And Then I Found Out the Truth (11 page)

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.

After all, pretty much every EAROFO member company had an outpost in Buenos Aires. Hunter was in Buenos Aires. Thad was in Buenos Aires. And T.K. was in Buenos Aires.

At least, I told myself, Rafe was there, too, and maybe he really did have a black belt. He’d make sure my mother stayed safe, even with the various sharks circling around her.

Except as soon as I hung up with Brett, a text came through from Charley.

Madge’s neighbor?

Rafe on plane back; landing NY in AM

Which left T.K. without even the non-Rock-like presence of Rafe. And I knew she was in hiding and everything, and that Mark guy was probably with her, and there were thirteen million other people in the greater Buenos Aires area to shield them, but panicking seemed increasingly like a reasonable option.

Only twenty-four hours ago, Carolina had told me I had nothing to worry about. Rafe would take care of T.K., neither Thad nor Hunter was the Sagittarius, and Quinn was under a lot of pressure but not for the reasons I thought.

But every single thing I’d learned since then threw every single thing she’d told me into question.

And now I had no idea what to think.

Fifteen

I waited up for Charley, even though she didn’t get back until after midnight. It turned out she’d spent her entire day alternating between trying to locate Dieter and trying to figure out if he’d been harnessing the power of visual media in ways we had yet to discover. And while both his whereabouts and his rationale for papering the entire city with our images remained a mystery, she had learned he’d been using their production company’s credit card to pay for it all, from the billboards in the subway to Mister Softee. Unfortunately, she’d also learned he’d already maxed out the credit limit, which meant she couldn’t stop him by canceling the card.

So she wasn’t in the greatest mood to start with — when she walked in she didn’t even pause to put her bag down but just made directly for the freezer and pulled out every pint of ice cream we had — and none of the developments I shared with her did anything to improve her spirits, though she tried to act like everything was under control for my sake.

“It will be fine,” she said. “Your mother’s in a safe place, and Mark is with her. And when Rafe’s flight lands tomorrow morning he’ll be able to give them a heads-up to be on the lookout for Thad along with Hunter and everyone else.”

But the way she didn’t comment on Gwyneth’s love of Animal Planet or her secret eavesdropping closet combined with how she insisted I finish off the rest of the double chocolate peanut butter fudge, which I knew was her favorite, told me she was far more concerned than she let on, and that didn’t exactly help with my own anxiety levels.

For the second night in a row, I didn’t sleep well. You probably couldn’t even call what I did sleeping — mostly it was a lot of staring up at the ceiling while my thoughts raced around in a circle, skidding from one worry to the next and then around again after they’d completed a full circuit. But just as the sky was starting to get a little less black outside the window, I must have drifted off, because when the phone rang the noise jerked me awake.

It wasn’t my cell phone, or Charley’s, either. It was the landline out in the main room of the loft, the one only telemarketers and Patience ever used. And under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have budged — Charley could sleep through a symphony of jackhammers in her bedroom, so it wasn’t like the ringing would disturb her — but with everything that was going on I was out of bed and rushing to answer it without thinking twice about why anyone would be calling at such a strange time.

In the semidark, it took me a couple of rings to locate the handset on the kitchen counter, and I stubbed my toe in the process, so I had to hop around silently cursing for another couple of rings before I could pick up. “Hello?”

“Why are you not trusting what I tell you?” a voice demanded. “It is very discourteous.”

The green numbers on the microwave clock read 5:13 A.M., and I must have been more asleep than I’d realized, because it took me a moment to place the voice and remember the other person who sometimes called on this line. “Carolina?”

“I do not know why I bother to tell you things when you do not listen. In my country, the children have the respect for the elders.”

Apparently she was referring to herself as the elder and me as the child in this situation, which seemed like a stretch given she was only a few years older than I was, but it seemed unwise to point that out when she was already so riled up. “I do have the respect —”

“You ask for my help and then you disregard what I say. And you do very little preparation for the
examen.
You spend your time watching the TV with the sleepy cousin.”

