“Her?”
“Mother. Margaret Croft.”
If you were found dead with a three-inch-long piece of unchewed meat blocking your windpipe, chances are someone might suspect it was murder. Especially if Soviet spies were chasing you.
That’s what I was thinking about the next morning at school while I watched an arrogant smile cross the face of my chess opponent, a seventeen-year-old who believed he was the center of the universe because he’d been plopped into the crib somewhere in the depths of a mansion within hours of his birth.
His name was Jed Murgoyd. Tall, braces, wire-rim glasses and an already
developed set of wrinkles around his mouth from constantly pursing it in disapproval at the world. He thought he was a chess expert because he understood terms like Qg3 and Nd5, algebraic notation for chess moves. He also thought he was an expert because he’d thrown a Marshall Defense at me in what at this point was an unfolding attempt to mimic a classic 1925 game between Frank James Marshall and Alexander Alekhine. As if I couldn’t recognize it.
We were hunched on opposite sides of a chess board in a cafeteria called Lounge A in Bishops Prep High School—a frequent scene in my alternate but artificial life.
This was the kind of school where the hallways were always hushed in anticipation of yet another graduate somewhere in the country sending word of yet another coronation. Senator.
CEO
of a major corporation. Prime minister. Those kinds of achievements, all adding
yet another photo to yet another hallway so that the rest of us could walk beneath their gazes with the unspoken promise that yes, we too would honor the school’s tradition.
Murgoyd and I had reached move fourteen on the board. I’d just gone Qe3 from Qd2—sent my queen from the second row forward and the square fourth from the left to the third row forward and fifth from the left—a back-to-back move that should have alerted him that I was replicating Alekhine’s strategy. Inching forward like that on the surface showed fear, especially given Alekhine’s reputation for a fierce and imaginative attacking style.
Now I had to sit and watch the permutations cross Murgoyd’s face. Was he going to pretend to take the bait and follow in Marshall’s footsteps by attacking with bishop to c6? Or would he actually do something original in his life?
Which gave me time. Too much time. To wonder about who had been wearing
the white Converse shoes and why Raven and Jo had shown up at the gym and how the cops had arrived so quickly and what they had been expecting.
Much more pleasant to think about the inglorious end of Alexander Alekhine, which was officially blamed on a heart attack even after the autopsy strongly implied that someone had shoved steak down his throat. But hey, those were the Russians, and that was the Cold War. Not nice and civilized like now, when people taped curling irons to your hands.
It hurt just to twitch my fingers. That was another thing I didn’t want to think about. What it would be like later in the day to form fists inside boxing gloves and repeatedly slam a heavy bag for half an hour.
Finally, Murgoyd made his move. Bishop to c6. Shocker. A diagonal move that left his king slightly exposed.
I pretended to think. The best move would have been to switch castle and
king 0-0-0, and he would have probably followed suit on the opposite end of the board, but a shorter distance 0-0.
Instead, I messed with Murgoyd by moving Qf4, putting him in a position of taking my unprotected queen.
There should have been gasps around me—if the spectators were knowledgeable about chess. My chess games usually drew the dweeb crowd, most of them posers following the school’s current fashion of celebrating intellect. The posing stopped at the end of the school day, because girls never choose the smart ones, but during school hours it impressed the teachers, and Bishops Prep was the kind of school where that actually mattered.
Murgoyd, at least, wasn’t a poser, and he muttered, not believing my stupidity. And because I wasn’t known as a stupid player, this made him doubly suspicious. Was I throwing a Marshall move right back at him? Frank James Marshall had become legendary for his “swindle”
moves—using tricks that seemed like magic to turn games around.
The dweebs around us leaned in for a better look, only because they had been clued in by Murgoyd’s muttering and were trying to understand what was unusual about my chess move.
It was exactly what I needed. At this moment, at the far end of the lounge, Jo was nudging open Jed Murgoyd’s backpack. She was wearing one of our school’s boy uniforms and had performed the anatomically impossible feat of taking the curves out of her body to become almost invisible as a boy.
