The House of Secrets

by Brad Meltzer

  Her cell phone began to ring. She looked at the number. Agent Rabkin. She should answer the call, find out if he had anything new…except all she heard in her mind was: Run. Don’t look back.

  She turned off her phone. There was a reason she came home. The memory she didn’t share with Skip. The memory of what she’d hidden here.

  Hazel opened her closet door. Hanging shirts, T-shirts, long-sleeve T-shirts, all arranged precisely by color, starting with white, ending with black. The labels indicated she’d spent a lot of her free time inside J.Crew. On the bottom, she had her pants and shorts, ordered by season, also by color. There was a chest of drawers in the closet too, an antique highboy, the kind you lug to every place you ever live. It was a classic. Indestructible.

  She pulled open the drawers.

  Socks.

  Underwear.

  Pajamas.

  Sweatpants.

  And then, in the bottom drawer, arranged neatly, just like everything else, were her guns.

  21

  Hazel tore up her apartment looking for a concealed-carry permit. She didn’t remember one, which worried her even more. Cold facts—like the facts from her anthropology research—wasn’t that something she should recall? But, as she was learning, when it came to the “facts” of her personal life, from the pictures on her wall to the clothes in her closet, once something entered the so-called “emotional” part of her brain and became part of the intimacies of her life, all the details became jumbled.

  Pulling open drawers, she found loads of other stuff—an old PalmPilot, birth control pills, a vibrator, even her passport—but she still couldn’t find the permit.

  Wouldn’t she at least remember the bureaucratic parts of the process? Getting background checked? Learning if the state thought she had high enough moral character?

  Maybe she didn’t have any moral character.

  Maybe that’s why there was no permit.

  Maybe that’s why, with each episode of The House of Secrets that she watched over the past few days, she found herself rooting for the myth not to be figured out conclusively.

  Rooting for the bad guy.

  Rooting for whatever was hidden to stay that way.

  It made her think of Johannesburg.

  It was a doomsday episode, where Dad came back, as he always did, and where the world didn’t end, because it never did. She’d watched it last night with Skip, who told her that when Dad finished filming there, his heart stopped working for the first time, but not the last time. Now, something told her to put it on again.

  Hazel opened her computer, found the episode on YouTube. Like last night, her dad looked sick. Worn down. Dilapidated.

  She stared at her father’s face, his skin. Pale, even with makeup on. The whites of his eyes, the sclera, almost cream in color. Infection. Maybe jaundice. Hard to tell. Hands, trembling.

  Where had she been when he’d fallen ill?

  Drifting.

  Her passport said Lebanon. Then Ireland. Then Iran. All in a month’s time.

  As she studied the screen, Hazel’s eyes slid toward the right-hand column. The videos “Up next.”

  The House of Secrets—Moscow (1985). Two million views.

  The House of Secrets—Kabul (2002). Four and a half million views.

  The House of Secrets—Iran (1980). Seven million views.

  Hnh.

  She remembered that episode. She’d watched the Iran one a few days ago, where he talked about a Bakhtak, a creature in Persian legend that sat on your chest while you slept, turning dreams into nightmares. But now…

  She reached for her passport. There was a stamp for Kabul in there too.

  And Moscow. All in the same month.

  What had she been doing there? Lebanon, she remembered, interviewing bombing survivors. Kabul was to study war and its survivors. But Iran? She stared at her passport, details coming back. The secret dance clubs of Tehran, DJs spinning into the morning, the taste of her own sweat, the burn in her eyes, the sense of doing the wrong thing, in the wrong place, with the wrong people.

  Her dad had been to all of those places too, over the years. On YouTube, she looked at the date of the Iran episode. 1980. Americans still being held hostage, Carter still in office, Hazel only a year old, and he’d gone to Iran?

  She clicked on the episode. There was her dad, younger than Hazel now, meeting with people cloaked in shadows, telling Bakhtak stories. Then these men—they were always men—walked with him through shaded courtyards, Jack absently pulling dates off trees, shining them on his shirt, small children running at his feet, kicking a soccer ball.

