And Then I Found Out the Truth (9 page)

“Hey,” said Gwyneth, sliding into the seat adjacent to me and popping open her soda. And then, in case my existence hadn’t already taken enough of a turn for the surreal, she actually joined in the conversation.

Not for the first five minutes or so, because that part was less a conversation and more a soliloquy from Natalie on whichever of Edward’s virtues she’d neglected to mention as yet. This was fine with me — just because I was cranky didn’t mean I should drag her down, too. I was also sort of hoping it would make Gwyneth think twice about joining us again.

But then, as Natalie wrapped up an extended description of how Edward had constructed his first telescope from plastic cups, rubber bands, and spare Power Ranger parts when he was four, Gwyneth said, “Are you talking about Edward Vargas?”

“Do you know him?” asked Natalie, startled that her path and Gwyneth’s could cross in any way except by sheer accident.

Gwyneth took a long sip of TaB. “We went to camp together.”

That instantly had me trying to imagine Gwyneth at camp — I mean, what kind of camp could it have been? — but nothing could tear Natalie’s attention away from Edward. She’d always thought Gwyneth to be entirely a black hole, rather than just in a limited way like I was with science, but now she looked at her with fresh interest.

“What can you tell me about him?” she said. “I’m eager for additional data points.”

Gwyneth crunched a Frito. “He’s sort of a player, isn’t he?”

Across the table, Natalie flinched. “A player? What do you mean, a player?”

Gwyneth shrugged. “You know. Like, a player.”

“Are you saying he goes out with a lot of different people?” I asked.

“Uh-huh,” said Gwyneth, washing down the Frito with more soda. “He’s supposed to be a major serial.”

“What’s a serial?” I asked, since Natalie had been struck temporarily mute.

“Like, a guy who’ll be really serious about one person, but then he dumps that person after a week and moves on to the next person, which will last a week, and then he dumps her and moves on to the next person. And so on. A serial.”

“Are you absolutely sure?” I asked Gwyneth. “We’re talking about the same Edward Vargas?”

“He goes to Dalton, right?” she asked Natalie.

Natalie nodded, still mute.

Gwyneth shrugged again. “Same guy.”

Natalie’s face had gone so white it was starting to scare me. She was even paler than Gwyneth. Meanwhile, Gwyneth seemed unaware of having single-handedly reduced Natalie’s entire world to jagged shards of dashed hope.

“It might just be rumors,” I rushed to tell Natalie before she could pass out or anything. “You know how little things can spin out of control. Somebody hears something and tells someone else and the next thing you know there’s a story out there that’s totally different from reality. It’s not real evidence. It’s hearsay.”

“Hearsay,” Natalie repeated softly.

Then she said it again, more firmly this time, and it was like the word suddenly switched on her inner prosecutor.

The color came rushing back to her face, and she pushed her tray to the side and grabbed a pad of graph paper and a mechanical pencil from her bag. “I want the details,” she said to Gwyneth. “Names, dates, known associates, suspected accomplices — anything you can give me about this allegedly serial behavior.”

And it was like we’d accidentally stumbled onto Gwyneth’s secret area of expertise. She reeled off who had done what to whom and when and how they’d done it like she had a database stored in her head. It was also the only topic I’d ever seen animate her. Her face actually moved more than the bare minimum required for words to pass from her lips as she told Natalie everything she’d ever heard about Edward Vargas.

Which turned out to be a lot. According to Gwyneth, Edward had been cutting a swath through the city’s female population since the sixth grade. I couldn’t imagine how he’d found time to do all of the things she said he’d done when he was so busy with MIT and Caltech and everything, but apparently he was an accomplished multitasker.

When Gwyneth was finally tapped out, Natalie leaned back in her chair and studied the paper before her, shaking her head in stunned disbelief. “The data here is so inconsistent with what I observed on an empirical basis when we met. He seemed so genuine.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

Even Gwyneth was curious enough to ask. “Yeah. What?”

“I don’t know,” said Natalie. Her voice sounded strangely unfamiliar to me, and I realized it was because I’d never heard her be indecisive before.

