Dare You

by Jennifer Brown

  She looked over her shoulder to a cheap wooden door with a plastic sign glued to it, the letters yellowing. PASTOR. Undulating cloud white. As always. “Can we do this later?” she whispered.

  “I don’t think so. We drove all the way from Brentwood to talk to you,” I said. “About Peyton? About the things you told her?”

  She threw another glance over her shoulder and then pushed a couple of buttons on her phone and turned off her computer. She got up and ducked her head into the office, spoke for a moment, and then came back, grabbing a purse from under her desk on the way. “Not here, though,” she said. “My house. I just live down the hill there.” She pulled keys out of her purse and headed for the door.

  When she said she lived down the hill, she literally meant she lived down the hill, a few hundred yards from the church. In a rusted-out trailer with holes poked in the window screens, pressed up against a corner of land where two tree lines met. It was surrounded by overgrown weeds. Her house number jumped out at me—melon, melon, brown, 771—but mostly I was overwhelmed by the spongy brownness of the place. So depressing.

  Also, so isolated. Other than the church and the cows, Brandi Carter’s trailer seemed to be the only thing out here.

  “You might as well come in,” she said when we reached the trailer.

  Inside, the trailer was dark and smoky, but clean, and dominated by a trio of mewling cats. They wrapped themselves around Brandi’s legs, sweet-talking her, until Detective Martinez came through the door; then they ran away. I could smell the morning’s breakfast—bacon—stale on the air.

  She dropped her purse on a tiny cigarette-pocked kitchen table and then reached over to turn on a living room lamp. The effect didn’t so much brighten the place as highlight its flaws. Half-filled ashtrays sat on every table. Bowls with cat food spilling out of them dotted the kitchen floor. A dented olive-green refrigerator hummed from a corner of the kitchen, which was really just an open space off the living room that contained a sink, an oven, and a fridge. The brown inside my mind deepened, pushed on me so hard I almost felt like I needed an ice pack for my head.

  “You can sit,” she said. She went to another lamp and switched it on, shooed a cat out of a chair, and sat in it.

  I sat on the couch opposite her, the smell of smoke wafting out of the cushions making me want a cigarette, bad. Detective Martinez stood behind the couch. I could feel him gazing around the room, cataloguing any potential evidence. I suddenly kind of regretted bringing him here. This wasn’t just about Rigo Basile or Luna or Dom Distribution or me going to prison. This was a piece of my personal life, my history, my family. He wasn’t part of that. As much as it sometimes felt like he was.

  “Nikki Kill,” Brandi said, wonder filling her voice. Her features softened into what might have been fondness. “I guess I never thought I’d see you right here in my own home.”

  “I guess I never thought I’d be in your home,” I countered. “Especially since I didn’t even know you existed until last fall.”

  She ducked her head, trapped her hands between her knees, palms pressed together as if she were praying.

  “I guess I want to know . . . who are you?” I asked. “I mean, I know you’re Brandi Carter and I know you knew my mom, and I know you told Peyton some things that messed up her life. Ended it, really. So who are you? And why did you find Peyton in the first place?”

  “I was curious, I guess,” she said. “It’s not a good reason. I feel such remorse over what happened to her. I should’ve known Bill would never let her be a threat. It’s just . . .” She gazed off into nothingness and then went back to studying her hands. “I needed to get it off my chest. I needed her to know who I was. I think I intended for all of you to know. Maybe I would have found the courage to tell all of you at some point. And now you’re the only one left, and I’m afraid to tell you anything. Because of what happened to her.”

  “The only one what?” Detective Martinez said from behind me. He’d been silent until that moment, and I think we’d both kind of forgotten that he was there.

  “You really shouldn’t be here,” Brandi said, ignoring his question. “It’s not safe.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “How so?”

  She didn’t answer, only chewed her bottom lip and continued staring at those folded hands.

  “Come on,” I said, exasperated, throwing my hands up into the air and flopping back on the couch. “Give us something. I can’t take all this secrecy anymore. This isn’t some soap opera story. This is my life. And my life keeps getting shittier and scarier every single day. And soon I will be in prison because everyone was too afraid to talk.”

