And Then I Found Out the Truth (2 page)

“But I’ll talk to you later, okay?” he said.

I didn’t even try to say anything else but just nodded, wondering as I did what would happen next. The steps had largely emptied out by then.

But before I could do much wondering, Quinn’s lips were on mine.

And this time it definitely counted.

Two

The kissing left me giddy, and I practically skipped around the corner, to where I’d agreed to meet Rafe. I hadn’t wanted everyone at Prescott to see that a thirty-something Colombian man would be escorting me home.

He was leaning against a parking meter, reading a copy of the
New York Post
and otherwise trying to look inconspicuous. When he saw me he folded the newspaper and tucked it under one arm. “Good afternoon, Delia,” he said, his brown eyes warm behind little round glasses. “Did you have a nice day at school?”

Rafe’s full name was Rafael Francisco Valenzuela Sáenz de Santamaría, and he was a private detective, though he dressed like a cross between an investment banker and a petting zoo attendant, in dark suits and silk ties patterned with small animals. Today it was white rabbits on a field of green twill.

I’d hired Rafe to help find T.K. soon after she disappeared, when everybody thought I was crazy for even suggesting she might not be dead. Actually, Quinn was the one who hired him, since I didn’t have anywhere near enough money, though when Charley found out she insisted on paying Quinn back.

Based on the information I’d already gathered, Rafe was able to track T.K. down in South America. It had been a huge relief to confirm she was alive and well and that I wasn’t an orphan, but until we could nail the bad guys who were out to get her, it wouldn’t be safe for her to return home.

So now our investigation had entered its second phase, which was all about building a case against the evildoers so we could bring them down. And because T.K. wasn’t the only person they seemed to be after — at least, not judging by how a black Range Rover had tried to run me over the previous week — Rafe was also supposed to be keeping an eye on me. Which was sort of comic, since he’d never have to worry about anyone confusing him with The Rock.

We took the subway down to Tribeca, to Charley’s loft on Laight Street. Practically everyone at Prescott lived closer to school, in fancy doorman buildings or town houses on the Upper East Side. But that was how my mother and her sisters grew up, and Charley had been eager to put as much distance as possible between herself and her childhood without leaving Manhattan altogether.

Now she lived on the top floor of a converted nineteenth-century button factory, and though there was nobody to help with the door and the elevator didn’t always work, once you did get upstairs you found yourself in the sort of relaxed, flowing space that didn’t exist on Park Avenue. Except for the bedrooms and bathrooms, it was one vast room that could double as a roller rink, but mostly we used it for eating takeout and watching DVDs.

Charley arrived just as we did, so Rafe could finish the blushing and stammering that always happened when he first saw her while we were still in the elevator. Of course, Charley didn’t even notice. This was partly because she was used to men adoring her — my aunt’s ridiculously gorgeous, with long dark hair and luminous skin and amazing style, and she’s also close to six feet tall — and partly because she was too busy talking.

“Look,” she said to me, “your mom will never forgive me if your grade point average plummets on my watch, and I know I’m the last person to give anyone a hard time about anything requiring the slightest amount of left-brain dexterity, but you’d much rather have me giving you a hard time than Patty giving you a hard time, and the good news is that Dr. Penske reached me first and I somehow convinced him not to tell Patty, so we’ve dodged a bullet, but that’s contingent on you doing a lot better on your next quiz, the date of which is supposed to be a surprise but I pried out of him it’s going to be this Friday, so we’d better get cracking, and when I say we, I mean you and whomever we can find to help you. Rafe, can you do science?”

Charley tends to speak in run-on sentences. She’s also the only person who calls Patience “Patty,” not that Patience approves. Then again, Patience is the only person who calls Charley “Charity,” so she’s kind of asking for it.

“Wh-what?” said Rafe. It would’ve been pathetic if I didn’t know how he felt. His blushing and stammering weren’t that different from my brain paralysis.

“Science,” said Charley. “Delia flunked her physics quiz.”

That got Rafe’s attention. “Flunked?” he repeated as the elevator doors slid open into the loft.

“Flunked is a strong word for it,” I said. “I did get nearly half the answers right.”

