The Almost Truth (6 page)

“I don’t need to see where things are going. I
know
where they’re going! I’m going to college. I’m going away. There isn’t a future in this, with us. We shouldn’t have had sex. I thought it could be, just, I don’t know, a friends with benefits kind of thing, but it’s clear you want more. Only I can’t give you more.”

“I want more?” Brendan laughed. “Oh, that’s rich. Are you saying you felt nothing? I was there, remember?” He yanked me close and kissed me, my mouth opening under his. I could feel the burn of his stubble as his face pressed down on mine. I could feel the heat coming off his body through my clothing. I tried to pull away, but he held me closer for a second before letting go. “Call me crazy, but it feels like you want more too. Maybe you don’t want to admit it, but you do,” he said.

Brendan stomped past me and clambered up the rocks, back to his car. My fingers touched my lips. I could see my hand was shaking slightly. I couldn’t tell what I was upset about . . . that Brendan had kissed me or that he’d stopped?

I
took a sip of my Diet Coke. It had gone flat and warm. I stretched my head to one side and then the other to get the kink out of my neck. I’d spent the past few hours on the computer. I had stacks of notes spread all over the bed. Being a good con artist isn’t all based on charm; research is required. I now knew a bunch of facts about the McKenna family.

The McKenna family had money dating back to the eighteen hundreds, when Mr. McKenna’s great-great-grandfather had been a lumber baron. Their house in Seattle’s Montlake area looked from the photos to be roughly the size of a castle. Our entire trailer would have fit on the front porch. Not that they would let us park our rusted trailer anywhere near their contemporary mansion.

Fifteen years ago they came to Bowton Island for a vacation.
They stayed at the Keppler Hotel. On the third day of their vacation, while Mr. and Mrs. McKenna were out sailing with friends, their three-year-old daughter, Ava, went missing while being watched by the nanny. The McKennas hired private investigators, and huge amounts of reward money were offered, but nothing ever showed up. Not Ava, not her body, not a ransom demand. It was like Ava had simply disappeared.

I’d found hundreds of articles that came out around the time Ava went missing, but there was more recent stuff too, the occasional human interest story, a plea for any new leads because the case remained open. A few years ago some bones were found on the island, and for a brief period of time people thought it might be Ava’s body, but it turned out to be the ribs of a dog.

Some good came out of the tragedy. Mrs. McKenna found her mission in life after her daughter went missing. She started a nonprofit group, the McKenna Children’s Foundation. It spent millions on helping families with missing kids and on providing less privileged kids access to early education.

Mrs. McKenna wasn’t the only one who found her calling after Ava disappeared. Their nanny was Nancy Goodall. I’d seen her on TV a bunch of times. She’d started a security company that specialized in children. She marketed her guilt—“I failed a child, but you don’t have to fail yours”—into a security gold mine. The company sold nanny cams, kits where you could collect your kids’ DNA and fingerprints in case they ever went missing, stuff like that. She tended to show up on TV whenever a kid
went missing, lecturing on what families could do to keep this from happening to their children. She was a regular on CNN and the talk-show circuit. She had recently started her own cable show. I could hardly wait to miss it.

I looked down at all my notes. I’d written down all the details I thought might be important. I flipped through the pages to see if anything jumped out. The whole thing made me sad. The idea of just not knowing what happened must have eaten Ava’s parents alive. I imagined that at first they prayed she was okay, but eventually they must have just wished to find her body, something to put the whole thing to rest. I had a mental image of Mrs. McKenna walking through Pacific Place shopping mall in Seattle, looking at the face of every teen girl she saw and wondering if it might be her daughter.

I pulled out a bunch of our family photos. I wanted to see how I looked compared to Ava at age three. I found all my old school photos. There was a tragic goth phase in freshman year, when I had worn so much eyeliner it’s a wonder I didn’t develop some sort of allergy. I couldn’t find any pictures of me before age four. In the photos of me at four, my hair was cut so short I looked like some sort of prison inmate. I’d picked through the rest of the photos in the shoe box, but while I’d found a few pictures of my parents from when they first got married, there were no baby pictures. This is what happens when you keep your family mementos in a couple of beat-up old shoe boxes. We weren’t the kind of family that did a lot of scrapbooking. Construction paper, glitter pens,
and happy-face stickers were in short supply at our place.

