“Where I’ve got to,” I said.
“The FBI?” he said. “You think you know something?”
“The FBI already knows everything I do,” I said. It was a better lie than my last one, and the flash of panic in his eyes proved it. “I’m just getting out of here. Let me go, Patrick.”
He shook his head and took another step toward me. I backed away until the knob of the front door was digging into my spine. “I can’t do that,” he said.
“You can’t stop me,” I said, my voice calmer than I felt. “The damage is done, so you might as well let me go. Don’t make it worse.”
“I don’t know what you think you know—”
“That you murdered your little brother?” I said. The words just burst out of me. I couldn’t stop thinking of the boy on the baseball card, of how Danny was only a little older than that boy. “Dumped his body in the desert somewhere?”
Patrick stepped back as though I’d shoved him. “I could never hurt Danny.”
A liar knows his own kind. I should have been able to see the falsehood, but Patrick looked sincere. I guess he was a better liar than I thought. Better than me.
“He was just a little boy, Patrick,” I said. “Maybe he wasn’t perfect, but he deserved a family who loved him. Not one that would kill him and cover it up.”
“I didn’t do that!” he said, and he lunged toward me, not like he wanted to hurt me but like he wanted to bring me close, to make me understand. “He was my brother, and I loved him. I would have never touched him.”
“But you’d make your mother think she killed him,” I said, wheeling away from Patrick’s grasp, “and you’d blackmail her into covering it up. Make her live with that guilt and watch it destroy her a little more every day. What about that? What about Mia and Nicholas, having to live with the hope that Danny’s alive and will come home some day, when you know he’s dead? When you know because you killed him?”
Suddenly, the front door opened and Lex, loaded with grocery bags, came in.
“Hey, what are you two doing—”
“Lex, get out of here,” Patrick snapped.
“Does she know?” I said. “She must. You made her lie for you and say she’d seen Danny the morning he went missing.”
Lex’s face went lifeless and white, and the bags dropped from her fingers.
“Lex,” Patrick said softly. “Please. Go.”
But I was on fire. With the unfairness of what happened to Danny, with the unfairness of what happened to the boy on the baseball card. With what Patrick had done to Nicholas and Mia and Lex. Of how he took this wonderful family and twisted it until it broke.
“What else did you make her do?” I said. “How did you tell her you’d killed him?”
Lex covered her mouth with her hands. “Oh God,” she said.
Patrick rushed to her, putting his arms around her. She was crying, and she mumbled something into his chest I couldn’t make out.
“Please,” he said to her. “Please leave.”
“He killed Danny, Lex!” I said. “How can you be okay with that? He’s a monster!”
“No!” Lex cried. She held harder on to Patrick. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Patrick shook her. “Don’t say another word.”
I stared at them. Lex was sobbing, and they weren’t tears of grief or anger. They came from somewhere deeper and darker than that. And the way she held on to Patrick, desperate for his comfort and his . . .
His forgiveness.
The realization came to me slowly and in waves. Each time I tried to push it back, it came in stronger, a high tide that couldn’t be held back.
I looked at Patrick, whose expression was stricken and pale. “You didn’t kill him,” I said. I turned to Lex. “You did.”
• • •
Patrick let go of Lex. My head was swimming. Of course it was Lex. While Jessica had avoided me, and Patrick had put in just as much time with me as he needed to maintain the illusion, Lex had always been around. Either to keep an eye on me, because she had the most to lose, or to, in some sick way, assuage her guilty conscience by caring for me the way she hadn’t cared for her real brother. Patrick had helped protect her, because that’s what Patrick did; he was devoted to her above all people. She was the only one he’d create such an elaborate fiction for. He helped her convince Jessica that she’d been the one to kill Danny to protect Lex, he’d probably buried the body himself to protect Lex, and he’d taken the heat from the FBI to protect Lex.
“Why did you do it?” I whispered.
“It was an accident,” Patrick said.
“Bullshit.” I backed away from them. “You wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to cover up an accident. Why are you protecting her?”
Patrick jumped at me, but Lex stopped him by grabbing him around the arm. “Stop it!” she said. “Stop!”
Then she put her hand on his cheek and turned his face to hers.
It was a simple movement, but there was something about it. The way her fingers lingered on his skin. The way the touch stopped him in his tracks and the way he leaned into it. It was . . . intimate.
It was not the way a sister touched a brother, and with a shiver, I heard Kai’s voice in my ears.
That’s some seriously ironic shit.
They were close. Like, really close.
Patrick beat up any guy who came near Lex until none did. He was in Lex’s bedroom in the early hours the night I’d discovered they knew I wasn’t Danny. His safe combination was her birthday, and he had a picture of her on his bedside table. One where she was lying on her side with her cheek in the grass, and if he was lying down in bed looking at it, it would be almost like . . .
