The Ones We Trust (6 page)

Dad makes a face as if he just bit down on a sour apple. “And? What’d you tell her?”

“I take it you’ve met her.”

He nods, one sharp dip of his chin.

“Then you know what a mighty woman she is.”

He dunks his chin again.

“Did you know she’s set up a foundation in Zach’s name, and that she’s raised and donated over a million dollars to other military families in the past year alone?”

I read all sorts of things in his hesitation but mostly impatience. “I know more than I care to know about Jean Armstrong. Spit it out, darlin’. What are you trying to say?”

“I’m trying to explain to you why I told her I’d think about it.”

“Because she’s philanthropic?”

“No. Because she’s
likable
. I
like
her. Jean Armstrong knew who I was before I walked through her door. She knew you were my father, she knew my writing, and she still picked me. How awesome is that? She wants me to help her write what I’d imagine is the single most momentous project of her life. Beyond the fact I was supremely flattered, she sparked something inside me. Something that makes me think I might want to write again, Dad. Something positive and good and important.”

“Maybe or for sure?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

My father clamps down on his lips, watching me for a long, drawn-out moment. In the military, walking away from duty for any reason is a serious offense, and though he’s never said as much out loud in the years since Chelsea, I know he never agreed with my decision to walk away from mine. So on the one hand, while he might be thrilled
in theory
at my step back into the sunshine, that doesn’t mean he’s not going to try to talk me into another subject matter.

“Believe me when I say you do not want to get mixed up in this matter. And that’s not the general talking, that’s your father. Stay away from the Armstrongs. You do not want to open that Pandora’s box.”

“Why not?”

He shakes his head. “I can’t tell you that.”

“Is it because the Armstrongs’ allegations are true? Have they hit a nerve?”

“You know I can’t tell you that, either.”

“Okay, then. What
can
you tell me?”

“I can tell you that as of today, there are 6,717 other American mothers who’ve lost a son or daughter in the war on terror. Other mothers who’ve been torn apart by grief and have somehow figured out how to put themselves back together without starting a federal investigation. Write about one of them.”

“That’s basically telling me nothing.”

“Then how about this—the Armstrongs are off-limits, Abigail. You are not to talk to them, you are not to visit them at their house or place of business, and you are most certainly not to write about them. Not one word. And that’s an order.”

His tone is forceful, unrelenting, and his words ambush me. I hold his glare and my breath, trying to rein in my temper. Last time I checked, I was not one of his subordinates, but his thirty-two-year-old daughter. I pay my own way, I make my own decisions, and I don’t take orders from anyone but my boss. Especially ones as questionable as the one my father just gave me.

Because, in ordering me to stay away from the Armstrongs, he’s also telling me there’s more to their story. More he knows, more they don’t, and more he doesn’t want anyone, including me, to find out. Much more.

Ricky Hernandez
rips through my mind, and not for the first time I wonder who he is, where he is, what he saw. Because if anything, this conversation with my father has convinced me that Ricky is as big a lead as I thought he was. Instead of talking me out of Zach’s story, my father seems to be doing exactly the opposite.

“Sorry, Dad. I’m still thinking about it.”

My father fixes me with a stare stony enough to make the thundercloud on his face settle onto my chest, pushing down like an elephant-sized weight. I hold my breath and his gaze until, without another word, he turns and marches off toward the house.

I’ve been dismissed.

11

Maria’s convertible comes roaring out of her condo’s garage, and I hit the start button on my Prius.

So far, Ben’s intel has been spot-on. Maria has upgraded not only her bustline but her entire life. She’s traded in her Honda for a fancy BMW convertible, a sporty hardtop with every option imaginable. She lives in a two-story condo on the twenty-second floor in The Mansion, one of Baltimore’s swankiest high-rises on the waterfront in Locust Point. And she drapes her new curves in the latest fashion, designer dresses and red-soled heels and calfskin bags that cost three times more than I make in a month.

