The Ones We Trust

by Kimberly Belle

  And so, as soon as Maria motors away with a throaty vroom, I’m dusting off my old talents with the sourpuss nurse behind the Villa’s double glass doors. Leslie, according to her name tag. She glances up when I come through and holds up a finger, indicating I’m to wait until she’s off the phone.

  “Exit twenty,” she says in a short, I’ve-got-better-things-to-do-here tone, then gives the person on the other end half-assed directions from the beltway. While she’s talking, I take a good look around.

  The Villa’s lobby is light and friendly, the walls smeared a buttercream yellow and hung with the kind of framed pictures you’d expect in an assisted living facility—cheerful flowers and frolicking farm animals set against sunny landscapes. My gaze zooms in on the visitors’ log, on handwriting I recognize immediately. The neat block letters that are fat and round, their slight slant to the left. Maria Daniels, here to see Matthew Daniels, room 213.

  A relative?

  But Maria doesn’t have any family. I distinctly remember her telling me the last of them died in the year prior to Chelsea.

  Then again, Maria hasn’t exactly proven to be the most trustworthy source.

  Leslie hangs up, hauls a mammoth sigh. “Can I help you?”

  I’m careful not to give her too big of a smile. Overworked and underpaid types like Leslie here want validation, not an ass-kissing.

  “Yeah, my boss sent me over here to check out your facility. Apparently, Sunnybrook comes highly recommended for his disabled son, who I didn’t even know he had until it was suddenly in my job description to vet out his son’s new living arrangements.” I plant both forearms onto the counter and lean in conspiratorially. “Next thing you know, he’ll be asking me to bring him coffee and pick up his dry cleaning.”

  She gives me a half-amused snort. “Sounds frighteningly familiar.”

  “I’ll bet. Anyway—” I make a show of looking around “—this place looks nice. Do you maybe have a brochure or something?”

  She fishes a packet from a drawer and passes it to me. “What type of disability does your boss’s son have?”

  I give her a wry smile, wrapping my words in a what-can-you-do tone. “You and I might think sharing his disability would be essential information for vetting out a place, but we’d be wrong. My boss didn’t tell me anything other than the address.”

  “Probably help your employee review, then, if I gave you a tour.”

  “Omigod, totally. It might even get me my very first good job.”

  Leslie squeezes out a smile, heaves herself out of her swivel chair and buzzes me through.

  See? Easy as pie.

  I trail her through the building as she gives her sales pitch, making notes on a blank page in the back of the brochure. I pepper her with questions about the resident population and the varying levels of care, on the campus and all its facilities, on the programs that are designed to enrich and empower. I don’t have to pretend to be fascinated by her talking points. Whoever Matthew Daniels is, he’s somewhere between early twenties and late thirties, moderately to severely mentally challenged and highly supervised.

  A cousin? A brother? After everything I’ve learned from Ben, after everything I’ve seen here today, I’m starting to wonder if any of what Maria told me three years ago was even close to the truth.

  We’re making our way through the second floor when a sudden and high-pitched squeal slices through the air and pierces my eardrums. Leslie looks more annoyed than surprised at the interruption. “Sorry,” she screams over the noise. “We’re going to have to cut this short.”

  I nod and follow her around the corner toward the stairs, but we pull up short at the mass of residents clustered at the far end of the hall by the window. Their backs are huddled together, their hands pressed tightly over their ears. Leslie pushes through them like a linebacker, pausing for only a second or two in front of the glass, and then the crowd parts again, and my heart gives a lurch at the sight of Leslie’s expression as she reemerges. Without even a glance in my direction, she barrels past me and disappears into the stairwell.

  A few moments later, the fire alarm stops its deafening shriek, as abruptly as a needle yanked from a record. The silence that follows is so heavy it’s tangible, a whole other noise punctuated with the soft sniffs of someone crying.

  “What happened?” I say, pushing up onto my toes, trying to see, but a good dozen shoulders block my view. All I can make out from my spot behind them are treetops and the blue sky beyond.

