The Second Son

by Martin Jay Weiss

  Ethan asked Sean glibly, “How would you know?”

  “She told me so.”

  “When did you meet her?”

  Sean and Jack exchanged a look.

  “Sean’s right,” Jack said as he stood up, preparing. “It’s time to get everything in the open.”

  “That’s what I thought we were doing,” Ethan said.

  “Remember I told you that Brooke was the reason I moved up here?”

  Ethan nodded. “You said that she introduced you to the guy that hired you.”

  “Exactly.” Jack looked over at Sean. “Sean is that guy. Brooke introduced me to Sean—”

  “She introduced us,” Sean repeated. “I also had met her at Dancing Rabbit.” Sean pointed at the rabbit statue on his fireplace, its large, black, glassy eyes staring back as if it were watching them, gauging. “She gave me one of those trophies after our retreat.”

  “Just like the one she gave us,” Jack said.

  Just like the one she gave the Walls, too, Ethan thought.

  “I was so impressed with her,” Sean continued, “I hired her as a consultant. She helped us refine our mission, how we can use our technology to help people. We even developed a few apps for her.”

  “She was a consultant for Hounddog?” Jack looked genuinely surprised and said to Sean, “You never told me that.”

  “I couldn’t tell you. We signed a confidentiality agreement. Silicon Valley is competitive. We need to be discreet about everything as we grow.”

  “So do we,” Ethan said sharply. “And there are laws against hiring a consultant who was living with the CEO of your biggest competitor.”

  Sean didn’t waver. “She never discussed your business with me and, obviously, she never discussed my business with you. She wasn’t duplicitous. I wouldn’t have hired her if I had any doubts about her loyalty.”

  “You don’t get any more duplicitous than using a false name. She isn’t really Brooke Shaw. Did you know that her real name is Stella Godeaux and she’s wanted for murder?”

  “No. I did not.”

  “Sean’s right,” Jack said. “Until we know her side of the story, we can’t make assumptions.”

  Ethan took a deep breath and lowered his voice. “I’ve been telling myself the same thing, over and over again, trying to believe that she must have a reason. I fell in love with a woman that couldn’t do any of these things. I would never describe her as duplicitous or deceptive or dangerous. But the facts keep hammering away at my loyalty. The FBI showed me a security video of her injecting some kind of syringe into her father’s IV.”

  “What?” Sean and Jack said simultaneously.

  “Her old man died of cyanide poisoning,” Ethan said, looking out the window shaking his head. “I don’t know how to spin that one.”

  “We have to consider all the angles and possibilities,” Sean countered. “They played a video on the news of Jack running away from his attack and made it sound like he was a murderer, too. “The truth isn’t always obvious.”

  “Brooke is not a killer any more than I am,” Jack agreed. “Now is not the time to lose faith in her.”

  This hit Ethan hard. He was giving up on the woman he loved enough to commit the rest of his life to. Everything he learned in the last few days was painting a completely different picture of the woman he thought he knew so well. The FBI had convinced him that she had killed her father. The security video was proof. Her family inheritance was motive. Bailey told him that her brother Clinton had financed Stalker just to find her. She had secretly worked as a consultant for Hounddog, his competition. And worse of all, she disappeared without any explanation. All logic told him that she was deceitful, at the very least. But his heart still beat for her. Jack and Sean were right, he decided. Now was not the time to give up on her.

  “Sometimes you live your life with blinders and choose not to see what’s really going on,” Jack added. “You won’t see the real truth if you don’t see the entire picture. Like when Barry died—”

  “Let’s not beat a dead horse,” Ethan moaned. “Why would you bring up Barry now?”

  “Because it’s a perfect example. You’re still angry at Barry, and for all the wrong reasons—”

  “Like everyone else, I’m angry because he killed himself.”

  Jack added, “And because he didn’t come to you before he did the deed. Am I right?”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Ethan relented, “I think I could have helped him if I knew.”

  “Did you ever think that maybe he didn’t want you to judge him and that’s why he didn’t say anything?””

  “Judge him?”

  Jack glanced at Sean for reassurance. Sean nodded back. This made Ethan even angrier and he asked them, “Am I missing something here?”

  “I loved Barry,” Jack told Ethan.

  “So did I,” Ethan snapped back.

  Jack’s voice shook, “Not in the same way as I did.”

  A long silence followed.

  A deadly silence.

  Sean nervously grabbed the snacks no one had touched, and headed back to the kitchen saying, “See, we all feel much better now that everything is in the open, don’t we?”

  Ethan stared at his brother, trying to cipher the bomb he just dropped, if he understood him right.

  “Barry was my first love,” Jack explained, “and neither one of us were ready to accept what we were.”

  “That’s why…” Ethan cleared his raspy throat. “That’s why he killed himself?”

  Jack nodded. “His family would have disowned him. Remember his dad? Remember his brothers? They would have flipped out. Barry was a star athlete. He was popular. No one would have accepted him. Or at least that’s what he thought. He couldn’t live with himself, disappointing the people he loved.”

  “He could have kept it to himself and lived a lie, like you apparently have.”

