She had used her debit card (linked to her parents’ checking account) to buy her train ticket from New Hampshire to Penn Station. She had used the same card at the ATM around the corner from our apartment to take out cash.

  Aaron and I weren’t in any kind of trouble once it was established that Heather had come to visit Aaron on her own. However, since the FBI had been kind of half-heartedly looking for us anyway in pursuit of our parents, the situation in the living room kind of caught fire. Within an hour, there were a lot more guys entering our apartment in suits with walkie-talkies. I was able to text Tony Michaels and ask that he get his butt over to our apartment before one of the guys in suits seized my mobile phone.

  “You two just sit tight until Agent Phillips gets here,” Aaron and I were told.

  We both sat together on our couch, frowning, saying very little.

  Eventually Felix woke up on the roof and elbowed his way into our apartment.

  “Excuse me sir, this is a federal investigation and I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” an agent on the young side said, stepping into Felix’s way as he tried to enter our living room.

  “That’s my fiancée over there, and I’m not going anywhere,” Felix told him, pushing past him and sitting down next to me on the couch.

  My brother, overhearing this, turned to me with an eyebrow raised as if to say, “Really?”

  After an hour there was a change of plans, and my brother and I were escorted down the stairs of our building to black sedans waiting for us on Baxter St. There was no way they were going to let Felix accompany us to wherever we were being taken, so I tossed him my keys and asked him to text Jacinda and let her know what was happening.

  Tony Michaels was parking his Audi outside our building as Aaron and I were being pushed into the back seats of sedans. He abandoned his car in the middle of the street and ran toward one of the agents in charge, flashing his press badge. I couldn’t hear what the agents were telling him, but I sure hoped he was going to follow us.

  Aaron and I were taken to a huge corporate office building in Lower Manhattan, and were led up to a plain white-walled conference room with windows overlooking the 9/11 Memorial. I felt like an animal on display at the zoo every time a female intern in sensible pumps entered the room to ask us if we wanted coffee.

  Finally, the mysterious Agent Phillips entered. He had gray hair and looked like ex-military, with wire-rimmed glasses and mean eyes.

  “Hello, Aaron and Grace. I’m Agent Fred Phillips. I think you probably have some idea of why you’re here today,” he said.

  “No, actually,” Aaron sassed. “My sister and I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  I blushed. I had vandalized private property with spray paint, illegally tattooed celebrities and my boyfriend, and probably committed at least ten other crimes I had forgotten about. But Aaron didn’t know about any of that, thank God.

  “Do I get, like, a phone call or something?” I asked, really wanting to touch base with Tony to find out what these guys could do with us. I didn’t want to miss work at the Blue Phoenix. I didn’t want to not be home if Feng knocked on our door and wanted someone to read him a story. I realized, with surprise, that I had a life to get back to.

  “You’re not under arrest,” Agent Phillips assured me. “But we sure could use your help in getting in touch with your parents.”

  “Go to hell,” Aaron told him. “We don’t have anything to do with those people anymore, and we’re not going to cooperate with you to bust them.”

  Agent Phillips patiently explained to us – as if we wer
e toddlers who could barely comprehend spoken language – that the federal government could subpoena us to spill what we knew. If we chose to hold out and obstruct justice, we could be held in contempt and face our own jail sentences.

  “Bring it,” Aaron challenged him. “You can’t use us to further your investigation. We just spent the last four months of our lives starving, working our butts off, making sacrifices, all to create a new life for ourselves. You can’t just pull us back in.”

  “Well,” Agent Phillips hesitated, “Unfortunately, son, we can. You can either cooperate with us today, this afternoon, and give us a location, or we can subpoena you, and within the next few weeks you’ll be back downtown, under oath in a court of law.”

  Aaron remained obstinate.

  We were finally released that evening after nightfall. Tony had remained in the lobby on the first floor of the federal building all afternoon on the phone with his editor, keeping him abreast of what was happening. He seemed relieved to see us finally free to leave the building, and he took us to a diner to buy us burgers and fries before dropping us at our apartment.

