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“Well, it’s a start,” she said, pursing her lips and I had to smile. It was time to get him out of the house. I walked him to the car and stared at it.
“I don’t know if I can drive that car,” I said.
I usually drove Ethan to school and back in the SUV. But this little sports car was Sam’s toy, and he was the one who drove it to work. He usually didn’t let anyone touch the coupé.
“Oh, it handles easy, you’ll see.”
He called a local charter service and booked a flight for me to Martha’s Vineyard. He told me the plane would wait and hopefully, return when I found my brother. I kissed him goodbye, then went inside to talk to my parents. I knew they didn’t like the idea of Sam being back in my life, but they would be focusing on my finding Tucker.
“Last we heard, he was holed up in that mansion with the girl, up to no good,” my mother said, unhappily. “I haven’t heard from him in days.”
From Zac I had a general idea where the Tennant house was and fortunately, once I had landed and found a car to take me there, the local driver knew which way to go.
“Everyone knows Lexi Tennant,” he said and winked at me. “Bit of a wild child!”
I didn’t like hearing that.
“I’m actually looking for my brother,” I said.
The driver, a young guy around my age, looked at me. “They’re a rowdy bunch. Lexi always has people staying with her, they get pissed, and we drive them around all the time,” he said, knowingly. He pulled up outside a large property with a big iron fence. We pressed the intercom and the gates opened without anyone asking me any questions.
The driver laughed. “They probably think it’s one of their friends.”
I asked him to wait for me and got out. The house was enormous, beautiful, and expansive, with wide lawns and trees in the distance. I walked up to the front door and saw it was slightly open. Music and the sound of laughter came from inside. I heard water splashing as if people were swimming. I pushed the door open and entered a large, marbled foyer, with a table containing a stunning bouquet of flowers. Two grand staircases swept towards the top floor. On the ground floor, there were plush sitting rooms and in one of them, I saw young men sprawled on the expensive furniture. The smell of weed was overpowering. One of the men, who wasn’t wearing a shirt watched me come in through heavily-lidded eyes.
“I’m looking for Tucker,” I said. “Do you know him?”
He didn’t seem to understand me.
“Tucker!” I said louder. “Or Lexi?”
That seemed to register. He pointed upstairs as if even speaking a single word was too much effort. I went upstairs and found a plush carpeted corridor, with cabinets and Oriental vases on display. I had never been surrounded by so much wealth and I wondered how my brother, who’d always been more of a working-class guy, fit into all this. I followed the sound of giggling into a huge bedroom with a four-poster bed, where two young women were sprawled on the bed, doing each other’s nails.
“Lexi?”
A blond girl looked up, she looked about twelve years old. She stared at me as if through a haze, like she was in a kind of dream world.
“I’m looking for Tucker, do you know where he is?”
“Tucker,” she said, as if trying out the name for the first time.
“Tucker?” the other girl turned to her, and they started laughing like it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.
“Is he here?” I asked again. But they kept on laughing, hysterically and I realized I wasn’t going to get anything meaningful out of them. I looked in all the bedrooms and bathrooms, but he wasn’t there. I went downstairs, out to the pool area and saw someone sprawled on a pool lounger. It was Tucker, completely passed out though.
I ran out to the taxi driver and got him to help me carry Tucker to the car.
“Is he all right?” the driver asked, uneasily. He clearly wasn’t keen on taking anyone in the car who may be about to throw up all over his seats.
“He’s fine,” I said, hoping it was true.
I hadn’t seen Tucker in months, and I was shocked at the state of him. He’d lost weight and was barefoot, wearing a cowboy hat and leather vest. He looked like he’d just been in a music video or something.
“Take me back to the plane,” I said.
Tucker mumbled something but he didn’t open his eyes.
Nobody from the house had said anything to me as we’d carried Tucker from the house. The gates swung open automatically as the car crushed the gravel on the way out. It felt surreal, like something from a movie.
