Full Ride (15 page)

Mrs. Congreves goes back to shaking her head, more emphatically than ever.

“It's not really . . . my place . . . to tell you that,” she says.

“Then whose place is it?” I'm almost begging now.

Mrs. Congreves keeps shaking her head. All the warmth has gone out of her eyes.

“You would have to talk to the Courts about that,” she says. “It's really for the family to decide who they tell and who they don't.”

She glances at her watch.

“Oh, dear, how did it get so late?” she asks, in a totally different voice than she's been using with me all along. It's like she's not even trying to keep it from sounding fake. “I'm sorry, young lady, but I think we're going to have to end this. I do have other obligations.”

This from the woman who assured me over the phone when I said I had a lot of questions, “Oh, that's no problem! I've got nothing on my schedule this afternoon.”

“Please,” I say to her. “Please
explain
.”

“I really can't,” Mrs. Congreves says, and it's so odd: For
someone who clearly loves to talk, it sounds like she's relieved not to have to tell me anything else. It's like a magician's trick: She may still be sitting right in front of me, but she's vanished from the conversation.

“Can I show you to the door?” she asks.

She stands up so abruptly, her wicker chair slams against the wall.

I am on autopilot now. I have a moment of flashing back to how I behaved during Daddy's trial: Stand when someone tells you to stand; walk when someone tells you to walk. Your head may be spinning, but somehow your body can do what it's supposed to.

Without quite realizing it, I propel myself out of my chair and stumble across the floor. Mrs. Congreves grabs my arm to help me—or, maybe, to make sure I keep moving.

My mind is stuck on repeat:
But . . . But . . . But . . .

We reach the front door, and I resist the temptation to brace my feet against the doorframe and refuse to go. What good would that do?

“Good luck with your essay,” Mrs. Congreves says.

And then she gives me a little shove. I stumble out onto the front porch.

She immediately shuts the door behind me.

I stand numbly on Mrs. Congreves's porch.

What was that all about?
I wonder.

I half expect the door to spring back open, Mrs. Congreves to come bursting back out:
Oh, all right. I'll tell you the rest of Whitney's story.

That doesn't happen. The door stays firmly shut.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see the blinds of Mrs. Congreves's front window twitch slightly: She's checking to see if I've left yet.

She might call the cops,
I think.
The cops could look up my records; they might even tap into some database that shows the connection to Daddy . . . then they'd treat me like a felon's daughter . . . my secret would spread . . .

I'm extrapolating way too much—thinking too much like Mom—but at least I understand the problem of being related to Daddy. I can't understand anything about Whitney. I stumble on out to Mom's car, which I've borrowed for this expedition. I put the key in the ignition, turn it, drive slowly down Mrs. Congreves's driveway. Barely thinking, I veer into the next
driveway over, the one leading to Whitney Court's old house.

I pull to the edge of the driveway and stop the car. A wind chime dangling by the patio sends out an eerie tinkle. Was that wind chime there fifteen years ago, when Whitney lived here?

Why would it have been?
I think.
No Court has lived here in a decade. They probably couldn't stand to stay after Whitney . . . what? If she didn't die, was she maybe kidnapped? Is that what happened? Is that what destroyed her?

I tell myself that's a ridiculous theory. If she'd been kidnapped, everybody would know. There would have been all sorts of references online, and people would still talk about it. The Courts would have spent their money trying to find her, not giving out scholarships.

I take the car out of park and let it inch forward slightly. Two of my tires are on the grass, digging into the Courts' former lawn. There are no other cars in the driveway, but I think I see a flicker of movement through one of the back windows of the house. It could have been a dog or a cat or a shadow or just my imagination, but I still hit the brake.

It feels like many eyes might be watching me: from Mrs. Congreves's house, from the Courts' old house, from the dozens and dozens of McMansions stretching toward the horizon. I am behaving suspiciously, and for what? Even if someone is home at the Courts' old house, there's no reason anyone there would know Whitney.

I put the car in reverse and back up to the road. It's a public road; there's nothing suspicious about me driving here. I make myself accelerate to a normal speed and drive home. But I'm still dazed.

I can tell the apartment is empty as soon as I step inside. Mom has left a note on the table:

Bec,

They called me in early b/c 3 day-shift nurses got sick. Kelly's picking me up and will bring me home tomorrow. So you've got the car all night. (Be careful!)

Love,

Mom

P.S. If I keep getting overtime—or a second job?—maybe it won't matter if you can't apply for financial aid. We'll pay for everything on our own.

I crumple the note in my hand. Has Mom gone totally nuts? Does she have any clue what college actually costs? She can talk all she wants about being poor but honest and paying our own way, but financial aid is going to be the only route for me, unless I really do get a full-ride scholarship.

And that brings me back to Whitney Court.

Maybe Mrs. Congreves is just senile and confused?
I tell myself.
And she just doesn't remember that Whitney died?

Mrs. Congreves didn't
seem
senile—it's hardly a sign of dementia that she couldn't remember whether an imaginary animal from fifteen or twenty years ago was a pig or a cat. But I decide to try calling the Congreves daughters.

“Hello, you've reached Tiffany Congreves at Imagitechnics. Please leave a message.”

“Hi, Tiffany here, or, actually, not here . . . You know what to do if you want me to call back.”

“You've reached the offices of Dillman Incorporated. If you are calling after hours . . .”

“Rachel's not available right now, so . . .”

I've run through all their numbers, work and home and cell. I don't leave any messages. I want to know what happened to Whitney Court right
now
, not whenever Mrs. Congreves's daughters feel like calling back some stranger who thinks their mother might be senile.

