All These Beautiful Strangers

by Elizabeth Klehfoth

  He took me to a cheap pizza parlor across the city that smelled like burned cheese, and he ordered me a giant plastic cup of soda. As I sat across the booth from him, sucking dumbly on my straw, he started to ask me about my mother.

  No one besides Dr. Malby ever talked to me about my mother. But he wanted to know. What had that last month been like with her? Had she seemed different in any way? Who came and went at the house? How had things been between her and my father? And that night that she disappeared—what had I heard? What had I seen?

  That was it. We talked. It felt good, actually, to talk about it, to talk about my mother with someone who had known her, too. To not keep it all inside like it was some dark, forbidden thing. For someone in my own family to want to know, to listen.

  It was dark out when he drove me home and the truth was, I wasn’t scared or even aware that anything was wrong until we pulled up to the curb in front of my building, and I saw the police car parked there, its lights flashing red and blue moons that were orbiting the sidewalk. And that’s when I started to cry, panic welling up in my chest.

  As soon as my uncle Hank stopped the truck, I unbuckled my seat belt and started pulling at the door handle, trying to open it, but it wouldn’t open because it was old and finicky and got stuck if you didn’t do it just right, and so I started to scream. And that’s what the police officers and my father saw when they came running out to the curb—me, in the front passenger seat of Uncle Hank’s truck, screaming and pounding the glass with my palms like some caged animal. Uncle Hank hurriedly got out and went around to try to open the door from the outside.

  He didn’t get to open the door though, because my father caught him just as he was rounding the hood of his truck, and my father took Uncle Hank by the lapels of his jacket and pushed him up against the hood. I couldn’t hear what he was saying through the glass and my screams.

  Later, when Uncle Hank and the police officers were gone, my father asked me where Uncle Hank had taken me, what we had done, was there anything we’d talked about? And I recounted the trip in the rusted truck, and the soda at the pizza parlor, and the questions Uncle Hank had asked about my mother. About him.

  Later that week, during math lessons, when our teacher left us to quietly work out equations at our desks while she took the attendance forms down to the office, I heard it mounting in the room behind me, like it was a real, physical thing filling the room, pressing up against me, stealing the breath from my lungs—the whispers, the snickering. I got that old familiar feeling in my chest—the one that had suffocated me the year after my mother disappeared—the feeling of being looked at, talked about, held up for speculation. It hollowed me out inside, made me want to hold my breath and close my eyes and disappear.

  “Ask her,” someone whispered loud enough for me to hear, and finally Tommy Hartman leaned forward in his desk and poked me hard in between my shoulder blades with his pencil.

  “Hey, Charlotte,” he said, his voice loud and unkind.

  I debated whether I should answer him, but finally I half-turned in my desk to face him. Whatever was coming, it was best to just rip it off quick, like a Band-Aid.

  “What?” I asked. I could feel heat rushing into my cheeks, the hot panic in my chest. And I hated that they could see it on my face, hear it in my voice—that I was afraid.

  “How’d he do it?” he asked.

  “How’d who do what?” I asked.

  “You know,” he said, irritated, as if I were playing games with him, as if I knew exactly what he was talking about.

  Everyone had abandoned the work in front of them; I could feel all my classmates’ eyes on me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. My palms were sweaty and I wiped them on the thighs of my pants, hoping nobody could see.

  And then he said it.

  “How’d your dad kill your mom?” Tommy Hartman asked.

  The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and I couldn’t breathe. I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out. My mouth hung open stupidly and I just gaped at him like a fish caught on dry land, gasping for air.

  “I bet he strangled her,” Monica Petrosky, the prettiest and cruelest girl in the class, said.

  They all started in then, as if this were some sanctioned event.

  “Where’d he put her body?”

  “Aren’t you scared your dad is gonna murder you?”

  “Shut up,” I said. “Shut up!”

  It came out louder than I expected, that silent rage inside me. They were quiet, shocked, but only for a second.

  “Ooooohhhh,” somebody in the back of the class crowed. “Watch out, or Charlotte Calloway is gonna murder you.”