“Unacceptable,” said Rafe. “What are we going to do?”

The use of the first-person plural seemed aggressive given that Charley was just my temporary guardian and Rafe wasn’t any sort of guardian, but Charley was focusing on being severe. “We’re going to start by spending every waking moment cramming physics into Delia’s head until Delia is not only acing her class but is also ready to take first place in whatever contest is the contest of choice for teenage science geeks these days.”

Rafe was nodding in agreement, but Charley could’ve said we’d start by lighting my physics text on fire and roasting marsh-mallows over it and he would’ve agreed. Now she checked my reaction. “Did I sound scary?”

“Absolutely,” I said, not wanting to disappoint her.

“I’m totally getting the hang of this parenting thing.”

“Sure,” I said. “And studying isn’t a bad idea. There’s just one problem.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“I don’t think you understand what you’re up against. Natalie called me a ‘scientific black hole’ today.”

“But that’s good, isn’t it? It means you suck up information,” said Charley.

“It means I suck up information and vaporize it. You could crack open my skull and there’d be nothing inside.”

One of the things I like about Charley is that she can be stubborn and flexible at once. So instead of insisting on doing things her way, she asked, “What do you suggest, then? We can’t just let you flunk.”

“I suggest we concentrate on T.K., because she’s the only person who can get me through the class and she’s also the only person who can get me out of it. Not that she ever would, but maybe all of the foreign travel she’s doing will broaden her perspective.”

Charley thought this over. “Fair enough,” she said. “As long as you pass your next quiz. And almost passing won’t cut it. I can push Dr. Penske just so far before he blabs to Patty.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said. “So long as you realize my best is seriously awful.”

“Okay,” she said. “It’s a deal.”

Rafe was as ready to agree to this new plan as he’d been to agree to anything else Charley said. He set his briefcase on the big table in the middle of the room and pulled out a roll of butcher paper. “I thought it would be useful to summarize the status of the investigation on a single page, but it required a somewhat larger surface than a legal pad,” he explained.

“You’re like the Jack Kerouac of private eyes,” said Charley. And then, when neither of us responded,
“On the Road?
A defining work of the Beat Generation? Typed on a continuous scroll more than one hundred and twenty feet long?”

Rafe’s scroll was only seven or eight feet long, and he unfurled it across the table as Charley and I anchored the corners with the salt and pepper shakers and a couple of bottles of hot sauce. He’d used a different colored marker for each aspect of the case, showing the potential connections with a rainbow’s worth of arrows and interlocking circles.

Where most people would see chaos, Charley saw art. “Rafe, it’s beautiful!” she said. “I didn’t realize you had such a well-developed aesthetic sense.”

This launched him on a fresh wave of blushing and stammering, so I left them to it and examined the list of suspects, written in bloodred ink at the center of the page.

At the top of the list were the members of EAROFO, a shady political action committee comprised of the chief executives of just about every major American oil company. EAROFO was an acronym for End American Reliance on Foreign Oil — which opening up an enormous new source of oil would definitely accomplish, whether it was legal or not.

A couple of months ago, T.K. heard a rumor through one of her environmental groups that EAROFO might be up to something questionable in Antarctica. She’d contacted the organization with what she’d thought was a generic request for information, but apparently it wasn’t generic enough since we were pretty sure that’s what raised the alarm on their end and set the plot against her in motion. We’d turned up evidence of our own pointing to EAROFO, too, but the clincher had been when the brown-haired woman I’d spotted leaving the offices of Navitaco, one of the EAROFO member companies, tried to lure me into the path of a speeding SUV.

So we were fairly confident EAROFO was behind everything — the group had the motive, means, and opportunity, which Rafe said were the three critical pieces of the puzzle. But we still didn’t know who, specifically, within EAROFO was masterminding the operation, and given the power and resources of its members, figuring this out was going to be a challenge.