“What are you working on? School’s over; you should be free from homework.” I jumped. Mom was leaning against the doorjamb. I hadn’t even heard her come in. She was still wearing her maid uniform from the hotel. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her makeup had worn off during the day until all that was left was a trace of her berry pink lipstick bleeding into the lines around her mouth.

“This? This is nothing, just something I wanted to check out.” I quickly shuffled all the papers into a pile before she could see them.

Her eyebrow went up slightly. “Doesn’t look like nothing.”

“I’m checking into student loans and grants.” I crossed my arms over my chest, daring her to ask me more.

Her eyes shifted away. “Any luck?”

I shrugged and waited to see if she would say sorry for taking the money.

“I brought home a pizza. No green peppers, double mushrooms,” she said. Ordering my favorite pizza was as close as I was going to get to an apology.

I followed her into the living room and plunked down on the sofa. I grabbed a slice out of the box. Mom picked a few of the mushrooms off. She wasn’t a ’shroom lover like me.

“Your dad called this morning. He was disappointed he missed you.” She nibbled on her pizza. “You weren’t home when he called last time either.”

Ah, the pizza came with extra mushrooms and a side of guilt. “I had to work.”

“You know he can’t just call whenever he likes. He’s only allowed to use the phone at set times.”

“I think that’s the point of jail, the whole restriction-of-freedom thing,” I said. Next my mom would be pointing out that prison officials were cruel because my dad wasn’t allowed to wander home whenever he wanted.

“You don’t need to be such a brat.” Mom waved her pizza in my direction. “You know why they don’t send donkeys to college?”

“No one likes a smart-ass,” I answered. This was a very old joke in our house.

“The point I’m making is that your dad misses you.”

“I’m not avoiding his calls; I had to work.” This wasn’t completely true. My dad and I tended to avoid each other. It was a mutual thing. I always felt that he’d never wanted kids; he always looked at me as if he was wondering when I might leave. He was never the kind of dad who got down on his hands and knees and played with me as a kid when he was even around, and as I got older, we seemed to have even less to talk about. My mom, however, liked to have this fantasy where we were the perfect family. I’m pretty sure inside her mind we had a nice cozy bungalow with a white picket fence and a golden Lab named Buster.

When she talked about our lives, I almost didn’t recognize them. She had this ability to completely remake history to fit her fantasy. She would talk about how when I starred in the school
play in eighth grade, my dad brought me flowers after the show. I’m not sure where she got that idea; he hadn’t even shown up to the play, and I wasn’t the star; I was some background player. All her family memories where straight out of a Hallmark card, with us wearing matching holiday sweaters while we made Christmas cookies together. For years I thought I was going crazy, since I didn’t remember all these things, but then I realized she just made them up. Cut out any parts of her life she didn’t like and squished in a new and better memory to fill the gap.

“Your dad thinks he might be released early. They’ve got overcrowding issues, and he doesn’t have any disciplinary reports this time. The lawyer is pulling together something to take to the probation board.”

“Dad always did master the good behavior part on the inside. It’s when he’s released that he has a problem.” I saw Mom open her mouth to argue with me, and I held up my hand to stop her. “I’m joking.”

“I was thinking when he gets out, we could still take a summer vacation as a family. We could go down to the Oregon coast, maybe visit Portland.”

I stared at her. I bet she was picturing driving down the coast singing show tunes and having some sort of family bonding moment. Our last family vacation had been a nightmare where we traveled from Walmart to Walmart while my dad worked a fake return scam. It wasn’t the kind of vacation full of happy memories.

“I’m not sure I can get time off,” I said. It seemed a better excuse then telling my mom I would rather be tied to the bumper and dragged behind the car than go on another family vacation. “Do you know where my baby pictures are?” I asked, steering her away from the vacation topic.

“Did you look in the shoe box?” Mom took another slice and flicked the mushrooms off.

