The House of Secrets

by Brad Meltzer

  Even now, sitting at a red light on 10th Street in Washington, DC, Rabbit was still picturing the note—his wife’s block handwriting laced with hidden rage.

  Rabbit was headed downtown, to an address Moten had given him, though Rabbit knew it by heart: 935 Pennsylvania Avenue. Headquarters of the FBI. They’d give Rabbit a new ID and a plane ticket on United Airlines, leaving for Dubai in just a few hours.

  Three weeks ago, when Moten came to him after Jack’s accident, Rabbit saw it for exactly what it was. An opportunity. A chance to actually fight the bad guys, to put some good in the world. He’d lost so much—his job, his wife, his daughter—this was his chance to write a good chapter for once, to rebalance the scales and prove he could be that person, that amazing person he used to be but somehow lost sight of.

  A person of potential.

  Like the great Jack Nash.

  Of course, as Rabbit scratched at the shiny veneer, he quickly found out, yet again, that something he loved—Jack and his House of Secrets—was just another lie.

  But the more Rabbit scratched, the more he realized that it wasn’t just Jack Nash who was a mess. Rabbit was thirty years old, and the majority of his days were spent attempting to stop nightmares from happening, and where had it gotten him? Alone in the world, not a single damn friend, a wife who still wouldn’t speak to him, a daughter who still didn’t know him, and the one person he’d had a decent conversation with in the last six months was Hazel Nash.

  Slowly, a few of Hazel’s memories had come back. If she eventually found out what else was in her head—tomorrow, next month, fifteen years from now—maybe he’d end up needing to stop her from making some nightmares too. If what Rabbit had seen in her file was just a quarter of her real life, what would happen when the other 75 percent came back to her?

  Or came looking for her?

  From here on out, it wasn’t Rabbit’s problem. Now his job was to follow orders. Get on the plane. Find Skip. Close the loop and keep things quiet.

  But as Rabbit made a left onto Pennsylvania Avenue, circling past the concrete, bureaucratic hulk of a building that was home to the FBI, he couldn’t help but notice another building, diagonally across the street, where massive Corinthian columns were draped with gold and blue banners.

  Rabbit should’ve headed for the parking spot that was waiting for him at the FBI. Instead, he drew up to the curb and lingered on Pennsylvania, squinting at the banners.

  Making Their Mark: Stories Through Famous Signatures

  Underneath was the massive signature of John Hancock, as well the building’s ID.

  The National Archives

  Rabbit stared at the building and took a deep breath through his nose.

  Then this thought. Go to the airport; get on the plane.

  Then: It’s not that he didn’t trust Moten…he just didn’t know if he trusted whoever worked above him.

  Yet for a man who’d spent his entire adult life in intelligence, Rabbit couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d never known what it felt like to truly be fooled.

  Ten minutes later, he was in the lobby of the National Archives, approaching the sign-in desk.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” a female guard said. “We’re not open to the public until ten a.m.”

  “I have an appointment,” Rabbit said, flashing his badge. “Now who do I talk to about Benedict Arnold books in your collection?”

  66

  Hartford, Connecticut

  The Bear parks his rental car—a Buick LaCrosse, because no one notices someone who drives a Buick LaCrosse—next to Ingrid Ludlow’s driveway, and waits to see if a light goes on, if a shutter opens, if a dog barks.

  Nothing.

  He calls Ingrid’s telephone. It rings and rings. No voicemail. No answering machine.

  She lives in an old neighborhood in Hartford, one of those filled with cottages built in the 1800s that sit right next to teardowns with elderly owners waiting to die. The area might be called charming, but The Bear thinks it’s probably infested with rats.

  He walks up to the front door, rings the doorbell, waits. He presses his palm against the center of the door, feels it give. He thinks: Termites.

  A threat to structural stability, surely, but it was not as bad as once having an order for your head from the KGB, or a death warrant issued against you by the IRA, or the half-dozen fatwas that chased her across the Middle East and North Africa. There was a time when Ingrid Ludlow would be worth a mint dead. Now? Old wounds tended to heal when you stopped picking at them. Not even the termites seemed to be in a rush.

