Allison got out of her car.
She walked to the front door of the little brick bungalow and rang the doorbell. It was a cute house with everything in good repair. The paint was new. The lawn was well-maintained. Not surprising. Unlike the rest of the kids, Kendra had always made her bed without prompting from Dr. Capello. She’d said made beds just looked prettier. Allison stiffened in nervousness as she heard footsteps approaching the front door. There was a pause, which sounded to her like the unfastening of several locks, and then the door opened.
It was Kendra who stood across the threshold—Allison recognized her at once. She was taller, of course, but not much taller. The braids with rainbow-colored beads were gone and now she wore her hair in natural curls. But those were the same large brown eyes behind her glasses and the same pretty face with the same full lips and the tiny mole on the bottom one, a beauty mark Allison had always envied.
“Can I help you?” Kendra said.
“Kendra,” Allison said with a nervous smile. “You probably don’t remember me. My name’s Allison. We used to live together with Dr. Capello in Oregon.”
Kendra’s eyes widened behind her glasses.
“I shouldn’t talk to you,” Kendra said.
“Why not?”
“I’m not one of you,” Kendra said, taking an uncertain step back as if she meant to shut the door.
“Well, technically I’m not one of them, either,” Allison said with an awkward shrug. “Last week was the first time I’d seen them in thirteen years.”
“So you didn’t go back to them? You’re not with them? Not one of the kids?”
“No. I promise. I’m not one of the kids. I left, too, remember?”
Kendra nodded slowly.
“What do you want?” Kendra asked.
This wasn’t the happy reunion Allison had hoped for.
“I was hoping I could talk to you. That’s all.”
“Do they know you’re here?” Kendra asked.
Allison instinctively knew “they” meant the whole family, the Capellos.
“I didn’t tell anyone I was coming. Can you give me just a couple minutes? Then I’ll go, I promise. We used to play together on the beach, remember? You taught me how to make sand castles. Yours were palaces and mine were shacks.”
“You weren’t very good at it,” Kendra said.
“No head for architecture.”
There was a pause, a long one, and then Kendra stepped back again, but this time she held open the door to let Allison inside.
“You’ll have to forgive the mess,” Kendra said.
The house was even nicer inside than outside. It looked like a page from a Pottery Barn catalog. The walls were a soothing gray with white crown molding and white wainscoting. The brown sofa matched the brown-and-gray rug, which matched the rather generic abstract pictures hanging on the wall. It was all spotlessly clean and tidy.
“The mess?” Allison said as she followed Kendra to the sofa. “Where?”
Kendra sat down and faced her across the coffee table. Computer coding books were arrayed on it in neat piles, and Allison remembered Roland saying that was her area of expertise these days.
“I’m the mess,” Kendra said, and gave her the faintest of smiles.
“Mess?” Allison asked. “You?”
“I—Just a joke,” Kendra said. She turned her head, looked away and didn’t look back. “Why did you come to see me?”
“Roland wrote me a letter a couple weeks ago. Like I said, I hadn’t heard from him in thirteen years. He told me Dr. Capello was dying. Did you know that?”
She shook her head.
“I flew out to see him. I ended up staying longer than I intended. Roland and I are...we’re involved.”
“Oh,” she said. “You always did like him.” Kendra didn’t show the slightest flash of surprise or jealousy or guilt.
“Dr. Capello operated on Roland, didn’t he?”
“Better talk to him about that.”
This was getting Allison nowhere.
“You remember why I left?” Allison asked.
“Someone in your family took you in,” Kendra said. “After you fell.”
“Right,” Allison said. She thought about telling Kendra the whole story about the phone call to her aunt and Oliver and all of that, but she decided to wait and see if Kendra brought it up. It was hard to imagine this anxious and quiet young woman hurting anyone, but if she had a guilty conscience, maybe it would come out on its own.
“So, ah...” Allison continued. She hadn’t really planned this far ahead. She’d make a terrible detective. “Since I got back I was just curious how everyone was. You remember Oliver?”
“I remember.”
“Did you...” Allison didn’t know how to say it. “Are you in touch with him?”
“No, why?”
“I was wondering if you knew... Oliver killed himself right after he left the house. Had you heard?”
“No,” Kendra said. “But I’m not surprised.”
“You aren’t? Why not?”
Kendra shrugged and didn’t answer.
“Do you know a boy named Antonio Russo?”
She shook her head again.
“He used to live with Dr. Capello, too,” Allison said. “For a week or so. Before my time there.”
“He dead, too?”
“I don’t know. Why do you ask?”
“No reason.”
Allison sighed, frustrated.
“Kendra, I’m really sorry for just showing up out of the blue. I’m trying to figure something out, and I was hoping you could help me.”
“I don’t think I can,” she said. “I wish I could.”
“Maybe if you told me a little more?” Allison said. “I guess we don’t know each other very well anymore, but—”
“It’s not you,” Kendra said. “Don’t think it’s you. I’m not mad at you. You and me, we were good. It’s... I can’t talk about this.”
Kendra finally looked at Allison again.
“I suppose they didn’t tell you about me,” Kendra said.
“Well, Roland told me you two used to be a couple.”
“When we were kids,” she said. “Just dumb kids.”
Allison decided to try a new tactic.
“Someone maybe tried to kill me,” Allison said. Kendra’s eyes widened again. She sat up straighter.
“My Lord. Recently?” Her shock was as genuine as her question. Either Kendra had nothing at all to do with the fall or she was the best actress in the world.
“No, in the house,” Allison said. “When I was a kid. My fall wasn’t a fall, I don’t think.”
Allison told Kendra about the phone call, about Dr. Capello telling her he thought Oliver was to blame, how unlikely that was as Oliver had left before any of it happened.
Kendra listened intently, asking no questions. When Allison came to the end of the story, she looked at Kendra and with her hands open and her voice pleading she said, “Please, if you know anything at all, tell me.”
“They told me you fell,” Kendra said. “That’s all I ever knew about it. Except... Roland thought you wanted to leave after because of him.”
“You don’t know anything else about it? About Roland? About Dr. Capello? Anything?”
Kendra took a long, slow breath before raising her hand and, with her index finger extended, indicated the roof of the house and the four walls.
“Dr. Capello bought me this house,” Kendra said. “That’s why it’s hard for me to talk to you. I wish I could. I do.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not following you,” Allison said.
“There was an agreement. I can’t break the agreement.”
An agreement. Where had she heard something like that before?
McQueen.
“A nondisclosure agreement?” Allison asked.
Kendra paused, then nodded.
Allison inhaled sharply. Why would someone with nothing to hide make someone else sign a nondisclosure agreement?
“I like my house,” Kendra continued. “I spend a lot of time in the house. I work from home. I don’t go out very much. I freelance. If I don’t work, I don’t make money. Sometimes I’m too sick to work. I don’t want to lose my house.”
“It is a very pretty house,” Allison said. “I wouldn’t want to lose it, either.”
Kendra looked at her with a deeply apologetic expression. It was the look of a woman who desperately wanted to talk but couldn’t. Allison wouldn’t force her to say anything for all the money in the world.