The House of Secrets

by Brad Meltzer

  “Who’s they?” Skip asked. “Who’s the mysterious they that always knows everything?”

  “Historians,” Hazel said. “Go on.”

  “Then Alexander Hamilton shows up,” Rabkin said, “and delivers a handwritten letter from Benedict Arnold to George Washington. In it, Benedict asks his old friend for three things: 1) He wants Washington to protect Arnold’s wife Peggy Shippen, who everyone in the country wants to see with a noose around her neck. 2) He said that all of Washington’s aides are innocent and had nothing to do with Arnold’s treason, so please let them live. And 3) In one of the oddest requests a person could make in such a moment, Benedict Arnold asks that his clothes and baggage be sent to him.”

  “What’s so important about his baggage?” Skip asked.

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?” Rabkin said. “Benedict Arnold has just put a knife in the back of his best friend, become one of the most hated men since Judas, has basically abandoned his life, and his wife is in danger of being murdered—and what does he ask for? He wants his luggage. He says he’ll even pay for the freight, if need be.”

  “If I were George Washington,” Skip said, “I would’ve lit it all on fire. Burned it like it was Atlanta.”

  “Wrong war,” Hazel said. Not that it mattered. If there was one constant in history, it was that the victors torched property, salted the earth, destroyed all the old idols. No sense warehousing the past when you could obliterate it entirely. Which made this all the more curious.

  “Most people would’ve taken revenge,” Rabkin agreed. “But for some reason, Washington obliges. It’s a moment no one can explain. Washington hates this man. He spends the rest of the war hunting him and calling for his death. So why in God’s name does he send Benedict Arnold a final care package?” He looked at Hazel.

  “You want my opinion?” Hazel asked.

  “I want your theory.”

  “People in traumatic situations,” she said, well aware of the irony, “are unreliable. Washington acted one way when he was feeling emotional, another way when he was feeling pragmatic. It’s called being human.”

  “That’s a theory.”

  “It’s more like my life right now.”

  “Or maybe George Washington was a class act,” Skip said, “and all that was in the luggage were clothes and belt-buckled shoes.”

  “That’s another theory. And some say that’s exactly what was in there. A bunch of clothes, undergarments, and a few tins of wig powder. Others say it was a stack of old letters and books, since Benedict got his start as a bookseller. But another theory that’s persisted for years is that among those books was a very special volume. Benedict Arnold’s personal—”

  “Bible,” Skip said, glancing over at Hazel, who was trying her best to be unreadable. Because she couldn’t believe anything she was hearing. Couldn’t fathom how she’d woken up from a coma to find herself in this life. She tried to imagine her father spending time at this job. Tried to imagine the choices he’d made, him searching for this bible. Tried to remember any hint of this secret life, or her new fear. Her real fear. That she was a part of this life too.

  “There’s also this,” Rabkin added. “During the Revolutionary War, George Washington used to use old books to send coded messages. Paper was hard to get and very expensive back then, so they’d write on the interior pages of any book they could get ahold of, including bibles.”

  “And that’s true?” Skip asked.

  “They’d take them off the dead redcoats if they had to,” Rabkin said. “It was war.”

  “So now we’re supposed to believe that when Washington handed over Benedict’s belongings, he was actually sending a hidden message?” Skip asked. “You’re starting to sound like an old House of Secrets episode, and not one of our good ones.”

  “That’s not the only thing bibles were used for,” Hazel said, feeling something click into place, like she was in the classroom, piecing together some bit of history. It was a brand-new sensation, but also one that felt…comfortable. Felt right, which was a sensation she’d been missing for two days. She walked over to the rolling side table next to her bed, opened the top drawer, pulled out a faux-leather bible with the name of the hospital—UCLA Medical Center—embossed on the cover.

  She flipped it open to the back pages, which were lined for notes but were empty. “Back in the 1700s, if you’re living out in the country, there was no local library. So the Bible might be the only book you had, right? Instead of just using it for its intended purpose, people also used them as both diary and ledger. They’d keep birth dates, marriage dates, business deals, whatever.” All the blessed events, she thought. “If you go back through history, that’s where people recorded everything they wanted to record, because it was the one possession they’d always take with them. People kept their histories in their bibles.” She closed the hospital bible, put it back in the drawer. “For better or worse.”

