by Paula Stokes
The desk is empty except for a tangle of cords.
That leaves the bed and the bookshelf. Reluctantly, I pull the mattress away from the box spring, trying not to think about Parvati. There are a couple of porno magazines stashed near one edge. Langston raises an eyebrow as I reach for the first magazine. Preston hid stuff inside of a book. Why not inside of a magazine?
But there’s nothing there except for Señorita Septiembre’s chichis grandes.
I move to the bookshelf. The top shelf bows beneath a row of snooty-sounding novels he probably had to read for his English classes at Bristol Academy. Below it are this semester’s books from Vista Palisades. The trigonometry book that doubles as a hiding place is on the bottom shelf. Maybe Preston carved out more than one secret stash book. Leaving the trig book for last, I pull out each of the books and shake them. None of them are hollow, but random things rain out from the pages onto the carpet—a ticket stub from a concert we went to together, a couple of receipts, a picture of Parvati at a school dance. I glance through the receipts, but nothing seems relevant.
I pull the trig book from the shelf and open it.
Langston leans in, popping his gum as I flip through the secret compartment. There’s a passport, a picture of Parvati (clothed, thankfully), and a couple of pictures of a brown-haired kid that must be Preston when he was about nine or ten. Beneath them is a tiny ziplock bag of white powder. I’m pretty sure it’s not baking soda. I wonder why Parvati didn’t tell me Pres had cocaine. Maybe she didn’t dig all the way to the bottom.
I hand the ziplock to Langston and start to put the pictures back when something about one of them catches my eye. Preston is sitting on crumbling stone porch steps, the kind that ought to lead up to an old Victorian mansion. The house isn’t in the picture, but there’s a pair of carved lions flanking the steps. The lions are made of reddish-gray stone, and the left one has a chip off one side of its mouth so it appears to be snarling. My jaw drops a little. I know that lion.
I know that place.
“Were you aware Preston was using cocaine?” Langston asks.
I barely hear him. I’m still staring at the picture of Preston, at something that seems impossible. “Was Pres adopted?” I blurt out.
Langston pockets the coke and tries to take the photograph from me, but I don’t let go. I give everything a second look. The kid’s hair is curly and a lot darker than Preston’s, but the shape of his face, his smile, it’s the same. It has to be him, or a really close relative.
And Preston doesn’t have any brothers.
“Of course not,” Langston says. “His birth is a matter of public record.” But now there’s something different in his voice. Something taut. Nervous.
Something that makes me nervous.
I back off immediately. “Sorry. This picture just reminds me of a place where I used to live. A group home.”
“Group home?” Langston pauses. “Like an orphanage?”
“They don’t call them that anymore,” I say. “But yeah. Homeless kids, runaways, the occasional juvenile delinquent.”
Langston recovers almost immediately. His voice flips back into nature-documentary mode. “Why would you think it’s the same place?”
“It had lions like this. I thought they were cool when I was a kid.” I don’t tell him about the chipped stone on the lion’s mouth, about how I’m 99 percent sure this is a picture of the Rosewood Center for Boys. I don’t tell him how much I hated the place, or how one of the “lifers,” a kid named Henry, supposedly set a drunk homeless guy on fire once “just to see what would happen.”
As soon as I arrived there I started planning my escape. I had been surviving okay on the streets. I wanted to go back, find some other kids to hang with. We could protect each other if we banded together. And then I found out I was getting adopted and decided to give the Cantrells a chance. I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of new parents, but they lived by the beach and worked on the boardwalk. Surfing was the one thing that still connected me to my dad, so I was willing to try living with them if it meant being close to the ocean again. Plus they wanted to adopt me, not just take me for a foster-kid test drive, so I wouldn’t have to worry about getting dumped back at the group home just as I got comfortable.
Langston shakes his head. “Lots of houses have stone lions. This could be in a completely different state, or country for that matter. Preston spent some of his childhood at boarding school. If this is even Preston. Maybe it’s a friend from his childhood.”
Right. A childhood friend that could basically be his twin. Langston knows something, but he’s not going to give up any info that might be damaging to the senator. I would swear to it that Preston is standing in front of the very same building that my parents adopted me from eight years ago.
“Yeah. You’re right,” I tell him, bobbing my head and trying to sound convincing. I figure it should be easy enough to check if Langston is lying. Pres’s dad has been a politician for a long time. A birth or an adoption in the DeWitt family should have been newsworthy enough for someone to report on. Too bad my disposable phone won’t get me online. I’m going to have to go home to do some research on the matter.
Langston is still hovering behind me. Something about this picture freaks him out, and he’s not going to let me keep it. But I need it. I know I do. “So how do you know that’s coke?” I ask. As he goes to pull the ziplock bag out of his pocket, I pretend to put the picture back into the hollowed-out trig book but palm it and slide it in the center pocket of my hoodie at the last minute. That’s a trick I learned from an older kid when I was homeless. Misdirection usually works, but not always, so only steal what you absolutely need.
Langston holds up the tiny baggie. “Powdered cocaine looks a lot like baking soda, but I tested it on my gums. Cocaine causes a numbing sensation.”