When she spoke again, though, it was with her usual crisp certainty. “But I’m sure I’ll think of something.”

Twelve

Sadly, while Gwyneth was full of information about anything to do with people hooking up in Manhattan, selected parts of the Hamptons, Palm Beach, and Aspen, she was useless when it came to more urgent matters like what might have happened to Quinn in Mr. Seton’s office that morning.

But that didn’t stop her from thinking we were better friends now than ever before, and when Mr. Dudley canceled class, citing the number of absent students and an unspecified conflict, which probably meant he had an audition, she followed me up to the library without asking where I was going or why.

Prescott’s Upper School was housed in two adjacent brick-and-stone town houses, and the library stretched across what had once been the attics of both buildings. Now the space was bright and modern, with skylights in the sloping ceilings and study carrels tucked in among the bookshelves. It would’ve been a pleasant place just to hang out and read, but Gwyneth peeled off without comment and disappeared into the stacks, and I made directly for the row of computers lining one wall.

I probably could’ve spent the unexpected free period studying for my physics quiz, but it seemed only fair I should be able to use at least part of the time to focus on the Sagittarius, like Carolina had suggested. The other alternative was fretting more about Quinn, and I knew exactly what Carolina would have to say about that.

There wasn’t a lot of public information available on EAROFO — it didn’t have its own Web site or handy MySpace page for those of us trying to figure out what sinister plots it might have under way. The only source I’d found so far was an online directory of Washington, D.C.-based lobbying organizations that provided the names and titles of EAROFO’s board members. Now I returned to the Web page and printed it out for a better look.

There were twelve board members in total, and I studied the list for what felt like the millionth time, hoping maybe I’d generate a fresh insight or new lead. But I already knew about Trip Young from Navitaco, and the eleven others were still nothing more than names on a piece of paper. The accompanying photos showed ten white men, one black man, and a white woman, all dressed in nearly identical business suits and entirely unremarkable except for how uniformly old and stuffy they looked.

Printing out the list and checking it again took less than two minutes, so then I started Googling the individual board members. I’d done this before, too, a couple of weeks ago, and had only turned up links to the Web sites for their respective companies and the occasional reference to something more personal but equally unrevealing, like a country club tennis championship or a charity gala.

Nothing had changed since the last time I’d tried, but it was frustrating to get the same results anyway. So to narrow things down a bit, I searched for each name with Thad Wilcox, and then, to be fair, with Hunter Riley as well. Carolina had told me neither was part of the group that was “greedy for oil,” but it wasn’t like she’d definitively said they were innocent, either. She’d even said that there was something “not right” about Thad.

And Google did return a bunch of hits. Which was exciting until I realized none of them was particularly incriminating.

For example, Thad had played in an amateur golf tournament years ago with Victor Perkins, the chairman of Perkins Oil, but so had tons of other people, and both he and Sam Arquero, the head of Arquero Energy, were active in the Princeton alumni association — again, along with a cast of thousands. Hunter spoke on a panel with Trip Young at a recent Wall Street conference, but I already knew they were acquainted. He’d also served on a fund-raising committee for an adult literacy program, and so had Anthony Kaplan, the CEO of Energex, but there wasn’t any overlap between the periods during which they’d each been actively involved.

So it wasn’t like I was turning up lots of evidence documenting close ties between Thad or Hunter and anyone at EAROFO. Not that I really expected to, but at this point I would have welcomed any lead, however tenuous or remote. Otherwise, I felt like I was sitting around, powerless, as I waited for Rafe to return from South America or Charley to dig up another random “source” or Carolina to have another illuminating dream.

I was closing down the Web browser when I heard my phone quietly buzzing from the depths of my book bag. The librarian was at the far end of the room, at his desk and with his back to me, so I decided it would be safe to slip the phone out and check messages.

