The Second Son

by Martin Jay Weiss

  The mess hall was a wide-open lodge with high ceilings and a help-yourself cafeteria where servers in hairnets spooned out vegetarian fare that left you hungrier than when you came—what you’d expect from an adult camp for earth-crunchers. Rows of long community tables extended from each side, and when Ethan and Elvis entered, most of the seats were taken. All of the Rabbits glanced up as they moved through, then went back to their crimson-colored soups, stews, and chilies, minding their own business, which he already knew was what Rabbits did best.

  Elvis pointed toward the back. “How about that table in the corner?”

  “May I use the bathroom first?” Ethan asked, hoping to rattle his agenda.

  Elvis pointed to the other side. “It’s over there.”

  “I remember. Thanks.”

  Ethan crossed the room and glanced at the entrance, noticing a bulky man close the doors. Two other men sporting man buns and unkempt beards were loitering oddly, as if they were sidelined players waiting for their coach to let them in the game. Ethan assumed that it was the only entrance, unless there was a back door in the kitchen, which would be difficult to get to. He was sinking further into the rabbit hole.

  He scanned the Rabbits, wondering if one of them had texted him the warning. The unisex lavatory had three stalls, three urinals, and three sinks. There was no lock on the door so Ethan had to move fast.

  He tucked into the last stall, shut the hinge, and responded to the text message: Who is this?

  The response: Sender account no longer valid.

  Ethan relieved himself as he considered his options.

  When in Rome.

  Then he heard sirens in the distance.

  He glanced another text: Get out of there.

  Shit! Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.

  He noticed an open window, possibly large enough to climb through. He stood on the toilet, extended his long arms, and reached the ledge, never more grateful that he was six foot five.

  Just then, the bathroom door opened. Ethan ducked back down, squatted on the toilet, never more annoyed that he was six foot five. He peeked through the crack.

  One of the Man Buns that had been guarding the door washed his hands at the first sink, checked himself out in the mirror, and then toyed with his hair.

  He’s stalling.

  Ethan grunted noisily, to express his need for privacy, and it seemed to work. Man Bun walked out. Ethan moved quickly and swiftly, pulling up, over, and through the window. He heard the bathroom door open again, and he jumped.

  The drop down was greater than he had anticipated, more than a dozen feet, but luckily he landed in a dirt pile that helped break the fall. The sun had fallen behind the horizon and it was getting dark fast. No one saw him behind the building—yet—but he took cover behind a cluster of bushes and searched for another exit besides the reception area he had entered through. The sirens were getting louder. Red-and-blue flashing lights from the road, approaching.

  He heard a voice coming from the bathroom. “Mr. Stone? Are you okay?” It was Elvis. Ethan could hear him checking the stalls, slamming the doors open. Then he shouted, “He’s gone!”

  Elvis noticed the open window but it was too high for him to reach. He rushed back into the dining room and ordered, “Shut the gate! Lock the exit!”

  Ethan made his move. He ran low and swift, staying in the shadows, disappearing behind the cottages, and then evanescing into the woods. He hoped that his long legs and the endurance he’d built up jogging on the Santa Monica bike path would be enough to outrun a mob of vegan yogis.

  He climbed the fence at the edge of the property. When he glanced back, he could see that Dancing Rabbit was up in arms. Rabbits were rushing from the mess hall, pointing and yelling bloody murder in all directions. The police were talking to Elvis, probably to get a detailed description of what Ethan was wearing, all the gory details of the two-time trespasser. Never in Ethan’s wildest imagination would he have thought the police were actually there to apprehend him for the murder of Wade Franks, an ex-convict found dead in a strip mall parking lot earlier that day, or that his brother was seen on the TV news running away from the dead body, murder weapon in his hand, and Ethan was now being mistaken for Jack.

  Ethan considered going back and telling them he had only trespassed again because he was worried about Brooke, who was still the latest missing Rabbit. He already knew that the Big Sur detectives—Ramsey and Johnson—were suspicious of Dancing Rabbit and their possible connection to the missing people in the area. But he was aware that this was a small town and Dancing Rabbit was one of the few businesses that the police needed to protect. And Ethan had trespassed on the property last time he was there, uninvited, and stormed into one of the cabins.

  It looked bad.

  Then, one of the Rabbits pointed toward the bushes where Ethan was hiding and nudged one of the police officers. Running from Rabbits was one thing. Running from cops was another.

  It looked very bad.

  Ethan’s phone pinged and he looked down at another text: Go! Now!

  So just like Jack, he did the only thing that made sense at the time.

  He turned around and ran like hell.

  CHAPTER 25

  Ethan’s instincts took over. He charged through the dense woods, vaulting shrubbery like in a hurdle race, and hightailed it onto the main road. Staying in the shadows of tree barriers, he moved then hid, again and again, hoping to gain some distance. The police would likely apprehend his Tesla in the Dancing Rabbit driveway, and he considered calling Jack or Bailey to come pick him up. But where would he hide for the few hours it would take either one to get there? The police would be able to search every square inch of Big Sur by then. And he was on the only road in or out of Big Sur. No doubt they would troll Highway 1, slowly and thoroughly, until they found him.

