His little mouth turned down. He stood up and grabbed the end of his bongo drums, dragging them behind him as noisily as he could. He disappeared into the hallway, and a few minutes later the sound of a slamming door reverberated toward them.
Lianne slowly sank into a seat several feet away from Veronica. She stared down at her lap. “You must have questions—”
“We don’t have to—” Veronica spoke at the same time, her voice overlapping with her mother’s. She pressed her lips tightly together in a rueful smile. “It’s okay. I’m here to do a job. To help you find Aurora. You don’t owe me any answers.”
“I’ve been clean for seven years now. Seven years, three months, twelve days.” It was like Lianne hadn’t even heard. “Tanner and I met in recovery. He’s Rory’s dad. Hunter’s dad too. I guess that’s obvious. I’m sorry, I’m just … I’m nervous.” She took a deep breath, and when she spoke her voice was calmer. Her eyes settled on Veronica’s face. She looked almost frightened, her pupils wide and dark. “Hunter … Hunter’s your little brother.”
“Yeah,” Veronica said softly. “I got that.” She looked away, a strange knot twisting in her chest. She felt lost, disoriented—as if all the world’s coordinates had suddenly rearranged themselves and she didn’t have a compass. Anger had been her default for so long with her mother. And if it were just Lianne, she could have rallied that anger. She could have stoked it to protect herself, to keep her mother at arm’s length. But a brother? She didn’t know what to do with that.
“What is he, five? Six?” Veronica’s voice was so soft it was almost swallowed by the enormous room. Lianne nodded.
“He’s six.” She smiled weakly. “He doesn’t know about you. I … I’ve always wanted to tell him. But it’s difficult to explain.”
Veronica wondered if the little boy was in his room with his ear pressed to the door. She remembered being six. Keeping half an eye on the levels in the bottle, understanding even then that there was some mysterious relationship between that and her mother’s behavior. Sometimes it’d been better than that—sometimes it’d been good. But that only made the bad times so much worse.
“Right now, with so much going on, I don’t want to … to confuse him. He’s already terrified. He loves Rory.” Tears spilled down her cheek. She didn’t try to wipe them away.
“It’s fine, Mom.” There’s no reason to change anything, Veronica told herself. I don’t want you back in my life. I don’t want your drama, your manipulations, your lies. I don’t need you. I don’t need this little kid whom I’ve never even met. “We don’t need to complicate things right now. We just need to focus on bringing Rory home.”
Lianne nodded, chewing on the ragged edge of a nail. Her lips trembled slightly. She took a deep breath, her eyes settling on Veronica’s. “When Ms. Landros said she was sending in a PI, I did … I had a moment where I wondered if it’d be your dad. I never thought it’d be you.”
Veronica was spared having to answer by the sound of someone coming in the front door. Lianne shot to her feet. Veronica relaxed slightly—they wouldn’t be alone together anymore. No more memory lane. No more risk of ripping open ancient wounds. A moment later, two men entered the room.
One was the lanky man Veronica had seen on TV hours earlier. Aurora’s dad, Tanner Scott. He wore a denim jacket fraying at the wrists and carried two small white sacks that smelled of grease and salt. Behind him came a broad-shouldered boy in a gray cardigan and skinny jeans. He was maybe eighteen or nineteen, clean shaven and pale. He balanced a tray of fountain drinks in his hand. Something about him looked vaguely familiar to Veronica.
“We got lunch!” The first man held up the sacks. His eyes fell on Veronica.
“This is my husband, Tanner,” Lianne said. “Tanner, this … this is Veronica. She’s the PI Petra hired to help us find Aurora.”
Tanner’s pale blue eyes widened, and he did a double take, looking Veronica up and down. A sad, strained smile spread over his face. “Veronica, honey, I’ve heard so much about you over the years. It’s great to finally meet you.” His voice had a clipped Midwestern twang, the vowels hammered flat. Before she could do anything, he’d wrapped her in a quick, surprisingly strong hug, takeout bags still clutched in his hands. Veronica stood stiff and awkward in his embrace. When he let go, she stepped discreetly away.
“And this is Adrian Marks,” Lianne said quickly, gesturing to the teenaged boy. “He’s Rory’s best friend; he practically lived at our house last year. He was with her the night she disappeared.”
