Don't You Trust Me?

by Patrice Kindl

  “Oh, I suppose you’re right,” Brooke said. “I just hate to see people cornered and caught. It’s like watching one of those nature shows where the predator is stalking its prey. I can’t look; I can’t even stand thinking about it.” She shuddered.

  Huh. I kind of like those shows.

  “What if she steals because she enjoys stealing?” I asked. “What if she’s had a perfectly normal childhood but happens to think it’s more fun to take things than it is to save up money to buy them?”

  Emma shook her head pityingly. “You are taking a very old-fashioned view of crime. Nobody is born evil. Nobody is born a thief. People don’t do terrible things without reason. Nope, she’s compensating for something.”

  “And you say she’s been caught before,” said Brooke. “Now that she knows the consequences, why would she keep doing it if she weren’t driven to it?”

  Consulting my own personal experience, I offered some suggestions: “Poor impulse control? Thrill seeking? A taste for the finer things in life coupled with a disinclination to pay for them?”

  They both smiled at me and shook their heads.

  Okay, if you say so. Far be it from me to disillusion you.

  “Say, isn’t that your mother’s Subaru, Emma?” I inquired. “You know, the one whose glove box Francea has her hand in right now?”

  Emma snapped to attention. “What?”

  “That looks like a fine set of binoculars she’s secreting in that big handbag of hers,” I added.

  She gasped. “Those are my dad’s Vortex Razor! He’ll kill me if those get stolen. He always tells me to lock the car, but I forgot they were in there.”

  “What do we do?” whispered Brooke.

  “We get them back!” said Emma. She set her jaw and looked like she was about to march over to Francea and shake them out of her.

  “But how? Won’t she deny it if we ask her?” Brooke restrained Emma by clutching her arm. “Oh, Morgan, what should we do?”

  “I’ll get them,” I said. “But if I do, you both owe me. Stay here and don’t move.”

  Not pausing to see if they agreed with this proposition, I began walking fast in Francea’s direction. Alarmed, she veered away from the Subaru and moved several cars away. Once she was screened by a big van, she faked a sudden need to retie her shoe and bent over.

  While it was true that I could not see her, it was also true that she could not see me. I walked softly around the back of the van and up behind her. I grabbed the big handbag.

  “Eeek!” Francea whirled around. “What . . . what are you doing?”

  I turned and checked to make sure we were out of the line of sight of Emma and Brooke. We were. I rummaged through the bag and found the binoculars. I slipped the strap around my neck and kept rummaging. Four cell phones, a tablet computer, a wad of cash, several credit cards with a variety of different people’s names, and a bottle of vodka. Oh, and a tiny little handgun.

  “That’s mine!” Francea cried as I brandished the last item.

  “Oh? I thought it might belong to your kid brother. It looks like a toy.”

  Her eyes shifted frantically back and forth, considering this opening. She was too young to have a license for it, and we both knew it.

  “It . . . yes, it is a toy. It’s my brother’s, like you said. Can I have it back?”

  “It sure is realistic,” I said, tilting it to admire the light gleaming off the barrel. “Looks like it could do some damage, small as it is.” I’d never handled a gun before, but I suspected that the little catch thing was the safety. I fiddled with it.

  “No, it’s just a—”

  Bam! The bullet hit the ground by her right foot, and she leaped into the air like a prima ballerina. Yes, that was the safety, for sure.

  “My goodness, how alarming. I thought you said this was your brother’s toy.” I aimed the little gun squarely at Francea.

  “Keep it! Keep everything!” she gabbled. “Please don’t shoot me.”

  “Really, Francea, you are an embarrassment to our tribe.” I smiled and shook my head at her in pained disappointment.

  “To our what?” She peered at me, trying to read my expression. “I’m sorry! I’ll go straight. Honest. I’ll never steal again.”

  “Uh-huh, sure.”

  “Don’t you believe me?” To my mingled admiration and hilarity, two big tears streaked down her cheeks. This idiot actually thought that I would pity her “distress.”

