DAVID
Robbie shows up late that afternoon, the rat-a-tat on the front door summoning David from where he sits on the couch, working at his laptop. He peels back the strip of duct tape covering the peephole, expecting to see another reporter’s bland face looking back at him, and instead sees Robbie’s dark features. David opens the door. “Hey,” he says, shaking Robbie’s hand and holding the door wider. Eve’s asked David to give the man a chance, so David had nodded at the guy’s jokes, listened to his stories about the customers at the bar he owns, but that’s as far as it’s gotten. They’ll never be friendly, not the way it was with Owen. He closes the door behind them and locks it. A conditioned response from when Tyler was young and loved latching and unlatching the front door. “Any news?”
“No, but you’d never know it, the way those reporters are after us. They’re calling, looking in the windows, swarming around the car when we pull out. I had to go the back way just to get here. But Charlotte won’t let me tell them to buzz off. She says it’s a small price to pay to keep Amy in the news.”
They’re standing awkwardly in the front hall. What does Robbie want? “Offer you a beer?”
“Wish I could, but I told Charlotte I wouldn’t be gone long. I just came by to see if Tyler could take a look at my cell phone. The mike’s not working.”
His son, the neighborhood tech genius. David glances at his watch. “It’s almost time for him to come out. Come on in.”
They sit in the living room. “How’s Charlotte doing?”
“Oh, you know. She’s trying to be strong, but the whole thing’s so fucked up. I don’t know about that police detective who’s running the case. Detective Watkins. She’s giving Charlotte a real hard time. I don’t think she has a clue. What did you think of her?”
Who is Robbie, anyway, but the guy Charlotte’s dating? “She seems to know what she’s doing. I don’t think the fact that we haven’t found Amy is a reflection of her inability to do her job.”
“She keeps asking Charlotte the same questions over and over. When did she last see Amy? What did they argue about? Like it’s going to do any good.”
This is the real question, isn’t it—does Charlotte know more than she’s saying? The mother’s always the first suspect. But Charlotte had seemed genuinely worried when David saw her Friday night. She’d been out in the pouring rain, running heedlessly along the side of the road. Unless she’d been running away from something.
“What was Amy doing outside?” David asks.
“Charlotte says she went out to cool off.”
“Why leave the porch?”
“Who knows? Probably trying to scare Charlotte.”
Who hadn’t known her daughter had gone off into the storm. “You ask me, she was lured away.” Kittens and puppies.
“Huh.” Robbie hunches forward, elbows on his knees, hands knotted together.
“Too bad no one saw anything.”
David and Tyler lay the pieces of the grill across the stone pavers. Tyler’s wearing his sweatshirt, jeans, socks and shoes. His hands are covered with cotton gloves. It’s a beautiful evening and here his son is, hiding from it.
The French door opens behind them, and Eve comes out to join them. She’d dressed quickly that morning, moving from the bed to the closet. How many times has he watched her draw up a zipper, fasten a button? It’s been six weeks since they’ve had sex, and even then it had been quick and passionless. Eve has made no gesture, no comment at all to show she’s aware. Does she even miss him? He had thought they’d gained some ground at the airport, the way she had clung to him, but that moment had fizzled into nothingness. Look at the night before, when he’d told her about Detective Watkins’s insinuations about Tyler. She wanted him to be upset, too, but what did she think he could do about it, sue the police force? He’s been home two days and Eve won’t even look at him. It’s Amy’s disappearance; it’s Tyler’s birthday. It’s everything, balled up into sadness and anxiety and fear.
“Are the reporters still out there?” he asks, and she nods.
“You don’t think they’ll be there much longer, do you?”
“I hope not.” He snaps a burner into the control valve.
“Is Melissa home?”
“She’s in her room. She’s been there all day.”
“Oh.” Dark shadows ring her eyes. She sinks into a chair and puts her elbows on the glass table. “What are you two up to?”
