The House of Secrets

by Brad Meltzer

“You accusing me of selling my dad’s coat to this dead man?” Skip asked.

  “Not just a dead man. A dead ex-con. Two years ago, Nixon spent time in prison.”

  “For moving stolen merchandise?” Hazel asked.

  “Nope. For forging his boss’s signature on company checks, then trying to burn the place down to cover it up. That’s fraud and arson,” Rabkin said, watching both their reactions. “Darren Nixon wasn’t the nicest of guys,” he added, his thumb tapping where his wedding ring used to be. Agent Rabkin’s wife hasn’t been gone long, Hazel thought. That explained the overgrown eyebrows too. Probably divorce. If Rabkin were a widower, maybe he’d have a softer edge. As it was, he seemed jagged to a fault, as if he was ready at any moment to put his fist through a wall. Or into a person’s mouth.

  “You don’t think it’s odd, that when it comes to Darren Nixon, your father’s jacket was found on someone he certainly wouldn’t associate with?” Rabkin asked.

  “It wasn’t my father’s jacket!” Skip practically shouted. “It was Benedict Arnold’s!” He breathed hard. “My father came into possession of a jacket like this. Maybe it was even this one! Maybe it wasn’t!” He stared down at the grisly picture. “I swear to you, I’ve never seen this guy. I don’t know him. And if it helps, my dad knew that that coat, I mean the one he owned at least, was a fake.”

  “You seem more confident now.”

  “You asked me the story of the jacket, that’s what I know about the jacket. It was fake,” Skip said.

  “Then do you have any idea why your father would go pay Nixon a personal visit? Or did he regularly go visit ex-cons who binge-watched his show and wore his old clothing?”

  “Watch your tone,” Hazel warned. Was this new, her protective feelings about Skip? Or did this come from some proven trust she couldn’t quite remember? “He’s telling the truth: That jacket is worthless. It’s a fake.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t recognize the jacket,” Rabkin said.

  “I lied,” Hazel said.

  “No surprise there.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Have you even heard the doctor’s latest theory about your injury, Ms. Nash?” Agent Rabkin asked.

  “Dr. Morrison said I have a traumatic brain injury. They’re still doing tests to see the extent.”

  “That doesn’t mean they don’t have a theory. Apparently, the problem’s in your left amygdala. Way I understand it, our brains are like power grids. Blow out one transformer and you can black out an entire city—or part of it, which is what happened in your case. They said it produced a condition that’s like the opposite of PTSD.”

  “They don’t know what they’re talking about,” Skip said. “She remembers her studies…her anthropology research.”

  “I’m sure she does. But tell me about your brother, Ms. Nash. Do you admire him? Are you jealous of him? Or better yet, what about your dad? He died almost two weeks ago. But have you cried about it yet?”

  Hazel didn’t say anything. She looked out the window. Tried to imagine how the people out there in the real world would respond to this line of questioning. The kids walking on the campus at UCLA. The tourists shopping in Westwood. Hell, even the doctors and nurses downstairs in the cafeteria, whiling away their breaks over a slice of German chocolate cake and Instagram. A chill ran through Hazel. The room was suddenly cold. “I loved my dad,” she said. She meant those words. Even if she couldn’t remember all the contours of their relationship, some things could be felt. “I did love him.”

  “I’m sure you did. But according to Dr. Morrison, there’s the issue,” Rabkin said. “In post-traumatic stress disorder, your emotional memories get heightened, which is why soldiers duck for cover when they hear a loud noise. For you, it’s the opposite—your emotional memories got scrambled. So you can recall cold data like your address or license plate number, or even the Wikipedia facts of an ancient papyrus—but anything you have an emotional connection to, whatever info was in the emotional part of your brain, well…that’s why you can’t remember your best friend. Or your first kiss. Or what made you happy.”

  “So she has no emotions?” Skip asked.

  “No, of course she has emotions. She can love, hate, feel, or experience the quiet terror that she’s probably feeling right now. What she lost is her attachment—to people, to objects. So what she really lost, when it comes to the people she cared about, is her memory of their relationship. Isn’t that right, Ms. Nash?”

