The Wonder Test Page 5

  Okay, maybe it sounds kooky, but when a new person enters my life, one of the first things I instinctively commit to memory is the sound of his or her vehicle.

  I’m at the door before the doorbell chimes. Kyle is holding two cups of coffee and a bag of doughnuts. “Have you been to the Royal Donut Shop yet?”

  “Once or twice.” I push aside papers and files to clear space for him at the kitchen table. “I was just getting to the interview with McCrory.”

  “Stafford was a great pitcher. McCrory coached him on four different teams, beginning in Little League. Every year, the coaches hold a draft, and they pick the kids in order of talent. McCrory said Gray Stafford was tops every year. Mostly, McCrory was just mad that the incident caused Stafford to miss half the season.”

  “A kid went missing and he was worried about his Little League team?”

  “This town is serious about baseball.”

  I’m still trying to form a picture of Stafford in my mind. After years of profiling adults—primarily diplomats and spies—it’s difficult to switch gears and think about someone his age. Kids are tricky. While adults remain largely unchanged through the years, kids are a moving target.

  “I don’t know what to do next,” Kyle says. “While he was missing, the department got dozens of leads. After the news got hold of the story, the leads piled up, but most came from outside: San Francisco, San Jose, as far south as Cabo and as far north as Calgary.”

  I sip my coffee. “Anything promising?”

  “Not that I could tell. I tracked down every last one. Since then, the leads have dried up.”

  “What does Chief Jepson say?”

  Kyle mimics a gruff cop voice: “Let’s see if we can get this closed out. Last thing we need is people in a panic.”

  “What do you know about the two kids who disappeared the year before Stafford?”

  “The Lamey twins? That case is inactive.”

  “What?”

  “Crandall isn’t exactly a hard charger. He followed up, sort of, but when the leads ran dry and the Lamey family moved east, he decided to shelve it.”

  “Don’t tell me the Lamey twins showed up on a beach somewhere.”

  “You’re going to want to see that file too. I’ll bring it by tomorrow.”

  “What’s the story?”

  “They were one grade ahead of Gray Stafford, lived less than a mile from him. They disappeared in the spring, the previous year. Like Stafford, they showed up almost two weeks later, but not in Half Moon Bay.”

  “Where?”

  “Marin Headlands.”

  “Seems related, no?”

  “Of course,” Kyle says. “But we never found any evidence to connect them. I hate to say it, but the fact that the twins are on the spectrum complicated things. Everyone assumed they had just walked off. When they reappeared, unharmed, unable to articulate where they’d been, it confirmed what a lot of people wanted to think. This is Greenfield. If a crime can be explained as a misunderstanding or, better yet, kids being kids, if it can somehow be kept out of the annual statistics, that’s what happens. Kids wandering off on their own? That’s just bad luck.”

  “Have you talked to the Lameys since they moved?”

  He shakes his head. “They dropped off the map. Supposedly they went to Boston, but I couldn’t find them. Got any ideas?”

  “Not sure. Can I see the beach where Stafford reappeared?”

  Kyle doesn’t hesitate. “Yes ma’am. How about now?”

  “I have a lunch commitment. Does tomorrow work?”

  “Absolutely.”

  As he’s heading back to his cruiser, I ask, “Hey, do you know a little guy named Harris Ojai? Shorts and a bow tie?”

  “Real estate agent,” Kyle replies. “He sells a lot of houses.”

  “Dumb question: Where is he from?”

  Kyle gives me a funny look, and I regret asking the question. Totally inappropriate, but I’m too curious to stop now. Being a profiler, I’m always trying to figure people out. “Like, nationalitywise?” I clarify.

  Kyle smiles. “Sorry. Didn’t understand. Harris is a strange dude. Sometimes I wonder if he’s from this planet. Whatever you think he is, he’s not. Even the accent is phony. His family goes back a long way around here. His great-great-great-grandfather was one of the original founders, railroad baron. He grew up on that huge estate on Robin Road. Went to Vista School.”

