The Almost Truth (13 page)

“You know, we don’t have to fit all of the Seattle tourist sites into one visit,” I pointed out. We’d already stopped at the Mystery Bookshop and strolled through Pioneer Square.

Chase grabbed my hand, and we wound our way through the thick crowd of tourists that always surrounded the fish shop. The clerk, dressed in his orange rubber waders, called out the order for salmon, and another clerk chucked the giant silver fish through the air. Flashes went off as the groups of tourists tried to capture the moment on film. The first clerk caught the fish and the crowd let out an appreciative whoop.

I dragged Chase away from the crowd to a small store wedged in the corner. The brass bell rang as we entered. The store walls had shelves from top to bottom filled with giant glass mason jars full of spices and teas. Chase paused inside the door and took a deep breath. His face split into a smile.

“This place reminds me of something out of a Harry Potter book,” I confessed.

Chase wandered along the wall, reading the tags for the jars. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they had eye of newt in this place,” he said.

I smiled. It felt like Chase had passed some sort of test by liking the store. A test I didn’t even know I was giving him. “Come on. I have a lot I want to show you before the market closes.”

I pointed out all the sights while we wandered. The original Starbucks; the flower stalls; the place that made every possible type of pasta, including a chocolate fettuccine; the vegetable stalls stacked with red peppers, giant leeks, and quirky things you hardly ever see, like purple potatoes.

The market merchants were starting to wrap up for the day, either piling things into giant Rubbermaid containers or covering the stalls with bright blue tarps. Chase left me rifling through a stack of woven scarves while he went to take a picture. When I spun around, he was standing there with a giant bouquet of flowers. It was practically a bush of bright, candy-colored flowers. I almost fell into the scarf booth.

“Flowers for the lady.” Chase bent over gallantly and passed me the bouquet.

“Are you crazy? These must have cost a fortune.” My hand barely fit around the wrapped stems.

“They gave me a deal because it’s the end of the day. Besides, it’s the least I can do since you’re showing me all around the city. And don’t forget you got your team to do all those brochures this afternoon. I’ll have to thank them, too.”

I had folded and stuffed five hundred programs all by myself. My paper cuts had paper cuts. “Everyone was glad to help,” I lied. “It’s a great cause.”

I looked down at the bouquet. I couldn’t recall anyone ever getting me flowers before. I didn’t even know if my family owned a vase. Everything Chase said and did seemed like a glimpse into an alien world. An intoxicating, wonderful world. A place where people traveled, and gentlemen opened the door for you, and brought flowers instead of a six-pack of beer.

“The communications director for the foundation is coming tomorrow. You should bring all the volunteers by. We could take a picture for our newsletter.”

My imaginary community service group was becoming a hassle. “I’ll try, but you know how it is getting people together in the summer. I’m surprised the director is coming over already. The event isn’t until this weekend.”

Chase rolled his eyes. “We’ve hit a snag. Remember how I was telling you that the McKenna family isn’t that crazy
about Nancy Goodall, their old nanny?”

I nodded.

“She announced on her new TV show last night that she’s attending the event. Near as we can tell, she doesn’t have tickets to the fund-raiser, but the hotel confirmed she just made a reservation.”

“She has to know they wouldn’t want her there. Why is she showing up?”

He shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. The communications director is afraid she’s going to be dragging a bunch of camera people with her and doing a segment for her new show, trying to profit off all the media attention the event is getting. As far as the McKennas are concerned, there’s nothing she wouldn’t do for some extra time in the spotlight. They don’t want her to capitalize further on the death of their daughter.”

I used the tip of my shoe to outline one of the cobblestones. “Are the McKennas certain their daughter is dead?”

“I think at this point they’ve acknowledged that’s the most likely outcome. Mr. McKenna wanted for years to purchase a headstone for Ava to put in the family plot. Mrs. McKenna has always refused, but I heard from my parents they’ve gone ahead and ordered one.”

“Do you know why they never had more kids?” I asked. I took another deep sniff of the bouquet, before forcing myself to focus on what Chase could tell me.

