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Mike still wanted that kid back. But that kid was probably gone. Maybe that was okay.
Mo pulled into the driveway. He was taking them to the Rangers versus Devils game down in Newark. Anthony, who along with Mo had saved their lives, was going too. Mike had thought Anthony saved his life the first time, in that alley, but it had been Adam who’d delayed them long enough—and had the knife scar to prove it. It was a heady thing for a parent to realize—the son saving the father. Mike would get teary and want to say something, but Adam wouldn’t hear it. He was silent brave, that kid.
Like his father.
Tia looked out the window. Her two men-boys started toward the door to say good-bye. She waved at them and blew them a kiss. They waved back. She watched them get into Mo’s car. She kept her eyes on them until the car faded away at the turn down the road.
She called out. “Jill?”
“I’m upstairs, Mom!”
They had taken the spy software off Adam’s computer. You could argue it a dozen different ways. Maybe if Ron and Betsy had been watching Spencer more closely, they could have saved him. But maybe not. There is a certain fate to the universe and a certain randomness. Here Mike and Tia had been so worried about their son—and in the end, it was Jill who came closer to dying. It was Jill who suffered the trauma of having to shoot and kill another human being. Why?
Randomness. She happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
You can spy, but you can’t predict. Adam might have found a way out of this on his own. He could have made that tape and Mike wouldn’t have been assaulted and nearly killed. That crazy kid Carson wouldn’t have pulled a gun on them. Adam wouldn’t still be wondering if his parents truly trusted him.
Trust is like that. You can break it for a good reason. But it still remains broken.
So what had Tia the mother learned from all this? You do your best. That’s all. You go in with the best intentions. You let them know that they are loved, but life is too random to do much more. You can’t really control it. Mike had this friend, a former basketball star, who liked to quote Yiddish expressions. His favorite was “Man plans, God laughs.” Tia had never really gotten that. She thought that it gave you an excuse to not try your hardest because, hey, God is going to mess with you anyway. But that wasn’t it. It was more about understanding that you could give it your all, give yourself the best chances, but control is an illusion.
Or was it still more complex than even that?
One could argue just the opposite—snooping had saved them all. For one thing, snooping had helped them realize that Adam was in over his head.
But more than that, the fact that Jill and Yasmin snooped and knew about Guy Novak’s gun—without that, they would all be dead.
So ironic. Guy Novak keeps a loaded gun in his house and rather than it leading to disaster, it saves them all.
She shook her head at the thought and opened the fridge door. They were low on groceries.
“Jill?”
“What?”
Tia grabbed her keys and wallet. She looked for her cell phone.
Her daughter had recovered from the shooting with surprising ease. The doctors warned her that it could be a delayed reaction or maybe she realized that what she did was proper and necessary and even heroic. Jill wasn’t a baby anymore.
Where had Tia put her cell phone?
She had been sure that she had left it on the counter. Right here. Not more than ten minutes ago.
And it was that simple thought that turned everything around.
Tia felt her body go rigid. In the relief of survival, they had let a lot of things go. But suddenly, as she stared down at the spot where she was sure she had left her cell phone, she thought about those unanswered questions.
That first e-mail, the one that started it all, about going to DJ Huff’s house for a party. There had been no party. Adam had never even read it.
So who had sent it?
No . . .
Still searching for her cell, Tia lifted the house phone, picked it up, and dialed. Guy Novak answered on the third ring.
“Hey, Tia, how are you?”
“You told the police that you sent out that video.”
“What?”
“The one with Marianne having sex with Mr. Lewiston. You said you sent it out. To get revenge.”
“So?”
“You didn’t know about it at all, did you, Guy?”
Silence.
“Guy?”
“Let it go, Tia.”
He hung up.
She crept up the stairs quietly. Jill was in her own room. Tia didn’t want her to hear. It was all coming together. Tia had wondered about that, about these two horrible things—Nash going on his rampage, Adam vanishing—happening at the same time. Someone had joked that bad things come in threes and you better watch out. But Tia had never quite bought that.
The e-mail about the Huff party.
The gun in Guy Novak’s drawer.
The explicit video that was sent to Dolly Lewiston’s address.
What tied them all together?
Tia turned the corner and said, “What are you doing?”
Jill jumped at the sound of her mother’s voice. “Oh, hi. Just playing Brickbreaker.”
“No.”
“What?”
They joked about it, she and Mike. Jill was nosy. Jill was their Har riet the Spy.
“I’m just playing.”
But she wasn’t. Tia knew that now. Jill didn’t take her phone all the time to play video games. She did it to check Tia’s messages. Jill didn’t use the computer in their room because it was newer and worked better. She did it to see what was going on. Jill hated to be treated like a little kid. So she snooped. She and her friend Yasmin.
Innocent kid stuff, right?
“You knew we were watching Adam’s computer, didn’t you?”
“What?”
“Brett said that whoever sent that e-mail had done it from inside the house. They sent it, they went on Adam’s e-mail because he wasn’t home, they deleted it. I couldn’t figure out who would or could do that. But it was you, Jill. Why?”
Jill shook her head. But at the end of the day, a mother knows.
“Jill?”
“I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“I know. Tell me.”
“You guys shredded the reports, but I mean, why did you suddenly have a shredder in your bedroom? I could hear you whispering about it at night. And you even bookmarked the site for E-SpyRight on your computer.”
“So you knew we were spying?”
“Of course.”
