Revealed (15 page)

“You do realize it could be anywhere, don't you?”

We were standing on the Braggs' front lawn. As it turned out, Mom had given me and Callie a ride, and Nia had hopped out of her parents' car less than a minute after my family's Subaru pulled away. In spite of my happiness at being reunited with Callie and Nia, standing there, the brightly lit windows of the house's enormous interior casting shadows on the perfectly cropped grass, I couldn't help being more than a little overwhelmed by our task.

“The only question is how we're going to get past Heidi in the first place. Once that's accomplished, we're golden.” Nia's voice was so confident I couldn't believe we had the same agenda. It was like I was planning on breaking into Fort Knox and she was hoping to get herself a Limonata, which I happened to remember was her favorite drink. No common soda for Nia. “Oh, don't worry about that; Heidi's going to be late,” Callie said casually.

I was totally confused by that. “How can she be late? The party's at her house.”

“She'll stay in her room getting ready,” Callie explained, brushing her hands together. “She'll want to make an entrance.”

“But it's her house,” I repeated stupidly.

Suddenly Callie and Nia burst out laughing, like I'd just uttered the funniest thing since Abbott and Costello's
Who's on First
.

“Sorry, Hal,” Callie said, covering her mouth with her hand but unable to prevent another burst of laughter from escaping.

“Yeah, sorry,” Nia echoed, laughing, too.

“Let me guess—I'm being such a guy, right?”

“Something like that,” Callie assured me, patting my arm as she and Nia, emboldened rather than daunted by what a dolt they were working with, started up the lawn toward the Braggs' house.

There were a few cars parked in the driveway, meaning either the Braggs had a fleet of automobiles or that some of the older cast members had already arrived. As Callie pushed the front door open without knocking, voices from inside made it clear we were not the first guests to show, which was a relief. The bigger the crowd, the easier it would be to disappear.

Everything as far as the eye could see was white or off-white—the sofas, the rugs, even the walls, which didn't seem to be painted so much as . . . upholstered in a pale beige silky fabric. To my right, a bunch of people were gathered around an enormous glass table in the gigantic dining room. To my left was a sunken living room that was itself roughly the square footage of my entire downstairs. For once I was glad to be no good at math—just thinking about calculating the odds of finding a twelve-inch-by-twelve-inch box in all that space was enough to make me want to turn around and go home. Forget the fact that the box could be anywhere in the house. It could be anywhere
not
in the house.

“Should we split up?” I suggested, trying to silence the voices of doom in my head. “Text if we find something?”

At this suggestion, Nia spun to face us. “Give me your phone numbers.”

Callie's face was bewildered. “Nia, what are you talking about—you've called me a million times by now. You
have
my number.”

Nia pulled an iPhone from the tiny handbag that swung from her wrist.

“You got an iPhone!” Callie nearly gasped.

In response, Nia wacked Callie on the butt with her bag. “No, you shallow I-Girl, it's my brother's. He loaned it to me.”

“That's
former
I-Girl,” Callie corrected her. “And where's
your
phone?”

“Out of juice,” Nia explained, and she prepared to enter our numbers into Cisco Rivera's phone. Her eyes gleamed in a way that made me wonder if Cisco
knew
he'd loaned his sister his iPhone. “Now, scoot.”

* * *

Of course Nia and Callie were right that it made total sense for me to go upstairs and risk running into Heidi and the other I-Girls. Our little scene in the auditorium notwithstanding, I hardly had the history with Heidi and her flunkies that Nia and Callie did. Still, that fact did nothing to make my heart pound less furiously as I pushed open the bedroom door of the Orion police chief.

Oh, sorry, sir, I was just looking for the bathroom. Now, really, I don't think we need those handcuffs, it was an honest mistake. Sir! Sir! Chief Bragg, don't I get even one phone call–

I tried to shake this image from my head, but by the time I was literally on my hands and knees under the desk in what must have been a guest bedroom, it was getting increasingly hard to come up with a plausible story to explain my behavior.
I think I might have left my coat last time I was over. When was that, you say? Oh, uh, I'm pretty sure it was never.