  “Do you believe that, Hazel?” Skip said.

  “It’s not about believing,” she said. “It’s what people did. It’s what people do.”

  “Listen to your sister,” Rabkin said. “According to a number of historians, the secret in Benedict Arnold’s bible was that he had an illegitimate son he was trying to protect. An even crazier theory says it wasn’t Benedict’s illegitimate kid—in fact, what they were really hiding was an illegitimate child sired by George Washington himself.”

  “What historians?” Hazel asked.

  “Government historians,” Rabkin said carefully. Patently not ignoring her, Hazel noticed.

  “We did two House of Secrets episodes on Washington’s secret-kid thing. I didn’t believe it then,” Skip said, “and I’m having a hard time believing it now.”

  “Do you believe this, which came from a team of professors who studied Benedict’s later life: What if Benedict Arnold’s greatest secret was that he never switched sides? What if his so-called ‘traitorous acts’ were actually planned by Washington, making Benedict the ultimate triple agent, infiltrating the British and always reporting back to us? Imagine that,” Rabkin said.

  He stared at Hazel for a few seconds, not speaking. She wondered what had prepared Rabkin for this job, what had made him memorize these facts. She’d spent her own life inside ancient texts. Agent Rabkin looked like he’d spent his life contemplating how to shoot people. Except…his hands. He had the smoothest hands. And then there was that tan line where his ring should be. Someone had loved this man. He’d picked out vows to say. He’d gone on a honeymoon. Maybe he was divorced, maybe his wife was dead, but at some point, someone was worried about this man.

  “Everyone thinks Benedict Arnold is the bad guy,” Rabkin said, “but maybe he’s the hero of the story.”

  Hazel sat with that. On her left, she noticed the photo of her and her dad at the Dodgers game.

  “I still don’t understand what this has to do with my father,” Hazel said.

  “That’s because you haven’t seen the body,” Agent Rabkin said. From his suit pocket, he pulled out an envelope with a photo and slid it onto the table.

  8

  The Bear lands in Dubai, that shithole, then sits on the tarmac for two hours.

  The pilot says something about a backup at the gate, and it will be just a few more minutes, then the flight attendants start coming down the aisle with the drink cart. It’s the United Arab Emirates, so The Bear figures the airport is like a police state anyway.

  The Bear gets it.

  No problem.

  Security first. Besides, he emailed in a tip hours earlier, on the layover in Frankfurt, saying that a flight coming in forty minutes before them had a passenger presenting with some Ebola-like symptoms, which would take the attention of the Americans who were here too.

  “You’d think they’d know that we all have somewhere to be,” the man sitting next to The Bear says. His name is Arthur Kennedy. He has about five hours to live, by The Bear’s estimation. He’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt, t
an shorts, and sandals with socks, which The Bear thinks is a good look on precisely nobody, but particularly not on this fellow, with his strangely hairless legs. It’s a plane filled with tourists from all over the world. The closer they got to Dubai, the drunker the passengers got. Back in economy, it’s like a dance floor in Ibiza.

  “Where do you need to be?” The Bear asks, though he knows the answer.

  “Boulos Al Qasr,” Kennedy says, referring to a posh hotel that actually translates as The Palace.

  How original, The Bear thinks. As original as the name Arthur Kennedy. Or Darren Nixon. Was that really the best they could do? Dead Presidents?

  The Bear is not the sort who speaks to people on planes. He used to buy out the entire row when he flew. But all of the new regulations have made things more difficult, so The Bear has practiced restraint recently. But this is work, so he’s been talking to Arthur Kennedy, with his rum-and-Coke breath, off and on for hours now, letting Kennedy nap, which gave The Bear time to spike his cocktail with a dash of Lotrum, a drug you can only get in Russia these days, primarily for use in controlling behavior in animals.

