Page 10 of All These Beautiful Strangers
Next to the picture of my father was a picture of my mother with a halolike glow around the edges. I recognized it. I had seen it hundreds of times at my Grandma Fairchild’s house hanging in the stairwell with the pictures of Uncle Hank and Uncle Lonnie and Uncle Will, my mother’s brothers. My mother couldn’t have been more than eighteen. She was wearing a soft, cream-colored dress, her hair loose around her shoulders, smiling at the camera. She looked so young and sweet and innocent in the picture next to my father. Doe-eyed and fragile. Something in my heart seized, and I started to read.
No one could have predicted that what started as a fairy tale would end so tragically. Grace Fairchild, daughter of mill worker Frank Fairchild and preschool teacher Alice Fairchild, had a humble upbringing in Hillsborough, Connecticut. When she caught the eye of billionaire Alistair Calloway, heir to the Calloway Group, she was introduced to a whole new world: a penthouse apartment on the Upper East Side, luxurious weekend trips on private jets, lavish gifts. Grace thought she had found her Prince Charming. Little did she know that beneath the surface lurked a killer.
“She was blinded by his charm, his money,” Grace’s older brother Hank says. “She didn’t see him clearly. And then when she saw what he really was, it was too late. That month before she went missing, Alistair and Grace fought constantly. She was going to ask him for a divorce. The night she disappeared, she told him to leave. They got into an argument. She screamed at him not to touch her anymore. She said, ‘Get your hands off me.’”
I stopped reading. I had told Uncle Hank about that. Sitting across from him in that cheap pizza parlor, sucking on that soda he had bought me as he plied me with questions, I had told him my mother’s last words to my father. Like a traitor. Like a worthless, pathetic traitor. But I hadn’t known he would do this—sell it to the highest bidder, for the whole world to see.
I had told him other things, too. Happy things. Why hadn’t he told them any of that?
I handed the tabloid back to Heather. The glossy pages felt slick and slimy under my fingers.
“It wasn’t like that,” I said. “How they make it sound. How he makes it sound. They weren’t getting a divorce.”
I couldn’t believe this was happening. Again.
When my mother had first gone missing, it had been big news—splashed across the cover of every gossip magazine, a topic on every news outlet. The police took my father away for questioning; there were search parties formed to comb the woods near the house and divers who searched the dark depths of Langely Lake. Everyone was looking for a body. Nobody ever found one.
It didn’t matter that my father had an alibi. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t even been at the house that night when she went missing; he was at our apartment in the city, a hundred miles away. It didn’t matter that my father had loved her, that he would never have hurt her. It was a dark and juicy story, and so people ate it up. Murderer, they whispered. Wife-killer, they said.
After my mother went missing, my father hired a private investigator to find her, and that’s when the investigator found the bank tapes. There was security footage at the local branch of Connecticut Mutual. Days before she disappeared, my mother withdrew hundreds of thousands of dollars from the safety-deposit boxes she shared with my father. She’d taken that money and walked out of our lives forever. I was seven; my sister, Seraphina, was barely five. The national news channels played those bank tapes for weeks—the humiliating evidence that proved my mother had robbed and abandoned us.
My father searched for her for a year and could never find so much as a trace of her. On the anniversary of her leaving, he let the private investigator go. He said if my mother was that determined not to be found, then he didn’t want to find her.
I had endured the stares, the pitying glances, the whispers, for a year after my mother left us—we had all endured it. And now, just when things were starting to return to normal, this happened.
I hate him, I thought. I would never forgive Uncle Hank for doing this to my father, for making me do this to my father. For this dark cloud that he had dragged over us when the storm had finally seemed as if it were starting to clear.
“It sure sounds like he did it,” Heather said, as if she hadn’t heard me. And I knocked those stupid glasses off her face, the metal stand under our feet leaving a permanent scratch on the left lens.
Later, my father sat me and my sister down in his study and told us we were not to speak to our uncle Hank again, that he wasn’t to come near us, unless my father was present. He couldn’t bring himself to look at me as he spoke, and I tried not to hold that against him.
“Your uncle Hank is not well,” my father said. And then he told us how we were going to live with our uncle Teddy and aunt Grier for a little bit, until things blew over. And I tried not to hold that against him, either.
Now I crumpled up the note Uncle Hank had left in my mailbox and threw it in the trash. I willed myself not to think about it.
I looked up and saw through the window to the mailroom Leo walking across the quad with Dalton and Crosby. Good, a distraction. I adjusted the strap of my bag over my shoulder and ran after them.
“It’s a fifty-dollar buy-in,” Crosby was saying when I caught up to them.
“Big plans for tonight?” I asked, slightly out of breath.
“Just a couple of guys playing a friendly game of five-card draw,” Leo said.
“Is this a ‘boys only’ thing because you’re scared to lose to a girl?” I asked.
Crosby put his arm around my shoulder. “Charlie, my boy Dalton here is the biggest feminist I know.”
“Yeah, male, female, I like to beat them all equally,” Dalton said. “I’m not afraid to take your money, Calloway.”
“All right, then,” I said. “What time are we talking?”
For the second night in a row, I snuck out of my window after curfew. Only this time, instead of heading to the Rosewood Hall parking lot, I headed north toward the edge of campus. The quickest way to the upperclassman boys’ dormitory was through a well-lit campus patrolled by Old Man Riley, Knollwood Prep’s security guard. Instead, I skirted the edge of campus, cutting through an undeveloped field, with grass that came up to my knees in places. There was just a sliver of moon in the sky to light my way.
Dalton’s room was on the ground floor of Acacia Hall, the upperclassman boys’ dorm. Because he was a senior, he had the entire room to himself. The boys had left a candle in the window in front of a closed curtain so I would know which room to go to. I knocked on the windowpane three times before Dalton swept back the curtain, blew out the candle, and let me in.
“We were beginning to wonder if you’d show,” Crosby said as Dalton shut his window behind me and drew the curtain tight so there was no chance of Old Man Riley’s catching a glimpse of our late-night game on his rounds. “You know, pregame jitters.”
Dalton had an old card table set up next to his single bed. On the other side was his swivel desk chair and on the third side of the table was a trunk. I was the last to arrive and so there was only one seat left: a spot on Dalton’s bed next to Crosby.