She goes by Maria Davidson now, though even with the new name, it wasn’t very hard for me to find her. All I needed was her old cell phone number and a fleeting memory of her telling me she moved here from Detroit. Everyone leaves a digital trail. You just have to know where to look.

For days now I’ve been trailing her as she goes about her business, and it’s been every bit as thrilling as it sounds. I’ve followed her to the grocery store, to the nail salon, to CVS and the mall and Starbucks, everywhere but to an office.
Never
to an office. As far as I can tell, Maria Davidson is not employed...at least not in the conventional definition of the term.

I pull into late-morning traffic and trail a good three or four cars behind Maria’s BMW, keeping a careful watch as she zips in and out of lanes. She takes a left up the ramp to 95, then merges onto the beltway heading west. I follow for another half hour, until we’ve looped all the way around to the northern end and exit in Pikesville. We weave past businesses and restaurants, schools and synagogues. A doctor’s appointment? Another shopping spree? I grip the wheel a little more tightly and keep a close eye on her back bumper.

We take a left onto a tree-lined street, and then another into a complex called Sunnybrook Springs. The place screams assisted living, from the clusters of squat buildings to the wide doors and easy-access ramps to the folks milling about the manicured grounds. Maria pulls into a lot on the far side of the grounds, climbs out of her car with a bouquet of flowers and heads across the pavement to a brick building that, anywhere else, would look like a two-story block of apartments. The plaque to the right of the building tells me it’s Sunnybrook’s Villa, and judging by the measures Maria has to take to make it through the double doors, it’s highly secured.

I back my Prius into a spot at the far end of the lot with a clear view of both the door and Maria’s dark and silent BMW, and reach for my phone.

Floyd picks up on the third ring and greets me with, “You little minx.”

“Excuse me?”

“You could have warned me what I was getting into. Good thing I wasn’t in public when I pulled up that clip. Imagine what the lunch crowd at Panera would have thought.”

I smile at what I know is a joke. Floyd isn’t stupid. He wouldn’t work anywhere but at home, on his own highly secured, impenetrably firewalled network. He’s thorough, too. I figured it was only a matter of time before he found the clip. “Does this mean her money is connected to the videos?”

“Well, seeing as she hasn’t shared a penny of that income with Uncle Sam, I think that’s a safe assumption. But again, at this point, it’s just an assumption. Oh, and her name’s not Duncan. Your girl was born Maria Elizabeth Daniels and hails from Toledo, Ohio.”

I frown. “I thought she was from Detroit.” In fact, I found at least three different addresses when I went looking for her there, which tells me that if nothing else, she lived there for a while. Toledo’s not too far down the road from Detroit, but still. What other lies did she feed me? What else have I missed?

“Anything else?” I say.

“You can’t rush genius, hon. I’ll call you when I call you.”

* * *

While Mandy’s superpower is stopping traffic, mine is the ability to talk myself through any door. It’s a skill I honed in my time as a journalist, this innate ability I have to read a complete stranger, to be so attuned to their sensibilities that I know what to say, how to act, what cards to play to make me seem just the right mix of friendly and sympathetic. Sometimes getting invited inside is as simple as slipping them a crisp bill, but more often than not, it’s about gaining their trust, about making whoever’s on the other side of that door think you’re one of them.

And so, as soon as Maria motors away with a throaty vroom, I’m dusting off my old talents with the sourpuss nurse behind the Villa’s double glass doors. Leslie, according to her name tag. She glances up when I come through and holds up a finger, indicating I’m to wait until she’s off the phone.

“Exit twenty,” she says in a short, I’ve-got-better-things-to-do-here tone, then gives the person on the other end half-assed directions from the beltway. While she’s talking, I take a good look around.

The Villa’s lobby is light and friendly, the walls smeared a buttercream yellow and hung with the kind of framed pictures you’d expect in an assisted living facility—cheerful flowers and frolicking farm animals set against sunny landscapes. My gaze zooms in on the visitors’ log, on handwriting I recognize immediately. The neat block letters that are fat and round, their slight slant to the left. Maria Daniels, here to see Matthew Daniels, room 213.

