And Then Everything Unraveled (10 page)

Charley and I stayed up way too late watching
Pretty in Pink
and eating Thai food, but I still woke up the next morning before my alarm went off, like my subconscious wanted to tell me something.

I’d been having a dream about surfing with Quinn, and while you didn’t have to be Freud to come up with theories about that, I still felt like I was somehow missing the point. It wasn’t until I’d spent a full five minutes lying in bed, sleepily contemplating the wedge of light between the windowsill and the bottom of the shade, that I figured out what the point was.

I leaped up and dashed to my computer. I’d never heard back from any of the bloggers I contacted about the satellite photos, but I’d bookmarked their blogs. Now I pulled up the first one and scrolled down through the more recent posts to find the right images.

There were a lot of posts, on a lot of different topics, but I couldn’t find the one I wanted, so I decided it must be in the archives. There I found hundreds of old posts, going back several years, but none of them was the one about the
Polar Star
’s disappearance. Which was strange.

I searched the second blog. And then I searched the third blog. A prickling feeling ran along my spine as I clicked from page to page.

All of the posts about the satellite photos were gone.

Maybe if one of the bloggers had taken down his post, I’d understand. Even if two had done it, I might be able to come up with some sort of explanation.

But all three?

Natalie responded to my text within seconds, and we met in what was becoming our usual spot on the steps in front of school. I handed her my laptop and watched as her fingers attacked the keyboard.

“I’m checking your cache files,” she explained. “Sometimes your browser will store copies of pages from the Web sites you visit, so that it doesn’t have to ping the site’s server again if you go back—it just returns the page you were looking at before. What were the URLs for the blogs again?”

The next thing I knew, she’d pulled up a copy of the blog post that was no longer on the blog itself. “You made it look so easy,” I marveled.

“It was,” she said. “Now what did you want to show me?”

“Here,” I said, pointing to the screen. “See the time stamp on the photo with the
Polar Star
? And then the time stamp on the other one, where the ship has disappeared, is for a few minutes later, right?”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“But the angle of the sun is a lot steeper in the second photograph—you can tell by the way the light looks on the water and the shadows on the whitecaps. Does the sun move a lot faster in Antarctica than it does here?”

“It’s not the sun moving, it’s the earth moving,” Natalie said automatically, but she’d already pulled out a small ruler from her bag and was holding it against the images on the screen, measuring the shadows cast by the waves. Then she took out a calculator and began jotting down numbers on a piece of graph paper. I didn’t even try to follow whatever it was she was doing.

She filled the sheet with equations and calculations, peering from the screen to her calculator and then back to the graph paper again. It was almost time for class to start before she drew a line under a final number and put her pencil down.

“There,” she said with satisfaction. “This will be somewhat imprecise without knowing the exact orbital position of the earth on the date in question—I can look that up later if you want—but my calculations are directionally correct. And they indicate that the second picture was actually taken at least two hours
before
the picture with the earlier time stamp. Somebody must have swapped out the real picture with the older one and then added the fake time stamp.”

I was in awe. “You’re good,” I said.

“This is pretty basic stuff,” she said modestly.

I thought about the two-hour gap, and the disconnect with the time stamps, and what it all meant. “So the
Polar Star
could have sent out the SOS and then just gone radio silent and sailed away before anyone got there.”

“There was more than enough time,” said Natalie.

“But why?” I asked. “And then who switched the photos and changed the time stamps?”

“It had to be someone with access to the site that posted the original images, which probably means they control the satellite, too,” said Natalie. “And that rules out a lot of people. It’s not like you can go buy a satellite at the drugstore and launch it from your backyard. They cost millions of dollars. I think they’re regulated, too. A government or a big corporation is probably involved.”

“So we’re up against a government or a corporation?” I asked.

“Or someone with the power to manipulate a government or a corporation,” said Natalie. “Oh, and don’t forget the power to convince all the bloggers to take down their posts and not respond to your e-mails.”

