The House of Secrets

by Brad Meltzer

  She wondered, though, did she usually act this way? Maybe Skip had been right that morning, when they were together in the house, watching old episodes of The House of Secrets, seeing their dad aging in hour increments on the screen of the iPad. For years, Dad had Skip right by his side: a sandy-haired boy in Libya searching for remnants of the dragon slain by St. George; at thirteen and awkward, talking about the power of crystals in Santa Fe; at seventeen in Philadelphia, all sinew and nonchalance, walking the underground tunnels of the city, looking for ghosts.

  And then Skip was gone, on teen-idol cruises to Mexico, reality shows in Japan, conventions anywhere, sharing stories about what NASA told him about aliens, where he thought Jimmy Hoffa was buried, overseeing dives for sunken Revolutionary War treasures, coming up with an odd gold coin. He was, Hazel realized, only a couple of generations removed from selling miracle elixirs at a sideshow.

  Hazel tried to focus on the TV show, tried to keep her concentration.

  Onscreen, Jack was sitting on the porch of a falling-down river house, talking about the python with a Haitian woman who was no more than twenty-five. The missing girl’s mother. Her eyes were so wide with fear, it was a wonder she managed to put one word after the last. In her studies, Hazel had seen it a thousand times, when she was interviewing survivors of a thousand different horrors. Fear brought out precision in language. You didn’t have the benefit of metaphor or equivocation when you were in the middle of an unending trauma. She wondered what that did to the amygdala.

  “I have a daughter,” her father says to the young mother, then reaches out, touches her on the wrist. “Hazel-Ann.”

  “Pretty name,” the mother says.

  “If she were missing, I’d never stop looking for her,” Jack tells her. “Ever.”

  Hazel hit Stop. Scrolled back. Listened to her father’s words again.

  Again.

  Again.

  “I’ll find your daughter. She is somewhere,” Jack says.

  Again.

  Again.

  In fifteen minutes, the plane would swing toward San Francisco, where a woman named Hazel-Ann Nash lived. She’d gone missing in a car accident. That didn’t mean she wasn’t somewhere.

  18

  FBI Building

  Los Angeles

  Trevor Rabkin was taping up his old life when his phone buzzed. A few months back, he’d given away the last of his ex-wife’s clothes, what she’d left behind in the dryer when she walked out. A couple of shirts. Jeans. A scarf he’d purchased for her at a market in Kabul. Now, at his desk at FBI Headquarters, he was sealing a box filled with toys for his daughter. Get it into the mail. Be ready for the next part of his life. It was almost noon. Hazel would be arriving in San Francisco any minute.

  “Your girl is in the wind,” his new boss, Special Agent Louis Moten, said.

  “Sir?”

  “Hazel. Did you know she’s in San Francisco?”

  “I’m aware.”

  Moten made a noise, like a grunt. A surprised but content grunt. “You knew she’d go,” Moten said. It wasn’t a question. “Good job, Agent.”

  “You asked me to handle this. I’ll handle it,” Rabkin said.

  Last month, Trevor Rabkin accidentally blew the cover of an FBI agent involved in a bank robbery syndicate by shooting him. The FBI was in the process of kicking Rabkin to the curb. So what was next? Law school? No. Too many people. He wasn’t great with people. Maybe he’d look into veterinary medicine. Specialize in farm animals. Horses and cows. Not as much emotion wrapped up in those.

  Except he’d already thrown away so much. He could say lost. But that wasn’t true. He’d thrown it away.

  That’s when a man he’d never seen before entered his office. Older, late sixties at least, a gut, white linen suit, like he was just in from a courtroom in Mississippi in 1967. The man’s nose looked like it’d been hit a few times. No obvious guns on his body. Not even a bulge on his ankle. Paper pusher, Trevor had thought, though the guy carried himself like a cowboy, all his weight back on his heels. He had a file in his hand.

  “You Agent Rabbit?” Louis Moten had said.

  During his military training, they didn’t call him Rabbit just as an easy nickname. It was also because he was fast, though these days he wore the name because he kept jumping around—this would be his third transfer within the FBI in as many years. And most likely his last.

