The Last Orphan -
Chapter 27
Outside a closed bedroom door on the slightly worn maroon carpet of the second floor, Mason turned to Evan and said in a lowered voice, “You will be honest with us. Completely. Or I will pull the plug on all of this. Understand?”
Evan said, “Yes.”
Deborah shouldered past her husband to Evan. For the size of the house, the hallways were surprisingly cramped. “Was Ruby right about Tartarus? Is Luke Devine behind this?”
“I don’t know.”
Deborah pressed closer. “Can you keep her safe?”
Evan said, “Yes.”
“No matter what?”
“Yes.”
Through the door issued televised sounds of gunfire and explosions. An action movie?
“Okay,” she said. “Then let Ruby tell you.”
Evan asked, “Tell me what?”
“That’s up to her,” Mason said to his wife. “To decide whether she trusts him.”
Deborah said, “We should be in there with them.”
“We will ask Ruby what she wants,” Mason said. “If she’s comfortable being alone with him, she’ll say so.”
Evan picked up the third person: “He will do his best to make her comfortable.”
Deborah rapped on the door with a single knuckle.
A voice from beyond: “C’min!”
Deborah opened the door, and the three of them crowded at the threshold like bozos determining how to exit a clown car.
Slumped in a beanbag cast in the sterile blue light of a big-screen TV, Ruby worked an intricate joystick, playing a first-person shooter game. Her face was pallid, slack. It looked like she’d been at it for hours.
It took a moment for Evan to understand the decor. Sports Illustrated swimsuit pictures tacked up over a bed with green flannel sheets. A framed Red Sox jersey covered with Sharpie signatures hung on the wall next to a pennant. Photos wedged in the frame of a mirrored closet door showcased Johnny through the years with different friends and girlfriends—and quite a few with his sister.
Ruby nestled deeper into the beanbag, seemingly comfortable in her brother’s room.
“Ruby,” Deborah said with enviably refined diction, “you have a visitor. Evidently approved by the president of the United States.”
Ruby didn’t look over. Her hands pulsed around the controller. On the television several shady mercenary types met their end, their heads exploding in tomato bursts. The game was no more demure when it came to their screams of agony. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“Cool.” Ruby favored them with a single quick glance. “Well, hi.”
Deborah said, “Would you like us to stay, dear?”
“I’m fine.” Ruby shot a soldier in a gas mask in both knees and then kicked him back into the conveniently located tail propeller of an attack helicopter. Intestinal muck spattered a heretofore invisible lens.
Mason offered Evan a nod of encouragement. “Good luck.”
For the first few minutes after Deborah and Mason withdrew, Evan watched Ruby obliterate an entire squad of mercenaries with a .50-cal meat chopper.
She neither spoke nor looked up.
Finally she tossed over a second remote and chinned at the beanbag next to her. “Don’t just stand there. Get in.”
A challenge.
Evan sat with the remote and tried to figure out the weapon-control system. The movement mechanics were baffling; every time he tried to lead a target, he missed by several inches. The little recoil buzz of the joystick drove him crazy.
He missed all his shots.
He took fire.
He ate a grenade.
He accidentally shot himself in the leg. Twice.
“You really suck at this,” Ruby said.
“That seems to be the case,” he conceded.
Taking pity on him, she turned off the game. “You’re here about my brother.”
“Yes.”
“Do you actually want to figure out what happened to him? Seriously? Or is this more a*s-covering bureaucratic nonsense?”
“The former.”
“Why?”
“I saw that video you posted a year ago.”
“Right,” she said. “And then you just decided to help.”
“Yes.”
She did a double take, saw that he wasn’t joking. “Okay. What do you want to know?”
“Anything you can tell me. What he was like. The kind of crowd he was running with. You said you don’t think he knew the young woman whose body was found with his. Did he date black girls?”
Ruby looked appalled. “That’s so racist!”
“Why?”
“Why? Because you assume there’s, like, a type that dates black girls. And a type that doesn’t.”
“Okay,” he said. “Did Johnny just date people who he liked no matter their skin color?”
Her cheeks dimpled ever so slightly with amusement, the effect winning.
“Yeah,” she said, “he dated everyone. And everyone dated him. That was him. That was Johnny.”
Her eyes lowered and her face softened in that manner he’d seen time and again with Joey when emotion started pressing toward the surface. Evan knew to keep his mouth shut so as not to scare it back down inside her.
