“I’m going to call Asher and see where he is,” Nicholas said.
We pulled into a space in the student parking lot, and Asher came out to meet us. Just in case.
“Hey, man,” he said to me as I climbed out of Nicholas’s car. “You okay?”
I nodded. “Fine.”
“It’s good, right, that they found it?” he said. “It’ll help them catch the bad guys, right?”
“Hopefully,” I said, exchanging a brief look with Nicholas.
We were halfway to the school when a reporter and cameraman stepped out from behind a pickup truck.
“Daniel Tate?” he said, pointing a digital recorder at me.
“Leave us alone,” Nicholas said.
“Daniel, are you optimistic that your kidnappers will be found?” the man said, taking a step closer to me. Suddenly Asher was standing between us, his palm, the size of a serving plate, on the man’s chest, pushing him back.
“No comment, asshole,” he said.
A movement at the corner of my eye caught my attention. I turned and found a bank of cameras trained on me from the front of the school where the news vans were parked. This idiot reporter had attracted their attention. I immediately turned to hide my face.
“Nicholas,” I said. “Look.”
Nicholas took in the rows of cameras, with their telephotos lenses, and made an instant decision.
“Fuck this,” he said. “We’re getting out of here.”
We went back to the car, and I covered my face with my hands until we were far away from the school.
? ? ?
We went home, and because only Jessica’s car was there, we didn’t even need to explain to anyone why we were back. Ren texted me to see how I was, and I gave her the gate code and invited her to come over later that night. Meanwhile, Nicholas and I locked ourselves in his room to go over everything we knew, since there was suddenly new urgency to our investigation. It didn’t take long. There just wasn’t that much evidence. One moment Danny was there and the next he was gone.
On the Saturday morning Danny disappeared, he had breakfast with the family, except for Robert, who’d been in Palo Alto on a business trip since the previous Thursday, and Nicholas, who had spent the night and the bulk of that day at a friend’s house. Danny told Jessica he was going to ride his bike to his friend Andrew’s. The nanny had the weekend off, so Jessica then took Mia to a doctor’s appointment and to run several errands, which the FBI had verified. Patrick and Lex spent the day with friends, several of whom had been able to confirm their alibis. Everyone’s movements were accounted for in the hours before Jessica called the police to report Danny missing that evening.
Some part of the story was obviously off, but so many years later, it was hard to tell which one.
“This is impossible,” Nicholas said. “If the FBI can’t figure this out, what makes us think we can?”
“Hubris?” I said.
He laughed in that way he usually did, not a real laugh but a puff of air through his nose that could just as easily be mocking as amusement. “You’ve been paying attention to Mr. Vaughn.”
“Well, he’s just so inspiring,” I deadpanned, and he actually smiled for real.
Suddenly, someone downstairs started to yell. We glanced at each other and jumped up, Nicholas shoving all the papers under his bed before we rushed from the room. We stopped on the landing of the staircase and looked over the railing into the foyer. Lex must have arrived home while we were working, because she and Jessica were down there somewhere, and they were arguing.
“—me what to do. I’m the mother here, Alexis!”
“Then act like it for once in your life!” Lex replied. “We need you. Think of Mia; she’s only a little girl. If you keep going out there, someone’s going to notice, and then what’s going to happen to all of us?”
Jessica’s voice dropped, not so much that we couldn’t hear it anymore, but enough that the words became unintelligible. Lex’s reply was likewise impossible to make out. Then Jessica was stalking through the foyer and out the front door.
“We have to follow her,” Nicholas said.
“Now?” I asked. It was on our list of things to do, but we were checking off tasks a little quickly for my taste.
“Of course now,” he said. “You heard what Lex just said. This could be important.”
Nicholas ran back to his room to grab his keys, and then we headed downstairs. We crept to the front door so that Lex wouldn’t hear us and then ran around the side of the house to the garage, where Nicholas had parked, ducking under windows when there was a chance we could be seen. As soon as we were away from the house, Nicholas gunned the engine, and by the time we’d reached the gate that shielded Hidden Hills from the rest of the world, we’d caught up to Jessica’s SUV. Nicholas followed her from a discreet distance onto the freeway, where she headed east.
An hour later we were still driving, and the sun was sitting low in the rearview mirror.
Nicholas slammed his head back against the headrest in frustration. “Where the hell is she going?”
“Could she know we’re following her?” I asked.
“I don’t see how,” he said. “We’re a hundred yards behind her, and there are nine billion black BMWs in Southern California. Maybe she listened to Lex and isn’t going where she isn’t supposed to. Maybe she just likes to drive around, like she told you.”
“On the freeway?” I said.
Nicholas’s cell phone began to ring, and the display on his car’s computer console read “Asher.” He frowned but answered.
“Hey, I can’t really—”
But Asher was already talking. “Want to come over?” he asked, his voice filling the car. “I just found the most terrible-looking movie on Netflix.”
“I can’t,” Nicholas said.
“Hot date?”
“Danny and I are doing something.”
“Again? What’s going on with you two?”
Nicholas glanced over at me. “Ash—”
“A couple of weeks ago you barely even spoke, and now you’re ditching school together and, like, attached at the hip. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s great, but what changed?”
Nicholas sighed. “Just making more of an effort.”
“Liar! Oh my God, you’re so bad at it!”
I grinned, and Nicholas shot me a glare.
“I’ll call you later, okay?” Nicholas said, finger already hovering over the button that would end the call.
“Okay, liar! Love you!”
Nicholas jabbed the button, and the car went silent. He glowered, and I tried to hide my smile.
“It’s not funny,” Nicholas said. “I hate hiding things from him.”
“Then why are you?”
“I just . . . I need to keep him separate from family stuff,” he said. “He gets that.”
“How long have you two been together?” I asked.
“Two and a half years.”
I blinked. “Jesus.”
The corner of his mouth turned up. “Yeah, that’s the usual reaction.”
“So you were, what, fifteen?” I asked. “And you’ve been together ever since then?”
He nodded. “He’s seen all the worst parts of me, and it hasn’t scared him off yet.”
Those words hit something deep inside of me, and I knew they were going to linger. “That . . . must be nice.”