Chase looked down the street while he thought. “I think at
first they couldn’t face the idea of having a kid around. They didn’t want to feel like they were replacing Ava. Then Mrs. McKenna got really involved with the foundation, and he got busy with his company.” He shrugged. “It’s like there was this window of opportunity for them to be parents, and they missed it.”

“What kind of parents do you think they would have been?” I found myself holding my breath while he answered. I mentally kicked myself. These questions had nothing to do with the con. At some level I was still enjoying the fantasy that they were my secret family, and it, along with my fantasies involving Chase, were distracting me from my job.

“Mrs. McKenna loves kids. She’s one of those people who never talks down to them. You can tell that she’s actually interested in what they have to say. When she’s around kids for a foundation fund-raiser, she’s always the one who plops onto the floor to play a game, and never freaks out if one of the kids touches her with paint on their hands.”

“What about him?”

Chase laughed, and it struck me how model perfect he was. Even his teeth were attractive. “Here’s a secret you can never tell my mom when you meet her. When I was in high school, I got busted at this party. Someone’s parents were out of town, and we’d pretty much trashed the place. I guess one of the neighbors called the cops. When the police showed up, I was puking in the front hall planter.”

“Classy.”

“That was me, classy. I was terrified to call my folks, because I knew they would kill me. My mom’s dad was an alcoholic, so she’s supersensitive about any kind of drinking, not to mention I’d lied to them and told them I was sleeping at a friend’s house. So instead of calling them, I called Mr. McKenna. He was in town for business so I called his hotel. Just imagine what he must have thought, getting this call from his friend’s kid. It’s one thirty in the morning, I’m drunk, I might even have been crying because I was freaking out about the cops, so it’s not exactly the kind of call everyone wants to get.”

“What did he do?” Chase’s story fascinated me. I’d never worried much about my parents being mad at me. My mom just ignored any information she didn’t want to know, and my dad didn’t seem to care what I did. The closest I’d come to this kind of trouble was last summer, when I’d taken some rum my dad had to a party at the beach. My dad wasn’t mad that I’d been drinking; he was mad I’d taken his rum.

“Mr. McKenna showed up at the party. The police wouldn’t let anyone leave except with an adult, so he agreed to take responsibility for me. I remember he had these plaid pajamas on under his trench coat. He took me back to the hotel. He made me take a shower to clean up. He sent my puked-on sweatshirt down to be cleaned and ordered up some food from room service. I slept on the sofa in his room that night and he took me home in the morning. I was sure he was going to come in and tell my parents what an idiot I was, but he didn’t. He stopped the car
down the block and told me to remember that people are a sum of the decisions they make, and making stupid decisions is part of growing up, but not learning from them means you’re stupid.”

“That was the end of the lecture?”

“Short and sweet. The thing is, that lecture stuck with me. It was up to me to decide what kind of person I wanted to be, and I didn’t want to be the kind of person who’s known for puking in planters.”

“It’s not that simple though, is it? I mean, people aren’t shaped just by their choices. So many of our possible choices are set by the time we’re born. Who your parents are and what you have growing up makes a huge difference,” I pointed out.

“I don’t believe that. I mean, it might be harder to make good choices if you don’t come from a stable home where people are around to model that behavior for you, but ultimately it’s up to each person.”

I considered debating the issue with Chase. People who think you can be all you can be by pulling up your bootstraps are typically people who never had to worry about having boots to start with.

“Of course everyone is responsible for their own actions, but some people have reasons for why their lives are a mess,” I tried to explain.

“They’re a mess because they aren’t trying hard enough. People complain about not having enough, but it’s because they don’t make their own opportunities.”

I felt like chucking the bouquet at him. The lights in the market were starting to go out as vendors finished packing up for the night. It felt like dark clouds were moving in. I could just imagine what Chase would think of someone like my dad, or Brendan, or, for that matter, me. What would he make of the opportunities my family had seized?

“What do you say we grab some dinner?” Chase was smiling at me. Of course, he was actually smiling at someone he thought was a carefree college-bound girl who came from an upstanding family in the community and volunteered her time for charity events. The kind of girl I might have been if I’d grown up with people like the McKennas as parents. If Chase knew the real me, he would grab his flowers back with a look of disgust and run the opposite direction.