I'd been looking for at least forty-five minutes, and all I'd learned was that Mrs. Bragg had so many shoes they literally could not be contained within the more than dozen closets upstairs—when I opened the closet door in the guest room, a box dropped onto my head and red shoes exploded, the heels so spiky the impact of one with my head brought tears to my eyes. I was rubbing the spot on my scalp where a small lump was swiftly growing when my phone buzzed.

I'd never been so happy to do anything as I was to flee the upstairs of the Braggs' house. Walking by a closed door I'd passed before, I concluded from the Miley Cyrus now blasting from within that it was Heidi's, and I was relieved to know she was still sequestered in her room, at least for the moment.

Moment
, unfortunately, being the key word, I realized, as I took the winding stairs two at a time.

“What are you doing, Hal?”

I spun around so fast I'm pretty sure I heard something in my ankle pop. Just looking for the bathroom.
Just looking for the bathroom. Just . . .

But the person addressing me from the archway between the foyer and the Braggs' dining room wasn't a member of the Bragg family. It was a sophomore girl who'd played one of the courtiers in exile, Theresa Ax, also known as Terri.

Was she a good friend of Heidi's, good enough that she'd know there was no reason for me to be wandering around upstairs in Heidi's house?

“Um . . .” She was holding a sandwich and looking at me in this really intense way. Maybe it was just the guilt talking, but to me her look definitely said,
I'm onto you. . . .
I decided to punt. “Sorry, what did you say?”

“I
said,
what are you
doing
here?”

Here like upstairs at Heidi's house? Here like in the foyer?

“I . . .” It was one thing to tell Chief Bragg I was looking for the bathroom, another to casually inform Terri the sophomore girl that I'd been standing somewhere with my pants down.

She flipped her long black hair over her shoulder in a way that made me wonder if she was auditioning for a position in the soon-to-be-formed I-Girl sophomore division. If that were the case, I hoped for her sake that she spelled Terri with an i and not a y. “I don't think I've, like,
ever
seen you at a party before.”

“Oh, well . . .” My ankle was throbbing and I felt the buzz of my phone vibrating in my jacket pocket.

She took a bite of her sandwich and looked at me. “We should seriously hang out.”

Was this another Heidi Bragg trick? Would I ever again be able to talk to anyone without wondering what her ulterior motive might be? “Yeah, sure,” I said. Kitchens were usually near dining rooms, weren't they? That was how it worked in my house, anyway. I looked over Terri's shoulder—sure enough, there was a swinging door behind her.

Kitchen.

“I'll catch you later,” I said, then turned and practically flew through the swinging door.

The kitchen was crowded with people from the play. For a second I didn't see any of the I-Girls, but then I looked again and, out of the corner of my eye, spotted the one with the dark hair—I was pretty sure her name was Traci or Kelli. She was pouring some diet soda into a couple of glasses, and as I headed toward the door on the opposite side of the room, the one I was sincerely hoping would lead me to the hallway Callie was talking about, I thought she might have looked up and seen me. Right as we made eye contact, Nia, coming from the side, bumped into her. Traci/Kelli stumbled and several glasses of soda spilled down the front of her shirt.

Traci/Kelli's squeal of fury was like something you'd hear in a documentary about wildlife of the Amazon basin. I took a step toward them, ready to help out if she needed me, but Nia began to laugh.

Traci/Kelli's eyes widened with amazement. “You're
laughing
, you freak?”

Nia crossed her arms over her chest, still laughing. “Yes, I-Girl, I am.”

A couple of people standing around laughed briefly at Nia's retort as Traci/Kelli rattled the ice in one of the near-empty glasses in her direction. “You'll regret this!”

Nia shook her head mock-regretfully. “You know something? I really don't think I will.”

As I pushed through a door and out of the kitchen, I could not help but smile. I found myself standing at one end of a short hallway, empty except for Callie, who was standing about halfway down it staring at the wall.