  Detective Martinez came around the couch and sat next to me so he was closest to her. He leaned forward, his body language almost mirroring hers.

  “Who are we not safe from here, Brandi?”

  She chewed her lip, contemplated, and then let out a sigh, and for a minute I could see a shadow of the young woman in the video admonishing my mom not to make fun of her new church. Christ’s love is serious.

  “You already know who,” she said.

  “Hollis,” Martinez replied, and she nodded. “Why?”

  Because they’re dangerous and unhinged, I wanted to say. Is there any better reason?

  Detective Martinez stretched his neck and then tried again. “Let me put it this way. How are you involved with the Hollises?”

  “She used to work for them,” I said. “With my mom, right? You were both escorts. I know that much.”

  “For a time, yes,” she said. “But I’d prefer if that didn’t become public knowledge. Pastor Paul knows I have a history, and he is very forgiving, as is the Lord, but I would like it if he didn’t know the full extent of that history. And he wouldn’t be happy if the congregation found out about any of it. Neither would I. I’ve changed. Completely. I changed a long time ago. Your mom knew it. That’s why she came to me.”

  “Came to you? For what?” Detective Martinez asked.

  I put my hand on his arm to stop him. “My mom was pregnant,” I said, before Brandi could answer. I raised my eyebrows. “Right? She came to you because she was pregnant and needed help.” Suddenly all the pieces, which had been floating around in my head, teasing me, confusing me, were falling into place. It was as if I was watching a movie. One my mom might have made, only starring herself. Pregnant, terrified, nowhere to turn. Except her friend, who’d recently given up her life for the Lord. Her friend who would help her.

  She nodded.

  “And the baby wasn’t my dad’s.”

  Her face began to crumple in on itself. I could almost feel her dumping more and more brown into the room, spoonfuls, bucketfuls, truckfuls of dirt. It almost hummed, it was so thick. I was getting close to not being able to handle it anymore. She shook her head. “Let the past go. Please.”

  “It was Peyton,” I said to Martinez. “Her dad was Bill Hollis. My mom got pregnant by hooking.”

  Brandi held out her hands. “No. Not exactly. You have to understand. He was so powerful and charming and he was on TV all the time, and we knew this secret about him—that he was a regular at our service. We felt like we were in a special club.”

  “No way,” I said. “No way could my mom have fallen for that crap. She loved my dad.”

  Brandi Carter nodded vehemently. “She was madly in love with Milo, yes. And she tried to stay away from Hollywood Dreams. She’d quit years before, right after she met Milo. But something happened.”

  “What something?” Detective Martinez asked.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. She didn’t like to talk about it. There were some money problems or something. Some . . . rift. Milo was taking it hard. And they had you to take care of.” She gestured toward me. “You were just a baby yourself. And Bill . . . must have charmed her. Somehow. He had lots of ways.”

  “And she fell for that shit?” I asked, my voice getting shrill. To think of my mom—of the woman who scorned the men who stared at and obje
ctified her at the beach—as someone who would fall for schmoozy lines just because he was the Rich and Famous Bill Hollis angered me.

  “You have to understand,” Brandi said. “He had a way of making things true just by saying them. That’s how he got so successful.”

  “Well, running a couple of illegal businesses might have played into his success just a little bit,” Detective Martinez said.

  I couldn’t take it anymore—the energy of ragemonster red stirring through me, zapping itself into inky pops. I stood up. Brandi flinched as if I were going to hit her. “How? How on earth does a smart person like my mom get pregnant by a guy like that? How was she so stupid?”

  “We both did,” Brandi said sheepishly. “And maybe others. Probably others. He didn’t like to use condoms. He said he wanted things to feel more intimate than that—and he made us believe that we were special because he wanted that intimacy. We believed everything would be okay. Because he told us so. He said he could fix any mistakes. We were stupid. We were taken in by it all.”

  I flashed back to the video, and Brandi’s very pregnant belly. “You had Hollis’s baby too,” I said. “Of course you did. God, I can’t even imagine how many people did.” My mind whirled, trying to sort out what relation Brandi’s baby might have been to me; what relation any of Bill Hollis’s children might be to me. I thought none—there was no blood shared between us—but everything was so confusing, it felt like I was related to half the world.