  That image repeated.

  Every episode, at some point, small children encircled Jack, playing, laughing, shouting, acting like kids.

  Walking through the streets of Belfast in 1984.

  Moscow in 1985.

  Beirut in 1999.

  Kabul in 2002. Didn’t matter. Jack would get on one knee, whisper something in a child’s ear, muss up their hair, and then they’d run off squealing in delight.

  At the height of the show, he was so famous, adults and small children in countries that vilified the United States, like Russia and China, still loved him—because he was the guy who could say uncomfortable things about America. How many times had he done an episode about corrupt Presidents? Or given credence to things like secret wars, or the CIA using acid trips for mind control? Jack Nash was the guy who pulled the veil back. It didn’t matter where you lived, there was always a veil. So he could travel the world with impunity.

  And wasn’t that ironic.

  What had Hazel been doing all these years? Traveling the world with impunity too, going to those same places. Places normal people didn’t visit. And for some reason, she knew those visits weren’t with her dad.

  Hazel felt a pressure on her chest, like a Bakhtak, she imagined. For the past two days, she’d been focused on Agent Rabkin’s revelations, that her father had been working for the government. Like he was some sort of spy. But now, eyeing her passport and feeling her stomach twist, Hazel had to wonder: the guns, the poisons, even her continental drift…Was her dad the only one working for the government, or was she working for them too? Even worse: If this had something to do with Darren Nixon’s criminal past, if Nixon was threatening her father or even Skip, would Hazel hold back? Would anyone hold back to protect their family? Or to put it another way, when someone forced Darren Nixon’s face into the water, drowning him, was she the one watching his body twist in his fake Revolutionary War jacket?

  She shook her head. She was a professor and researcher, but she wasn’t a murderer. She was just a woman who’d made some bad choices. Wasn’t she?

  Her passport was open, shaking in her hands. All those places—Iran, Moscow, Kabul. And again that thought: Places normal people didn’t visit.

  She had no memory of being afraid there, wondered if werewolves ever feared anything. Silver bullets were pretty rare these days.

  And then there it was.

  Some clarity.

  Where had she gone? Eventually, everywhere Jack had been.

  What had she been doing? Researching the cultures of death? Reasoning with the end? No. Something worse.

  A cold sweat gripped her ribs, working up toward her neck. Hazel headed into her bedroom, stripped out of her clothes, crawled into bed nude. Her body slid into a perfect notch in her mattress, the sheets felt just right pulled up under her chin, her pillow cradling her head exactly.

  She closed her eyes, hearing her dad’s voice still talking onscreen in the next room.

  Could she see herself interviewing people in a thatched hut or a war zone somewhere?

  Could she see herself sitting up late, drinking coffee, typing, reporting her findings?

  Could she see herself in this apartment?

  She couldn’t.

  She knew those things were true, but they were gone.

  Could she imagine herself holding a gun, maybe that sleek silver SIG S
auer, the one with the grip so smooth that when she hefted it up an hour ago, it felt like her own skin?

  Could she imagine herself sliding the clip in, hearing the satisfying click, lowering it down by her leg, moving around a corner?

  Could she imagine herself firing it to protect her father?

  She could.

  22

  FBI Building

  Los Angeles

  There’s not enough here, Rabbit thought. He was staring at his computer, clicking through the tabs of various government databases. This is what investigation amounted to these days. Clicking. He wondered if more of his colleagues were sidelined by being shot at or by carpal tunnel.

  In the bottom left of the screen, he’d minimized the gruesome photo of this newest victim, also inexplicably dressed in another Revolutionary War coat: Arthur Kennedy, found dead in Dubai with a bright scar on his chest. The Dubai medical examiner hadn’t yet opened his chest, was waiting for someone to claim the body. If there was no next of kin, then who cared? Put it in a potter’s field, save everyone a night’s work.