  He needed a Trojan horse escape. He’d have to sneak away unseen somehow. So he decided that he needed to hitch a ride out of there.

  When he saw a car approaching, he jumped out on the road and waved his arms like a madman. The driver sounded his horn as he swerved around the thrashing giant, just missing him.

  No one in their right mind would stop for me.

  He looked back and saw two police cars backing out of the Dancing Rabbit driveway. There was a third car parked on the shoulder of the road. An officer pulled search dogs out of the back seat and prepared them for a hunt.

  There was no place for Ethan to hunker down. He was out of options.

  Just then, his cell phone pinged and he glimpsed another text: Across the street, behind the pines.

  He looked across the street and behind two large pine trees was a rustic cabin with the lights on, just up the road.

  He scrolled down: Sender unknown.

  Whoever was helping him wanted to be anonymous. He didn’t know how they were tracking him or why, but he was grateful.

  He stayed low and lumbered closer. The front door of the cabin had an open sign. A small parking area was empty, save for an old Ford pickup that looked like it’d been sitting there since the sixties.

  Chimes sounded when he went inside, but he didn’t see anyone. It looked like an arts and crafts museum with a lot of books and memorabilia; a hoarder’s posthumous tribute; a tomb.

  “What is this place?” he exhaled.

  He heard some ruffling from a back room and a chirpy female voice, “El sur grande, the splendor of the Central Coast, for those seeking isolation and natural beauty just like Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac, and Henry Miller. This is an aggregation of the most literary flower children, an informal respite. Are you looking for memoir or fiction?”

  “Who is that?” He moved toward the voice. “Where are you?”

  Ethan walked through the stacks, expecting to find an aging bookish hippie librarian, maybe one of Elvis’s old squeezes prepared to give h
im a dissertation on the beat generation, but when he turned the corner, he saw Brooke’s former roommate, Anna Gopnik—aka, the girl who drove over the cliff. She was alive and well, and tucked away in the safety of the Henry Miller Memorial Library.

  Ethan gasped. “I thought you were dead.”

  “I thought you were a womanizer,” Anna replied.

  “But I saw them pull your car out of the ocean—”

  “I saw you seduce my roommate and lure her down to the netherworld of Los Angeles, but here we are, both survivors of unfortunate fates and predicaments.”

  “They’re still trudging the ocean looking for you, but you’re here, you’re alive—”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, but cruise control did the deed for me. It’s more dependable than I am, and it’s not afraid of heights.”

  “You sent your car over the cliff…to fake your death?”

  “You’re smarter than you look.” She headed toward the front counter, near the entrance.

  He followed her. “They can’t declare you dead without a body.”

  “I left plenty of blood all over the inside of my car to give them DNA proof,” she explained. “It was painful, too.” She showed Ethan the bandages on her arms where she had cut herself.

  Was this another trap? Ethan wondered.

  “Did you send me those texts?”

  “What texts?”

  He showed her his iPhone. “These.”

  “No.”

  He scoped out the library to see if there were any cameras, or anyone else watching. As he looked out the rear window to see if there were any cars parked out back, he asked her, “Just tell me why?”

  “Why what?”

  “You know what I’m asking, why would you want people to think you were dead?”

  “We all have our reasons. Mine are personal.”

  “Does Dancing Rabbit help people fake their deaths and disappear?” he asked. “Do they give you someone’s identity, someone who won’t be missed? Is that what they meant by ‘a place to transform’? Is that what Brooke did?”

  “I really don’t know,” Anna explained. “No one tells anyone why they do it, who they were, who they’re going to become, where they’re going. That’s how this works. Never tell anyone, and no one will ever know.”

  “But you know that Brooke is hiding,” he pressed, “running from something—”

  “I don’t know anything. I just told you.”

  Ethan studied her face. She meant what she said.

  “I got these texts just as the police arrived, helping me get away. I think they were from Brooke. I think she was trying to help me get away.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  “She has to be close by then.”

  “Not necessarily,” Anna told him. “There’s a GPS tracker in your phone.”

  Ethan checked to make sure his Stalker app was off, and it was. “No one can track me if I shut off the tracking capabilities in the settings. It’s something I developed to make sure that I’m never tracked.”

  “You must be hiding something then,” she insinuated, for effect.

  “I’m not hiding anything.”

  Anna smiled. “Brooke uses an app that doesn’t shut the GPS down. It always knows where you are, like it or not.”

  “There’s no app on the market that does that.”

  “I didn’t say it was on the market,” Anna explained. “I said it was in your phone.”

  “Like a bug? She had a bug planted in my phone? Brooke doesn’t believe in invading people’s privacy. She hates technology.”

  “She doesn’t trust the way people abuse technology but she believes that technology can be used to help people.”

  Ethan glared back, confused.

  “She’s tracking you for your own protection,” Anna explained. “She had hoped you would stay away like she asked you to, but knowing how persistent you are, she knew it was unlikely.”

  “Is she doing it to keep me away or keep me on a leash?”