  “No, I don’t believe you, but I am impressed. Neat trick, those tears!”

  “Yeah, well, um. So . . . can I go?”

  “Sure. No, wait.” She wavered, considering flight, but then thought better of it. The gun was still aimed at her. I found her wallet, examined the library card to ensure the wallet was hers, stripped it of cash (a tidy sum, by the way), and threw it to her. She caught it and stared at me, openmouthed.

  “You’re a thief !” she said in tones of righteous indignation. “You—you stole my money! You knew it was mine and you took it.”

  “Did you think you were the first person to come up with the idea? You don’t have a patent on larceny. Now beat it,” I growled. As she hurried off through the maze of cars and I stuffed the goodies back into the handbag, I smiled reminiscently. I remembered the carnie guy telling me to beat it all those years ago. Somehow I doubted that Francea would learn as much from this encounter as I had from him.

  I stepped out from behind the van and found Brooke and Emma dodging around the cars, bent low but approaching cautiously. Lucky I hadn’t delayed any longer, or they might have been in a position to overhear our final remarks.

  “We called 911! Are you okay? Was that a gunshot?”

  I showed them the little gun. Brooke gasped and threw her arms up in front of her face, like that would protect her from stray bullets.

  “Oh, honestly, Brooke! I’m not going to shoot you. It went off accidentally. Look, I’m putting the safety on.” I pointed the gun down at the ground and twiddled with the catch. With any luck it had been rendered harmless.

  I told them the story of my ambushing Francea as she’d hid behind the van.

  “I snuck up behind her and grabbed her purse,” I said truthfully. Less truthfully, I continued, “And when I did, everything fell out. The gun went off—I guess when it hit the ground, or maybe I hit it with my hand. She tried to pick stuff up, but all she got was her wallet before she took off.

  “Okay, look,” I said, eying them sternly. “You called 911?”

  They nodded. I could hear sirens coming nearer, now I thought of it.

  “We are not going to tell them whose purse this is.”

  They both burst into confused, argumentative speech. I waited patiently for a break in the yammering.

  “Tomorrow is After the Race Is Run, remember?”

  They nodded. The sirens were entering the grounds of the ranch.

  “Do you really think that they will let us go on with the program if they find out about Francea?” Actually, they probably would have. Why not? I just didn’t want people possibly staying home because they’d read about Francea’s arrest in connection with the festival and had gotten nervous. I continued to fix them both with an unrelenting stare.

  “Maybe not,” said Emma.

  “Do you want all of our work to be ruined because of Francea? How about you, Brooke? You’re the one who can’t bear the idea of running to ground a fugitive from justice. Does either of you even know her last name or where she lives? I sure don’t,” I lied.

  “I think it was fate that made her take her own wallet instead of any of the things she’d stolen,” I continued, on a lofty note. “Well, that or maybe self-preservation, so the theft couldn’t be linked to her. In any case, the cops won’t know who she is if we don’t tell them. Personally, I think that if we turn these things over to the police, we’ll be doing the right thing.” Naturally, I had already transferred the cash to my own pockets. “How about it? Here they come.”

  �
�But the gun!” Brooke protested.

  “Oh, it’s not hers! She found that, and figured she could sell it,” I said.

  Brooke and Emma looked at each other.

  “I guess,” said Brooke. “If you’re okay with it, Emma.”

  “Yeah, I suppose.”

  The cops questioned me closely, which wasn’t surprising, given the gun. I described Francea vaguely enough that she could be any of a dozen girls, but accurately enough that, if they figured out which one she was, it wouldn’t sound like I had been trying to mislead them. I said that I couldn’t be sure if she went to our school—considering as how I was new there this year.

  They had to go through the whole crowd of people working there that day, getting names and trying to match the stolen items to the owners. I heard later that nobody claimed the gun, which appeared to be unlicensed. Somebody in this public-spirited crowd was being naughty.

  The one thing that everybody—cops, volunteers, and stable staff—agreed upon was that I was a truly remarkable young woman.