  Did that make sense to Rabbit? Of course not. People dressed like that don’t just drop dead with no one noticing. If no one noticed, it’s because at the time of death, no one was supposed to notice.

  And c’mon. The name. Kennedy. First Nixon, now Kennedy? That defied all logic and had Rabbit thinking that one, if not both, of those names might be fake.

  But the thing that kept coming back to Rabbit was that at forty-six, Kennedy wasn’t just an orphan—that was normal, parents die—but he had nobody. Not a cousin. Not a second cousin. Not someone who’d married into some corner of the family. No one. Didn’t even have a will on file, which, okay, that happens. Still, Kennedy should have friends. At least on the Internet.

  Rabbit again started clicking, started looking.

  No Facebook.

  No Twitter.

  Rabbit again thinking, There’s not enough here. Something’s missing.

  Parents. That’s what was missing. Rabbit clicked back to the case file, looking for Arthur Kennedy’s birth certificate. It wasn’t there. He had a Social Security number, so at some point, he had a birth certificate. Unless Arthur Kennedy was a fake name. Still, there’d be a record someplace, some piece of paper that helped him get through school and live on a day-to-day basis.

  Agents in New Haven should have pulled his passport application. No doubt, it was a low rung being assigned to the New Haven office. Probably the only thing of note they did was spy on students at Yale, try to infiltrate Skull and Bones, realize they didn’t want to piss off someone who might be President one day.

  Back to Kennedy.

  No arrests.

  Not on any obvious government watch lists.

  No taxes due.

  First-class airfare purchased using a credit card, not trying to hide. Reserved a room at the Al Qasr, paid up front, never checked in to his hotel. But his body wasn’t found for two days. That didn’t make sense.

  Where had he been?

  What had he been doing?

  There were many ways to find an answer. But as was his preference, Rabbit chose the most direct route. He picked up his phone, dialing a now-familiar number.

  No one picked up until the third ring.

  “What?” Skip asked. “What’d I do now?”

  23

  San Francisco

  Hazel woke up the next morning, showered, put on fresh clothes, swallowed a handful of medications, then walked six blocks to a convenience store, bought a disposable cell phone, and called Skip.

  Tried to, anyway.

  He didn’t pick up. Which wasn’t a problem, since all she had to do to find him was look online. Not even 10 a.m. and already, according to Twitter, Skip was at a Jamba Juice in the Valley. He even retweeted a photo from there, drink in hand, a girl on one side of him making that stupid duck face. Things were beginning to clarify for Hazel. One thing she was certain of: Skip needed to keep photos of himself off the Internet.

  From there, Hazel walked down 20th, found a bench inside Dolores Park. It was a sunny day, kids were playing on the slope of grass, rolling, rolling, getting up, running up the hill, rolling again. There was a playground at the bottom of the hill with a little putting green. Hazel thought about what it must have been like to be Darren Nixon, drowning in the middle of a park three thousand miles from home. What was the last thing he saw? His killer walking away? A blade of grass in the distance? From her vantage point, Hazel could see downtown San Francisco, the fog burned off, nothing but glittering metal and stone in the distance, but Hazel focused on what she could really see. What was true. What was no longer conjecture in her mind.

  She closed her eyes, tried to feel the place, tried to imagine herself here before, and there she is. Could see herself sitting on a bench, could see herself at sunset, with a man and his dog.

  Butchie.

  Could remember telling him a fact she’d learned. A small bit of anthropological significance in the space where kids jumped in a rented bounce house that night, had a picnic, a birthday party.

  “This place,” she’s saying to Butchie—and there’s his dog, off the leash, running, Butchie clapping, the dog running back, standing right by his side—“used to be a cemetery.”

  “What?” Butchie says back. “You gotta be shitting me. Like Poltergeist?”

  “No,” Hazel says, “they moved the bodies. It was a Jewish cemetery. This land became too valuable, so they just dug them all up and moved them to Colma.”

  “I don’t even know where that is.”

