“Well, it’s a lot of adjustment,” I said. “Even normal things, you know, seem new to me.”
“What about your relationships with your family members?” he asked.
I thought of Mia throwing herself into my arms, trusting completely that I would catch her. Nicholas watching me across a crowded courtyard. Lex trying to get me to take second helpings of food and ruffling my hair as she passed my chair. Jessica haltingly asking me about school and Patrick laughing at my terrible attempts to shift gears in the Jag when he took me to drive in an abandoned parking lot. They were the best family I’d ever had, and it was all total, total bullshit.
“They’re good,” I said. “Everyone’s been so supportive, and—”
“I’m going to stop you right there, Danny,” Sean said. “Let’s try that answer again, but this time, tell me what you really feel instead of what you feel like you should.”
Shit shit shit.
This guy was good. I had no choice but to be as honest as possible if I wanted to get out of this interview without arousing any more suspicion than I already had.
“I . . . it’s hard,” I said. “They are supportive, but I know I’m not the same boy I was when I was little. It’s like . . . it’s almost like we’re strangers sometimes.”
“That does sound difficult,” Sean said.
“It is . . . ,” I said.
“But?” he prodded. “It sounded like there was something else you wanted to say there.”
I swallowed around the sudden, very real lump in my throat. “But . . . I love them. And I want them to love me, not wish I was the boy who disappeared six years ago. I want them to know the me I am now.”
“You’ve changed,” Sean said.
“Yeah.” I rubbed a hand across my forehead. “Yeah, I have.”
It was the best damn performance of my life, because for once I was telling the truth.
• • •
Morales came to collect me from my meeting with Dr. Sean. She told me they were done. Patrick was waiting for me in the lobby, and we could go. She escorted me back to the front of the building.
“I’m sorry we had to bring you in again,” Morales said. “I know it can’t be easy for you to relive.”
“I would have thought that was the point,” I said.
She looked taken aback, which was pretty satisfying. “Excuse me?”
“Well, the reason you brought me back is you wanted to see how I’d respond to the stress, right?” I asked. “If my story would change at all?”
She smiled slowly. “Well, you never know what pressures or different approaches might cause a breakthrough, and that’s all we’re after here.”
“I understand,” I said.
“I thought you would,” she said. “You’re a very clever young man. Very perceptive.”
Morales opened the door to the lobby for me. Patrick was waiting.
“I had to be,” I said, and Patrick and I left.
• • •
Patrick drove me home. When I asked him on the way what Morales questioned him about, he dodged.
“Just the usual stuff,” he said. “You hungry?”
• • •
I said no, and Patrick dropped me off at home. He said he had an early deposition in the morning that he had to get ready for and I should give everyone his love. His headlights were gone before I’d even gotten to the front door.
Once I was alone, I took a deep breath and allowed myself to smile. I’d done it. Morales might be suspicious, but I’d gone through four FBI interviews and they had nothing on me. Maybe now I was out of the woods with them, and that meant I was as safe here as I could ever be.
I went inside the house and found Nicholas and Mia in the den, him on his laptop and her watching a movie. I sat down next to Mia, who put a pillow in my lap and laid her head down.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“Out,” Nicholas said without looking up from his screen.
“Where?” It wasn’t strange for Jessica to be gone, but it was weird for Lex not to be here. I would have thought she’d be waiting at the door for me, probably with food in her arms.
Nicholas shrugged. He obviously didn’t find it as strange as I did. He closed his laptop and left the room.
For the next couple of hours I hung out with Mia, serving as her human pillow while she finished her movie and then playing game after game of Spit, her new obsession.
“I’m hungry,” she finally said, and I checked the clock on the cable box. It was after seven, and still neither Jessica nor Lex was home.
“Me too,” I said. “Let’s see what there is to eat.”
We went to the refrigerator and peered inside.
“Oh,” I said. “Nothing.”
“Can we order a pizza?” Mia asked.
