But I bristle when I hear a familiar, chipper voice speaking to the doorman out front.
“It doesn’t matter if the mayor is having a party. She will be delighted to meet with me.”
“She’ll be delighted to meet with you,” the doorman responds mechanically, and invites Simon into the house.
I climb the gate that separates the backyard from the front yard, trying to get a better view into the windows of the foyer. My attention already torn between trying to ascertain what Daphne and Tobin are up to, and trying to figure out why Simon would be meeting with the mayor in the middle of her party, when something else pulls at me. The hairs on the back of my neck bristle, and I suddenly feel as though I am being watched.
I scan the backyard, but it seems as though none of the party-goers has noticed me perched on top of the gate. I look behind me into the front yard, and then beyond to the road. The light from one of the street lamps glints off the visor of the helmet of a man sitting on an idling black motorcycle. His face is completely covered by the helmet, but I can tell by the way his head is angled that he is either watching me or has a strange fascination with cedarwood fences. A catering van pulls up to the curb, blocking him from my view—and me from his.
I tell myself that he is probably just waiting to rendezvous with a party guest and noticed a teenager sitting on the gate in the middle of the mayor’s yard, and I turn my attention back to the windows of the room Daphne had entered. Only now she and Tobin are gone, and Simon and the mayor have replaced them in the room, seemingly locked in an intense conversation.
Chapter twenty-eight
DAPHNE
Tobin leads me down a long hall toward the front of the mansion. He stops and waits until one of the waiters passes, with a silver tray of tempura shrimp, before we duck through a set of French doors into a room I assume is his mother’s office. There are glass cases displaying various vases and artifacts lined up along the edges of the room. Some look Asian in origin, but most of them look like relics from ancient Greece or Rome.
“Is your mom a collector or something?”
Tobin puts a finger to his lips to quiet me. “Yeah,” he whispers. “But none of this is what I wanted to show you.” He leads me to a large mahogany desk and opens one of the drawers.
“What are you doing?”
From the way he’s acting, I almost think he’s planning on pulling a heist in his mother’s office—and using me as his accomplice—but what he pulls from the drawer is hardly something valuable. In terms of money, that is. It looks like an old family photo.
“Notice anything weird about this picture?”
There are a lot of weird things about this photo. It’s at least seven years old, based on how old Tobin looks in the picture, but I wouldn’t have guessed it was his family from appearance. The woman in the photo has long, naturally curly, auburn hair and a daisy tucked behind her ear, and the Japanese man in the photo has hair almost to his shoulders, and wears a beaded necklace and a T-shirt with a windmill design on the front. Besides their faces, they barely resemble the dapper power couple of the mayor and her husband. There’s another boy in the photo who looks to be a few years older than Tobin.
“Who’s that?”
“My brother, Sage,” Tobin says. “He went off to MIT a couple of years ago.”
“MIT. I’m guessing he wasn’t as into singing as you are?”
“No. He’s a mechanical genius, just like my parents.”
“Your parents?” Then I recognize the windmill design on his father’s T-shirt. “Wait. I’ve heard your last name before. Oshiro-Winters Wind Energy. Your parents own one of the largest alternative energy companies in the West. They built a wind farm a few miles outside Ellis a few years ago.”
“Owned,” he corrects me. “They went public and sold out just before we moved to Olympus Hills. They retired at forty, except for my mom going into local politics and all. They were total hippies, and now they’re the ultimate yuppies.”
“I’ll say.” I point at the picture. “Your mom looks like she could have been on the cover of a Simon and Garfunkel album.”
“But that’s not the weirdest thing about this picture. Do you see it?” He points out the way his brother Sage’s hand seems to float, as if it were resting on an invisible person’s shoulder.
“Is there someone missing from this picture?”
“My sister, Abbie.”
I think back to the only other time Tobin had mentioned his sister—in the grove. “Your sister. The one you said liked to go to the grove with her friends.… Before she ran away?”
Tobin nods. “It happened six months after my parents got rich and moved to Olympus Hills. They were so upset when she went missing. But not like worried upset, like angry upset.”
“Is that why they Photoshopped her out of this picture?”
“Not just this picture. All of our pictures. I can barely remember what she looks like sometimes. They say she dishonored the family. They won’t even speak her name these days. But the thing is, Daphne, sometimes, I don’t think she ran away. Sometimes, I think … that she was taken.”
“Taken. Like kidnapped? What do your parents think?”
“They think I’m nuts. She left a note on her computer, and my dad says the PI he hired to check it out couldn’t find anything to suggest there was foul play involved. But that note didn’t sound like the Abbie I knew. It was more like someone else had written it for her.”
“That’s insane. I mean, not that I think you’re insane. That’s just some pretty intense stuff. I mean, you were what, like, ten years old when this happened?”
He nods. “I was the last person to see her, you know. I was out riding my bike around the lake and I saw her crossing that bridge that leads into the grove only a couple of hours before she didn’t show up for dinner. She wasn’t alone.”
I raise my eyebrows, asking the question I can’t quite put to words.
“He was a new friend of hers from school—a visiting student from the East Coast. His last name was Lord and he looked an awful lot like this Haden guy.”
“What?” I say, completely confused.
“That’s why I flipped out at school on Monday. After hearing your description of Haden and hearing his last name … Something just came over me and I thought …”