  “Across the bay,” Hazel says. “It’s where they moved all the dead when they eventually decided there shouldn’t be any cemeteries in the city.”

  “That’s some dark shit,” Butchie was telling her, and yeah, she thought now, it’s what happened. Sometimes, the dead got moved, paved over, and forgotten.

  24

  Where are you?” Skip asked through Hazel’s new phone. He sounded frazzled, the opposite of the photo she’d seen of him minutes earlier, when it looked like he was having the time of his life at Jamba Juice. “I’ve been trying you all night!”

  “I pulled the cord from the wall. So I could sleep,” Hazel explained.

  “So you’re in San Francisco? You arrived okay?”

  Hazel didn’t say anything.

  “Hazel, are you being held at gunpoint?”

  “No,” she said. “I just…I don’t feel safe saying where I am.”

  “You need to contact Agent Rabkin.”

  “I don’t feel safe doing that either,” Hazel said. Two kids came running past, a boy and a girl, six, maybe seven years old, their candy bars melting in their hands. There was grass in their hair, and Hazel thought, They look like summer. “I found guns in my apartment, Skip. A lot of them.”

  “That’s not something I need to know about, Haze.”

  “What if I’m the one who killed him?” Hazel asked.

  “Who? Dad? I don’t care what they say, Dad had a heart attack.”

  “I’m talking about the man wearing Dad’s redcoat jacket. Darren Nixon. Do you think I might have killed him?”

  “They checked your records. You haven’t been in Canada,” Skip said.

  “Maybe I helped plan it then.” She told him about the book of poisons, about her passport, about her memories. “It’s like I major in death, Skip. There’s something not lining up.”

  “You had nothing to do with it,” Skip said. “Remember what Dr. Morrison said? These days will be hard. Not everything is going to make sense.”

  “That’s not helpful. How do you know what I don’t know?”

  “Because I knew him, okay?”

  “Knew who?”

  “Darren Nixon. The man they found dead. I met him.”

  “What’re you talking about?” Hazel asked.

  “I spoke to him once or twice. He was a crank. So if Nixon had contacted you at some point, believe me, I’d know. He would have sent me a
hundred emails about it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell Agent Rabkin this?”

  “Are you planning on telling Agent Rabkin about your specialty in poisons?”

  Hazel was silent.

  “Exactly,” Skip said.

  “So now you spend time with criminals? Tell me how you knew him,” Hazel demanded.

  “I met him at a convention. In Long Beach, I think. It was around a year ago. He was a huge fan of Dad’s. I got to know him a little bit. Few drinks. I didn’t know he was a convict. I thought he was a normal person.”

  “I thought you said you talked to him once or twice.”

  “It wasn’t a big deal. He wanted to buy some mementos from the show. Then he asked me about Benedict Arnold’s bible.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t even know what it was. It gave me something to talk to Dad about. Then it got weird, and I cut it off. End of story, until the FBI entered our lives.”

  “Back up. Weird how?”

  “Nixon started sending me letters,” Skip explained. “The usual kooky conspiracy crap. Multinational governments chasing Benedict Arnold’s bible, using it as some talisman. He had charts and graphs going back to the 1800s, crazy stories about the KGB and the Cubans in the eighties, then Al-Qaeda and 9/11 in the 2000s. You know, whatever people were scared of, that’s what he got obsessed with. Dad had that Revolutionary jacket he wanted to get rid of, maybe I told him about it. It was dumb—you know, don’t poke a bear—but I just thought, maybe that’ll get rid of him.”

  “Were you ever going to tell Agent Rabkin this?”

  “You really think he doesn’t know? He’s like Dad on the show. The only questions he asked were the ones where he knew the answers.”

  Hazel tried to arrange it all in her mind. “If everything you say about Darren Nixon is true, that he was a crackpot and everything he believed in was bullshit, why did someone kill him and stick a bible in his chest?”

  “I don’t know, Hazel. Why do you have guns in your house?”