Chapter Two
The day Ileana Dalca sustained her traumatic head injury, on the east coast of the United States, Abby Vicari was breaking into her own house.
At five o’clock in the morning, she knew her father would be awake in a half hour, and she needed to be in bed before he knew she was gone. She was tired and probably looked awful, so hopefully she would be able to convince her parents she was sick so she would be able to skip school for the day.
She punched in the security code at the gate and drove her new Ford Mustang, a present for her eighteenth birthday, up the winding driveway. Before the Mustang, she’d had a perfectly serviceable Buick Verano. It wasn’t the most youthful or stylish car in the world, but Abby liked having a different vehicle from all the other kids at the private school she attended. However, her parents were excited about giving her something they thought she wanted, and she didn’t want to seem ungrateful. So Ford Mustang it was.
The garage opened silently, but even if it hadn’t, her parents’ bedroom was on the other side of the embarrassingly large estate, so they wouldn’t be able to hear it regardless. The keypad to turn off the home alarm was sunk into the kitchen wall. With a yawn, Abby punched in the six-digit code.
The light kept blinking.
Frowning, she tapped it again. The light blinked more insistently. Then the phone rang.
“No, no, no,” she muttered, picking it up on the second ring, praying her parents were too deeply asleep for the phone beside their bed to disturb them. Fat chance. Her father was a notoriously light sleeper.
“Failsafe Securities.”
“Hi, sorry, this is Abby Vicari. I think I forgot my security code. Or it was changed or something.”
“What’s your password?”
“Putrii.” It was the Hindi word for daughter.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, that’s not what I have. Is there an intruder?”
“No. This must be some kind of mistake. I’m Abby. Do you need my social security number or something?”
“I can ask you a series of security questions.”
“Okay, fine, just please don’t let the alarm go off.”
“What kind of car do you drive?”
“A Ford Mustang.”
Abby could practically feel the woman’s brow furrow. She was probably nearing the end of her shift and in no mood for these shenanigans. “That’s not what I have.”
The damn Mustang.
“I’m sending the police.”
“No, please, wa—”
The phone was snatched out of her hand, and her father said gruffly, “This is Naresh Vicari. Hold on a moment, I’ll enter the code.” She watched his fingers, and though they moved quickly, she could tell the alarm deactivation code was completely different from when she left the night before. He answered three quick questions, thanked the operator, and hung up the phone.
“You changed the security code?”
“You’ve been out all night long, you’re sneaking into the house, and you dare to get belligerent because I caught you?” he demanded.
Abby put her hands on her hips. “It’s a little rude, is all I’m saying.”
He wasn’t distracted. “Where were you?”
“What difference does it make? I’m home now.”
“If you were out with that boy, I swear I’ll ship you off to an all girls’ school in Canada.”
“To finish out the last two months of my high school career?”
“Don’t mistake this for a bluff.”
She threw her hands in the air. “What would it help anyway, Dad? That boy you’re talking about doesn’t even go to my school. I’m sure I can find someone you’d disapprove of even more in Canada.”
“Like a Canadian.”
“Exactly. Have a good day. I’m going to bed.” She tried to scurry out of the kitchen, but two fingers hooked into the collar of her coat, pulling her back. He squeezed her just a little too tightly.
“The truth, Abhita. Were you out with that boy?”
“I do have other interests besides some kid I may or may not be dating.”
Naresh was an imposing figure. Almost a foot taller than his daughter, he spun her around easily so she had to face him. He wasn’t smiling when he said, “I’m going to check your odometer to see how far you went tonight. Then I’ll scrape dirt from your tires to narrow down the neighborhood. I’ll search your pockets and the entire vehicle for receipts or notes, I’ll also check your GPS to see if you needed directions, and finally-”
“All right, all right. I went to the city. Happy?”
“You were in D.C. all night alone?” he asked, his jaw clenched.
“I know people there.” That was a half-lie—she’d met people there and
went for coffee with them after the movies—but she told it with conviction. Her father could sense untruths a mile away, but she was in deep trouble already, and admitting to gallivanting through the dangerous streets of the nation’s capital after dark was enough to earn her a one way ticket to Canada.
“What were you doing?”
“There was a movie marathon showing the works of Sam Green, then I went to a diner with some people afterwards to discuss what we watched.”
“Who’s Sam Green?”
“My secret boyfriend.”
If Naresh found her joke funny, he hid it incredibly well. “Listen to me, and pay attention. This movie nonsense has got to stop. We didn’t send you to the best schools in the country and give you every opportunity we could so you could squander it doing something so frivolous. Am I making myself clear?”
Abby was fuming, but she knew this was not the time to pick a fight. She hated how he dismissed her passions as trivial and pointless so easily, but she was caught red-handed and didn’t want to give him more ammunition to punish her. “I get it.”
He was already in a suit and tie, and he grabbed his keys and briefcase. As he opened the door to the garage, he turned casually and said, “You’re going to school today. And except for school, you’re grounded.”
“I’m an adult, you can’t just ground me.”
“Funny, because I just did.”
“Not that you bothered to follow-up, but Sam Green is a documentary filmmaker.”
