Well, at least there was one thing I was now certain of. Nicholas hadn’t been in on Lex and Patrick’s plan.
“Who are you?” Nicholas finally said softly.
“Nobody,” I said.
“Did you hurt my brother?”
“No,” I said. “I’d never heard of your brother until this started.”
“Why did you do this?”
I sat up, fingering my jaw. My knee was scraped and bleeding.
“I didn’t mean to,” I said. “It just sort of . . . got out of my control.”
“Bullshit.” Nicholas sat up too and straightened his glasses and shirt. The neckline was stretched from where I must have grabbed him. “You don’t accidentally impersonate a missing kid, you sick fuck.”
“I didn’t think it would go this far. But I . . .”
“What? You what?”
“I liked your family, okay?” The words burst out of me. “I never had anything like this.”
His face turned like he’d just encountered a foul smell, and he rose to his feet. “Oh God, spare me your pathetic sob story. I’m going to make sure you rot in jail for what you’ve done to my family.”
Every part of me ached or stung. “What about what your family has done to me?”
Nicholas stepped toward me, his hands clenching into fists. “What, house you? Feed you?”
He needed to know the truth. Whether he hit me again or called the cops, he needed to know.
“You don’t really think they believe I’m Danny, do you?” I said.
For a moment he just stared at me.
“Of course they do,” he finally said. But his voice was wobbly.
“Mia does. Maybe your mother, although I doubt it,” I said. “But Lex and Patrick? Come on.”
Nicholas shook his head. “No way. Why would they pretend?”
“You’re one of the smartest people I know, Nicholas,” I said. “You must have figured it out. Subconsciously at least.”
“Shut up!” he said.
“They’re pretending because I’m a convenient cover.”
“Shut up!”
“Because no one will investigate Danny’s death while I’m here.”
Like a puppet with its strings cut, Nicholas collapsed back onto the grass.
• • •
We sat there under one of the crepe myrtles that lined the driveway for a long time, the crushed petals beneath us surrounding us with a sickly sweet, decomposing perfume. I tried to speak a couple of times, but Nicholas cut me off, told me to be quiet, he was thinking. So we sat there silently.
I thought about a lot of things. What I would say if Lex came back with dinner and found us here, both bruised and bleeding. How I might get away if Nicholas were to pull out his cell phone and call the cops right now. Ren’s smile and the warmth of her breath against me.
“How do you know Lex and Patrick know?” Nicholas finally asked. He sounded exhausted. Broken.
“I overheard them talking about it,” I said. “Besides, you always knew I wasn’t Danny deep down. Don’t you think they would have too?”
“Yes,” he whispered, plucking at the grass.
“Who made you believe you were wrong?”
“Lex and Patrick,” he said, even quieter. “I kept going back and forth, but they’d always tell me it was really you and that I just couldn’t let myself believe it. I wanted to believe it, but underneath I knew.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
His head snapped up. “You don’t get to say that to me, not after what you’ve done. Don’t mistake the fact that I haven’t killed you or called the cops yet for forgiveness. You’ll never get that from me.”
“Yeah,” I said quickly. “Okay.”
He pressed the heels of his hands hard against his eyes. “God. Danny . . .” He was quiet for a long moment, and then he said, “It was one of them, wasn’t it?”
“What?” I asked. I wanted to make absolutely sure I understood what he was asking before I answered.
“One of them . . . ,” he said. “They’re responsible for what happened to him, aren’t they? That’s why they’re using you to make everyone think he’s still alive. It’s the only reason they would have brought you here.”
Nicholas really was the smart one.
“I think so,” I said.
“So why the hell are you still here?” he asked. “Your cover is blown, or never existed in the first place. For all you know, they could be setting you up to take the fall.”
I blinked. “What?”
“It makes sense, doesn’t it?” he said. “You’re the outsider. The transient with—I’m just guessing here—the criminal record. I think you’re at least eighteen or nineteen, but here you are, posing as a kid, infiltrating this rich family. Maybe Danny ran away, or maybe he was kidnapped and escaped the way you said. You two became friends in some homeless shelter until you found out what kind of life he’d come from. Then you killed him so you could take his place.”
“That’s not what happened,” I said.
“I bet a jury down here wouldn’t find it so unbelievable,” he said. “Especially not when Lex or Patrick plants something of Danny’s on you. You’re the cover and the patsy, if they ever need one.”
Fuck. He was right, and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it myself. It was ludicrous, of course, but a jury would pick a grieving, upstanding family of their own kind over a nothing scam artist like me any day.
“So why are you still here?” he asked. “What are you doing with all that research on us?”
“I’m trying to figure out what really happened to Danny,” I said.
“Yeah, right,” he said. “What’s your real plan? Blackmail?”
“No,” I said. “I know you have no reason to believe me, but it’s true. I just want to find out who hurt Danny.”
He looked at me for a long minute, not believing me. Which was fair, since I wasn’t sure I believed myself either. He turned his head away as he engaged in some kind of internal battle, and I saw the moment he made his decision in the straightening of his shoulders.