  The Bear steps back around the side of the house, takes a photo over her fence with his phone, sees if there’s an attack dog, finds instead that Ingrid is growing tobacco and marijuana, just a few stocks of each, right there in view.

  Pushing seventy years old. Doing what she wanted. Wasn’t that nice.

  She’s earned it, The Bear supposes. All those years devoted to Jack Nash. She was a researcher and historian. Compulsive. A fine team put together by the government. Practical and accurate. The Bear doesn’t think there are many other academics running around the world with as much blood on their hands as Ingrid Ludlow.

  Well, maybe one.

  The problem with Ingrid, The Bear thinks now, is that technology erased the need for her skill sets, or at least made them both functionally less important. A Google search eliminated hours in a library. And a drone strike from thousands of miles away was much more effective these days than an American with a knife.

  So here was Ingrid today.

  “Can I help you?” a man calls out, getting out of a Subaru wagon across the street. He’s in his thirties, with messy hair in the style of scientists and people in bands. The Bear sees that he has a tattoo on his calf. It looks to be the Chinese symbol for patience. The Bear wonders: Why doesn’t he simply have the English word patience tattooed there instead?

  “Just doing a welfare check,” The Bear says. “Have you seen Ms. Ludlow lately?”

  “I think she’s away,” a woman says, getting out of the car, popping the trunk, unloading bags from Whole Foods. She shares a look with the man. “For a bit.”

  “Do you know where?” The Bear asks. He takes an awkward step into the middle of the street, hunches his shoulders, tries to look smaller, less threatening, opens his hands, palms out. Tries to become the kind of man who does welfare checks.

  The couple share another look. “She’s in the hospital,” the man says.

  “Oh, no,” The Bear says. “Did she fall?”

  Another look. “Just a checkup, I think,” the woman says. “Are you from the city?”

  “Yes. I’m her physical therapist. From when she took that fall last year,” The Bear says, using a key piece of information from Ingrid’s insurance file. Both strangers now smile, everyone at ease. The woman is also in her thirties. She’s wearing a tank top and yoga pants. She has the same tattoo as the man, though hers is on her bicep. The Bear wonders if the tattoos are messages to each other or to the rest of the world. Patience. A noble pursuit. Though if you needed to remind yourself of it so often that you ended up putting it on your flesh, it was likely a failed pursuit.

  “She’s up at the Institute of Living. On Barry Square?”

  “Oh,” The Bear says. A psychiatric hospital. “Permanently?”

  “No,” the woman says, “she said it was just for an oil change.”

  “Tell him what she really said,” the man says. “It’s hilarious.”

  “She says she likes the food.” The woman laughs, so does the man, so does The Bear, or at least pretends to.

  As the two of them go into their own house, The Bear goes back to Ingrid’s front porch, puts on a glove, pulls out one of the straws Skip chewed on—then drops it through the mail slot.

  “The Institute of Living,” The Bear repeats, looking it up on his phone. It couldn’t be that far from here.

  67

  National Archives

  Washington, DC<
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  You must be the Benedict Arnold fan,” the archivist whispered.

  “I’m not sure fan is the right word,” Rabbit said, standing from his seat at a long wooden table and offering a handshake. They were in the second-floor reading room, which felt like the 1750s, what with the banker’s desk lamps, ornate chandeliers, and the eerie quiet. Libraries were the one place people still kept alive the monastic virtue of silence.

  “Don’t be ashamed,” the archivist whispered, laughing a quiet laugh. His name was Beecher White, an archivist who specialized in “Old Military.” He had short cropped hair and looked like he had a black eye, though Rabbit imagined archivists didn’t get into too many fistfights. “When it comes right down to it, we’re all fans, aren’t we?” Beecher asked.

  Rabbit nodded, noticing the archival box he was holding. It was the size of a ream of paper, but he carried it like he was carrying the crown jewels.

  “I just told them I was looking for something interesting,” Rabbit said.