  “But,” I say, “the face?”

  “Plastic surgery. Chief Jepson has a theory that he’s trying to look like all different ethnicities and nationalities in order to attract more clients. Wouldn’t put it past him. I did hear, and I think it’s true, that Elton John played one of his birthday parties. Huge donor to the school.”

  11

  Compare and contrast comparison and contrast.

  The front door of Brenda’s house is ajar. I follow the sound of voices and find a group of women in the dining room serving themselves buffet-style from an impressive spread of salads. On the dining room wall, a beautiful photograph hangs: an enormous pool surrounded by snow, a single swimmer slicing through the expanse of blue, the word “Helsinki” scrawled across the bottom of the photograph in red.

  “You came!” Brenda exclaims. “Everyone, this is Lina. Lina, this is everyone!” I notice there’s no uniform today. One by one they say their names, and I commit them to memory: tall Elaine in the serious pantsuit, wispy Mary in yoga pants, redheaded Tina, Amanda in hospital scrubs.

  By the time I’ve poured myself a mimosa and filled my plate, the women have moved to the living room, where they’re sitting on sofas and ottomans, plates perched on their knees. I sip my mimosa, eavesdropping—kids’ sports, college applications, home remodels, spring break plans. When I overhear Elaine complaining about the school pickup policy, I slide down to the end of the sofa to join her conversation. “They’re high school students, for God’s sake,” she says.

  Mary pipes up. “I’d rather pick Olivia up than leave things to chance.”

  “Leave things to chance?” I ask.

  The room goes silent, and the women exchange glances, as if they’re deciding how much to tell me. “You haven’t heard?” It’s the redhead, Tina. “A student went missing last year on his way home from baseball practice.”

  I nod. “Gray Stafford. I did hear about him. What do you think really happened?”

  “We all have our theories,” offers Amanda. “But I feel better knowing that Danny is accounted for in the afternoons.”

  “What theories?”

  “Well, hell, if no one wants to mention it, I will,” says Brenda. “Gray’s dad used to be in gambling before he moved here. Sports betting. He got busted and served two years in some country club up north, then returned mysteriously as a pardoned man.”

  “But what about the Lamey twins?” I ask.

  Elaine dabs at her lips with a napkin. “That’s different. The twins wandered off. That’s on the parents, in my opinion. Could’ve turned into a real tragedy.”

  There’s so much that these theories don’t explain, but the fact that Gray’s dad did time certainly changes things. Especially if it involved organized crime, it’s not unusual for that kind of entanglement to reach the family.

  I want to hear more, but Brenda taps her knife on her glass as if calling us to order. “Sorry to interrupt gossip hour, ladies, but we need to talk about Saturday morning study group. Does nine a.m. still work?”

  Nods all around.

  “Okay, then.” She passes around a chart she’s printed in four colors. “Matthew will take the Ethicalities discussion this week, ­Olivia has Future Functionalities, and Hannah is in charge of Theories of Global Economics. That just leaves Analogies, plus Diagrams and Analyses. Lina, do you think Rory would be interested in leading a discussion?”

  “Wait, your kids
voluntarily do this on Saturday mornings?”

  The looks of consternation passing among the women indicate I’ve just committed some sort of blasphemy. “I think you’ll find the kids take the Wonder Test very seriously,” Tina says. “We all do.”

  Early in the evening, the Lamey file appears on my doorstep, and I retreat with it to the library, my favorite room in the house. I love the comfortable leather chairs and walls of books, complete with a rolling ladder. It feels like something out of a Hollywood set.

  Rory sits across from me, reading. He’s at that transitional age when he no longer wants to share every detail, yet he still likes being around me. I don’t want this phase to end.

  The Lamey file is all boilerplate, random copies, travel vouchers, and other useless administrivia. The investigation is cursory, the interviews short and unrevealing. I get the feeling it was conducted by a sloppy detective on his way to lunch.