  One of them, a pudgy woman with the round and plump face of a muppet, turns back, her already impossibly large eyes bulging with an uninhibitedness that reveals her condition. “Another fire.”

  “He set another fire,” someone wails between wet sniffs.

  “Who did?”

  “Matthew,” another says, and my ears perk up. Matthew Daniels? “It’s ’cause Maisie was just here. He always does bad things when Maisie’s been here.”

  Something about the name teases the edges of my memory. Maisie. It flits away before I can grab hold.

  “Who’s Maisie?” I ask.

  “His sister.” Muppet Face presses hers into the window. “She’s pretty.”

  Maisie Daniels.

  There’s something about the name, a gritty taste behind my teeth I can’t quite place. I pull out my phone and type the words into the search field. The image that fills my screen hits me like a Fireball shot, lighting me up from inside. The cheesy backdrop, an obviously fake library background. The lopsided pigtails tied with red yarn. The chipped and bucked front teeth pushing through the slight smile. I see it, and my breath dries up.

  “Fucking hell,” I mutter, and more than one person giggles.

  It’s Maria’s—no, Maisie’s second-grade picture. The same one that was circulated back in 1996, when she was snatched from her bedroom in the middle of the night. The same one I stared at for the good part of my junior year in college six years later, when I wrote my term paper singing the praises of the media, which I maintained made a greater contribution than the Toledo police force in pulling her filthy, undernourished but still breathing body from that man’s basement. By the time the police got their act together and sent out a search party, the media had already plastered her face on every newspaper, milk carton and television screen across the continental United States. All the cops had to do, I argued, was wait for someone to recognize her.

  My professor gave me a D-minus, but only because he liked me enough not to flunk me.

  What I didn’t understand then, what I understand all too well now, is that media attention can be a double-edged sword. In Maria/Maisie’s case, the media saved her life, and yet it also exposed a scared, scarred eight-year-old girl to the world. It revealed all the awful things that man did to her, to her no-longer-innocent body. It imprinted her face, her story, every awful, horrific, gruesome detail, on the collective American memory.

  You don’t survive a trauma like the one Maisie did undamaged. You don’t come out the other end unchanged. But damaged and changed enough to let others use her body for money, to put it on the internet for the world to see, even after it drove a former lover to suicide? An icy chill hijacks my spine at the answer: yes.

  “Lady, are you okay? You don’t look too good.”

  I look up into a pair of sweet, caring eyes. “No,” I say, “I don’t think I am.”

  * * *

  When I return home from Sunnybrook, Mandy is sitting at my desk, flipping through the Zach Armstrong printouts.

  “Hi,” I say from the doorway, but she doesn’t answer. Her brow is furrowed in concentration, and she’s twirling a long strand of auburn hair around a finger as she always does when she’s thinking really hard. It’s not unusual that she’s here. Mandy is one of the few people with a key to my house, and she uses it often. I work from home. Sh
e works from home. Impromptu work sessions like this one are a regular thing.

  Except Mandy’s not working. Her laptop lies closed and dark on the bookshelf behind her.

  “Hi,” I say again, this time with a bit more muscle, and she startles, catching a good few inches of air on the chair.

  “Jesus! Give a woman a warning, would you?” She presses a palm to her chest, blows out a long breath.

  “I did. Twice now.” I cross the room to my desk, pull up my content curation software and begin entering the keywords for searches for Maria, Maisie and her brother, Matthew. It takes only a few seconds, and once I’m done, I swivel in my chair and gesture to my once-neat piles, now scattered across the surface of my desk as if a windstorm picked them up and dumped them there. “What are you doing here? Besides making a mess of my papers, that is.”

  She spreads her arms wide. “The question is, what are you doing? If I didn’t know better, I’d say writing an article about Zach Armstrong.”