“What did Danny see?” I asked softly. “Did he walk in on you two together? Is that why he had to die?”
I could see it all in their faces as they stared at me. I was right. They had ditched school; no one was supposed to be home for a while. But Danny had left baseball practice early. He went looking for Lex because he wanted her to make him something to eat, and he’d found her in bed with Patrick. Naked. Maybe the grief of their father’s death had brought them together or maybe it had been going on longer than that, but it was the one secret no one else could ever, ever know.
The scene played in my head like a movie, the same way my lies did, and I watched it superimposed over the present.
Danny ran, and Lex caught him at the top of the stairs.
“I’m telling Mom!” he screamed.
“You’re not telling anyone!” she said, shaking him.
“Let go of me! You’re disgusting!”
She slapped him. “Don’t you say that!”
“I’m telling everyone!”
Danny tried to run. Lex knew she couldn’t let him go. She shoved him hard in the back. A spontaneous response. He went tumbling down the stairs, his head hitting the marble floor at the bottom with a crack, and then he was still.
I stared at the floor at the base of the stairs, just feet away from me. I saw the blood like it was still there.
Patrick lunged at me and wrapped his hands around my throat.
I fell to the ground, into the pool of blood I still saw in my mind. Patrick had his full weight on top of me, his knees digging into me as he pinned me to the ground. Lex tried to pull him off, but he shoved her away again and again. My vision started to go dark, like the closet door was closing and shutting out the light. I was the only one who knew the secret, so I had to die. He had to protect Lex.
I flailed with my arms, trying to find some way to hurt Patrick enough to get him off me. My lungs were burning for air, and I was wild. I scratched him across the face and dug my fingernails in. With one last surge of dying adrenaline, I reached Patrick’s eye with one of my hands and gouged. He yelled and reeled back, clutching at his face. In my darkened peripheral vision, I saw Lex run from the room, up the stairs. I gulped in fresh air through my burning throat and threw myself on top of Patrick. He was hea
vier, but I really didn’t want to die. I got my hands around his throat. Not so nice, was it? He struggled, and I slammed his head against the marble. I’d never thought I had it in me to kill a person before, but if it was him or me, maybe I could do it.
As I slowly squeezed the life out of Patrick, I realized the drops appearing on his face came not from him, but from me. I was crying, my tears falling down onto him. I never wanted this.
All I wanted was a family. All I wanted was to be loved.
But I guess we don’t always get what we want.
There was a sudden bang, a noise so loud it felt more like a sensation than a sound. I didn’t feel anything, but suddenly I was falling forward. Patrick rolled me onto my back as he scrambled out from under me, and there was Lex standing over me, Robert’s pistol smoking in her shaking hand. I touched my chest and felt wetness there. I lifted my hand and saw that it was red. Blood. My blood.
I felt my body turning cold as the blood drained out of me, pooling on the white marble of the foyer, but there was no pain. Above me, Lex was crying and Patrick was taking the gun from her hand. I knew what would happen now. I would “disappear” too, only this time there would be no one to worry or mourn for me. I would rot in a shallow desert grave, turning to bones and then dust, while the world wondered what happened to Danny Tate and never again thought of me. Just what I’d wanted for so long.
Lex collapsed at my side, crying ugly tears that contorted her pretty face. She reached out to me, but if her fingers touched me, I couldn’t feel it.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
I tried to speak but found I couldn’t. Blood gurgled in the back of my throat. I don’t know what I would have said to her anyway. Go to hell, maybe. Or I forgive you.
Somewhere there was a sound I recognized, but the world was slipping away and I couldn’t name it. But then I saw. Familiar beams of red and blue painting the white marble. I couldn’t remember what those meant anymore either, but I knew it was good. I smiled.
And then I died.
• • •
It was the FBI. Lynch had heard the gunshot and recognized it for what it was. He got Hidden Hills security to override the gate and call for backup. He’d arrived outside the front door, his siren blaring, just moments before I exhaled my last breath. After a brief standoff during which Patrick and Lex destroyed my laptop and Lynch waited for the cops to arrive, Patrick marched out of the house with his hands raised, the pistol clutched in one of them, protecting Lex one last time. They took him to jail, where he confessed to the murder of Daniel Tate. When they asked him why he’d done it, he wouldn’t say.
Nicholas went to see Agent Morales. He wanted to know why she was pretending the body they’d found on the floor of the foyer was his brother’s when he was sure she knew it wasn’t.
“What do you want me to say, kid?” Morales said. “His government issued passport identified him as Daniel Tate. His family—including you—told me he was Daniel Tate. Now you want to tell me he wasn’t?”