  Hazel stayed silent, the room now freezing.

  “So she knows I’m her brother, but she doesn’t know how she used to feel about me?”

  “They said it’s amazing she even recognized you. From here on in, she can walk into a bar, meet someone new, even be attracted to them, but have no idea they once broke her heart. It’s the same with her memories about herself. With the gaps she has—the files now gone from her mental hard drive—she’s still not sure what kind of person she is, much less who she was.”

  Hazel sat with that. Like any truth, she knew it as he was saying it.

  “Want to hear the most interesting part about the amygdala?” Rabkin asked. “It’s the size of an almond, only a few centimeters in size. Plus or minus. Tends to be a little larger for folks with anxiety disorders or who have undergone extreme stress. A little smaller for others.”

  “Like who?” Hazel asked.

  “Sociopaths,” Rabkin said. “Serial killers. A millimeter in either direction can signal problems.”

  Hazel wanted to sit back down on the bed. But she didn’t move. “Where do I fall?”

  “Dr. Morrison said your structure hasn’t changed,” Rabkin said carefully. “According to your last MRI, you were normal.”

  Were.

  “When was that?” Hazel said.

  “That’s the exact same question I asked,” Rabkin said. “It was six months ago. Checked yourself into the ER in Santa Cruz with someone’s teeth stuck in your forehead from a headbutt. That ring any bells?”

  “No.”

  “You told the doctors it was a skydiving accident. It was a fairly serious concussion.”

  Hazel wanted to argue, wanted to scream again, wanted to say it wasn’t her. But for two days now, this was her life. Simple facts? Those were easy. Emotional memories? File not found.

  In this case, she knew she skydived. She remembered that. But jumping out of a plane and ending up with someone’s teeth stuck in her head? It seemed the sort of thing that would get hardwired, but again, file not found. It was the same last night, when they gave her an hour to go online and she found a mention of an old drunken brawl (that she had started) in a bowling alley in Oakland. What the hell kind of person did she used to be?

  “Want to hear Dr. Morrison’s final piece of advice?” Rabkin asked. “He said that depending how you look at it, maybe this is a gift. You get to be anyone you want now. Anyone. This is your new life, Ms. Nash. Maybe it’s time to associate with better people. And make safer choices.”

  “What if I want my old life back?”

  “He said that once your brain starts to make associations—when you smell something, when you see something—you’ll find your way. But you have to proceed under the assumption that what’s gone is gone.”

  “Nothing is ever gone,” Hazel said. “Everything is somewhere.”

  Rabkin actually smiled then.

  “Listen,” Skip said, turning the photo over, so he wouldn’t need to see it again. “If you worked with my father, wouldn’t you know what he was up to?”

  “Your father was a cautious man,” Agent Rabkin said.

  “Did you even know him?” Hazel challenged.

  “No,” Rabkin said.

  “Who did?” Skip said.

  “Clearly not you,” Rabkin said.

  “It was a rhetorical question,” Skip said. He finished his cup of coffee, then looked at the bottom of the cup like it contained some magic. “This is crazy.”

  Hazel ag
reed, still replaying Rabkin’s words about her amygdala and the PTSD. At least now she had a theory—an explanation—for where so much of her life went. More important, according to the doctor, as her brain makes associations, some of it could come back. For that alone, the room wasn’t as cold anymore. Still, there was that word Rabkin used: Sociopath.

  Hazel glanced back at her hospital bed. On each of the side railings was a reinforced metal loop, welded into place. She hadn’t noticed the loops before, but she knew what they were there for. Handcuffs. This was the kind of bed they use in prison. The kind of bed that Darren Nixon probably slept in at some point.

  I am Hazel-Ann Nash and I am feeling like I need to know what the hell is really going on.

  “So you have no idea why or even if your father was searching for Benedict Arnold’s bible?” Rabkin asked.

  “Let me tell you a secret about my dad,” Skip said. “Stories like this Benedict Arnold one, they’re everything and absolutely nothing. Most people are content to just go live their lives. Some people need to need something else, something that isn’t right in front of them. Maybe that’s God. Maybe that’s quantum physics. Maybe it’s atheism. That’s the mystery. If Dad wanted Benedict Arnold’s bible, or his jacket, or his jockstrap, that’s the reason he chased it.”