  Beecher leaned in closer. “Everyone here, they want the dark, mysterious Benedict Arnold. Me? Personally? I like looking at people’s stuff.”

  “I do too,” Rabbit said.

  “Beautiful. Wonderful.” Beecher opened the box. “Then I think you’ll like this one.”

  68

  Hartford, Connecticut

  Home. That’s what Hazel was thinking about now, watching all of these people mill around the back lawn of this place where none of them wanted to live. They looked tranquil, even happy, some of them enjoying the sun, a few playing bocce, all of them surrounded by nurses and orderlies who would tackle them to the ground if they made a run for it.

  “They’re bringing her down now,” an orderly with a rash of freckles across his nose told her.

  Hazel nodded thanks, strolling around the circular fountain that was the centerpiece of the Institute of Living’s golf course–sized back lawn. The fountain was broken and its marble base was drained of water, but Hazel still circled it, over and over.

  Ingrid Ludlow didn’t live far from Arthur Kennedy. Barely an hour away. Both of their homes were close to the Connecticut birthplace of Benedict Arnold himself.

  From her pocket, Hazel pulled out the tourist brochure from the hotel, listing nearby historical sites.

  Benedict Arnold’s bookstore was labeled with a bright yellow star. That star was now a strip mall, meaning the most notorious traitor in American history was now haunting something called Pizza Bomb, a Super Speedy Printing shop, a UPS store, and a nail salon. And wasn’t that the way? The horror of history was not that it was repeated or forgotten, it was usually that it was ignored in favor of pizza by the slice and next-day shipping.

  On her phone, Hazel pulled up Skip’s Twitter page. He’d posted a photo of himself three hours ago from the balcony of his Dubai hotel room, along with an update: Good things happening! Stay tuned! House of Secrets coming back! #LostAndFound. It had been retweeted 603 times.

  She clicked through his updates, his photos from LAX, from London, from the Al Qasr beach, in each one his smile wide across the screen, life treating Skip Nash right, no matter where he was at any given time. It was, she knew, a lie.

  She clicked through the photos other people had posted with Skip, so many taken without him knowing: Skip at an airport coffee shop with a donut shoved in his mouth. Skip asleep aboard a plane. Skip standing in the shallow end of a pool surrounded by cabanas, with the Persian Gulf in the background, paradise manufactured out of the desert.

  She lingered on that last photo for a moment, staring at her brother. He was shirtless, wearing sunglasses. Both of his hands were flat on the surface of the water. He wasn’t smiling, wasn’t frowning, wasn’t outwardly doing anything but being still.

  It was probably just a trick of the photo, a single frozen moment in Skip Nash’s life when no one thought to bother him. He looked…at peace. It seemed all at once familiar and completely alien. Hazel tried to remember the last time she’d seen him being totally serene. Certainly not since she’d woken up after the crash.

  Hazel studied his face, trying to find a match in her brain, and there he was, standing in the shadow of the Three Gossips, a 350-foot sandstone tower in the middle of Arches National Park, outside of Moab. Time and the elements had cut the stone into the rough shape of three people, deep in the middle of a secret, their heads tilted toward one another, listening, for the last million years or so.

  When was this?

  A few weeks ago. The day before the crash.

  An entire lifetime ago.

  Now she remembered. She and Skip had gone hiking, each in a different direction. Hazel spotted Skip when she came up out of a wash to the west of the towers. Skip was standing alone, his head tipped back to the sky, sunglasses on, his palms down. He stood so still that for a moment she wondered if in fact it really was Skip she was seeing, or if it was a scarecrow, placed out in the middle of the desert as some kind of joke.

  She watched him like that for a minute, maybe two, thinking she should turn around, walk away, let him have his silence, and right when she made that decision, Skip dipped his head and saw her.

  “How long you been standing there?”

  “I just walked up,” she lied, and she knew, from the slightly embarrassed look on Skip’s face, that he knew too.

  He pointed at the Three Gossips. “Pretty incredible, isn’t it?”

