“No,” I said.
“Oh, Danny.” She put a hand on my leg. “I’m sorry.”
On the screen the fireworks began. Robert panned between the colors and the family. Jessica had her arms around Nicholas, Lex and Patrick were smooshed together under one big blanket, and Danny was lying on the deck, looking straight up at the sky.
“Stay still,” I heard Jessica say while Robert was filming the fireworks above.
Nicholas said, “Danny pinched me—”
“I did not,” Danny said. “Don’t be such a girl.”
“Shut up!”
“Boys!” Robert barked.
Lex grabbed the remote. “You know I love your dad, but he was obsessed with that camera. Who wants to watch a video of fireworks?”
She fast-forwarded until the picture changed from the darkness of the fireworks to another sunny day on a beach somewhere. Nicholas was the one filming this time. First, he captured Robert, Patrick, and Danny throwing a football back and forth, then panned to Jessica talking on her cell phone farther down the beach, then Lex holding Mia in her lap while she stuck her chubby little hands into the sand.
It was easy to forget how young Lex had been when Danny disappeared, just seventeen. Younger than I was and only a year older than Danny would be now. She was such a good sister, singing Mia a little song as they played in the sand together back then and taking care of all of us now.
But she might be a killer.
That was the only reason I was here. Because a crime couldn’t be investigated, its perpetrator put in prison, if the crime had never happened. Someone in this family had killed Danny and was using me to make it all disappear.
Lex and Patrick were my only ironclad suspects, because they were the only ones I knew were aware I wasn’t really Danny. But at this moment it was impossible to imagine Lex had anything to do with Danny’s death, even knowing what a gifted actress she was. She’d obviously had her troubles—I thought of how sickly thin she’d looked in the last home movie I watched and the vague allusions she’d made to problems that kept her from finishing college on time—but her love for her siblings was palpable. She was Mother Lex, the one who’d stepped into the vacuum Jessica had left when she retreated behind her bedroom door, who made us all breakfast every morning and adjusted Mia’s brace four times a day and was comforting me now, when she didn’t have to, even though she knew I was a liar. I couldn’t believe she could hurt Danny.
I could believe her love for her family would make her play along in order to protect someone else.
I watched the rest of the video closely, taking in every detail I could and turning my eyes as often as I could to Lex to see if there were any clues I could glean from her face as she watched her old family on the screen. I didn’t know what exactly I was looking for, since it was unlikely that one of the Tates, in the midst of frolicking on an exotic beach or attending some family function, would threaten to kill Danny while the camera was rolling. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that people are bad at keeping secrets, and eventually everything shows. You can learn all there is to know by watching someone hard enough, long enough.
Slowly, as we watched the movie, it dawned on me what I was doing.
I was investigating Danny Tate’s death.
? ? ?
For weeks I’d been living in Danny’s skin. Sleeping in his bed, sitting in his chair at the table, answering to his name. I had mingled his pain with my own in that FBI interrogation room, and I had smothered myself so that he could live inside of me. I was Danny Tate, and he was me. I felt a strange loyalty to him, maybe even an affection for him, and I couldn’t let what had really happened to him stay buried. When someone hurts a child, that person should pay. I was a liar and a con artist and probably a terrible person, but I still believed that.
I would find out the truth, because Danny deserved it. And because Mia, who was the only person I knew to be innocent in all of this, deserved it. I could get them that justice.
. . . or, because I was a terrible person, I could use the truth for myself, as leverage whenever I needed to.
I hadn’t decided yet.
? ? ?
That weekend I made a password protected folder on my laptop to hold all of my research on Danny’s disappearance. When I was supposed to be sleeping, I spent hours scouring the Internet, adding to it. There was a lot less information online than I’d hoped to find. A photogenic young white boy had gone missing from one of America’s safest and wealthiest communities. The story was a cable news producer’s dream. It should have been everywhere, but it had barely made a blip on the radar.
It seemed the rarefied nature of Hidden Hills, the very exclusivity that made Danny’s kidnapping such a shocking story, also helped keep it from becoming a widely known one. The gates around Hidden Hills slammed shut after Danny disappeared, the community withdrawing to protect its people and its way of life. The Tate family did the same thing. Other than one televised appeal given by Robert with the rest of the family in the background and the occasional comment from the family’s spokesperson and lawyer, the Tates never spoke publicly about Danny. When I’d first found out about this, I’d chalked it up to a weird rich people thing I couldn’t understand. Like seeking out publicity in the midst of their personal tragedy would seem common and crass to them. But it made more sense once I realized someone in the family had something to hide.
There was still some information to be found now that I was really digging, though. The basics were well documented in the recent LA Magazine article and elsewhere. Jessica had called the police at eight in the evening on a Saturday to report Danny missing. The last time he’d been seen was at breakfast that morning, when he’d told the family he was going to ride his bike to his friend Andrew’s house. When Jessica got home at six and Danny still wasn’t back, she and the kids—Robert was out of town on business—called Danny’s friends and drove around the neighborhood looking for him. When she got ahold of Andrew’s parents and learned that Danny had never been to their house that day, Jessica phoned the police.
The cops immediately issued an AMBER Alert. A house-to-house search was conducted in Hidden Hills, and the security tapes and logs from the community’s gates were examined. Nothing suspicious was found. It was like Danny had disappeared into thin air. More likely, of course, was that he had left the community in the trunk of a car or the back of one of the dozens of authorized work vans that had passed through the gates that day.