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 from Alonso.”
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 spoke through her, she’d never met him. She wished she’d tearfully told Rand that she hated Alonso 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 choose the 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 to steal something? What if they catch me?”
He laughed a little, as though her totally obvious conclusion was totally obviously wrong. “Nothing like that. Nothing illegal. 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.”
Rand glanced at her swiftly, as though he’d just realized how big a role he’d given her. “Think of it as playing pretend. Stand there for a few minutes like you’re a pretty princess, then sneak back out and wait for me in the car. You won’t have to say anything to anybody.”
He must have thought she was seven instead of twelve. “Whatever.”
He parked the car near a hedge, got out, and fumbled around in the trunk. When he returned, he had a Walmart bag containing a white cotton nightgown and a blond wig.
“Go on,” he said.
“Don’t look,” she said, and got into the back where she’d have more room.
“I don’t intend to,” he told her.
“And stand guard so no one else sees.”
He made an annoyed sound but stood with his back against the window and his arms folded over his chest.
She scrambled into the nightgown, pulling it on over her clothes and then slithering out of her shirt. She tucked the nightgown into her jeans. The material bunched up weirdly, but it was the only way she was going to be able to fully hide it under her coat. Then she jammed the wig on her head and tried to tuck any stray pieces of her own dark hair up into it.
When she climbed out, he began twisting the end of his mustache back and forth between his thumb and first finger, like a villain in need of someone to tie to some tracks. He frowned at her jeans. “You can’t wear those in front of the window.”
“Okay,” she said. He was clearly getting more nervous the closer to his plan they got.
“And you’re not wearing the wig right.”
“I don’t know how to put it on,” she objected. “I don’t even have a mirror.”
“Just…” He paused. “I don’t know either. Give it to me.”
He tried to adjust it to hide more of her hair, shoving at her hairline until he got so frustrated that he gave up. Charlie had a memory of an elderly neighbor with a wardrobe of wigs and a lot of bobby pins, but she’d bet Rand had never even heard of those, much less thought to bring some.
“It doesn’t matter,” he muttered, more to himself than to her.
She put back on her own coat. It was a pink puffer with ratty and somewhat matted fake fur around the hood. It had come to her secondhand, via one of her mother’s friends with a slightly older daughter. They were always dropping off clothes—all of them a lot cheerier and more colorful than Charlie would have chosen for herself.
Nothing she had on was appropriate for a place like this. She was going to stick out like a sore thumb. She was suddenly filled with the terrible conviction that Rand had no idea what he was doing.
It only got worse as they approached the gates. Stone walls led to wrought iron bars with cutouts of horses on both sides.
He leaned over to the com on one side of the stone pilings, pressed a button, and gave his name. They waited as the wrought iron gates swung open.
“Won’t they notice us being on foot? It’s weird,” she whispered to him, looking down a very long driveway at a gigantic mansion. Three stories, the top floor covered in painted shingles, and stone on the lower section. Ivy crawling around the windows and big white columns flanking the front doors.
“Don’t worry so much,” he said, and pulled her off the road. “I am considered eccentric, which helps me be able to explain anything I do in terms of my eccentricities. Do you know what that word means?”
“Yes,” she said, annoyed. Hadn’t she fooled at least some adults into believing she was a dead warlock? Maybe he should give her some credit.
He pointed across a stretch of sparsely wooded lawn that led toward the side of the giant mansion. “Go that way.”
“Go where?” she asked.
He sighed and pressed a phone into her hands. “Go in through the side. Then, I told you—second floor, third door on the left. Go quickly, but don’t run. Don’t draw attention to yourself and don’t get distracted. No matter what happens, this phone is not for you to call me on. This is for me to send you a signal. When it buzzes, you get into position and you take off your jeans.”