CHAPTER 1
"Dad, I'm home." No answer.
Leili Teng sighed. She told herself that after a week away, he'd come rushing to the door to welcome her. But she knew the minute she stepped into the unlit front hall that he would be sitting in his study, bent over his computer, lost in some other world.
She dreaded walking into her father's office. For the past few months, he'd covered his papers and turned off his computer screen, shielding his jumbled numbers from her eyes. She trudged down the hall to the study door that was shut tight against her. Last fall, it always stood open, beckoning her to come in. Today, he had taped a note above the door knob.
UOY EVOLI. RETAL WON TON.
Uoy evoli. Dad had written her that little message, their private code, for as long as she could remember. I love you. Some mornings, she'd find a note on her bedside table when she woke up, his letters neatly printed in a thin line: Uoy evoli.
Retal won ton. Not now later. A flash of anger tore through her.
The card may have taken longer to write than a welcome home hug.
In spite of the message, she knocked on the door and put her hand on the door knob. She needed to speak to him. And after all the secrecy of the past few months, Leili thought maybe he needed to speak to her as well. She let a shimmer of hope slip down her arm to her fingers and turned the handle.
She found him hunched in front of his computer, head in his hands. Numbers, letters and symbols blinked across the white glare of the screen, the only light in his icy room. He had a pad of paper on his right covered with minuscule scribbles and blue file cards stacked in precise piles on his left.
He turned to look at her and then quickly turned the pad, cardboard side up, on top of the mound of notes. "I didn't hear you come in," he said. The room darkened as the screen went blank. Leili had planned to tell him about her week-long trip. But her words vanished. Her father continued to face the blank computer as if it held him in a trance he could not break.
Could she explain to him how it felt to be with the Bennetts, part of a real family? Caitlin Bennett had invited Leili to spend spring break with Caitlin's parents and her brothers in a small rented cabin in West Virginia. The constant chaos startled Leili. Caitlin's younger brothers, eight year old twins, Max and T.J., couldn't sit still for any length of time, nor could their chocolate Labrador puppies, Chip and Fudge. On the second evening, a tangle of boys and pups upset the chess board, ending the game for the night. The Bennett clan also held silly contests over who could sing louder, run faster, or eat more pancakes with hugs all round for the winners and the losers. On the other hand, the whole family stopped often on the long hikes up mountain trails to admire a wild flower or the view. Once when a doe with two spotted fawns crossed the trail, they all stood silent in open mouthed admiration. Best of all, they treated Leili as one of them, teasing her with their easy-going comments and sharing their love of games, the outdoors and each other.
Leili wanted to confront her father with the thoughts running through her head. His increasing silence scared her. She wavered between concern for him and fears for herself. Caitlin's father is a United States senator. He had plenty of work over the week. He sat with his laptop in a corner for hours each day. But he never gave Caitlin an empty stare when she interrupted him.
Leili sighed. What's wrong? she wondered. Why this change? Here in our house now, it's secrecy, silence and solitude.
She tried to control her voice and said, "Sorry to disturb you. Senator Bennett asked me to remind you that his hearings begin Tuesday, the day after tomorrow. He hopes you'll call him in the morning."
He swiped his hand across his forehead. "Didn't you read my note? I'm right in the middle of ..." He shook himself and turned toward her, softening the harshness of his words with a sad smile. "It's good to have you home. I missed you."
Leili felt a flicker of his old warmth. She wanted to reach out to him, wanted them to be a team once again, the way they had been when they first moved to Washington ten months ago.
She watched the feeling pass from his face. Without responding to the message from the Senator, he turned back to his computer. She'd been dismissed. Leili quietly pulled the door shut behind her and leaned heavily against the wall.
Leili muttered to herself as she marched toward the stairs. "Dad, what's happened? It wasn't like this when we came here. You treat me like a spy." The word slipped out with a hiss.
She tromped up the bare wooden steps, loving the heavy echo that sounded in the narrow hall. Maybe he'll notice that, she thought. She banged her feet with satisfaction on the stair treads.
CHAPTER 2
Leili dumped her backpack on her bed and looked around. Her room soothed her. The clean white walls and the order of her things—every object in its place. The bookshelf beside the bed full of folk tales and other old favorites plus a few tantalizing new novels as yet unread. She and her dad had found the long table under the window in a junk shop. They had sanded the top until it was smooth and rubbed in three coats of tung oil with their bare hands like ancient Chinese woodworkers. Now the hard surface shone in the sunlight.