I nod. “Sorry, I guess that probably won’t help you find Pres’s killer, will it?” I slouch my shoulders forward and pray that Langston can’t see the rectangular outline of the photograph tucked in my hoodie pocket.
“We’re not inclined to think Preston’s murder was drug related, but it’s another lead we can follow up.”
We head back downstairs where Pres’s mom is still curled up on the sofa, stroking the Himalayan cat and staring at the television. She notices me for the first time. Her fake tan blanches white and her lips twist like she’s been sucking on a lemon.
I steel myself, wondering if she agrees with her husband or if she’s going to call me a murderer.
Instead, she starts to cry. “Oh, Max,” she wails. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know why he’s doing this to you.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
“WHO?” I ASK. “DOING WHAT?”
She doesn’t respond. Her sobbing escalates. Langston ushers me past the living room and out of the house. He’s still got a hand on my shoulder as we start heading across the grass toward the SUV.
“What the hell was that about?”
“She’s drunk. Distraught. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
“Really, because she sounded pretty fucking lucid to me. Almost like she knew who was setting me up.” He doesn’t respond, so I keep talking. “Come on, if you guys know something, don’t I deserve to know too? Who is he?”
Langston’s dark eyes blend in with the night. “She was probably just talking about me, bringing you into your dead friend’s room. Or perhaps about the senator involving you in this mess.”
It’s plausible, but I don’t believe him, not for a second. I slide into the passenger seat of the SUV and have him drop me off a couple of blocks from my house, just in case my parents are awake and happen to be looking out the window.
Our front lawn is full of garbage. Bottles, old newspapers, just random crap like someone emptied their trash can onto our grass. As I scoop up some of the bigger pieces of paper and dump them in our metal can, I see the brick that’s left a fresh dent in the hood of Ben’s pickup truck. There’s a note tied to it: �
�Bring back DeWitt before next week’s game, or else.”
I guess Pres’s disappearance must have made the news, but not his death. Nice. People are dead and the local idiots are worried about the outcome of a high school football game. They’ll probably come burn down the house when they find out Preston is never coming back. I wonder how long Senator DeWitt can keep the details out of the media, if he’s got a bunch of political analysts crunching numbers and gathering data on how to best capitalize on his own son’s demise. Shaking my head, I let myself into the house.
The first thing I see are the boxes of Christmas decorations pushed to the corner of the living room. Amanda was dying to put the tree up, and I was supposed to help. It takes so little to make her happy, and I couldn’t even manage that. Once this is over, I’m going to have to make it up to her somehow.
I turn away from the boxes and listen for the sound of creaking doors or footsteps that would indicate someone is awake. Thankfully, all I hear is my own breathing. How could I even begin to explain all of this to my parents? Why I hid from the FBI, why I went to Vegas, how I managed to make bail? It’s madness. It doesn’t even make sense to me.
With a pang, I realize how much I miss Parvati. She was the one person I could tell everything to. She had a way of making the pieces come together. I think about calling her for a minute, but I don’t.
Ben has a home office set up in a cramped little room next to the nursery. I make my way through the darkness and flip on his old desktop computer. It takes forever to boot up. While I wait, I trace a question mark in the dust with my finger and mull over what it might mean if Preston was adopted. I have no idea if it would be relevant, but somehow finding that picture doesn’t feel like a coincidence. If Pres was adopted, it’s a major life thing we share and he never told me. If he kept me in the dark about something so huge, who knows what other secrets he’s kept? I think back to his closet, to the clothes belonging to two people. Maybe there was a whole other side to Preston that I never saw. I didn’t even know he wore contacts. Maybe I didn’t know him at all.
The computer beeps twice and Ben’s desktop fills the screen. He’s used the same picture for wallpaper since he bought the computer a few years ago—a picture of him, Darla, me, and Amanda at Disney World. I was fourteen and pretended everything was lame all day, even though I kind of had fun. Amanda was seven and dragged me around the park by my arm. By the end of the day, my parents and I were exhausted, but Amanda was still going strong. So much for cystic fibrosis being a disability. She kicked all of our asses. I wonder if she’s taking any crap about me at school, or if kids her age are too young to know what’s going on.
I open a search box and type in “Remington DeWitt.” Hundreds of hits come back: news sites, opinion sites, websites for the state of California and the U.S. Senate. Too much boring crap to wade through. I add “baby” to the search box. Still too much to sort. I change it to “birth announcement.” Four sites come back.
The first one shows DeWitt visiting a children’s hospital during his campaign for the U.S. Senate. The second site is what I’m looking for. It’s a link to the Los Angeles Times, a small news blurb about the birth of one Preston Abbott DeWitt to then-Governor Remington DeWitt and his wife, Claudia. There’s a tiny picture with the article. Sure enough, a younger-looking DeWitt is smiling down at a swaddled infant.
I flip through the third and fourth links, but they don’t have anything new to tell me. I feel like I’m back to square one. If Preston wasn’t adopted, then why was he at Rosewood?
TWENTY-NINE
MY PHONE BUZZES AND I jump. It’s Parvati. Indecision stabs me in the chest. Two seconds and then I answer. I need info. She might have it.
