Revealed (16 page)

Callie put her hand on my arm and we turned to look at each other.

“A hidden room!” I whispered.

Callie's eyes sparkled with triumph. “And what do you want to bet our box is in it?”

Callie and I split up; she headed back to the den and I went into the laundry room. Now that Callie had pointed it out to me, the unaccounted-for space was completely obvious—unless the walls of the Braggs' house were more than eight feet thick, there was something between me and Callie, and it wasn't just a bookcase.

I started making my way along the wall, remembering from days spent reading my dad's old Hardy Boy novels that the important thing was to check every square inch. Except for a couple of framed movie posters and a wooden molding at about waist height, there didn't seem to be any place to hide a doorknob. I opened the small closet, empty except for yet another framed photo of Mrs. Bragg on the wall. This one was of her in a pair of running shorts and a jogging bra with what looked like a medal hanging on a ribbon around her neck.

My god, did these people never get enough of themselves?

I felt along the walls of the closet wondering if it was too risky to turn on a light. There was a window that opened onto the back lawn—if someone looked out the kitchen window, would they see a light coming from the laundry room window and wonder why it was on? I decided not to risk it.

My phone buzzed and I flipped it open. There was a message from Callie.

NOTHING. U?

I was about to type back that I, too, had struck out, when by the light of the phone I noticed something. Holding the illuminated screen open to the wall, I was able to see, nearly hidden in the seam of the wood trim and plaster wall, the tiniest lock I'd ever seen. Hands shaking, I texted Callie back.

SOMETHING.

An instant later, she was next to me in the closet and we were both staring at the lock.

“Okay, okay,” she whispered. “That's the lock.”

“Now we just need the key.”

“That's a big just,” she pointed out.

“Think,” I said. “If you were Chief Bragg, where would you hide a key?”

“Um, the police station? My key ring?”

“You're assuming it's a key only he needs. What if it's one he
and
Mrs. Bragg use? Or what if it's one the whole family uses for this secret room?”

Callie thought for a second. “It would have to be someplace central. Someplace everyone could get it.”

I nodded, then added, “And it's small, right? So you'd want to keep it near the lock.”

“Because if you dropped it, it would be hard to find.”

“Exactly. You wouldn't want to have to carry it all over the place.”

We turned in sync and looked back at the laundry room. When I'd first seen it, the space had seemed pristine and relatively empty—neatly folded piles of towels, jugs of cleansers with their handles turned out. Now that I was considering searching it for a key the size of a Band-Aid, it suddenly seemed enormous and cluttered.

“Okay,” I announced, hoping I sounded more confident than I felt. “Let's do it.”

But fifteen minutes later, we'd had zero luck. Feeling totally defeated, Callie and I sat with our backs against the washing machine. We stared, demoralized, at the wall with the lock, the Braggs' secret room so close and yet so far. The smiling, medal-clad Mrs. Bragg hanging in the closet seemed to be mocking our attempts to best her and her family.

Out of nowhere, Callie said, “Mrs. Bragg has a seriously sick body.”

I glanced up at the photo. Objectively, I suppose Callie was right, but Brittney Bragg, like her daughter, had always left me cold.

“I guess,” I said.

“And she's so discreet,” Callie added, indicating on her own body how little of Mrs. Bragg the jogging bra covered. “Oh, am I showing off my
body
?” She giggled an imitation of Brittney Bragg. “I had no
idea
.”

And suddenly I jumped to my feet. “Oh my god, I can't believe we missed it.”

“What?” Callie scrambled to her feet, watching as I crossed the small room, stood in the closet, and took the photo from its hook.

“I'm sure you can get a signed one from the studio,” Callie said, her voice dripping sarcasm. “‘Dear Hal—Love ya, baby! Brittney.'”

“No, no, don't you see?” I felt along the back of the picture, sliding my hand under the clips that held it in its frame.

“See what?”

A second later, my fingers felt what they'd been seeking. In the bit of light that came in through the crack under the door, Callie saw the key I was holding up for her to examine.

“But . . . how did you . . . ?” Callie's eyes were wide with amazement.

I hung the photo back on the wall and slipped the key into the lock. As I'd known it would, it slid in easily. Hearing the sound of a bolt sliding back, I turned to Callie, an enormous smile splitting my face. “In what universe would Brittney Bragg put a picture of herself looking super fly in the back of a closet?”

And with that rhetorical question, I pushed open the door to the Bragg family's secret room.

As we'd expected, the room was small, roughly the same dimensions as the laundry room. But that was where the similarities ended. If the laundry room and the rest of the Bragg house were pristine, almost sterile, this room was piled high with clutter—boxes overflowed their tops, files were stacked on the desk in the room's center, and the shelves that lined the walls were bowed under the weight of all the papers they held.

