buoy in the violent water of Lily’s life.
“Lily, my God,” she said. Agent Hunt stood behind them.
“This is the girl you were looking for?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. He nodded his acknowledgment and may have even smiled a little.
“She came wandering out of the New Day Farms about an hour before you. She’s been talking about an Agent Grimm, too. For someone who doesn’t exist, he sure does get around.”
Lily was shivering in her arms and Lydia held onto her tight as the girl began to sob.
“Please,” she said, appealing to the youthful humanity she saw in him. “Let me take her back to our hotel. I’ll tell you anything you want to know, just let me get her comfortable and safe.”
An hour later, Lydia, Jeffrey, and Lily were back in the hotel room with an escort waiting outside their door and Agent Hunt sitting at the table. Dax had not been released and no one would discuss his situation with either of them; Lydia was concerned… for a lot of reasons. She wasn’t sure how he had found them and led them out, or what would happen to him now. But she knew he could take care of himself; she’d worry about him after they’d talked to Lily, made sure she was safe from The New Day and returned her to her mother where she belonged.
“I did what you taught me to do. Only it worked a little too well,” she said with a slight laugh. She sat across from Agent Hunt, accepting a bottle of water from the minibar but nothing more.
Everything about her was changed. Where she’d been bright and exuberant, she was quiet and careful. Lily had always been the kind of girl who got excited by things, spoke quickly, moved her hands wildly, laughed easily. This girl was pale and thin as a slip of paper, speaking through lips that were cracked with dehydration, eyes that were dull and filled with grief. Her cloud of silky black curls that had always bounced around her face was gone; only the slightest stubble of her hair remained. She kept bringing a shaking hand up to it, feeling its texture. Lydia wanted to take her home so that she could be tucked in to bed and fed soup until she was feeling better. It was painful to watch her.
“So after your brother’s funeral you went up to Riverdale,” Lydia said. “To try to get into his head.”
She nodded. Swallowing the water seemed to cause her pain and Lydia remembered what Jeffrey had told her about the tubes he’d seen in the throats of New Day guests.
“I had the keys to his apartment. It didn’t take me long to figure out what he had been trying to do.”
“Did you know about the problems your stepfather was having with The New Day?” asked Jeffrey. Lydia glanced at him, realizing that Lily probably didn’t know Tim Samuels was dead. She figured that this wasn’t the right time and they weren’t the right people to tell her.
She shook her head. “No. I knew he and my mother were having problems. I suspected an affair, some asinine midlife crisis. But I didn’t know anything about The New Day.”
“Until?”
“Until after my brother’s alleged suicide.”
Lydia noticed Lily’s use of the word
“So Mickey went there to try to help your stepfather?”
She shook her head slowly, like she still couldn’t believe it. “That’s the way it looked to me; like he’d gone up there for the express purpose of infiltrating The New Day, maybe hoping to expose them or find evidence that could get them to release their grip on Tim.”
“What did you find in your brother’s apartment that made you think that?” asked Jeffrey. His tone was kind and warm, but there was a slight wrinkle in his brow that Lydia recognized as the expression of his natural skepticism. She was with him; something felt off.
“When we were kids, Mickey lived in his imagination, you know? He had a rough time of it after our father’s death. I was too young, really, to feel the impact the way he did. It altered him.” She paused, and turned the bottle of water on the table, inspected it with intensity, as if the movie of her childhood were playing out on the sweating plastic. “It was like he was always looking for something to fill the empty space our father left.”
The words hit Lydia hard, reminded her of her own childhood after her mother died. Her lonely hours filled with books and the stories she wrote. Even before her mother died her mind had worked that way; but afterward she practically disappeared into the mysteries she was forever trying to solve.
“He was different from other kids. He wore this loneliness, this sadness like a cape that somehow set him apart from everyone else, made him seem freakish and strange. So he was a target for bullies, he was awkward and never seemed to fit in anywhere. So he wrote. Notebook after notebook. Journals, poetry, short stories. He exorcised all his demons there. He cut the fabric on the bottom of his box spring and slipped them up inside there.”
“That’s where you found his journals in Riverdale?”
She nodded. “It was his current obsession, The New Day. But it was always something. He was always pouring himself heart and soul into something, trying to lose himself, trying to find himself. I’m not sure which.”
“And you always followed,” said Lydia, remembering the conversation when she’d told her as much.
“All my life I felt like I was chasing him up this path, and he was always just about to turn that one corner after which I’d never be able to find him again.”
Rivers of tears fell from both her eyes and met at her chin, dripped onto the ATF sweatshirt Agent Hunt had given her. Lydia wanted to comfort her but wasn’t sure how; she kept her distance.
“Your brother and your stepdad didn’t always get along. Did it seem weird to you that Mickey would shift off his life to help him?” said Jeffrey.
“They didn’t always get along, that’s true. But Tim raised us both, you know. They had a relationship, even if it wasn’t always an easy one.” She sighed and rolled her head from side to side as if to release tension residing there. “But you’re right. I don’t really know why he did it. My suspicion is that he just
She put an elbow on the table and leaned her head on her hand. Lydia noticed how frail and small her arms looked.
“So much made sense to me after I found his journals. He’d been so strange since the move, so distant, so wrapped up in Mariah. I just thought he was getting himself into another obsessive relationship that was going to end in disaster. Reading his journals I could see clearly how he lost his perspective, his advantage. He went in thinking he had the upper hand and they went to work on him.”
“Maybe The New Day knew who he was all along,” said Lydia.
“It’s possible, I guess. They knew everything about my stepfather.”
“How did your brother get involved with Mariah?”
“He met her at one of The New Day meetings. It was right at the point where his journal entries started to shift. He started out with nothing but disdain for them and slowly began to express a kind of grudging admiration.”
“He didn’t connect that Mariah was Marilyn.”
She shook her head. “No. He never made that connection that I know of. We’d never met her while my father was dating her. So he would have had no way of knowing what she looked like. Maybe Tim never even told him about her. I only learned that they were the same person after Mickey died. When I found the journals, I confronted Tim. He admitted to me that he’d confided in Mickey but claimed he had no idea what Mickey was planning.”
“At that point, Lily, why didn’t you take what you knew to the police?” asked Jeffrey.
She looked at him. “My stepfather. He has made some terrible mistakes that he thought were dead and buried. Trevor Rhames knew those secrets, threatened to expose him.”
Lydia shook her head. “What could be so bad that he would sacrifice his children to escape it?” It was the second time she’d asked that question in forty-eight hours.
Lily turned her eyes to Lydia. “I really don’t know. But he said it involved my mother and that she would be hurt by the exposure, as well.”
“You weren’t curious to know what they might be, these secrets?” asked Lydia, knowing the heart of a journalist too well to let that slide.
