Dare You by Jennifer Brown
The door was open, but I tried the key anyway. It didn’t turn. I strolled in like I owned the place, trying to be unimpressed by this gross show of wealth, but even I couldn’t help marveling at the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over Los Angeles. I walked over to them and spread my hands out, leaning my forehead against the glass to gaze down at the street below. My phone immediately lit up.
“What are you doing? Get away from the window,” Detective Martinez snapped when I answered it. I hung up without responding. I could see him on the sidewalk, staring up at me, his phone to his ear. I flipped him off.
“Fine, fine,” I said. “I’ve got shit to do anyway.”
I started with the bookcases, which were just as big and impressive as the windows. And stuffed with books—books about acting, books about directing, books about the history of movies, actor autobiographies. I pulled a few out at random—they were all signed. He had a fortune on one bookshelf alone, and it was all I could do to keep from lifting a few. After all, a man like him deserved the karmic retribution of being robbed blind, right?
But I could only imagine what Detective Martinez would do if I showed up outside with an armful of Hollywood loot. He would probably take it all away and turn it in, and have me locked up for the night just for pissing him off.
I pawed through the bookshelf for a long time, then pushed along the walls surrounding them, half expecting a secret door to open up. A part of me indulged in a fantasy that it would happen, and inside said secret room would be Arrigo Basile, cooking boxed macaroni and cheese on a hot plate, the cane—coated with Peyton’s DNA and Rigo’s fingerprints—in a locked closet that my key would magically fit, and my nightmare would be over.
But of course that didn’t happen, because on the other side of that wall was another office. No secret doors.
Another wall was dwarfed by a huge glass case, the shelves lined with movie memorabilia. It reminded me of the trophy case at school. These must have been Bill Hollis’s version of trophies. There was a lock on the case, but the key didn’t even fit in it, much less turn. I pawed all over the items on an unlocked shelf nearby instead.
The shelves scoured, I turned to a closet. But all that was inside was a beige raincoat and an umbrella. So totally normal, you’d never think this was the closet of a complete psychopath. I examined the doorknob—no lock.
I turned to his desk, a polished antique monster that was home to more movie souvenirs—a pair of glasses nestled in a box with a note that proclaimed them to be Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch glasses, a Batman figurine, a Return of the Jedi metal lunch box covered with scribbled autographs, a baseball from A League of Their Own. And then there were memorabilia from Bill Hollis’s own productions—a chewed cigar, a doll head, a cowboy hat, a horseshoe in a glass dome. All items anyone would recognize. All items anyone would want to have. Even me, before I knew the man behind the movies.
There wasn’t really anything else on top of his desk, except for an in-box with two office memos—one about paid time off and the other about open insurance enrollment—and a desk calendar with nothing written on it. I pulled open drawers. Nothing, nothing, nothing. One drawer had a lock, but it was left open. I tried the key just to be thorough. No luck.
I plopped down in his chair, feeling completely defeated. Detective Martinez would be full of I-told-you-so’s when I came out empty-handed. It would be such a grand opportunity for him to remind me that going into situations with no plan was stupid, and a big old waste of my time, and, in this case, all kinds of illegal. I swiveled the chair so it was facing the window, using my foot to idly turn a giant globe that was sitting on a nearby stand. It didn’t help that I knew he was down there on the sidewalk right now, just waiting for me to—
I stopped the globe with my toe, then sat forward and gazed at it. There was something off about it.
It was the word Kenya—orangey with brown spots. It was split by the equator. Only it was split split, the Ke above the line and the ya below, off-kilter a little, the n completely missing. Since when did globes have an equator line lie over the name of the country? Since when did the country boundary lines have jags that didn’t match up? I ran my finger over the equator.
Since it wasn’t a line.
Since it was a crack. An opening.
I stood, the continents all going mint green, surrounded by spearmint oceans, and felt along the line. Sure enough, it went all the way around the globe. I unscrewed the top of the stand and turned it to one side, leaving the globe free to take out.
