The Hidden Things

by Jamie Mason

  Owen snatched napkins out of the chrome holder on the table and extended them to Carly. “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  • • •

  Owen stopped on the sidewalk in front of his car and snap-flexed his suit sleeves into place. Carly stood next to him, done with crying and wishing she hadn’t started. Embarrassing. She felt dumb and blotchy.

  He pointed down the road, down the way Marcelline and John had raced away. “So you want me to just drive that way until something else comes up to give us a clue?”

  “Yes.”

  Owen sighed hugely. “If you’re right, you understand that it really makes more sense for me to just let one of them kill the other and buy the painting from the one who’s left. Then I can go home.”

  “That won’t work.”

  He looked down at her. She looked up at him, but the sun behind him made her squint. She looked back down the road.

  “They don’t have it,” she said to the street. “I do.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  * * *

  Owen didn’t want to let on that the jolt had been oddly pleasant. The shock of her was a sparkling bit of fun on a grim day. The distraction of a shooting star.

  “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me where you’ve put it?”

  “Nope.” She didn’t look at him and walked to the passenger door of his car.

  He unlocked their doors from his side. “And even though Marcelline is worried I might hurt her, you’re not, because you think I won’t do anything since you’re a kid.”

  “Yep.”

  “Fair enough.” Owen got into the car.

  He watched Carly take in the interior of the Mercedes, both of them lost for a moment in her barefaced appreciation of the look and feel of it. She ran her finger over the hashy stripe on the carbon-fiber faceplate, double-checking the illusion of texture there.

  Owen felt a gurgle of envy percolating in his chest for the unselfconsciousness of the gesture.

  He started the car and pulled out to the light on the main road. “So just go that way?”

  “I guess.” She smiled, a little gift in it for him that she acknowledged the lunacy of their predicament.

  His phone rang through the audio system. He checked the screen, then answered, “Samantha, I’m a little busy right now.”

  “Don’t fuck with me.”

  “Just so you know, we’re not alone and you’re on speaker.”

  “Marcelline is with you?”

  “No. But a friend of hers is.”

  “A friend? What are you talking about?”

  “It’s Marcelline’s friend Carly. Say hello, Carly.”

  Carly looked to Owen for confirmation that he really wanted her to say it out loud, and he nodded toward the dash.

  “Um, hi.”

  “That sounds like a kid. What is going on, Owen? Where is Marcelline? Is she okay?”

  “Is who okay? Carly or Marcelline?” Owen cut his eyes at Carly and grinned.

  “I’m serious. Do not fuck with me.”

  “Language.”

  Samantha’s voice faltered. “Owen, have you done something?”

  “I have not. It was Jonathan. That’s why I’m sitting here with Carly, not Marcelline. He found her and they zoomed off on a high-speed chase. That’s the story I was told.”

  “Did he take the painting?”

  “I’m not sure, but that’s a reasonable guess.” He put his finger across his pursed lips for Carly’s benefit. She nodded and the little conspiracy crackled between them.

  “So what are we doing?” Samantha asked.

  “We?”

  “My nerves are shot, Owen. Pick a side.”

  “No. But I will say that, as it stands, I’m in it for the painting and to go home for now. Any number of things could change how I feel about that, but that’s where we are at the moment. If that helps you, great. And all that, of course, is if I can find it.” He cast a look at Carly, who returned it solidly, unblinking, unintimidated. Weird kid.

  Samantha let some dead air hiss through the speakers. When she spoke, she sounded sad and worried. “That’s not good enough.”

  “No?”

  “I want you to help Marcelline.”

  From the passenger seat, Carly darted in between Owen’s shoulder and the dashboard and leaned in. “I do, too,” she said, and glanced up at him.

  “Carly,” Samantha said through the speaker. “Do you have something to write with?”

  Carly looked expectantly at Owen, who gave up and pointed at the center console. She took Owen’s pen and twisted in her seat to pull a folded paper from her back pocket. “Got it.”

  “Take down this number. Owen, if Carly here gives me a call later and tells me what happened, I will do a load of laundry for you. Whites. With bleach. Lots of bleach.” Samantha read out a telephone number and Carly called it back to her as she wrote.

  “Is this a result-based promise or do intentions count?” Owen asked.

  Samantha sighed. “I’m sorry for the crack about having your heart on your sleeve. That was unkind of me.”

  “I don’t really know what you expect me to do. We don’t know what we’re dealing with until one of them reaches out. And then, of course, there’s always the possibility that they’re perfectly happy, just the two of them doing whatever they’re doing and letting me stand around with my dick in my hand.” Owen looked over at Carly. “Sorry.”

  Carly shrugged.

  “It’s not like that,” Samantha said. “It never was.”

  “If you say so, then it must be true.”

  Samantha ignored it. “Could you send a text to Jonathan, maybe?”

  “I could. But since we don’t know which one of them currently has the upper hand in this, or neither one if they’re partners and don’t need it. . . .” He slid a sideways look at Carly. “It seems like a risk that Marcelline might not appreciate if we make things more difficult for her.”