I knew she was digging out Murgoyd’s keys and needed less than sixty seconds to make an impression of them.
The reason was simple, really. She believed she needed to, so that Raven could steal a painting from Murgoyd’s father and Jo could then forge it.
Did I care that I was in danger of losing a chess game because of it? Yes, I did care.
If he won, I’d have to put up with Murgoyd’s haughty superiority until a rematch.
So I dug in and found a way to kick Murgoyd’s butt, taking petty satisfaction when he was forced to topple his king. Murgoyd had no idea what had happened to his backpack. But then, neither did Jo. Because the key I’d helped her steal was one I’d planted there ahead of time.
Raven stood on the sidewalk across from the Greyhound bus station, where I had just pulled up. The top was down on the Mustang convertible so that I could talk to her without rolling down the passenger window. I was not in a great mood. Inching through downtown traffic in Vancouver will do that to a person, even when the sun is shining. It didn’t help my mood that my hands were scabbing from blisters that had broken while I was working the heavy bag in the gym the evening before.
“This cloak-and-dagger stuff is getting old,” I told her. Her instructions had been
to head toward Chinatown for our 11:00
AM
meeting. She had then called my cell five minutes before eleven to give me the final destination, so I wouldn’t know ahead of time where she would be waiting. Obviously, she still suspected I would try to set up some kind of trap. Given my own plans, she had no idea how right she was not to trust me.
“Get used to it,” she said. Then walked around to my side of the car and opened the door. “I’m driving.”
Behind us, a woman in a Toyota Prius honked.
Raven flipped her the bird.
The woman honked again.
“Excuse me,” Raven said. “I’ll have this handled by the time you get in the passenger seat.”
I didn’t like someone telling me what to do. But it would feel good not to have to grip the steering wheel. And it would suit my purpose for Raven to believe she
was in control. Besides, she was a car thief. I could trust her ability to drive.
I stepped out of the Mustang while Raven strolled to the Prius to have a chat with the woman behind us. To my right were the bus terminal and the railway station. Plenty of pedestrians. And plenty of homeless people. Beautiful weather for an aimless morning.
As I walked around the hood of the Mustang, I saw Raven leaning into the driver’s window of the Prius. The Mustang was jet black. The Prius, appropriately, a dull green.
Raven returned to the Mustang and slid into the driver’s seat.
“Nice chat?” I said. As far as I could tell, no punches had been thrown.
“I pointed out that her smug self-righteousness at driving a Prius was misplaced. That studies have shown a gas-guzzling Tahoe
SUV
has a smaller carbon footprint than her I’m-better-
than-the-rest-of-the-world status symbol. People don’t put together what it takes to have all those batteries for a Prius. I say ride a bike or take the bus.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s nice.”
Raven patted the steering wheel. “Slumming it, are we?”
The convertible was less than two weeks old. But the last car she’d seen me in was a Lamborghini.
“Borrowed it,” I said. “From a girl at school.”
I saw a slight tensing of her jaw muscles. I knew she didn’t like Bishops Prep and the pretentiousness there. It upset her that a daddy would give his teenage daughter a brand-new Mustang. It was an attitude I understood. And shared.
“Just took a flash of your pearly whites, did it?” Raven asked. “A flex or two of your biceps and she tossed you the keys?”
“Shallow gender stereotyping doesn’t suit you,” I said. “By suggesting I am just
a pretty face and that she cares only for my body, you belittle her and me.”
“Exactly,” Raven said. And gunned the Mustang, swerving hard. The rear tires squealed and slid across the asphalt, and a split second later we were facing the opposite direction, accelerating hard.
Two seconds later, she stomped on the brake for the red light at the intersection.
“You know,” I said, aware of people staring at us, “the entire point of my borrowing someone else’s car was to be inconspicuous. Perhaps you don’t understand the definition of that word.”
I spoke slowly, breaking it down to syllables. “In. Con. Spic. U. Ous.”
“And perhaps you don’t understand how dangerous I am when I’m in a bad mood,” Raven said. “This whole break-in thing is Mickey Mouse. It’s not like we’re hitting some skid-row house with bars across the windows. A place like this, on the coastline, it’s going to run in the millions. We’re talking sophisticated security.
