And Then I Found Out the Truth (16 page)

The morning dragged by, and then Charley tried to convince me to join her for lunch and a gallery show with a friend, but I was too distracted. Instead, I stayed at the loft, eating leftover pizza and waiting for Natalie to call. I was hoping she’d be able to crack open the security firm’s intranet sooner rather than later so I could figure out my next move — I knew exactly how Quinn felt when he’d talked about feeling useless.

A little before three P.M., my phone finally rang and I snatched it up. “Natalie?”

“No,” said a girl, and though the voice wasn’t distinctive, I knew exactly who it was from the way she stretched the single syllable into a languorous four or five.

“Oh,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment. “Hi, Gwyneth. How are you?”

“Fine.”

This was followed by a long silence. In the background, a male narrator was describing the mating rituals of the black-footed ferret, and I could picture my cousin staring at the TV, her mouth slightly open and her eyes slightly glazed.

“Are you having a nice weekend?” I said eventually, speaking extra loudly in case Gwyneth had forgotten about me and no longer had the phone against her ear.

But she was still there. “Uh-huh,” she said.

And then there was another long silence. I’d thought conversation with Gwyneth was challenging in person — trying to talk to her on the phone was like an extreme sport, but only in terms of the degree of difficulty and not because of any adrenaline rush.

“Well, thanks for calling,” I finally said. “I guess I’ll see you in school tomorrow.”

“Okay,” she said. And she hung up.

So that was a false alarm. But when the phone rang again, a half hour later, I was positive that this time it really would be Natalie and she’d have La Morena’s identity all figured out.

“Natalie?” I said.

“No.”

“Oh. Hi, Gwyneth. What’s up?”

“Nothing,” she said.

There was yet another long silence. But just as I was gearing up to get off the phone again, she spoke. “Quinn’s missing.”

“What do you mean, ‘Quinn’s missing'?”

“Fiona Riley just called my mom. Quinn disappeared between dinner last night and brunch this morning.”

I probably should have been more surprised, but on some subconscious level I must have been expecting this. I mean, I’d seen the state he was in the previous day — it was pretty obvious Fiona’s communications ban and everything else about being grounded was starting to wear on him. And if Quinn was gone, I also knew it had to be on purpose. People weren’t abducted from buildings like his — nobody could make it up to the penthouse without first conquering an army of doormen and elevator attendants.

No, Quinn had clearly escaped. Now I was only wondering where he was — I would’ve hoped he’d come straight to me, but it sounded like he’d been on the lam for several hours at least, and I hadn’t heard from him.

“Did he leave a note or anything?” I asked.

But I was talking to a dead phone. Gwyneth had already hung up.

I started dialing her number to call her back, but before I’d even hit SEND somebody buzzed the door from the street. I dropped the phone and dashed over to the intercom.

I pushed the button for the speaker. “Quinn?”

“No, it is not the Romeo. Now, why are you not unlocking the door? It is raining, and my shoes will be
destruido.”

I buzzed Carolina in.

“Ay, dios!”
she cried as she stepped into the loft. “The rain, it does not stop.”

She was dressed in a pale pink Hello Kitty rain slicker, complete with a matching Hello Kitty rain hat and umbrella.

“Can I get you anything?” I asked, assuming this was a purely social call. “We’re out of Yoo-hoo, but we have leftover pizza.”

“There is no time for the snacks,” she said. “We must hurry, before the auntie returns.”

She made a beeline for my room and pulled my roller bag out from under the bed, leaving it unzipped on the floor. Then she began grabbing items from my dresser and tossing them into the bag. Her hands moved with certainty as she sorted through my clothes, like she already knew the exact contents of my wardrobe, which she probably did.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I pack the suitcase for you.”

“But — why? Are we going somewhere?”

“I cannot go. I am the guest yoga instructor this week. You are the one who is going, and you know where it is you go. The Romeo, he is there already,
sí
?”

And then it came to me. “Quinn’s in Buenos Aires.”

“Por supuesto.
Where is your
pasaporte
? I know you are having one, from when you go to India with the papa. Ah, here it is,” she said, opening the drawer of my desk.

Now that I thought about it, it was pretty obvious. Of course Quinn would want to find out for himself once and for all what his father was up to, and he was never going to be able to do that while he was under house arrest in New York.

And my immediate reaction was envy — while I sat around waiting for Natalie to hack Web sites and Rafe to report back on his findings, Quinn had gone ahead and done something. He truly was starring in his own movie.

But that didn’t mean I could just pick up and follow him to South America. Quinn was eighteen and had his own money. I was sixteen and had fourteen dollars in my pocket. And at this point I wasn’t even supposed to be taking the subway by myself.

“I can’t go to Buenos Aires. Charley will kill me. And I have no money.”

“You have the ATM? And the credit card,
s
í”

“Sí,
I mean, yes, but Patience controls the accounts. She’ll cancel the cards if she finds out what I’m doing. And then she’ll kill me if Charley hasn’t killed me first.”

“This is why you go now. You will be in Argentina before they can make you stop.”

“But —”

Carolina had been burrowing into the depths of my not very deep closet, but now she spun around and shook a shaming finger in my direction. “Not with the buts. In my country, we do not have the luxury to sit and wait for others to do for us. When we want things to be done, we do them.”

She had a point. And the thought of finally taking action was completely intoxicating, not to mention the possibility that I’d actually get to see my mother as soon as the next day.

And that managed to outweigh everything else. I knew Charley would be upset when she found out, but I also hoped she’d understand. She might not agree with Carolina’s methods, but I was pretty sure she’d agree with her message.

The time had come to take a starring role.