  “What are you going to do, then?”

  “I’m going to wait, Samantha. They’ll be in touch. This would be a pretty pointless exercise if they don’t. Hopefully Carly will give you a call before the streetlights come on. Because I won’t.”

  “I’m sorry, Owen.”

  “That’ll be the day.”

  Owen killed the call from the steering wheel. They drove on for a while in silence.

  “You’re going to have to tell me where the painting is, you know,” he said.

  “I know. But I don’t want to go home yet.”

  “Convenient. Because you can’t go home yet.”

  Her head jerked up, testing the air for a threat in that comment. “Why?”

  “Look, it’s not personal. There’s just no way to turn you loose in the world until this is done. God knows what you’d say.”

  “I wouldn’t say anything. But I don’t want to go anyway. I want to make sure that Emma is okay. Marcelline.”

  “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “I understand. But it’s the best I can do. So where are we going?”

  Carly unfolded the paper, a receipt, that she’d written Samantha’s number on. “When Marcelline was washing up, I took it into the party store and asked them to gift wrap and hold it for me. I said it was a present for my mom.”

  Owen couldn’t decide if the tremor in him was nausea or a laugh trying to elbow through his amazement.

  “What?” she said.

  “That painting is worth a fortune. And you left it at a party store.”

  “They didn’t know what it was. Sometimes there’s nothing safer than cluelessness. Ask any kid.”

  • • •

  Owen waited at the curb. He didn’t like the worry of all she might get up to in there if she changed her mind, but he weighed it against the inescapable fact that he didn’t look like anyone’s idea of a teenage girl’s father, and he was too old to be her brother. People would stare.

>   Carly reappeared after a tense few minutes. She slid the festively wrapped rectangle into the back and plopped into the passenger seat as if it weren’t only the second time she’d gotten in beside him. She adjusted the air flow onto her face and petted the leather of the seat.

  “All set?”

  “Easy-peasy,” she said, but looked as if she might cry.

  “What is it?”

  “My mother must be freaking out.”

  “So send her a text. Make something up. Tell her you’re at the movies.”

  “Yeah, I might have thought of that if I had my phone anymore. This is bad. What if she calls the cops?”

  Owen pulled into a parking space. “Do you know your mother’s phone number?”

  “Yes, but she doesn’t have her phone. John does.”

  “Is there someone else who can take her a message?”

  “I guess Ada. She only lives two streets over.”

  “Do you know this Ada’s number?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know your own phone number?”

  “Ye-eess.”

  “I know how to mask a text, spoof a number.”

  Owen watched Carly fall lost into the sea of possibilities. She gasped. “Oh, wow. Will you show me how?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you would be an unstoppable menace. But I will send your mother a note so that she doesn’t think you’re dead.”

  “I wouldn’t be an unstoppable menace.”

  Owen squinted through the windshield. “If you could only see you like I see you. No. I’m not showing you how to do it.”

  “You know I still have to make that call later. To tell whatsername what happened so that you can get whatever ‘laundry’ means in secret code.” Carly pierced him through, the cheeky point of it glittering in her eyes, trying to bring him around to meet up with her honesty.

  He held his smirk down between his teeth. God, this fucking day. “I don’t like you.”

  She buckled her seat belt. “I don’t think that’s true.”

  They watched the clear streamers of heat waving on the rim of the rise in the road. Owen sent a text from Carly to Donna via Ada, saying Carly was sorry. That she was upset and keeping her phone off. That she was fine and safe and that she’d be home in a little while.

  “I don’t want to sit here anymore,” she said. “Can we drive?”

  “Okay.”

  “Your car is pretty.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  • • •

  They resumed the ride back in the direction that had swallowed up Marcelline, and Jonathan after her. They hadn’t made it four miles past where they’d first set out before they found her car on the side of the road.

  “Stop!” Carly cried. “Wait, stop!”

  “We can’t.”

  “Why not?” Carly twisted in her seat, ducking out of the seat belt to better see into Marcelline’s car as they drove past.

  “Well, I don’t know. What do you think you’ll say to the cop who stops while we’re poking around an abandoned car?”

  “What if she was in it?”

  “She wasn’t. She’s with Jonathan.”

  “You don’t know that. Please.” Carly was winding up to crying again. “Stop! Go back!”

  “Listen to me. Calm down. She’s not in the car. She’s not in the hospital. I promise you, she’s with Jonathan.”

  “She might not be. She might be hurt.”

  “I didn’t say she wasn’t hurt. Look, that wasn’t a crash. That was a swerve to a stop. The back right wheel was broken, she may have tagged something, maybe a curb, but the car wasn’t smashed in. There’s no reason to think she was banged up at all. But she was being followed. We know that. So, Jonathan picked her up. The question is whether she was happy or not to go with him.”

  “You can’t know that’s what happened. You weren’t there. Maybe someone else stopped to help her. Maybe she got away.”

  “And you don’t think we would have heard from her by now if any one of those other things had happened?”