“I got us a new grill.” Tyler loves grilling, and their old grill was well past its prime. David had imagined that Tyler would enjoy assembling it with him. What kid doesn’t like wielding tools and making things work? But Tyler’s listless in his help. David’s asked him for the wrench and his son only looked at him blankly.
“Wow.”
“Yeah, it’s got six burners and a warming rack.”
“Double wow. I guess we’re cooking out tonight?”
“How do hamburgers sound?”
“Great. Burgers sound great. What do you think, Ty?”
“Sure,” Tyler says. He’s got the instruction sheet spread out and is studying the small print.
“Any news?” David asks, though he already knows the answer. Eve would have said something right away. The energy around her would have been different.
“No.” It’s clear she doesn’t want to talk about Amy. She watches Tyler, her eyes soft with hope. He wishes he could see what she sees. I don’t know how to be the mother of a boy, she’d confided when they learned she was pregnant with Tyler. It bothered her those last few months. She wandered the aisles of the baby boy clothes in the department stores; she’d pick up a toy truck and put it down again. Then came that early morning when he returned to the maternity ward after phoning his father with the news, to find her propped up in bed, gazing down at their newborn son in her arms. It had been a full minute before she’d even realized he was in the room.
“I see you mowed the lawn,” she says.
“Half of it, anyway.” He’d gotten lucky. The police detective had emerged from Charlotte’s house to issue a statement, and all the reporters had flocked to her. He’d never mowed a lawn so quickly in his life. He’d left swaths of grass untouched. “I’ll tackle the backyard tomorrow.” This is what they talk about lately, the lawn, the bills, what kind of floral arrangement to send his sister on her birthday. “Did you know we have grubs?”
“No. Is that bad?”
“The skunks will eat them,” Tyler says.
“How do you know that?” David asks. Tyler possesses such a wide and strange assortment of trivia. It saddens him, thinking of what could have been.
Tyler just shrugs.
“There are holes all over the yard.” David has spent this day searching the ground in one way or another. “I’ve looked into it. There’s some poison I can spread around, but nothing natural.”
Eve never allows weed killers or fertilizers in their yard. She scrubs the counters with baking soda and cleans the toilets with vinegar. She buys organic food. They don’t know what could harm Tyler. They don’t dare find out.
“We could always tear it up and put in a rock garden,” Eve says. “Then Tyler could pretend he’s an astronaut landing on the moon.”
“I’d rather go to Mars.” Tyler pushes himself up. “We need flashlight batteries.”
Eve watches him go. “He’d be such a great astronaut,” she says dreamily.
David grits his teeth. Tyler isn’t going to grow up to be anything at all. “I hate it when you do that.”
“Why? It’s not as if I say it to him.”
“You live in a fantasy world. Tyler’s melanoma is going to reappear. It may already have.”
“The doctors will treat it.”
“What if they don’t catch it in time?” And even if they do, there’s no guarantee.
“David, why are you doing this?”
Her stubbornness is astounding. “You’re the one who talks to the doctors. You’re the one who does the resear
ch. You know the facts better than I do, so why do you ignore them?”
“What do you want me to do—give up?”
“Of course not. I just want you to be realistic.”
“Why is that so important to you? What does it matter what I think?”
“Because all you think about is him.”
“Someone has to!”
“Meaning I don’t?”
“You couldn’t even remember to bring home his birthday present.”
“It’s just a camera, Eve. Get some fucking perspective.”
“You didn’t even check him over. He could have been seriously hurt.”
So that’s what this was about. “But he wasn’t.”
“But he could have been.”
She can never leave anything alone. It always has to be her way. There’s never room for anyone else’s opinion. “It’s always what Tyler wants, what Tyler needs. What about what I want? We don’t go to movies. We don’t eat in restaurants. We’ve never gone on a vacation. What about Melissa? Do you think of her at all? Something’s wrong with our daughter. Something’s really wrong, but you don’t have a clue.”
