The Almost Truth (10 page)

“No way.” My skin tingled with excitement.

“That’s a lot on the line for her. Can’t see her giving up her regular gigs on the
Today
show easily. She’s parlayed this whole thing into a nice career. One that’s paid for some nice designer
duds, a vacation property in Maui, and an expensive lifestyle. That’s an awfully nice career to risk losing, especially over a kid who’s been gone for years.”

“I need to know more about the nanny,” I said.

Brendan stood up from the table. “Now you have something to talk about with Mr. Fancy Pants over dinner.”

F
iguring out what to wear on my date felt more complicated than deciding what to write for my Berkeley essay. I wanted to look nice, but not like I was trying too hard. I wanted to look sexy, but not like I should be working on a street corner. The outfit needed to be classy, but not something that looked like I was trying to impress someone. People who have money can sniff out cheap clothing at a mile. If the fabric drapes incorrectly, if it pills up, or if the seams don’t line up, it screams low-end mass retail. I had a few really nice things that I’d bought at a thrift store in a wealthy section of Seattle. After pulling things on and off in various combinations for a half hour, I decided on a navy blue sundress with spaghetti straps and bright red poppies along the hemline. It was a bit too dressy for the restaurant, but it was my best option.

The screen door slammed shut, and I could hear my mom kick off her shoes in the living room. Perfect. She might let me take her car so that I wouldn’t have to show up for my date on my scooter. Helmet hair is not an elegant look.

“Don’t you look nice,” Mom said as I walked out. I did a model spin for her and posed like I was at the end of the catwalk. “Brendan certainly is a lucky young man.”

I felt myself slump. My mom had wanted me to date Brendan for my entire life. “I’m not going out with Brendan. My date is a guy I met at the hotel, one of the guests. Brendan and I are just friends,” I said slowly and clearly so there could be no confusion.

“Oh.” She rummaged in her purse, pretending to look for something, so we could avoid discussing that awkward topic any further.

“When I was at the hotel today, I saw they were gearing up for a big charity event,” I said.

Mom shrugged. “It’s summer; seems like they’ve got something going every free moment. They had three weddings last Saturday alone.”

“It’s a fund-raiser. It’s the anniversary of the girl who went missing fifteen years ago, Ava McKenna.” I paused to see if she would jump in and mention how she’d been connected to the case.

Mom made a noncommittal sound and flopped down on the sofa. She pulled out a book with a pirate with his shirt torn off on the cover. It was unclear to me why people in romance
novels are always wearing clothes that are half shredded. “You’re welcome to take my car tonight if you want. I don’t plan to move from this spot.”

“Thanks.” I shifted in place waiting for her to say something about Ava, but instead she clicked over to a rerun of
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
. She snorted when the contestant missed an easy question. I watched her for a second and then tried to drag her back to the topic at hand. “You must have worked at the hotel when Ava went missing. I bet it was pretty exciting.”

Mom didn’t even turn away from the television. “I don’t really remember. I guess so.”

My eyebrows drew together. “You don’t remember her going missing? It was the biggest thing to ever happen on this island. They had the FBI here.” I waited for her to volunteer the other obvious reason she should remember: She’d been questioned by the police.

Mom shrugged. “How does someone even go on this show if they don’t know something simple like that? I swear they must give a reverse intelligence test to screen contestants. If you have the sense to get yourself out of a paper bag, they pick someone else.” My mom dreamed of being on a game show. Not that she ever applied, or did anything about it, other than talk about how she would win the big prizes.

“The police must have been all over everyone at the hotel, wanting to find someone who had seen something,” I said, giving her another opportunity.

“I think I worked in the laundry back when that happened. I don’t remember much about it.” She turned the volume up a notch.

I stared at the back of her head. My mom was lying. The police had questioned her in particular. No way she had forgotten something like that.

Mom turned to face me. “I thought you had a hot date. Why are you so interested in all this ancient history all of a sudden?”

“I’m not interested,” I said with a shrug. I scooped the car keys off the table by the front door. Two could play this game. I could lie just as well as she did.