  She nodded. “When I found out I was pregnant, I left town. Bounced around a little.” She glanced between Detective Martinez, who was still sitting patiently on the couch, and me, and then started talking fast, words spilling over one another. “I was really lost, and I was afraid of having his baby. I knew he wouldn’t want me to.”

  I remembered the invoices from Dr. Slovenka I’d found in Hollis’s office. “Elective” surgeries going back years. Of course. That was why he’d kept those invoices. They were trophies of his conquests. His power over people in black and white. “He’d made others get rid of theirs.”

  She nodded. “I was scared to death. Always looking over my shoulder. And then I found the Lighthouse and got settled. I figured he would never find me here. He’d never even be looking for me here.”

  “But Mom knew where you were. She knew about your baby.”

  “And when she found herself in the same position, she panicked. She didn’t want Milo to find out she’d gone back to Hollywood Dreams, so she came to me. She knew I would protect her. And she knew I would protect the baby.”

  I sank back onto the sofa. It all made sense now. Mom’s belly was showing in those pictures. She might have been willing to pretend the baby was Dad’s, but she knew Bill Hollis would never believe it. He had been sleeping with her, too, and wouldn’t take the chance that the baby might be his. She knew he would force her to abort Peyton, on the off chance that she might have been his. She must have made up a story about a project and come to Brandi to wait out the pregnancy in safety.

  Keeping everyone in the dark. It was the only way to keep Peyton safe.

  “God, my dad didn’t know at all.” This, which should have been a relief, only served to mystify me even more. He was clearly lying about something to do with the Hollises. What was Dad hiding, if it wasn’t Mom’s secret? What was in that black box?

  Brandi leaned forward and reached for my knee, but came up short and ended up tucking her hands between her knees again, hanging off the edge of her chair as if to bolt. “Your mom cared about Peyton a great deal, Nikki,” she said. “It killed her to give her up. But she couldn’t keep her, for the same reasons I couldn’t keep my baby around Brentwood. And she couldn’t leave Milo. Or you. She just . . . had no choice. She left Peyton with me and went back to Milo like nothing had ever happened.”

  Mom had given up Peyton for me. She had chosen me over my sister. I thought of Peyton, covered in crimson, lying in that hospital bed, the urge to cry stronger than it had ever been. Peyton had been given up for me, yet she still reached out to me when she needed family.

  I wished I would have known the real Peyton Hollis when she was alive.

  Detective Martinez cleared his throat. “So if Nikki’s mom had her baby here, how did Peyton end up being raised by Bill and Vanessa?”

  “It took them a couple years, but they found us. And they took her. They took both of them,” Brandi said, her face clouding over with anger. “They took your mom’s little girl and my little boy.”

  “Both?” Detective Martinez echoed at the same time that I said, “Oh my God. Dru. Your baby was Dru.”

  Now tears did flow. She nodded, her chest hitching with held-in sobs. “He found out about me. Somehow word got out where we were and Bill found me. He couldn’t stand the idea of Hollis blood living in ‘a trashy trailer.’” She made air quotes with her fingers. “So he and his hideous wife took them. Ripped them right out of my arms, crying their little eyes out. They were still such babies then. He told me if I tried to follow them, or if I ever surfaced at all, he would have me killed. He had a guy who could make it look like an accident, he said. Someone who would do anything without questions.” She leveled her wet face at us. “I believed him.”

  Detective Martinez glanced at me.

  “Rigo?” I said, and he nodded.

  “I always watched them,” she said. “When they didn’t know it. I followed them in the papers, and I hid in places where I could see them. Outside school and so forth. And they seemed happy. The Hollises were definitely able to give them more than I ever could have. They were too young when he took them. They didn’t remember me at all. They weren’t sad about me.”

  “But then Peyton stopped looking happy,” I said.

  She didn’t need to answer. We all knew where the story went from there. Brandi reached out to unhappy Peyton, told her the truth, and Peyton ended up dead.