Or free to open.
I stuck my fingernails into the crack and wiggled them until they had a hold. Then I pulled, the top of the globe coming off effortlessly. The world exploded with a ruby fountain.
Inside the globe were papers. Phone numbers written on scraps and napkins, business cards with women’s names on them, and Polaroid photos of half-nude girls, their names and numbers written across the bottom. I recognized Blue. And Brigitte, who had worked in the front office of Hollywood Dreams. Each of the photos and papers and cards had stars scrawled across them, under the phone numbers. Gross. He rated his conquests. Just like movies. It was almost as if he kept these things as memorabilia of his success, just like the things in the glass case and on top of his desk. Trophies.
I dug through—it was all disgusting, but nothing earth-shattering. We already knew about Hollis’s little hobby. What was earth-shattering was how many there were. And how far back they went—some of the girls in the photos wearing seventies-style clothing, some of the papers yellowing with age.
One of the papers said Carrie, with five stars. I dropped it, wiping my palms on the seat of my pants. God, what if that was my mother? No, not what if. Probably. My stomach turned, my hands suddenly done searching.
But as I dropped the Carrie paper back into the globe, I noticed something. A pop of official-looking navy. Business forms. I dug down to them. Under the scraps of paper were what looked like invoices. They seemed out of place here. Why not keep invoices in his file cabinet? Or in accounting?
I studied one. It was from a Dr. Slovenka, the scrub-blue words surgical, elective the only notation under services rendered. Five hundred dollars. I leafed through. They were all from Dr. Slovenka, all ranging in price from three hundred to a thousand dollars, all listed as surgical, elective. Who was Dr. Slovenka and why were his bills stored in here?
I stuffed the papers back into the globe and shut it, screwing the base top back on, then went out into the cubicles.
I lowered myself into a cushy chair and pulled up Google on my phone. One search got me a hit.
Anton Slovenka, MD
Femalternatives Health Clinic
It was a clinic in Pomona that specialized in women’s health.
They specialized in birth control, pregnancy verification, ultrasound, and . . .
“Abortions,” I read aloud.
I sagged in the chair, disappointed. The globe had seemed like such a huge find. The only find, really, at Gold Goose. But we already knew that Bill Hollis was a regular john. It wasn’t a huge leap to believe that he had gotten a few girls pregnant. Especially since I already knew he had gotten my mom pregnant.
But nothing in the globe, in the office, in anything got me any closer to Rigo, and I was going to have to face Detective Martinez downstairs and admit he was right. This, too, was a dead end.
But as I made my way back down to my car, I couldn’t get those invoices out of my head. All those elective surgeries by Dr. Slovenka were abortions. And Bill Hollis had a collection of them. He was paying for Dr. Slovenka’s services and had been for years. The question was, how many of those surgeries were actually elective, and how many did Bill Hollis just make happen?
And why did that seem like an important distinction to make?
25
DETECTIVE MARTINEZ HAD been unexpectedly—and unusually—gracious about me finding nothing at Gold Goose, probably because he could see on my face how frustrated I wa
I’d been driving around ever since, the key to nothing rattling in the cup holder in the center console. I wasn’t ready to go home yet. Detective Martinez called three times, but I ignored my phone. I wasn’t in the mood to talk. There were too many things to think about. The things Blue and Ruby had told me, about Bill Hollis, about my mom, about the mysterious other business they owned, and about Peyton. About how all these things fit together. What was Peyton trying to tell me? To what answers was she leading me?
And there was the cane. Rigo’s cane, which had probably—if they’d done what I would have done—already been destroyed. My biggest hope of exoneration had undoubtedly been fed to a wood chipper or a fire pit or was floating in the Pacific by now.
I found myself driving past Tesori Antico, slowly, one way and then the other, time after time. At one point, I thought I saw a light, probably originating in that back room. I got out of my car and cupped my hands against the window and peered inside. Nothing. A feeling that there was movement, but not movement that I could actually see.
