“No,” Drew says. “It was just to throw the scent off a bit. We thought it might help if they had another thread to pull that led nowhere. I don’t know. We figured it might take longer to put it all together, and we needed time.”
“To help your father? That’s what this is about?”
“Mom, he’s broken. He’s not in his right mind. I thought I could protect him for a little while—just until we could figure it out. He couldn’t go back to prison. Can you imagine? I figured he just didn’t know what he was doing, so we came up with a plan.” Drew sits down next to Roxie.
“And it kinda worked,” Roxie says. “People stopped talking about the Labor Day bomb and thought about their kids—the school thing is all they talked about. Still is. And then we went to work.”
“For a short time... and then everything became about Tia, but that still gave us more time,” Drew says.
“How has it gone this far?” Sasha asks, stunned, trying to absorb it all.
“I had to do something. I mean, if you saw the pair of them—Dad and this guy, I don’t even know his name—there’s no way they were capable of tying their shoes, let alone building a car bomb.”
Sasha turns from the window and looks at both of them.
“You know you’ve broken the law? You know all these theories and ideas may be nothing and you’re in deep shit? Andi might be...” Just then Sasha’s phone rings and they allleap. Roxie stands expectantly, and Sasha looks at her screen. Then she shakes her head, indicating that it’s not Andi. It’s Raffy. She picks up.
“Hello?” There is no voice on the other end. “Hello?” she says again. Then the line goes dead. What the hell was that? She pushes the phone into her pocket without telling the kids who it was.
“It wasn’t her,” she says, then looks to Drew. “How did it get this out of hand? Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I thought you might be in on it,” he says, and the words steal her breath.
“What?”
“We started to go see Dad, to hang out there, help out a little. We totally decided he wasn’t involved, but we were determined to find out the truth now anyway. I asked him not to tell you I was seeing him. I guess he felt like that was one of the few things he could do for me, so he kept his word. I wanted time. Then Roxie found something.”
“It’s in the folder,” she says.
“I wanted to show you. I know this is when I should have gone to the police, but, Mom, I thought I was protecting you.”
“What? What did you find?” Sasha asks, her heart in her throat.
“In the firepit in his yard—we’d hang out there sometimes. A few days ago, I saw a scrap of cloth. Orange with a tiny kangaroo on it. I said it looked like Tia’s running headband she got in Australia, and then I realized... itwas. It was a piece of it. The edges of what was left were burned,” Roxie says.
“Jesus,” Sasha whispers to herself, unable to think, unableto process how Raffy could have Tia’s headband. There has to be an explanation.
“But when we decided we needed to turn it in, I finally put together who that guy was in the photo you had in your bag. I thought it was an odd thing to have when I saw it, so I took it,” Drew says, and Sasha remembers watching him take the photo of Jack and thinking he was the one in trouble, never considering for a second it was some crazy attempt to protecther.
“We figured out it was Jack, Regan’s husband, who’s supposed to be dead, so we looked up his photo and reverse-image searched it, and we learned who he really was. Do you know Jack wasn’t his real name? And did you know he testified and put away some big drug dealer in Mexico at the same time Dad was there? It’s all connected,” he says, then taps something into his phone. He turns around a photo to show her. “It’s even more connected than you think,” he adds.
Sasha looks at the face in the photo and all the threads start to unravel. She feels so instantly lightheaded and numb as she tries to make sense of it that she thinks she could pass out. She steadies herself with one hand on the arm of the chair next to her.
“Stay here,” she says suddenly, reaching for her bag and heading toward the front door. “Tom is in New York, and the kids are in school till three. Is Carson at work?”
Roxie nods vigorously.
“Wait for the police. I’ll be back.”
“Mom!” Drew hollers after her.
“Lock the door, and don’t answer it for anyone. Do not even think about leaving this house. I mean it. Got it?”
“Mom.”
“Drew. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, but...”
