The Ones We Trust (10 page)

15

Ben suggests we meet in the food court at Arundel Mills, a cavernous mall south of Baltimore. At just before four on a school day, the place is a madhouse, packed with after-school shoppers, harried moms and their screaming kids, and a slew of somewhat sketchier types thanks to the casino next door. By some miracle, I find us a table at the edge of the dining area, sit down and wait.

He shows up ten minutes later, and other than a fresh T-shirt, he hasn’t changed much since the last time I saw him. His hair still hangs dirty and long over his eyes, his clothes still dwarf his childlike limbs, his face is still arranged in that carefully disinterested expression. But his eyes find mine from beneath the chunks of his bangs, and I catch their light. He’s eager to hear what I have to say.

He slides his backpack off his shoulder, drops it on the floor and sinks onto the chair across from me, pulling the buds from his ears. “Hey.”

“Hi, Ben. I didn’t know what you wanted,” I say, gesturing to the mini-mountain of Chick-fil-A bags and cups on the table between us, “so I just got one of everything.”

His gaze dips to the mounds of food, then back to me. “The cows will be thrilled.”

Okay, so maybe I went a bit overboard, as I tend to do, but this offering is fueled by more than just guilt. It’s also fueled by worry for the skin-and-bones kid who showed up at my doorstep all those weeks ago, and the fact that he travels all over Baltimore and the District unsupervised. Where is his father? I rip open a bag of sandwiches and hand one to Ben.

“Maria Duncan’s real name is Maria Elizabeth Daniels. She wasn’t from Detroit, but from Toledo, sixty miles south. She never went to college, never got a degree in business accounting, never worked for any one of those places on her résumé.”

Ben drops his sandwich back onto the table uneaten. “So, she lied?”

His prepubescent voice cracks on the last word, and I wonder if it’s hormones or emotion that send it into a tailspin. Either way, I soften everything about mine when I answer.

“She lied.”

“About everything?”

I nod. “Pretty much.”

“But that’s...that’s insane. The press dug up everything on my mom.
Everything.
Even shit that shouldn’t have mattered, like bounced checks and speeding tickets. How could they have missed such humongous things about Maria?”

“Same way I did. Because we were so focused on exposing your mother that we didn’t take a closer look at the victim.”

“But if Maria’s a liar, then she’s also not the victim. My mom was.”

By making that connection, Ben is grasping a little at straws, and understandably so. No one wants to believe their mother is capable of cheating on their father, of the dishonesty and pretense and hypocrisy of publicly condemning the very thing she is trying to suppress in herself. But Maria’s lies don’t erase Chelsea’s guilt, and Maria was a victim long before Chelsea came along, just not in the way Ben thinks.

“When Maria was eight, she was abducted from her bedroom in the middle of the night. Her captor broke a window, plucked her out of her bed and stole her from her own house. Her parents were fairly prominent, and they were in the middle of a very loud, very public divorce. But because one of Maria’s first-grade teachers had reported bruises on Maria’s skin a few years prior, the police went after her parents. Her father, specifically. They questioned him for days, while meanwhile across town, a janitor from her school had Maria locked in his basement. Think about the worst thing he could have wanted her for, and that was his reason.”

Across from me, Ben swallows, but he doesn’t speak.

“The police found her three days later, naked and filthy and abused in every possible way, thanks to a tip from a neighbor. He saw her through a basement window. This was 1996, the year Amber Hagerman’s murder prompted the Amber Alert system, but too late to help Maria. But that neighbor recognized Maria that day because of the media, and the way they plastered her face on every newspaper and television set across America.”

Ben is silent for a long moment, and then he looks away. I give him plenty of time, watching his gaze roll over an elderly couple in matching green tracksuits sharing a plate of fries, three toddlers wrestling in the aisle, the throngs of people and shopping bags and messy tables piled with fast-food wrappers. He takes several deep breaths, as if collecting himself or his thoughts, deciding what to say, and with each one, his expression smooths out to carefully blank. It’s a practiced move, and I’m starting to think the kid’s way tougher than I’ve given him credit for.

Finally, his gaze hitches back to mine. “So, okay...if her parents were prominent, they must have had some money.”

“They went bankrupt around the time of the divorce. There were whispers that maybe it was the reason for the divorce. Either way, Maria needs the money. As far as I can tell, she’s not working, and she’s got a handicapped brother to support.” He shrugs, the gesture a silent
so what
, and I plant both palms on the table and lean in. “Look, I’m not in any way excusing her behavior. I’m only trying to explain why I think there’s more to her story than we originally thought.”