  “He doesn’t mean that,” Sean shouted from the kitchen.

  Ethan glared at Sean, as if he were to blame, and spotted Sean’s monogrammed kitchen towels. “S. M. Sean McQueen. It’s your initials.”

  “Genius,” Sean said. “He can read.”

  Ethan turned to his brother. “Those skimpy red underpants I found in your bathroom had the same embroidered initials. I thought it was a stupid logo, like an S&M thing. But it’s him… It’s you… You two… You two are…?”

  This time Sean and Jack overlapped: “Gay!”

  “He’s quick, too,” Sean joked to lighten the mood. “Jack chased me out of his new house this morning because you were on your way over,” Sean told Ethan. “That’s the reason I left my underwear behind. And monogrammed underwear is not something you want to leave behind.”

  Ethan couldn’t help chuckling at that one. “Monogrammed underwear is not something you want to admit you have, either,” he chimed in.

  They all laughed.

  Jack said, “Brooke introduced me to Sean because she knew we’d like each other. Not to divulge company secrets. She and I got pretty close while she lived with us. She was easy to talk to. I trusted her. I liked her.”

  Ethan nodded. “I know.”

  “That’s why I had opened up to her about Barry and me. She understood why I hadn’t come out to you. She knew that I didn’t want to disappoint you. She got that. I knew you’d feel ashamed, maybe hate me, and I couldn’t handle that.”

  Ethan’s spine straightened. “You thought I would hate you? We’ve never had secrets, you and me.”

  “Except this one,” Jack told his brother. “It’s going to take some time to process this. I get it.”

  Ethan stood up, walked over to the windows, and stared out at the wondrous view of the bay. “You’re not one to care what other people think. You’re not afraid of being different. You’ve never backed away from controversy, and b
eing gay isn’t even as controversial anymore. This explains a lot of your odd, secretive behavior, but I don’t get why you would hide it from me all these years.”

  Jack got up and stood by his brother. “You’re right. I don’t care what most people think. But I do care what you think. We could always laugh about our differences that no one else could see because we look alike, but if we’re being honest, you have expectations of me, like I should live up to the standards you have for yourself. We can be different but we’re still a reflection of each other, in the same way that macho dads can’t handle gay sons—”

  “You didn’t think I’d approve?”

  “I worried you’d be ashamed as a republican with a Mexican cousin wanting to cross the border.”

  Ethan smiled. “Good thing gay is the new black, right? Tim Cook is the new Steve Jobs. Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon are the new news.”

  “Are you saying that I’m destined for greatness?”

  “Not at all. Especially since you left Stalker. But you don’t need my approval, or anybody else’s.”

  The twins both stared out at the bay for a bit. “You never understood why I get so depressed,” Jack continued. “You can’t imagine how low I go. I take meds on and off, depending on how bad things get, and the mood of my psychiatrist.”

  Ethan finally had a reason to justify feeling overprotective of his brother. “You once told me that you never wanted to have kids because it took the option of suicide off the table. That was long before Barry. Scared the hell out of me. I always worried about you after that. Who says things like that? Barry never said things like that and he actually did it.”

  “Barry didn’t get the idea from me.”

  “I didn’t say that—”

  “I didn’t know he was going to do it. I had no idea.”

  “Of course you didn’t know,” Ethan said. “I’m sorry you didn’t think I would support who you are. I’m sorry I was so blind. I’m sorry I gave you reasons to think that I couldn’t handle it—”

  “And I’m sorry I didn’t have enough faith in you,” Jack cut in. “You’re the one person in this world I should never doubt.”

  Ethan put his hand on Jack’s shoulder. “You’re my brother, my blood, we’ve shared everything.”

  “Even our birth,” Jack agreed.

  “I could never hate you,” Ethan assured him. “Turning my back on you would be turning my back on myself.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Mindfulness is about living in the moment, but it’s hard to stay present when the past is coming for you. Brooke was convinced that if the past caught up with her, she would have no future, which presented a tremendous internal predicament. Even though she was adamantly opposed to using invasive technology to spy and manipulate, it was her only chance to survive.

  It seemed to Brooke like an either/or quandary; either we are pawns living in an Orwellian world, or we go completely off the grid. And if we choose the latter, we need to use technology to stay safe, which often requires monitoring, spying, and, yes, privacy invasion. She had given much thought to this maddening paradox, especially since she had been on the run in America.

  When she heard about the government monitoring phone calls, medical records, bank transactions, and private communication—all in the name of fighting enemies of the free world—it made her paranoid. Knowing that people were being recorded almost everywhere, she grew concerned for modern society, fearing that basic trust was in crisis. Even the thought of drones taking out terrorists in foreign lands with a push of a button kept her up at nights vexing that it was only a matter of time until our enemies acquired the same technology to wipe us out.

  For every step of progress, there’s an equal or greater danger.

  But when Brooke weighed the pros and cons, and considered the cause and effect of using technology to its full advantage, she decided that it was worth the risk of dreadful consequences in the name of freedom—hers and her fellow Rabbits.