The table held her journal, a ceramic pot filled with pens and a treasured photo of her mom. The expanse of bare wood invited her to sit down to write another of her fantasies about cranes flying to people's rescue and gentle dragons hiding in piney forests. Outside her window, leaves small as mouse ears unfurled on the gnarled apple tree. She tried to clear her mind and fall into her fantasy world, but the real facts of what was happening with her father held her back.
Leili studied the photo of her mom holding a rattle in front of a laughing baby for maybe the ten thousandth time. It had been taken only a few months before she died. "Believe it or not," her dad told her when he gave her the framed photo, "that tiny baby is you. You gave your mom a lot of joy. See how she looks at you."
Leili stared at the photo, comparing her years in California with the months since then in Washington. After her mom's death, she and her dad moved into a small apartment in her grandmother Teng's traditional Chinese house on a lonely hilltop high above San Francisco. Grandmother Teng watched Leili carefully to see that Leili followed her strict rules: take your shoes off before you enter the house, eat everything on your plate. Don't run in the halls.
By day, Leili went to her grandmother's real estate office until her father picked her up after work. At age three, her grandmother hired Tutor Chen, a white bearded teacher, to begin morning lessons. By age ten, the lessons lasted most of the day.
Her dad, a computer analyst, received an offer to become Under Secretary of Technology for the Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C. In early June, only ten months ago, they packed up the car with their books and belongings and drove across the country, moving into a small rented bungalow on Upton Street on Leili's thirteenth birthday. For Leili, it meant freedom. No more home schooling with Tutor Chen. No more living by Grandmother's rulebook.
Furnishing the house. Cleaning. It had been an adventure. A shared adventure. They ran twice a week or set out for long bike rides in Rock Creek Park and on the C and O Canal. They toured Washington on trips her dad called Teng Topical Tours. Sometimes they stopped in at the Capitol to visit Senator Bennett. He and her dad had been friends at college. Leili would read a book while her dad and the Senator chatted briefly in his office.
She glanced at her watch. It was getting late. She'd left her father alone for a week. There would be nothing for dinner. She scurried downstairs to the kitchen.
Leili grabbed the pouch of house money from its drawer. After checking the fridge and making a short list, Leili started for the corner store. She smiled to herself. She got a kick out of planning the meals and doing the shopping. She liked the freedom of packing her lunch, walking to the bus stop, managing the daily routine for the house. Here, taking charge, she felt far older than her thirteen years.
The trip to the store took little time. Back in the kitchen with her supplies, Leili chopped chicken into bite-sized pieces, letting her mind drift. She wouldn't switch dads for anything. Yet she longed to be an almost normal family. She often wondered what life would have been like with a mother and a father. Her dad spoke of her mom regularly, her beauty, her laughter. He showed Leili pictures of her mom playing the violin, their wedding and many more photos of her holding baby Leili. Until recently, he had tried hard to be both mom and dad. When she was little and they were living in their two small rooms at Grandmother's, he had brushed her hair and told her bedtime stories. He understood that she couldn't play at Grandmother's office. He tried to make up for it with evening walks when she was tiny and runs along the ocean front as she grew older. After the move to Washington, they had learned to cook together and shared the chores. Until ... there it was again. The change.
She looked back over the last few months. He'd stopped joining her for runs, bike rides and the Saturday morning house cleans. The old dad was never rude, and he never, never, never raised his voice. But when Mr. Delgado assigned team projects for Social Studies, Caitlin and Beth Sanderson had come over after school, the very first time she had ever invited anyone to the house. Dad yelled, actually yelled. "Keep it down, girls, I'm working!"
The phone rang at odd hours. Once, when she heard its trill in the middle of the night, she leapt out of bed and ran to his door, fearing something had happened to Grandmother. She knocked and opened his door. He looked up at her as he put his hand over the receiver. "Go back to bed."
At breakfast the next morning, she asked him who had called.
"Called?" He looked down at his feet. "Oh, it was nothing. Just something at work."
"But Dad, it was 2:00 A.M. I checked my watch."
"Forget it, Leili," he pushed her oatmeal toward her. "It's not about you."
The secrecy. What's he hiding? And why? Perhaps all his actions were related to hers. She hadn't begged him to go jogging since she had started running with Caitlin. And maybe it bothered him when she brought home friends? Was he jealous? Leili wondered. The way I hated his friendship with that woman Anh? And all the secrecy. Was it only her imagination? Maybe she watched too many spy shows on TV.
She put the chicken in a bowl and started mincing ginger. Its tangy smell sparked her resolve to do better by him. This would be the stir fry to beat all. Her father would be thrilled to have her back for sure.
