Page 23 of Book of Night
“He said that he’d been doing a reading and there was something that concerned you. He wanted to tell you himself.” Mom was boiling green tea in a regular pot with several pieces of quartz at the bottom, for clarity of thought. “Go on in. I’ll join you in a minute.”
Rand was sitting on the couch. His mustache looked even longer than it had before, twisted up with wax on both sides into a style he called “imperial” and everyone else called “hipster.” He had on a tweed jacket and slacks, only slightly worn at the elbows and knees. It all combined to give him an affable look that fell somewhere between professor, old-timey saloon owner, and Rich Uncle Pennybags from Monopoly.
One of his main gambits was convincing older women that he was special and that they were special through their connection to him. Charlie had no idea that Alonso was stepping on his game.
She also didn’t know that Rand was a con artist.
“Sit down,” he said, patting the couch beside him.
She chose the chair that was as far as she thought she could go without seeming rude.
He gave her the fake smile that adults give kids—too broad. “Your mother probably told you that I have a message for you.”
She just kept looking at him. The only good thing that living with Travis had done for her was free her from wanting to please adults.
He cleared his throat, leaned forward, and kept going. “But it isn’t really a message from me, it’s a message fromAlonso.”
Charlie opened her mouth to object, before she realized that she couldn’t. If she did, she’d be admitting Alonso wasn’t real.
“You see,” Rand said, looking her right in the eye, like he knew exactly what she was thinking. “He came to me in a dream and revealed that it was important you help me. You believe in Alonso, don’t you?”
Later, she would wish that she’d said many things. She wished she’d been clever enough to tell him that since Alonso spokethroughher, she’d never met him. She wished she’d tearfully told Rand that shehatedAlonso speaking through her and that he’d taken enough from her already. Basically, she wished she’d already become the con artist he was going to turn her into.
But in that moment, she was too scared. She felt cornered, caught. And so she just nodded.
“Good,” he told her. “You’re going to come with me to a party this weekend. Tell your mother you want to go.”
“I’m not doing any sex stuff,” Charlie told him.
Rand looked surprised, then insulted. “That’s not—”
“Keeping my clothes on,” Charlie said, in case he didn’t understand what she meant. Her mother had told her that when guys asked you to keep a secret, it was usually sex stuff.
“All you have to do at the party is tell lies,” he assured her nastily. “And you’re good at that, aren’t you?”
Which was close enough to a threat. When her mother asked Charlie if she wanted to go with Rand, she insisted that she did.
Much later, she would realize that her mother shouldn’t have been okay with that. Twelve-year-old girls don’t have any business gallivanting around with grown men they don’t know particularly well. But her mother worked a lot back then and was so busy that having Charlie out of the house for a few hours on a weekend was a relief.
The party was being held in the Berkshires. Charlie sat silently in the passenger seat of his car, although he tried to talk her around. He let her choosethe station on the radio. He took her through the McDonald’s drive-through and let her order whatever she wanted, which was fries and a milkshake. He told her a story about her mother that was a little bit funny.
It didn’t make her hate him any less, but it did mean she enjoyed the drive more.
Finally, as they drove along a tree-lined road, past mansions set acres and acres apart, she caved and asked him the question she should have asked before she ever got in his car.
“What are you bringing me to this place to do?”
“You’re going to sneak upstairs at the party.”
Charlie gave him an incredulous look. “You want me tostealsomething? What if they catch me?”
He laughed a little, as though her totally obvious conclusion was totally obviously wrong. “Nothing like that. Nothingillegal. You’re going to wear a nightgown under your coat. You go upstairs, third room on the left. Don’t let anyone see you. I want you to wait until I give you the signal, then stand in front of the window in the nightgown. And before you ask, it’s not skimpy or anything like that. Nothing to offend your delicate sensibilities.”
He was making it sound easy, but that was a lot. “Why?”
He kept his eyes on the road.
She sucked up the last of the strawberry milkshake through the straw, the sweetness of it mingling with the salt on her lips. Sucked again, to make that sound adults hated. “If you want me to do it, you better say.”