Ben falls silent. Still. I don’t want him to get his hopes up for news I can’t give him. This time around, I’m not making any assumptions, not until I know all—and by all, I mean every single goddamn one—of the facts.

“Look, Ben. I have someone looking into Maria’s finances, but I just want you to be prepared for the possibility I might find nothing.”

“You won’t.”

“I might. If Maria’s smart, which she clearly is, she’s got the money well hidden and will keep it black, which means we won’t be able to trace it.”

“Do you think my mom was paying her, too?”

I start to remind him his mother was far from wealthy, but his voice sounds so hopeful, so desperate to believe Maria took his mother for a ride, that I quickly stem my answer.

“Maybe...” I lift both palms from the table and point them to the sky. Even if I do find evidence of blackmail, it won’t release his mother from wrongdoing. Chelsea was still a hypocrite and an adulterer, just perhaps a deceived one. “Like I said, I’ve got somebody looking into it.”

“So, basically, you brought me all the way down here to tell me you’re still working on it.”

“No, I brought you all the way down here to tell you I’m not making the same mistake this time. Maria Duncan-slash-Daniels will not get past me again. I don’t have all the facts on her yet, but I will.”

“And when you do?”

This time I can give him the answer I know he wants to hear. “You’ll be the first to know.”

* * *

Gabe calls at exactly ten-thirty, as he’s been doing for the past four nights, only this time, he doesn’t start the conversation by asking about Graciela.

“Hey,” he says, then nothing more.

Weird how you can cram so much into one syllable, how you can fill up three little consonants and vowels until they’re boiling over in emotion. In that one tiny word, I hear despair and frustration and misery and desperation and loneliness and sorrow. Above all, I hear sorrow.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Everything.” He sounds tired, and his words are slow and slushy around the edges, as if maybe he’s been drinking. He sucks in a long breath that catches on the end. “It’s Zach’s birthday.”

I freeze in the middle of my living room, my heart pinching in sympathy. “Oh, Gabe...”

“We went to Nick’s. Mom insisted, even though he told us not to come.” I hear him take another deep breath, this time through his nostrils. “It wasn’t pleasant for any of us, and not just because we were missing Zach. Nick is...not well.” There’s another long pause, another hitching breath. “Watching Zach die has broken him in a way I don’t know how to fix.”

Gabe sounds so sad and confused and lost, and my heart heaves for him, just rises up in my chest and rolls over. I want to reach through the phone and wrap myself around him in a tight hug, hold on until this awful day has passed and it’s tomorrow. From everything I’ve learned about Nick, Gabe didn’t just lose one brother that day on the battlefield; he lost them both.

I tell him the only thing I can think of: “I’m so, so sorry.”

“Yeah,” he whispers. “Me, too.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“You can talk to me. I don’t care about what. Anything. Just...talk.”

So that’s exactly what I do. I sink onto my couch and steer the conversation far, far away from war and death and dying. I point it instead to a long, drawn-out tale of the summer Mandy and I spent waiting tables in Tahoe, drinking and partying and kissing far too many boys and maybe once a girl, and how our little adventure solidified Mandy’s position as not just my best friend, but my sister. I tell him about Rose, how I had no idea my heart could hold so much love for one little person until she came along, and how flattered I was she wants me, and only me, to take her trick-or-treating this Halloween. I tell him about the book I’m reading and the cooking lessons I’m giving my mother for Christmas and the race my rowing team won last month. I talk about everything and nothing.

After forever, my words trail off, and the waiting stillness on the other end of the line makes me think Gabe must have fallen asleep.

And then his deep and rumbly voice comes down the line. “So. To recap, you kissed a girl?”

“I just talked for forty-five minutes straight, and that’s the part you picked up on?”

“Uh, yeah. Was it Mandy?”

I can still hear the heaviness pushing at the edges of his tone, but something lighter has blown in, something that makes him sound much more like Gabe again, the one I met those first two times at the hardware store. It pushes a smile into my answer.

“No, it wasn’t Mandy. I don’t even remember her name. She was just some girl I met at a bar.”

“Was she hot?”

“Yes. She was hot, I was drunk, we were both in college. It was an experimental summer for me.”

“I’ll say. Was there tongue? Any skin-on-skin action?”

I can’t stop the giggle that sneaks up my throat. “Gabe. Can we please move on?”

“One more question.” He pauses, and his voice drops an entire octave. “What are you wearing?”