“He wasn’t,” Nicholas said. “You know he wasn’t.”
Morales shrugged. “Prove it.”
“Do a DNA test—”
“The body’s already been cremated,” Morales said, “at the request of your mother.”
Nicholas went still, his every muscle wound tight. “This isn’t right. You know it isn’t. You just want to be able to close your case.”
Morales leaned forward. “You want some advice, kid?”
“No.”
“Well, you’re going to get it,” she said. “Move on with your life. Your brother is dead, and the person who killed him will spend the rest of his life in jail. All that’s left for you to do is put up a nice headstone somewhere and let your parents and sister have some closure. What happened here . . . it could be a lot worse.”
Nicholas remembered something I’d said once, about how Mia would be left with no one if the truth about what had happened to Danny all those years ago was exposed.
“Thanks for your help,” he said, and left.
• • •
In her bedroom Lex stared at the baseball card. My picture, with my real name printed underneath, stared back up at her, smiling. Deliberately, moving slowly so that she wouldn’t burn her shaking hand, she held the baseball card over a candle until it caught, curled, and blackened.
• • •
A few weeks later that headstone Agent Morales had suggested was up, and Nicholas and Ren jumped the fence at the cemetery to meet there late one night.
Daniel Arthur Tate, the headstone read. Beloved Son, Brother, and Friend.
It was not exactly what I had imagined, but it was home.
Nicholas and Ren sat in the grass beside my grave and took turns drinking from a flask.
“I think he was going to tell me, you know,” Ren said. The day after my funeral, Nicholas decided he wasn’t keeping secrets he didn’t have to anymore. He brought Asher home to meet his family. He told them all about NYU. And when Ren cornered him one day at school and told him she wanted the truth, all of it, he gave it to her. “The last time I saw him, he promised he’d tell me everything.”
“What would you have done?” Nicholas asked.
She sighed. “I don’t know.”
“Did you love him?”
She took a long sip of the alcohol and shook her head. “I didn’t really know him.” She sighed. “But maybe I could have loved the real person he was. Someday.”
“I know what you mean,” Nicholas said.
“When are you leaving?” she asked.
“Next week,” he said. “Asher and I moved up our trip. I just . . . have to get out of here. I heard you’re moving?”
She nodded. “Joining my parents in Dubai.”
They sat in silence for a long time after that, passing the flask back and forth. I wished I could talk to them. Tell them I was sorry, tell them the truth, make it all right.
But you only get one life to do those things, and mine was done.
“I’d better go,” Nicholas finally said, standing.
“Yeah, me too.” Ren pressed her hands to the grass, and I recognized the unspoken good-bye in the gesture. “You know, I never even knew his real name.”
Nicholas looked down at the headstone, where the name of his brother was engraved.
“Me neither,” he said.
And then they left.
• • •
I’ve imagined a hundred lies I could tell you about what happened to me. Maybe Ren and I really did run off together. Maybe I was arrested right alongside Lex and Patrick and I’m composing this from my prison cell. Maybe I’m actually a grown Nicholas sitting at a laptop in my apartment in New York City, trying to use words to sort through that terrible period of my life.
But, strangely enough, I think the truth is the best version this time. My little burial plot isn’t much, but it’s a place to belong. A place where people I love, who love me, too, come to see me. Jessica visits often with Mia, who always has a handpicked bouquet for me and kisses my headstone before she leaves. Robert and Nicholas come whenever they’re in town. And every once in a while Lex comes to stand at a distance, silent and pale faced. It’s not a lot, but it’s enough for me. I’m Daniel Tate, and, weirdly, I’m finally at peace.
• • •
Do you believe me?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to thank my editor, Zareen Jaffery, Mekisha Telfer, Chloë Foglia, Justin Chanda, and everyone else at Simon & Schuster for their hard work and backing of this book.
Much appreciation also goes to those who read Here Lies Daniel Tate in its early stages and offered their suggestions and encouragement: the Moor women (Lynn, Annie, Ava and Amrita), Diana Fox, Shae McDaniel, and Eden Grey.
Lastly I’d like to thank my friends and family for their unceasing support and my readers for their patience and continued enthusiasm. Love you guys!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cristi
n Terrill holds a bachelor of arts from Vassar College and a master of arts from the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. She lives in Virginia, where she leads creative writing workshops for DC–area kids and teens and emerging YA novelists. Her first novel All Our Yesterdays was the winner of the International Thriller Writers’ award for Best Young Adult Novel. Visit her online at @cristinterrill.
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Also by Cristin Terrill
All Our Yesterdays
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An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people,
or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places,
and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2017 by Cristin Moor
Jacket photographs copyright © 2017 by Michael Frost
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