  “That explains a chase. It doesn’t explain what could be a secret obsession he hid from his own family.”

  “All obsessions are inexplicable,” Skip said, “until you go out into the world and find out there’s ten million people shouting from their basements about the same thing. Then it’s just culture.”

  “That’s the problem,” Rabkin said. “Your father shared his obsession with one guy—a guy he shouldn’t’ve been around—and that guy is now dead. Then your dad died three days later.”

  Hazel flipped the photo faceup again. “Why didn’t he turn over?”

  “What?” Agent Rabkin said.

  “Unless you’re at sea, or you don’t know how to swim,” Hazel said, “it’s actually pretty hard to drown. That whole drowning-in-a-teaspoon-of-water thing is pretty much a myth. I don’t see why this guy Nixon didn’t just turn over.”

  “He’d been poisoned,” Rabkin said with a new tone in his voice. That was another test. One that Hazel passed. “We found a paralyzing agent in his blood. A pretty significant dose.”

  “That’s even harder,” Hazel said, “historically speaking.” Hazel thought about how the tribes of the Amazon were frustrated when they tried to use poisonous leaves and bark to kill people. The formula was hard to get right, people’s body chemistry imprecise. “To just kill a person you’re confronting,” she continued, “one-on-one, in an open space? It’s easier to just shoot them, or, if you’re worried about the noise, stab them in the chest. Poisoning someone and then hoping they drown? That takes work. And the outcome is a gamble.”

  The words tumbled out of Hazel’s mouth before she even understood what she was saying, like she was an actress standing in front of a class, playing a teacher. Again, it felt right. And then she realized why Agent Rabkin had at first seemed familiar. He reminded her of herself. Or some version of herself.

  “Why the hell do you know that?” Skip said.

  “While you were on TV,” she said, “I was in school.” She slid the photo back to Agent Rabkin. “Tell me more about the poison in Nixon’s body.”

  “It wasn’t something we normally run across. A drug called Polosis 5,” he said. “The only other place it’s shown up—in a smaller quantity, but it was definitely there—was in your father’s body.”

  “So someone poisoned our father?” Hazel said. Skip couldn’t even speak.

  “I didn’t say that,” Rabkin said. “What I’m telling you is your dad was at Nixon’s house. Then, a few days later, he died out in his car while he was with you.”

  “Then why’d they tell us it was a heart attack?” Skip said.

  “Skip, stop talking,” Hazel said. There was something starting to work in her mind, some wire twisting loose.

  “You look like you have a theory, Ms. Nash.”

  “Hnh,” Hazel said. “I’m just thinking, maybe this isn’t about Darren Nixon being a bad guy. Maybe he’s just a collector, but for this purchase, maybe he bought more than a coat. Whatever he found, maybe someone came looking for that, then came after Dad. Or maybe while Nixon was up in Canada, Dad arrived at Nixon’s place, accidentally ingested some remnant poison, and it took a few days to kick in,” she said. “Where’d you say Nixon lived again? Spokane?”

  “That’s classified.”

  “Except you already told us,” Hazel said, thinking Agent Rabkin wasn’t real solid on what was and wasn’t secret.

  “I see what you’re doing, Ms. Nash. And I appreciate it. But let me remind you: You can study death all day long; it doesn’t make you a federal agent.”

  “That’s not—”

  “I’m sorry your father’s dead. I truly am. But if you and your brother want to help us, the best way to do that is by telling us all you know, then let us do our job, while you recover from your accident.”

  Hazel nodded, still wondering how a bible could even fit in someone’s chest. Plus, why was her father spending time with someone as sketchy as Nixon? And more important, why would someone even want a bible that belonged to Benedict Arnold? That seemed to be about more than just money. Was there really something hidden inside? Some old secret? Whoever had it, they had it for a reason, right? It couldn’t be a good one. Who does anything for peace anymore?

  “Can I ask you one last question, Ms. Nash?” Rabkin said. “Did you kill your father?”

  “Hey!” Skip shouted.

  “You have a feeling, Ms. Nash. So what’s your gut tell you?”