A relative?

But Maria doesn’t have any family. I distinctly remember her telling me the last of them died in the year prior to Chelsea.

Then again, Maria hasn’t exactly proven to be the most trustworthy source.

Leslie hangs up, hauls a mammoth sigh. “Can I help you?”

I’m careful not to give her too big of a smile. Overworked and underpaid types like Leslie here want validation, not an ass-kissing.

“Yeah, my boss sent me over here to check out your facility. Apparently, Sunnybrook comes highly recommended for his disabled son, who I didn’t even know he had until it was suddenly in my job description to vet out his son’s new living arrangements.” I plant both forearms onto the counter and lean in conspiratorially. “Next thing you know, he’ll be asking me to bring him coffee and pick up his dry cleaning.”

She gives me a half-amused snort. “Sounds frighteningly familiar.”

“I’ll bet. Anyway—” I make a show of looking around “—this place looks nice. Do you maybe have a brochure or something?”

She fishes a packet from a drawer and passes it to me. “What type of disability does your boss’s son have?”

I give her a wry smile, wrapping my words in a what-can-you-do tone. “You and I might think sharing his disability would be essential information for vetting out a place, but we’d be wrong. My boss didn’t tell me anything other than the address.”

“Probably help your employee review, then, if I gave you a tour.”

“Omigod, totally. It might even get me my very first
good job
.”

Leslie squeezes out a smile, heaves herself out of her swivel chair and buzzes me through.

See? Easy as pie.

I trail her through the building as she gives her sales pitch, making notes on a blank page in the back of the brochure. I pepper her with questions about the resident population and the varying levels of care, on the campus and all its facilities, on the programs that are designed to enrich and empower. I don’t have to pretend to be fascinated by her talking points. Whoever Matthew Daniels is, he’s somewhere between early twenties and late thirties, moderately to severely mentally challenged and highly supervised.

A cousin? A brother? After everything I’ve learned from Ben, after everything I’ve seen here today, I’m starting to wonder if any of what Maria told me three years ago was even close to the truth.

We’re making our way through the second floor when a sudden and high-pitched squeal slices through the air and pierces my eardrums. Leslie looks more annoyed than surprised at the interruption. “Sorry,” she screams over the noise. “We’re going to have to cut this short.”

I nod and follow her around the corner toward the stairs, but we pull up short at the mass of residents clustered at the far end of the hall by the window. Their backs are huddled together, their hands pressed tightly over their ears. Leslie pushes through them like a linebacker, pausing for only a second or two in front of the glass, and then the crowd parts again, and my heart gives a lurch at the sight of Leslie’s expression as she reemerges. Without even a glance in my direction, she barrels past me and disappears into the stairwell.

A few moments later, the fire alarm stops its deafening shriek, as abruptly as a needle yanked from a record. The silence that follows is so heavy it’s tangible, a whole other noise punctuated with the soft sniffs of someone crying.

“What happened?” I say, pushing up onto my toes, trying to see, but a good dozen shoulders block my view. All I can make out from my spot behind them are treetops and the blue sky beyond.

One of them, a pudgy woman with the round and plump face of a muppet, turns back, her already impossibly large eyes bulging with an uninhibitedness that reveals her condition. “Another fire.”

“He set another fire,” someone wails between wet sniffs.

“Who did?”

“Matthew,” another says, and my ears perk up. Matthew Daniels? “It’s ’cause Maisie was just here. He always does bad things when Maisie’s been here.”

Something about the name teases the edges of my memory.
Maisie.
It flits away before I can grab hold.

“Who’s Maisie?” I ask.

“His sister.” Muppet Face presses hers into the window. “She’s pretty.”

Maisie Daniels.