“Look!” Callie was pointing across the room to a small wooden chair.

On it was Amanda's box.

As soon as we were standing next to the box, we could see that someone had been working very, very hard to open it. On the chair next to it were a screwdriver and a hammer, and whether those had been the tools used or they were next up at bat I couldn't tell, but something sharp and strong had definitely been jammed into the pristine wood. I felt nauseated looking at the gouged edges, like it was Amanda herself who had been attacked.

“They seriously wanted into this box.” I shook my head.

“We've
seriously
got to get it out of here,” Callie said, wrapping her arms around the box and stepping toward the door. As she did, her foot knocked a crate piled high with papers, and the top layer slid to the floor.

“Damn!” She put the box on the desk and knelt on the floor, frantically mashing papers into a pile and dumping them back into the crate. Each time she did, though, a new avalanche of stuff would pour from the overstuffed crate.

“Wait. Wait.” I knelt beside Callie, smoothing out some of the papers that had gotten wrinkled while Callie pushed against the stuff inside the crate to make space for them.

As frantically as I was working to flatten out the sheets of paper, I tried to glance at them, too. The first one meant nothing to me. It was a map of a city I'd never heard of—Saint Cloud or Saint Calude, I was reading too fast to be sure—with a small yellow X on a street, the name of which I didn't catch. Next was a receipt from what seemed to be a gas station, followed by a cell phone bill.

“Callie, I'm going to text Nia. I think we should pass her the box from the laundry room window or else someone might—”

“What the hell?!”

I looked up. Callie was sitting back on her heels, holding what looked like a photograph. Crawling over to her side, I looked at the picture of two young girls, each standing astride a bicycle. In the background, I could just make out the Washington Monument.

I studied the picture for a minute. “Hey, is that—”

Callie's hand was shaking so hard it was difficult to see the girls' faces, but I was pretty sure one of the girls was Heidi Bragg. I took the photo from Callie and held it close.

“It's Brittney.” Callie's voice was oddly flat, like she was half asleep. I turned to look at her, and the blankness of her voice was matched by the blankness in her eyes.

“Callie? Are you okay?”

Finger shaking, Callie pointed at the photo in my hand. “That's Brittney Bragg.” I looked where she was pointing and I saw that she was right. The girl looked a little like Heidi, but the jaw was one hundred percent Brittney. Plus, the bike she was on was an old-fashioned one with a banana seat, the kind my mom had as a kid. I couldn't see Heidi, no matter how young she was, riding a bike that was so last century.

“Who's the other girl?” I asked, wishing I could say something that would remove the stricken look from Callie's face.

“That's my mom,” she said.

My phone buzzed and I grabbed it from my pocket, asking as I did, “Your mom and Brittney Bragg were friends when they were kids?”

“That's the thing,” Callie said. “They weren't. I mean, my mom never said anything about knowing Brittney when they were younger.”

For a second I was confused by the unfamiliar number that had sent me a text, but then I remembered that Nia had her brother's phone.

FIND ANYTHING?

I quickly texted back, describing as best I could the location of the laundry room window. Finished, I turned to Callie, still staring at the picture.

“We have to get out of here.”

Callie nodded but didn't speak. I went over to the desk and grabbed the box, amazed again by how easily Callie had carried something so heavy. As we made our way to the door, Callie pointed to a small white case about the size of a mini-fridge that neither of us had noticed before. It was plugged into the wall and had a glass front. Inside were—

“Is that . . .
blood
?” Callie knelt down on one knee and I crouched beside her as best I could without putting the box down.

Sure enough, inside the case, which I could see now was a refrigerator, were vials of a thick red substance, each clearly labeled with a number followed by a series of letters. I found myself thinking of Thornhill's files and wishing I could compare the numbers and letters on his files with those on these vials. Was it just a coincidence that everywhere I turned someone seemed to be keeping track of people and things with long letter/number combinations?

With the blood samples was an orange plastic prescription bottle, like the kind my antibiotics came in when I got sinus infections. I squinted at the label, and as I read the name of the prescribing physician, my heart stopped. “Callie?”

She'd started to stand up, but at the sound of her name, she squatted back down and looked where my finger was pointing. “‘Dr. Joy,'” she read. Callie turned to me, not bothering to push out of her eyes the hair that had fallen in her face. “This is the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. Let's get out of here.”

I nodded and followed her through the door of the office into the laundry room. As quickly as I could, I put the key back where I'd found it, then replaced the photo on its hook. Brittney Bragg's smile, which had seemed self-satisfied before, suddenly looked terrifying. I had an insane image of her drinking the vials of blood—half TV anchor, half vampire—before Callie shut the door to the closet and hid Mrs. Bragg from view. A second later, I was hoisting up the window and looking at Nia, who was frantically texting into her brother's iPhone.

