Here Lies Daniel Tate

by Cristin Terrill

  I could have just nodded. Could have let him have that moment of terrible relief of finding out that none of the people he loved was a murderer. Maybe he would have been so grateful that he would have let me go.

  But he wanted to know the truth, and for once in my life I wanted to be honest with someone.

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’m not sure.”

  “What do you mean?” he said. “Why would my mother confess to accidentally killing Danny if she hadn’t?”

  “She could be trying to protect Patrick,” I said. “Or maybe Patrick made her believe she was responsible somehow. After seeing all those arrest records . . .”

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” he said. “So he got into some fights in high school. It doesn’t mean he murdered his own brother. No. Patrick’s innocent. It was just my mom, and it was an accident. You want me to think there’s more to find so you can stay here longer.”

  He wasn’t entirely wrong about that last part, and we each knew it. This bit of honesty worked both ways.

  “Just your mom?” I repeated. “Think about it. Why didn’t she just call the police if it was such an innocent accident? Knowing Jessica . . .”

  Nicholas’s face darkened. “She was drunk.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And Patrick and Lex helped her cover it up. They had to have.”

  He shook his head. “No. You don’t know that.”

  “Jessica said she didn’t see Danny because it was dark,” I said, “but Danny supposedly went missing when it was still light out on Saturday. If Jessica was the one who killed him, she had to have done it the night before.”

  “And Patrick and Lex both said they saw Danny the next day. Dammit.” He stood and walked over to the window, bracing his hands on the sill and taking deep breaths. “They were already lying for her.”

  “Plus . . .”

  “What?”

  “Can you imagine your mom driving out to the desert to dump the bike and . . . bury the body?”

  “No,” he said quietly. “It could only have been Patrick. So this is it? Either my brother killed Danny in a violent rage because he was being blackmailed, or, best-case scenario, my mother killed him accidentally and made it look like he went missing so me and my dad and Mia could spend the rest of our lives worrying about him and hoping he’d come home someday?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “How long have you known this?”

  “Since last night.”

  “And you’re just now telling me?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  “I take back what I said before,” he said, turning on me. His eyes were on fire. “Turns out I do have the energy to hate you. I’m turning this all over to the FBI. Let them sort out what really happened.”

  He went for the door, but I stepped into his path. I felt like a rubber band pulled dangerously tight, and my hands were fisted at my sides to stop them shaking. Nicholas took a step back from me. I think he thought I was going to hit him, when all I was trying to do was hold myself together. I lifted my hands up in surrender.

  “Are you sure you want to do that?” I said. “It won’t bring Danny back, but it could send half of your family to prison.”

  “You’re just trying to save your own ass,” he said. “If I expose them, I expose you.”

  “That’s true,” I said, “but it’s more than that. I know what it’s like to have no family; you don’t. Even if they’re not perfect, even if they did something terrible, they love you. They treat you well and give a damn what happens to you. What would you do without them? What would Mia do without them?”

  “Don’t.”

  He tried to brush past me, but I caught his arms. I didn’t want him to turn me in, but even more than that I wanted him to understand. “Imagine what this will do to her, to learn these things about the people she loves. Who will take care of her with both of your parents and Lex and Patrick in prison? You certainly won’t be going off to college next year, not unless you’re willing to abandon her when she needs you the most. Think of what her life will be like. They’ll put her in care. She’ll be alone, she’ll be scared—”

  “Stop it!” he said, trying to pull himself out of my grasp.

  I couldn’t control the words now. “You’re so selfish. All you want is to get away, to wash your hands of this place and these people, and you have no idea how lucky you are. They love you.”

  “They’re liars!” he said in a furious whisper. “Killers and liars!”

  “Who love you!” I said. “You don’t think it could be worse?”

  Suddenly, all of the fight rushed out of Nicholas. Like a plug had been pulled and all that righteous fury that was fueling him went swirling down the drain. He sank onto the floor, burying his head in his hands, and his shoulders started to shake with silent sobs.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said softly. He sounded so young all of a sudden, and I remembered with some surprise that I was the older of the two of us.