T
ortuffo’s was one of four restaurants on the island outside the hotel. We also had a Dairy Queen, a coffee shop that made sandwiches, and the Beach Shack, which specialized in burgers and hot dogs that always had a bit of sandy grit in them. Tortuffo’s was small. It only had room for about fifteen tables, and even then the waitresses had to turn to the side to snake through with their trays. You could get a pizza there, but it wasn’t a pizza joint. They specialized in homemade pasta and gnocchi, along with chicken and steak. The owner greeted every guest who came in and stopped by two or three times during your dinner to ask in his thick Italian accent if your meal was good. He was actually Irish, but he did a great fake accent that fooled everyone who didn’t know him.

I parked my mom’s car outside the restaurant. She drove a
1974 robin’s-egg blue Karmann Ghia. My dad had bought it for my mom from a junkyard before I was born, and fixed it up. Brendan’s dad was a mechanic at the Keppler. He kept their cars and various landscaping machines running. As a favor to my dad, he kept the car in mint condition. At least I didn’t have to be embarrassed to be seen with it. It wasn’t a Lexus or BMW, but it had its own quirky style.

Chase was already inside. When I approached the table, he stood like a gentleman out of the eighteen hundreds. He was wearing jeans with a dark shirt.
Shit
. I was overdressed.

“You look great,” Chase said, reaching to pull my chair out for me.

“Thanks.” My nose was already twitching from the smell of garlic, roasted tomatoes, and fresh baked bread. Maybe in addition to being overdressed, I could order way more food than any one person needed and stuff it all into my face, chewing with my mouth open. That’s me, born classy.

I picked at the hem on my cloth napkin, trying to think of something to say.

“How did things go with your aunt?” Chase said, looking over the options on the leather menu before giving his choice to the waiter.

My mind went blank. I couldn’t remember what Brendan had called her. This was the problem with lying to someone: keeping it straight. “Um. She’s good.” I stared down at the menu as if it were a tricky calculus problem to be solved.

“Hey. They have fritoles for dessert. Have you had those?”

Not only had I not ever had one, I wasn’t even sure what it was. But for all I knew, rich girls ate them all the time. I made a noncommittal noise.

“I spent the winter in Venice a couple years ago, and during Carnevale I must have eaten a thousand of those. I’ll bet I gained twenty pounds in fried dough, raisins, and pine nuts. I haven’t had one since then. Have you ever been to Venice in the off-season?”

I loved how he assumed I’d been to Venice at all. “No, I haven’t.”

“It’s amazing. I love the city at any time. How can you not love a place where they once called their currency a sequin?” He laughed. “The city is totally different in the winter. It’s cold and damp. The place isn’t packed with tourists, and the streets fill with fog and make it feel like the city’s been cut off from the rest of the world. It seems possible you could turn a corner and find yourself several hundred years in the past.”

“It sounds perfect.” I made a mental note to add Venice to my list of places I wanted to go someday. “Did you go with family or friends from school?”

Chase flushed. “It’s stupid. I went by myself over winter break because I had this idea that I was going to write a book. I think I thought I was a modern-day Byron or something. I was going to write the great new American novel. I rented an apartment overlooking the Grand Canal in Salute-Punta Dogana. I
brought my laptop, arranged for this local woman to bring me meals, and sat down ready to bleed onto the page.”

I absolutely loved that he’d done this. It was the most romantic thing I could imagine. I didn’t know anyone who had just up and rented an apartment in Europe to do anything, let alone write a book. “What happened?” I asked, leaning forward.

Chase laughed. “Turns out I had nothing to say. I started wandering the streets, drinking cups and cups of espresso in these small cafés, anything to avoid just sitting there at the desk. At first I told myself that I was soaking up the atmosphere, ‘letting my muse find her way’ kind of thing. Eventually I realized I wasn’t fooling anyone; I wasn’t a novelist.”

I felt the absurd urge to defend him. “You might be. You can’t expect that you would just sit down and write a novel. It’s the kind of thing that takes practice. You wouldn’t expect to sit down at a piano and start playing Mozart. Why would writing be any different?”