“Nia, it's okay, we're here,” I hissed.

To my surprise, Nia didn't stop typing. “Nia, you can stop texting us. We're right here.” I leaned out the window with the box in my arms.

“I'm not texting you,” Nia said, not turning to look at me.

“Then who—”

“Send. And Send. And Send. And . . .” Muttering to herself that way, she was like a woman possessed.

“Nia, this is heavy.” I raised my voice and she finally looked up, then reached out her hands to take the box, saying, “Oh, sorry,” almost as if the box were somehow an afterthought.

I couldn't resist a little pride in my and Callie's success. “Pretty cool, right?” I asked, grinning. Now that I was half out of the house, I could hear the sound of more cars pulling up to the Braggs'. It sounded like every single cast member had decided to come to the party.

Still typing into Cisco's phone, Nia said, “I'm sorry, you want me to admire you for retrieving something that you lost in the first place?”

Okay, clearly I should have resisted. “Fair point.” I slid myself back inside the laundry room. “We'll meet you out front in five.”

As I put my hands on the screen to drop it down, Nia said, “If you have trouble finding me in the crowd, meet me at the corner.”

Had Nia been in a play with a cast twice the size of the one I'd worked on? I couldn't really see how we'd be unable to find her but I just said, “Okay, the corner,” and shut the screen.

When I turned around, Callie was still holding the photo of her mom and Brittney. Sensing my eyes on her, she said, “Don't tell me I shouldn't have taken it.”

That was pretty much the last thing I would ever have told Callie. If my mom disappeared, I'd take anything I could find that reminded me of her.

“Callie, of course you should have taken it.” I put my hand on her shoulder and together we looked at the picture of the smiling girls.

“Can I tell you something?” Her voice was quiet and shaky, and I had the feeling she was trying not to cry. Without waiting for me to answer, Callie continued. “It's been so warm all week, so yesterday, I went up to the attic to get some summer stuff. . . .” Just thinking about Callie doing that made my heart hurt for her—twice a year my mom suddenly announces it's time to put away (or take out) our winter clothes; she spends a whirlwind weekend putting cedar blocks in duffle bags of warm clothes and washing stuff that she decides smells “like the basement,” and next thing I know the sweaters in my drawers have magically been transformed into T-shirts or my shorts have become jeans.

If she disappeared from our lives, who would do that?

Callie continued. “When I opened this trunk that has all my T-shirts and stuff, on the inside of the top was a . . .” She gestured to indicate something spread out across a surface. “You know those stars you can stick up on your ceiling to make constellations? The kind that glow in the dark?”

I nodded. Cornelia had some in her room. Since my mom had put them there, and since her idea of astronomy is limited to the sentence, “Aren't the stars pretty tonight?” I wasn't sure they were exactly in the shape of constellations, but I knew what Callie was talking about.

“Well, she'd used them to make a star map. Do you know what a star map is? It's a map that shows where the stars are at a particular place and time.”

I nodded and she went on. “Well, the star map in the trunk was the Orion sky. In spring. And . . .” Callie sniffed. “At first I thought, you know, maybe it was like a private joke about when she got out our summer stuff. But with everything that's happened”—she gestured in a way I knew was meant to indicate Amanda, Thornhill, her mother's disappearance, the stolen box— “I got this crazy idea that maybe it's a message. That it means something I'm supposed to understand.”

“Oh, Callie.” I pushed her hair back from her face. The sound of cars honking at one another filtered through the closed window, and when Callie glanced at me, I could see that her cheek was wet. I wiped at it gently, wishing there was something more I could do.

“She'll come home, Callie. She's safe and she's going to come home.”

Suddenly Callie shook herself and wiped at her other cheek with the back of her hand. “I know that,” she said, nodding her head vigorously. “I do.” She turned to me and gave a sad half smile. “I just miss her, you know?”

Now it was my turn to nod.

“So let's get this show on the road, okay?” Callie's voice was normal again, and I could tell she was as okay as she was claiming to be. From the other side of the laundry room door, the sound of voices could be heard, louder than before.

“Sounds like the party's in full swing,” I observed.

Callie stepped in front of me and crossed the room. When I reached her side, she bumped me gently. “Hey! Can you believe we made it in and out of there without getting caught?” There was a wicked smile on her face, and I had the feeling she might not have been half as pleased with herself if we'd stolen Amanda's box back from anyone other than Heidi Bragg.

“Seriously,” I agreed.

She pulled the door open and bright light from the hallway flooded the laundry room, momentarily blinding me.

When I could see again, I found myself staring into the faces of Heidi Bragg and the rest of the I-Girls.