“Now,” he said, “tell me everything.”
I didn’t tell him everything. But I told him more than I’d ever told anyone else. I explained the scam I used to run—posing as a younger, traumatized kid so that I could get a spot in a care home—and how I impersonated his brother just to buy myself some more time. How I ended up in way over my head.
He smiled bitterly and shook his head. “You expect me to believe it’s just a coincidence that you chose to impersonate someone with a family as rich as us?”
“Yes,” I said.
Do you believe that? Nicholas didn’t.
“Bullshit. You make it sound like all of this just happened,” he said. “Like it wasn’t something you did on purpose, every single day. You could have stopped it at any time.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I didn’t want to stop it. I still don’t.”
He shook his head. “You’re a sociopath.”
I thought of that hole I’d felt in my chest for most of my life, the empty place where other people seemed to have something I lacked. It hadn’t felt so empty lately, but did a couple of months negate the lifetime that came before it? “Maybe you’re right,” I said.
Nicholas shut his eyes and turned his head away from me, like he couldn’t risk looking at me for another single second.
“I knew it,” he said. “The second you stepped off that plane, I knew it. Every time you spoke to me I knew it, but I tried so hard to believe what everyone else told me.”
“It’s only human nature,” I said. “You can’t blame yourself.”
“No, I blame you.” His expression was smoldering with his hatred of me. I could feel the heat radiating off him. “I blame you and whoever else in my family knew about this. God, I can’t wait to get away from these people.”
He was stuck and couldn’t wait to leave. I wanted to stay and knew he’d never let me.
“What about my mother?” he asked. “Does she know too?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “but it would explain why she avoids me so much.”
“That’s no kind of evidence,” he said. “It’s gotten worse since you got here, but she’s been avoiding all of us for years.”
I thought of the Jessica I’d seen in the family movies from before Danny went missing. She hadn’t been the most nurturing parent, but she was usually there.
“What changed?” I asked.
“Damned if I know. She could be great when I was little. But then . . .”
“Danny disappeared?”
“No, it started before that,” Nicholas said. He was staring at his steering wheel, but his eyes were far away, seeing something I couldn’t. “When Lex and Patrick’s dad killed himself, it hit her hard. They were still pretty close even though they’d been divorced for years. He used to come over all the time to watch us when Mom and Dad were busy with Mia’s doctor appointments and stuff. After Ben died, Lex started with the pills and Patrick was always getting into trouble, and Mom just couldn’t handle any of it. She and Dad were arguing all the time and the drinking had gotten bad, and then Danny disappeared and she went off the deep end. She’s been like this pretty much ever since.”
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
He looked at me.
“Why do you believe me?” I asked.
“About what happened to Danny?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense, isn’t it?” he said. “They wouldn’t put on this show if they didn’t have something to hide. One of them must have murdered him to justify all of this.”
I felt suddenly cold.
“Murdered?” I repeated. I’d never said that word to him, had never even let myself think it.
He nodded. “If whatever happened to Danny had been an accident, why not just report it at the time? Why go through all of this? No, it had to have been something more serious than that.”
It was the same thought process I’d gone through the night I discovered Lex and Patrick knew who I really was, but it sounded so much worse coming out of Nicholas’s mouth. “You really think someone in your family is capable of that?”
He turned to me, his expression like stone. “They’re not the perfect family they pretend to be, okay? You don’t know them like I do, and you really don’t know who they were back then.”
“Did you mean what you said, that you won’t turn me in if I help you?”
He took a deep breath. “If someone in my family killed Danny, they think they’re safe right now, and that’s how I want to keep it. If I expose you, it’ll put them on their guard. Hell, for all I know, they might flee the country or something, and then I’ll never find out what happened to my brother.”
“I get it,” I said. I think I even believed him. Besides, I could try to run, but how far would I get? With the Tates’ money and resources after me, not to mention the FBI, my guess was not very far, and trying to get away would only make me look more guilty if Lex and Patrick tried to pin Danny’s death on me. If I helped Nicholas, there was a chance, however small, that he’d let me leave quietly when this was all over. “So what do we do now?”
“I want to take you to see my dad,” he said. “I think I’ll be able to tell from his reaction to you if he knows anything about what really happened to Danny. Mom will be trickier. She’ll never say a word to me, but if you get close to her, we might get an idea of how much she knows.”
“I can try,” I said. But unless I magically transformed into a bottle of bourbon, getting close to Jessica was going to be hard.
“Don’t try, just do it,” he snapped, his relatively civil attitude suddenly turning nasty. He started to climb out of the car.
“Hey, wait,” I said.
He paused with the door halfway open, his back turned to me.
“You said you knew every time I talked to you that I wasn’t Danny,” I said. “How?”
He was still for a long moment. Finally, he said, “You were too nice to me.”
Then he got out of the car and slammed the door behind him.
? ? ?
That night, armed with a plate of food, I climbed the stairs to the master suite. I knocked, and a minute later Jessica opened the door. She flinched when she saw me. Behind her I could see that the bed linens were rumpled, and the bedside table was covered with prescription pill bottles and a tumbler of something brown. Also sitting there, completely out of place, was a small crystal figurine of a dolphin. Although the most harmless item on the table, it was the one I looked at the longest, because it was the most puzzling.
“I figured you hadn’t eaten yet,” I said, offering her the plate. “We ordered from Mangia. I know you like their eggplant parmesan, so we got you some.”
“I’m not really hungry,” she said, starting to inch the door closed.
I grabbed the door. “Then maybe you want to come down and sit with us while we eat? Mia’s going to show us the diorama she made for her science class, which should—”
“I have a headache,” she said. “I’m just going to go to bed.”