My giggle turns into a full-blown laugh, and Gabe joins me. I know he’s only joking. I know his questions and his flirting are little more than a distraction tactic—albeit a fairly effective one—to lighten up the weight of the day, but I can’t help the way his interest makes my skin tingle. The way
Gabe
makes my skin tingle.

“Are you going to be okay?” I ask.

“I think so. Thanks for talking me off the ledge.”

“Anytime.” I check my watch, see it’s closing in on midnight. Gabe and I have been on the phone for well over an hour. “Only twenty more minutes and we’ll have talked into tomorrow.”

My unspoken offer hangs in the air for only a second or two before Gabe snaps it up. “You forgot to tell me how the bathroom is coming along.”

I flick off the table lamp behind my head, pull an afghan over my body and fill him in on the bathroom, as well as my ideas for the powder room down the hall. Twenty minutes stretch into twenty more, and those twenty into another hour. We talk about TV shows and restaurants, about vacations and books and movies. It’s the kind of conversation that says nothing except neither of us wants to get off the phone. Finally, at some time past one, our words fade into whispers and then into silence.

“Abigail?” he says, his voice just another shadow in the room. It pulls me back right as I was drifting off.

“Yes?” I whisper, but I’m already smiling.

He’s quiet for a moment, then, “Talk to you tomorrow.”

“Talk to you tomorrow.”

We hang up, and I fall asleep right there on the couch, my phone clutched close to my heart.

16

On Wednesday, I’m returning from a mid-morning run when I find Gabe on my front porch steps. I’ve been gone only an hour or so, but he looks as if he’s been waiting for all of it. He’s hunkered into a thick Patagonia fleece zipped high against the wind, his hands stuffed into his pockets, an Orioles cap pulled low on his forehead.

“Hi,” I say, waving as I jog up the front walk. “I didn’t know you were—” He lifts his head, and his face kicks my already double-time heart into redline territory. “What’s wrong?”

“We need to talk.”

It’s not just his carefully controlled expression but his ominous tone that drops my stomach onto the cobblestones under my feet. “Oh, God. What happened? Is Nick okay?”

He seems a little surprised at my question. It flashes across his face before he wipes it clean.

“No. No. Nothing like that. It’s just...” He trails off, and I realize something is wrong, very wrong here. I can see it in how the line of his mouth is set under a good three or four days of scruff, how his shoulders are tense and tight beneath his leather jacket. But it’s more than just his obvious tension; there’s something about the way his gaze won’t quite stick to mine. “Can we go inside?”

“Just tell me!” I prop my right foot on the top step, unfasten the key from where I’d tied it onto my shoe and hustle us both into my foyer. “What’s wrong? What happened? Did I do something?”

“You tell me.” He drops his head and hands me a folded piece of paper he pulls from his coat pocket.

I take the paper from his fingers, and my entire body tenses. My shoulders, my back, my legs, every muscle bunching and bracing for whatever’s written on it. I know from everything about him that it can’t be good.

I peel the page open, my gaze falling on the army logo and the CONFIDENTIAL knifed in big, black, block letters across the top of the page, and the combination buckles my knees.

“Where did you get this?” It’s my voice, but the tone is all wrong. Quiet and controlled and strangely detached, as if I’m asking him if they’ve fixed the sinkhole on Wisconsin Avenue.

“Somebody leaked it to our lawyers. Anonymously, of course. It hasn’t gone public yet, but it will.”

It’s the last thing I hear before I read the paper further, and everything stops making sense.

As you are well aware, Corporal Zach Armstrong was killed on November 21 while on active duty in Afghanistan. Since his death, media interest in his story has been high, and high-ranking officials, including the United States President, have made increasingly public comments about his death at the hands of the enemy. However, all United States officials should avoid making any comments that paint his death as heroic. Unknowing statements such as these by our country’s leaders may cause public embarrassment should the circumstances of Corporal Armstrong’s death ever become public.

And there, slashed across the bottom of the page, is my father’s name and signature. The world warps under the weight of them, as if the entire room is teetering, tilting every atom in my body off-kilter.

I check the date at the top. Just three weeks after Zach’s death, well before the investigation began, and a little over three months before my father retired.

“Abigail.”

I blink up at Gabe. “Huh?”

“I said you need to get out of those wet clothes. You’re shaking like a leaf.”

His words cut through the ocean roaring in my ears, but I can’t seem to focus on them. My head is reeling, repeating and tripping over my father’s instead, in the Oval Room bathroom hallway. The words that suggested he’s still following me. The words that asked me if I trust him. The words telling me, in no uncertain terms, to back off and let it go.

