The House of Secrets

by Brad Meltzer

  Hazel recognized that—Honor the people who love you, that was her father, wasn’t it?—as Skip waved his sparkler like a conductor, making an infinity symbol in the air.

  The sparklers were technically illegal in Studio City, Hazel thought, suddenly remembering that from nowhere too.

  “Make ’em last,” Skip said, still conducting.

  Hazel let the sparkler burn down, down, down, until the last lick of flame smoldered between her thumb and index finger, until Skip leaned over and blew it out.

  “Try not to kill yourself,” Skip said. “You’re all I have left.”

  She watched the ember. “Can I ask you something and you won’t be offended?”

  “Sure,” Skip said.

  “Do I like you?”

  Skip laughed. “You revere me.”

  “Even when you were on the show with Dad?”

  “Especially then,” Skip said. “It was actually kind of awkward. I’m not a hero.”

  He kept his face straight for almost a full twenty seconds. He was a better actor than she thought. He yanked open a cabinet, pulled out two coffee mugs, and set them on the marble island between them.

  “You didn’t hate me,” Skip said. “We had a few odd years there. Plus, you weren’t into the show, that’s for sure.”

  “What about recently?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Just as Hazel started to answer, someone banged loudly on the front door.

  Hazel looked at Skip, close enough that she could really see his face. He was a boyish thirty-nine, but time wasn’t always going to be his friend. There were deep lines around his eyes. Worry lines. It was almost midnight. “You expecting someone?” she asked, quickly thinking they had that front gate for a reason.

  Skip shook his head. She was starting to see his pattern. Skip had nothing; he always had nothing.

  Bam-bam-bam!

  “Open the door! FBI!”

  Hazel lunged forward, looking through the peephole. At the sight of him, Hazel’s first inclination was to back up quietly and pretend no one was home, get to a phone, call 911, run out the back as fast as she possibly could.

  “Ms. Nash,” Agent Rabkin said from the other side of the door, “if that’s you standing there, you need to open this door before I kick it in.”

  14

  What do you want?” Hazel challenged.

  “No one knew you were checking out of the hospital,” Agent Rabkin said, stepping through the living room, then the dining room, as he scanned the house. Hazel saw what he was really doing, picking apart what had been turned into a time capsule of her dad’s life: a photo of him shaking hands with President Reagan, a still from the time Skip was on The Love Boat (he couldn’t have been more than ten), and Hazel playing field hockey, blood on her right knee, a stick in her hands, and a look like murder in her eyes.

  “I didn’t know I had to tell you,” Hazel said, “especially since I don’t know you.”

  “I’m not your enemy, Ms. Nash.”

  “Then why’re you here?”

  “To make sure you and your brother are safe.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Then I suppose you’ll be on your way,” Hazel said, motioning to the door as Skip handed her a fresh cup of coffee. She took a sip. It tasted like warm dirt, but brought a memory of standing under a spindly tree in the sub-Saharan savanna, sharing a cup with her guide. Hazel had been there to study a group of Bushmen who had death rituals that were unique even among the tribes of the region: When someone in the clan died, they would pick up camp and move, never to live in the spot of death again. Still, something more was starting to work at her now.

  “You have a good night, Ms. Nash. You too, Skip,” Rabkin said. “And don’t forget: If you interfere in this investigation, I will arrest you.”

  Hazel watched Agent Rabkin leave, followed him out the front door past five pairs of shoes, and didn’t say a word as his black Suburban rolled backward out of the driveway.

  She’d grown up on this tree-lined street. Movie studios used to set up on the end of the block to shoot establishing shots. Dozens of horror movies started in her safe, sun-dappled neighborhood, and only cut away when the monsters showed up, or someone with an ax came out of the bushes. Except Hazel knew there was a secret in every house on the block, a creature under every bed.