“Good,” he said, “because that’s your only chance to prove it wasn’t you.” He stood up and looked down at me, looming over me. “You’re a psychotic, cruel, pathetic excuse for a human being, and there’s only one thing you can do that will stop me from making sure you rot in prison for impersonating my brother.”
“What?” I asked.
“Help me find out who killed him.”
Then he walked back to the house.
• • •
The next morning I dragged myself from bed to the bathroom and found an impressive black eye staring back at me. Nicholas might have damn near broken his hand, but he had a decent left hook. I couldn’t go downstairs looking like this.
I crept to Lex’s room. Most mornings she was already making breakfast by the time I woke up, but I knocked softly on the door just in case. There was no response, so I ducked inside. As I’d hoped, the counter in her bathroom was littered with cosmetics. I riffled through them carefully, looking for what I needed without disturbing too much. Behind a bottle of men’s cologne I found a goldish cream eye shadow, and there was a liquid concealer by the hot tap. I stuck them into my pocket and returned to my room. Lex had so many bottles and concoctions that I doubted she would notice, at least until I could come home from school that afternoon with some story about getting hit by a ball in gym class.
When I was presentable, I went downstairs and found Nicholas already eating scrambled eggs, a Band-Aid across his jaw. I guess I scratched him when we were fighting.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Cut myself shaving,” he said.
“You want some eggs, Danny?” Lex asked from the stove. From the corner of my eye I saw Nicholas wince.
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m not hungry.”
“We’ve got to leave for school, actually,” Nicholas said. “He’s doing a tutorial with Mr. Vaughn, and
I have a lab to finish up.”
“Oh,” Lex said, looking down at her skillet full of eggs. “Okay.”
Once we were in the car, I asked Nicholas what was going on. I didn’t have a tutorial with Vaughn, and I doubted he had a lab.
“Don’t speak,” he said, not looking at me. “I don’t want to get so angry that I accidentally crash the car.”
I waited as he drove us silently toward school. Every few minutes his hands would tense around the steering wheel, turning his bruised knuckles white, and it was hard not to assume that he was imagining wrapping those hands around my neck.
There was only a smattering of cars in the parking lot at Calabasas High this early in the morning, but Nicholas parked in the very back corner of the lot. He kept the car running for the air conditioner but unbuckled his seat belt and turned to me. He felt uncomfortably close.
“Now,” he said, “tell me everything.”
I didn’t tell him everything. But I told him more than I’d ever told anyone else. I explained the scam I used to run—posing as a younger, traumatized kid so that I could get a spot in a care home—and how I impersonated his brother just to buy myself some more time. How I ended up in way over my head.
He smiled bitterly and shook his head. “You expect me to believe it’s just a coincidence that you chose to impersonate someone with a family as rich as us?”
“Yes,” I said.
Do you believe that? Nicholas didn’t.
“Bullshit. You make it sound like all of this just happened,” he said. “Like it wasn’t something you did on purpose, every single day. You could have stopped it at any time.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I didn’t want to stop it. I still don’t.”
He shook his head. “You’re a sociopath.”
I thought of that hole I’d felt in my chest for most of my life, the empty place where other people seemed to have something I lacked. It hadn’t felt so empty lately, but did a couple of months negate the lifetime that came before it? “Maybe you’re right,” I said.
Nicholas shut his eyes and turned his head away from me, like he couldn’t risk looking at me for another single second.
“I knew it,” he said. “The second you stepped off that plane, I knew it. Every time you spoke to me I knew it, but I tried so hard to believe what everyone else told me.”
“It’s only human nature,” I said. “You can’t blame yourself.”
“No, I blame you.” His expression was smoldering with his hatred of me. I could feel the heat radiating off him. “I blame you and whoever else in my family knew about this. God, I can’t wait to get away from these people.”
He was stuck and couldn’t wait to leave. I wanted to stay and knew he’d never let me.
“What about my mother?” he asked. “Does she know too?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “but it would explain why she avoids me so much.”
“That’s no kind of evidence,” he said. “It’s gotten worse since you got here, but she’s been avoiding all of us for years.”
I thought of the Jessica I’d seen in the family movies from before Danny went missing. She hadn’t been the most nurturing parent, but she was usually there.
“What changed?” I asked.
“Damned if I know. She could be great when I was little. But then . . .”
“Danny disappeared?”
“No, it started before that,” Nicholas said. He was staring at his steering wheel, but his eyes were far away, seeing something I couldn’t. “When Lex and Patrick’s dad killed himself, it hit her hard. They were still pretty close even though they’d been divorced for years. He used to come over all the time to watch us when Mom and Dad were busy with Mia’s doctor appointments and stuff. After Ben died, Lex started with the pills and Patrick was always getting into trouble, and Mom just couldn’t handle any of it. She and Dad were arguing all the time and the drinking had gotten bad, and then Danny disappeared and she went off the deep end. She’s been like this pretty much ever since.”