  It’s no use not telling her. The only person on the planet with a curiosity determined enough to compete with mine is Mandy, and if I don’t admit to why I’ve plowed through a good chunk of the Amazon rainforest for printouts of everything ever written about Zach, she’ll hound me until I do. I give her a quick recap of my initial run-in with Gabe at Handyman and how, two days later, an anonymous package arrived on my front doorstep, revealing the name of a thirty-sixth soldier.

  Mandy’s eyes go wide. “You don’t think that’s a little coincidental, meeting Gabe one day and finding this mysterious package on another? I mean, what are the odds?”

  “Questionable at best. Which means whoever gave me that transcript wanted me to find Ricky, which as far as I can figure means they wanted me to reveal him to the world.”

  “Are you going to?”

  I shake my head. “Hell, no. I already told you, I’m done with that part of my life. But I had to do something, so I gave a copy of the transcript, unedited version, to the Armstrongs.”

  “Oh, my God. What did they say? What did your father say?”

  “Gabe told me to get lost, Dad cornered me in Mike’s backyard, and Jean asked me to help her tell Zach’s story.”

  Mandy sits back in the chair, her eyes going even wider than before. “Like, ghostwrite it?”

  I lift a shoulder. “I guess. We didn’t really go into the details.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I told her I’d think about it.”

  She smacks both palms on the desk. “Are you crazy? Call her up right now and tell her you’ll do it. Tell her you’ll get started tonight. I’ll help.”

  “What about my father and Chris? What about Gabe?” She dismisses Gabe with a flick of a manicured hand, but I’m not so ready. “He’ll accuse me of scheming this outcome all along, of planning the whole thing. He probably thinks I hypnotized his mother or cast some evil spell that bewitched her into asking me. He’ll think I went there with the intention of walking out with a book deal.”

  “Did you?”

  “Absolutely not.” Regardless of my interest in Ricky—who he is, what he saw—I did not in any way sweet-talk Jean into asking me for help writing Zach’s story. Jean’s request came out of the blue, and it was all her own. I had nothing to do with it, other than maybe giving her the honest answers she wanted to hear.

  “So, what do you care what Gabe thinks?” Mandy says, handing me her cell phone. “Jean’s the one you should be trying to impress. Call her. Say yes. You know you want to.”

  I stare at her, but I don’t argue. As my best friend for almost two decades, Mandy knows me better than pretty much anybody on the planet, and she’s right. I do know. I roll Jean’s request around for the hundredth time, and the temptation is hot caramel on my tongue.

  “And as for your father and Chris?” She shakes her head. “Whoever gave you that transcript was trying to tell you something, and it doesn’t reflect favorably on either of them.”

  Another good point, and one that’s occupied the better part of my mind since tripping over the envelope on my front doorstep. I think about who would have purposefully breached OPSEC to give an unmarked, uncensored copy to me. Someone who has it out for my father or Uncle Chris? Possibly, but then why give it to me? Why not give it to the Washington Post instead?

  There’s something I’m missing here.

  Something that’s maybe in the transcript.

  I dig through the papers on the desk in search of it, but there are over two thousand pages of printouts here, and Mandy has made such a mess of my piles, it will take me forever. “Where did you put the transcript?”

  “I didn’t.” When I look up in surprise, she adds, “I never saw it. When you mentioned it just now, I figured you’d put it somewhere safe.” She takes in what feels like a frantic expression on my face, purses her lips. “Please, tell me you put it somewhere safe.”

  “It was on the top of Zach’s pile. You must have seen it. About twenty pages smothered in pink highlighter.”

  Mandy shakes her head, and the first niggle that something is wrong rises in my chest.

  I lick my finger and flip through the top of each stack for a second time, and then a third, my eyes peeled for swipes of hot pink.

  But on every page I come to, there’s only black and white.

  “Okay, so when did you see it last?” she asks.

  At the reminder, I pop out of my chair and rush over to the copy machine. The last time I touched the transcript was when I was making a copy for the Armstrongs. But when I lift the cover on the machine, there’s nothing there. The glass is empty.