  The sky blue Cape Cod across the street. Who lived there way-back-when? They weren’t close, so the memory was clear. The Caswells. Their father walked out on them. The yellow California ranch house next door? The Laramors. Oldest son died in a car accident, hit by a drunk driver. Down at the end of the block? The two-story Brady Bunch house that had been remodeled, with a wrought iron fence now wrapped around the whole place, including a call box. Who lived there? The Sorensens. The mother used to walk down the middle of the street in her robe and nothing else, cops would get called, and then they wouldn’t see Mrs. Sorensen for a few weeks, maybe a month.

  It was summer in Los Angeles, the time for serial killers and wildfires, but being outside was suddenly the only place Hazel could stand to be. The inside of her father’s house was closing around her like the walls of the hospital, like the walls of her mind.

  Mysteries need to be solved.

  Three guesses per night.

  “Hazel? You okay?”

  She turned around. Skip was standing behind her.

  “There’s a rub in every deal,” Hazel said. There was a memory she couldn’t grasp, some lost piece of time, a thread that, pulled tight, would end up in her hand. “In the hospital, Rabkin never answered our question about what work Dad did with the government.”

  Across the street, the garage door of the Cape Cod opened and two teenage boys came rolling out on skateboards. Under the driveway spotlight, they were shirtless, tan, and in mid-sentence. Hazel caught something about a party in the canyon. It was the middle of the night and no one was stopping these kids from doing anything.

  “This isn’t a conversation for the front lawn,” Skip said.

  “Dad lived here for our entire lives. Whatever secrets he had, they managed to stay on this block.”

  “Maybe I should go on TV and tell everyone that Dad was a spy,” Skip said. “I bet we’ll get some answers then.”

  “That doesn’t mean they’ll be the right answers.”

  Skip started to reply, then stopped as Hazel’s words sank in. “Dad was decapitated in the car accident,” he said. “Last week, when I first met Rabkin, he told me that. I wasn’t sure if you heard. I thought you should know.”

  “Hnh,” Hazel said. “Was Dad already dead?”

  “If he was alive, it wasn’t in a significant way,” Skip said.

  Hazel nodded, thinking she knew a bit about what it might be like to be alive insignificantly. Over the past week, what had she seen when she was in that coma? Blackness. If she wanted light, if she wanted answers about her dad and Benedict Arnold’s bible, there was only one place she’d get them.

  15

  The Bear stokes the fire. The problem when you burn clothing is the unpredictability of fabrics, which is why The Bear prefers to wear silk. It’s hard to ignite, burns slowly and erratically, if at all—and in the situation where someone might try to set you on fire, a significant amount of accelerant would be needed. Make them work to kill you, The Bear thinks. Make them leave evidence.

  It seems to The Bear that he’s dealing with an acetate today, what with the acrid smell and the molten black sludge that’s filling the bottom of the firebox. He’ll have to chip that off when it cools, flush it down the toilet, then have housekeeping come in early, before he checks out, make sure they give the toilet a good scrubbing.

  The housekeeping staff at the Al Qasr hotel has been very attentive thus far. He’ll leave them a nice tip when he checks out in a few hours. Will fill out a comment card.

  He tosses a pair of socks in the fire. They sizzle and melt. Nylon. Arthur Kennedy had enough m
oney to sit in first class, and still, nylon?

  It’s five o’clock in the Eastern Time Zone, so The Bear gets online and watches the feed of the local New Haven, Connecticut, news. A reality TV star has been arrested for tax evasion. The Friends of the New Haven Animal Shelter will host a pet adoption in the parking lot of the IKEA tomorrow at 11 a.m. There was an earthquake in Plainfield, of all places.

  No mention of local man Arthur Kennedy’s body being found in Dubai. In truth, The Bear is surprised. He’d left Kennedy outside the mosque in Sonapur, the old burial ground that the Emirates had turned into a camp for the workers of the high-end resorts. Just a few miles from the most expensive and lavish destinations on the planet and yet it was a squalor of tenements and shanties. A bad place to die, a worse place to live, The Bear thought, knowing a little light wouldn’t be such a bad thing to shine on that shadowland.

  But he’s spent more than a day waiting for someone to find the body and put the word out.

