And Then Everything Unraveled (11 page)

She’d gone pale beneath the olive of her complexion, and she held her fingers to the sides of her head. “It will be okay,” she said, but her teeth were clenched like she was in pain.

I jumped up. “I’ll call a doctor.”

“No, no doctor. This is just what is happening sometimes, when I do the reading. I get the ache of the head.”

“Can I get you some aspirin, then? Or maybe you should lie down?” I reached to help her up.

She cried out at my touch and jerked away.

“What’s wrong?” I asked in alarm.

“Red,” she said. “It feels all red.”

“What feels all red?”

“You do. And that means danger.” Her dark eyes were enormous in her ashen face.

“Danger?”

“Yes. Danger. For you.”

With that, Carolina staggered over to the sofa and collapsed into a ball on the cushions. A second later, she started to snore, enormous, honking snores that sounded like they couldn’t possibly come from such a tiny person.

I waited for a while to make sure there wasn’t anything seriously wrong with her, but the color was already returning to her face as she slept, and her hands had lost that cold, clammy feeling. After ten minutes or so, I covered her with a blanket patterned in Hello Kitty characters and quietly let myself out.

I ran into Charley on the sidewalk in front of the building, her finger poised at the buzzer for 3F. “Oh, no,” she said, disappointed. “Did I miss the entire thing?”

“We just finished,” I said.

“How was it?” she asked.

I was still reeling from Carolina’s final warning, but that didn’t mean I’d forgotten what she’d said about T.K. not wanting to be found. And with the exception of the
novio,
everything else had been so on target that I wasn’t about to disregard her insistence that my “aunties” would only make trouble if they
knew. The last thing I needed was anything that would turn the “eight” into a larger number.

So I just said in what I hoped was a convincing way, “She was really helpful. Thank you for setting it up.”

I could tell Charley wanted the details, but she was good at knowing when not to push. “We can arrange another appointment for you. I was thinking I might schedule one myself. There are some things I wouldn’t mind running by her.”

“Like what?” I asked as she flagged down a cab to take us back to the loft.

“Like should I keep my date tonight or stay home and eat leftover Thai food with you? I bet you’ve never seen
Valley Girl.
It has Nicolas Cage from before he got creepy, and you’re in luck, because I own it on both DVD and VHS.”

I managed to convince Charley not to cancel, though I think that was mostly because her date was named Bill and he’d grown up in the Midwest. Since the guys she usually went out with came from places you needed a passport to get to, a corn-fed American seemed exotic to her. “I wonder where he’ll take me?” she said. “Wouldn’t it be fabulous if it’s one of those places with checked tablecloths and jalapeño poppers and frozen drinks? And maybe brownie sundaes for dessert?”

It took forever to get her ready, because choosing an outfit was even more of a challenge when there was a chance her date would be wearing Dockers. But I finally got her out the door, noticing as I did that eight
P.M.
had come and gone
uneventfully. Then I took a carton of Thai leftovers from the refrigerator and settled myself at the table with a fork and my laptop.

I had plenty of homework, but I’d already discovered that most of my teachers were willing to cut me some slack since they thought I was recently orphaned. There was also a packet of documents from Thad’s secretary, but I pushed it aside. As far as I could tell, they were all about company business, and not about why Thad had erased T.K.’s hard drive or what exactly his role was in this whole mess.

Right now, my highest priority was to find a real detective. For whatever reason, T.K. wanted everyone to think she was dead. And that had to mean that someone or something was a threat to her, and it also had to mean that she couldn’t come back until the coast was clear.

I had no idea how she’d ended up in such a situation—she was like the poster child for law-abiding citizens. She even took the speed limit as a literal limit, rather than just a casual suggestion. But one thing was obvious: If T.K. was on the side of right, then whoever was such a threat to her had to be up to no good. They had to be incredibly dangerous, too—otherwise she’d never have felt it necessary to go to such an extreme.

So, I was way out of my league at this point, and Carolina Cardenas telling me I felt all red hadn’t exactly been a soothing experience. If I wanted to get to the bottom of things, I was in desperate need of professional help.