All at once, Veronica realized where she’d seen him. He’d been at the party—she’d seen him playing Lady Gaga on the grand piano. He nodded at her now. His mouth was small and sullen, his eyes dark and wounded. She felt a rush of sympathy—he had the same lost look she’d seen on Hayley Dewalt’s friends. That same sense of some vital, careless, innocent thing ruined.
Paradise doesn’t just get lost in Neptune. It gets razed to the ground.
Tanner set the food on the kitchen counter. “Do you mind us eating while we talk? I don’t want the burgers to get cold.”
“Not at all.”
They took a few minutes, digging through the bags, opening the foil-wrapped burgers, and sorting out whose was whose. Lianne took a tray to Hunter in his bedroom. By the time she returned the others had gathered around a table topped with sea-green glass, burgers unwrapped, fries jutting from cardboard containers. There was extra food; Tanner had offered a burger to Veronica, but her stomach turned at the thought. She pulled out her notebook and a pen.
“Can you tell me a little about Aurora?” Veronica asked. “Her interests, her personality?”
Tanner stood halfway up so he could get his phone out of his pocket. He opened his picture albums app and handed the phone to Veronica.
“I made an album, to show the cops or the press or whoever,” he said.
There were two or three dozen photos—the first was dated 2006, when Aurora would have been eight. Veronica started scrolling through.
The pictures showed first a whip-thin, wild-haired little girl. At eight, nine, ten, Aurora Scott had a coltish look, all hard angles and tensed muscles, like at any moment she was seconds from bolting. A kid who ran and played, she thought, looking at the skinned knee below a pair of shorts, the dirty arms and legs. She couldn’t even hold still for Lianne and Tanner’s wedding pictures—in almost every shot she was looking away from the camera or fidgeting with the bow in her hair, her flower-girl basket half crushed in one hand.
The girl grew up before Veronica’s eyes. There were pictures of her in the Arizona desert, standing next to towering saguaro cacti. Pictures of her holding a two-year-old Hunter in her lap in front of a Christmas tree. One caught her in midair as she leapt from a diving board at the pool, arms and legs akimbo. In junior high she went through a lightning-quick girly phase—sequins and short skirts, bubblegum-pink lip gloss and long wavy hair. That look disappeared abruptly between snapshots, replaced with knit caps and baggy layers. Skater chic.
“She’s spirited,” Lianne said softly. “Funny, smart.” Adrian nodded his agreement.
The last handful of photos—the ones taken in the past year—showed a girl with the casual, hard-edged style of a tomboy grown up to be beautiful. Black leather jacket, distressed jeans, stretched-out sweaters hanging off one shoulder. Her auburn hair was long and straight, and her eyes were green, catlike, and rimmed with black liner. She smirked and pouted, never quite smiling for the camera.
Veronica’s chest tightened. Something in the tilt of the girl’s head, the arch of her eyebrow, made Veronica think of Lilly Kane—brazen, fearless. And something else, maybe just a certain sharpness in Aurora’s eyes, reminded her of herself. Sixteen, with a hair-trigger bullshit detector. Sixteen and looking for a fight.
She looked up at Lianne and Tanner. “Did you know Aurora was planning to come to Neptune for spring break?”
Tanner and Lianne exchanged glances.
“We did,” Tanner said. “We drove her to the bus station. She came out to visit Adrian. We were nervous about letting her come, of course, but she really wanted to.”
“This is Adrian’s freshman year at Hearst,” Lianne explained. She blinked, and Veronica saw tears forming in the corners of her eyes. Adrian’s own eyes were downcast, heavy. “She begged us to let her come out and see him.”
Because she “wanted to” is a strange reason to let your unaccompanied sixteen-year-old stay with a male friend in the combination drug den/orgy that is Neptune’s spring break scene. Veronica tried to keep her expression neutral, but Lianne must have seen a flicker of judgment somewhere, because she shook her head.
“I know it sounds … negligent. But you have to understand. Rory doesn’t … doesn’t always make friends easily. She’s been so lonely since Adrian moved to school. We thought it would do her some good.”
Veronica shot a glance at Adrian. He picked at his french fries, his burger sitting untouched in front of him.