  We sat in silence, absorbing everything Brandi had just told us. Peyton was reaching out to me when she knew she was likely going to be killed by her own father. She knew I would help her the same way my mom knew Brandi would help her.

  But I could feel the mood in the room change. That familiar gray was creeping in on me again, only this time it wasn’t coming off Detective Martinez.

  “There’s more,” I said.

  Brandi didn’t move. She looked between us again, seemingly weighing her options.

  “There’s something more,” I repeated. Detective Martinez turned to me, a quizzical look on his face. “Hunch,” I whispered. He seemed to accept that. I leaned toward her; she edged back in her chair, quivering. “What is it? Please. You have to tell me.” She still didn’t move, but the gray rolled in thicker, like smog. “I’m in a lot of danger. If you cared about my mom at all, you will help me out. I’m begging.”

  She rocked back and forth a few times, and then nodded. “Okay.” She got up and went into another room. I could hear what sounded like a drawer opening and closing. She came out holding a DVD. “There’s this.”

  Detective Martinez got up and took it from her before I could get there. “And this is . . . ?”

  “It’s Peyton,” she said. “It’s for you, Nikki.”

  33

  BRANDI CARTER DIDN’T have a DVD player or a computer. The only computer she ever needed was the one at the church. We said our quick good-byes, Brandi and I standing awkwardly in front of each other, unsure what a good-bye should entail between the two of us. I knew we weren’t related, but everything between us was so personal, it somehow seemed that we were. Would Mom have wanted us to be friends? It was hard to say what Mom wanted anymore. Mom was the stranger now.

  “Would you be willing to come up to Brentwood and tell the police what you just told us?” Detective Martinez asked.

  She blanched. “I don’t think I can.”

  “They’re in Dubai,” I said. Blue had said I was stupid for believing that, but surely they wouldn’t come back. Not while knowing they were wanted for so many crimes.
“They can’t hurt you from there. Just steer clear of Luna—she’s the real danger right now.”

  “Nikki,” she said. “There’s one thing you need to keep in mind. They can hurt anyone from anywhere.”

  We left the trailer dejected that Brandi wouldn’t testify, and so full of emotion I couldn’t concentrate on my own name, but at least we had the DVD. Another clue left by Peyton. Or maybe just a good-bye.

  We drove around for another thirty minutes, looking for a library. We finally found one and asked the librarian to let us use a computer in one of the soundproof study rooms.

  The door clicked shut behind us, and it was so quiet I swore I could hear both of our hearts beating.

  “You ready for this?” he asked, holding the DVD.

  I nodded. “Not really, but . . .” I tipped my head toward the computer.

  He booted it up, slid the DVD into it, and we waited. There was only one file. He clicked it.

  Peyton’s face blinked onto the screen. It wasn’t the old Peyton—the one I’d known to be a snotty, uppity bitch ruling the hallways at school. It was the Peyton I’d sat beside in the hospital. Her hair was short and chunky and dyed brown. She had a tattoo on her neck.

  A rainbow.

  Live in color.

  I blinked away the crimson that wanted to push in. The crimson that always wanted to bring my mom with it. The crimson that was exhausting me.

  Peyton adjusted the camera and then sat back. She smiled, and I only realized then what her smile looked like up close. Engaging. Warm. Trusting. I’d never noticed it at school. I was too busy in my own little world, avoiding that crowd as much as humanly possible.

  She waved. “Hey, Nikki.” She seemed to get lost after just that much, her eyes darting to the side, but then she relaxed, letting her shoulders slide down. “Hopefully I’m just being dramatic, right? And like, six months from now I’ll be asking everybody for my stuff back.” She chuckled, pushed her hair out of her eyes. “That’ll be embarrassing.” She sobered, thought some more, and looked into the camera again. “But I don’t think I am being dramatic. God, I’m so stupid. Of course I’m not, if you’re watching this. You wouldn’t be watching it if I was alive. Right? I mean, that’s the point of this whole trail I’ve been leaving. So. Yeah. Dramatic. Not so much.” She rolled her eyes and chewed her nail thoughtfully, then squared up at the camera again.