The list didn’t end with EAROFO, either. We’d identified a couple of more secondary suspects as well. One was Thaddeus J. Wilcox IV, the chief operating officer of T.K.'s company, TrueTech. I’d always thought Thad was a weasel, and he’d done some strange things since my mother disappeared, like erasing the hard drive on her computer and trying to get Patience to sign papers giving him control of the company. Of course, Patience would never give up control of anything willingly, and she’d stymied him. But when I’d asked Thad point-blank if he was in on the whole conspiracy, he hadn’t denied it — he’d only told me to “stop nosing around in other people’s business” in a way that managed to be condescending and menacing at the same time.

So I wouldn’t mind if we found out Thad was an evildoer. In fact, it would be fine by me. I felt a lot less fine, however, about our other suspect, since he was Quinn’s dad, Hunter Riley. Hunter ran a hedge fund that traded energy stocks, and though he’d already made piles of money, he could make even bigger piles of money if he had advance knowledge about changes in the market for oil. He also had Trip Young, Navitaco’s CEO, on his speed dial, which seemed excessive since Hunter’s office was only a few floors above Trip’s in a midtown skyscraper. They could’ve easily gotten together in person whenever they wanted to chat.

For obvious reasons, I was not so secretly hoping Hunter was innocent. After all, neutralizing Quinn’s father wouldn’t be the healthiest thing for our relationship. And with two kisses that definitely counted added to the one that possibly counted, I was starting to believe I could call it a relationship, which was a stunning thought all by itself.

Anyhow, we had our suspects, even if I did feel deeply conflicted about one of them. The catch was that we couldn’t just organize a trip to Antarctica to get the evidence we needed, because it turned out that was a good way to get people interested in killing you. And going after any of the evildoers directly would be tough, especially if we didn’t want them to know what we were trying to accomplish.

It took a while to come up with a plan, but we ultimately decided the best place to start was with the original crew from the
Polar Star,
to learn who had negotiated their replacement.

“I’ll leave for Argentina tomorrow,” Rafe said, rolling up the butcher paper and returning it to his briefcase. “Your mother will be able to tell me how she found the ship’s captain initially, and I’ll try to track him down.” Rafe had a supersecret way to get in touch with T.K. — so secret he wouldn’t even tell Charley and me, because he thought it was safest for us not to know. Which was frustrating, though he was probably right.

“And I’ll see what I can learn from my sources, too,” said Charley.

“What sources?” I asked.

“Oh, you know,” she said mysteriously. “Sources.”

“Fine,” I said. “But what do I do while you’re talking to your sources and Rafe’s talking to his?”

Charley glanced at Rafe before answering. “Delia, you’ve got a lot going on already. Why don’t you sit tight and let us take care of things for now?” Then, without pausing for breath, she changed the subject. “I don’t know if you two are hungry, but I’m starving, and I’m thinking Wiener schnitzel and maybe spaetzle from that new Austrian place. They do make their waiters wear lederhosen, which seems cruel and possibly constitutes creating a hostile work environment, but maybe we can overlook that if the spaetzle’s any good, because good spaetzle is hard to find, and perhaps you can’t get good spaetzle without the lederhosen, which would also explain why anyone wears lederhosen in the first place. What do you think?”

I thought sitting tight was the last thing I intended to do, with or without spaetzle, and that Charley, of all people, should know that.

But I just said, “Austrian sounds great.”

Three

We ordered in Wiener schnitzel and spaetzle and also apple strudel, because Charley said one slice of strudel counted for at least two servings of fruits and vegetables. Then, when the delivery guy arrived and Charley decided he looked like Steve Sanders, Rafe made the mistake of asking if Steve Sanders was a friend of hers. Apparently he’d never watched the original
90210,
though it was syndicated in Colombia.

He had no idea what he was in for. Charley had the DVDs for all ten seasons, and she made us watch the pilot while we ate, providing commentary throughout. She even made Rafe promise he’d take the rest of the first season to watch on his flight to Argentina.

After dinner, as we were putting the dishes in the dishwasher, the phone rang — not Charley’s cell or mine, but the landline in the loft. “Shall I?” offered Rafe, since Charley and I both had our hands full.

“No!” we yelled in unison. Besides telemarketers, only one person used that line, not that Charley had authorized her to do so — it was still a mystery how she’d obtained the unlisted number.