Unraveling Isobel (25 page)

Or maybe it did work, because it seemed as if I closed my eyes for a second, but when I rolled over and looked at the clock, my heart stopped. I was late for school! I jumped out of bed and stood in the middle of the room trying to figure out what to do first. Another look at the clock confirmed it; I wasn't going to have time for a shower. A quick swipe of deodorant was going to have to do. I yanked on a pair of jeans and a shirt and pulled my hair into a ponytail. I looked in the mirror. Yikes. I put on some lipstick and mascara. It helped a bit, but there was no risk anyone was going to think I was a beauty pageant contestant who had wandered into school by accident.

I stuffed the copy of
Alice in Wonderland
into my backpack and ran down the stairs. Dick came out of the kitchen.

“Ah, it's you. I thought perhaps with all that noise that a herd of circus elephants had broken free from their paddock
and were thundering down the stairs.” Dick had a smear of jam on his upper lip. He was smiling at me.

Ever since our fight he'd redoubled his efforts to come across as my closest buddy. The day after, he'd made a big show of apologizing to me in front of my mom. That way he could be the good guy and I could be the difficult moody one. Now that I knew about the papers, I had to fight the urge to push him away from me.

“There was something for you in the mail this morning.” Dick passed me an envelope. The return address was blank and the envelope looked rumpled. I peered at the postmark. The letter had been mailed from Oregon. It was from my dad. I stuffed the letter in my bag before anyone tried to take it from me.

“Thanks.” I gave him a thin-lipped smile and looked around him into the kitchen. Thank God, Nate was back.

“Can I grab a ride with you?” I asked him.

Nate looked up from his bowl of cereal. “Sure. Let me finish breakfast and we'll go.”

I stood by the kitchen door with my bag.

“Someone is eager to start her school day. Come on in and I'll make you some toast,” Dick said.

“No, thanks.” I shifted my weight and tried to send thought waves into Nate's brain.

“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Jump-starts the brain.” Dick waved a piece of bread in my face.

“Richard, don't pick on her,” my mom said.

When did Dick become the toast pimp? Did he feel some sort of need to shove carbs onto other people? The last thing I was going to do was take anything from that guy. For all I knew it would have arsenic in it. People who displeased Dick were suspiciously accident prone.

“I don't want any breakfast.”

“Oh, come on, just a nibble. You're getting too skinny.” Dick poked me in the waist and I slapped his hand away.

The smack sounded very loud in the kitchen. Everyone stopped what they were doing.

“Oh, Isobel,” my mom said sadly.

“I don't want him touching me,” I said.

Dick's eyes filled with crocodile tears. “Emotional outbursts. They talked about this.”

“Who talked about what?” I asked.

“Why didn't you tell me you dropped out of cheerleading?” my mom asked.

“I was going to tell you.”

Mom's and Dick's eyes met across the kitchen. Mom wiped her hands on the kitchen towel. “We've made an appointment for you in Seattle.” She raised her hand before I could say anything. “This isn't open for discussion.”

I looked at Dick. I knew what he was doing, getting rid of me.

Nate tipped his cereal bowl so he could drink the last of the milk. “Let's go.”

“Do you want to drive?” Nate asked as we got out to the car.

“No, I need to talk to you, and I'm not sure I can talk and focus on the road at the same time.”

Nate touched my arm. “Don't worry about this stupid appointment. Anyone who meets you can tell you're fine.”

I waved off his comment; for once my mental health wasn't my biggest worry. By the time I jumped into the passenger seat, I was ready to explode. I pulled my dad's letter out from my bag and opened it with shaking hands. It was short.

Dearest Isobel,

I love you. Always have, always will. Call me collect anytime you want to talk. I've been listening with my heart before you ever opened your mouth.

Love, Dad

His number was scribbled at the bottom. I folded it carefully and put it in my pocket. I wanted it close to me.

Nate slammed the door as he climbed into the driver's seat. There was so much I needed to tell him that I didn't know where to start. The words were logjammed in my throat. How do you tell the guy you like that you think his dad might be a murderer? He looked over at me before he turned the key.

“Listen, I'm sorry about last night. I shouldn't have taken off like that.” Nate chewed on his lower lip.

It took me a beat to realize what he was talking about. So much had happened since then, I'd almost forgotten how we left things.

“It doesn't matter,” I said.

“No, it does. I don't want to be one of those people who runs away from conflict instead of dealing with it.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but he cut me off.

“I went to the party last night.” He tilted his head back. “You were right. It was a mistake.”

“I'm serious. It doesn't matter.”

“Nicole kissed me.”

I felt my brain screech to a halt. WTF? “She kissed you,” I repeated. So was he saying that he didn't kiss her back?

“We were sitting there just talking, and then she leaned over and kissed me.” He turned to face me. “I pushed her back right away.”

“What did Nicole do?”

“She wasn't happy.”

“She's not the kind of girl who's used to a lot of noes.”

“I don't care what she thinks. I care what
you
think. Nothing happened, but I wanted you to hear this from me and not someone at school.” He tilted my chin up with his finger. “I'd never lie to you.”

“I know,” I whispered back, and somehow I
did
know. Nate was like someone from another time. He was one of those people who meant it when he gave you his word. His character mattered
to him. I would totally have smothered him with kisses to show him what a stand-up kind of guy I thought he was, except for the fact that we were still parked in our driveway.

“What did you want to tell me?” he asked.

“I figured it out.”

“Figured what out?”

“The one, two, three thing.”

Nate read my expression. “It's bad, isn't it?”

I nodded.

“Is it my dad? Is he doing it?”

I looked past Nate to see Dick peering at us through the living room curtains. I had the eerie feeling that somehow he could tell what we were talking about. “I'll tell you later. Can you go now?” I hunched down in my seat. Nate turned around and saw his dad in the window and then glanced back at me.