  He checks the New Haven Register. Nothing. Checks the Hartford Courant. Nothing. Widens it out to the papers in Boston, New York, even Philadelphia. Nothing. He checks crime blotters. Checks Twitter. Checks Facebook. Checks Instagram. He checks the social networks in the UAE, Russia, China, everywhere. Spiders through the credit reporting services, the banks, everything.

  Quiet.

  He reads the obituary for Jack Nash, celebrated TV host of The House of Secrets. There’s plenty of noise there. Whole websites are claiming it was murder, assassination, cover-up.

  He looks for the man known as Darren Nixon, who was found with a bible in his chest.

  Quiet there too. That much he expected. People were still good at their jobs occasionally.

  Then he looks for Hazel. And Skip.

  Skip is easy to track. On Twitter, someone named Tommy2unes posted: “Just saw Skip Nash at Starbucks. Gave condolences. Super nice. #HouseOfSecrets.” For twenty years, Skip had been on TV. Wherever he went, someone saw him. He was a living alibi. This made The Bear’s work easy. The bait was set. When word got out, Skip and Hazel would come running.

  The Bear does 100 sit-ups, 150 push-ups, another 100 sit-ups, another 150 push-ups. Then he orders crème brûlée from the room service menu.

  The Bear eats his crème brûlée. Looks for Arthur Kennedy again.

  Refreshes.

  A hundred crunches.

  Refreshes.

  The Bear calls the New Haven police from one of his three cell phones, not that they’d be able to trace him all the way to Dubai. Not the locals, anyway. It was up the chain that was the issue. “Would it be possible to check on my cousin? He hasn’t answered his phone in days and I’m starting to worry. His name? Yes. Arthur Kennedy. Yes, I’ll hold.”

  He hangs up, tosses his phone into the fire, watches it melt.

  That should do it. Maybe Skip wouldn’t come running.

  But Hazel would.

  16

  I don’t think you’re ready for this,” Skip told her the following morning. They were getting off the highway now, on the turnoff for the airport and its giant LAX sign. “For all you know, this is exactly what Rabkin wants you to do: to go searching like Dad did. Maybe he’s using you.”

  “No one’s using me,” Hazel said. Part of her thought that was true. Another part of her thought about Darren Nixon, about Benedict Arnold’s bible, about her father. Mostly about her father. Whatever was really going on, she had to know who her dad was, even if she didn’t quite know who she was yet.

  “You should throw away your cell phone,” Hazel told Skip. “Burn your computer too. Whatever’s going on, I’d rather do it without the FBI.”

  “I don’t know, Haze,” Skip said. “All those years I was on the show, Dad never said a word to me about searching for anything that belonged to Benedict Arnold. Don’t you think one night, when we were in a hut in Asia, or out in Africa, doing that show on Bushmen and their precognitive dreams, he would have said something?”

  “You were a kid.”

  “I’m not a kid anymore.” He looked in the rearview mirror, then pointed over his shoulder. “You think Dad wanted us to be followed?”

  Hazel turned around. There was a black Suburban behind them.

  “That’s an airport shuttle,” Hazel said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it’s obvious,” Hazel said. “Skip, I meant what I said about your phone.”

  Skip pulled up to the curb at LAX. The black Suburban passed them. It had a giant sticker in the back window advertising Luxury Limousine Transport.

  “See?” Hazel said.

  “You think it would say surveillance?”

  The Suburban was far away now, fading from view.

  “I can come with you if you want,” Skip said.

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.

  Skip didn’t say a word for almost a full minute. Finally, “Why aren’t you scared?”

  “I don’t know,” Hazel said.

  “It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be.”

  “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “You could die,” Skip said.

  “I’ve already been dead,” Hazel said, thinking, I’m already dead. “How long were we out there in the desert before help came?”

  “An hour,” Skip said. “I don’t know. Maybe more.”

  “If someone wanted us gone, we’d be gone.”