  Rabbits weren’t only people that worked at the Dancing Rabbit ecovillage—those wonderful people she met who committed themselves to sustainability, community, and leaving the world a better place. While she was living there, on the lam, she came to realize that there were a lot of people like her that desperately wanted to drop off the grid. Their reasons varied. Some needed to run. Some just wanted a change. And all of them didn’t know it was possible. She had tapped into an underserved market, and, like all great entrepreneurs, she built a business that filled a unique void. She took on clients slowly, vetted them thoroughly, and turned aspiring escape artists into her own version of Rabbits, with mindful transformations that changed them forever. She was able to manage the business remotely—as a digital nomad—from iPhones that could only be traced back to employees at Dancing Rabbit, good citizens that never left the property, and who didn’t even know the phones were registered under their name.

  Since Brooke’s select clients paid handsomely for this service, she was able to continually invest in custom tech artillery that kept her fellow Rabbits safe. In addition to the apps she had Hounddog build—Pocket Dialer and Black Box—she had a surveillance company called Eyecam build her miniature security cameras inside things she would give to potential clients.

  When she was working at Dancing Rabbit, she gave porcelain rabbit statues to everyone that participated in her corporate retreat seminars, to remind them of the bliss they experienced in Big Sur, that nature was always with them, and transformation and growth were forever possible. She had Eyecam customize statues for people she believed had potential to become her future Rabbits, and would suggest that they place it in the center of their homes—in the most common room of their house—for a constant connection to mindfulness. Of course she never told them that it gave her ability to record activity in their homes to monitor them and determine if she were going to take them on as clients.

  That’s right, the Dancing Rabbit statues had security cameras installed in their heads, and she could access the real-time video it recorded with the Eyecam app called Security Video.

  In the case of Rufus Wall, when he met Brooke on the Hounddog corporate retreat, he confessed a desperate desire to change his life but he didn’t know how. Work had become a grind for him. His doctor had told him that his health was fragile and he couldn’t keep up the pace he was going at. He wanted to work less and take life a little slower, possibly in some lovely place. His wife Sarah, who controlled the family finances, wouldn’t hear of it, as she was also spending his money faster than he could make it. Further, her odd behavior whenever he returned from business trips—which was often—made him suspect that she was cheating on him. But divorce was not an option. Sarah was greedy. She had nothing to lose, everything to gain, and a best friend who was a ruthless divorce attorney.

  For Brooke, finding out that Sarah Wall was having affairs only required one look at the Security Camera app the first time Rufus went out of town. When the Hounddog was away, the Hounddog’s wife sure did play, and the porcelain rabbit saw it all. Sarah’s deviant sexual exploits in the living room with her Pilates instructor were reason enough for Rufus to justify leaving the marriage. Rufus was an ideal Rabbit candidate and Brooke promised to help him transform. She advised him to be patient and wait for the right time. He was an extremely talented programmer and she laid out a future for him that made his long wait well worth it.

  More than a year later, they executed their plan.

  —

  Sarah Wall was beside herself when she had first received the call from the Big Sur Police Department explaining that they had found her husband’s suitcase in a car that went over a cliff. She racked her brain for a reason why Rufus had been in Big Sur when he had told her that he was going to New York on business. There was only one explanation: he was having an affair. Despite her own infidelities, the thought enraged her. She wanted to get even, and the best revenge was living
well. If he were up in Big Sur shtupping some young hippie chick, like the one he supposedly went over the cliff with, then she would get everything. She could cash in the $2 million life insurance policy she had made him buy, add it to their substantial investment account she had been managing, move back east (preferably somewhere warm), look for a new Pilates instructor, and make a fresh start.

  But to do all that, she needed a body.

  The morning after Ethan had paid her a visit, she woke up feeling anxious. She made herself coffee and checked the Big Sur News online to see if her husband’s body had been fished out of the ocean during the night. But no such luck.

  Then she went to the Fidelity website to see how her stocks were doing. Fortunately, the market was up. Unfortunately, her investment account was down. Way down. In fact, it had been emptied. Zero balance.

  Since she and Rufus were the only two people who had access, she immediately called the Big Sur detectives who had notified her about her husband’s supposed accident, to let them know that her husband was alive, a thief, and on the run. She demanded that they expand their search to find him. She wanted to press charges. She wanted to sue him. She even called her divorce attorney friend to prepare for battle, no matter the cost.

  The Big Sur Police Department notified the FBI, and when the FBI got a face recognition match and learned that Rufus Wall had used the identity of Benjamin Carver and married murder suspect Stella Godeaux, they turned up the heat.

  —

  Brooke had promised Rufus that she would monitor the situation until he was safely relocated. She turned on her Security Camera app and selected the Dancing Rabbit statue inside the Walls’ home and saw quite a scene:

  —

  FBI agents Matz and Shu ran inside the house waving their credentials, their voices overlapping, “Federal agents…” “The cavalry has arrived…” “Shut up, Shu! Collect intel… Do your job.”

  Sarah entered the living room sobbing.

  Matz approached her. “Sarah Wall?”

  Sarah sniffled.

  “I’m Agent Matz, FBI. Okay if we sit over here?”