Page 127 of All These Beautiful Strangers

Part Four

Thirty-Seven

Charlie Calloway

2017

I couldn’t sleep. Instead, I stared up at the ceiling of my bedroom in the dark and listened to the strange middle-of-the-night noises of Dalton’s home. On the floor above me, I heard a toilet flush, the sound of water rushing through pipes in the walls. I heard footsteps, the creak of floorboards, the shutting of a door. And I waited. I waited for silence, for the stillness that would tell me everyone was sound asleep and I could finally make my move.

All through dinner, I hadn’t been able to look at Margot. We had been seated next to one another, and once, when I went to pass the dish of green beans, my hand grazed her fingers, and I almost dropped the dish. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise up. I excused myself to go to the bathroom, and in the safety of the washroom on the main floor, I sat on the marble vanity and texted Greyson.

I hadn’t spoken to Greyson since his very dramatic exit from my dorm room a few weeks back, and I didn’t really want to talk to him now, but I didn’t have a choice. Greyson was the only one who knew what was going on, the only person who wouldn’t need a very detailed play-by-play to be brought up to speed. And I needed to talk to someone. I needed to know I wasn’t crazy.

I think I might have found my mother’s suitcases, I texted. The ones she left with.

I knew I wasn’t imagining things or misremembering. I recalled those suitcases vividly—a pair of Burberry cloth suitcases in a paisley print, the luggage my mother used to pack for weekend trips to the city, the ones that disappeared with her. They were mentioned in the PI’s reports.

Though, if they didn’t belong to her, this would not be the first time I had thought I’d spotted my mother’s luggage and been mistaken. Once when I was nine, I had seen those suitcases while going through security at JFK, and I had run after the woman carrying them, sure that she was my mother, until she turned around and revealed herself to be a middle-aged Polish lady (she had stared down at me with sunken eyes, asking in her thick accent, “What, child? What?” as I looked dumbly up at her). Maybe that’s all this was, too: an unlucky coincidence.

I used to imagine my mother with those suitcases, traipsing through foreign airports, on her way to somewhere warm and exotic. But what if all this time, they had been sitting in a dark basement in Southampton? Margot’s basement. But how would they have gotten there? And if they were there in Margot’s basement, where was my mother?

My phone vibrated in my hand, and I looked down to see Greyson’s name on the screen. He was calling me. I cupped my hand over my mouth and answered my phone in a whisper.

“Hello?”

“Charlie, what’s going on?” Greyson asked. “Where are you?” He sounded slightly out of breath.

“Don’t be pissed,” I said. “But I’m at Dalton’s family’s place in Southampton.”

I heard Greyson mutter an expletive under his breath. “What’s the address?”

“You’re not coming down here right now,” I said, much louder than I meant to. My voice echoed in the tiled room. Crap. I lowered my voice again. The Daltons were right down the hall. I couldn’t risk their overhearing. “I’m fine,” I said. “I mean, they might not actually be her suitcases. People have the same luggage. But it’s the same print and brand and it just spooked me.”

“Where’d you find them?” Greyson asked.

“In the basement,” I said. “Next to these boxes and old furniture covered in sheets. Like I said, it could be nothing.”

“Get the hell out of there,” Greyson said. “Charlie, just leave. Right now. Grab your stuff and go. I’ll drive down and get you.”

“I’m not leaving,” I said. “I haven’t gotten to see what’s in them yet. My mother’s suitcases had this tear in the lining. I need to open these up and see if—”

“Charlie, are you crazy?” He sounded angry. “If those are your mother’s suitcases, then that means . . .”

Greyson stopped and I felt the weight of the invisible ellipses, the things he wouldn’t say. That my mother hadn’t taken off of her own accord. That she hadn’t left us. That she was dead, just like they all believed. That she wasn’t coming back.

“We don’t know what it means,” I said. “It could mean anything.”

“Charlie, listen to me,” Greyson said. “Your father and Margot were engaged. They were in the A’s together; they go way back. Don’t you think it’s possible that if your mother’s suitcases are in Margot’s basement, that maybe she helped him . . .”

“Helped him what?”

“Get rid of the evidence?”

“Maybe Margot helped my mother leave,” I said stupidly.

“If your mother left, why would she leave her suitcases in Margot’s basement?”

“I don’t even know if they’re hers yet,” I said.