  “You still interested in being an actual agent?” Moten had asked. “Maybe use what you learned in Afghanistan.”

  Trevor tightened his gaze. He hadn’t told Moten that he’d served, much less where he’d been stationed. No, Moten wasn’t a paper pusher. He was the kind of guy who burned papers.

  “I’m in from Bethesda,” Moten had said. “You ever been out to Bethesda, Agent?”

  “No, sir.” Bethesda was the command center for half a dozen different operations. The kind that didn’t exist. Line items for million-dollar staplers? Those were in Bethesda.

  “It’s a swamp,” Moten had said, a thin smile spreading across his face. “You got a wife? Kids?” he’d asked.

  “No,” Trevor had said. “Not anymore. My wife took my daughter with her.”

  “That doesn’t mean you don’t have a kid.”

  “I was just—”

  Moten cut him off with a wave. “You got anyone you tell your secrets to? Therapist? Dog?”

  “No.”

  “Then we share a very good belief system,” Moten had said, pressing his palms together so his rings clinked: a gold wedding ring on his left hand…and on his right, a class ring from somewhere, one of those gaudy numbers that made it look like you won the Super Bowl for graduating college.

  “Everyone deserves a chance at redemption, don’t you think?” Moten added. “How’d you like a job?”

  “Depends what kind.”

  “How about one that doesn’t treat you like a moron?”

  Trevor nodded. He liked this man and his ugly suit. But what he liked even more was the chance to once again be the rabbit who was fast.

  From there, Rabbit got files on Jack Nash, the poison in his body, and all Jack’s work with the FBI. He also got files on Jack’s kids. The dumb one named Skip. And the one they didn’t trust. The wild one. Hazel. Dad traveled a lot. Hazel did too.

  “There’s something else,” Moten said today through the phone. “I’m sending it to you now. Could be nothing. Probably nothing. But I need you to look if it becomes an issue.”

  There was a ping on Rabbit’s computer. He opened the file.

  An American man named Arthur Kennedy was found outside a mosque in Sonapur, dead from what the UAE authorities were calling natural causes: respiratory failure, likely from a stroke.

  Which meant he dropped dead. Happened to people every day.

  The problem was, there was no one to claim his body, which meant by UAE law he’d be buried in an unmarked grave at the paupers’ cemetery, since no one was paying to ship his remains around the world.

  Case closed.

  Until New Haven cops got a call from someone purporting to be a cousin of Kennedy’s. When they couldn’t get a return on the phone number, they kicked it to the New Haven FBI field office for some help, and then it pinged and pinged and pinged, until it was in Rabbit’s email.

  Rabbit looked closer at the details in Kennedy’s file:

  Connecticut driver’s license. Forty-six years old. Height: 5′8″. Weight: 211 lbs. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Organ donor.

  From the photo on his license, he was mostly bald, not bothering to comb anything over, just an island above his forehead, sidewalls. He’s smiling, his teeth terrible, crooked, jagged, like his entire mouth is a crumbling Greek city.

  He had a real estate license since 1996. Owned three properties in New Haven, including a warehouse and the adjacent parking lot. If you want to make money, build a parking lot, even if it just means paving dirt and painting lines, and then you can charge people to leave their cars on it, money ou
t of nothing, every day.

  What caught Rabbit’s eye was that there was no next of kin, no will on file.

  Not with an attorney. Not with a lawyer or a bank trust.

  There was an OkCupid profile with a hundred personal answers, none of which looked terribly personal. Didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, but didn’t mind if you smoked or drank. Enjoyed American history, considered himself middle-of-the-road politically, but “didn’t believe the liberal media.” His typical Friday night included “wine, good friends, and some spirited debate.”

  Rabbit had set up his own profile a few weeks after his wife Mallory left. It was the middle of the night and he was sitting in Powell Library at UCLA, surrounded by students cramming for a future they thought was assured. He’d gotten through fifteen questions, then decided he’d be better off trying to find another agent to date. That hadn’t worked either.