“Sure, there’s a seafood place a few blocks from here.” I turned to lead the way. The street angled sharply uphill.

Chase lightly touched my elbow. “Hey, you okay? You look sad all of a sudden.”

He had no clue. “I was just thinking about the McKenna family. Maybe Ava is still out there somewhere. Maybe there’s still a chance for her to come home.”

“I had no idea you were such a hopeful person,” Chase said.

“Sometimes hope is all you’ve got.”

C
hase and I took the last ferry home at midnight and then stayed up until two a.m. sitting on the beach and talking. I didn’t regret a moment of it until my alarm went off at five a.m. for breakfast service. Three hours does not count as a night of sleep. It’s more of a long nap. I thought about calling in sick, but it would have left Libby in the lurch, and after she’d let me bail yesterday, I couldn’t do that to her.

My tips were lousy. I practically paid
them
for the pleasure of working. It was my own fault. I dropped a plate of scrambled eggs into one woman’s lap. I screwed up a bunch of orders and gave a cheese omelet to a guy who was lactose intolerant. The killer was that I kept forgetting to refill people’s coffee. Denying people access to caffeine first thing in the morning is a surefire way to make sure they leave you only a single dollar and complain
to the manager. All I wanted to do was go home, peel off my uniform, and crawl back into bed, but as soon as I pulled into my driveway, it became apparent that bed wasn’t going to happen.

I parked my scooter. If I’d made a list of people who I didn’t want to see today, the two sitting across from each other at the picnic table would have been at the top of it. Although both of them must have heard me approach, neither bothered to look up from the deck of cards on the table.

“Can you see it?” my dad asked. His voice sounded like he smoked four or five packs of cigarettes a day, but he actually didn’t smoke at all.

Brendan fanned out the cards, then gathered them up and tapped each side of the deck on the table before picking a card at random and inspecting the back. “I give. Did you use some kind of ink to mark them? Maybe something that only shows up with a blue light or something?” He tilted the deck of cards into the sun.

My dad barked out a laugh. “Where am I going to hide a blue light at a poker game? Nah, I shaved the deck.” He took the cards from Brendan, sorted them, and then ran his thumb along the side. “There. Try feeling it now.”

I stood next to the picnic table with my arms crossed. Shaving cards, usually done with superfine sandpaper, is a classic way to mark the cards. If you have the touch, you can feel the difference between the cards and cut the deck so you always came up
with a winning hand. Magicians use shaved and marked cards to pull off their tricks. Cons use them to ensure they always have the luck. Of course, if someone catches you cheating, they might finish the game by beating you up in an alley, which feels a lot less lucky. My dad wasn’t the best con artist, but I will give him credit for being good with cards. I couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t have a pack in his hands or in a pocket.

Brendan ran the ball of his thumb against the deck. He pulled a card out and flipped it over. A four of diamonds. He cursed and my dad laughed.

“You gotta have the touch. Featherlight,” Dad said, waggling his fingers in Brendan’s face. “I worked on this deck for weeks. It’s a thing of beauty. It’s like Michelangelo himself shaved this deck. I can feel it, but no one else is going to notice a thing.”

I picked up the deck and felt the sides of the cards. I quickly fanned through the facedown deck and picked out four cards. I looked down at them and smiled, then tossed the four aces faceup on the table.

My dad scowled and scooped up the cards. His complexion had the gray pasty color that comes from being locked up. He had also gained weight, his skin looking puffy on his frame. Prison food is heavy on the carbs, low on nutritional value.

“Welcome home,” I said.

My dad grunted, which I took to mean,
“Thank you, daughter. I am glad to be back home in the bosom of my family. While in prison I realized that we were never as close as we should have been,
and I’m going to dedicate my life to making our relationship better.”
I watched him shuffle the deck, cutting then recutting it. Maybe the reason we were never close was because I wasn’t really his daughter. On the other hand, if he went to all the trouble to steal a kid, you would think he would want me around. Otherwise, why not just get a puppy?