I got back in my car and decided to hang out in front of the store for a while. Maybe the next plan didn’t need to be any more complicated than this. Maybe the SUV would round the corner and I could bust into the store behind them and wrestle the cane away and be done with it.
And then what? Having the cane was not the same as having Rigo.
Still, I waited. I watched. I moved only to get food and go to the bathroom and then came right back. The sun went down. I’d been there for hours and literally nothing had happened. The entire family was gone. Or hiding.
I called Martinez back.
He picked up on the first ring. “Martinez.” Low, serious.
“Hope I didn’t interrupt anything important?”
“Where were you?”
“Chill, Detective, I’ve been driving around. Thinking.”
I heard a leathery squeaking sound and knew immediately that he was on his couch. Leaning forward, probably. Elbows propped on his knees while he talked to me. A serious crease in his forehead. Feet bare, probably watching something romantic with Blake. Barf. “Listen, I’m sort of in the middle of something.”
“Well, you were the one obsessively calling me, not the other way around. Did you call just to make sure I hadn’t run away with the circus, or did you actually have something to say?”
“I’ve been going through that paperwork,” he said.
I drew a blank.
“The paperwork from the evidence box.”
I vaguely remembered him flipping through bills and statements. “And?”
“I’ll bring it to you tomorrow,” he said. “I think I might have seen something important in there, but I’ll need you to confirm.”
I chuckled. “So serious, Detective. So . . . policey.” I lowered my voice into my best impression of him. “I’ll need an affirmative on that ASAP please.”
“Uh-huh, it’s all pretty by the book,” he said, still in his professional voice. He wasn’t going to play at all tonight. A straw-brown thought that I pushed away quickly. Why would I be disappointed that he wanted to keep it professional?
“Okay, got it,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow and we’ll go over it.”
“Sounds good,” he said. “See you then.” He hung up abruptly.
I stared at my screen, which confirmed that the phone call had disconnected. “Well, good-bye to you, too,” I said, even though I knew he couldn’t hear me. “Jeez.”
I decided to call Dad next.
“Hey, Nik, how are things at the homestead?” I could hear a mouse clicking in the background. He was working, as always. Even on the road, he was editing photos.
“Fine. Quiet. When are you coming home?” Right now I wasn’t sure what to trust with Dad, but I knew for sure that I could trust him more than Luna. And I wasn’t too thrilled with being alone for much longer.
“Maybe tomorrow night, if we work fast and get out of here in the morning.” He paused, the clicking stopped. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” I lied. “Of course. I’m safe, Dad, you don’t have to keep worrying about me.” Another lie. Or two. “I just miss you, is all.”
“Well, I’ll be back soon, and then I don’t have another trip for at least a few weeks. We can spend some quality time together. Maybe go to the beach a little? Work on our tans.”
I laughed. Dad was epically white. He didn’t tan. He burned, peeled, and freckled, and then went right back to white. But he was always trying, as if forty-plus years of effort were just a warm-up and he had yet to perfect the formula for being brown-skinned.
“What? What’s so funny?” he asked, which only made me laugh harder. I could hear the laughter straining in his voice too, and suddenly I was hit with an intense blanket of gross brown sadness. Even if he was kind of lame and hands-off, Dad could always at least make me laugh. And it sucked to think that this man who’d had me giggling for all these years had been somehow involved with Hollywood Dreams and had never said anything.
“Keep it up. Keep laughing. You’ll see when I’m so sun-kissed you won’t even recognize me. You’ll walk right past me, thinking, ‘Who is this god of tans?’”
The laughter trailed off. Little did he know, I already didn’t recognize him. “Whatever,” I said. “You keep trying, old man. I’ll show you how it’s done.”
“Great. It’s a date, then. I’ll call you tomorrow on my way home, okay?”
