How Nancy Drew Saved My Life (23 page)

“I always thought so, too,” said Annette, her expression swiftly moving from puzzled to sad.

It was so strange to see her looking like this. Ever since I'd known her, she'd always been so sunny. Even the times of day when most small children acted up had never affected Annette. “The witching hour” was what 4:00 p.m. had been referred to in the Keating household, the time of day when you couldn't make a phone call without there being screaming interruptions, and if you wanted to start dinner preparations, you could only do so with little people attached to your thighs. It took this moment of seeing Annette looking so starkly woebegone to recognize what a remarkably happy child she normally was.

Impulsively, I took her in my arms.

“What is it?” I asked, smelling the fresh-soap scent of her sweet head against my shoulder. “What's wrong?”

And it was then that I got one of the answers I'd been looking for.

Just when I'd been despairing that I was never going to learn the truth about Annette's mother, she told me herself.

“All those pictures of me and Papa,” she said in a half sob.

“What's wrong?” I asked again. “Don't you like them? I think they're perfectly marvelous pictures. He clearly loves you so much.”

“I know that,” she said in a voice that was eerily reminiscent of her father's, the kind of voice that said I was an idiot for missing the forest for the trees. “But where is Mama?”

“Where is Mama?” I asked quietly. I'd felt so close to the information for so long and yet it had always eluded me. I sensed I needed to be extra careful now.

Annette took a deep breath for such a little girl, as though bracing herself.

“She is dead,” she said at last.

Of all the things I'd imagined—that her parents were divorced, in the process of getting a divorce, that her mother had abandoned her, that her mother was a madwoman locked away in the secret room who made herself known by cackling maniacally every time I came close to a moment of happiness with her husband—I'd never imagined this.

“Yes,” Annette explained. She was tearful at first, but then grew stronger as she went on. “Mama died when I was born.”

“What?” I asked dumbly.

It was like hearing my own life story, except in my story, after that awful beginning, my father had left and I'd wound up having an awful middle story, too. In Annette's lucky case, her father had stayed.

Thinking of him in this way only served to strengthen my feelings for him.

“I really do not mind that so much,” Annette said bravely. “I mean, of course I mind that Mama is dead. But since I never knew her, really, how much can I mind her not being here?”

She made sense, more sense than I usually made of the same topic.

“What I
mind,
” she went on, “is not having any mama at all. When I look at all these pictures—” she indicated the albums, her father's and the one she'd just made “—I am of course happy that Papa is with me in the pictures. I only wish there were a mama, any mama, in the pictures with us, as well.”

That was when she told me her secret wish.

“When you first came to us,” she said, “I used to dream at night that somehow you and Papa would fall in love and then we would become a family.”

I said nothing.

“That was silly, wasn't it?” she said with precocious wistfulness.

“It's never silly to dream,” I said, taking her in my arms and hugging her close.

“Anyway—” she took in another big breath “—after I gave up on that silly fantasy, and I saw Miss Bebe for the first time, I began thinking…Wouldn't it be great if Papa married her?”

 

Wouldn't it be great if Papa married her?

I couldn't get those words out of my head. They taunted my every second.

Would it be great if Edgar Rawlings married Bebe Iversdottir?

Annette would finally have a mother then, a beautiful blond mother who would undoubtedly be an asset to her husband's diplomatic career. After all, hadn't Robert Miller said she was the daughter of a dignitary?

But I didn't like Bebe Iversdottir. To me, there had seemed to be something…evil about her.

Then I told myself that was my imagination going into overdrive. But Nancy Drew also had an overactive imagination, I'd remarked on more than one occasion. Every time something happened that would impress most normal human beings as being not such a much, like a car driving by too quickly, Nancy would conclude something outrageous like, “I'll bet that driver is a jewel thief!” Of course, she was always right.

But what had Bebe done, really, to arouse my suspicions?

Sure, there was that whole thing with her suggesting Ambassador Rawlings send Annette away to boarding school. But was that really so awful? Maybe she'd been at boarding school herself. Maybe she was suggesting it, not because she was so selfish that she wanted the ambassador all to herself, but because she was really selfless and wanted what she thought was in the best interests of the child. It was possible.

Okay, so maybe it didn't seem likely, but it was possible.

And if she was really not evil, if she was really just some nice, blond, beautiful woman who happened to be in love with the ambassador, then what did that make me?

I saw what it made me.

It made me jealous.

Worse, it made me in love with him.

For the first time, I saw that Gina was right in what she'd suspected and I saw the extent of her insight: somehow, without realizing it, or at least without admitting it to myself, I'd fallen in love with Edgar Rawlings, deeper than I'd ever been with anybody.

What had my subconscious mind been thinking?

I knew what it had been thinking. It had been thinking that I could do over the past, exchange the mistakes I'd made with Buster for a success story with Edgar Rawlings.

I saw the futility of it.

Why in the world would he ever pick someone like me, whose sole claim to fame in life was as the Gubber Snack Foods Kid, over someone like Bebe Iversdottir?

The answer was simple: he wouldn't.

Whatever I'd been dreaming of, a world in which I became Mrs. Ambassador, suddenly beautiful and dancing my life away in the arms of a man who loved me, a world in which, petty as it might sound, I would be on an equal footing with Buster and Alissa Keating, only I would be on an even better footing, since my love would be real and true while theirs would only ever be false and false—whatever that foolish dream was, it was just that and would only ever be that: a foolish dream.

