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Chapter 14

Myron’s car climbed up past the nouveau riche mansions, so expansive they appeared to have been taking some sort of growth hormone. The lawns were overly manicured, the hedges cropped with too much precision. The sun shone down as though someone had pressed a button and cued it up to do so. The brick was perfectly faded, too perfectly, adding to the faux-Las Vegas-Disney effect of the surroundings. No one had a tar driveway. They were made of some kind of fancy limestone that you didn’t want to ruin by driving over it. Everything reeked of money. Myron rolled down the window expecting to hear a fitting soundtrack to this ideal setting, maybe Bach or Mozart, but there was only the sound of silence, which, come to think of it, was the ideal soundtrack.

The homes were beautiful and picturesque and had all the warmth of a chain motel.

There were several news trucks on the street, though not as many as you might think. The gate was open, so Myron pulled into the Baldwins’, yep, limestone driveway. It was eight thirty, half an hour until the meeting with the Moores. Myron stepped out of the car. The grass was so green he almost bent down to see if it’d been freshly painted.

A chocolate Labrador sprinted toward him. Her tail was wagging so excitedly that her butt could barely keep up. She half slid the last few yards to him. Myron got down on one knee and gave the dog a good scratch behind the ears.

A young man-Myron guesstimated his age at twenty-came up behind her. He had the dog’s lead in his hand. His hair was long and wavy, the kind of long and wavy where you keep throwing back your head to keep it out of your eyes. He wore a black Lycra jogging ensemble with navy blue sleeves that exactly matched the navy blue in his sneakers. Myron thought that maybe he could see a little of both parents in his features.

“What’s your dog’s name?” Myron asked.

“Chloe.”

Myron stood. “You must be Clark.”

“And you must be Myron Bolitar.” He took a step and extended his hand. Myron shook it. “Nice to meet you.”

“Same,” Myron said.

Myron did the math quickly in his head. Clark was Rhys’s older brother. He’d been eleven when the kidnapping occurred, making him twenty-one now.

For a moment they both just stood there awkwardly. Clark looked to his right, then his left, then forced up a smile.

“You in school?” Myron asked, just to ask something.

“Yeah, I’m a junior.”

“Where do you go?”

“Columbia.”

“Great school,” Myron said, just to say something. “Do you know your major, or is that an annoying question only adults ask?”

“Political science.”

“Ah,” Myron said. “That was my major.”

“Great.”

More awkwardness.

“Any idea what you want to do when you graduate?” Myron asked because he couldn’t think of something more hackneyed and inane to ask a twenty-one-year-old.

“None whatsoever,” Clark said.

“No rush.”

“Thanks.”

Was that sarcasm? Either way, more awkwardness ensued.

“I should probably go inside,” Myron said, pointing toward the front door, in case Clark didn’t know what he meant by “inside.”

Clark nodded. Then he said, “You’re the one who saved Patrick.”

“I had help.” Which again was a stupid thing to say. The kid wasn’t looking for humility right now. Then: “Yeah, I was there.”

“Mom says you almost saved Rhys.”

Myron had no idea how to reply to that, so he started to glance around, and then it dawned on him.

This was the crime scene.

The path he was now standing on had been the one Nancy Moore took when she first rang the bell to retrieve Patrick from his playdate. It was the one Brooke would take a little while later when they couldn’t reach Vada Linna, the au pair.

“You were eleven,” Myron said.

Clark nodded. “Yeah, that’s right.”

“Do you remember anything?”

“Like what?”

“Like anything. Where were you when it happened?”

“Why does that matter?”

“I’m just taking another look at the whole thing, that’s all.”

“So what do I have to do with it?”

“Nothing,” Myron said. “But that’s how I do it. Investigate, I mean. I stumble in the dark. I ask a lot of dumb questions. Most go nowhere. But sometimes even a dumb question creates a spark.”

“I was in school,” Clark said. “Mr. Dixon’s class. Fifth grade.”

Myron considered that. “Why weren’t Rhys and Patrick in school?”

“They were in kindergarten.”

“So?”

“So in this town, kindergarteners only go for a half day.”

Myron mulled that over for a moment. “What do you remember?”

“Nothing really. I came home from school. The police were here.” He shrugged.

“See?” Myron said.

“See what?”

“You helped.”

“How?”

The front door opened. Brooke stepped out. “Myron?”

“Yeah, sorry, I was just talking to Clark.”

Without another word, Clark put the lead on the dog and started jogging toward the road. Myron headed toward Brooke, not sure if he should kiss her cheek or shake her hand or what. Brooke pulled him in for a hug, so he went with it. She smelled nice. She wore blue jeans and a white blouse. They looked good on her.

“You’re early,” Brooke said.

“Do you mind showing me the kitchen?” Myron asked.

“Getting right to it, eh?”

“I didn’t think you’d want me to ease into it.”

“You thought right. This way.”

The floor was marble, so their footsteps echoed in the three-story foyer. There was a grand staircase, a look you didn’t often see in real life. The walls were light mauve and covered in tapestries. There were steps to move from the living room into a rectangular kitchen the approximate size and dimensions of a tennis court. Everything was either white or chrome, and Myron wondered at the effort it must take to keep a room like this clean. There were floor-to-ceiling windows offering a rather breathtaking view of the backyard, a swimming pool, and a gazebo. Farther out, Myron could see the start of the woods.

“So if I remember the police report right,” Myron said, “your nanny was by the sink.”