  “So brave, so strong,” said my cousin Brooke. “Really,” she said, when her parents and grandmother showed up to escort us home, “I’ve never met anyone like her in my life.”

  14

  EVERYONE IN THE HOUSEHOLD WAS involved in After the Race Is Run, even Mrs. Barnes, the housekeeper, who was one of the breakfast cooks. We were therefore up at dawn on the day of the benefit, and over at the stables setting up by seven. At ten thirty, when the event was already in full swing and crowds of people were wandering around, I realized that I had left some of the paperwork I needed back at the house, so Emma offered to run me back to pick it up.

  When we got there, Emma waited in the car, as we both assumed I would be inside for less than a minute. I would have been too, except that the phone rang while I was passing through the hall on the way out, paperwork in hand.

  Since I still had no cell phone, people had to reach me by using the house phone. It might, therefore, have been somebody calling about the event, with a message I needed to hear. I groaned but veered into Uncle Karl’s study to pick up the handset.

  “Styles residence,” I said, seating myself behind Uncle Karl’s desk. My eye roved over the papers laid out on the surface. Generally he was tidy, so his early start this morning must have distracted him from doing his filing. A letter from his lawyer, one from his accountant, and a few bills. Interesting. I had never thought of looking through his desk before, but a little exploration might pay off sometime in the near future.

  A faraway voice floated up from the earpiece of the receiver.

  “Hello? Hello, is that Brooke? This is Janelle. Your cousin from Los Angeles.”

  A small eternity seemed to pass. My brain finally kicked into gear. Janelle. From Los Angeles.

  “Where are you?” I said at last.

  “It’s—oh, I’m at this little lake in the San Jacinto Mountains a few hours away from LA. Brooke, I am so, so sorry that I skipped out on coming to live with you guys. It’s been awful. If I’d known what he was like—”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, rolling my eyes. Yeah, trust good old what’s-his-name to screw up.

  “You must have thought it was pretty weird when that other girl showed up instead of me.”

  “What other girl? There was no other girl,” I said firmly. I wanted the girl she’d met at the airport kept entirely out of this conversation. “You simply weren’t there when we went to get you. We were scared to death. What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, right. So . . . okay, never mind her, then. But, see, I’m in awful trouble, Brooke. I haven’t got any money and my boyfriend has, like, deserted me here all by myself without a car or anything. He left here headed for Las Vegas. I don’t know what to do. I never should have ditched you like I did. I wish I was in Albany now instead of here. I never want to see Ashton again for the rest of my life.” At this point she hiccupped and broke down into noisy tears.

  Great. Every time I talked to this girl, she was sobbing.

  Finally the storm subsided and I heard some broken murmurings, from which I picked out a few words.

  “They must hate me! Why won’t they answer me?”

  “Who must hate you?” I inquired, not bothering to disguise my voice. She had convinced herself that I was Brooke, and seeing that the two girls hadn’t spoken in years, how was she to know? She wasn’t likely to remember the sound of my voice from that brief interlude in LAX.

  “My parents!” Her voice became a little more controlled. “I keep calling and calling them, but they never pick up the phone and they never call me back! And there’s no electricity here because Ashton’s horrible uncle turned it off, and I can’t charge my phone—it’s this cheapo prepaid thing, anyway. And besides, there’s no reception, so I have to walk three miles into this tiny little village to use a public phone. Can you believe it? They have a pay phone in the convenience store. It took, like, a million quarters to call New York. And Ashton is just gone, and he’s not answering my phone calls. And I think I might be pregnant! And I don’t know what to do-hoo-hoo!”

  Lots of wailing on the other end of the phone.

  While she howled, I thought fast. I had to decide. Should I hang up, go upstairs and pack, and then spin some sort of a tale so that Emma would drive me to the airport? I would take with me the files I had had the foresight to swipe. Once in a new location I could fake up some identification that made me look eighteen. Or, of course, I could go back to my parents and resume my position in their house.

  No.