The front door bell rang, an insistent buzz. Before Leili could dry her hands, it buzzed again. She turned off the burner under her supper and called out irritably, "I'm coming. I'm coming."
Sunday night. Strange. A heavyset man with glasses stood on the porch, his finger resting on the bell ready to ring again. Another man, tall and blond, waited by a dark car parked on the street. Leili felt as if she were playing a crabby sitcom housewife. "It's rude to ring like that."
"I'd like to speak to your father," the large man said. His voice had a high-pitched nasal twang.
"He's not home." She knew her father didn't want to be disturbed. "Are you selling something?"
"Your father is at home."
He pushed his way into the front hall and leaned in closer to Leili, as if he were telling her a secret. "He hasn't left the house all day."
Leili's mouth opened in surprise. Had they been watching the house?
"Tell him Rangle is here, Richard Rangle." A smile crept into his tight mouth. "I'm not selling anything." He stared at her through his rimless glasses without blinking. "I'll find him myself."
Leili recalled her dad hiding his work from her. "No. Stay," she said, wanting to add "Sit," like commands to Chip or Fudge. But this was no friendly Labrador pup. "I'll tell him you're here," she said.
"Show him in," her father said when he heard Rangle's name. He scrambled to turn off his computer and locked his notes in a drawer, double checking that everything was out of sight.
Leili hung by the door as Rangle went into the study. Her father looked at her. "This doesn't concern you, Leili," he said. He closed the door on her then, making his point loud and clear.
Dismissed again. Leili started angrily for the kitchen, then remembered the heating vent in her bathroom directly above her dad's study. Sometimes she could hear him clear his throat, as if he was just outside her room.
Leili tiptoed upstairs. She knelt with her ear pressed to the cold grate and listened to Rangle's words at first muffled. "... snooping in our system ... codes ... no bill." Then clearly. "Lay off Bennett."
Leili's knees ached on the cold bathroom floor. Her heart pounded so hard she thought they might hear it down below.
Her father's voice dropped low. She heard "FBI." A squeak, a chair pushed back on the floor? The words became clearer. "I appreciate your coming." He raised his voice. "But Leili and I won't be disappeared."
Footsteps started toward the door. She hurried back down to the kitchen to finish supper. She found the stir fry limp and soggy in the pan, the bright green gone from the broccoli, the rice clumped and gluey. The word, "disappeared," wrapped around her mind, enveloping her in something shapeless and bulky, making her movements slow and uncertain. She'd known eavesdropping on her father was wrong, and now she wished she hadn't heard anything at all. Now she longed for secrecy and silence.
CHAPTER 3
At dinner, they nibbled at the soggy stir fry. Her father stared down at his plate at nothing she could see.
"Dad? How are you?" Working up her courage, she said "Who was that ...?"
"How are the Bennetts?" he asked.
"They're fine. You know, always talking at once."
"Did you all do a lot of hiking on those mountain trails?"
Had he heard her? Leili decided to try again. "Dad, that man Rangle, he was strange. He sort of bullied past me into the front hall. He knew you were home like he'd been spying on us."
She had caught his attention. Finally, he looked her straight in the eye. "Don't mind him. He has been trained to act like that." He looked away again.
"Dad, are you in danger?"
Her father continued staring at his plate. If he asked her, she knew she'd have to confess to spying on him.
"I may have to disappear," he said.
That word again. A chill spread through her body. "Disappear?" Leili asked. "What do you mean?"
"I mean I may have to leave home for a little while." He paused and looked around the room, as if he were searching for his words. He studied the overhead fan, his watch and the fan again. "Needs oiling. It revolved only twelve times per minute."
Leili bit her lip. "Dad?"
"I need to focus on my work," he continued. He smiled and shrugged. Then he leaned toward her with droopy eyes and a furrowed brow. "I want you to visit your grandmother while I finish a difficult assignment. That way, I won't worry about your having enough food and company."
"Dad, I do the shopping. I like it."
"That's not the point. I can't concentrate with you on my mind."
Tears welled in Leili's eyes. She shook her head, hoping he hadn't noticed.
He stood and walked around the table, patted her on the back awkwardly and started to leave the room.
She stood as well. "Don't go without talking to me." She shuddered. Her words sounded harsh, rude. "Please," she added hastily, swallowing her tears as best she could.
He turned back, wrapped his arms around her for one moment and then pulled his chair next to her.
"Leili, you're right to question me. And I should have filled you in sooner. I'll explain and then we'll talk about what we should do for you. Months ago, Sam Bennett asked me to do some background research for his committee."
