Two Can Keep a Secret(83)

“Your brother saved you,” she says.

I feel like Sadie’s robot character in The Defender. That does not compute. How did Ezra wind up in the Nilssons’ basement? But before I can ask another question, everything fades again.



The next time I wake, pale sunlight is streaming into the room. I try to sit up, until a figure in scrubs covered with sailboats gently forces me back down. “Not yet,” a familiar voice says.

I blink until Melanie’s face comes into focus. I want to talk to her, but my throat is on fire. “I’m thirsty,” I croak.

“I’ll bet,” she says sympathetically. “Just a few sips of water for now though, okay?” She raises my head and puts a plastic cup to my lips. I drink greedily until she pulls it away. “Let’s see how you do with that before you have any more.”

I’d protest, but my stomach is already rolling. At least it’s a little easier to talk now, though. “Malcolm?” I manage.

She places a comforting hand on my arm. “In a room down the hall. He’ll be all right. And your mother is on her way.”

“Sadie? But she’s not supposed to leave Hamilton House.”

“Oh, honey. Nobody cares about that right now.”

Everything about me feels as dry as dust, so it’s surprising when tears start rolling down my cheeks. Melanie perches on the side of my bed and snakes her arms around me, folding me into a hug. My fingers curl onto her scrubs and clutch tight, pulling her closer. “I’m sorry,” I rasp. “I’m so sorry about everything. Is Mr. Nilsson …” I trail off as my stomach lurches and I gag.

Melanie raises me into more of a sitting position. “Throw up if you need to,” she says soothingly. “Right here is fine.” But the moment passes, leaving me exhausted and coated in clammy sweat. I don’t say anything else for a long while, concentrating on getting my breathing under control.

When I finally do, I ask again. “Where is he?”

Melanie’s voice is pure ice. “Peter’s in jail, where he belongs.”

It’s such an enormous relief that I don’t even mind when I feel myself slipping into unconsciousness again.



By the time Ryan visits, I almost feel like myself again. I’ve been awake for more than thirty minutes, anyway, and I’ve managed to keep down an entire cupful of water.

“You just missed Ezra,” I tell him. “Nana made him leave. He’d been here for seven hours straight.”

Ryan lowers himself into the chair beside my bed. “I believe it,” he says. He’s not in uniform but wearing faded jeans and a flannel shirt instead. He gives me a nervous, lopsided smile that reminds me of Ezra’s and I wish, for one irrational second, that he’d hug me like Melanie did.

Your brother saved you, Nana had said.

She was right. I just didn’t realize which one.

“Thank you,” I say. “Nana told me you came looking for us at the Nilssons’. But nobody told me why.” I search his open, friendly face, wondering how I ever could have imagined that it harbored dark secrets. My Spidey sense is officially crap, which I’m sure Malcolm will tell me as soon as I’m allowed to see him.

“I don’t want to tire you out,” Ryan starts tentatively, but I cut him off.

“No, please. You won’t, I promise. I need to know what happened.”

“Well.” He hunches his shoulders and leans forward. “I can’t get into everything, but I’ll tell you as much as I can. It’s hard to know where to start, but it was probably with the bracelet Daisy gave me. She says she told you about that.”

“The bracelet? Really?” I sit up so fast that I wince from the headache that suddenly hits me, and Ryan shoots me a worried look. I settle back into the pillows with pretend nonchalance. “I mean, okay. Sure. How so?”

He regards me in silence for a few seconds, and I press my lips together so I won’t accidentally vomit. “I didn’t think much of it at the time,” he finally says. “I followed up with the jeweler and she had no paper trail. She’d sold a bunch of bracelets around the same time and kept lousy records. Dead end, I thought. But I asked her to contact me if any similar sales took place, and last month, she did. A guy bought the exact same bracelet and paid cash. When I asked her to describe him, he fit Peter to a T. Not that I realized it at the time. I didn’t start connecting dots until you guys brought me that repair receipt. That made me question the whole Nilsson family. Then I asked Brooke’s parents if I could look through her jewelry box.”

I have to make myself remember how to breathe. “And?”

“She had a bracelet exactly like Lacey’s. Her mother didn’t know when she’d gotten it, or from whom. But we had our own theories. Obviously.”

“Right, right,” I say sagely. Like that had ever occurred to me, even once.

“At the same time, we were scouring Brooke’s house for clues. Her phone had gone missing the same time she did, but we were able to seize her computer. There was a diary on it, buried among a bunch of school files and password protected. It took us a while to get it open, but once we did we had most of the story. Brooke’s side, anyway. She was cagey about names and details, but we knew she’d had an affair with someone older, that she’d been with him the night something terrible happened, and that she wanted to make things right. We had the car repair receipt, so we were starting to piece things together. But it was all still circumstantial. Then the Huntsburg police found Declan’s ring at the crime scene.”