“That’s right.”

Myron spun to his left. “And the two boys were sitting at the kitchen table.”

“Right. They’d been out playing in the yard.”

Myron pointed out the windows. “The backyard?”

“Yes.”

“So they’re playing outside. Then your nanny brings them in here for a snack.”

Myron walked over to the sliding glass door and tried it. It was locked. “They would have come in this door?”

“Yes.”

“And then she left the door unlocked.”

“We used to always leave it unlocked,” Brooke said. “We felt safe back here.”

That quieted the room.

Myron broke it: “According to your nanny, the kidnappers were wearing black and ski masks and all that.”

“Right.”

“And you don’t have any surveillance cameras or anything like that?”

“We do now. But then, no. We had a camera by the front door so we could see who rang the bell.”

“I assume the police checked it out.”

“Nothing to check. It didn’t record. We only used it for live viewing.”

There was a round kitchen table with four chairs. Rhys had only the one sibling-Clark-so Myron wondered whether it had always been like that, the four chairs, and after what happened to Rhys, no one had the heart to move it. Did they sit there at dinner every night for ten years, at that table, the one chair empty?

He looked at Brooke. She knew what he was thinking. It was all over her face.

“We sometimes eat on the island too,” she said.

There was a large rectangular marble island in the middle of the kitchen. A variety of upscale brass pans hung from the ceiling above it. One side had storage. The other had six barstools.

“One thing,” Myron said.

“What?”

“Everything faces the windows. I mean, except for one of the chairs at the kitchen table. The sink has a view. The stove has a view. The barstools and even the table.”

“Yes.”

Myron walked over to the sliding glass door. He looked to his left, then to his right. “So three men in ski masks get all this way-all the way to this door-and no one sees them?”

“Vada was busy,” Brooke said. “She was preparing the snack. The boys, well, they wouldn’t be looking out the window. They were probably playing some kind of video game or messing around.”

Myron looked at how wide open the yard was, how big the windows were. “I guess that’s possible.”

“What else would it be?”

No reason to answer that quite yet. “Clark told me he was in school when the boys were taken.”

“Right. So?”

“Most kids finish school around three in the afternoon. The kindergarteners in this town only go half a day, right?”

“Right. They were let out at eleven thirty.”

“And the kidnappers knew that too.”

“So?”

“So nothing. It suggests some planning on their part; that’s all.”

“The police figured that. They figured that they probably followed Vada or Rhys and knew their schedule.”

Myron thought about that. “But Rhys didn’t come home after school every day, did he? I mean, I assume sometimes his playdates took him to other kids’ homes. I assume he went to Patrick’s sometimes, for example.”

“Right.”

“So on the one hand, this looks carefully planned out. Three men. Knowing the schedule. And then on the other, they rely on your au pair leaving this sliding door unlocked and no one seeing them as they approached.”

“They could have known she never locked it.”

“By spying on how she entered the kitchen from the yard? Unlikely.”

“They also could have smashed the window,” Brooke said.

“I’m not following.”

“Let’s say Vada had spotted them. Do you think she could have gotten to the door and locked it in time? And then what? They could have smashed the glass and grabbed the boys.”

It was all possible, Myron thought. But why wait? Why not grab the boys when they were out in the yard? Were they afraid someone would see?

It was too early to theorize. He needed to gather more facts.

“So here they are, the kidnappers, stepping inside right where we are now,” Myron said.

Brooke stiffened for a moment. “Yes.”

“That was kind of abrupt, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“I’m not. But it doesn’t mean I have to be insensitive either.”

“Let’s get this out of the way,” Brooke said.

“Get what out of the way?”

“You’re probably wondering how I do it,” Brooke said. “How I come into this kitchen every day and walk right past where Rhys was taken. Do I block? Do I cry sometimes? I do a little of both, I guess. But mostly I remember. Mostly I come in this kitchen and what happened is my companion. And I need that. Everyone wondered why we didn’t move away. Why we invite this pain. I’ll tell you why. Because this pain is better. This pain is better than the pain of giving up on him. A mother doesn’t give up on her child. So I can live with the pain. I can’t live with giving up.”

Myron thought about what Win had told him, about how the lack of closure was eating at Brooke, making it all the more unbearable. There comes a time when you have to know the answers. Maybe you can live with the pain, but the not knowing, the purgatory, the limbo, had to eat away at your bones.

“Do you understand now?” Brooke said.

“I do, yeah.”

“Then ask your next question,” she said.

Myron dove right in. “Why the basement?” He pointed to the sliding glass door. “You break in here. You’ve grabbed the boys. You have the nanny. You decide to leave her alive. You decide to tie her up. So why not do it here? Why bring her down to the basement?”

“For the reason you just stated.”

“That being?”

“If they tied her up here, you’d be able to see from the backyard.”

“But if the backyard is that exposed, why go that way in the first place?”

Myron heard heavy footsteps coming down the steps. He checked his watch. Eight forty-five A.M.

“Brooke?”

It was Chick. He hurried into the room and pulled up when he saw Myron. Chick wore a business suit and tie and sported a fancy leather tote, the modern-day equivalent of a briefcase. Was Chick planning on talking to Patrick, and then, what, catching a few hours at the office?

Chick didn’t bother with hello. He held up his mobile phone.

“Don’t you check your texts?” he asked his wife.

“I left my phone in the foyer. Why?”

“Group text from Nancy to both of us,” Chick said. “She wants us to meet at their house, not here.”