“You want me to face the facts?” she hisses. “Well, how about this one? What if that was Tyler’s last birthday?” Her eyes are blazing, her fists clenched. She looks so self-righteous.
“Did it ever occur to you that work isn’t the only reason I stay away?”
Her face goes blank. Then she stands so abruptly her chair topples backward with a crash. The patio’s quiet after she leaves, reproachful. He grinds a bolt securely into place.
In two months, they will have their first hard frost. The days will grow shorter, the sun weaker in the sky. Tyler can be up and among them for longer and longer stretches of time. They’ve grown to love the long dark nights, trudging through the snow, all of them equally covered head-to-toe in wool and fleece. For those few months, they could almost imagine what it feels like to be a normal family. It used to be enough.
MISTER
Got a second? Robbie had said, coming in and sitting down in Tyler’s desk chair. He’d spotted the photographs spread across the desk at the same time that Tyler had, picking them up and shuffling through them as he talked. The mike on my cell keeps cutting off. Can you take a look? Tyler had watched nervously, his heart pounding. At any second, Robbie was going to stop and stare with a frown. Dude, were you taking pictures of me? But then Robbie dropped the photos and leaned back to pull his phone from his pocket. It was an easy fix, just resetting preferences. Robbie would know that. He knew all about phones, so why was he really there? But Robbie left without saying, rapping his knuckles on the desk before standing. Thanks, dude. He’d left behind the heavy stink of cologne. Tyler turned the fan on in the bathroom to make it go away.
He raises the cover on the grill. Smoke churns up, blinding him. He steps back, coughing. It had been torture, trying to put the stupid thing together. His dad had watched every move he made, waiting for him to screw up.
“This lady came into Kroger’s today.” Zach’s voice is tinny, coming over the speaker on Tyler’s cell phone. Tyler’s got it lying on the metal tray attached to the grill. This thing is monstrous. It could grill a dozen burgers and a dozen pieces of chicken all at the same time, easy. But all it has on it are four small patties. Cheese drips onto the flames, making them sputter. “She said she was a psychic and that she dreamed she saw Amy someplace dark and cold.”
“Like where?” Tyler asks. From where he stands on the patio, he can see Holly’s house. Lights are on over there. He hears Holly’s voice, the slam of a door.
“I don’t know. She was talking to the other people in line. What do you think? Do you think she could be right?”
They’ve watched those shows where psychics talked to people in the audience and made them cry. It seemed pretty real. “Maybe. Like a cave.”
“That would suck, man.”
Amy’s scared of spiders. They used to torture her by dangling plastic spiders from tree branches so she’d run away and leave them alone. It makes Tyler feel bad, remembering this.
“They’re putting together special patrols to walk kids to school,” Zach says. “They’re even going to have parents standing on the street corners.”
Tyler hadn’t heard anything about that. Why would he have? He wasn’t walking to school. He’s never walked to school a day in his life. “You scared?”
“No way.” But Zach doesn’t sound like he means it. “What about you?”
“No.” He is, though, a little.
“You want to head over to Alan’s later? We’re having a brawl.”
Alan has every gaming platform they make. There’ll be kids sprawled across the floor and couches, drinking pop and wearing headsets. But Tyler knows how it will play out. Everything will be cool until just before dawn, and then the quiet knock on the door. His mom, come to pick him up. The other mom will stand there in her bathrobe and talk as he gets his things together. The whole point of a sleepover is to be awake when everyone else is asleep. With him around, that never happens. Someone’s mom always has to stay up.
“Maybe another time,” Tyler says, and they hang up.
“Good job,” his mom tells him as he comes in with the platter of food.
They eat on the patio, the way they always do when the weather’s okay. His mom worries about him getting fresh air. Melissa says there’s nothing fresh about the air in Columbus, but his mom tells her it’s the principle of the thing.
“How was the mall?” his mom asks Melissa.
“Didn’t go.”
“I thought you wanted to find something to wear for school.”
