“Just, like, one ice cream sandwich . . .”
As far as they knew, Danny was alive and well that Friday, so it didn’t matter if Patrick was building a false alibi for himself the day before he disappeared.
The day before he disappeared.
The day before he disappeared.
“Wait, Patrick called you that day?” I asked.
Kai raised an eyebrow at me. “Yeeeah. I remember it was practically right after school, ’cause he’d ditched that afternoon or else he would have just asked me in person.”
Patrick was building himself an alibi for that Friday afternoon, hours before the time Jessica claimed she hit Danny with her car.
Danny found Patrick’s stash, Patrick hit him, and Danny wasn’t breathing. Patrick panicked and called Kai, asking him to go to the movies so he could show he wasn’t at the house when Danny died. But he quickly started seeing all the holes in that alibi. His cell phone was pinging off a tower near his home at that moment, not the movie theater Kai would go to. The theater would probably have some kind of video surveillance that would prove Patrick wasn’t with Kai. The cops wouldn’t buy that this was an accident, not with his record. He’d go to jail unless he could come up with a better cover story, something that protected him completely.
So he called Lex, his devoted sister. She loved Danny, but she loved him more. She took Jessica to dinner, kept her out until it was dark, slid another cocktail toward her, maybe one laced with one of the pills Patrick was pushing and Lex was taking. When they came home, Jessica blurry behind the wheel, Patrick was waiting. He hid behind the bushes around the driveway, hit the back of Jessica’s car with a baseball bat and left Danny’s body there by the wheel. Waited for the screams and wails of the women discovering the body to come rushing to the scene.
Then together Lex and Patrick convinced a not-right-in-her-mind Jessica to let them bury the body in the desert where no one would find it and fake the kidnapping. By the time Jessica would regret the lie, it was too late. Telling the truth would send two of her children to prison for her crime.
It all made total, terrible sense.
? ? ?
I knew the truth now. The details might have been wrong, but the overall picture was right, I was sure of it. I knew what had happened, but I didn’t know what to do.
Part of me wanted to just run. This was all too much for me, and running was my strong suit. If Patrick had killed his actual brother and made his mother think she was responsible to protect his own ass, he was definitely capable of killing me. His need to keep me around to maintain the fiction of Danny still being alive had protected me this long, but he might risk getting rid of me now that I knew what I did.
Except . . . I had protected his secrets until now, hadn’t I? Maybe if Patrick knew just how much I’d discovered and that I was willing to play ball, he would make sure I could stay. Maybe I could use this information to get what I really wanted.
Only that would mean lying to Nicholas, the only person I’d ever been completely honest with, and who maybe, someday, would care about me anyway.
I guess the real question was, what was the most important thing to me? To be comfortable and happy and surrounded by lies? Or to risk it all for the chance of something better and purer?
Which person did I want to be?
? ? ?
I didn’t know yet. I asked Ren to drive me home.
“You okay?” she asked.
I nodded.
“There’s something you’re not telling me,” she said.
“You’re right.” I pressed my forehead, and then my lips, to hers. “But I want to. And I will soon. Everything. I promise.”
It didn’t feel like a lie.
After Ren dropped me at home, I raced upstairs to transfer the audio file of Kai’s admission from my phone to the password protected folder on my laptop and then deleted it. It would be safe on my laptop until I knew what, if anything, I wanted to do with it.
When that was done, I went to a window and looked out over the backyard, the pool glittering in the sun, the hazy red mountains in the distance. The longer I stood there, the more my vision seemed to darken around the edges, like the walls were closing in, the doors starting to swing shut, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
? ? ?
Lex took me to school the next morning. Nicholas had gone in early on some flimsy pretext, because he didn’t want to see me. Maybe he was angrier than I thought. I waved good-bye to Lex and walked toward the front doors of the building. There was a black car parked at the curb, and as I got close, the driver’s door opened and Agent Morales got out.
My stomach plummeted. Nicholas had turned me in.
“Hi, Danny,” she said, like it was the most natural thing in the world for her to be there. “Can I have a word?”
“I’m sorry, Agent,” I said, unable to believe how calm I sounded, “but I think school is about to start.”
She took a couple of steps toward me, until we were face-to-face. “Here’s the thing, Mr. Tate. I’ve got some questions, and you’ve got the answers. You can either come with me now, or we can wait here together while I call your brother-lawyer and get him to join us. Either way, you’re talking to me today, and something tells me you might rather do it without a chaperone.”
She was smiling, and the expression chilled me to the core. I tried to think of a way out of this, a way to run, because I was sure that once I left with her, I was never coming back. But my mind was numb. There was nothing I could do. I nodded mutely and climbed into the back seat of the car.
? ? ?
Morales took me to the L.A. field office, where Agent Lynch met us in a familiar interrogation room. Morales offered me a glass of water.
“No, thanks,” I said.
Morales smiled and opened the file folder in front of her. “Here’s the thing—”
“Is it legal for you to be questioning me without my guardian present?” I asked.
“It’s perfectly legal since you’re not under arrest,” Morales said, “plus, those rules only apply to minors.”
“I’m sixteen,” I said.
“Sure you are,” she said, and the hollow ball of fear inside of me grew. “Here’s the deal, kid. I know you’re not Danny Tate. Lynch there knows it. I’ll wager most of the people you’ve come into contact with since you got here know it.”
She hadn’t said Nicholas knew it. If he’d talked, it would have been the first thing she’d have flung in my face, that my supposed brother had ratted me out. Nicholas hadn’t turned me in, and even in this moment, that fact gave me back a little bit of strength.
“You’re wrong,” I said.
“What was your third-grade teacher’s name?” she asked. “Who was the first girl you kissed?”