Линвуд Баркли - Find You First

Chloe thought about what she’d seen on the computer. “Why would Todd be looking up old-age homes? He told me his grandparents are all passed on, right?”

Madeline nodded. “Yup. All passed on. Why would you ask that?”

“It was on his computer,” she said.

Madeline thought about that. “I guess you should ask him.”

“I should ask him?”

“You’re his sister,” Todd’s mother said.

“I’ve only been his sister for a couple of weeks.”

“That’s not true. You’ve always been his sister. You only just found out recently. That’s different.”

“Still, you know him a lot better than I do. I think if anyone’s going to talk to him it should—”

“No, no, I think you came into our life for a reason.” Her eyes seemed to drift skyward for a second. “I think you came into our life to help Todd find his way. He can’t stop talking about you.” She laughed. “If you weren’t his sister, well, I think he’d be very interested in you in a different way.”

Chloe shivered. “Yeah, well, thanks for that. I’m really glad to have connected with Todd, too. And, you know, if he ever needs someone to talk to...”

“That’s wonderful. I’m so glad you feel that way. Okay, let’s do your little movie.” She sat back in her chair and flashed Chloe a Hollywood smile.

Madeline was sitting on the couch in front of Todd’s TV, watching Family Feud , her right leg resting on a plastic milk crate, an ice pack under her ankle, when it came time to say goodbye.

“You okay if I don’t get up?” she said.

“No problem,” Chloe said, standing at the door.

“Give us a kiss before you go,” she demanded. Chloe bent over to give the woman a peck on the cheek, but got pulled into another hug. “Don’t be a stranger. And don’t forget what I asked you.”

“Sure thing,” Chloe said.

“Walk you to your car,” Todd said.

Once outside, he said to her, “She can be a bit much sometimes. But she’s really happy to meet you. Did she give you a good interview?”

“Yeah.” Chloe paused, wondering whether to get into it. “She’s worried about you.”

“What else is new?”

“She says you’re getting into some bad shit, but she doesn’t exactly know what.”

“She imagines things,” Todd said.

“Why did you have a list of old folks homes on your computer screen?”

“Huh?”

“I saw it. Before you closed your laptop. Why would you be researching those kinds of places?”

“I might have gotten on the page by mistake.”

“Why’d you have two cell phones?”

Todd blinked. “Who says I have two cell phones?”

“They were sitting right there.”

He shrugged. “Just a backup. You know, in case one dies.”

They’d reached Chloe’s Pacer. “Let me tell you a story,” she said. “I go visit my grandfather a lot.”

“Yeah, you said.”

“One time I was there, sitting in the dining hall, and there was this one old lady, in a wheelchair, and she wouldn’t stop crying. Sometimes, you know, you hear them moaning and stuff because they’re old and shit hurts. But she was just crying and crying. I thought maybe someone had died. So I asked my grandfather, did he know what happened with her?”

“Okay.”

“And he says, that day was her son’s birthday. She had this grown-up son, like forty or fifty years old. But anyway, it was his birthday, and he was going to come and visit her, but she had nothing for him. She’d always get one of the staff to go out and pick him up a gift card for Burger King. Her son loved Whoppers, and I think I saw him one time, and I gotta say, I believe it. She’d get him a card with fifty bucks loaded on it. But she didn’t have any money in the bank. She couldn’t do it. She’d lost almost everything. Not a fortune. Around three thousand or something, although if I actually had that much in the bank I’d feel like the richest person on Earth. But anyway, she had all this money but she got scammed out of it.”

“Scammed?”

“Yeah. I don’t know all the exact details but she gets this random call one day, and it’s someone pretending to be a relative or something, and they’re in some kind of trouble and need money right away. Like, for an operation or bail, or something. And she falls for it, and wires all this money to someone. And that was the last she saw of it.”

“Jeez,” he said. Hesitantly, he asked, “What’s the name of this old folks place?”

“Providence Valley.”

Todd nodded slowly. “Oh.”

“Heard of it?”

He shook his head.

“Anyway, it was the saddest crying I ever heard,” Chloe said. “What kind of person would do something like that?”

“I don’t know,” Todd said. “Someone kind of shitty, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Chloe said. “Someone kind of shitty.”

New Haven, CT

“It’s not true,” Caroline Cookson said evenly. “None of it.

I never talked to anyone at Google or Apple or Netflix or anyone about some app.”

“You didn’t say something to one of the Google representatives that could have been interpreted as a request for money, and that you had Miles’s blessing?” Gilbert asked his wife that evening as they got ready for bed.

Caroline laughed. “Wow. That’s just... I don’t know what to say. You think I’d forget saying something like that?”

Gilbert had been cautious with his tone, trying not to sound overly accusatory. More like he was just hoping to clear up a misunderstanding, trying to give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe there was a simple explanation for what Miles had disclosed to him. Dealing with Caroline could be like walking on proverbial eggshells. You had to be careful because she could become very defensive in a hurry, and when that happened, watch out.

But Caroline, who gave every indication of being shocked by what Miles had told Gilbert, remained relatively calm. To Gilbert’s surprise, her response bordered on sympathetic.

Caroline blinked her blue eyes at him and slowly shook her head. “I just feel so badly for him. What a terrible thing for Miles to go through. And you. You must be devastated. But honestly, what he told you, it simply did not happen.”

“Why would he lie about that?” Gilbert said.

Caroline, pulling her long blond hair back behind her head and securing it with an elastic, just as she did every night before crawling into bed, thought about that. “Maybe he’s not lying,” she said.

“What?”

“Maybe he believes what he’s saying. After you got home, and told me about Miles’s diagnosis, and went upstairs to give Samantha the news, I did some online research. You know that Huntington’s will affect his mental capacity. That dementia is part of what he’s going to go through. Maybe he’s confused, misinterpreting things, misremembering things, believing certain events happened that never did. For some reason he believes I did this awful thing, when the truth is I did not.”

Gilbert thought about that. It didn’t strike him that Miles was anything less than fully engaged. He had to admit Caroline was convincing in her denials, but then again, that was the sort of thing she was good at.

“I mean, okay, I did talk to some of the Google people at that party,” Caroline said. “But nothing along the lines of what Miles suggested. Let me ask you this.”

“What?”

“Did he show you any proof?”

“Proof?”

“Any documents? Any emails? Recordings of me talking to someone at Google? Anything at all like that?”

“No.”

Caroline nodded with satisfaction. “Well, there you go. Don’t you think, if he’d had any evidence, he would have shown it to you?”