Melissa’s been on the phone with Brittany for weeks, talking about dresses, jeans, shoes. She’s like this every year before school starts. “I don’t care anymore.”
“Oh, honey,” his mom says. “Why don’t I take you to the mall tomorrow?”
“No.” Melissa jabs at her food with a fork, but she doesn’t bring it to her mouth. His mom’s not eating, either. It’s only Tyler and his dad, reaching for the ketchup, spooning beans onto their plates. “Brittany’s coming over later.”
“It might be tricky.” His dad looks up. “With all those reporters out there. Tell her to drive slowly. Or, if you want, I can drop you off at her house.”
“Like I’m three?”
“You could climb over the fence and go the back way,” Tyler suggests, and Melissa looks at him. For a moment, he sees the spark of approval in her eyes.
“You can’t go through our neighbors’ yard,” his mom says.
“They won’t mind,” Melissa says.
“What about their dog?”
“It’s just a stupid little dog. It won’t hurt me.”
“I’m sure it’ll be okay, Eve,” his dad says. “They’ll understand, given the circumstances.”
His mom’s face goes still. His dad isn’t looking at her, though. They’ve had another fight, Tyler guesses, probably about him. Their fights usually are. He’s heard their voices through his bedroom vent. It’s always his name that catches his attention and makes him stop to listen. He’s never heard their actual words.
Circumstances is just another word for Amy, missing. “What if they never find her?” Tyler asks.
“They will,” his dad says.
“But what if they don’t?”
“They’ll never stop looking,” his mom insists.
Yes, but Tyler knows there’s a difference between looking and finding.
So that’s what Dr. Cipriano’s been doing—he’s been building a cage.
Tyler crouches by the narrow basement window, peering in around the cobwebs littered with dead leaves and twigs at the room below. Cement floor, beige painted wall, and something new: a box, made of wooden two-by-fours and chicken wire. It’s huge, big enough that Tyler could crawl in and stretch out if he wanted to.
Dr. Cipriano comes into view, dragging a big paper bag behind him across the cement flo
or. He ducks into the cage and shakes out the bag’s contents. Tyler squints to see. It looks similar to the straw his dad spreads out to protect new grass.
Dr. Cipriano rolls the empty bag into a tight cylinder. He’s talking to someone. Who? Tyler leans close to the glass to see, but whoever it is is around the corner and out of sight.
Holding his camera against his chest, Tyler crabwalks past the stiff branches of the cypress tree that reach out to snag his sweatshirt and yank down his hood, over to the next window. Now he can see the shadow of someone lying there and just the very tip of something pale and narrow—a finger, waving this way and that. The only person Tyler’s ever seen in Dr. Cipriano’s house was Bob. He doesn’t think this is Bob’s finger. It’s too strangely shaped, for one thing. It’s the wrong color, for another. Tyler raises his camera to his eye, but everything goes black. Dr. Cipriano’s turned off the light.
Tyler pushes himself up. Next time, he won’t stop at Sophie’s house first. He’ll come directly to Dr. Cipriano’s. Sophie’s house had been a bust, anyway. Her window was dark and stayed dark the whole time Tyler crouched outside, waiting.
Something’s moving over in Albert’s yard, something small and determined. It’s Albert’s cat, Sugar, creeping through the tall grass, the pale tip of her long tail barely visible. She’s after something. That would be good—an action shot. Tyler follows her across Albert’s yard and stops as she crosses into the Farnhams’ yard.
He eyes the small white box perched above the Farnhams’ back door. It just sits there, pushing him away. Tyler’s old enough now to push back.
The Farnhams’ grass is cut short and even, springy beneath his shoes. There are lots of interesting things all around him: a gazebo, a water fountain, a wishing well, a pond with a little statue of a boy with a watering can. Wind chimes dangle from the branches. He ducks to avoid hitting them. Something sparkles in the distance and he fumbles for his flashlight. Then the world around him bursts into brightness.
The Deepest Secret Page 12