And Then I Found Out the Truth (4 page)

Definitely bizarre.

“Come on,” said Charley. “Let’s get out of here while the get-ting’s good.” She hurried me into a conveniently passing taxi. “Barney’s,” she told the driver. “And step on it. Please. If you don’t mind. Thank you.”

He pulled away from the curb with a satisfying screech of tires, but Charley sighed anyway. “Saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ is the right thing to do, but it does ruin the overall effect.”

“Do you think Dr. Penske got to Patience?” I asked as the cab sped down Fifth Avenue. “Was that why she was there?” My threat level, already elevated, had cranked up to Code Red. Though, now that I thought about it, Patience couldn’t be meeting with Dr. Penske, since I’d seen him leave when Quinn had. Unless she intended to stake out his office until he returned tomorrow morning, but that seemed unlikely. People fit themselves around Patience’s schedule, not the other way around.

“I called Dr. Penske this morning, to tell him we’d spoken about your quiz, and he promised he wouldn’t say anything to Patty,” said Charley. “He even said scout’s honor, which actually means something when he says it, because did you know Dr. Penske is a den leader for his son’s Cub Scout troop?”

I did know, because he mentioned it frequently in class, and whenever he did, Natalie would write me a frenzied note about how a man of science should be more aware of the scouting movement’s fascist overtones and she’d enlighten him herself but was concerned doing so would negatively impact the recommendations she’d need Dr. Penske to write for her college applications (which, by the way, weren’t due for another year and three months).

But I wanted to keep Charley focused, so I just said, “Then what was Patience doing there? She looked really —” “Terrifying. I know.”

“I was thinking more like determined. She’s always terrifying.”

“Well, she’s always determined, too. What’s even more bizarre is I left a message for her today and she never called back,” said Charley.

“Why would you do that?” Patience had made it clear there was no need to RSVP for Thursday, not that Charley wasn’t already planning on coming down with a severe communicable disease that would last precisely as long as dinner.

“I wanted to know whether she’d been in touch with Thad after she foiled his attempt to alienate you from the fruits of your mother’s labor. I’d thought Patty would jump at the opportunity to make his life a living hell, not to mention that asking her to call me is an open invitation to make my life a living hell, or at least inviting a lecture on whatever I’ve done most recently to embarrass her, like breathing, and I thought she’d jump at that opportunity, too. But she hasn’t made a peep in my direction all day. She’s been completely peepless.”

And somehow, silence from Patience was even more ominous than the alternative.

Charley’s career path probably shouldn’t be called a path, since it’s been more a series of nonlinear hops from one unrelated activity to another. Before Dieter’s film, she’d done stints in the Peace Corps, zoology, and Eastern medicine, though not necessarily in that order.

Somewhere along the way, she accidentally made some money, and thanks to our ancestor, Reginald Phineas Baxter Truesdale, who was an evil coal baron back in the nineteenth century, she inherited a lot, too. Having such a healthy bank account makes her feel guilty, so she gives money away to just about anyone who asks. She also likes to act as a one-woman retail stimulus package whenever time allows.

Barney’s wasn’t really Charley’s style, nor, according to her, was it mine. But she still knew without checking the directory exactly where we wanted to be, which was in the accessories section of the Co-Op department on the seventh floor, and once we arrived she made Patience look like she was in training for the Slowpoke Olympics.

It took less than thirty seconds for her to pick out a Subversive choker with a bunch of gold chains and different lockets, though agonizing over a Dannijo cuff bracelet with a pattern of overlapping leaves and an Alkemie one with an elephant took several minutes at least. We ultimately agreed to buy both and share, though I suspected Charley’s secret plan involved wearing them together.

I thought I’d be fully accessorized after that, but we took the subway down to Nolita, where we stopped to pick up several pairs of Erickson Beamon gypsy earrings before hitting a stand on Canal Street so Charley could get us matching I

We wound up in Chinatown, at a crowded dim sum restaurant where everyone but us was speaking Cantonese. A continuous stream of passing waiters handed out little plates of dumplings and spring rolls from trolleys, tallying your bill based on the number of empty plates on your table when you finished.