“Yes, I looked in the box. There’s a bunch of stuff in there, but no baby pictures.”

“Well, I don’t know where they are then.” Mom tossed her slice back down and stared at me with her mouth pressed into a thin line. “So, let me guess, the fact that I don’t have baby pictures is a sign that I’m a bad mother.”

I stared at her with my mouth open. Parents freak out at the most random things. “Um. No. I just wanted to find some of my baby pictures. I thought maybe you knew if there were photos kept someplace other than the box.”

“There were a bunch of photos that got ruined when the crawl space flooded when the sewer line broke. I threw out a couple boxes of things. Your baby pictures might have been in there.”

You had to love the symbolism, the entire record of my babyhood flooded with sewage and tossed away.

“Did you talk to Thomas about staying on in the fall?” Mom reached forward and grabbed her pizza slice back. “He should be able to find you something in the hotel.”

“I’m not convinced I’ll be here in the fall.” I couldn’t believe my mom thought I was going to give up that easy. I hadn’t even considered calling Thomas yet, even though I liked him. He had worked at the hotel for something like forty years. Unlike the owner and some of the other managers, he was from the island. He wasn’t the kind of person who figured that because he was your manager he was some sort of god.

“Well, don’t leave it for too long. They’re going to let summer staff go in a few weeks, and everyone will be jockeying for a position. If you aren’t careful, there won’t be anything for you and you’ll be stuck having to get a job over in the city.”

I opened my mouth to tell her that missing out on a position at the hotel wasn’t exactly a great loss, but then something occurred to me. Thomas would have been working at the hotel when Ava was taken. If there was anyone who would have dirt on what had happened behind the scenes, it would be him. Nothing happened in that hotel that he didn’t know about. Nothing.

I stretched over and gave my mom a hug. She looked shocked.

“What was that for?” she asked.

“Because you’re right. I do need to talk to Thomas. I’m going to do it first thing tomorrow.”

T
he Keppler Hotel was built in 1922. It was huge, with over three hundred rooms, four ballrooms, two restaurants, a tearoom, a pool, a glassed-in sunporch stuffed with white wicker furniture, and a lobby that stretched over a hundred feet, with clusters of sofas and chairs in red paisley fabric. Each table had a vase with a giant floral arrangement that had to be changed every four days. Entire hothouses must have been dedicated to growing flowers for the Keppler. The front desk was carved, polished cedar, and at the end of the lobby was a fireplace the size of a minivan.

Since there weren’t many places like it, several movies had been filmed at the hotel. There was a horror film, a cheesy love story, and a political thriller. Two years ago they filmed a historical movie, and most people on the island had gotten to be
extras. Being in a movie is a lot less fun than you might think. I’d sat on the front porch sipping tea in a peacock green Victorian gown for hours. I’d thought my bladder was going to blow up before they finally gave me a bathroom break. I watched the movie when it came out, but I never saw myself. So much for my big Hollywood break.

I slipped in the side door off the lobby. Mr. Stanbury, the general manager, didn’t like staff to be in the hotel if we weren’t working. I think he was afraid he might not recognize us if we weren’t in uniform and might accidentally be nice to us. The makeup sales convention must have ended, because there were lines of women checking out and clucking about wanting to be sure they made the ten a.m. ferry. Each woman appeared to be traveling with at least six suitcases the size of a small SUV. The porters in their bandleader-styled uniforms were hustling around, working up a sweat. I caught one of them and asked if he knew where to find Thomas. He pointed me toward the tearoom.

I waved to some of the waitstaff setting up for the high tea that afternoon. It didn’t matter how good the scones with cream were, I couldn’t imagine wanting hot tea on a day like this. Thomas sat toward the back at one of the tiny round tables with his adding machine and a stack of receipts. He squinted at a piece of paper then smiled when he saw me approach.

“Tell me what the number is there.” He handed me the receipt.

I glanced down before passing it back. “A hundred forty-three dollars and sixty-four cents.”

“Why people have to write so small you need a telescope to see it is a mystery to me.” Thomas’s fingers sped over the adding machine, tallying up the numbers.