“The backlighting gives me headaches.”
“Then get the audiobook.” Charlie waves a hand at the car radio. “Or don’t, actually, because I already have it.” He unlocks his phone and hands it over. Simon scrolls through four chaotically disorganized pages before finding the audiobook app.
“I didn’t agree to any of this,” Simon says as he opens the book and starts it from the beginning.
Chapter Eight
They’re still in the middle of the desert when houses start to appear. Before Simon’s ready for it, Charlie’s taking an exit.
Simon’s experience of the world is mostly confined to a couple of affluent zip codes in California and the greater New York area, cities in Europe that have fashion weeks, and various beachy vacation spots.
He isn’t avoiding the rest of humanity out of snobbery—which he’s sure of because there are plenty of things he does avoid out of snobbery. It’s just—new things make him uncomfortable, and since his baseline level of comfort these days is a two out of ten, maybe it isn’t a terrible idea to do what it takes to prevent that number from sinking any lower.
The neighborhood Charlie turns into is rough, not just by Simon’s standards. The lawns are a mix of dry dirt and weeds. A couple houses have boarded up windows.
“I tried to buy him a nicer house,” Charlie mutters. “That didn’t go over too well.”
“Not judging.”
“Yeah, right.”
For the past half hour, Charlie’s been cracking his knuckles, rolling his shoulders, gripping the steering wheel so hard his fingers gowhite. He’s grinding his teeth loudly enough that Simon can hear it. He’s worried, and if there’s anything in the world that Simon understands, it’s worry. After six hours in the car together, Simon can’t just sit idly by, so he aims for distraction.
“When my mother tried to buy me a nicer house, I didn’t talk to her for three months.” This is a lie. Simon and his mother exchanged perfectly cordial texts and had their usual semi-monthly phone call in which they take turns monologuing at one another, but in his heart, Simon wasn’t talking to her.
“Your house went for over two million dollars. What the fuck.”
“Did you look up my house on Zillow?”
“Obviously.”
Simon snorts. “This was before I bought the house.” He’d been living in a perfectly nice condo in West Hollywood, but Simon’s mother had been Concerned.
Charlie turns into a driveway that already has an ancient car parked in it, propped up on concrete blocks. Simon isn’t totally sure about his role in this whole operation, but when Charlie gets out of the car, Simon follows.
It seems like a bad sign that the rusty mailbox next to the front door is overflowing. Charlie rings the bell anyway and radiates impatience for thirty seconds. Then he goes around the side of the house, uses his bare hand to scrape through the dirt in a cement planter, and returns with a key. “Fucker’s hidden his key in the same place for twenty years.”
Simon is absolutely abetting a felony right now. The only reason he isn’t actively having a panic attack is the sheer novelty of crime.
When Charlie opens the front door, they’re blasted with hot, stale air.
“Dave?” Charlie calls. “It’s Charlie!”
Until now, Simon has managed not to think too hard about what exactly Charlie’s expecting to find here, but he’d like to imagine that if there was any real possibility of—say, just for the sake of argument—a dead body, Charlie would have called emergency services days ago. Still, Simon stays by the front door while Charlie heads into the house, calling his stepfather’s name.
Then, feeling like an asshole for letting Charlie find whatever there is to find—which is not a body—on his own, Simon begins to look through the other side of the house. The kitchen and living room are a mess, but there’s nowhere amid the heaps of clutter a person could possibly be hiding. Through a pair of dusty sliding glass doors is an empty backyard. Well, empty of people. Three cats are perched on a concrete wall. Gas cans and oddly shaped bits of metal are strewn across the patchy lawn.
Inside, Simon looks at the dishes in the sink, the pile of newspapers on the coffee table, the loose paper clips and unemptied ashtrays and stray pieces of paper. He tries to push them to one tidy corner of his mind. They’re none of his business. It’s boiling in here, so he takes off his sweater and folds it neatly before putting it in his bag.
“His truck isn’t in the driveway,” Charlie says, coming into the living room. “And the AC is off, which means he probably planned to be out for more than a few hours.”
“Has he ever done this before?”
“No.”
“If he was going on a trip, who would he have told?”
“He doesn’t really have friends. I checked the garage’s Facebook page and messaged a few of the people who’ve interacted with it, but nobody got back to me. I think they’re dead.”