  “Juliette is interested in talking to you,” I told him, relaying the content of my friend’s most recent e-mail to him. “But only if you don’t go into too many details about her dad’s case.”

  “Thank you,” Tony said. “I appreciate you reaching out on my behalf.”

  When we got home that night, Felix was waiting for us in our apartment, pacing nervously. Coverage of the agents picking Heather up from our apartment and of us being hauled downtown for interrogation was on the evening news, and unbelievably enough, one of the big news magazine shows was airing a special about the case against my parents.

  Aaron was in a dour mood and went into his room and shut the door. There was a good chance he was going to lose his job for having missed a lunch shift without calling in to say he had an emergency. Felix and I sat down on the couch and watched the special in silence. He had never seen any of our cable programming and had claimed to not really know that much about Daddy, so the news broadcast was kind of a crash course for him.

  Tons of people who had been members of The Church of the Spirit had been interviewed about donations they had made to the fraudulent funds. People who couldn’t even pay their mortgages, whose homes were in foreclosure, had still donated money to my parents’ fundraising efforts. One woman in Georgia, who was a devout follower, had five foster children living with her, all of them with special needs. She had donated a thousand dollars to the fund for the Amazing Grace Foundation because she had once been an abused wife and whole-heartedly believed that Daddy was building a safety net for women in India.

  I wanted to cry for her, knowing how far a thousand dollars would go toward feeding five hungry kids. Another couple shared that they had donated part of their retirement fund to The Church of the Spirit, knowing that their donation would require them to work part-time for three more years after they had reached the retirement age. A group of young mothers in Wisconsin had held a craft sale and donated all of their profits to the Amazing Grace Foundation.

  “It’s not so much that I regret the amount we donated,” one of those young mothers told the newscaster.

  Those moms had raised over ten thousand dollars for the purpose of the donation.

  “It’s that we all worked so hard for months on our crafts, and thought that we were really going to make a difference in the lives of some women out there who were less fortunate than us. That’s the part that really burns me. That we were so earnest in our intentions, and it was all in vain.”

  Her words made me cringe.

  Felix and I talked in lowered voices almost all night about what I should do. I wanted to avoid a rift with my brother; he was the only family I had left. It broke my heart to think about my parents being apprehended in Argentina. The thought of them being put on a plane back to the U.S. with Federal Marshals, being photographed relentlessly, being escorted to prison cells made me cry more than once during the course of the night. These weren’t just common criminals, they were my mother and father. Mama, who had braided my hair and taught me how to read and write. Daddy, who had told me so many stories and had told me so many times that he would love me forever.

  I could just refuse to cooperate. I could tell Agent Phillips I would wait to be subpoenaed before I would say a word about my parents’ whereabouts. That would be the easy thing to do; after all, it was possible that they weren’t even at the ranch of Don Fernandez anymore since I had basically told them I knew where they were and that the Feds were hounding me. The easy thing to do would be to wait this situation out; my parents would be found eventually without my information. Then, my parents would be apprehended, I would have had nothing to do with it, and wouldn’t have to live with the guilt of turning in my own flesh and blood.

  But if I did that, it would be like telling all of those people who had sent their hard-earned money to my dad’s church that I approved of what my parents had done. I would be no better than the cab driver who hit Quian, saying, “Sorry! Not my problem.” I was the only person on the inside of my dad’s enterprise who was even considering doing the right thing, it seemed. How ironic, that among a group of people who considered themselves to be devoted to God, that I was the only person committed to abiding by His rules.

  I had learned the hard way by getting burned at Prekin that not taking action when it was mine to take, would only compromise me in the end.

  “Just tell me what to do,” I begged Felix. “What would you do if you were in my position?”

  He thought about it seriously before replying, which I loved him for.