  I look up from the file to watch Rory. He’s reading intently, but I can’t see the title. Each night, Rory has three types of homework—questions from the test prep book, reading, and typing. Because the test is administered entirely online, all answers have to be typed. Last week, Superintendent Kobayashi emailed a link to a report about the correlation between typing and test performance. Fast typing may not make kids smarter, Kobayashi argued, but it does allow them to “communicate their intelligence more effectively. An improvement in typing speed by ten words per minute results in a four percent increase in test scores.”

  Four percent can apparently be the difference between living in Atherton and scraping by in Daly City. That may not mean anything to the general public, but it does to Greenfield parents. No one wants to live in Daly City. Atherton would be nice.

  Every night, I hear Rory’s hands flying over the keyboard. After that, he spends two hours reading. Students may fulfill their reading requirement any way they choose, so long as they record it. Time + quantity = success! Of course, I’m all for reading, but the school’s approach seems to miss the point.

  “They encourage us to read the same book twice or even three times,” Rory has explained. “According to Kobayashi, reading the same text repeatedly improves reading skills twenty-one percent better than reading something new. When you subtract your interest in the actual material, it helps you focus on the pure skill of reading and improves speed.”

  “I call BS.”

  Rory just gives me an annoyed look. He’s not buying into this Wonder Test stuff, is he?

  “Hey, I had lunch with some moms from the school today. They invited you to join a Saturday study group, but it starts at nine in the morning. Prime weekend sleeping time.”

  “Who are the kids?”

  I tick the names off on my fingers.

  “They’re cool. I guess I could do it, since Caroline already has a study group.”

  “Why don’t you join hers?”

  “Can’t. It’s more formal, mandatory for students who are struggling.”

  “Caroline’s struggling?” I say, surprised. “She seems pretty smart to me.”

  “Yeah, but she’s terrible at the test.”

  “I was terrible at tests too.”

  He turns the page of his book, not looking at me. “Mom, you don’t have to do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Try to relate. It’s so obvious.”

  “Well, at the risk of being obvious, what are you reading?”

  Rory holds up his book. The cover is an illustration of space, seven planets against a black background, bright clusters of stars. The title is printed in tiny letters against a glowing blue orb. Martin in Space, by Anders Svarlbard. “I rescued it from the recycle bin at the school library.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “The narrator is this teenager in Stockholm who cuts school one day and wanders around the city, gets lost in a confusing section of Old Town, meets some other kids who have beer, drinks with them, and then falls asleep in a park.”

  “Oh, a bit like The Catcher in the Rye.”

  “Sort of, but there’s more to it. Martin has this dream that he’s in a spaceship, moving eighteen thousand miles per hour through empty, dark space, all alone. The Earth is gone, and somehow he’s on his own, with enough food and fuel to last forever, a bed, and only a small window. He thinks of his parents, who he’d been fighting with, who he didn’t like much, or so he thought before the planet was destroyed, and he thinks about his former life that he once resented . . .”

  “And now he wishes he could have it all back?”

  Rory nods. “There’s more. The instruments in Martin’s aircraft don’t work. Because they’re out in space, the instruments have no way to define his position. They have no anchor. You know, like a compass needs the North Pole.”

  “It’s a metaphor, then?”

  “Yes, a metaphor for modern life. Martin can’t know where he is without something to compare it to. So, a million miles from Earth, that’s a location. At this very moment, you and I are at latitude 37.5741 degrees north, longitude 122.3794 degrees west. All locations are defined in relation to other locations. No place is only a place, everything is relational.”

  Work is an anchor, I think. Fred and Rory are anchors. Not long ago, I knew where I was in relation to my crucial points of reference. Then my dad was gone, and Fred, and soon thereafter, work. If not for Rory, I’d be like Martin in Space, free-floating, lost without an anchor. Only Rory is tethering me to Earth. It’s an enormous burden for a kid. It’s not fair to him.

