Ms. Neace had been our parents’ housekeeper for the better part of thirty years, but nonetheless, Dr. Bart had rarely allowed her into his office—she could go in only on Friday mornings, when he was at the university. Even then, Dr. Rose watched over her as she worked.
“Please, Meg. This is important. The police found a card just like it in Alyssa Tepper’s purse,” I told her.
“It can’t be the same one.”
“A 1936. Half the paper on the back was missing, and the left corner was torn.”
“For real?”
“There’s something else,” I told her. “She had a sparrow feather. I saw it in her apartment. It was on a leather strap, like a necklace.”
Megan said nothing.
“Meg, please,” I pleaded.
“Are you sure it was a sparrow feather? There’s, like, thirty-seven million kinds of birds, Michael, and they’ve all got feathers.”
“I’d recognize one of those feathers from a hundred feet.”
“You need to come home, Michael. Right now. Just come home.”
I looked down at Eads’s driver’s license in my hand. “I can’t. If I run, they’ll find me. I need to figure out what’s going on.”
“Maybe we should tell Dr. Rose.”
“No way.”
“She can protect you.”
“Promise me you won’t.”
Megan didn’t reply.
“Meg? Promise me.”
Finally, she said, “Promise me you’ll come home, then I’ll think about it.”
“I will,” I told her. “As soon as I can.” I hung up before she could object, because Megan would object.
At a small drugstore, with money from Roland Eads’s wallet, I bought a baseball cap, sunglasses, and a T-shirt. Not much of a disguise, but all I could put together. I also bought a disposable phone. I changed in the alley behind the store, stuffed my sweatshirt deep into a Dumpster, then dialed Megan from the disposable phone. The call went to voice mail.
I fished the cassette tape out of my pocket and glared at the handwritten label.
Dark room—M. Kepler—August 12, 1996.
Dr. Bart’s handwriting.
I was four in 1996. The year I went to live with the Fitzgeralds.
I needed a cassette player, and I knew where to find one.
Chapter Thirteen
Written Statement,
Megan Fitzgerald
To Special Agent Jessica Gimble, the lovely Detective Dobbs, and their friends in law enforcement—
Okay, fine, I’ll write it all down. Every last word of it. Not because you asked me to, but because I think it may be the only way all of Michael’s story gets out there. The truth of it. The nuts and bolts. I’m certainly not going to leave it up to any of you to piece together. I’ve spent the past two days watching all of you try to gather evidence and figure out what really happened, and while that was pretty entertaining, I can’t let you twist in the wind forever. You’re clowns in a circus car. Our tax dollars at work—what a joke. I owe this to Michael. I’ve got no intention of throwing him under the bus—he managed to crawl under there all by his lonesome. But when the dust settles on these last forty-eight hours, I do want to be sure the facts are straight. And you clearly need a little help in that department.
So here it goes, all that you’ve missed, spelled out nice and neat on a legal pad. I’ll try and keep it between the lines and in tight cursive just as Dr. Bart would have wanted. The language of a lady, as Dr. Rose would insist. Pay attention, kids—it’s time to go to school.
My shit of a brother hung up on me!
He called me from a pay phone somewhere in LA not only to repeat that he’d found a dead girl in his bathtub but also to tell me how his attorney had decided to bypass the court system and bust him out of jail. He finished with the attorney catching a bullet in the head soon after exiting said police station.
He rattled all this off, then he hung up on me! I hit Redial from my call log but the line just rang and rang, a dozen times at least. I couldn’t call him back on his phone; he said the police had that. I did the only sane thing I could—I rolled over in my bed and screamed into my pillow.
I felt better after that. Nothing like a good scream to clear the head. You all should try it, maybe you could actually do what you’re paid for.
That’s when I caught the smell of breakfast wafting up from downstairs—bacon, eggs, English muffins…Ms. Neace, no doubt. It seemed odd for such a normal thing to fill my senses after Michael’s phone call.
I pushed back my sheets and down comforter, sat on the edge of my bed, and caught the naked girl staring at me from the full-length mirror in the corner of my room. Even from that distance, I spotted the bags under my eyes, the tangled mess of my brown hair. At least my boobs looked good. I gave the nips a tweak. I could always count on the girls.
I had spent the entire night dialing Michael over and over after he’d found that body. I’d texted too. Dr. Rose always insisted I get at least eight hours. I probably slept half that. No bueno…
No way I could let Dr. Rose see me like that. She’d know something was up if I planned to help Michael, and that wasn’t an option. I snatched my robe from the back of my dressing-table chair, threw it on, and fumbled with my hairbrush.
One hundred strokes, fifty per side.
Better.
Little concealer under the eyes—much better.
I glanced down at my desk at that point, and I’m not gonna lie, I stared at it a few minutes.
Dr. Bart bought me that desk when I was a kid. An antique Cutler rolltop, more than one hundred years old, in perfect condition.
“This desk belonged to a schoolteacher in Buffalo during the First World War,” he told me on the day he presented it. He’d guided me down the hallway and ushered me into my bedroom blindfolded. “Her husband left to fight in the war, and she sat here every night writing him letters, praying for his safe return. He never did come home, though. When she passed at the age of eighty-one, she left the desk to her grandson, an attorney in the city. It remained in his office until I purchased it at an auction last week. This desk has seen the birth of equal rights, the Great Depression, multiple wars, the rise and fall of nations, the deaths of Kennedy and King, and the destruction of the Twin Towers. Imagine the secrets held within that polished mahogany. This desk is a witness to history, and now it’s part of your history to own, to cherish—you will write its next chapter before passing it on to your own children one day.”
I was five.
WTF, right? Who says that to a five-year-old?
Twenty minutes later, I wrote my name across the front with yellow crayon. Dr. Rose cleaned it before Dr. Bart saw what I’d done. I never did like antiques much, anyway.
There’s a hidden compartment under the center desk drawer—that’s where I kept the sparrow feathers Dr. Bart gave me over the years. Soft and pressed tight between the pages of Wuthering Heights.
Have you ever read that book, Detective Dobbs? I doubt it. You look like a jock who probably avoided books without pictures. I bet Jessica read it, though, when she was a girl, all curled up on a bench at her window in her perfect room on a perfect street in a perfect little town.