Something She's Not Telling Us - Darcey Bell Page 0,87

send you?” Brilliant Daisy waited until there’s no official busybody around to listen.

“Sure. Your mom told me, Aunt Ruth, could you please pick up Daisy and go out on a fantastic fun adventure?”

“What kind of adventure?”

“It’s a secret. I can’t tell. Except that it involves candy.”

“Cool,” Daisy says. “Let’s go.”

This is what Charlotte gets to enjoy every day. I can’t help wanting what she has. Who could blame me? I want it too. I want a beautiful, brilliant little daughter to pick up after school.

Just once.

25

Charlotte

Rocco scrolls through Ruth’s contact list.

“Bingo!” he says. “Here’s ‘Mom.’ Let’s start with her. Whom I’ve also never met or spoken to. You call her, Charlotte. It’s better if a woman calls, looking for her friend. Not some guy who’s stalking her, some old boyfriend or worse. Who knows what her mother’s heard about me, if she’s heard about me at all. How many pissed-off guys Ruth has on her trail, or men she’s scammed, or whatever—”

How long has it been since Ruth took Daisy? Where did they go? The pressure of wanting to turn back the clock feels like a fist pressing into Charlotte’s sternum, a bully not wanting to hurt her but just scare her. Scare her a lot.

She says, “If I dial from Ruth’s phone, maybe her mother will think it’s her and pick up.”

“Knowing Ruth, maybe her mother will think it’s her—and not pick up. But it’s worth a try. If the mother doesn’t answer, we can wait awhile and call back on your phone.”

“We don’t have a while,” Charlotte says.

Rocco presses the number with the Arizona area code and hands the phone to his sister.

A woman says hello. No regional accent, no obvious age. Purified of anything that might distinguish her from her neighbors.

“Hello, Naomi,” she says. Her voice is cold. “What do you want now?”

Very slowly and, she hopes, unthreateningly, Charlotte says, “Actually, I’m a friend of your daughter, Ruth. Not a very close friend—I don’t know her that well. We went out for dinner yesterday evening, and she left her phone on the table in the restaurant. I can’t remember her address, and I’m trying to get in touch with her, so I took the liberty of trying the number that said ‘Mom.’ I’m trying to figure out where she lives so I can—”

The woman (Mom) says, “She told you her name is Ruth? That’s what she tells everybody. Her name is Naomi. I should know. I named her. But as soon as she was old enough to read the Bible, she began to say I’d named her after the wrong person in that story. She said, Naomi’s the one who has to go to another country, Ruth’s the one who chooses to go with her. My daughter was determined that she was the one who was going to do the choosing. She changed her name to Ruth as soon as she was old enough. But her real name is Naomi, and she knows it. Naomi always had a chip on her shoulder. You know she lies. She hasn’t said one true word since she learned to talk. She doesn’t know the difference between telling the truth and lying.”

Rocco registers Charlotte’s astonishment. He mouths the words: “What’s she saying?” Charlotte could put Ruth’s mother on speakerphone, but she’s afraid of an echo. She pantomimes writing, and when Rocco brings her his phone, open to the memo app, she types in, Ruth’s name = Naomi.

It’s difficult listening and writing—and conducting a deeply unnerving conversation. But Charlotte will do whatever she has to do in order to find Daisy.

“Holy shit,” Rocco says. The woman hears a male voice, though not, Charlotte hopes, what it says, and she audibly tenses: a thread just slightly pulled.

They were right to have Charlotte call. Ruth’s mother might not have spoken to Rocco.

“I assume you know the Bible story,” Ruth’s mother says. “Ruth’s mother-in-law—Naomi—loses her husband and sons and has to go back where she comes from. Ruth insists on going with her. They meet this rich man, Boaz, who owns the land they’re harvesting, and Ruth puts on her nicest clothes and perfume and slips into Boaz’s tent and sleeps at his feet, and he’s so impressed he marries her. That’s the one, the ambitious one, the nervy one, the one my daughter wanted to be—”

Charlotte thinks she’s going mad. Her daughter is missing, and this woman is telling her Bible stories. But she can’t explain why she has no time to chat, why