Agent Armstrong glared at Sheriff Lundquist, whose expression didn’t change.
So we all knew who had been quick on the trigger. And now, thanks to the good sheriff, we were no closer to the truth or to finding my little brother. The information had stopped.
I wanted to blame him, but if I had found someone threatening Pixie, I might’ve done the same thing.
Agent Armstrong was still talking. “And Mr. Bulgakov gave no indication who this person might be. The one who outspied him.”
Pixie shook her head. “None whatsoever.”
Agent Armstrong asked Pixie more questions about what had happened the day before, and she answered them. But something was stuck in my mind after Pixie had said the word outspied.
The CCTV had been stuck on a loop showing the Breakers, but why in the garage, too? What had been going on there? Had Grant gone to the nest of blankets before he went to the gate? What had happened in the garage that he’d known about that someone would want covered up?
We were down to a short list of people who had the capability to find Lyudmila in the Breakers when Dad was away: There were the Grays, and our family. And then there was our travel team: Hannah, our cook; Edgar, who stayed above the garage; Joyce, who thought she was so important she was always just a step behind Dad; and Yuri, who was dead. One of us was a killer.
No wonder Grant didn’t want to come home when Pixie rowed him into the Sound. He was a witness. He’d seen something happen to his own mother, and he’d told no one. Not even me.
I swear, as soon as I found the little urchin, I was going to kick his ass for not coming to me first.
If I found him.
Outside, the weather was picking up. The wind whistled through the cracks in the windows, and the rain splashed against the glass.
I wove my way across the room and found myself sitting next to Pixie on the sofa. Agent Armstrong had finished his questioning and left with the others. Without thinking, I took her hand. I interlocked my fingers in hers. She took it and squeezed.
I should’ve known better than to reach for her.
Pixie was an observant girl.
She felt my scars. I’d been picking at them again. I couldn’t leave them alone, especially when I was stressed. She opened my palm and counted them. Five. A whole constellation of old cigarette burns.
“They’re bad again, aren’t they?” she said.
“It’s been a long couple of days,” I said.
She’d seen the scars before. Most of the time, they were easy to overlook.
But now they were leaking, oozing red.
Pix got up, went to the bathroom, and came back with a first aid kit. As she dabbed at my hand with neomycin ointment, branches blew back and forth against the windowpanes. Something swooped overhead, and I didn’t ask what.
“These aren’t ever going to fade, are they, Henry?” Pix asked, investigating my skin.
And maybe it was the trauma of the past couple of days, or the idea that I might never see my little brother again, or the knowledge that I’d had two mothers come and go from my life, but right then was when I broke.
I resolved to tell Pixie about the scars on my hand, and the secret of my life, and how I became a little soldier.
I am four years old. Meredith is two. We spend our lives propped between a pair of golden women. Two blondes. One, our mommy, sits us on her lap and reads to us every night before we go to bed. She takes us to the kitchen, where Hannah feeds us gooey chocolate desserts and lets us put all the sprinkles we want on them and writes our names in raspberry syrup.
Our nanny has golden hair just like Mommy’s. She’s pretty like Mommy, too. She takes us where we need to go and sets us up with experiments in foam shapes and glue and hardly ever gets upset when Meredith gets sloppy and gets glitter on the carpet.
I want to be a good boy for both of these golden women. But I can’t always be. I am told to sit still. But I just can’t. I break things. I break a Slinky. I break Candy Land. Once, I break the fountain in the front yard. I don’t mean to. I just want to play in it, and I break a tile trying to get to the part where the water comes out.
That’s when I get the first one, the first burn.
That was an expensive tile imported from Italy, the pretty blonde says. Your father will be mad when he finds out.
I didn’t mean to. It was hot. I just wanted to play in the water.
Still, your father will be furious. Come upstairs with me.
She takes me to the bathroom in the playroom on the top floor. She locks the door and opens a window.
She lights a cigarette. I’m surprised, because she doesn’t smoke.
Hold out your hand. You’ve done a bad thing, and now you’ll have to be punished, but it’ll be over quickly and you’ll be forgiven.
Just like that?
Just like that.