  I slowly sat beside him. I didn’t know what to say.

  “What do I do?” he asked, raising his head. “What does any of it even matter? Danny’s dead. His bones are out there in that desert somewhere. That’s all that’s left of him, and nothing I do can change that.”

  Slowly, I put an arm around his shoulder, and he let me. I felt a tremendous lightness taking shape inside of me. I had no secrets from Nicholas anymore.

  “We’ll find out what really happened,” I said. “Then you’ll know what to do.”

  “I hate you,” he said.

  “I know,” I said.

  But he didn’t move.

  • • •

  I told the truth and the world didn’t crash at my feet. I thought my lies and pretending were getting me closer to what I wanted, but I’d never felt so close to finally filling that hole inside of me for good as I did after I was honest with Nicholas. I wasn’t sure who the real me was anymore, but for the first time I wanted to try being that person. Secrets were the bricks in my walls, and I wanted to finally take them down.

  I woke up the next morning knowing which brick to remove next.

  Lex and I were the only ones at home, and I found her reading a magazine by the pool.

  “Hey,” I said, sitting down on the lounge chair beside hers. “Can you drive me somewhere?”

  “Sure. Where you going?”

  “My friend Ren’s house,” I said. “She just lives over in Calabasas.”

  Lex checked her phone. “I was going to leave in about a half an hour anyway to meet a friend for lunch. Can you wait until then?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Lex cocked her head at me and put a hand on my leg. “How you doing? It feels like I’ve barely seen you lately.”

  “I’m good,” I said.

  “School’s going okay?”

  I nodded.

  She smiled and brushed my cheek with the side of her thumb. “It’s like it was always meant to be now. You here with us.”

  My throat got tight, because for some reason I was sure she was talking to me.

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  She stood up, dropping a kiss on my forehead as she did. “I’m going to go change, and then we can go.”

  • • •

  Ren answered the door.

  “Hey,” she said with obvious surprise. “What are you—”

  “I don’t want to be your friend,” I said, because I knew if I waited even a second I would lose my nerve. “I want more than that. I get it if you don’t, but I do and I’m ready for it.”

  Her mouth opened and closed but no words came out.

  “Here’s the thing,” I said. “Someone told me once that being with the right person makes the world seem like a less scary place, and the world seems less scary when I’m with you. And I like myself better when I’m with you. And I think that’s a good thing and something I’m finally ready to deal with, so . . . I want us to be together.”

  She didn’t sa
y anything, just reached out and took my hand and pulled me inside the house. She pulled me up the stairs and into her bedroom, where she locked the door behind us. Then she pulled me toward her, so close I could feel the pattern of her sweater and the button of her jeans pressing against my body, and then she kissed me.

  • • •

  Later Ren and I were curled up on her bed, watching a movie on her laptop. Well, she was watching the movie. I was mostly watching her.

  It was a perfect moment. Deep in the marrow of my bones, I was warm.

  “My throat’s so dry,” she said, sighing and burrowing closer into my side. “It’s too bad I’m so comfortable here.”

  I raised an eyebrow at her.

  “I guess I’ll have to get up,” she continued, “and then I’ll have to get comfortable all over again, which can be tough. You’ve got to find the right configuration of pillows and make sure—”

  I groaned and rolled out of the bed. “What do you want?”

  “Diet Coke, please!” she said. “Good job picking up on my very subtle clues.”

  Downstairs I found Kai already standing in front of the open refrigerator. It was basically where he lived.

  “Hey, man,” he said when he noticed me. He took in my slightly rumpled appearance and grinned. “Whatcha been doing?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Right.” He offered me his fist to bump and then started gathering ingredients for a sandwich. “Be good to her though, seriously. She’s a good kid.”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  “Dude, this sandwich is going to be epic. Hey, you need to give me your sister’s number. I want to catch up with her. Sexy Lexi! I never hit that in high school, and it’s a damn shame. Came close a couple of times, but she and your brother were, like, attached at the hip, and he would have killed me.”

