THE NEXT DAY I AWOKE to someone gently shaking my shoulder.
“Max.” I opened one eye. Darla was standing over me, her hair hanging down in tangled clumps. She smelled like baby wipes as usual. My eyes flicked over to my alarm clock. Jesus Christ, it was only five forty-five. I didn’t need to be up for an hour.
“What?” I asked, not bothering to cover up the hostility.
“It’s Preston.”
Okay. Now I was awake. Had he gotten stuck in Vegas? Had he done something stupid and gotten arrested?
The side of my mouth was wet with drool. I wiped at it with the sleeve of my T-shirt. “What about him?” I rubbed my eyes.
“You saw him yesterday, right?” Darla’s voice sounded uncertain, the way it did when she was having trouble telling the twins apart.
“Yeah.” Hopefully. I was going to have one hell of a time explaining how Preston and I were surfing together if it turned out he spent the night in a Las Vegas jail.
“Claudia DeWitt is on the phone. She wants to talk to you. Apparently, Preston never came home.”
NINE
AND THAT’S HOW I ENDED up in one of those rooms like you see on TV. An interrogation room. Plain metal table, folding chairs, two-way mirror cut into the upper half of one wall. The air reeked of chlorine, which made me wonder what kind of mess they’d needed bleach to clean up. I plunked down in a chair at the far end of the table, leaving as much space between me and the detectives as possible. No, not detectives. FBI agents. Apparently when the kid of a senator goes missing they bring in the top dogs.
The taller one went by Gonzalez, but he had pale skin and green eyes and couldn’t have looked less Latino if he’d tried. He was skinny and square-faced, with hair that stuck straight up in places. He paced back and forth, muttering to himself and doing nervous things with his hands.
Gonzo’s partner had introduced himself out in the lobby, but I had already forgotten his name. He was bigger, with shoulders like a linebacker and a belly that had seen a few too many cheeseburgers.
“So take us through your camping trip with Preston, from the beginning.” The big guy’s voice was low, gravelly, like he should be outside chain-smoking instead of sitting here busting my balls. Man, Preston was going to owe me big-time whenever he crawled back into town. I could only imagine what sort of debauchery he had gotten up to in Vegas that made him decide coming home was optional.
Big Guy loosened his tie and apologized for the room temperature, which was somewhere between sweltering and broiling. I leaned in to catch the name on his ID badge. Special Agent James McGhee.
“When did you and Preston DeWitt arrive at the—” He mopped his forehead with the cuff of his dress shirt as he glanced down at his notepad. “Ravens’ Cliff Overlook?”
“Well, I had to babysit until six thirty,” I said slowly, staring at the sweat stains underneath his armpits. “So it was about seven when we met up.”
McGhee jotted something down on his notepad. I couldn’t read it from where I was sitting. “And then what?”
I glanced around. Were Ben and Darla watching from the other side of the two-way mirror? They had insisted on coming in the room with me, but the agents assured them I “was in no trouble” and “not under suspicion of anything” and “would feel more comfortable speaking freely without parents around.” It had made sense at the time, but now the walls felt like they were closing in. The second hand on the clock seemed to accelerate before my eyes, ticking faster and faster—like a bomb eager to detonate.
“And then we pitched the tent, built a fire, and sat around bullshitting until we got tired and went to sleep,” I said.
“Bullshitting,” Gonzalez repeated, as if I’d slipped up and given something away. He slid into the chair across from me, tapping one foot repeatedly under the table. “Did that involve drinking?”
“Maybe. Big deal.” It hadn’t actually, but one thing I learned when I was homeless was that you had to give authority figures a little bit of what they were expecting. Otherwise they wouldn’t believe anything you said, even the stuff that was true. Plenty of adults had seen me wandering the beach by myself and pegged me as a homeless kid. I always admitted it and told them my mom was standing in line to get us a bed at the shelter and had sent me looking for something to eat. That kept do-gooder types from calling social services, and it usually scored me a few bucks or some free food too.
McGhee nodded to himself and waited for me to say more.
I didn’t.
That would have been the time for the whole truth—Liars, Inc., the alibi, Violet, Las Vegas—but I couldn’t do it. For one, both agents were looking at me like I was some delinquent who accidentally killed his best friend in an alcohol-induced rage and dumped the body in the ocean. I didn’t know how much they knew about my past, but if they’d already made up their minds that I was guilty of something, explaining that I headed up a shady business selling lies to my classmates probably wouldn’t have persuaded them to cut me a break. Not to mention, if I’d told them about Liars, Inc., they would have shown up at school and started interrogating the students. And then discovered that Parvati was involved.
My parents would have sighed and looked disappointed if they found out I was forging permission slips and providing cover stories. Her parents would have sent her to military school several thousand miles away.
What I should have done was just confess to the alibi. Tell them my buddy wanted to go hook up with a girl and needed someone to cover. I could have done that without ever mentioning Liars, Inc. or Parvati. But when you put someone in a small stuffy room that’s eighty-five degrees and reeks of bleach, they stop thinking clearly. I panicked. Everything became black or white. Lie or tell the truth. Keep to the alibi and assume Preston was fine or confess the whole fucking deal.
“So you make a fire, have a little booze. Then what?” Gonzalez prompted.
“Then we went to sleep.”
“Alone?” McGhee asked.
“Huh? We were in the same tent, if that’s what you mean.”
“He means was it just you two or were there girls there too?” Gonzalez said, his hands twitching.
“Just us.”
“What happened when you woke up?” McGhee asked.
“I went surfing,” I said.
McGhee raised an eyebrow. “And Preston?”
Shit. My first screwup.
“I mean, we went surfing.”
“Did anyone see you guys?”
“I don’t know.” I faked a cough. “Can I get some water?”
McGhee gave Gonzalez a look. “Grab a pitcher for all of us, would you?”
Gonzalez swore under his breath but rose up from the table. He stormed through the wooden door, letting it slam behind him.
“Sorry about him,” McGhee said. “He’s tightly wound.”
And there it was. The whole good cop–bad cop routine. “No shit,” I said.