  Tommy Hartman howled with laughter; Monica Petrosky laughed so hard she snorted.

  I bit my lip and tried with everything that was in me to stop it, but I couldn’t. I could feel them coming, the hot tears filling my eyes. I looked up and saw our teacher, Mrs. Holiday, standing in the doorway.

  She put her hands on her hips and glared at all of us. “And just what is going on here?” she asked.

  Everyone got really quiet really quickly and once again, everyone’s eyes fell on me. I wanted desperately for everyone to Just. Stop. Looking. At. Me. I couldn’t cry in front of them—I wouldn’t.

  “Charlotte?” Mrs. Holiday asked. And her voice was not kind or comforting, but demanding, as if I were responsible for stirring up the class in her absence. And a part of me was thankful for her cruelty, because I knew one gesture of kindness would have undone me.

  “My stomach hurts,” I said. “Can I go to the nurse?”

  I hid in the nurse’s office until recess, and it was Heather Frank, a quiet girl who wore thick-lensed glasses, who finally showed me what had started the whole thing. Sitting on the empty bleachers, she pulled the thin tabloid from her bag.

  real estate billionaire murders wife, wife’s brother tells all, the title said in large, blood-red letters. Below it was a picture of my father, dressed sharply in a suit, ducking into a limo, his arm around the back of some faceless blonde in a halter dress. He looked handsome and haughty in that picture, but he had a wrathful sneer on his face. It made him look dangerous. Predatory.

  Next to the picture of my father was a picture of my mother with a halolike glow around the edges. I recognized it. I had seen it hundreds of times at my Grandma Fairchild’s house hanging in the stairwell with the pictures of Uncle Hank and Uncle Lonnie and Uncle Will, my mother’s brothers. My mother couldn’t have been more than eighteen. She was wearing a soft, cream-colored dress, her hair loose around her shoulders, smiling at the camera. She looked so young and sweet and innocent in the picture next to my father. Doe-eyed and fragile. Something in my heart seized, and I started to read.

  No one could have predicted that what started as a fairy tale would end so tragically. Grace Fairchild, daughter of mill worker Frank Fairchild and preschool teacher Alice Fairchild, had a humble upbringing in Hillsborough, Connecticut. When she caught the eye of billionaire Alistair Calloway, heir to the Calloway Group, she was introduced to a whole new world: a penthouse apartment on the Upper East Side, luxurious weekend trips on private jets, lavish gifts. Grace thought she had found her Prince Charming. Little did she know that beneath the surface lurked a killer.

  “She was blinded by his charm, his money,” Grace’s older brother Hank says. “She didn’t see him clearly. And then when she saw what he really was, it was too late. That month before she went missing, Alistair and Grace fought constantly. She was going to ask him for a divorce. The night she disappeared, she told him to leave. They got into an argument. She screamed at him not to touch her anymore. She said, ‘Get your hands off me.’”

  I stopped reading. I had told Uncle Hank about that. Sitting across from him in that cheap pizza parlor, sucking on that soda he had bought me as he plied me with questions, I had told him my mother’s last words to my father. Like a traitor. Like a worthless, pathetic traitor. But I hadn’t known he w
ould do this—sell it to the highest bidder, for the whole world to see.

  I had told him other things, too. Happy things. Why hadn’t he told them any of that?

  I handed the tabloid back to Heather. The glossy pages felt slick and slimy under my fingers.

  “It wasn’t like that,” I said. “How they make it sound. How he makes it sound. They weren’t getting a divorce.”

  I couldn’t believe this was happening. Again.

  When my mother had first gone missing, it had been big news—splashed across the cover of every gossip magazine, a topic on every news outlet. The police took my father away for questioning; there were search parties formed to comb the woods near the house and divers who searched the dark depths of Langely Lake. Everyone was looking for a body. Nobody ever found one.

  It didn’t matter that my father had an alibi. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t even been at the house that night when she went missing; he was at our apartment in the city, a hundred miles away. It didn’t matter that my father had loved her, that he would never have hurt her. It was a dark and juicy story, and so people ate it up. Murderer, they whispered. Wife-killer, they said.