“Hey,” she said, glancing over and seeing it was me before going back to looking at the wall in front of her.

“Hey,” I said. “Nia's kicking ass and taking names.” I went to stand beside her and see what she was staring at.

The sight nearly made me gag.

The wall was covered, almost literally, with photos of the Bragg family, particularly Brittney Bragg. There must have been five hundred pictures of them—the Braggs on a ski slope, goggles around their necks, parkas unzipped despite the cold that turned their breath white. Brittney Bragg in the shortest shorts I'd ever seen cracking a bottle over the bow of . . . I leaned forward and squinted.
Bragging Rights
. Of course. There was a series of faux-casual black-and-white pictures of the family, Brittney in a crisp, white, collared shirt, Chief Bragg in jeans and a dark T-shirt. Heidi wore a sundress, and her little brother was in what looked to be a soccer uniform.

Then there was the overseas portion of the wall: Chief and Mrs. Bragg at the Great Wall of China, the Acropolis, in front of the towering cruise ship that had no doubt delivered them to such exotic locales. In every photo, the two or three or four Braggs were smiling broadly, looking, for all the world, like the all-American family they were pretending to be.

I shook my head in amazement. “How is it possible for pure evil to look so happy-go-lucky?”

“This shouldn't be here,” Callie stated firmly.

“I mean, why limit ourselves to the pictures? The whole
development
is a scourge on the face of the planet.”

She shook her head. “But I mean, specifically, this wall.”

“I hear what you're saying, but, well, you know, without walls houses kind of . . . fall down.” Quickly, I added, “I'm kidding.”

“Maybe with all that knowledge you should consider a career in architecture.” A small smile played at the corner of Callie's mouth.

She stepped forward and knocked at the wall, then shook her head. “I don't even know what I'm knocking for. But they always do it in the movies.”

“Do you think it's hollow?” I stepped forward and knocked also, but the wall sounded like a wall.

“No, it's not that. Look.” She pulled me back in the direction I'd come from and opened a door I hadn't even noticed when I'd walked past. Inside was a laundry room.

Not quite sure what Callie was showing me, I looked around. But the room we were in just seemed like your basic, run-of-the-mill laundry room—washer, dryer, rack for hanging stuff. There were boxes of detergent and fabric softener on a shelf above the machines and an iron on an ironing board that stuck out of the wall next to a small door that looked like it might have led to a closet.

“Got it?” asked Callie.

“Um, okay, yeah.”

“Now, look at this.” She pulled me back into the hallway; a few feet past where we'd been standing, she opened another door. The room reminded me of the family room at Nia's—except that here the TV was approximately the size of the screen at your local multiplex. There was a stereo and a wall of built-in bookcases that, instead of books, held even more photos, mostly of Brittney Bragg smiling with local celebrities and politicians.

Callie watched me watching the room. “What do you notice?” she asked finally.

“That the Braggs are even more culturally illiterate and less aware of their relative insignificance in the world than I'd ever imagined?”

“True,” Callie agreed. “But what else?”

I had the feeling she wasn't asking about the décor, which was a little too much chrome and glass for my taste, so I just said, “I give up.”

“Don't feel bad,” she assured me. “I've been here a million times and I never noticed it, either.” She thought for a second. “Here's a hint: How big would you say this room is?”

I looked from one wall to the other, then calculated in my head. “I'm not great at this—maybe twenty feet long and fifteen feet wide.”

“Yeah, that's about what I figured. Now, come back into the hallway.” I followed her and we stood where we'd been when I first found her. “What do you notice this time?”

I looked at the wall. I looked at the door to the laundry room. I looked back to the door of the den. And, finally, I saw what Callie had seen.

“There's extra space!”

Callie was nodding excitedly. Again I looked at the wall and calculated the size of the two rooms we'd just been in. Even though I'm no expert at judging space, there were at least ten feet unaccounted for. Which meant—