  That corked her right up. She wound herself back under the seat belt and chewed her fingernails. Owen watched Marcelline’s car disappear around a bend in the rearview mirror.

  “Does your stepfather carry a gun?”

  “What? No! I mean, I don’t think so.” Her shrinking confidence on this point dwindled, sputtered, then went out. “I don’t know.”

  “Okay.”

  “Marcelline had one.”

  “Well, maybe she got to it first. I still think she would have called by now.”

  “What are we going to do now?”

  “We still wait.”

  But it was only for a few more minutes. The texts started rolling in.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  * * *

  Jonathan had rehearsed having the upper hand even before he’d ever once in his life had the upper hand. He’d done it since he was a little boy. Instead of getting songs stuck in his head, he looped elaborate scenes about his life, and the life he would have—detailed plays of his saying whatever he wanted to say, doing whatever he wanted to do, having whatever he wanted to have. Having everything, as a matter of fact.

  All the practice had made him good within a range.

  He’d been born with some talent for manipulation and had dedicated years of thought and testing to grooming his edge. But the second most important thing was knowing when it was all getting away from you. He had a sense for that, too. A knack for self-preservation beyond the basic animal toolset.

  In his earlier calls with Owen, there had been hotel and garage sounds. Only two hotels with parking decks were close by, and Owen had been in the first one. His car wasn’t hard to spot. Jonathan had tailed Owen to his meetup with Marcelline.

  There, he’d tried the simplest thing he could think of—to set things back the way they’d been, to have the painting and reclaim the meeting with Owen. From there, it should have fallen the expected way. He would get paid and get gone, just as he’d practiced in his mind’s eye.

  Going all the way to hands-on with Marcelline tipped this into a brand-new landscape. He’d felt the difference, the new requirements, in his bones. Then he smashed her facedown onto the steering wheel.

  The car had cracked something on her wild, sparking stunt ride out of the shopping center. It held out longer than he would have guessed. He watched it fight its injuries, hobbling down the road at an impressive clip for all the struggle. He imagined Marcelline wrestling physics behind the wheel. But after a few miles, the wobble disappeared in a snap and a hard pull to the right. The chase was over.

  He was behind her on the shoulder and out at a fast walk in seconds. She was frantic, grabbing at the clasp on her purse. He tried to look as helpful as possible from the outside. He opened the door and put her under control before she could get clear of her seat.

  He’d guided her, dragged her, dazed and wavering, into the back footwells of his own car. Both feet into this strange new territory, he was committed. There weren’t going to be any do-overs.

  He grabbed up her handbag, which had fallen onto the pavement, so no one would stop for it. He held tight against the instinct to rush. It would draw attention. A mild hurry would have to do, and it would probably keep him from falling over his own feet besides.

  But the plan, such as it ever was, ended at the bumper of Marcelline’s car. Jonathan checked the back seat. Empty. He glanced back. Marcelline still hadn’t risen over the window line of his car. He popped the trunk latch. Thank God it was there. He scooped up the blanket and garment bag, but it sagged—all fabric, no brace of wood—in his grasp. The tuxedo was the only thing under the zipper.

  From there, everything else had been a developing exit strategy.

  Marcelline fought like hell when he stopped to tie her the first time. Shirtsleeves, jacket sleeves, cummerbund, and trouser legs were the only useful things in the garment bag. Her own purse strap ev
entually got her feet under control. He pushed her down, struggling, over the hump of the floorwell and threw the garment bag and blanket over her for camouflage. Round two, when he’d gotten to where he was going and had more time and privacy, was even more vicious. He moved her into the front seat. By the end, they were both bruised and bleeding.

  Jonathan looked over at Marcelline. Her eyes were closed. The tears had dried in black-streaked, vividly pale tracks over her face that disappeared into the gag pulled hard through her lips. Her hands were tied, clasped in her lap, the broken nail beds still glistening with drying blood. Her left cheek was swollen and red, but going dark in the center where the first strike of the steering wheel had landed. The second blow had almost knocked her out, but the knot was hidden in her hair.

  Seeing her like that, tied at the neck to the headrest and at the wrists and ankles, he felt a mixture of guilt and amazement. He hadn’t known what all he was made of. Now the creature of his own mind was splayed out for vivisection.

  He’d never hurt anyone. Not really. Not directly. True, he’d never stopped any hurt either. He’d even nudged it along before.

  But instinct had been honed to habit, and today, habit had succumbed to evolution.

  He enabled his father to ruin. Marcelline was the first person he’d hurt with his own hands. Roy, well, Jonathan had escorted him right over the line.

  And Roy smelled terrible.

  Jonathan had come out here because getting rid of Roy was essentially the only thing that had worked out okay in the last few weeks. Revisiting his last success seemed to be the most hopeful thing to do. But the reek from the truck was already a bigger deterrent than he would have guessed.

  He wouldn’t take the Anningers’ money now for anything. It wasn’t worth it. Owen would never forgive this chaos twice. He’d find him. The only way to be clear of it was to be all the way clear of it. The little survival compass in his guts fluttered. He had to leave. He’d find another way.