Twenty-three

Once the decision was made, it was all surprisingly easy, and the fact that it was so easy seemed like an omen, a celestial nod of approval telling me I was doing the right thing. Barely ninety minutes after Carolina buzzed from the street I was at the ticket counter at JFK, booking the last available seat on an overnight flight to Buenos Aires.

There was only one part that didn’t feel easy or right, and that was navigating the window of time between when Charley would return to the loft to find me missing and when my flight would take off and she could no longer stop me. I did plan to let her know what I was up to, but I couldn’t run the risk of her finding out before I was airborne. Still, I hoped there’d only be an hour or so during which I’d have to worry about Charley worrying about me.

I’d thought about leaving a note back at the loft, but she might discover it too soon — I couldn’t let her know the truth until it was too late for her to do anything about it. Instead I’d switched my phone off while I was in the cab on the way to the airport, and I kept it switched off as I waited for my flight to begin boarding. I needed to make sure I couldn’t get any calls I didn’t want to respond to.

Only at the last possible moment, when I was on the plane and the flight attendant was asking people to power down their cellular devices, did I quickly turn mine back on and text Charley:

have 2 be star of own movie

sorry not 2 tell u b4

rafe will take care of me/no need 2 worry

Then I hit S
END
and switched the phone off again, ignoring both the new message icon on the screen and my uneasy conscience as the engines roared into life and the plane lifted off the runway. I’d set my course, and for the next eleven hours, there was nothing anybody could do about it, not even myself.

It turns out that when you buy the single remaining seat on a packed flight, not only is it going to max out your credit limit, it’s going to be the least desirable seat on the entire plane, smack in the middle of the very last row, near the lavatories and galley. On one side was a family with three small children squabbling in Spanish and on the other side was a group of people who had nothing in common except their annoyance at being trapped so close to the squabbling children.

So it looked like I was in for an uncomfortable flight, and I’d been in such a rush I hadn’t thought to bring a book or my iPod. T.K. would be horrified at the prospect of so much time stretching before me without any potential for educational use, though even she couldn’t expect me to try and do physics homework in my current circumstances.

But it didn’t matter. Now that I was sitting quietly in one place, the surge of adrenaline that had powered me from the loft to the airport and onto the plane shut down, leaving me exhausted. And in spite of my guilty conscience and the noisy kids and the thunderous snores from a guy a couple of seats away, who’d popped an Ambien while we were still at the gate, I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

I awoke to the thump of the wheels hitting the tarmac and applause from some of the passengers. A voice came over the loudspeaker, announcing first in Spanish and then in English our arrival at Ministro Pistarini Airport and informing us that the local time was shortly after seven A.M., an hour ahead of New York. At the end of the row, I could make out a patch of early morning sky through the window.

Around me the other passengers were gathering up their belongings, though it would probably be a while before we reached the gate, and being in the last row meant it would take forever before we could actually disembark. I also noticed a lot of them were turning their phones back on, and I realized the flight attendant must have given permission now that we’d landed. My respite from guilt was officially over.

As my phone powered up, I tried to steel myself for what was to come. I fully expected several dozen outraged texts from Charley, and I also knew she had every right to be outraged. And while I intended to text her back immediately, to assure her I’d arrived safely and would meet up with Rafe as soon as I could get in touch with him, I doubted that would do much to calm her down.

Strangely, though, there were only three messages waiting, which showed a level of restraint that was totally inconsistent with everything I knew about my aunt. The first had a time stamp of 6:17 P.M., about a half hour before my flight had taken off. I could feel the wince already taking shape on my face as I clicked it open:

stopping 4 coffee
text if u need anything or want 2 join
home 7:30ish

So that was a small relief — Charley would’ve received my own text before she’d even arrived home. There wouldn’t have been any window at all of her not knowing where I was.

The time stamp of the next text was 6:39 P.M., and this would inevitably be the outraged one, the response to my text. I opened it quickly, before I could chicken out, and it took me a second to realize it wasn’t even from Charley. It was from Natalie instead:

Q’s barcode worked

23 Navitaco visitors on day in question

checking names now

shouldn’t take long

Which was good news, I thought. Twenty-three was a lot, but once we sorted out the women’s names we’d have narrowed things down significantly. Then a simple Internet search should yield enough basic background information to help us figure out if any of them could be La Morena. I texted back an effusive note of thanks before scrolling to the next text.

This final one had a time stamp of 6:48 P.M., so it had to be Charley’s furious response, unleashing the full extent of her rage.

But it wasn’t. Not at all. It was from Natalie again.

And reading it temporarily put my guilt and Charley’s rage completely out of my mind:

ran regression; r-squared at 99% confidence interval

I wasn’t quite sure what r-squared meant, but 99 percent confidence sounded good. Particularly when I scrolled down for the rest of the text:

La Morena = Samantha Arquero

Head, Spec Ops, Arquero Energy

Father = Samuel Arquero, President, Arquero Energy

Of course
was my first thought.

My second thought was that I should’ve been able to figure this one out sooner.

I didn’t need to run a regression — not that I had any idea how I would anyway. The words on the screen made such perfect sense I felt as if on some subconscious level I’d already known.

And now I was hearing Gwyneth’s voice in my head, which was possibly the most bizarre thing that had happened in a while. “My mom will flip,” she’d said as she studied the pictures of the EAROFO board. “But I was asking about the old people.”

She’d made an interesting point, however unintentionally, and I felt sort of dense for not picking up on it then. After all, every member of the EAROFO board would qualify for the senior discount at the local multiplex. And though this entire situation had been a multigenerational extravaganza, with me orchestrating a search-and-rescue mission for my mother and Quinn’s dad being a suspect and everything, it hadn’t occurred to any of us to think about the other “children” who might be involved, and specifically EAROFO’s next generation.