  “If it was my mother? I couldn’t do it. No way. My mother could murder the President and I wouldn’t turn her in. But if my mother had sent your parents money, I would say, let’s call Tony in the morning.”

  “Felix,” I grumbled. “You are not making this easier.”

  “It’s not easy,” he teased me. “I used to think when I was a little boy that I couldn’t wait to be a man and get to make my own decisions. I remember telling my mom all the time, just you wait until I’m in charge. Honestly, though, being a grown-up and having to make decisions just sucks.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  “I can’t decide for you. I will love you no matter what you decide, because there’s no right or wrong way to go in this situation. But I think you know in your heart what you are going to do.”

  In the morning, we went to the coffee shop and picked at scones in silence, and when we got to the Blue Phoenix, I drafted my e-mail to Tony with the address and directions to the horse ranch of Don Fernandez de Rosario.

  My mother looked tired and older than I remembered her looking in Colombia just five months earlier. But then again, she was wearing a very unflattering orange jumpsuit, the inmate uniform, and wasn’t allowed to wear cosmetics behind bars. I was embarrassed for her; I knew how much Mama cherished her makeup.

  “Oh, baby, your hair!” Mama exclaimed.

  My hand drifted up reflexively to my bright pink mane, which had grown out significantly since Jacinda had chopped it back in October. It had become such a part of my daily life, I had forgotten that people outside of New York City might stop and stare at its unnatural shade.

  It was the middle of April. I was scheduled to take the GED with Jacinda the following week, and Aaron and I were trying to decide whether or not to renew our lease in Chinatown for another year in New York, or figure out what to do next with our lives. Mama had been in the federal prison in Goodyear, Arizona, just an hour’s drive from our ranch, for the last two weeks after being captured in Argentina and extradited back to the U.S. The newspapers all reported that the Mathisons had been brought to justice based on an anonymous tip.

  But I knew Mama was aware that the tip had been anything but anonymous.

  No one had really invited me to the prison for a visit. Truthfully, Felix and I had flown to Arizona primarily because the ranch was going to be
put up for auction that summer, and I wanted to review my belongings before everything was audited. I knew I wouldn’t be permitted to take anything of significant value out of our house, but I was more interested in things with emotional value, like my freshman yearbook from Treadwell, photo albums of me and Aaron when we were little, and some of my toys. There were a few things that were of questionable value that I was kind of hoping to ship back to New York for Quian, who was home from the hospital and making remarkable progress. Daddy had built me a doll house when I was seven that I thought Quian would adore, and it pained me to think about it possibly ending up in a landfill.

  “I changed it,” I said, stating the obvious. “My friend Jacinda is a hairdresser.”

  My mother looked uncomfortable in her chair on the other side of the scratched, blurry glass window from me. We had to communicate through the glass pane through black telephone handsets, which was really strange. She sounded far away, even though she was less than two feet away from me. I had never thought in my whole life that I would be looking right at Mama and feel like I was looking at a stranger, but that was how I felt that afternoon in that visiting ward.

  “It’s very hard for me to see you under these circumstances,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, Grace, that you had to come here and witness all of this.”

  Visiting the prison was, quite honestly, pretty lousy. I had to go through an intense pat-down and leave my apartment keys, spare change, and earrings (I had finally let Aimee pierce my ears) in the visitor’s center. Knowing that Felix was waiting for me in the front lobby, reading the article in Time magazine that Tony had just published about the children of high-profile Americans being investigated for financial crimes, made me feel both secure and antsy at the same time. I was comforted that he was there, but I couldn’t wait to wrap up my heartbreaking visit with Mama and rejoin him.

  “I’m sorry about all of this, too,” I said.

  “You have to believe me when I say I didn’t know about any of it,” Mama said, whispering hoarsely. “My attorney keeps telling me not to talk about it, but I can’t help it. You know I can’t do math to save my life. Your father handled everything related to church finances. All I ever saw were your tuition bills and expenses related to managing our household.”