  After my mother went missing, my father hired a private investigator to find her, and that’s when the investigator found the bank tapes. There was security footage at the local branch of Connecticut Mutual. Days before she disappeared, my mother withdrew hundreds of thousands of dollars from the safety-deposit boxes she shared with my father. She’d taken that money and walked out of our lives forever. I was seven; my sister, Seraphina, was barely five. The national news channels played those bank tapes for weeks—the humiliating evidence that proved my mother had robbed and abandoned us.

  My father searched for her for a year and could never find so much as a trace of her. On the anniversary of her leaving, he let the private investigator go. He said if my mother was that determined not to be found, then he didn’t want to find her.

  I had endured the stares, the pitying glances, the whispers, for a year after my mother left us—we had all endured it. And now, just when things were starting to return to normal, this happened.

  I hate him, I thought. I would never forgive Uncle Hank for doing this to my father, for making me do this to my father. For this dark cloud that he had dragged over us when the storm had finally seemed as if it were starting to clear.

  “It sure sounds like he did it,” Heather said, as if she hadn’t heard me. And I knocked those stupid glasses off her face, the metal stand under our feet leaving a permanent scratch on the left lens.

  Later, my father sat me and my sister down in his study and told us we were not to speak to our uncle Hank again, that he wasn’t to come near us, unless my father was present. He couldn’t bring himself to look at me as he spoke, and I tried not to hold that against him.

  “Your uncle Hank is not well,” my father said. And then he told us how we were going to live with our uncle Teddy and aunt Grier for a little bit, until things blew over. And I tried not to hold that against him, either.

  Now I crumpled up the note Uncle Hank had left in my mailbox and threw it in the trash. I willed myself not to think about it.

  I looked up and saw through the window to the mailroom Leo walking across the quad with Dalton and Crosby. Good, a distraction. I adjusted the strap of my bag over my shoulder and ran after them.

  “It’s a fifty-dollar buy-in,” Crosby was saying when I caught up to them.

  “Big plans for tonight?” I asked, slightly out of breath.

  “Just a couple of guys playing a friendly game of five-card draw,” Leo said.

  “Is this a ‘boys only’ thing because you’re scared to lose to a girl?” I asked.

  Crosby put his arm around my shoulder. “Charlie, my boy Dalton here is the biggest feminist I know.”

  “Yeah, male, female, I like to beat them all equally,” Dalton said. “I’m not afraid to take your money, Calloway.”

  “All right, then,” I said. “What time are we talking?”

  For the second night in a row, I snuck out of my window after curfew. Only this time, instead of heading to the Rosewood Hall parking lot, I headed north toward the edge of campus. The quickest way to the upperclassman boys’ dormitory was through a well-lit campus patrolled by Old Man Riley, Knollwood Prep’s security guard. Instead, I skirted the edge of campus, cutting through an undeveloped field, with grass that came up to my knees in places. There was just a sliver of moon in the sky to light my way.

  Dalton’s room was on the ground floor of Acacia Hall, the upperclassman boys’ dorm. Because he was a senior, he had the entire room to himself. The boys had left a candle in the window in front of a closed curtain so I would know which room to go to. I knocked on the windowpane three times before Dalton swept back the curtain, blew out the candle, and let me in.

  “We were beginning to wonder if you’d show,” Crosby said as Dalton shut his window behind me and drew the curtain tight so there was no chance of Old Man Riley’s catching a glimpse of our late-night game on his rounds. “You know, pregame jitters.”

  Dalton had an old card table set up next to his single bed. On the other side was his swivel desk chair and on the third side of the table was a trunk. I was the last to arrive and so there was only one seat left: a spot on Dalton’s bed next to Crosby.

  “I did have some reservations about coming,” I said as I sat on Dalton’s bed and folded my legs underneath me to get comfortable. “Number one: will they still like me when I beat them to kingdom come and take all their money? Number two: what if they cry? I’ve never seen a whole room of boys cry before.”