I glance at the clock. It's five forty-five p.m., a time when normal adults like the Congreves girls—er, women—would be driving home from work or maybe starting to fix dinner or hanging out with their boyfriend/significant others. (Mrs. Congreves said they each have one.) They probably won't answer their phones for an unidentified number anytime soon.

I think of looking up the Courts' new number in Cincinnati and calling them—Mrs. Congreves did say they were the ones to talk to about whatever happened to Whitney.

Yeah, right,
I think.
That would make a great impression: “So if your kid's not dead, what happened to her?” I bet that would make them blackball me from the scholarship, right there.

I want to talk to
somebody
about this. I think of Rosa's “Us poor kids have to stick together,” but I don't want to admit to anyone I'm competing against that I'm so woefully confused.

Jala,
I think.
She's not competing for this scholarship.

I dial her number. I get her voice mail too, her musical voice saying she's sorry she can't answer in person.

I clear my throat and start rambling: “Hi, uh, I was hoping you could talk . . . I just had the weirdest conversation about that scholarship and I thought maybe you could help me figure something out . . . Anyhow, call me when you can. And, uh, hope everything's going okay at OSU . . .”

A beep cuts me off before I'm done talking.

I sit there, staring down at the phone. Who else do I want to call?

Daddy,
I think.

I drop the phone. I ball up my hands into fists and pound them against my forehead:
No, no, no!

I do not want to talk to Daddy. Even if I did, it's not like I could call the prison in California and they'd casually bring him to the phone, at my whim.

But Daddy would know how to find out about Whitney,
I tell myself.
He knew how to find out anything about anybody online. You could just pretend you were talking to him. You could just do what you know he would tell you to do.

I am so tempted.

The computer knowledge itself didn't make Daddy a criminal,
I remind myself.
It was how he used it.

I sit down at the table and open my laptop.

“I'm not breaking any laws,” I say out loud as I turn it on. “I'm not doing anything an ordinary person couldn't do, if they knew how.”

The computer fires up, and I type in the words “social security death records.” This takes me to a genealogy website that promises access to eighty-nine million records, from all fifty states.

How old was I when I first saw Daddy playing around with this site?
I wonder.
Eight? Nine? Ten?

I can remember sneaking up on him in his office as a prank; I was young enough to be amused by the panic that raced across his face. I thought that meant my prank was a good one, not that he was afraid I'd be smart enough to figure out he was doing something wrong.

I wasn't that smart. Not then. And he covered quickly.

“Oh, here I am acting like such an old man, looking up relatives who have been dead for years,” he said with a rueful laugh.

I knew to look respectfully sad. All of Daddy's closest relatives were dead. Or at least that's what he'd told us.

“Let's turn this into a game an old man can play with his daughter,” Daddy said, teasingly ruffling my hair. Now I'm suspicious: Was he just doing that so his arm would block my view of the screen while he closed down whatever else he had open? Was it something I might have asked questions about?

Regardless, we began competing to come up with the most boring names we could think of. We got points for both dullness and the number of people who had died in the United States bearing that name. I won with “Joe Gray,” which had been carried by more than eight thousand dead people.

“And it's boring and colorless, almost by definition!” Daddy said. “Gray—perfect! I could never beat that!”

Later, after Daddy was arrested, I found out that “Joe Gray” was one of the most common fake identities he used in his scams. He used it for years.

Was I supposed to feel honored that Daddy valued my suggestion that much? As he looked at the death records that day, was he thinking,
Wow, Becca is really good at this. I'll definitely have to bring her into the family business when she gets a little older?

Did anybody besides Daddy and me ever know that “Joe Gray” was my idea?

I realize I am pressing down on the keyboard so hard that it hurts. I'm making an incoherent row of
k
's and
d
's and
f
's.

I take my hands off the keys and clench them together.

“You're not doing anything wrong,” I tell myself once again.

I erase my mistakes and type in the name “Whitney Elaine Court”—I know her middle name from the yearbooks. I don't know her exact birthdate, but I know she turned eighteen in
May of her senior year—they had a birthday cake for her during the cast party for the musical. So I can put in the month and the year.

No death records come up. Does that mean Mrs. Congreves was right and Whitney is still alive?

Maybe Whitney got married,
I tell myself.
Maybe that's why nothing's showing up, because she had a different name when she died.

The same genealogy website brags about having marriage records from all fifty states, so I try Whitney's name and birth month and year on that search form instead.

Nothing.

I sit back, staring at the screen.

Maybe she died overseas?
I wonder.
Maybe she studied abroad during college and something awful happened to her? Maybe she was on some sort of volunteer trip to some dangerous part of the world?

I'm pretty sure that would still show up in the social security records. But maybe there was some mistake.

Wouldn't there be newspaper articles about that?
I think.
Wouldn't I have found an obituary, if nothing else?

Not on the regular Web. Not from thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years ago.

That's why you go to the deep Web if you really want an answer. . . . On the deep Web, pretty much anything that's ever been on the Internet is still there . . .

I can hear Daddy saying that. It's like he's infested my mind tonight. Reinfested. Whatever.

But he gave that advice when I was a fifth grader doing homework,
I think.
He wouldn't have told me to do anything illegal when I was just a little kid!

How else am I supposed to find out anything about Whitney?
She's not dead, not married, not on Facebook, not on LinkedIn, not employed in any job that shows up online . . .

If I didn't know better, I'd think Whitney didn't even exist!