“Max?”
“I said hang on.” Irritation creeps into my voice. Probably not a good move toward a guy with a gun strapped to his armpit. I force my eyes away from the bed and turn toward the closet instead. The sliding door is still partially open. Surprising. Maybe the feds haven’t been letting Esmeralda clean in here.
I pull the closet open the rest of the way. Half empty, according to Parvati, but still twice as many clothes as I own.
“We did a thorough check of the closet,” Langston says.
Ignoring him, I flip through all of Preston’s clothes, patting down the pockets, checking for keys or notes or anything else small that could be a clue. No luck. Several pairs of tennis shoes and shiny loafers are lined up on the floor of the closet. I shake each of the shoes, but nothing falls out except some sock lint and a couple of tiny pebbles. The shelves above my head are mostly empty except for some old yearbooks and a couple of empty shoeboxes.
Next, I move to the dresser. The top is a mix of sports trophies and toiletries. A picture of me, Preston, and Parvati clowning around at a party is tucked into the side of the mirror. I check each drawer. Boxers. T-shirts. Socks. A junk drawer full of computer cables. Surf wax. Small bottles that look like energy drinks but are labeled as “Herbal Detoxifying Elixirs.” I uncap one of them and peek inside. Ugh, it smells terrible, like a rotten starfish.
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 Se?orita 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.