  Onscreen, Rabbit clicked open the medical examiner’s photos and tried to make sense of what he was seeing.

  Arthur Kennedy may have died of natural causes, but he’d been left outside for a while, long enough for the sun to get to work on him before anyone found him. There were no obvious signs of trauma. Kennedy was sitting up, head bent back, mouth open wide, gravity working on his face, making it look like he was mid-scream. The flies didn’t help matters.

  It was gruesome—but it was how people looked when they died. It was the one thing he’d never really gotten used to in this job. All the bodies he’d seen, he always ended up mentally cutting and pasting loved ones’ faces onto them, imagining what they’d look like after their final moment.

  There were, however, two things that seemed unusual about Arthur Kennedy. The first was his clothes.

  He wore a military uniform—blue wool jacket with gold piping on the lapels, gold buttons down the front, long white socks, black shoes—like something you’d see in a Civil War reenactment. No, not Civil War. Revolutionary War. A tricorn hat was knocked off his head. All he was missing was a musket.

  How the hell did the UAE cops not flag something like this? Unless they were told not to flag it.

  The second thing was that, underneath Kennedy’s jacket, his chest was bare—except for a dark red line at the center of his breastbone. A jagged new scar with an oblong lump. Like there was something hiding underneath.

  19

  San Francisco

  I thought you weren’t coming back,” the manager of Hazel’s apartment building said. They were walking down a long hardwood hallway in her building off 16th Street in the Mission District, one of those refurbished San Francisco tenements. That meant it had all the brick and wood of the past, all the shiny metal of the present, the whole world now a Pottery Barn.

  Hazel couldn’t remember the building manager’s name, wasn’t sure if she’d ever known it. She had to buzz him to get in, since she also had no idea where her house keys were.

  Probably on the floor of the Utah desert along with the rest of her.

  “Then with all that publicity and such,” the manager was saying, “I thought, well, better change the locks out front, in case someone comes snooping around, pretending to be a relative. Didn’t know there’d been a celebrity living in my building all these years.”

  “Did anyone come?” Hazel asked.

  “Couple reporters. But I didn’t let them talk to anyone.” Hazel thought his name was Hal. Maybe Charlie. One of those. “Your friend came too.”

  She cocked an eyebrow.

  “The one with the pit bull. Butchie,” the manager said. “Couple looky-loos too. People left some candles out front for your dad, some flowers, stuffed animals. For a bit I was worried it was going to be a Princess Di thing, and I’d have to figure out what to do with ten thousand teddy bears. That didn’t come to pass, thankfully.”

  “I hate teddy bears,” Hazel said.

  “Never trust anything with buttons for eyes.” They came to unit 106 and he handed her the key. “Here you go. Good to have you back.”

  “Can I ask you a question?” She felt like Dr. Morrison, offering forewarnings during simple human conversation. Something she understood better now.

  “Sure,” Hal-or-Charlie said.

  “Were we friends?”

  Hal-or-Charlie didn’t think for even half a second. “I wouldn’t say that, no.”

  “Have we ever even spoken before?”

  “You had a problem with your shower that one time. Then those times when you thought someone was stealing your mail. Other than that, I guess not really.”

  “When was that, with my mail?”

  “Last time? I don’t know. Two months ago?”

  Last time.

  “So only when I had a problem?”

  Hal-or-Charlie shrugged. “That’s how it is sometimes.”

  “Why did you look out for me then?”

  “Isn’t that what people do?”

  “Do they?”

  “I guess I just think most people are good,” he said, watching Hazel open the door to her home. “Pay that back and maybe when the wolves are gathering, someone will shoo them away from my door too.”

  20

  Hazel’s apartment was small. Seven hundred square feet. Galley kitchen. Two plates still in the sink. A glass. A coffee cup. The refrigerator was filled with things she couldn’t imagine she enjoyed: condiments, half a dozen plastic bottles of blue Gatorade, and unopened packages of pre-sliced, pre-packaged lunch meat—salami and roast beef—not even any bread to put the meat on.