Well, no fucking wonder.

My gaze sticks to his name at the top of the memo between my fingers, and the letters go dark and blurry, then explode in a burst of white. I wait for my vision to clear, for the white to fade into a tunnel of dancing black spots, and then before I know it, I’m wandering through my downstairs rooms, drifting, strangely numb, as if maybe my head has figured out my father’s involvement, but the rest of my body is still struggling to catch up.

Now what?

I wander through my office, into the hallway, pausing at the door to the kitchen. Gabe stays close on my heels the entire time.

My father knew. He knew the truth about Zach’s death, almost from the very beginning, and yet he didn’t tell the Armstrongs. Even worse, he did everything in his power to cover up his involvement—from them, from the public, from me, the daughter who compiled silly articles for a silly health care web magazine and whom he thought would be the very last person to take an interest in the story.

I’m standing at the kitchen table when it comes over me, slowly at first, like a storm rumbling in the distance. My breath quickens. My fingertips and toes start to tingle. Something cold and hard forms in my belly, growing and pulsing until it grips me by the guts.

My father
knew
.

“Jesus!”
My voice is high and loud and furious. I whirl around, bounce right into Gabe.

He steadies me with a palm to each elbow. “Are you okay?”

I give Gabe a you’ve-got-to-be-joking grimace. Clearly I am about as far away from okay as you can get. “It all makes sense now, you know. Cornering me in the castle, following me to the bathroom. His tail’s probably calling him as we speak, reporting back that you’re inside my house.”

“What are you talking about? Whose tail?”

“My father’s tail. That’s the only way he could have known.” I wrench my arms from Gabe’s grip, look around for my keys. I spot them on the counter under the microwave.

“Could have known what? Where are you going?”

I look at him as if he just asked me if I had a date with the president. “Where do you think I’m going? To talk to my father, of course.”

And that’s when I hear it again, Gabe’s earlier words when I asked him if I did something.
You tell me
, he said. The words blow through the fog in my brain, stoking the fire already licking at my insides. “What did you mean, ‘you tell me’?”

He hesitates, just a second, but I see it. Gabe knows exactly what I’m referring to. Still, he pretends not to, scrunches his brow in mock confusion. “What?”

I narrow my eyes, step right up to his big frame. “Don’t play games with me. When I asked you if I did something wrong, you said, ‘you tell me.’ You thought I knew about my father’s involvement, didn’t you? Even after you clinked your glass against mine and toasted to a fresh start, even after I let you talk me into calling Graciela with some bullshit story about her brother, even after all our midnight confessions. You assumed I knew.”

He shifts his weight, looking uncomfortable. “If it helps my case any, I certainly don’t anymore.”

“Jesus, Gabe!” The heat spreads through my body, licking at my limbs and flushing my face. “You really are an ass-hat, aren’t you?”

He gives me a good-natured grin. “And you’re only figuring this out now?”

“Nothing about this is funny. This is the opposite of funny.”

“You’re right, and I’m sorry. But if I were my therapist,” Gabe says calmly, rationally, “I’d tell you now is not the right time to talk to your father. You’re too angry. You need to calm down first, think things through.”

“What I need is for you to get out of my way.” I plant both palms on his chest and shove, but it’s like trying to push through the Washington Monument. Gabe’s feet don’t even budge.

He shakes his head. “No good decision is ever made when you’re this upset.”

I snort. “Said the man who got drunk at his own brother’s funeral.”

God, that felt good. I get it, I think suddenly. I understand why Gabe allows his temper to get the best of him. How good it must feel for him, too, to sneer and bark at journalists, to shock them with his
no fucking comments
. It’s release, pure and simple, and it feels freaking awesome.

He flinches at my comment, but he doesn’t take the bait. “Exactly. I should know.”

That he somehow manages to keep his own temper in check pisses me off even more, stirs the giant vat of anger brewing in my gut until it explodes in a ball of fire. I shove at his chest again. “Damn it, Gabe, let me through!”

He reaches for me, but I lurch backward, and one of my flailing arms connects with a vase of yellow roses on the kitchen table. Gabe springs forward to catch it but is too late, and as I’m flying into the hallway, I hear the unmistakable sound of the vase smashing into a million tiny pieces on the kitchen tile.

By the time he catches up, I’m already in my car.

* * *

I find the general puttering around in the backyard in a pair of ancient wellies and Mom’s floral gardening gloves, planting a bed of orange mums by the garage window overhang. He looks up when I come through the garden gate. A smile climbs his cheeks when he sees me, then falls just as quickly when he gets a load of my expression, and the half-crumpled sheet of paper in my fist.