  Rory runs his hand through his hair, a gesture that reminds me so much of Fred I feel twin stabs of pain and joy in my heart. “I wish Dad was here. It’s totally his sort of thing.”

  “How does the book end? Does Martin find his way back home? Does life return to normal?”

  “I think in the end it turns out that Martin didn’t just cut school and wander around Stockholm. It turns out that Martin in Space is really about Martin in space. He actually is floating through space, unable to define where he is, and so he sleeps away his days, dreaming of when he was a child, dreaming of that day when he wandered around Stockholm, drinking a beer, trying to figure out who he was.”

  12

  Are Christmas trees good or bad for the planet? Furthermore, are they good or bad for the soul?

  It feels strange to be sitting in the passenger seat of Kyle’s police cruiser. I observe the equipment: the shotgun attached to the ceiling, the radio, the bulletproof glass partition between the front and back seats. B-cars are more subtle, with all the real gear concealed in the trunk.

  “I was watching a documentary on NBC last night about an important spy case,” Kyle says. “You were in New York at the time the case was going on. Maybe you know it. There was a book too.” I know what he’s going to say before he says it: Blue Squared.

  Because so much of the case is classified, the writer didn’t know my real name. Despite the requests from Public Affairs, I never granted an interview, and the writer got plenty of things wrong. I remember everything from the actual case, but all I recall from the book is a description of an arrest, a sentence about me in my Royal Robbins pants.

  “Did you know the woman who solved it?”

  “We were acquainted, yes.”

  A bug smashes against the windshield, and Kyle turns on the wipers to remove it, leaving a grotesque smudge on the glass.

  “Hey, you promised you’d tell me how you ended up with the FBI.”

  “When I was young, I planned to be a professor of literature. In grad school, a friend dared me to apply to the FBI. I did. It was nothing more than a lark. I never expected to pass the written test, which is heavy on math. After that, I didn’t expect to pass the endless rounds of interviews and assessments. And then I didn’t expect to pass my seventeen weeks of training at Quantico.”

  “So why’d you stay s
o long?”

  “Fame and fortune, obviously,” I deadpan.

  Years ago, when my father asked why I had stayed with the FBI for so long, I realized it wasn’t the cases, the intellectual challenges, or even the occasional adrenaline rush that made it difficult to leave. Instead, it was a feeling of belonging to something worthy.

  The organization doesn’t exist for the pursuit of money. No one joins to get rich. Because agents work out of sight of the press and the public, the FBI doesn’t tend to attract self-aggrandizing types. Thanks to the excruciatingly detailed background checks, the office has a uniquely open atmosphere. Everyone is an open book. Questions are usually met with direct and unqualified honesty, even when the answer may not be something you want to hear. I tried to explain it to my dad but ultimately couldn’t find the right words.

  Instead, I told him this: With searches and arrests, the call is usually for 4:30 a.m. Driving to the meeting spot, I’m tired, cold, cradling my coffee, navigating empty streets while the world is sleeping. I pull into the corner of a parking lot in front of a big-box store, and I sit drinking my coffee, listening to quiet music, headlights off, hidden in the darkness. Then I see them, two by two—­headlights pulling off the highway, onto the side streets, slowly moving toward me. In minutes, my car is joined by another. The two cars become four; the four quietly become eight. Friends, coworkers, or sometimes strangers who will become friends all standing around in the cold and dark, talking and laughing, relaxed, preparing to complete the serious task at hand.

  Of course, I don’t explain all of this to Kyle. I just say, “When I arrived at Quantico, I was such a fish out of water. Now, the FBI is home.”

  We veer onto 92 and head over the mountain in silence. Soon we’re enveloped in fog. I power down the window, and the fresh smell of the ocean blows in. I take a deep breath, filling my lungs. In Half Moon Bay, we turn left onto Cabrillo Highway. We follow the highway for half a mile before turning right onto a one-lane road littered with potholes.