  In humans, as Kennedy will soon learn when he gets off the plane and tries to walk for more than a few meters, it causes profound muscle weakness. He’ll look drunk. In fact, his respiratory system will be failing. And then, two hours from now, The Bear will dispose of this man.

  “That’s where I’m staying,” The Bear says.

  “You ever been?”

  “First time,” The Bear says.

  “It’s supposed to really be something,” Kennedy says. “It’s not like one of those new glossy places on the Palm, where you could be anywhere, right?” He shakes his head. “No, it’s the full Arabian experience. They tried to make it an honest re-creation of what it would have looked like a hundred and fifty years ago to be in a castle, but with a spa and steak house and golf course.” He shakes his head again. “Not a lot of respect for history anymore.”

  “Then why are you staying there?”

  “Irony,” Kennedy says, laughing at his own joke.

  Arthur Kennedy is a loose end. A mistake from another decade. The Bear shouldn’t have to take care of this problem, but Jack Nash’s death—and what happened to Darren Nixon—has turned on a few too many lights, shaken cages, aroused the sleeping animals. The Bear will feed them, get them to go back to sleep. Then he can deal with Hazel.

  Arthur Kennedy hasn’t lived a life deserving of his fate. But few do. He looks out the window. “So typical. The FAA. The TSA.” Kennedy shakes his head again, slower this time, a string of saliva slipping from his mouth. “It’s like they forget the T stands for transportation, right?”

  The Bear opts not to tell Arthur he’s not in America anymore. Instead, he says, “If you had taken this trip a hundred and fifty years ago, the authentic experience would be that you arrived nearly dead from scurvy. If you arrived at all.”

  The Bear checks his phone. It’s two in the afternoon. As planned. He scrolls through social media, looking for mention of the Ebola flight. It’s nowhere.

  Disappointing but predictable.

  Real problems—even when they weren’t real—tended to take more time to really gain traction. Unlike Hazel and Skip Nash, for instance. A picture of Hazel walking the hallway with her brother, dressed in her hospital gown and shorts, had gone from an Instagram account belonging to @cotslipping to the front of Reddit in just over twenty-four hours. Now, her hospital gown had its own Twitter account with four thousand followers.

  It takes so little these days, The Bear thinks, to divert attention.

  “I have a car coming,” The Bear adds, “if you need a ride to the hotel.”

  “Yeah? You wouldn’t mind?” Kennedy asks.

  “It would be my pleasure,” The Bear says, meaning every word.

  “Tell you the truth?” Kennedy leans toward The Bear, as if he has any choice: The Lotrum soon will render him functionally unable to lie. “I’ve actually got a date. Sounds crazy, right? Guy like me? I mean, take a look at me. Pushing fifty, could probably lose fifteen pounds, and here I am, flying to another country to meet a girl. I know I’m not some supermodel. The Internet is the great equalizer, right? Met her a week ago, and now here I am. Just a real estate guy from Connecticut chasing love in the United Arab Emirates. Isn’t that a thing? Crazy.”

  The Bear feels the slightest pang of guilt. There was no girl. There was just The Bear at a keyboard, writing to Arthur Kennedy for the past week. Through their emails back and forth, Kennedy revealed himself to be a rather romantic man. But he was also a loose talker on all topics, and that simply would not do. The climate had changed.

  If it had been solely up to The Bear, he would have handled this quietly, in Kennedy’s home in New Haven. But decisions were being made outside of his realm. And that was too bad.

  An example needed to be made.

  9

  Hazel had seen plenty of dead bodies before. The first was in college—a girl who lived down the hall from her in the dorms hung herself. Jumped out of her dorm room window with a rope tied around her neck on one end, her bunk bed on the other. She hung there for an hour while firefighters were called to cut down her door. Hazel didn’t know the girl at all. Is that why she remembered her now?

  Then a body in a river in Egypt. Another stranger.

  And then all the pictures of bodies she’d studied while trying to figure out the balance of cultures, why people killed each other, as important to her studies as why people loved, a fact that she imagines now must have been disillusioning. But there they were in her mind, a bibliography of bodies, civilization’s worst.