I still had the list I’d made the previous day of private investigators. To be on the safe side, I created a new e-mail account using only my first and middle names, and then I e-mailed the investigators that seemed most promising, explaining as discreetly as I could what I was looking for and signing my name as Delia Navare.

And just as I sent off the last e-mail, an IM popped up from Erin.

WIDGETTE: OMG!

DELIATRUE: ?

WIDGETTE: finally!!

DELIATRUE: J??

WIDGETTE: asked me 2 geolog symposium at S’ford—plate tectonics!!!

DELIATRUE: is that good?

WIDGETTE: subduction + statigraphy = tru romance!!!!

Erin and Justin had been in love with each other since the third grade, not that either of them had ever acted on it, so this was exciting, and we had to IM for a while about what she should wear. I had to force myself to sign off and get back to work if I wanted to follow up on everything Carolina had told me before Charley returned.

For starters, I Googled “Ross” and “penguins.” And in case
I’d had any doubts left about Carolina’s abilities, this pretty much vanquished them. Smack-dab in the Southern Ocean, practically next to the Amundsen Sea and where it almost definitely would’ve been the next stop on the
Polar Star
’s itinerary, was the Ross Sea. The Ross Sea was adjacent to the Ross Ice Shelf, which looked like penguin heaven as far as I could tell from the photos I found on the Web.

Of course, just because I now knew what the label on the Ross folder referred to didn’t mean I understood all of the stuff in it—only that it was relevant. So next I Googled “Melvin Stern.”

It turned out that Melvin was a really popular name for Mr. and Mrs. Sterns who wanted their sons to grow up to be doctors. There was a psychiatrist Melvin Stern in Colorado and an oncologist Melvin Stern in Kansas and an orthopedist Melvin Stern in Texas, but I didn’t think any of them was the Melvin Stern I wanted.

It wasn’t until I tried “Melvin P. Stern” that I struck gold. Because while there was a Dr. Melvin P. Stern practicing proctology in Connecticut, there was also just a plain old Melvin P. Stern in Washington, D.C. And this Melvin P. Stern was the executive director of a political action committee called End American Reliance on Foreign Oil.

So EAROFO was an acronym, just like I’d thought. But the only information I could find about it was in an online directory of political action committees and other types of lobbyists
in Washington. The entry didn’t give any detail about its activities, but it did provide the names and titles of its board members. And every single one was the CEO or chairman of an oil company. Some of them were both.

The pieces were starting to come together. On a hunch, I typed in “Ross Sea” and “oil.” Somehow I wasn’t surprised when this led me to a discussion of the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty—the same treaty T.K. had been looking up on the Web. And I was even less surprised when I read that the treaty’s key provision was an international ban on oil exploration and drilling in specific areas of the Antarctic, including the Ross Sea.

That’s when another IM popped up, this time from Justin.

JUSTROCKS: sup?

DELIATRUE: congrats!

JUSTROCKS: ?

DELIATRUE: E luvs geology

JUSTROCKS: she told u?!

DELIATRUE: plate tectonics = romance. or something like that

JUSTROCKS: ha. anyhow—no big deal

He could pretend to be blasé, but I knew he was psyched. And since I also knew he’d never come right out and ask, I told him what to wear, too. I might not be able to tell Charley about
the other things I’d been up to, but I was looking forward to telling her about how my two best friends were going to a lecture about rocks on their first date. She hadn’t entirely believed me when I’d tried to explain what Silicon Valley was really like.

And maybe it was all of the thinking about rocks that did it, because as soon as I logged off with Justin, the final puzzle piece snapped into place. I grabbed the mysterious copy of a copy of a drawing from the folder. Suddenly, I knew exactly what it was.

It wasn’t some sort of abstract art experiment, or anything nearly that obscure. It was a geologic map. The different layers were actually different strata of the earth’s crust, shown in cross-section. Even I could remember that much from ninth-grade earth science.

And when I pulled up a regular map of the Ross Sea on my computer screen, it was right there, staring me in the face: The coordinates for the Ross Sea were 81° South and 175° West. The same numbers as on the drawing, except the
W
for West must have gotten cut off when it had been Xeroxed, which was why it looked like a
V.