  Hazel thought for a moment. Weighed the evidence. Considered her knowledge of obscure poisons, like the one that apparently killed Darren Nixon. “No,” she said, thinking, I don’t think I did.

  “That’s good to hear. Then you have nothing to worry about,” Rabkin said. He opened the door, then walked out without looking back. “I’m glad you’re feeling better, Ms. Nash.”

  10

  Johannesburg, South Africa

  2011

  Season 23, Episode 12 (2011): “The Conspirator of Johannesburg”

  Jack Nash is sixty-five years old, sitting at one of five stools in a 150-year-old pub in Johannesburg named The Gun Hall. He’s waiting for the end of the world…and a woman calling herself Emily to come out of the bathroom.

  No.

  The toilet. That’s what they call it here, not even the loo. He wonders what the etymology of that word is, what the rub on that deal is, and remembers that he has all of the world’s knowledge in his pocket and he could probably just ask Google for an answer. It used to be that he needed to employ a staff of researchers to figure out the most mundane questions, kept university librarians around the country on speed dial, met his assistant Ingrid that way—or thought he had, anyway. But now he never needed to speak to anyone if he didn’t want to, which meant that days like today were getting more and more rare: a face-to-face meeting with an actual human source.

  Emily walks through the pub, and Jack sees that she’s nervous. She kneads her hands together. Touches her nose. A series of common human tics that convey anxiety. “I’m sorry,” she says, and sits down beside him. “Dr. Horton doesn’t feel comfortable meeting you here.”

  Jack glances around. No one’s noticed him yet. He has on his best disguise: a baseball cap, a bit of beard, and his back to the room.

  “You’re safe here. This place has been a sanctuary since the nineteenth century,” Jack tells her, though back in the nineteenth century, The Gun Hall used to be…rough. Even during apartheid, it was rough. Today, it’s all cleaned up, filled with tourists snapping photos of their food, the sort of place you held a wedding.

  “He’s been burned by the press,” Emily says.

  “I’m not the press. I’ll let him tell his story the way he w
ants.” That was true. Jack wasn’t a reporter; he didn’t chase truth; he chased ratings. And right now, Emily’s boss, Dr. Stephen Horton, was predicting that asteroid HM13 was going to slam into us, bringing about the end of the world. Most years, it’d be a good enough story. Today, as we approached 2012 and the Mayan doomsday, this is a two-hour special. Shark Week for the paranoid.

  “I’m sure you’re aware,” Emily says, “that forces are at play who would like to keep Dr. Horton quiet.”

  Jack sips his beer. He’s known Emily for twenty minutes and already knows that she’s a liar. It’s not a problem, on its face. Liars are dependable. You always know what their rub is, which makes it easier to figure out their next steps. Which is what Jack likes. Unweaving the fiction. Is the world going to end next year? Probably not. But raging asteroids weren’t the only thing Jack was here for.

  “I’m staying at the Saxon,” Jack says. He drops some cash on the bar. “Dr. Horton wants to talk, he can find me there.”

  Jack steps out into the street, but he doesn’t hail a cab. It’s beautiful in Johannesburg today, and if Jack’s going to die, his last moments shouldn’t be in a car.

  He’s thinking of his daughter—of Hazel—home sick from work with a sore throat. Jack called her three times, checking to make sure Hazel got a doctor’s appointment. Everything should get looked at. Everything, he always tells her. Indeed, he’s about to go for call number four when someone recognizes him.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Nash?” Jack turns around. There’s a man in a button-down shirt, black pants, sunglasses. “You are Jack Nash?”

  “I am,” Jack says.

  “Could I get your autograph?” The man has a piece of paper and a pen in his hand. Jack wonders how long this man has been following him.

  “For my son,” the man adds.

  “Of course,” Jack says, that old paranoia falling away. He takes the paper and pen from the man, smiles big. “What’s his name?”

  “Bethel,” the man says.

  Jack looks up, hearing the word. The magic word. Bethel. The great old city where the first great spy story happened, back when it was still called Luz. “I know a man from Bethel,” Jack replies, using the recognition phrase his supervisors had him memorize.