“But —”

“I am not always knowing all there is to be knowing, but what I am knowing is always correct, is that not true?” “Yes, but —”

“I will still tell you what I must tell you, but I do not want you to be doubting me. It is very ungrateful.” “I don’t mean to be ungrate —”

“La Morena.
We did not talk of La Morena before, we are thinking she is not important. But I see now, she is very important.”

“What’s a
morena
?”

“A lady with brown hair. Hers is like mine but not so long, and also she has the tan coat with the belt,
cómo se dice,
the trench coat,
sí
? She is in my dream, and when I wake, I know that she is very dangerous. Very red. It is possible she is the Sagittarius she is so red.”

“But —”

“That is all I am knowing in this moment. I will tell you more when I see more. But be keeping your eye on La Morena. Now I must go. I do not want to be late for sunrise yoga.”

I returned the handset to its cradle and limped back to my room — my big toe was still throbbing from where I’d smashed it into the leg of a chair — but I didn’t bother trying to get to sleep again. Instead, I went to sit on the broad sill of the window, watching as the sky turned from charcoal to a watery gray and thinking through what Carolina had said.

I knew exactly who Carolina meant when she talked about “La Morena,” not that I knew the woman’s name or anything else about her beyond what she looked like. But this woman was the only person I could think of who fit Carolina’s description, with brown hair down to her shoulders and a trench coat, though sometimes she pinned her hair up and she didn’t always wear the trench coat.

All along, we’d assumed she was merely another EAROFO puppet, like the “researchers” on the
Polar Star.
It hadn’t occurred to us that she might be a puppet master in her own right, pulling the strings herself. But now, as I added everything up, I realized it made perfect sense.

I’d seen this woman on a total of five occasions. The first time was a couple of weeks ago, when she’d walked past on the sidewalk in front of Prescott as I sat talking to Natalie before school. I’d seen her again on the afternoon of that same day, when I was with Quinn in Central Park, and then a few days later, in the ladies’ room of the theater where Quinn took me to see an off-off-Broadway production of
Romeo and Juliet,
though I didn’t put her together at that point with the woman on the sidewalk and in the park.

It wasn’t until the day after that, when I’d seen her leaving Navitaco’s offices, that I recognized her as the same person I’d been seeing everywhere else. And that had been on a Monday, and on the following Tuesday, she’d called my name and beckoned from across the street, hoping to lure me into the path of an SUV hurtling full-speed in my direction.

Looking back on the whole thing, I was surprised we’d all managed to pass her over as a serious suspect. We’d assumed that whoever was really orchestrating things would delegate the dirty work, like tailing me or conspiring to commit vehicular homicide, the way they’d delegated the dirty work of doing away with my mother.

Meanwhile, because we knew so little about her, we hadn’t tried to track her down ourselves — there was no obvious place to start. It wasn’t like with the original captain of the
Polar Star,
where presumably T.K. would be able to give us a name and other background information. This woman was entirely anonymous.

It didn’t help that she looked so normal. She’d blended in perfectly everywhere I’d seen her, and there was nothing about her appearance to suggest she was evil to the core. If anything, she was sort of pretty, about Charley’s age, with shiny hair and pert features and cat-shaped eyes, though Charley would have found her fashion sense lacking. Charley wore a trench coat sometimes, too, but hers was zebra striped.

And if trying to track this woman down before had seemed hard, now it seemed impossible. She’d completely stopped following me after the Range Rover incident — at least, I hadn’t seen her recently, and I’d actually been on the lookout. And while I knew that was probably something to be thankful for, I couldn’t help but worry about what she might be up to in her spare time now that she wasn’t busy shadowing me, and I also wished she’d left us with more to go on before she’d decided to leave me alone.

It would have been a lot easier if La Morena had let Charley style her. Because even if she was still in New York — which was a big if, since Buenos Aires seemed to exert a magnetic pull on evildoers — there must have been tens of thousands of other women with brown hair and beige trench coats around, and hundreds of thousands when you factored in the greater tristate area.