  She knew there were other dead bodies. Her mother for one, but Hazel had no mental picture. There had to be others. The dead who Hazel cared about, all of them now lost.

  This had to be the first dead body she’d ever seen in a mini-golf playground, however. It lay facedown between a six-foot-tall water geyser shaped like a star and another, inexplicably shaped like a smiling purple and gold pig. It was a particularly unsettling sight. Which was probably the point. Suffocation turns a body ugly.

  Except Hazel, to her own surprise, wasn’t unsettled. Skip, on the other hand, jumped back from the table like he’d been shocked. “Jesus,” he said. “A spoiler alert would’ve been nice.”

  “That’s Darren Nixon,” Agent Rabkin said. “Thirty-six years old. Quiet life. No wife. No kids. Worked in Spokane at a chemical plant as a maintenance engineer for a time. Bounced at a pub on the weekends. According to his Netflix queue, he loved your dad’s show. Then, for some reason, your father made a personal visit to him the week before your accident. Either of you know anything about that?”

  “I never even heard of Darren Nixon until you asked me last week,” Skip said.

  Rabkin looked at Hazel, who closed her eyes, trying to think. Nothing. Always nothing. “When do they think he was killed?” she asked.

  “Hard to pinpoint because of the freezing,” Agent Rabkin said. “Best guess is about two weeks ago. Around the time your father went on that trip.”

  “That doesn’t mean my dad did anything. I could’ve killed him too,” Hazel said, trying to take pressure off her father, but quickly realizing she was moving in the wrong direction.

  “Hazel, don’t say that,” Skip snapped.

  Hazel was staring at the photo, trying to make sense of it. The man was facedown in maybe two inches of water. He had on a scarlet military jacket with four brass buttons and gold cuffs. Like something from the 1700s.

  “The jacket looks familiar,” Skip said.

  “It should,” Rabkin said, pumping his bushy eyebrows, which could use a little manscaping. That’s what happened when your wife was gone. “I just found out this morning, that jacket belonged to your father. It’s supposedly Benedict Arnold’s coat from Fort Ticonderoga. I assume you knew he had something like that.”

  There it was, Hazel thought. The real reason Rabkin suddenly showed up. That wa
s the trap he’d been setting, and Skip walked right into it, an occurrence, she imagined, that wasn’t a rarity.

  Skip took the photo from Hazel. He looked at it for a few seconds, set it down, then shook his head, like he was trying to clear the image. “If you say so,” he said.

  “Take another look. It’s important. You’re not in trouble if you recognize your dad’s jacket. But if it’s not his, we need to know.”

  Hazel put her hand over Nixon’s head, so Skip wouldn’t have to see Nixon’s tongue lolling out of the side of his mouth. “I guess it looks like his,” Skip said. “Someone gave it to Dad. It was probably a fake, like that huge statue of Anubis—the Egyptian god who guides souls to the afterlife—that he has in his living room.” People gave Skip and his father all kinds of crazy things over the years. The nail that held Christ to the cross. The Sword of Damocles. Amelia Earhart’s flying gloves. Impossibilities, Jack called them. “There’s a thousand of those jackets out there, and all of them belonged to Benedict Arnold, you know? Dad got it years ago. Just one of those things.”

  “You know what it reminded me of, Skip?” Rabkin asked. “When you got caught selling one of your dad’s old Civil War swords. You remember that?”

  “That was a misunderstanding,” Skip said, more to Hazel than to Rabkin. Like maybe she didn’t know the truth. And she didn’t.

  “You told the buyer it was from Gettysburg,” Rabkin said, “that it belonged to General Lewis Armistead. That’s in the court records, Skip. Are you saying the court records have been falsified?”

  “I’m saying,” Skip said, “that I was in a bad place.”

  “Did the rehab help?”

  “I haven’t gone back, have I?”

  Hazel was wrong. This was the actual trap. And for the second time, Skip had his leg in it. The FBI wasn’t just here for information; this was an interrogation.