“I don’t care if he’s the heir of Slytherin, you shouldn’t have been out all night in the city. Believe me, there will be more discussion about this at a later time.” He left before she could say another word.
To the empty room, she shouted, “Was that a Harry Potter joke, Dad? I’d hate to think you’re wasting your time on something so frivolous!” Deflated, she went to bed because she figured two hours of sleep was better than none. Despite her ire toward her father, she was asleep the second her head hit the pillow. After what seemed like five minutes, the alarm on her phone was blaring. The urge to stay in bed was strong, but her father would check to see if she was in class, and if she wasn’t, the ramifications would be disastrous.
Luckily, she didn’t have to worry about what to wear. Her school had a strict uniform code that took the guesswork out of wardrobe choices. She pulled on a fresh pair of sharply creased gray slacks, a white button down shirt with a plaid blue tie, and a navy blue blazer. Her dress shoes were in her car, so she padded downstairs in her tartan socks.
It was her day to present a current event in political science class, and she decided to choose a sports story this week. The reason why they did current events every day was because most of the kids in her school were the children of politicians who were studying to be the future lawyers and lawmakers of America. She purposefully tried to find stories no one else in her class would find relevant, and even though she wasn’t particularly athletic, she enjoyed sports. The strategy and statistics that comprised the majority of sports now were constantly evolving, and since she’d started dating Calixto Cruz, she found sports even more fascinating because he was an athlete. She found an appropriate story after a quick web search and headed to school.
It took three 5 Hour Energy drinks and a double dose of No-Doz, but she managed to make it through the morning. Her sports presentation was for political science, her second to last class of the day, but thankfully it didn’t take a lot of brainpower.
“Abby, do you have a current event to present?”
“Sure.” She pulled out the iPad every student was issued and brought up the article. “An eleven-year-old Romanian gymnast was critically injured yesterday in a training accident.”
“Alert the Pentagon.” Bryce Tucker was the son of a senator who was also the son of a senator, and unimaginatively, his aspiration was to be a senator. His favorite hobby was tormenting Abby. He was an all-American in every way: sandy blond hair, blue eyes, square jaw, and a perfectly symmetrical face. He even played football, though he wasn’t the quarterback. That would have been too much for any of them to bear.
Their teacher ignored Bryce. This close to graduation, Mrs. Buell was done trying to reform him. “Why did you choose this article?”
“She’s asking because no one cares about gymnastics,” Bryce interjected, and his buddies began to chuckle.
The desks in this room were arranged in a circle, and she turned slightly to her left to face him. “People do care about gymnastics. The Olympics are in a few months, and gymnastics is the marquee event.”
“Okay, no one with any actual awareness of the world cares about gymnastics.”
Abby rolled her eyes. “There are whole countries on this planet where gymnastics is the most popular sport, but I guess someone as world-wise as you would already know that.”
“Not any countries with a GNP higher than the cost of my watch,” he said with a snicker.
“Wow, and it’s a wonder why your father is labeled an elitist.”
“Kids, stop it,” Mrs. Buell said.
Bryce leaned forward in his seat, his hands gripping the front of his desk. “Better an elitist than a curry-munching desert donkey terrorist.”
“Bryce!” the teacher barked.
It was so absurd, Abby actually laughed. “Bryce, even you’re not so stupid you think that makes any sense at all.”
“I know you’re a sorry-ass chee chee who better keep her head down and her sari up if you don’t want your daddy to take away the little bit of freedom you think you have.”
The air in the room went still, and Abby was so shocked she wasn’t sure what to say. Maybe he wasn’t as dumb as he acted. A chee chee was a slur for a lower caste Hindu, it literally translated to dirty, and the jab about her father was a low blow. She was actually kind of impressed that he knew the racial epithet and a little perturbed when she wondered how long he’d been keeping that insult in his back pocket for just the right occasion.
Quickly, she decided making a big deal out of his small-minded, pointed racism was not the way to go. She leaned back and waved her hand dismissively. “This little girl was in a serious training accident, and it wasn’t so long ago that the entire Eastern bloc was under scrutiny for unsafe and abusive training practices with their young athletes.”
Adam, one of Bryce’s buddies, piped in. “So you’re a conspiracy theorist now?”
“I’m not theorizing anything. I’m just saying this little girl is possibly dying in some shabby Romanian hospital, and the only reason this was reported at all is because her older sister is Trixie Dalca, who I’ve been a fan of since she won the world championships. So maybe it’s not the first time something like this has happened. Maybe it won’t be the last.”
Adam was spurred on by his friend’s boldness. “Again, why should we care?”
“Because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” She said it simultaneously with Bryce and was shocked to hear the words come out of his mouth, both because he actually knew the quote and had the sense to understand her point of view in presenting this story as her current event.
Mrs. Buell put her hand over her heart. “You’ve been paying attention. I feel like a proud mama.” Everyone in the class laughed, and the tension was eased. “Thank you, Abby. Lauren, you’re up.”
The next day, with a good night’s sleep under her belt, she checked ESPN first thing in the morning. Buried deep in the website she found an update on Ileana Dalca. It was hard to explain why, but she felt an incredible sense of unease when she learned Ileana Dalca was dead.