  “Those machines usually have a memory function, you know. Let me see.”

  While Mandy fiddles with the buttons on the screen, I search my desk and the cabinets and bookshelves. I search under the rugs and in the magazines and under the potted peace lily in the hallway. I search in the recycling bin and the pile of mail by the microwave and in the junk drawer and under every piece of furniture in the entire house. I search everywhere I can think of. The only things I find are a few stray socks and more dust bunnies than I’d care to admit.

  By the time I return to the office, my hands as empty as when I began, Mandy is pulling a fresh copy off the machine. But still. A transcript appears. A transcript vanishes. Both under suspicious, and suspiciously criminal, circumstances. A jolt of something creepy shoots through me, knotting my shoulders and wringing my stomach like a wet rag.

  Mandy looks over, and I can tell her thoughts are colliding with mine. “Maybe you should call the police.”

  “And tell them what? That someone snuck in and stole a document I wasn’t supposed to have in the first place? And anybody who doesn’t break a window or bust down a door is not going to leave prints.”

  “Okay, but what if they come back?”

  “Why would they come back, when clearly they already got what they came for?”

  She holds the fresh copy in the air, an unspoken reminder that my statement is not quite true. “But who would give it to you in the first place? What do they want?”

  “I don’t know, but I intend to find out.”

  “How are you going to do that?” she asks, but she’s already smiling, already nodding as if she knows what’s coming, and she approves.

  “I’m going to find Ricky.”

  12

  After a weekend behind my computer, I’ve made zero progress. I still haven’t found Ricky. I haven’t heard a peep from Floyd. I’ve stared at the transcript until the letters blur and run together. By Monday morning, I’m sick and tired of thinking about all of it, and my veins hum with cooped-up energy.

  Outside my windows, the temperature has taken a nosedive, and the heavens are unloading a steady stream of rain, so I release my frustration the old-fashioned way. Upsta
irs in my bathroom with hard, physical labor.

  I spend the day cutting and spacing the floor tile—a smooth, square porcelain that looks as if it might be stone unless you happen to notice the price per square foot, which was a total steal. I use the spacers Gabe threw into my cart just in case, and I start from the middle of the room as the internet told me to do.

  I must admit, something about the work is soothing. Maybe it’s the rhythm. The buzz of the saw, the swish of the trowel, the rake of the mastic. Or maybe it’s the way it takes all my concentration, giving my mind a much-needed rest. Even though my loudest thoughts are still there, percolating under the surface—Maria’s shenanigans, Ricky’s whereabouts, my father’s objections, Jean’s request—the work drowns out their constant loops through my consciousness.

  When the last tile is set, I push to a stand, stretch out my creaky bones and head down the hallway for the shower.

  The doorbell rings as I’m drying myself off. I run across the hall, throw on some clean clothes—an ancient rowing sweatshirt and a pair of yoga pants—and hurry down the stairs in bare feet and wet hair.

  The face that greets me on the other side of the door is just as wet. Actually, everything about him is soaked—his hair, his shoes, his bomber jacket of brown-and-black leather. Gabe, of course. I’m as surprised as I would be to find Elvis dripping on my front porch floor.

  “Sorry to just show up unannounced, but I was out for a walk and...” A frigid gust sends a whirlwind of leaves and rain across the yard, and Gabe and I shiver simultaneously. He looks beyond my shoulder, casting a longing look down my centrally heated, dry hallway. “It’s probably really warm in there, isn’t it?” His gaze returns to mine, and to my locked-down expression, the way I shift to fill up the opening in the doorway. “Right. Of course not. Never mind.”

  “What do you want, Gabe?”

  I know I’m on the wrong side of rude, but the last two times I saw Gabe, he accused me of lying, called me names and basically threw me out of his mother’s house, so I don’t exactly feel inclined to let him into mine. He doesn’t look angry or combative, but still. Unless he’s here to thank me for sliding him Ricky, he can stand outside on my freezing doorstep in his wet clothes all night as far as I’m concerned.