“Okay. You can tell me on the way.”

I waited until we were past the orchard and turning onto the main road. Then I took a deep breath and jumped in.

“It wasn't one, two, three; it was one twenty-three.”

Nate parked in the back of the student lot. He had asked a few questions when I started, but he hadn't said anything for the past few minutes. The car was off, but he sat looking straight out the windshield, his hands at ten and two on the steering wheel. I watched everyone streaming into school. It was raining, so everyone was rushing. With umbrellas and their hoods
up it was hard to tell who anyone was.

“Are you sure, Isobel? Maybe it wasn't what it looked like,” Nate said, breaking the silence at last. His voice was tight and thin.

“I brought everything.” I fished through my bag and pulled out the book. Nate's hand hovered over it as if he wasn't sure if he wanted to touch it. I opened the book myself and pulled out the papers, handing them over.

Nate looked over the pages, flipping back and forth. His finger traced over the writing at the bottom of the one page.

“I remember my mom talking about this treatment, just before …” His voice trailed off for a beat. “Just before she died. It was a one-on-one therapy that was supposed to reestablish neural pathways or some such thing. She was really excited for Evie to try it. She figured Evie was so young that her brain would be more open to change, more flexible or something.”

“It looks like she went to get money for the treatment, only to find out it was missing.”

“It wasn't missing; my dad took it. He stole that money right out from under my mom and sister.”

I could see his jaw tighten like he was grinding his teeth together. I rested my hand on his arm. “Do you know what your dad spent the money on?”

“If I had to guess, it would be the house. The whole place is a giant money pit. The wiring is old; the plumbing is even older. There's always wood rot, or the roof is leaking something. My
dad's been saying for years that if he didn't do something soon with the west wing, it was really going to start falling apart. I never asked where he was getting the money to chip away at things. My mom wanted to sell it. There were people a few years ago who wanted to buy the place and turn it into an inn with a spa and everything. I remember my parents fighting about it. My mom wanted to buy a regular house.”

“Something without a ballroom?”

Nate smiled. “At least a smaller ballroom.”

“There's more,” I said. “The phone number scribbled at the bottom is an attorney's office. The firm specializes in divorce. It's the biggest one in Seattle. Really well-known. My mom used to work there.”

Nate looked up, surprised. “Do you think my mom and your mom knew each other?”

“I don't know. If your mom called this firm, then my mom would have at least talked to her on the phone. She was the receptionist there.”

“If my mom knew my dad took Evie's money, she'd consider getting a divorce. They already didn't have a great relationship. My mom was a major momma bear when it came to my sister. She would have done anything for her. She blamed herself for Evie's accident. I think she thought she should have been able to do something. After she was born, Evie was in the hospital for months, and it was pretty clear that she wasn't ever going to be normal. The doctors mentioned
the option of putting my sister in some kind of home. My mom lost it. She was never going to let that happen.”

“She sounds like she was a great mom,” I said softly.

“Yeah.” Nate took several deep breaths, and I could tell he was trying hard not to cry. “She would have left my dad when she heard this. There would have been no ‘I'm sorry' big enough to make up for it. So I can understand how she'd run into your mom, but how did your mom and my dad meet? I can tell you my mom wouldn't have been in the mood to make any introductions.”

“I've been thinking about that. Our parents say they met in June, but what if they didn't? What if they were together before your mom passed away? If your dad had known she was talking to a lawyer, he could have called the law firm, too, looking for information.”

“You think they were having an affair?”

“Maybe. I wondered … what if my mom knew your mom was looking for a divorce?”

“Then if your mom told my dad … He can be pretty charming when he wants information.”

“Yep.”

Nate shook his head. “Then what? Do you think your mom and my dad conspired to kill my mom? That's stupid. People get divorced all the time. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but there would be no reason to kill anyone.”

“If your parents got divorced, would your dad have to sell
the house? I mean, would your mom want to split it so she'd have money to take care of Evie?”

Nate slumped in his seat. He looked like a balloon that someone had let half the air out of.

“I hadn't thought of that. My dad would never sell the house. Never. He loves that house more than anything—me, my sister, my mom.”

I hated to see Nate like this. He looked lost, alone. I slid closer to him in my seat. “I'm thinking out loud. I'm not sure of anything. I could be way off base.”

Nate didn't say anything. He was staring down at his hands on his lap as if they were a crystal ball that was going to have the answer to this mess.

“Or maybe my mom and your dad did know each other, but nothing happened,” I suggested. I had been desperate to talk to Nate, to tell him this news, but now that I had, I wanted to take it all back. This is what everyone talks about when they say if you unburden yourself, you're shoving the burden onto someone else. “Or, you know, it could also be one of those things where the whole thing is just one of those random coincidences. You hear about that stuff all the time. Once I read this story about these guys who lived next door to each other and both had wives with the same name, and it turned out they were twins who'd been separated at birth.”

Nate looked up and me, and I forced myself to stop talking.

“You're right. This paper doesn't have to mean anything, but it does. If we'd just found it in a desk, that might be something, but you found it because my sister, my dead sister, is sending messages from the beyond to lead us to it.”

I didn't say anything. He had a point.

“My sister is trying to tell us something. She tried to tell me, and I didn't listen. I was so impatient that I had to go to a party.” Nate slapped his hand on the steering wheel. I rested my hand on his arm.

“Don't be so hard on yourself. It wasn't like you didn't try.”

“But instead of sticking with it, I quit. Just like my dad. He never had any patience for Evie. He used to get annoyed when she was trying to say something, and he'd cut her off or make a guess about what she wanted to say, or he'd pass her off to my mom.”

“You're nothing like your dad.” I rubbed his shoulder, wishing I could do something more to make it okay.