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Go ask Nicholas what he wants.”
Mia ran upstairs and came back with Nicholas in tow.
“Lex isn’t home yet?” he asked when he came into the kitchen.
I shook my head. “I’m going to call her.”
While Nicholas called to order two large pizzas—“And mozzarella sticks!” Mia said—I dialed Lex’s number. It went to voice mail, so I tried texting her. Where are you? Everything okay?
A half an hour later, the gate buzzer went off.
“I’ll get it,” I said. Mia followed me into the foyer, singing, “Mozzarella sticks, mozzarella sticks!”
I hit the button that would automatically open the gate, and opened the front door to wait for the pizza guy to drive up. But he was already there, climbing out of his car. Behind him Jessica was pulling up.
“Evening,” the delivery guy said.
“Hey, how’s it going?” I said, but I wasn’t really paying attention. I was watching Jessica climb out of her car. She seemed more or less sober, which was good. Her windshield was coated in dust. She didn’t wobble on her high heels as she walked up behind the delivery guy and swept into the house.
“Want some pizza, Mom?” I asked her retreating form.
“Or some mozzarella sticks?” Mia added.
Jessica didn’t say anything, just disappeared up the stairs. I was probably imagining it, but I swear I could hear the click of the lock as she hid herself behind the door to her bedroom.
“She never wants to eat with us anymore,” Mia said.
I signed the delivery guy’s receipt while Mia took the boxes he handed her. “Did she use to?” I asked. “Before I got back?”
Mia shrugged. “I usually ate with Magda, but sometimes Mom would eat too. More than she does now.”
So Jessica was avoiding me. Mia and I took the pizza to the kitchen, where Nicholas was setting cold sodas and a roll of paper towels on the kitchen table.
“Mom’s home,” Mia said as we came in.
“She went upstairs,” I added. “She . . . wasn’t hungry.”
Nicholas smiled grimly. “Of course not.”
“Why doesn’t she eat with us anymore?” Mia asked.
Nicholas’s eyes flickered up to me and then away again. “I don’t know, Mimi. I guess she’s just tired.”
The three of us ate and cleaned up and watched another movie and Mia went to bed, and still Lex wasn’t home. I sent her another text and left another voice mail. Nicholas called Patrick, but he didn’t answer either, which was not unusual if he was working like he said he would be. He often turned off his phone whenever he went to the law library.
“This is weird,” Nicholas said. “Something’s wrong.”
If he was worried enough to be voluntarily speaking to me in more than monosyllables, it had to be.
“What should we do?” I asked.
Nicholas fished his keys out of his school bag. “I’m going to find her.”
“I’m coming with.”
He shook his head. “Someone’s got to stay here with Mia.”
“Mom’s upstairs,” I said.
“Whatever,” he said, and didn’t pr
otest when I followed him to the garage and climbed into the passenger’s seat of his car.
“Where do you think she is?” I said as we left the gates of Hidden Hills behind.
“Her house,” Nicholas said. “Maybe one of her friends’. I have no idea. Try calling again.”
I called for the fourth time, and this time it went straight to voice mail without any rings. “Her phone is off,” I said.
Nicholas drove to Lex’s house, which I had never seen before. It was a small Craftsman in Century City on a street full of small, pretty houses. From the light of the streetlamp, I could see that Lex’s place had an air of neglect that none of the other homes had. The lawn had patches of dead, brown grass, and the paint was beginning to peel. Maybe it was because Lex wasn’t here very often, or maybe it didn’t occur to her to take care of a place that was already so much less grand than the home she had come from. Her car was parked at the curb, but Nicholas didn’t seem relieved, so I didn’t feel relieved either.
Nicholas knocked on the front door, but at the same time he tried the knob and found it unlocked. Without waiting for Lex to answer, he walked inside and I followed him.