I’d bet anything that somewhere in those layers of earth, beneath the freezing polar waters, was oil. Oil that could go a long way to reducing, if not completely ending, American reliance on foreign oil for a really long time. Of course, to get at it, you’d have to violate the treaty.

And I’d also bet that T.K., obsessive labeler and filer that she was, would never have included all of those items in the same folder by accident.

Which could only mean that the oil company executives of EAROFO, the oil under the Ross Sea, and maybe even Thad, were all inextricably tied together.

I met Natalie before school again, and this time I told her about Carolina and also everything I’d learned about EAROFO and the Ross Sea and the oil. She was eager to study the geologic map for herself, but she was less thrilled about Carolina.

“I don’t believe in psychics,” she said. “Are you sure your aunt hadn’t already told her all about you, so she’d know what to say? Or maybe she researched you on the Internet or something? That’s how these people work. They find out something about you, and then they play off your reactions and what you tell them.”

“How could she know about Ross?”

“Are you absolutely sure you didn’t mention it yourself?”

“I’m positive. And she definitely came up with Romeo on her own, too.”

“That could have been a lucky guess. I mean, every girl has a crush on someone—she could have meant it as a generic term.” I’d told Natalie about Quinn and drama, but she’d figured out the crush part by herself.

Mostly Natalie seemed offended that Carolina could just
know things, rather than having to study and analyze to get to the answer. It was like an insult to her entire worldview. But she did agree with Carolina about the one thing I thought she’d have dismissed as melodramatic psychic-babble.

“Look,” she said. “We know that someone powerful is behind the changes to the satellite photos and that there’s big money behind EAROFO. And it sounds like your mother was on to something that nobody wanted her to know. So, if they went after your mother, won’t they come after you if you start asking the same questions?”

If she was trying to make me feel better about Carolina’s warning, she wasn’t doing a very good job. I mean, there’s nothing like the most rational person you know on the East Coast agreeing with the most irrational thing a psychic has said to really drive a point home.

The bell went off right then, and my phone began to ring at the exact same time, so Natalie went ahead while I picked up the call. The screen showed a New York area code, and I was hoping it would be one of the detectives I’d contacted.

But it was Patience instead. “Ridiculous,” she said. “Absolutely ridiculous.”

“Uh, hi?” I said.

“I don’t know what that man thinks he’s doing, but it’s unacceptable. And it’s impossible to get him on the phone to explain himself.”

She had to rant a bit more before I could figure out which man she was talking about and what was so ridiculous and unacceptable. It turned out that Patience had received her own copies of the documents Thad sent me, and she was a lot more interested than I’d been in what they said. She’d also read beyond the first two lines of the first document, which was as far as I’d gotten.

According to her, the net impact of the proposals in the documents was that Thad would have more responsibility and I would have less. I didn’t really want any responsibility, so this would have been fine if I had even the slightest trust left in Thad.

But Patience now trusted him even less than I did. She said Thad was trying to alienate me from my birthright—her word, not mine—which to her was like a declaration of war. And you really, really didn’t want to be at war with Patience. If Thad hadn’t been such a weasel, I would’ve felt sorry for him.

“I’ll let you know when I’m able to schedule a call with this Wilcox person, but don’t worry, Cordelia—we will not be authorizing a single one of these outrageous proposals,” she assured me.

She wasn’t big on good-byes, either, so I was standing there talking into a dead phone when Quinn brushed past on his way inside.

“Morning, Juliet,” he said.

And because I was overwhelmed by EAROFO and Natalie’s warning and Patience and everything else, all so early in the morning, the sound of his voice instantly brought on a minor fit of brain paralysis. Not that it mattered, since he was gone almost before I’d realized he was there and meanwhile my phone was ringing again.

I picked it up without checking the screen since I assumed it would be Patience, ranting about whatever she’d forgotten to rant about before.

But this call really was from a detective.

It was hard to catch his name because it was so long and Spanish-sounding. And he wasn’t one of the detectives I’d contacted, but a colleague had forwarded him my e-mail. He also had an appointment available that afternoon and would be delighted to see if he could help.

I did some quick thinking. I’d have to skip drama again, but this was much more important. And while today I didn’t have a note from Charley to excuse me, I told him I’d be there anyhow.

I had an idea about how I could get out of class without my aunts finding out.