2 Sisters Detective Agency(62)

“Baby,” I said, “despite what you might think about overweight and socially defunct women from the howling depths of Colorado, we are perfectly capable of sleeping with random guys without needing them to rescue us from crushing loneliness by getting romantically involved. Now go take a shower,” I instructed. “I’ll make coffee.”

The doorbell rang. Baby tottered over in the bemused fashion of a girl only just coming to terms with both the worst hangover of her young life and the idea that I, of all people, was more sexually liberated than she was. She opened the door to Ashton Willisee. His exhausted, terrified face made me drop the dustpan into the trash can at my feet.

“I need help,” Ashton said.





Chapter 82



The boy smelled of smoke. One of the knees of his black jeans was torn, and I could see a cube of safety glass, the kind used in car windows, wedged into his boot. Ashton walked in stiffly and went to the spacious living room, numbly staring at the party junk on the couch as though he didn’t know how to solve the intricate problem of shoving it aside to sit down. Baby assisted.

“We killed someone,” Ashton said.

“What the fu—” Baby wheeled around, her eyes wide and locked on me.

I put a hand up as I sat down across from the boy in an armchair. “Ashton, don’t say another word,” I said. “Whatever you’ve done, you don’t need to make it worse by blurting out something that might count in court as a confession to people you barely know.”

Baby’s eyes somehow grew even larger. “He just said he—”

“He’s shell-shocked, panicked, maybe injured,” I said to Baby. “He needs his parents and a legal representative on hand as soon as possible. Ashton, I want you to call your parents now and—”

“I don’t have my phone,” he said. While Baby was becoming more excited by the second, Ashton on the other hand seemed to be calming, easing himself back into the leather couch and fixing his mussed hair. “And I don’t want a lawyer. Last night my friends and I broke into a house in Brentwood, and while we were there, we got trapped. We set the place on fire to escape. We killed the lady who lives there.”

I held my head in my hands, my thoughts racing to find a way to contain the situation legally, even if Ashton insisted on blathering all the details of his crime to Baby and me. Baby curled up on the couch sideways, facing Ashton, her phone glowing as her thumbs danced over the screen.

“I’m going to jail,” Ashton said.

“Well, not for murder,” Baby said. We both looked at her. She was chewing a nail as she scrolled one-handed. “‘A home invasion in Brentwood last night has left a woman with multiple gunshot wounds and neighbors terrorized.’ Looks like half her house burned down, but she’s still alive. She’s in stable condition at Santa Monica Med Center.”

All the air seemed to go out of Ashton. There was silence as Baby continued to scroll.

“You killed two dogs,” she finally said. She looked up from the phone at the boy beside her. “You asshole.”

“I didn’t mean to kill or hurt anybody,” he said. “And what happened last night wasn’t my fault. When it started, when I got into all this, we were just trying to scare people.”

“I’m really going to advise you to stop talking now,” I said.

“I don’t have any choice,” Ashton said. “I have to tell someone what we’ve been doing because he’s coming. He’s going to kill me. And if I don’t let the secret out now, no one will ever know.”





Chapter 83



Ashton told us everything. I sat and watched the boy physically unfold as his story did, his posture loosening, his hands—which had been tucked tightly into his armpits—slowly emerging and beginning to illustrate in the air.

It had started with another excruciating Thanksgiving dinner. In the hours after sunset at his parents’ vacation home in Carpinteria, before Ashton was allowed to join the local kids on the beach, during the insufferable cocktail swigging and hard laughing of socialites with deep tans and painfully white teeth. He’d stood on the balcony and watched his uncle Ray argue with his wife, Francine, then his uncle’s big hand smacked the side of Francine’s head in the dark beyond the palm trees. The strike had made no sound in Ashton’s world, was swallowed up like a scream in space. When he went downstairs and tried to explain what he’d seen, the adults smirked and shrugged or wandered away, changing the subject the way they had with just about everything unpalatable he’d brought up over the years.

As Ashton spoke, I saw the anger rise in his throat and temples, and I recognized a pain in him that I had witnessed many times across my career working with troubled youth. The unmistakable hurt of a child ignored, a child discovering that justice didn’t always play out in the real world.

In that moment, Ashton had realized every story he’d ever been told in his life was a lie. The wolf eats Grandma. The witch eats the children. The robber dashes away from the cop. Sometimes in life people didn’t get what they deserved, and that ugly truth so rocked the boy’s world that he began to obsess over the slap. The sound of it in the night. The looks on his parents’ faces. It stopped being about Aunt Francine and Uncle Ray and started being about everything. The whole unfair, awful, stupid world.