“Don’t look at me like that, Abigail.” He straightens, leaning his weight on the shovel, and bobs his head at the memo. “That document doesn’t contain all the facts.”

In the car on the way over, the closer I got to confronting my father, the more my rage melted into plain, old-fashioned fear. Not of what I would say, but more of the extent of his involvement in the matter. I’m terrified of finding his fingerprints on more than just the memo, and yet the former journalist in me has to ask.

“But you wrote it.” It’s the first time I’ve actually said the words out loud, and they feel like okra, prickly and slimy on my tongue. “Three weeks after he was killed, you wrote a memo that insinuated not only was Zach Armstrong killed by friendly fire, but that the army was doing everything possible to sweep that little tidbit under the rug.”

Dad picks up a shovelful of dirt and dumps it onto a pile on the bricks. By turning back to his work, he’s not dismissing me per se, but rather taking the importance of our conversation down a notch.

“I wouldn’t be so quick to judge me, darlin’. At least not until you know all the facts.”

“Then tell me the facts.” I sink onto a stone bench at the edge of the terrace. “Please.”

He shakes his head and reaches for a potted mum. “You know I can’t do that.”

“Okay, then. Tell me you didn’t do it. Tell me you didn’t write this memo.”

I know it’s irrational to demand such a thing when I’m holding the evidence in my hand, but I’m desperate. This is the man who taught me about loyalty and integrity and respect, about selfless service and personal courage, and now I’m like Dorothy, peeking behind a curtain at something I don’t want to see. The lasso around my lungs pulls tighter. Did all those lessons mean nothing?

Or did he get so caught up in duty, honor, country that he lost sight of what’s right?

Screw duty. Screw honor and country. I just want him to explain how he could have written the goddamn memo.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” he says. “I’m not at liberty to discuss this matter with you.”

At his easy dismissal, my frustration morphs into anger, pulsing and pricking under my skin. My father keeps telling me I don’t understand, asking me to give him the benefit of the doubt. Yet how can I just trust in him blindly, when it’s written here in black and white?

“Okay, then,” I say, “why don’t I tell you what I know instead? Zach Armstrong was killed by one of his own men, but for some reason, the army made a conscious decision not to tell the family. Instead, you painted him as a hero and used his fame to bolster public opinion of a war gone bad.”

“Me, huh?”

I shrug, pointing to his name on the paper, printed there in black and white. “Your name is on the memo. Can you imagine how that poor family felt when they read it?”

“I’m sorry they had to.”

“How else were they supposed to find out about their son? Oh, wait. That’s right. They weren’t.”

“Don’t be sassy with me, young lady. We didn’t want to give the Armstrongs half-baked information, that’s all that memo is saying.”

“And yet the army gave them a contrived story about how he’d been killed by enemy fire. Hell, even the president was bragging about what a hero Zach was to the press. It was utter bullshit!”

“We did what we had to do at the time.”

“What about now? What about doing the right thing now?”

“There are things going on here you don’t understand. Things that are none of your business. You do
not
have all the facts.”

I groan. “Why don’t you tell me, then?”

“You know me, and you know I can’t do that. You’re going to have to trust me on this one.”

“I don’t...” My voice almost breaks from the sob trying to sneak up my throat, but I swallow it down before it can escape. “I don’t think I can do that.”

The hurt in his face is instant. His cheeks collapse and his jowls sag, and his upper body curls into itself as if I just punched him in the gut. He covers it by reaching for the shovel, but it might as well be made of lead. It takes him forever to haul it upright. “Then maybe you should pay more attention to the word
confidential
written across the top.”

“And maybe you should pay attention to your own conscience. Because this?” I shake the memo in the air. “This is reprehensible.”

I can see I’ve gone too far. He spikes the shovel into the dirt so hard it stands at attention, even when he lets go to clench his fists at his sides. “What do you want from me, Abigail? Because I’m not going to stand here and discuss this matter with you any longer. This is where the story ends.”

“This is
not
where it ends. Because it’s about to become everybody’s business. This memo is going public. You know that, right?”

“I do.” He scoops up a mum by its roots and jams it into the ground, thrusting dirt all around it.

Right now, I suppose the best I can hope to hear is that he knows the way the army handled Zach’s death was wrong, that he regrets his involvement in it, that he’s sorry. But my father would clearly rather murder his mums than offer up either an explanation or an apology.