She said this like it was no big deal, but I suddenly felt very small.

After a morning and lunch period without any Quinn sightings, I got a text from Charley. She was stuck in the editing room with Dieter and Helga, but she’d join me for my appointment as soon as she could get away.

That was okay with me—if anything, I’d probably be more comfortable without Charley there. That way I could explain about all of the things I’d found out on my own without having to feel guilty when she realized just how much I’d been hiding from her.

I’d sort of been picturing Carolina Cardenas in a run-down office, with her name stenciled on the door in peeling paint. She’d be wearing a fedora and chain-smoking, and every so often she’d take a bottle out of her desk drawer and pour a shot of whisky into a coffee mug. Of course, I’d also been picturing everything in black and white, since the phrase “private detective” made me think of an old Humphrey Bogart movie I’d once watched with Nora.

Instead, Charley’s directions took me to a neighborhood on the Lower East Side that was a mix of restaurants and shops and tenements in varying stages of gentrification. The signs hanging in the windows were in just about every language you could imagine, and twenty-somethings with lots of tattoos and piercings shared the sidewalks with yuppies and Hasidic Jews and Chinese. I felt a bit out of place in my plaid kilt and blazer, but nobody paid much attention to me.

The address I was looking for was on Essex Street, in one of the tenement buildings that wasn’t being renovated. It was so different from what I’d expected that I almost called Charley to make sure I had it right. But
C. CARDENAS
was clearly written on a label next to the buzzer marked
3F.

Of course, the fact that it was written in purple sparkle pen should have clued me in immediately, but I was getting used to Charley finding the most unconventional way to accomplish even the most conventional goals.

The outside door clicked open before I could ring, so I assumed that the detective had some way of knowing I’d arrived. The same thing happened when I reached the third floor—the Europop that was blasting from behind 3F stopped abruptly, and the door swung open before I could raise my fist to knock.

Going by Carolina Cardenas’s receptionist, this time Charley just might have outdone herself on the unconventional front. The girl at the door was maybe a few years older than me, but even smaller, with wavy brown hair hanging almost to her waist. She wore a tiny miniskirt and a tinier halter top, and each of the toenails on her bare feet was painted a different color.

“You are Delia,
sí
?” she asked with a friendly smile.

“
Sí.
I mean, yes.”

“It is a delight to know you. Your auntie, she is still with the scarf man,
sí
? No worries, we do not have the need to wait for her. Please, come in, okay?”

“Okay. Thank you.” I followed her into a room that was furnished in a combination of Ikea and flea market.

“Please, you seat yourself here, okay?” She indicated one of a mismatched pair of canvas director’s chairs at a bright yellow
plastic table, and I obediently sat myself. “Can I offer you a beverage refreshment? I have the Coca-Cola Light and the Strawberry Quik, also. You like the Strawberry Quik?”

“Oh, no, that’s all right. Thank you, though.”

“Then we will commence, okay?”

“Okay.”

I was thinking that meant that she would go get Carolina Cardenas or take me to another room that was more of an office. Not that there seemed to be any other rooms. Instead she sat down at the table across from me and grabbed my hand.

“Ay!” she said, as if I’d given her an electric shock. “You are very noisy.”

“Excuse me?” I said, trying, unsuccessfully, to get my hand back.

“You have many things in your head that are making the noise.
Sí
?” Her big brown eyes stared into mine, and her free hand played with a crystal charm that dangled from a ribbon around her neck.

And that’s when I realized why Charley announcing that she was sending me to a private detective had seemed so strange.

She hadn’t been sending me to a private detective.

This girl wasn’t Carolina Cardenas’s secretary or receptionist. She was Carolina Cardenas. And Carolina Cardenas wasn’t a detective.

She was a psychic. A psychic being much less of a strange idea coming from Charley than a private detective.

I probably wasn’t doing a very good job of hiding what I was thinking. “You have the big surprise,” Carolina said with a giggle. “You are expecting that I am the
investigadora,
like in the
Angels of Charlie, sí
?”