“Sure.” Then, before he could hang up, and before I could let myself think about it, “Hey, Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“I was just wondering. Did you and Mom have friends?”
“Did we have friends?”
“Yeah, you know. People you hung out with. Any movie people or anything like that?” I held my breath, bracing for an answer. This was his chance to tell the truth. If he did, I would know it was all just a mistake and that we were still good. If he didn’t . . .
“Ah. You want to know if we ever had any brushes with fame. Nope. Believe it or not, our whole lives in Hollywood, and not a one. Although your mother swore she saw Judge Reinhold at Fatburger once.”
“Who?”
“That’s what I thought. No. The short answer is no. Mom and I were pretty much stay-at-home types. Especially once we had you. Your mom was always about being the best mother she could possibly be, and she hated to leave you. Too bad we didn’t have any more kids. We would have liked to. Though I suppose that turned out for the best. I had my hands full with you.”
“I try,” I said, deadpan. “But you didn’t have any friends? Nobody that I would know or anything?”
“Why are you asking?”
“I don’t know. I was just curious, I guess. Been thinking about Mom a lot lately. Ever since . . . you know . . . since what happened last fall. It just reminded me of when she died, and I was wanting to know more about your life together. It’s no big deal.”
“Well, sorry I couldn’t give you more exciting news. Would it help if I lied and told you Sylvester Stallone was our dog sitter or something?”
“Ha-ha, you’ve never had a dog,” I said, but the words wanted to get closed in my throat by hearing him say, if I lied.
“Tell you what. We’ll talk more about the good old days when we go to the beach, okay? I’ll try to think up some stories about Mom that you don’t already know.”
You mean the one where she ran away to give birth to another baby? I wanted to ask. Or the one where the two of you hobnobbed with the Hollises and gave them my sister? Instead, “Sure. That sounds great. Have a fun last day.”
“Good night, Nik.”
“Good night, Dad.”
I hung up. He would come up with stories about Mom between now and when I next s
I drove home, thinking about the box under his desk again, and mulling over possible lock combinations. I didn’t have anything going on tonight—I would spend some time under the desk trying to crack the code.
I went in through the garage, but the second I was inside, I could sense something was off. I smelled fresh air. Or maybe the house just didn’t feel as sealed as it should.
I had only half a second to notice broken glass on the floor, glittering in the moonlight by the kitchen table, a breeze pushing in the curtains where the window used to be. “Hello?” I said, hunching back into a ready stance, my fists clenching, my heart immediately jumping into overdrive. “Luna? I know somebody’s in he—”
But I didn’t get to finish my sentence before I was hit from behind.
26
THE WIND WAS knocked out of me as my midsection rammed into the kitchen counter. The scream that I’d just been ready to let loose instead came out as a grunty oof, followed by a lot of coughing and gagging and gasping for breath that wouldn’t come.
Whoever or whatever had hit me from behind was most definitely not Luna. She was tiny—smaller than me—and this force felt massive. And male. There was no way I could beat it from this position.
Yes, you can, Gunner said in my head. Calm down. Never say never.
I writhed, still coughing and gasping, trying to find a weak spot, a way out. Instead, the body pressed against me harder.
“Stop moving, bitch.”
“Let me—let me up.” I continued coughing, but the air was coming a little easier to me now. A dull ache panged through my ribs where they’d hit the counter. The wind had been knocked out, that was all. You can handle that, Nikki. You’ve experienced worse. Way worse. I pushed my head up, hoping to use the leverage to break free.
Instead, a hand covered the back of my head and slammed it into the counter. I saw white as my nose made contact. Blood instantly began gushing, tears rushing to my eyes. I let out a scream and the hand pushed my face forward again. This time I was able to turn my head just enough so that it was my cheek that took the blow. Still painful, but less so. Instinctively, my head moved back again, and again he slammed it forward. My teeth smacked against my lip and now I felt blood in my mouth too. This time, I kept my head down, just turned my face to the side.