2 Sisters Detective Agency(19)

“Baby.” I grabbed her wrist. “You are not going to Milan.”

“It’s so funny that—”

“I’m serious,” I said. “Listen, I get it. I totally get where you’re coming from here, okay? Your dad is gone, and some woman who’s only been in your life for five minutes starts bossing you around. You’ve had all the independence you’ve ever wanted, and now a stranger thinks she can walk in and change that instead of trusting you, like your father trusted you, to take care of yourself.”

Baby glared at me.

“But you have to see where I’m coming from too,” I said. “Dad created this situation, and it doesn’t matter how stupid or selfish it is—this is the situation we’re in and we’ve got to deal with it. And it’s going to take more than a few hours to do that. You can’t run off to Milan before we’ve straightened all this out.”

Baby grabbed a beer bottle from a table nearby and flung it at the wall beside us. It shattered, startling the girl on the couch and two other girls I hadn’t noticed earlier, sleeping on blankets by the windows.

She pointed at the wall now dripping with beer. “Give me my credit card and get out of my face or next time that’ll be your head.”

“Baby, I’ve been visiting teenagers in juvenile detention since before you were born,” I said. “If you think having a beer bottle thrown at me is the worst threat I’ve ever faced, you’re dreaming. You’re not getting the card. You’re not going to Milan. End. Of. Discussion.”

She stormed off. I did the same, internally raging at my father for having done this to us, and at myself for doing a terrible job of handling Baby so far. I didn’t get her. She wasn’t responding to sympathy, humor, or stern directives. I worried that eventually I would run out of my usual grab bag of strategies for dealing with teenagers in peril. It didn’t make sense to me that I couldn’t level with or relate to my own sister.

I reminded myself that now wasn’t the time to panic or decide I’d failed. After all, I’d known her only a couple of hours. Baby and I would grow to understand each other eventually.

I went back into the garage and popped the trunk of my car, then hefted the duffel bag of cash out. I carried it upstairs and found my father’s bedroom on the second floor. I could tell it was his room from all the cigar stink. In the en suite bathroom, I knelt and gave the block of wood under the cabinet doors an experimental push. It tilted out from its housing and toppled over.

Creature of habit, my father, just like me.

When I was a little kid, maybe six, I discovered my father’s hidey-hole in our home in Watkins. I walked in on him grunting and sweating, his body bent and his arm shoved deep into the small space under the vanity in my parents’ bathroom. I thought for a moment he was fixing a plumbing problem, as I had seen workmen do around the house, but catching my father doing manual labor was as bewildering as if he had been in there training a monkey to do backflips. Then I saw him pull out a small jewelry case from the hidden space and place it on the floor by his knees. That’s when he noticed me standing there and snapped with sudden, shocked rage. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Nothing!” I cowered. “What are you doing?”

“None of your business, kid.” He grabbed his knees, his face reddened and puffy. “What in the world has your mother been teaching you that you think it’s okay to go creeping around people’s personal business? You’re so nosy! Goddamnit!”

He shoved the case into his back pocket, and I hung around guiltily in the bedroom while he recovered.

“You still here? What are you, my supervisor? You gotta watch everything I do around here?”

“Is that a present for Mommy?”

“Is what a present for Mommy?”

“The box.” I pointed at his pocket.

“Listen, kid.” He bent and pointed a finger in my face. “You tell your mommy about that box, or that little hole under the sink, and I’ll gut every toy you own and stuff a nice big pillow for myself with their insides. You understand?”

I’d waited for the little jewelry case to turn up at my mother’s birthday dinner or at Christmas. Month after month I’d waited, but it never showed up.

Now I bent all the way down and looked into the dusty darkness. It was clear items had been hidden in the space over time, but there was nothing there now. I could see shapes outlined in the dirt and grit but couldn’t tell what they had been.

I unzipped the bag and took one last look at the money. A few stacks of bills had slid around, revealing a key on a yellow plastic tag near the top of the pile. The label on the tag was for a storage facility in Torrance. Trepidation washed over me. Whatever Dad was keeping out in Torrance must be as secret and full of malignant potential as the hidden cash itself. I took the key, secured the money in the hidden compartment under the vanity, then walked into the hall and saw Baby on a balcony overlooking the beach.

“We’ve got to go,” I said.

“Where?” she asked. She swiped quickly at her face to hide her tears.

“Torrance,” I said. “I have a feeling Dad’s got more surprises in store for us.”





Chapter 22



Jacob moved like smoke. It was a skill he’d learned early in his time as a killer, when he’d been too raw and inexperienced to kill up close. He’d ventured silently into hotel rooms in Paris and London to replace pills in bathrooms with lethal capsules full of ricin powder or arsenic, leaving no trace of himself.