I went after her and caught her outside the restaurant.
“Mom, wait,” I said, catching her by the arm.
She turned to me as she pulled her arm out of my grasp, and her unfocused eyes were swimming. She was, I realized, terrified.
“Hey, it’s okay,” I said. Why was I still lying? We both knew this was a farce, so why pretend? Maybe, for once, I could get what I wanted by telling the truth. “I think we should talk.”
I paid the bill at Mélisse with the emergency credit card and then walked Jessica over to a Starbucks across the street. I bought her a black coffee, and we sat down at a table next to the window.
“I’m sorry this has been so hard for you,” I said. “Me being here and everything.”
She looked up at me uncertainly.
“I didn’t mean to make things difficult for you. Really.” I thought of a woman in an arm chair, flipping channels on the television, a phone ringing in the distance, and I couldn’t keep the tinge of bitterness out of my voice. “I can see that Lex and Patrick put a lot of pressure on you to treat me like everything is the same, but I want you to know that I understand. You don’t have to pretend with me.”
Jessica’s face went very still, and then I noticed tiny movements around her eyes and mouth, like something was happening inside of her that she was trying to contain.
I leaned closer to her. “Lex and Patrick aren’t here. We don’t have to pretend nothing’s changed.”
Moisture gathered in her eyes, clinging to her lower lashes. “Please don’t tell them,” she whispered.
“I promise,” I said.
I was convinced; Jessica couldn’t have been the one to kill Danny. How many times had I seen Lex or Patrick remind her to keep up the fa?ade? They wouldn’t have had to do that if she were the one with something to hide. She wouldn’t seem so scared of them right now if it were her ass she was protecting. No. Setting aside how I felt about them, it was more likely that Lex or Patrick had been responsible, and Jessica was keeping the secret to avoid losing another child.
“I can’t imagine what it must have been like,” I said, “to have your son be missing for so long.”
She looked down at the table and blinked to clear her eyes. “I . . . I wasn’t always such a bad mother, but after . . . what happened . . .”
I wanted to tell her that Danny might be gone, but her other children still deserved a loving mother, but that would be taking honesty too far. She had to feel safe with me if I was ever going to get anything useful out of her.
“You know you can talk to me,” I said. “I know it seems strange, but if you need someone to talk to about all of this, no one understands better than I do.”
Her voice was so soft I could barely hear it. “I just want everyone to be safe.”
“That’s what I want too,” I said, reaching out to touch her cool hand. “That’s why I’m here.”
She looked up at me and, very slowly, nodded.
? ? ?
It wasn’t a confession, but it was progress. With enough time I was pretty sure I could get her to tell me what she knew.
The only question was how much time Nicholas would give me.
? ? ?
Nicholas was not happy.
“So she didn’t tell you anything?” he asked as we sat alone together during lunch period. He’d banished Asher to his backup seat at the jock table so we could talk openly.
“What did you expect?” I said. “I did everything I could. Hopefully I’ll be able to build on it, and eventually she’ll confide more in me, but all I know for sure now is that she knows I’m not Danny.”
He sighed. “Which means she must know what really happened to him.”
I nodded. “She’s covering for someone.”
“We’ve got to go to Patrick’s apartment and find those files,” he said. “He never wants any of us to go over there, and that just makes me want to even more. Did you ask Mom where she goes all the time?”
“Yeah, she fed me some bullshit line about long drives to the beach,” I said. “If we want to know, we’re going to have to follow her.”
Nicholas’s phone rang. The administration had recently lifted the cell phone ban, and so far no one had dared to take my picture again. He frowned down at the display but answered it anyway.
“Hello? . . . Yeah, okay . . . Yes. Thank you.” He ended the call and started gathering his things. “That was the prison. You’re on the visitors’ list. We can go see my dad.”
“What, now?” I said as he shouldered his bag.
“Yes, now. I’m not drawing this out any longer than we have to,” he said. “If we leave now, we can be back before anyone even knows we’re gone.”
? ? ?
Nicholas and I headed north to Lompoc Federal Correctional Institution, a prison with one of those minimum security, luxury resort sections for criminal CEOs and power brokers no one wanted to piss off too badly.
Nicholas radiated impatience the entire ride. I needed an escape plan. He wasn’t going to last the weeks or months or years it might take to discover what really happened to Danny. At any moment he could get fed up and decide it was worth it to turn me in as a fake. And if we did find out who had killed Danny, my window for escape was even narrower. Nicholas and I had reached an uneasy sort of truce lately, and part of me hoped he would let me go in return for helping him find his brother’s killer, but the chances were slim. Other than a packed bag hidden in Danny’s closet, ready for me to grab and run, I hadn’t made any preparations. I needed to start, or I’d end up in a place a lot less nice than the prison we were approaching.
“So what are we going to do?” I asked as we parked in the lot across from the prison. It was surrounded only by a low chain-link fence, and beyond that were a lush, green lawn and a modern building that could have just as easily been a nicer-than-average public school.
Nicholas shrugged, which was probably difficult considering how tense he was. “We see how he reacts to seeing you. It should give us some idea how much he knows.”
“And the Mia thing?” I asked.
“I don’t know about that,” he said. “Just let me handle that part.”
“Okay. What are you hoping for here?”
Personally, although I doubted it, I hoped like hell that Robert Tate had been the one to kill Danny. It would mean the members of the family that I knew hadn’t. But obviously it wasn’t as easy for Nicholas. Unlike everyone else in the family, he actually seemed relatively close to Robert. They talked on the phone, and I suspected some of his weekend “hikes” with Asher were actually trips to Lompoc.
He sighed. “I honestly don’t know.”
We checked in with the guard at the front desk and went through a metal detector and bag search, and then we were led to the visiting area.
“Does he know we’re coming?” I asked, suddenly feeling nervous. I’d spoken to Robert on the phone a half a dozen times, but coming face-to-face with the man was different.