“Uh—”

“Do not worry yourself,” she said. “I can still help, even if I am not the
investigadora.
Your auntie, she says you are having the questions. I am seeing that. So many questions!” Her brow furrowed. “But not the questions she says.”

Given my parents and everything they were all about, I probably should have been trying to figure out how I could make a graceful exit. I mean, psychics are pretty much the opposite of scientific method. But I’d watched enough
Medium
on TV to be curious about what Carolina could tell me. I’d just have to make sure that T.K. never found out about this. Or Erin. Or Justin. Or even Natalie. I didn’t think I could handle the mocking.

“I know, you are having the doubts,” Carolina said. “But I can give you answers. Like, you know, the Ross you are wondering about, the one in the picture? It is a place, not a person. And it is not the place you are already knowing, the place where you do the surfing. This Ross is very cold, with the water and the wind and the ice. And the, how do you say in English,
los pingüinos,
the funny birds in the coats?”

“Penguins?” I said reflexively.

“
Sí, sí,
the penguins.”

Now she was totally freaking me out. “How do you know all that?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Some of it, I know from your head. The rest I just know from my own head. It is that way since I was a baby. Now, you want to talk about your mama,
sí
?”

After what she’d said about Ross, I was scared to hear how she’d answer my next question. But I took a deep breath and made myself say the words. “Is she—is she alive?”

“Your mama? It is certain she is alive,” Carolina said in surprise, like I’d asked her something so basic she couldn’t understand why I’d bothered.

And though I’d been telling myself the same thing, and in spite of knowing about Aisén and everything, listening to her say this with such confidence made me practically giddy with relief. Only when I finally exhaled did I realize I’d been holding my breath. “Then do you know where she is?”

Carolina frowned, concentrating. “I see her, but it is not easy. She worries about you, but she does not want to be seen. And the place she is in, it is very beautiful and wild, but not warm. There are the big mountains, also with the ice, and there is water. But it is not the Ross place. It is a different place. But you should not be worrying yourself. She is safe. And she also is with the
novio.
”

“What’s a
novio
?” I asked.

“You know, the boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend?” As far as I knew, T.K. hadn’t gone on a single date since my dad died. “Are you sure about that?”

“Certainly I am sure,” said Carolina, like I’d offended her. “Why would I be saying such a thing if it is not true? You will be meeting him when you see your mama.”

I forgot about the
novio.
“When will that be?” I asked eagerly.

“Soon,” she said. “In eight.”

“Eight what?”

“Ay! That is what is not clear. I am thinking and thinking and thinking, since your auntie was calling, but all I see is eight.” She screwed her eyes shut, like she was trying extra hard to focus, and gripped my hand more tightly. “Maybe eight weeks? Or months? I do not think years, but it is possible. I am sorry, I wish I could be telling you more exactly. But you will see her in eight.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to quell the panic set off by the “eight years” comment.

She opened her eyes. “Now, you must not say anything about this to your aunties. They are not ready to know what is true, so it will only make trouble. And then the eight becomes ten or twelve. This is very important. You understand?”

Hearing about ten or twelve didn’t help with the panic,
either, but then Carolina abruptly changed course. “Now, let us be talking about you. You are the artist,
sí
?”

“What? Uh, no. I’m in high school.”

“But you have the art. You are a performer.”

“I’m supposed to be in a play, but—”

“I see the,
cómo se dice,
the kissing,
sí
?” She giggled again. “And the Romeo, he is just like you.”

“How is the Romeo just like me?”

“You are both missing your mamas.”

According to Charley, Quinn had pretty much sent his mama packing, so I didn’t see how he could be missing her. “Why is he missing his ma—I mean, his mother?” I started to ask. But just then Carolina’s hand went suddenly cold and clammy and slipped out of my grasp.

She moaned. “
Ay, Dios.
”

“Carolina? Are you all right?”