  Hazel cracked open a Gatorade, drank it down. Unwrapped a package of salami, shoved four pieces into her mouth. Guh. Couldn’t taste anything. She needed something spicy, something to taste, something to remind her she was human.

  She stepped into her living room. There was a single couch that looked like it had belonged to someone else first, Hazel was pretty sure it was a remnant of that phase when everything was shabby chic. There was also a glass coffee table covered with textbooks—Understanding Cultural Rituals of Death; Introduction to Anthropology, 25th edition—magazines, and a stack of ungraded student papers.

  She picked one up and read the student’s name.

  Dakota Shepherd.

  Hazel could picture her exactly, which was a relief. She sat in the front row and asked on the first day that she be called “Cody,” which was probably one of the only reasons Hazel remembered her, with or without a brain injury, because three days a week, whenever she saw her, Hazel repeated “Call her Cody” in her mind, sensitive to people being called what they wanted.

  As Hazel skimmed the paper, she saw that Cody had written about the Buddhist tradition of spending forty-nine days after the death of a loved one working through the stages of bardo, chanting sutras to help ease the dead toward happiness in their next state. To Hazel, that was a good idea. Maybe she’d do that next, instead of working through the facts of her present existence.

  Her walls were covered in framed photos…of herself.

  There she was skydiving, it looked like over Santa Cruz if her topography facts were still right. As always, facts were easy. But people…emotions…experiences? Next to her in a circle of jumpers was a man with a tattoo on his throat. It was of a pit bull, the name Butchie scrawled across it in Old English. The man’s helmet, and Hazel’s, read Butchie’z Airborn Adventurez! The photo looked recent. Still, file not found.

  There she was in Egypt, head wrapped in a yellow scarf, actually atop a camel. There’s a cut over her left eye, nothing serious but a wound nonetheless. She reached up, felt the skin above her eyebrow, felt the slight raised edge of a scar. File not found.

  And then in Africa, a man she couldn’t remember standing next to her. His right arm was wrapped around her waist, his thumb and middle finger squeezing her hip, his shirt unbuttoned one too many spots, revealing his red burned skin. A name appeared in her head. Karl. Karl with a K. And then, out of nowhere, she could feel his breath on her neck, could remember a scene in a tent village on the savanna, the two of them
screaming at each other deep into a desert night, and then him saying, “It’s called an affair for a reason.”

  That’s all she had. Hazel pulled the photo off the wall, tossed it into the garbage, and went into her bedroom.

  Her bed was unmade, the outline of her body right where she left it weeks ago, a tangled depression in the sky blue sheets. The walls of her bedroom were filled with even more photos of herself. Hazel tried to remember some concrete detail about each trip. Beirut: Interviewing the living survivors of the Lebanon bombings. Paris: Complex mourning rituals of runaways. New York: Lunch with her father at Tavern on the Green. Who was on the other side of the camera? Strangers. Now and then.

  The best thing, she realized, was that she didn’t care.

  No. That wasn’t true.

  She knew she did. But the benefit of her injury was that she didn’t have to anymore. She could throw away every old photo. She could keep feeling nothing about the past, could only accumulate new feelings. That’s what Dr. Morrison’s advice was. According to Agent Rabkin, that’s what Morrison wanted her to know. That when she walked out of the hospital, she wasn’t bound by the person she’d been, by the people she’d grown up with. She could walk away.

  She could forget about all of this.

  She could get back into the classroom.

  She could teach the realities of the world.

  The things we all have in common, and the things none of us do.

  The unchangeable history.

  Except, she now was beginning to understand, history wasn’t fixed. Only its reporting was.

  There was a single book on her nightstand. Ancient Poisons. She picked it up. There were dozens of dog-eared pages, highlights in yellow and orange, arrows, underlines, questions: At what quantity is tissue poisoned? Check re: temperature at which full dissipation occurs. Was this who she was? Was this her specialty? Being a recluse sociopath?

  Flipping to the index, she searched for Polosis 5, the drug they found in Nixon’s body, in her father’s body. She didn’t know what surprised her more: that it wasn’t in the book, or that she was thankful it wasn’t there.