It was enough to make me cry.

But I couldn't cry. I needed to remain calm, do my job, I needed to be Annette's competent governess, the woman who would turn her over to her new mother when the time came.

 

I decided to drown my sorrows by learning how to drive.

I know that might not be the solution most people would choose. But I was responsible, to a certain extent, for a young child, so it wasn't as if drinking in the afternoon was an option.

Besides, Lars Aquavit had been after me for a long time to teach me.

“How is it possible for a person not to drive?” He would laugh at me often.

“Well,” I'd say, “it's not like it's every person's calling, in the way that it's yours. I suppose I could just as easily say to you, ‘How can you not be a governess?'”

“Because I am the driver,” he would say quite reasonably.

“Well, there you go,” I'd say.

On that day, however, I said something different.

“Today's your lucky day, Lars,” I informed him.

His eyebrows rose.

“I'm going to finally let you teach me to drive,” I said.

“God bless the trolls,” he said. “Let's go.”

 

I wish I could say it went well.

The way I'd figured it, if I could just be competent at this one thing that most adults in the world were reasonably competent at, it would restore my sense of confidence.

But such was not to be.

In the Nancy Drew stories, the young sleuth/girl detective had been a great driver, zipping around in her convertible. Of course, in the Nancy Drew stories, the cars of other drivers often functioned as weapons. One time, someone even hit Nancy's frisky terrier, Togo! (Of course he was okay.) And even sleuthing around Amish country, Nancy's horse and buggy were run off the road by another horse and buggy! Still, despite averaging one near-death close call for each of the fifty-six stories, she never once hesitated to get behind the wheel or pick up the reins again. She was just unstoppable.

Now here was I, who had never had any appellation attached to my name, unless it was that of the Gubber Snack Foods Kid, hoping to become equally competent behind the wheel, so that, should it ever become necessary, I'd be able to give all the bad guys a run for their money.

Of course, Nancy and her friends always gave cute yet important-sounding names to anything they did that smacked of mystery or danger. Need to get an owl out of a friend's house? Dub the mission Operation Owl!

Maybe, I thought, if I could find something cute yet important sounding to call my learning to drive, my mission would be a similar success.

“Ready for Operation Cruise Control?” I said with forced cheer, placing my hands on the wheel in the ten and two positions I'd seen other drivers adopt; well, the careful ones.

“What?”
For the first time since I'd known him, Lars Aquavit looked at me with scorn; well, except for every time he teased me about being the only adult in the world who couldn't drive.

“Ready to teach me to drive?” I amended meekly, already starting to feel dejected about the whole thing.

I tried to listen carefully as he patiently explained the controls of the car to me: brake, clutch, gas; first through fifth gears.

Somewhere around clutch and second gear, I felt my brain shut down. I'd always had a mental block where geography was concerned, just couldn't figure out where in the world anything was, and I'd long suspected that my aversion to driving was because I knew I'd have a similar block there and that even if I could learn how to drive, I'd never be able to find anything anyway.

Still, how hard could it be? Sixteen-year-olds all over the United States learned how to drive every day. On farms, five-year-olds were probably learning to drive tractors. So, really, how hard could it be?

And it wasn't like I was going to need to know gears above first, certainly not right away. The main thing Lars Aquavit was going to teach me to do on the first day, I was sure of it, was how to go forward and how to reverse. Even an idiot could do that.

“Okay,” he instructed, “slowly reverse the automobile out of the driveway.”

I adjusted the gears and hit the gas.

There was just one problem. I had somehow got the Drive and Reverse parts of the stick confused, so we surged forward instead.

All right,
two
problems: I hit the gas really hard.

“Brake!” Lars Aquavit yelled. “Hit the brake!”

But my mind froze and I was unable to do anything but stare straight ahead, hands still at ten and two, as we hit the corner of the embassy. Lars Aquavit was quick. Seeing me freeze, he immediately reached downward and, with his fist, punched the brake.

But not quick enough to prevent me from crumpling the front end of the car and putting a healthy dent in the structure of the building.

“Reverse!” he yelled. “Put it in Reverse! Not the D! The R! Look for the P with a tail on it!”

This time, with his explicit abecedarian instructions, I had no problem finding the appropriate gear. The problem was that I still had what I would come to learn was known as a “lead foot” and I'd used that lead foot so strenuously while reversing that I literally flew us backward into an enormous bank of snow and dirt.

“Stop,” he groaned. “Please stop. You are awful at this.”

“Oh, God!”

“Please turn off the car, Charlotte,” he begged, fist once again on the brake.

Even
I
knew that driving, even learning to drive, wasn't supposed to go like this.

Meekly, I obeyed.

Lars Aquavit took his fist off the brake, wiped a relieved hand across his brow. He was always so cool. I'd never seen him rattled like this before. He slowly pushed open the door, walked around to the back of the car. I got out my side, walked around to the back, as well.

The back of the car really was buried.

“Give me the keys,” he instructed.

I handed them over.

“At least,” he said, “if I can get the car out of that bank, I can see how bad the rear damage is.”