Anyhow, as we were eating, Charley eventually got around to telling me about how she’d had coffee earlier with one of her mysterious sources, a man she’d met back when she’d decided to open an art gallery. This had been a short-lived venture, because while she liked being surrounded by art and hanging out with artists, the only people who’d been buying art at the time were Wall Street types.

“Let’s just say that Patty would have wanted to invite all of these guys over for scotch and cigars. But after the market crashed, a lot of them lost their jobs and decided that meant they should get in touch with their own creative sides, because what the world has been lacking is the found-object sculpture of arbitrageurs.”

“So you had coffee with somebody?” I prompted. Charley almost always does get to the point — sometimes she just needs an extra push to get her there.

“Brad,” she said, accepting another plate of pot stickers from a passing trolley and setting it on the table between us. “A disproportionate number of these guys are named Brad, and I can guarantee you they also spent both their teen years and their twenties wearing their baseball caps backward, which is not a good look. This particular Brad is trying to be a stand-up comic, because he thinks it draws on the same set of skills he honed as a commodities trader.”

I perked up. “Commodities like oil?” I asked.

“You are very clever, in addition to being well-accessorized,” said Charley with visible pride.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. So, yes, Brad traded oil futures. He still does, actually, but now he trades them in his pajamas at his kitchen table instead of in a Zegna suit at Lehman Brothers.”

“And?”

“And he told me a couple of interesting things. First, the energy markets have been unusually volatile of late — prices are all over the place.”

“What does that mean for us?” I asked.

“Well, Brad thinks the volatility is because there are even more rumors than usual floating around.” “What kind of rumors?”

And that’s when the conversation ground to a halt. At least, Charley paused for a full three seconds before answering, which is like a regular person’s conversation grinding to a halt.

She put down her chopsticks, leaving a pot sticker only half-eaten — a clear indication she was about to tell me something very serious — and I realized she’d been working up to whatever she was going to say next for a while.

Charley chose her words with care. “The rumors are that a very influential person has been making bets that the price of oil is going to head down. Seriously enormous bets. And way, way down.”

“Oh?” I said, but my mind was already skipping ahead.

You didn’t have to be a commodities trader to understand that whoever was making the bets must think there would be a lot more oil available soon, which would drive down prices. Which suggested this person knew what was going on in Antarctica, because it wasn’t like there was an endless supply of as-yet-untapped sources of oil on the planet, particularly ones that were being secretly tapped. Which then suggested this person might also have been involved in trying to have T.K. killed, since she’d been planning on letting the world know what was happening, which would’ve made the bets he was placing worthless.

And all of this meant we should definitely be targeting this person in our investigation.

But based on the way Charley was acting, it was pretty obvious we already were.

Five

Meanwhile, Charley was still talking. “You know I hate to be the
bearer
of bad news, and I hope you remember you’re not supposed to kill or shoot or otherwise punish the messenger, especially when the messenger has just bought you a fabulous selection of accessories she fully intends to borrow only on those rare occasions when she has your explicit permission to do so, but the influential person who’s betting the price of oil is going down —”

I finished her sentence for her. “Is Hunter Riley.”

She seemed relieved that I was the one who actually said his name. “Sadly, yes. And I don’t see why he’d be making those bets unless he really is in on the whole thing.”

I might have been able to convince myself temporarily that Quinn hadn’t remembered correctly where Hunter was heading the next day. But combined with what Charley had learned, it was all sort of incriminating. And now I had no way to rationalize not telling Charley, even before I could ask Quinn about Hunter’s exact destination.

She was a bit upset I hadn’t told her right away, but since it had taken her almost as long to work up the courage to share the details of her conversation with Brad, she could hardly hold my rationalizing against me. Instead she insisted I eat the remaining pot sticker as she settled the check and gathered our shopping bags. Then, as soon as we hit the street, she texted Rafe. He’d be picking up his messages when he landed in Buenos Aires.