Video, silent alarm, maybe even rent-a-cop patrols. I have no idea of the layout or what we’re up against. And I’m supposed to trust that you’ve got all the angles covered? A trust-fund kid who trades down from a Lamborghini to a Mustang and whose most difficult decisions in life are whether to ring the maid for tea or coffee with breakfast?”
I should have been offended by her insults. But I took her anger as a good sign. It meant she was distracted. I needed her distracted. If she stayed distracted, she wouldn’t see the scam I was pulling on her.
“Got the breakfast decision covered,” I said. “Usually Earl Grey tea. And freshly squeezed orange juice.”
The light turned green. She floored the Mustang and expertly fought the skid, then zipped in and out of the traffic.
I hid my smile. Yup. An angry person was easier to fool than one who was thinking.
The drive took a little over half an hour. From the grittiness of the east end of downtown Vancouver, we traveled through layers of wealth reflected by buildings and storefronts that went from tattoo parlors and pawnshops to fur-coat storage and jewelry stores, from motels to high-rise luxury hotels. The end of downtown threw us into Stanley Park, onto the Lions Gate Bridge, then past the immaculate lawns and pruned hedges and trees of West Vancouver. We followed the Trans-Canada Highway until it abandoned us for the ferry terminal at Horseshoe Bay. We jumped onto Highway 99—the Sea
to Sky Highway—to follow the coastline north, a route familiar to me because of endless trips during my childhood.
My phone’s turn-by-turn directions were the only sounds in the car.
Deep-green, tree-covered coastal mountains to our right. Flashes of the waters of the strait to our left. Then an exit right and a left-hand turn onto the overpass and into a gated community, well screened from the highway noise by trees and walls.
I opened the glove compartment and pulled out a garage-door opener. I pointed it at the gate and clicked. The gate swung open.
“She lives in this community too?” Raven said, referring to the girl she believed had loaned me the car.
I shrugged, knowing my insolence would stoke Raven’s anger. “The millionaire-billionaire community is not large.”
Raven gave me a deadpan glance that said she wasn’t impressed. She drove us around the curves, past the high hedges
and to where the road dead-ended at a house high enough to be visible over the walls that guarded it.
“Go up the driveway and park,” I said, “like we are expected friends.”
“I don’t need that kind of help from you,” she snarled. “What I need to know is which of the keys works.”
At Bishops Prep, when Jo had made impressions of the keys in Murgoyd’s backpack during the chess game, she’d had no choice but to take impressions of all seven keys before returning them to his backpack. Two were obviously car keys, so that left us with five.
“It will be easy to figure out. Try them one by one and see which fits.”
“Remind me again how you know the security code?” she said.
“Nope,” I said. “I need to protect my source.”
“I don’t like this.”
“I’m in just as much danger as you are,” I said. “You’ll have to trust me. Wear the
ballcap in the trunk and keep your head down. The video cameras won’t be able to identify you.”
“I don’t—”
“I know. You don’t trust me. Too bad. I’m going to sit in the car,” I said. “You know, as lookout.”
“First,” she said, “call again. I want to hear the phone ringing.”
This was a realistic request. I’d assured her that I’d been at this house many times. That there was a phone near the front entrance.
I pulled out my cell. An unanswered phone meant no one was home. I dialed the number, confident that when she reached the door, she’d hear the phone.
With the cell phone to my ear, I smiled sweetly at Raven. “Go ahead. And don’t forget the painting. It’s in the trunk.”
“Idiot,” she said.
Such venom.
She popped the trunk and took out a small backpack. The painting wasn’t large.
It was the forgery I had asked Jo to do for me.
I was impressed at her acting. She flounced up the driveway with the backpack slung over her shoulder on one strap, like she was one of the privileged, one of the elite, one of the few.
She disappeared around a corner of the hedge.
I leaned back and lifted my face to the sun. The warmth felt good.
I closed my eyes briefly but opened them again as I heard tires on the driveway and the idling of a car. I glanced in the rearview mirror.