  “Please don’t tell me that aliens carved it with their lasers, as a warning.”

  “Naw, Haze,” he said. “That’s just erosion.” He took a swig of water, then gave her a smile that didn’t seem all that joyful. “You remember the trip we took out here when we were kids?”

  “Barely,” Hazel said.

  “Same here.” He looked back up at the massive sandstone towers. “I remember those, though.”

  “It kills three,” Hazel said. Skip cocked his head, like he wasn’t sure what Hazel meant. “Gossip. It kills the speaker, the listener, and the one who’s being talked about. Everyone loses.”

  “You come up with that?”

  “No,” Hazel said. “It’s in an old book.”

  “I should probably read more old books.” He gave her that smile, the one that was in Teen Beat, the one that he’d worn on TV everywhere. Hazel realized now, frozen on a lawn in an insane asylum, that in every memory of her brother, he was wearing the same mask.

  She tried to rewind her life back to the crash, but all she saw in her mind was the color red. Twenty-four hours after their conversation, Jack would be dead, Hazel’s memory would be scattered, and Skip would be the only one left standing. And then? Three more dead people. First Darren Nixon, then Dr. Morrison, and now Arthur Kennedy. Everything starting the moment that poison stopped Jack’s heart.

  But…no.

  That wasn’t true. It began when Jack started working for the government. That was the thing to remember. It was a series of dominos, tipping over across time. Benedict Arnold’s bible may have been one of Jack’s obsessions, but in the scope of his entire life, what did it really matter? It didn’t define him. It wasn’t larger than his children. His family.

  But maybe she was looking at things wrong. Dr. Morrison didn’t kill himself because of Benedict Arnold’s bible, he killed himself because he was a man with secrets, a drug addict, a person whose life would crumble if the truth about him were known. He would be stripped of his license. He would be sued. He would live in infamy, which didn’t have much appeal these days for those who didn’t want to get their own reality TV show. His life wasn’t altered by something as ephemeral as a secret plot. It came from something concrete and tangible. Something bad—a regrettable human error that would take away everything if people found out.

  Was it the same with her father? Did something happen on one of his bible-finding missions? Something where he made a mistake? Something where he hurt someone he loved?

  “Son of two bitches. Look at you,” a female voice called out.

 
; Hazel turned just as the institute’s back door swung open.

  “Hazel, Hazel, c’mon inside,” her dad’s former assistant Ingrid called out. “You know I hate the sun.”

  Hazel put on a smile, wondering what could possibly make this old woman insane.

  69

  Sirte, Libya

  1983

  Season 7, Episode 12 (1983): “The Dragon of Libya”

  How did Jack get here?

  It’s because his ratings were in the toilet. That’s what the network guys had told him. He’d seen the numbers. How was he going to compete against Joanie Loves Chachi and The Dukes of Hazzard? Never mind Monday Night Football, which Jack would prefer to watch too.

  “Maybe it’s time to pull the plug,” Jack had said, because the truth was, walking away would be better for his health, better for his life. Maybe get a job doing the weather in LA, where he’d just look into the camera and say it was going to be about seventy degrees.

  “Why not bring your kid on a few episodes,” someone had suggested.

  Maybe it’d get kids watching. Then maybe they’d try a Saturday morning cartoon with Skip. In a year or two, they’d get him into Tiger Beat and Teen Beat, anything with a beat. Could he sing? They’d make him bigger than Shaun Cassidy if he could carry a tune.

  A silly idea. Dumb.

  But it worked.

  They’d done an episode on Alcatraz—that went fine, Skip a bit tentative at first, but he warmed up as the shoot went on. By the third day he was hamming it up, and Jack had to rein him in.

  Then they did a show on the old Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, and Skip lit up. Even Claire could see it.

  “He’s a natural,” she whispered to Jack as the two of them watched Skip run up a stairwell that dead-ended into a brick wall, chasing a phantom’s footsteps. Claire never came to the shoots, hadn’t in years, but she wanted to make sure Skip was okay. “He doesn’t even see the camera.”