There’s something about the name, a gritty taste behind my teeth I can’t quite place. I pull out my phone and type the words into the search field. The image that fills my screen hits me like a Fireball shot, lighting me up from inside. The cheesy backdrop, an obviously fake library background. The lopsided pigtails tied with red yarn. The chipped and bucked front teeth pushing through the slight smile. I see it, and my breath dries up.

“Fucking hell,” I mutter, and more than one person giggles.

It’s Maria’s—no,
Maisie’s
second-grade picture. The same one that was circulated back in 1996, when she was snatched from her bedroom in the middle of the night. The same one I stared at for the good part of my junior year in college six years later, when I wrote my term paper singing the praises of the media, which I maintained made a greater contribution than the Toledo police force in pulling her filthy, undernourished but still breathing body from that man’s basement. By the time the police got their act together and sent out a search party, the media had already plastered her face on every newspaper, milk carton and television screen across the continental United States. All the cops had to do, I argued, was wait for someone to recognize her.

My professor gave me a D-minus, but only because he liked me enough not to flunk me.

What I didn’t understand then, what I understand all too well now, is that media attention can be a double-edged sword. In Maria/Maisie’s case, the media saved her life, and yet it also exposed a scared, scarred eight-year-old girl to the world. It revealed all the awful things that man did to her, to her no-longer-innocent body. It imprinted her face, her story, every awful, horrific, gruesome detail, on the collective American memory.

You don’t survive a trauma like the one Maisie did undamaged. You don’t come out the other end unchanged. But damaged and changed enough to let others use her body for money, to put it on the internet for the world to see, even after it drove a former lover to suicide? An icy chill hijacks my spine at the answer:
yes
.

“Lady, are you okay? You don’t look too good.”

I look up into a pair of sweet, caring eyes. “No,” I say, “I don’t think I am.”

* * *

When I return home from Sunnybrook, Mandy is sitting at my desk, flipping through the Zach Armstrong printouts.

“Hi,” I say from the doorway, but she doesn’t answer. Her brow is furrowed in concentration, and she’s twirling a long strand of auburn hair around a finger as she always does when she’s thinking really hard. It’s not unusual that she’s here. Mandy is one of the few people with a key to my house, and she uses it often. I work from home. She works from home. Impromptu work sessions like this one are a regular thing.

Except Mandy’s not working. Her laptop lies closed and dark on the bookshelf behind her.

“Hi,” I say again, this time with a bit more muscle, and she startles, catching a good few inches of air on the chair.

“Jesus! Give a woman a warning, would you?” She presses a palm to her chest, blows out a long breath.

“I did. Twice now.” I cross the room to my desk, pull up my content curation software and begin entering the keywords for searches for Maria, Maisie and her brother, Matthew. It takes only a few seconds, and once I’m done, I swivel in my chair and gesture to my once-neat piles, now scattered across the surface of my desk as if a windstorm picked them up and dumped them there. “What are you doing here? Besides making a mess of my papers, that is.”

She spreads her arms wide. “The question is, what are
you
doing? If I didn’t know better, I’d say writing an article about Zach Armstrong.”

It’s no use not telling her. The only person on the planet with a curiosity determined enough to compete with mine is Mandy, and if I don’t admit to why I’ve plowed through a good chunk of the Amazon rainforest for printouts of everything ever written about Zach, she’ll hound me until I do. I give her a quick recap of my initial run-in with Gabe at Handyman and how, two days later, an anonymous package arrived on my front doorstep, revealing the name of a thirty-sixth soldier.

Mandy’s eyes go wide. “You don’t think that’s a little coincidental, meeting Gabe one day and finding this mysterious package on another? I mean, what are the odds?”

“Questionable at best. Which means whoever gave me that transcript wanted me to find Ricky, which as far as I can figure means they wanted me to reveal him to the world.”

“Are you going to?”

I shake my head. “Hell, no. I already told you, I’m done with that part of my life. But I had to do something, so I gave a copy of the transcript, unedited version, to the Armstrongs.”