  Not a chance. I had come too far, learned too much, gained too much power and influence here, to go back again. I liked it here. I liked my riding lessons. I liked eating Mrs. Barnes’s cooking. I liked living in luxury. I wanted the big event that I had envisioned and was bringing to reality today to be a huge success. I wanted to be hailed as the heroine of Lebanon Hill High, admired by one and all (except Helena). Okay, I probably wasn’t going to be able to stay much longer—not unless I could somehow vaporize Janelle long-distance through the telephone—but I wanted a week or two more, at least.

  “It’s a good thing I’m the one who answered the phone, Janelle,” I said in a low, confidential voice. “Yes, I’m afraid your parents are really mad at you. And so are mine. Pretty much everybody is. I overheard my parents talking about it. ‘She’s made her bed. Now let her lie in it.’ That’s what your mother said. Everybody assumed you took a bus or hitchhiked back to California to meet up with Ashton somewhere. Your mom was so pissed off that you’d scared us all like that—she said she didn’t ever want to see you again. She thought you probably would get pregnant, and she said she’d be ashamed to be the grandmother of a baby born to a sixteen-year-old girl. I’m sorry to tell you this, but you have to understand the situation.”

  The scream of fury coming through the phone nearly cracked my eardrum.

  “My mother is such a bitch!”

  Actually, I had to agree. As brief as my exposure to her mother had been, I’d come to the identical conclusion.

  “But look, are you sure you’re pregnant?” I asked.

  “Well . . . maybe not. We did use a, you know, a condom most of the time. I’m not due for my period for a while yet—I’m just scared I might be. Because then what? And they don’t have any pregnancy test kits at the convenience store. I looked. It’s super-rural around here, and I don’t have a car.”

  “Oh, you can’t tell with those home tests until you’re two or three months along, anyway,” I said. I had absolutely no idea if this was true or not. “Listen; here is what I think we should do. Can you stay where you are for a few weeks, until you’re sure if you’re . . . you know, expecting?”

  “I haven’t got any money!”

  I sighed. This was going to be painful, but there was no help for it.

  “I have some saved up,” I said. “If I sent you, like, a few hundred dollars, could you make that last until you know for sure? Because I think I could talk my parents
into paying for you to come out here like you were going to before. See, your parents are seriously ticked off. But my parents think that your parents are being too harsh. Only, it would really help if I could tell them that you’re not pregnant.”

  “Oh.” She thought about this for a moment. “That’s nice of you. But maybe, if you sent me some money, I could go home. I mean, they couldn’t actually kick me out.”

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” I said. If she went home and found the house empty, she’d probably talk to the neighbors, or get in touch with one of her friends, and there was sure to be some way of contacting the Johanssens in Brazil. “See, your parents decided to go away on a little vacation, so they’re not there. And before they left,” I added, “they changed the locks on your house, so if you came home, you wouldn’t be able to get in.”

  “What? What century are we living in, the Middle Ages? Lots of girls get pregnant! Okay, I can see they’d be mad, but they changed the locks?”

  “I’m sorry, Janelle. Yeah, it does seem pretty mean, but that’s what they told my mom and dad. Honestly, if you would just stay where you are for a week or two, until we know if there’s anything to worry about, I think that would be best. If you aren’t pregnant, I might even be able to get your parents to take you back,” I added as one last inducement.

  “Wow.” She was silent a moment. “I’m not sure I even want to go back, if they’re going to be that awful. I guess that explains why they never came looking for me. I kind of expected them to eventually figure out about Ashton’s uncle’s camp when they realized we were both missing. But, like, it’s been months and they haven’t even checked. That is so cold! I’m better off without them. Except . . . I’m only sixteen! I don’t have a job, I don’t have any money—”

  “I’ll send you some money,” I said hastily. “I’ll do it right away and Express Mail it to you. What’s your address?”

  After a bit more sobbing and wailing, I got an address and we arranged for her to call when she knew what her situation was. We hung up, and for a few seconds I sat there, thinking. It wouldn’t buy me a whole lot of time, but at least I could finish up with After the Race Is Run, collect a bunch more money, and exit in a dignified and organized way, instead of fleeing with the police of two states on my trail.