“Lex?” he called. I spotted a switch on the wall and flipped on the lights. The place was a wreck. Unopened mail was piled up by the door. Clothes were strewn across the floor. Empty bottles lined the countertops. It was hard to reconcile this place with the Lex who was always cleaning at home.
“Lex?” Nicholas called again. There was no answer, and he started walking through rooms. I followed behind.
“Goddammit,” he said when he reached an open doorway. I came up behind him and saw Lex in her bedroom, passed out on top of the covers, a bottle of wine on the nightstand.
It looked to me like she’d just had a little too much to drink and fallen asleep—not exactly an emergency—but Nicholas rushed to her side and began to shake her.
“Lex, wake up!”
She roused slightly and moaned, but she didn’t open her eyes. Nicholas bent over her and lifted one of her eyelids with his fingers. The eye underneath was shockingly blue, her pinprick sized pupil almost swallowed up completely. I knew that look.
My heart seized in my chest.
“Fuck,” Nicholas said. He knew it too. “Go into her bathroom. Grab any pill bottles you find in the medicine cabinet and then come back here.”
The bathroom was next door, and behind the mirror I found a half a dozen prescription bottles. I grabbed all of them with unsteady hands and shoved them into the pockets of my jeans. There was no way to know which she had taken. In the next room I could hear Nicholas saying Lex’s name, trying to get her up.
When I came back in, he had her sitting up, all of her weight flopped forward on his shoulders.
“I can’t get her up,” he said.
“We’ll carry her,” I said.
Together we got Lex to her feet. She wasn’t totally unconscious, but she wasn’t exactly awake, either, and she did little more than hang limply between us as we carried her out to the car. I sat in the back with her as Nicholas got into the driver’s seat.
“Should we call an ambulance?” I said.
He shook his head and gunned the car to life. “This will be faster. Tell me if she stops breathing.”
I shook Lex whenever she started to drift off. “Stay awake!”
In the front seat Nicholas honked at a slow moving car in front of us and cursed when we hit a red light.
“Look at me, Lex,” I said, slapping her cheek just hard enough to focus her. “Keep your fucking eyes open!”
When we reached the emergency room, Nicholas ran inside and came back out with an orderly and a nurse with a wheelchair, who took Lex away. I gave the medications I’d found in her bathroom to another nurse and told them we didn’t know what she’d taken. Then Nicholas and I went to the waiting room and took seats in the plastic chairs against the wall. He called Jessica and told her what had happened, while I called Patrick and left him another voice mail. After we’d both hung up, we just sat there in silence for a long time as the last of the adrenaline burned out of our systems.
“This isn’t the first time, you know,” he finally said. Unnecessary, since his response to the situation was clearly one of familiarity. “Probably no one’s told you this yet, but Lex and pills go way back.”
“Yeah?” I said.
He nodded, staring off into the middle distance. “I guess it started around the time her dad died. But things got really bad after . . .”
“After me,” I said. “I really ruined everything, didn’t I?”
“Not you,” he said. “The animals who took you.”
We were both silent for a minute. I kept seeing Lex’s eyes, unfocused and unseeing. I felt shaky and hollow. What would I do if she died? What would any of us do?
“She OD’d in college,” Nicholas continued after a long pause. “Patrick found her half-dead, and she was unconscious for two days. She went to rehab and relapsed a couple of times, but she’s been sober for almost two years now. At least we thought she was.”
Why now? The question hung in the air between us like the antiseptic smell of rubbing alcohol, thick and sharp. Patrick and I had spent the entire day being questioned by the FBI, and Lex had thrown back a fistful of pills with a half a bottle of wine. I wondered if the connection was as clear to Nicholas as it was to me.
The numb, impassive look on his face was starting to crumble. His lips thinned into two straight lines and his brow furrowed as he tried to hold it in, but he couldn’t. He rested his face in his hands and started to cry.
“Hey . . .” I leaned closer to him. “Hey, it’s okay . . .”
“It’s just first Mom went off the deep end, then Dad got put away, and Patrick became this total stranger,” he said, his voice muffled, “so if something happens to Lex . . .”