“I think I liked the idea of being an author more than I wanted to write. My problem is, I’ve never been really good at anything.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but he raised a hand to stop me.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not fishing for a compliment. I’m good at a lot of things. Good student, decent at lacrosse, I make a pretty good omelet, but there’s nothing that I’m
really
good at. You know what I mean? Like, really good.”

“Like, the reason you exist,” I said.

“Exactly! I wanted to have something that was my passion. Some big grand point to my life. It seemed like everyone I knew had something. They wanted to be rock stars, or get into medical school, or this one girl I dated in high school desperately wanted to be the next Martha Stewart. She had binders full of all these recipes and craft ideas. She would videotape herself pretending to do show segments on things like quilting teapot cozies out of old baby clothing and put them up on the Internet.”

“Wow. She sounds intense.”

“Tell me about it. She made great cookies though,” he said with a smile. “She drove me nuts, but I was fascinated by the fact that she knew what she wanted, that she was so sure.”

“And now, do you know what you want to do?” I reached for one of the bread sticks at the same time he did and our hands bumped. I jumped as if an electrical charge had run through my hand.

Chase leaned back with a sigh. “No. Not really. I know I want to do something that matters. I don’t want to look back and think: ‘Yep, I sure owned some nice cars.’ It doesn’t have to be world changing, like saving all the hungry kids in Africa, but I want it to be something. In the meantime, I’ve decided to let up on myself and stop trying to figure out what to do with my life and instead focus on what I’m doing right now.”

“Seems like a plan. The work you’re doing with the foundation is important.”

“That’s me, charming money out of the wealthy one dollar at a time.”

The waiter put our plates down. Chase had gone for pasta with various kinds of seafood. It looked exotic, but I didn’t think I could bring myself to eat anything that had a tentacle. I’d ordered lasagna. I hoped that didn’t make me look boring. People who rent apartments in Europe eat tentacles, and lasagna eaters consider going to Target to be a big adventure.

“Maybe being charming is the thing you’re really good at, and if charming raises money and awareness for an important cause, then it’s pretty important.”

Chase’s eyes met mine across the table. It was likely due to the candles everywhere, but his eyes actually seemed to twinkle. He nudged my foot with his. “Are you saying you think I’m charming?”

I blushed. “Now you
are
fishing for compliments.” Our feet were still touching under the table. I didn’t want the connection to end. If he pulled away, there was the risk I would lunge forward so I could still touch him.

“So, tell me about you. Do you know your passion? Your reason for being?” Chase swirled his fork through the pasta, winding it up. He smiled at me, and I tried to determine if he said the word “passion” with an extra emphasis or if it was my rabid imagination.

“I’m not always sure what I want. Sometimes it seems more clear what I don’t want,” I admitted.

“But don’t you want to be going
to
something instead of running away from something?”

I put my fork down. “I’m not running away,” I said sternly, to convince either him or myself. “I don’t know everything I want, but I do know I want to be an architect.”

“I should introduce you to Mr. McKenna,” Chase offered.

My pulse jumped. “When are he and his wife coming over?”

“Just before the event. Nothing against your hometown, but as you might imagine, this isn’t their favorite place. They aren’t even staying the night. They chartered a boat that will take them back to Seattle after the fund-raiser.”

“Who else is coming to the party?”

Chase listed off the A-list of the Seattle social scene. There were even a few celebrities coming in from California. He noticed my expression. “Celebrities attract media attention. We should bring in a million or so in donations at the event, but we’ll get significantly more online from people who read or see something in the news about it. It’s the follow-up donations that make the difference. We make way more in ten- and twenty-dollar donations. It all adds up.”

“What about the nanny, Nancy Goodall?”

Chase grimaced. “Yeah. She wasn’t invited.”

“Do the McKennas blame her for what happened?”

“No. I think they blame themselves more. They felt bad for her. Nancy was distraught when Ava disappeared. She was in her twenties at the time. The McKennas let her go—they didn’t need to employ a nanny when they didn’t have a kid anymore. Then, of course, she couldn’t find another job.”