“What were you trying to tell me about Preston?” I ask.
“Oh my God, Max. So it’s true? They let you out?”
“Yeah,” I say, not bothering to explain. Every syllable out of her mouth hurts me. All I can hear is her saying Preston’s name as she rocks back and forth on top of him. I squeeze my eyes shut, as if the visual is playing out on the patterned wallpaper of Ben’s office instead of the inside of my skull. “What were you trying to tell me?” I ask again.
“What’s wrong? Are you mad because I got us caught?” She’s still talking, but I hold the earpiece away from my head because I almost can’t stand it anymore. “My parents will drop that stupid restraining order once they find out you’re innocent and—”
“I know about you and Pres.” The words come out sharply and suddenly, like I’m vomiting up bowling balls.
Dead silence. And then a tiny breath. “What?”
“Your friend Preston? I know you guys . . . slept together.”
“Max.” Her voice softens. “I can explain.”
“No, P,” I say. “I don’t want to hear about how it was all practice for being a spy or maybe a school project you two did together on the Kama Sutra.” My voice starts to crack. I am dangerously close to losing it. “All I want to know is what was so important that you left me three messages.”
“All right.” She sounds hurt. I don’t think I’ve ever raised my voice to her before. Never had a reason to. “I think maybe Preston was adopted, and Violet Cain was his real mother.”
“Why would you think that?”
“I was going through all of my texts and emails from Preston, looking for anything that might be a clue. One of them reminded me of something that happened a couple years ago.”
“What?”
“I found a lot of money in the trig book, like thousands of dollars. I asked Pres about it and he said his parents gave it to him. Said they were always giving him money because they felt bad about the adoption.”
“What did he mean?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Parvati says. “He was drunk at the time, and after that he never brought it up again.”
Probably because they were too busy getting naked. Bile surges up into my throat. I swallow it down, try to keep from pushing the entire computer onto the floor. “Well it’s an interesting theory, given her age. But she can’t be,” I say, “because I have a birth announcement in front of me, DeWitt and his wife holding baby Preston, back when DeWitt was the governor.”
“Damn it. I thought for sure I was onto something,” Parvati says. “I just keep thinking about Violet being thirty-five. There’s no way Pres would be hooking up with someone that age. He’s never shown any interest in older women. There has to be some other reason he went to see her.”
“Uh-huh.” I’m trying to focus, but my brain keeps flashing back to those pictures of Parvati and Preston.
“Are you at home?” she asks, oblivious to my thoughts. “I’ll sneak out. We can go through all the information together.”
“No,” I say tersely. “I’ve got to go. I’ll double-check the adoption angle, just in case.”
“Come on, Max. You know we work better as a team.”
“I thought we did,” I say. “But that was back when I thought we told each other the truth.” I hang up before she can answer. She calls back, but I let it go to voicemail. She sends me a text and I turn the phone off without reading it.
Using just the light of the computer screen so as not to wake anyone up, I scan the entire study, looking for Ben’s giant key ring. I don’t see it, so I head into the hallway, planning to check the kitchen next. My foot collides with something hard and plastic and I trip over a bouncy seat parked outside the nursery. “Son of a bitch,” I say, just a little too loudly. One of my sisters stirs in her crib.
Uh-oh. The whole house shakes with the wailing of a healthy-lunged baby, which is shortly joined by the wailing of a second healthy-lunged baby.
Darla stumbles out of her bedroom in a flannel nightgown, her hair sticking up on top. “Max?” She stops like she isn’t sure I’m real. “We got your message, but—”
“I know,” I say. “I owe you an explanation, and I wish I had one.”
I follow her into the nursery, where she picks up
Jo Lee and gestures for me to get Ji Hyun. It might be the first time I’ve really held one of my little sisters.
“Sorry,” I say. “I think I scared them when I bumped into their bouncy thing.”
“It’s okay.” Jo fusses in Darla’s arms. Darla rocks her back and forth and motions for me to do the same with Ji.
Gradually, Ji’s screaming fades to wailing and then sniffles before subsiding. I smile despite everything that’s happening. The babies are cute when they’re not screaming, but why Darla wanted to adopt more kids when she’s over forty is beyond me.
“What happened?” Darla asks. “Did the charges get dropped?” Her voice is so hopeful that it kind of breaks my heart to tell her no.
“But who could have possibly posted your bond?”
“I don’t really know,” I hedge.
Darla looks worried. She lays Jo down in the crib, and I do the same with Ji. “Max, you’re not involved with drug lords or the Mafia or anything, right?”
I snort. “Darla. I don’t think the Mafia employs a lot of high school kids.”
Her cheeks go pink and droopy, like one of those half-dead roses that gas stations sell around the holidays. I know she’s given up hoping I’ll start referring to her as “Mom” someday, but she still wilts occasionally when I say her name. I don’t call her Darla to be mean. It’s just that my real mother died giving birth to me. It seems like the least I can do after that kind of sacrifice is not replace her with someone else. Besides, as hard as she tries, Darla just doesn’t feel like a mom. More like a cool aunt, but I know that isn’t what she wants to be.
“No drugs?” she asks.