  “Maybe both, I really don’t know. Nobody shares how or where or why.” Anna pulled a copy of Tropic of Cancer from the shelf. “I always thought Henry Miller was a foul-mouthed, crude, hyperbolic druggy hack. But Brooke seemed to like him and she wanted me to give this to you.”

  Ethan noticed a familiar coffee stain on the cover, and the receipt used as a bookmark was from Bulletproof, a coffee shop in Santa Monica that Brooke used to frequent. “This is her copy. She was here!”

  “Yes.”

  Ethan looked around.

  “She’s not here now,” Anna assured him.

  “Was she here to arrange your disappearance? And Rufus Wall’s? To stage the car accident? Is the timing of her disappearance linked to yours—?”

  Anna opened the book to a bookmarked page with an underlined passage, and told him, “She thought this would help you understand.”

  Ethan read the passage aloud, “‘As soon as a woman loses a front tooth or an eye or a leg she goes on the loose. In America she’d starve to death if she had nothing to recommend her but mutilation.’” Ethan looked up. “I don’t get it. I’m not missing a tooth or an eye or a leg. And I’ve never hunted in my life. Is this some kind of message, a metaphor, a clue, or what?”

  “She thought it would make sense to you. Honestly, that’s all I know.”

  “I told her that she was my missing piece,” Ethan blurted, as if a light bulb went off. “When we met—”

  “Gag me with a spoon.” Anna sighed impudently, as if he struck a nerve. “When Brooke told me she was moving to Santa Monica to live with you, I asked her what she liked about you, why she was so sure. I actually thought your brother was more sensitive—”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “But she said you were a hunter, the kind of guy who wouldn’t give up until you found your missing piece. I thought it sounded overly sentimental. I also thought it was rather callow, both of you so sure that you would end up together—”

  “It wasn’t,” Ethan snapped. “When you know, you know.”

  Anna rolled her eyes. “That’s what she said.”

  Dogs barked outside. Then a car door shut.

  Anna looked out the window. Police were approaching. “If they catch you, you never saw me.”

  She put her finger to her lips and disappeared into the back room. Then he heard her voice once more: “There’s a trail just out the back exit that goes up into the hills.”

  And he took off.

  CHAPTER 26

  The cloud-covered moon cast an ambient glow over endless verdure, overgrown and dense, and a narrow trail up the steep hillside. Ethan plowed upward, maneuvering through the thick vegetation. He hoped it led somewhere, hopefully not to another lion’s den. He could hear the dogs barking; they were ascending the trail, not far behind.

  Twenty minutes in, Ethan reached the zenith, a narrow ledge with a gnarly drop down to a dried lakebed. He looked for another option but the posse was getting closer. He sidestepped the ridge, slowly at first, and then he picked up speed. After traversing fifty yards or so, his foot hit a loose patch of dirt. He slid and went over, bouncing hard off the jutting, rocky slope as he tumbled. Luckily, he grabbed a thick tree root embedded into the protuberance and broke the fall, just in time.

  He watched Brooke’s copy of Tropic of Cancer soar into the frondescence abyss, as if he were watching her—or her last words to him—fly away.

  Then he had an epiphany.

  The reference about her being his missing piece could only mean one thing: she wanted him to know that it was real, their love, their bond.

  When you know, you know.

  Anna Gopnik had doubted their love, even when she’d handed him the book. Bailey and Emily had warned Ethan that he didn’t really know her. And after she left, even Ethan had
doubts. She knew he would, considering the way she left. She also knew that he would be so determined to find her that he would ignore her wishes that he leave her alone, especially if he thought she was in trouble. She wanted him to know that she wasn’t running from him. She knew he’d need to know if what they’d shared was real. So she left him a passage that referred back to their first meet-cute, when he told her that he would never give up until he found his missing piece.

  That was all he needed to know and it gave him the strength of a thousand men. He pulled himself up the side of the mountain, hand over hand. If the tree root hadn’t spent the last hundred years growing exactly where it had, he would be dead. He looked down at the heart-stopping drop. He lost her book instead of his life and he remembered Brooke often talking about life being full of paradoxes, and her definition of mindfulness resonated: “Life is just a series of perspectives that shift from moment to moment.”

  But when he pulled himself up to safe ground, his perspective changed once again, as did his circumstance.

  Half a dozen police officers were pointing guns at him. One of them said, “Hands over your head where we can see them.”

  Ethan squinted as a flashlight shined in his eyes. “I can explain everything. I’m unarmed—”

  “Hands!” The officer shouted.

  Ethan obeyed.

  Another officer pulled back on snarling canines. “Relent!”

  Two more officers approached. One of them pulled Ethan’s arms back and clamped handcuffs on his wrists, the other patted him down and said matter-of-factly, “You are under arrest for the murder of Wade Franks.”

  “Wade Franks? I don’t even know who that is. I didn’t kill anyone—”

  “Save it,” the cop patting him down said, now satisfied that Ethan wasn’t packing a gun. “You are a criminal suspect in police custody, and I’m going to explain your rights, do you understand?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law…”

  “This is a mistake,” he protested.

  “Walk!” The officer shoved Ethan forward and finished the Miranda rights as they all headed back down the mountainside.