Page 54 of Hide and Seek
“Shut up.”
“Someone’s touchy.” His tone is mild, but I can hear the edge under it.
“It’s nothing,” I tell him, not looking up from my tablet.
There’s some rustling, then the squeak of Jace’s chair as he stands. “I’m going over to the main house to see what Xave is up to,” he says when I look up. “Are you coming?”
I shake my head.
His expression stays neutral, but I can see the flare of frustration in his eyes. “Do we need to talk about this?”
“No.”
“Are you still lying to yourself about what’s going on?”
“No.”
“Good.” He rakes one hand through his hair and pushes it back from his forehead. “Did you do something stupid?” he asks in his usual blunt manner.
“Depends on your definition of stupid.”
He rolls his eyes. “Will whatever you did come back to bite us in the ass?”
I shrug.
He stares at me for a few beats, and it’s one of the few times in our lives that I can’t read him.
One of the reasons so many people underestimate us or think we’re nothing but empty-headed rich kids is that we’ve always been able to mimic other people’s expressions and reflect whatever we want back to them. We can look happy or sad or confused or sorry on command, and we know how to tailor our reactions not just to a situation, but also to the person, so they think exactly what we want them to.
The only people we can’t do that to are each other and our cousins, to some extent. We could manipulate them the same way as other people if we wanted to, but there’s no point. They know how we are, and they accept us, so they’re the only ones who get the unfiltered version of us.
I don’t like that Jace is hiding from me, but I can’t fault him for it because I’ve been doing the same to him, and he knows it.
We stare at each other for a few beats, then Jace breaks eye contact and grabs a sweater off his bed. “I’ll be back later.”
“’Kay,” I say as he heads toward the door.
I look back down at my tablet as soon as it closes behind him.
I’ve spent the past few days working double time trying to figure out how Myles got mixed up in what happened to Felix and what, if anything, it has to do with what’s going on with him right now. We have most of the information we need, but there’s just enough missing that I can’t piece things together without a larger margin of error than I’m comfortable with.
The facts are simple. Myles worked with Jacob Fisher, and Jacob tried to kill Felix. But if you factor in the other stuff we know, it’s no longer a simple cause-and-effect situation. Myles helped Jacob try to kill Felix, but he also helped Felix whenJacob tried again. And there’s no paper trail between Jacob and Myles, or even the person who hired Jacob and Myles. All the evidence we have stops at Jacob.
I also need to figure out what the Kings have on him, and if they’ll be able to exploit it again in the future. But I can’t do that without all the facts, and every search for new information has come up blank.
Even the police report that Jace found and was able to decrypt didn’t really tell us anything new. All it said was that Myles was abducted on his way home from school and that there were no witnesses or footage of the abduction and they only know it happened because of Myles’s testimony, and the ransom note his family got.
There were a few details about the initial investigation in the file, but considering it was a high-profile kidnapping with a ransom demand, there was almost no mention of any actual legwork or evidence collection, just a lot of conjecture on the part of the officer who wrote the report.
And just like Xave said, Myles was found unharmed less than twenty-four hours later. The report had some details that the article didn’t, like how Myles knocked on multiple doors in a residential neighborhood and had to ask several people to call the police and his parents before someone took him seriously and called it in.
But that’s where things get vague again. According to the report, Myles didn’t see the people who snatched him, and he was taken to a house and held there until he was able to escape and walk to the nearest neighborhood to ask for help.
That’s it. No details about the house, his captors, his imprisonment, nothing. And the file was closed without anyone looking deeper into who did it, like Myles escaping on his own somehow zeroed out the kidnapping and ransom demand.
And it doesn’t look like anyone other than Myles tampered with the file. The actual reports didn’t have any evidence of being changed or altered, and nothing was redacted. It’s possible that because Myles lived in a semi-rural area, the country bumpkin cops were just incompetent and botched the case because they had no idea how to handle an actual crime, but the complete lack of details for such a high-profile victim and the passive wording in the report makes me think there was more to it.
So even with the new info, I’m still left with more questions than answers. It’s like putting a jigsaw puzzle together without a reference photo and missing a half dozen important pieces.