  I tried to smile to humor him. Even though Lex wasn’t actually my sister, I didn’t want to hear about the possibility of him “hitting” her.

  But then I realized this was an opportunity.

  “I forgot you knew Lex and Patrick in high school,” I said. “Patrick was pretty tough back then, huh?”

  “Shit yeah. He could be a scary dude when he got worked up, and he was crazy protective of Lex.” Kai looked down at his sandwich as he squirted mustard haphazardly across two slices of bread. “They were close, you know. Like really close. No one ever messed with her because they knew they’d get cut off or worse.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and pretended to check my texts. What I was actually doing was starting an audio recording. I wasn’t sold on Jessica’s confession, and Kai, who obviously knew about Patrick’s checkered past, might say something interesting I’d want Nicholas to hear.

  “I mean he’d beat the shit out of them, man. Damn, where did I put the cheese? I just had it.” Kai searched through the ingredients on the countertop. I reached for the bag of deli cheese slices that was about four inches from his hand and gave it to him, and he dissolved into giggles. That’s when I realized just how high he was.

  “No,” I said. “What did you mean by ‘cut off’?”

  “Well, before he was Mister Big Important Lawyer Guy, Patty was the biggest dealer at Calabasas High,” Kai said. “If you pissed him off, no one would sell to you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Hell yeah. He was a badass, and no one touched his little sister.” He took a giant bite from his sandwich and started to laugh. When he spoke, it was around a mouthful of food. “This one time a guy grabbed Lex’s ass in the hall, and after school Patrick just started whaling on the dude’s car with a baseball bat. It was awesome. They got into this big fight. Pretty sure Patty put the guy in the hospital.”

  I could see it all in my head. Danny poking around Patrick’s room, looking for money to spend at the arcade with his friends or just looking for dirt on him. What he stumbled on instead was Patrick’s stash. So much pot and pills and powder that even Robert Tate wouldn’t be able to pull enough strings to keep Patrick out of serious trouble. Danny told Patrick he’d need a hundred bucks to keep quiet. When Patrick refused, Danny yelled for their mom, just to scare him. But Patrick lost his temper. He hit Danny, harder than he’d meant to, and Danny never got up again.

  “No one messed with Lex after that,” Kai continued, “even though she was pretty much the hottest girl in school. Such a fucking waste of a perfect rack, but no one would risk asking her out.”

  “Not even you?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Not even me. I wasn’t suicidal. But maybe now that Patrick’s all upstanding and shit, he wouldn’t mind me getting back into touch with his little sister, you know?”

  “Why did you two stop being friends?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “You disappeared, and they hauled his ass to jail because they thought he’d killed you or something. He went straight after that, got totally boring. He wouldn’t even talk to me anymore.” He sounded actually hurt about that last part. “The last day I talked to him was actually the day before you got snatched.”

  “Yeah?” I said. When Kai stuck his head back in the refrigerator to fish out a beer, I glanced down at my phone to make sure it was still recording.

  He nodded. “He called me and asked me to go to the movies and buy him a ticket.”

  “Huh?”

  “It was this thing we’d do for each other sometimes,” Kai said, “if we were doing something we shouldn’t be. I had this girlfriend, right, that my parents hated. Forbid me to see her, like some Romeo and Juliet shit. She lived up in Ventura, so when I’d go see her, Patrick would go to the movies and buy two tickets. He’d give me one of the stubs, and when my parents asked where I was, I could show it to them. Couldn’t have been up in Ventura, I was at the movies! I’d do it for him sometimes too.”

  My heart was thumping. “And he asked you to do that for him the night before I disappeared?”

  “That afternoon, yeah,” he said. He started rooting around in the freezer. “I never even got to give him the stub. It was a zoo around your house, and he wouldn’t take my calls. Damn, I could have sworn there were ice cream sandwiches in here!”

  “Did you tell the police?” I asked.

  “Why would I?”

  “Because . . .” Then I realized. The police would never ask about what Patrick was doing the day before Danny was reported missing.

  “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.