  “She certainly talks a big game,” Crosby said, shuffling the cards.

  “Pride cometh before a fall, Calloway,” Dalton said, taking a seat on his trunk.

  Auden pulled out a large pencil case and started divvying up the “chips.” We couldn’t play with real poker chips, for the same reason none of us had brought any money to the game. Gambling was an automatic suspension at Knollwood. Instead, we played with Post-it notes ($10), pencils ($5), erasers ($2), and Skittles ($1), so that we had plausible deniability in the event we were caught around a card table. The money was real enough, and the losers would square away with the winners by the end of the week.

  Dalton dealt first and I picked up my hand with an almost giddy glee. It was a strong hand: a pair of queens and an ace. But I was less focused on my cards than on watching the other players, noting when they limped or raised, how many cards they exchanged, whether they folded early or called the hand.

  I’d always loved poker because it was a game of reading people. Everyone had a tell—a quickening of the breath, a facial tic, a knot of muscles tensing in the neck. It almost wasn’t fair to Leo that I was playing, because I knew him so well. His tell for a good hand was the same as when he was talking to a pretty girl: a practically imperceptible twitch of the right corner of his mouth that gave him an almost arrogant smirk. You had to really know him to catch it.

  Sometimes a person’s tell wasn’t so much a physiological response as a behavior. I quickly learned that Auden was a cautious player; he almost always limped from round to round and folded early, so you knew if he raised the bet or stayed in after the second round he had a winning hand. Crosby played like he lived: with a practiced nonchalance, raising when he should fold, rarely bowing out until the last draw. Dalton was the most difficult to read; the whole game, I couldn’t get a handle on him.

  It was nearly two in the morning, and we were down to our last hand. It was the final round of betting. We had all gone big this round; there was nearly $65 in the pot. Leo was out and Auden had just folded. Dalton was up. He could put another $20 in to limp, or raise, or fold. We all knew why he was hesitating: at this point, he was up $100, the most of all of us. But if he put in another $20 to stay in and lost and I took the pot, I would best him at $95 to $80. If he folded right now, he’d still be in first, regardless of whether I won the pot or not.

>   I put my cards facedown and pushed them forward, like I thought it was my turn and I had decided to fold.

  “It’s not your turn,” Auden whispered.

  “Oh, sorry,” I said. I made a show of scooping my cards up and acting all embarrassed. If I could have blushed on command I would have.

  “I’m in for twenty dollars,” Dalton said, putting two Post-its from his large stack into the middle of the table.

  As soon as he laid his Post-its down, I scooped my cards back up and moved two Post-it notes of my own into the middle of the card table.

  “I’ll see your twenty dollars,” I said, “and raise you another ten dollars.”

  I pushed two pencils into the middle of the card table.

  “You angler,” Dalton said. He had a smile on his face but there was a hardness to his eyes. He was trying to play it cool but I could tell I had upset him.

  “That’s cheating,” Auden said.

  “Morally ambiguous,” I corrected him. “If I did it on purpose. Maybe I didn’t mean to go out of turn.”

  “Did you?” Auden asked.

  “Would you believe me if I said no?” I asked.

  “I like her,” Crosby said to the room. “I like you,” he said to me, clapping his hand on my back. “I hope you did do it on purpose.”

  Auden looked to Leo for support, but that was useless. Leo laughed and leaned back in his swivel chair. He shook his head. “I told you guys not to let her play,” he said.

  “I’ll see your ten dollars,” Crosby said, moving two of the pencils from his stack into the middle of the table. Dalton reluctantly did the same.

  Then, all together, we turned over our hands. Dalton had three jacks. Crosby had two pairs. I had a flush.

  Crosby did a doleful slow clap. Dalton let out a heavy sigh. Auden cursed under his breath.

  “Well done, cousin,” Leo said.

  “Lovely playing you all,” I said as I leaned forward and scooped all of the pencils, Post-its, erasers, and Skittles to my end of the table. “And I wasn’t kidding earlier. I really will freak out if you start to cry.”