The room was warm, and the air bore the faintest tinge of incense. Several worms of ash lay in a cherrywood burner on the nightstand.
Evan marveled at how the room had been preserved, as if Johnny might stroll in at any moment and plop down on the bed. He wondered how much time Ruby spent in here playing video games, burning incense, occupying the space her brother used to fill.
“He was out ahead of everyone else,” she said. “Always in a rush—to practice, to a party, to fun. The first to drink, the first to have s*x, the first to smoke pot. But he was the most naïve, too, somehow.” She pursed her lips. “His base setting was … faith in the world. He thought the universe was as loving as it presented itself to him. They talk about that as entitlement, but, man, I’d never want to be that kind of ignorant. He was my big brother, right? But also he was so … young. And kinda dumb. But sweet all the way through, you know?”
She picked at a fingernail. “And he was … beautiful. Like someone Lord Byron would’ve fallen in love with. He had this dreamy stoner smile like from the seventies. He was insufferable.” She was crying. “And if he was just dead because an Acme safe fell on his head or because he drunk-crashed his car, then fine. But if someone did this to him? Just because? I don’t know how to live in a world where that goes unanswered.”
Evan said, “Me neither.”
She swiped away tears with the pulled-down cuff of her sweater, not breaking eye contact. There wasn’t a trace of embarrassment in her for crying.
“Look at that,” she said. “We agree on something.”
The moment sat there bright and pleasing between them.
“Your parents said you had something to tell me,” he said.
She shrugged. “Okay.”
The quickness of her response caught him off guard.
“What?” She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “If my parents say I can trust you, I can trust you.”
“It’s that easy?”
“Have you met my parents?”
“Briefly. But I take your point.”
“And believe me,” Ruby said, “I’m dying for more people to trust. It’s the only way out of any of this.”
“You are terrifyingly astute.”
“So I’ve been told. But there’s a thing. Which is. I haven’t shown this to anyone else but my parents. And if I show it to you, you have to protect me.”
This was proving to be the easiest game of Win Your Trust he’d played in all his years of operating.
He said, “Okay.”
Ruby shifted to fish out her iPhone and held it up so it captured facial recognition. Pulling up voice mail, she went to a saved message labeled: UNIDENTIFIED CALLER.
She hesitated. A thin line of sweat sparkled at her brow. She blinked a few times rapidly, bracing herself. Then pressed PLAY.
A voice distorted through horror-movie software, all low growling menace and satanic reverberation: “Stop talking about your brother. Stop asking questions about your brother. Or I will come for you like I came for him. You’ll get your counseling, your medication to try to convince yourself that maybe I forgot, that it’s safe to talk to the cops, that the threat is no longer real. But I am. I always will be. You will never be safe from me.”
It clicked off. Her lips were trembling. She quit out of the screen and shoved the phone back into her pocket, then rolled her lips over her teeth and bit down.
He wondered at the kind of strength it would take for a nineteen-year-old girl to be able to carry a message like that around in her pocket. He wondered if the level of anger elicited in him was sustainable or if it would burn a hole straight through the mission.
“There,” she said. “I told you. Now you have to keep me safe.”
She bounced up and skipped out of her room. Making a mental note to grab a recording of the voice mail later, Evan followed her downstairs to the kitchen.
Mason was slicing heirloom tomatoes at the counter, and Deborah sat on a stool across from him, flipping through a gossip magazine.
“I showed it to him,” Ruby announced.
The words had a visible effect on both parents. Mason gave a somber nod and resumed chopping.
Ruby slung an arm across Evan’s shoulders, though she had to reach up to do so. “I found him,” she said. “So now I get to keep him.”
“What do you mean you found him?” Deborah asked.
“I wiled him here. With my damsel-in-distress wiles.” Draping the back of her hand across her forehead Lichtenstein-style, Ruby feigned a swoon into Evan. He caught her and propped her neatly back on her feet. “And now? He is my sworn liege forever.”
Deborah set down the magazine and strummed the shiny cover once with perfectly manicured nails. “Is that so, Evan No-Last-Name?”
“I meet a lot of characters in my line of work,” Evan said. “Your daughter’s the first one who’s scared me in a while.”
Mason migrated the last few perfect circles of burrata from the cutting board onto matching tomato counterparts and drizzled them with a balsamic reduction. “Forever’s a long time, Ruby,” he said, “so why don’t we start with dinner?”
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