Rafe had cautioned us against discussing the investigation over the phone — if the bad guys were powerful enough to get away with illegally tapping into Antarctic oil fields, they could probably arrange to listen in on our calls or read our messages without too much trouble. But that meant we needed a way to communicate when we weren’t safely inside the loft or surrounded by non-English speakers, so we’d worked out a code.

Of course, this actually meant Charley had worked out a code, since Rafe seemed to lose any capacity for independent thought in her presence and I’d already learned that sometimes it was easiest just to let her have her way. And though she could have used A,
B,
and
C
or something like that to reference our various suspects, such a straightforward solution would never have occurred to her.

As a result, our suspects were now code-named after the Chipmunks. EAROFO was Alvin, since we thought whoever was orchestrating everything there was the principal troublemaker. Thad was Simon, because he was so nerdy, and Hunter was Theodore, because we’d still been hoping he’d turn out to be harmless. And in case that wasn’t convoluted enough, Argentina was Madonna, because Madonna had starred in a movie about Eva Perón, who’d been the first lady of Argentina, and Charley had been a Madonna fan since her very first album.

Anyhow, this is what Charley ended up texting Rafe:

Theo visiting Madonna — confirmation pending

I wasn’t altogether confident Rafe would remember Theodore was supposed to be Hunter — he knew less about the Chipmunks than he knew about teen prime-time soaps — but he should get the Madonna part since Charley had found a clip of Madonna in
Evita
on YouTube and played it for us twice. That should be sufficient for him to put T.K. on preliminary alert.

Which brought us to our next problem. Because before I could even get in touch with Quinn for the confirmation, Charley felt obligated to give me a minilecture on how while Quinn might be a stand-up guy, we now had more reason than ever to believe his father wasn’t, which implied I needed to be extra careful when it came to what I told him.

To be clear, it wasn’t like Quinn didn’t already know T.K. was still alive. After all, he was the one who’d loaned me the money to hire Rafe in the first place. He’d also been there with me the previous week, when Rafe showed up with the picture of T.K. he’d taken less than thirty-six hours earlier, somewhere on the outskirts of Santiago. In fact, our second kiss occurred that same afternoon, and since it hadn’t been in the context of
Romeo and Juliet,
it was the first one that definitely counted.

After that, though, Charley and Rafe made me swear not to tell Quinn anything more about the investigation. This had turned out to be easier than I’d thought it would be, since we hadn’t had much private time. Quinn spent the weekend at his family’s place in Southampton, and this week there’d only been the quick snatches of conversation after school. It was just like Quinn had said — we were logistically star-crossed.

But now I was beginning to wonder if it was more than logistics. Because on the walk back to the loft, as I was explaining all of the logistical problems to Charley, I realized something startling:

Quinn hadn’t been asking me for the details on the investigation, not even on those few occasions when we’d been alone together. Last week he’d wanted to know everything, but after that it was like he’d forgotten any of it ever happened.

And that was strange. In fact, it was downright disturbing, particularly when I took into account the way today’s kiss goodbye hadn’t been a kiss but a wholly unsatisfying shoulder squeeze. Sure, there’d been a lot of people around, including my aunt, but still — a shoulder squeeze?

I froze in place, right there on the sidewalk. “Oh, no.”

“Oh, no what?” asked Charley, stopping alongside me. We were both oblivious to the resulting pedestrian pileup behind us.

“Quinn hasn’t asked about the investigation.”

She shrugged. “Maybe he understands you shouldn’t be talking about it, and he doesn’t want to put you in an awkward position. Or maybe he has other things on his mind.”

“Maybe he doesn’t have other things on his mind. Maybe he’s losing interest.”

“Excuse me?” said Charley.

“What if Natalie’s right about Quinn’s essential nature? What if the last couple of weeks were an aberration, and now he’s reverting to his normal apathetic state, where first he stops caring about the investigation and then he stops caring about me? It’s like in that book with the lab rat, only instead of intelligence it’s emotion, and he’s already peaked.”