“She’s going to be okay.” I didn’t know what to do. Should I hug him? I wasn’t good with things like this.
“This fucking family,” he said. “Who’s going to look out for Mia? I’m going to be trapped here with these fucking people just as I was about to get out.”
I finally put a hand on his back. He tensed beneath the touch at first, but slowly I felt his muscles begin to relax.
“It’s going to be okay. Lex will be fine.” She had to be. “And so will Mia and so will all of us.”
Slowly, then all at once, Nicholas turned and put his arms around me. His hands fisted into the back of my shirt.
“We’ll get through this,” I said, finding the words I wished someone had said to me once. “You’re not alone, okay?”
“Thanks, Danny,” he said, and it sounded so strange that I wondered if it was the first time he’d ever called me by name.
• • •
I swiped Nicholas’s phone when he went to the restroom to wash his face and texted Asher, asking him to come. He arrived less than an hour later, so he must have redlined it. He rushed right up to us, pulled Nicholas out of his chair, and threw his arms around him.
“Oh my God, hon, how is she?” he said. “How are you?”
Nicholas’s initial look of bewilderment changed to one that looked like a mixture of pain and relief.
“They told us she’s stable, but that’s all we know,” he said. “How are you here?”
“Danny texted me when you didn’t, you big idiot,” Asher said, still holding him tight.
Nicholas turned his head to look at me. After a moment he nodded his head in a way I thought meant ‘thank you.’
Together, the three of us waited. Asher got us snacks from the vending machine and chided Nicholas until he ate. I tried Patrick’s cell again. We watched the news on the television in the waiting room with no interest.
Patrick arrived—breathless and panicked, explaining that he’d been in the library—just as a doctor came to tell us they were ready to discharge Lex. After a couple of hours of oxygen and charcoal, she was safe to go home to rest. When a nurse brought he
r out, she took one look at us and started to cry.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, the words practically unintelligible, as Patrick wrapped her up in his arms, nearly swallowing up her tiny frame.
She tried to reach for Nicholas, but he shied away from her, and she just cried harder. Patrick kept an arm around her waist and steered her toward the door, saying he’d meet us at home. Asher stood awkwardly against a wall, keeping his distance, until they were gone. Then he kissed Nicholas and said he would call him in the morning and left as well.
Nicholas and I drove back to the house in silence. Patrick took Lex up to bed, and we all went to sleep.
• • •
The next morning Lex made French toast and smiled and asked Mia about her homework, and it was like it had never happened.
• • •
Lex’s overdose brought home for me again how good this family could be at keeping secrets and how little I actually knew about them. It was time to move on from what had happened the day Danny disappeared to the suspects. Maybe it was just the effect of sitting in that waiting room not knowing if Lex was going to live or die, but I felt like something bad was coming, nipping at my heels. Like time was running out.
When everyone else was occupied, I made my way to Robert’s office, just down the hall from Danny’s bedroom. There was a filing cabinet in the closet that I had spotted when I’d first arrived and was familiarizing myself with the house. I’d tried to open it but found it locked. Maybe some of the Tate family secrets were kept inside.
When I got to the office, I closed the door behind myself and began to look for a key to the cabinet. If I couldn’t find one, I’d probably be able to jimmy the thing open with a screwdriver or a crowbar, but I didn’t want to leave evidence of what I’d done if I could avoid it. Besides, most people didn’t go to great lengths to hide the keys for these kinds of things.
I sat in the leather chair behind the desk and began to go through the drawers one by one. You’d be surprised how many people leave the keys to a filing cabinet in their top drawer. Robert Tate wasn’t quite that dumb, though. I searched every drawer and the cabinets behind the desk thoroughly, but all I found were dusty office supplies and, to my surprise, a distinctive kind of triangular case that could only hold a small handgun. Another item added to my list of reasons to consider Robert a suspect.