  Skip got out of his car, popped the trunk, and pulled out Hazel’s bag. It was a bowling ball bag with a Skippy peanut butter logo on it, the kind of gross, hip thing you buy in LA and never use again. Hazel knew it wasn’t hers, and knew there were barely any clothes in it. Two shirts, two pairs of pants, no shoes. Those had been cut off her when she was brought into the hospital; she bought flip-flops in the gift shop. She wanted to go home to San Francisco, get some clothes of her own. And get some other things too.

  “Are we people who hug?” Hazel asked.

  “We aren’t,” Skip said. Hazel made a face, then reached out and wrapped her arms around him. “Don’t do anything stupid, okay?” he said.

  “That’s the plan,” she said.

  17

  I recognize you,” the man sitting next to Hazel on the flight to San Francisco said. They’d been in the air for thirty minutes. Hazel’s head was down, her earphones in, as she watched her father on the iPad she had grabbed from his house. This was precisely how she’d spent nearly every free moment since she left the hospital: trying to learn everything her dad knew.

  Onscreen, there he was, in the Everglades, 1981, searching for a hundred-foot python that locals said had eaten a missing girl. He never found a giant python. Nor any bones of a young girl.

  Hazel took one earphone out. “I’m sorry?” she said.

  The man was staring at her like he knew her, his face too close to hers. He was in his forties, dressed in a suit, but not like the kind Agent Rabkin wore; this one was tailored, and it didn’t look like he had a gun. He wore a dress shirt, one with a white collar and blue stripes, which made him look like a network anchorman. Or an asshole. He had a watch that would let him know the hour in two other time zones she was pretty sure he couldn’t identify.

  “I said I recognized you,” he said. “You’re a woman who doesn’t want to be bothered.”

  “Perceptive,” Hazel said, and started to put her earphone back in. The man tugged the cord out of her iPad.

  “I’m Tony Champion,” he said and extended his hand. Hazel didn’t take it, because she thought she might break his wrist. “Name isn’t familiar to you?”

  “No,” Hazel said, feeling her anger rising, but unsure how to stop it.

  “Tony Champion’s Tri-City Ford? No? Nothing?”

  “I’m not from the area,” Hazel said. Whatever area he was from.

  “Ah,” Tony said. “I recognized you in the airport, actually.” He winked at her. Actually winked. “No worries. I’m not one of those people, right? That annoying guy who talks to you on
a plane and then you’re worried he’ll follow you out to your car or something? I’m not that guy. I’m more like the guy who sits down next to you and talks nervously because he’s afraid to fly.” He paused. “That came out wrong. I mean. Let’s start over. Can I start over?”

  “You can try,” Hazel said.

  “I look over and I see you, and I’m like, okay, I know that girl, she’s the one from that car crash in the desert, I mean, I know you’re more than that, but I eyeballed you at the airport—Jack Nash’s daughter—and then I look down and see your father there on your screen and I know for sure. And I think, What are the odds? We should have a drink. Do you want a drink? You have a drink with me, I’ll give you back your earphones. How’s that for a deal?”

  “I don’t want to be bothered,” Hazel said.

  “I get it,” he said. He rolled her earphone cable around between his thumb and forefinger. Then tugged it again—hard—so it ripped from her ear. “But what choice do you have now, right?”

  Hazel turned her whole body toward Tony, leaned into him, past the armrest. They locked eyes, and Hazel gave Tony a good deep drink of her black glare. Let him see the fire he’d started.

  Hazel saw his pulse beating in his throat. If she wanted to, she could go for blood right where he sat. He’d be unconscious before he could even ring for the flight attendant. How many ways could she do it? She could snap her headphones apart into sharp points. She could use her seat belt buckle to clip his throat. She could use her bare hands…and wouldn’t that be satisfying about now?

  Slowly, Tony Champion’s smile faded. Hazel could see his face turning pale, could smell the fear coming off him, hear his breath quickening. Her earphone cable slipped from his fingers.

  He wasn’t half as terrified as Hazel now was. It was one thing to protect herself, but her thoughts, the violence, had come so fast, so intensely, so…naturally. Who the hell was she in her old life?

  Her hands now shaking from the adrenaline rush, Hazel took her earphones back and plugged them in.