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
He looked at me.
“Why do you believe me?” I asked.
“About what happened to Danny?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense, isn’t it?” he said. “They wouldn’t put on this show if they didn’t have something to hide. One of them must have murdered him to justify all of this.”
I felt suddenly cold.
“Murdered?” I repeated. I’d never said that word to him, had never even let myself think it.
He nodded. “If whatever happened to Danny had been an accident, why not just report it at the time? Why go through all of this? No, it had to have been something more serious than that.”
It was the same thought process I’d gone through the night I discovered Lex and Patrick knew who I really was, but it sounded so much worse coming out of Nicholas’s mouth. “You really think someone in your family is capable of that?”
He turned to me, his expression like stone. “They’re not the perfect family they pretend to be, okay? You don’t know them like I do, and you really don’t know who they were back then.”
“Did you mean what you said, that you won’t turn me in if I help you?”
He took a deep breath. “If someone in my family killed Danny, they think they’re safe right now, and that’s how I want to keep it. If I expose you, it’ll put them on their guard. Hell, for all I know, they might flee the country or something, and then I’ll never find out what happened to my brother.”
“I get it,” I said. I think I even believed him. Besides, I could try to run, but how far would I get? With the Tates’ money and resources after me, not to mention the FBI, my guess was not very far, and trying to get away would only make me look more guilty if Lex and Patrick tried to pin Danny’s death on me. If I helped Nicholas, there was a chance, however small, that he’d let me leave quietly when this was all over. “So what do we do now?”
“I want to take you to see my dad,” he said. “I think I’ll be able to tell from his reaction to you if he knows anything about what really happened to Danny. Mom will be trickier. She’ll never say a word to me, but if you get close to her, we might get an idea of how much she knows.”
“I can try,” I said. But unless I magically transformed into a bottle of bourbon, getting close to Jessica was going to be hard.
“Don’t try, just do it,” he snapped, his relatively civil attitude suddenly turning nasty. He started to climb out of the car.
“Hey, wait,” I said.
He paused with the door halfway open, his back turned to me.
“You said you knew every time I talked to you that I wasn’t Danny,” I said. “How?”
He was still for a long moment. Finally, he said, “You were too nice to me.”
Then he got out of the car and slammed the door behind him.
• • •
That night, armed with a plate of food, I climbed the stairs to the master suite. I knocked, and a minute later Jessica opened the door. She flinched when she saw me. Behind her I could see that the bed linens were rumpled, and the bedside table was covered with prescription pill bottles and a tumbler of something brown. Also sitting there, completely out of place, was a small crystal figurine of a dolphin. Although the most harmless item on the table, it was the one I looked at the longest, because it was the most puzzling.
“I figured you hadn’t eaten yet,” I said, offering her the plate. “We ordered from Mangia. I know you like their eggplant parmesan, so we got you some.”
“I’m not really hungry,” she said, starting to inch the door closed.
I grabbed the door. “Then maybe you want to come down and sit with us while we eat? Mia’s going to show us the diorama she made for her science class, which should—”
“I have a headache,” she said. “I’m just going to go to bed.”
I wanted to grab her and shake her. For having a k
id—kids—who loved her and throwing them away. For being so damn selfish. For having children in the first place if she wasn’t going to take care of them.
But I had a job I needed to do, so I pushed my anger down.
“Okay,” I said with a smile. “Love you, Mom.”
She gave me a halfhearted smile in return and closed the door.
This was going to be even harder than I thought.
• • •
I was headed back for the dining room when Nicholas caught me on the stairs. He’d been locked in his room ever since we got home from school, poring over the documents and notes I’d collected. He grabbed my arm and hauled me into his bedroom.
“What the hell?” I said.
He had a stack of papers clutched in one hand. “Are these for real?”
“What are they?”
“You didn’t alter them or something?”
“I don’t even know what those are,” I said, “but I didn’t touch anything. What’s going on?”
He swore under his breath and sank down onto the floor. I took the stack of papers from his hand and laid them out on the rug. Mia’s medical records, a police fact sheet on Daniel, some kind of report from the hospital from the time Nicholas broke his wrist, and a medical intake form from one of Lex’s trips to rehab. I looked up at Nicholas, who was staring at the ceiling, his hand over his mouth.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Look at the blood types,” he said.
I frowned and searched the documents for the information. Mia and Lex were both B positive, and Nicholas and Danny were O negative.
“So?” I said. Unlike Nicholas, I wasn’t an honors student taking all AP classes. Even if I had finished high school, I doubt I would have gotten what he was driving at.
“It’s biologically impossible,” he said. “I’m O negative because both of my parents are. O negative parents always have O negative children.”
I looked down at the papers again, and what he was saying slowly dawned on me. “But Mia . . .”
“She’s B positive, which means one of her parents was,” he said. “Mia’s not my father’s child.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Are you sure?”
He nodded. “I think she’s Ben McConnell’s.”
Here Lies Daniel Tate Page 22