My immediate thought — complete with another missed heartbeat — was that Quinn had finally texted, and I tried not to be disappointed when I saw the only person I’d heard from was Charley. Of course, I was even more disappointed when I read her message:

please don’t hate me

can’t make dinner w/ WW

absolutely legit reasons — really!

go w/Monkeys after school

take taxi home — make sure driver sees u inside

have I mentioned please don’t hate me?

Charley sometimes called Patience the Wicked Witch of the Upper East Side. She also referred to Gwyneth and Grey as the Flying Monkeys. Of Jeremy, Patience’s husband, Charley just said, “They’re perfect for each other. Which should tell you a lot.”

I’d completely forgotten we were supposed to have dinner at Patience’s apartment. This had probably been willful self-delusion on my part — family fun at the Truesdale-Babbitt household wasn’t high on the list of things I wanted to do that evening, or ever for that matter. It also didn’t help that I’d already had enough quality time with Gwyneth to last for the next several decades, but it looked like I was in for more, and Charley wouldn’t be there as a buffer.

I was about to write back asking for details on the “absolutely legit reasons” — Patience would be sure to ask — when my phone buzzed with another new text.

This one wasn’t from Quinn, either, though I was starting to wonder if skipping heartbeats so frequently added up to a workout of sorts. It was just an afterthought from Charley:

p.s. — might want to avoid bus shelters

Which, even for Charley, made no sense. She’d told me in her first text to take a taxi. So I was about to write back to that when she beat me to it again:

p.p.s. — also ice cream trucks

Which made even less sense. She knew perfectly well I preferred my ice cream in pint form — the soft-serve cones and Good Humor bars the trucks sold were only for when things got desperate and there wasn’t a grocery store or deli nearby with a decent freezer section —

“What’re you doing?”

Gwyneth’s voice at my shoulder was so unexpected I almost dropped the phone, and my heart skipped yet another beat, this time because I was startled and not due to a jolt of hopeful anticipation. I’d liked the hopeful anticipation better.

“Texting Charley,” I said. “She can’t make dinner.”

“My mom will flip. But I was asking about the old people,” she said, tapping the printout on the table before me.

“Oh. That. It’s just some research. For a project.”

“What kind of project?” she asked.

“For, uh —” I tried to think of a class Gwyneth would know nothing about. “It’s for Latin.” “Latin?”

“Sure,” I said, trying to sound like a list of oil company executives was precisely the sort of thing a person would need to research for Latin class. Mostly I was wondering why Gwyneth had chosen this moment of all moments to discover her curiosity.

She peered down at the paper. “Does EAROFO mean something in Latin?”

Not that I was aware of, but if that’s what she wanted to think, it was fine with me. “It means, uh —”

But before I could think of a suitable lie, the bell rang to signal the end of the school day, and it also seemed to shut down Gwyneth’s interest. She hoisted her Prada bag over her shoulder and turned toward the door. “Ready?” she asked.

I moved to follow her, too relieved that she’d dropped the subject of EAROFO to process the way she’d said “ready.” Like there was no question of us not leaving together, and, even scarier, like that’s how it would always be.

A chill went through me. I had no idea what the new black might be, but one thing was becoming all too clear: Delia was the new Grey.

Thirteen

Patience and her family lived only a few blocks from Prescott, so Gwyneth and I walked to their apartment after school. At least, I walked. Gwyneth sort of ambled. But those few short blocks were all it took for Charley’s last two texts to get a lot less cryptic.

Because first we passed the shelter at a bus stop, and Charley and I were splashed across the side. At this point, I was starting to feel numb to the whole thing — I mean, bus shelters were a logical progression for Dieter as he moved on from subways and scaffolding, and mostly I was glad we hadn’t shown up on an actual bus. Somehow the idea of my face rolling up and down the avenues was more than I could take.

But it was like that thought called up what I saw next, and it almost had me wishing for a bus instead. Because right on East 79th Street, parked in a prime spot for catching tourists on their way to and from Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was an ice cream truck. And I didn’t know how Dieter had pulled it off, but the big cartoon drawing of the Mister Softee man on the side of the truck, the drawing with the jaunty red bow tie and ice-cream cone hat, was gone, replaced by Charley and me.