You Deserve to Know

Chapter 24

24

THIS PAST SPRING

Digging up dirt on Scott took a little work, but Lisa had always enjoyed a good project. It helped distract her from unpleasant thoughts, like how unsatisfying her home life had become. Sometime in the past few months, Kai seemed to have shifted his affection from her to Marcus. Where he was once a mama’s boy, now he would barely let her touch him, much less hug or kiss him. All he could talk about was sports, and all he seemed to want to do was hang out with his friends, or in his room with the door shut. She had heard this was a phase that boys went through, and that they came back around toward the end of high school, but it hurt. He used to want to tell her everything about his day, and now sometimes he could barely bring himself to grunt at her.

Her relationship with Marcus was no better. Having just made partner at his lobbying firm, he was riding a professional high, but it meant even less time for her. Sure, there was more money, more prestige, private boxes when they went to see the Nationals play baseball, that sort of thing. But she couldn’t help but feel his success diminished her. She was an appendage to him now, a vestigial one, at that. They hired people to clean, to tutor Kai in math, to tend the yard, to shop for their groceries. How essential was she?

To Anton, she was essential. He said he could barely function on the days when he didn’t see her. She didn’t love him, but she was addicted to the surreptitious nature of their affair, to the secrecy, the thrill of sneaking around. It injected a much-needed boost of adrenaline into her boring suburban days that seemed to meld into one another. She pondered how he might help her get even with Scott. Just remembering those cruel words of Scott’s, how casually he encouraged Aimee to pull back from their friendship, set her pulse racing.

The background check she paid for hadn’t offered much of interest upon her initial reading. But when she re-read it, a detail jumped out at her. The first time Scott’s social security number had ever been used was twenty-eight years ago, in a small town in Northern California. Her interest was piqued.

Because Scott said he grew up in New Mexico.

And according to her math, he would have been around eighteen when he used this social security number to get a job.

A little sleuthing around the internet gave Lisa a pretty good idea about this small town, which had emerged as a logging hub in the early twentieth century but had since fallen on hard times. It was a little too far north, past Sonoma and Napa Valleys, to make it a weekend destination for wealthy tourists from San Francisco. It lay right in the middle of what was known as the Emerald Triangle, a vast area in Northern California famous for its cannabis production—both legal and illegal.

What was Scott doing up there when he was eighteen?

A few days later, when all three families were together, she floated the idea of taking a trip to wine country.

“Wouldn’t that be great, Marcus?” she asked in front of everyone. “I’ve never been to Northern California. I mean, not past San Francisco. Have you?” She turned to Aimee when she asked this.

Aimee shook her head. “Never been west of the Mississippi, but I’d love to go. Maybe when the kids are older.”

“How about you, Scott?” Lisa asked.

“Have I ever been west of the Mississippi?” He smiled. “Well, I grew up in New Mexico, so that’s a yes.” He winked at her and took a swig of his beer. It was a non-answer. Lisa pushed a little.

“What about Northern California? Any interest in seeing wine country, or going even farther up the coast, maybe see the redwoods? It’s supposed to be beautiful up there.”

This was the moment when he could say, Oh, I’ve been there. I worked up there one summer. Or some other plausible explanation.

“Love to. One day I’d like to drive all the way up the coast from L.A. to San Francisco and then up to Eureka. Maybe even keep going to Crater Lake in Oregon.” He turned to Aimee. “One day we’ll do that together.”

“You never visited California playing baseball?” Aimee asked Scott. She turned to everyone. “Scott started at third base on his high school varsity team.” She beamed at him.

“Nope. Never traveled that far. We drove all over the state, and we did end up in Arizona more than a few times, but not California.”

The conversation moved on to road trips, to must-see national parks, and the difficulties of traveling with children. But Lisa zoned out. All she could think about was that Scott was lying. He had been to California, all right.

She could barely contain her impatience waiting for Marcus and Kai to leave the house the following Monday morning. She had cleared her schedule, switching her appointments around so she would have the whole day to spend online if needed.

She settled into her desk chair with a can of Yerba Mate and fired up her computer. On the desk was an 8 × 10 photo of her and Marcus standing with Aimee and Scott at Tikki Night at the school a few years ago. They had smiles on their faces, leis around their necks, and a glossy sheen, thanks to hours spent dancing. Lisa had gone to Michaels and bought an unfinished wooden frame, which she had painted and glued letters to at the bottom. #SLAM TIME!

She turned the photo facedown so Scott wasn’t staring at her. SLAM was over. Gwen had ruined it. There was no going back. She began googling and it didn’t take long to find what she was looking for.

The tiny newspaper story was written the same year Scott was in California. She leaned forward in her chair, as if getting closer to her computer screen might bring her closer to the truth about Scott. There was something here, all right. But what was it? The story was buried in the middle of the Metro section of the Redwood Independent , a local paper that had closed in 2010, but lucky for her, had been archived online.

A UTHORITIES S EARCH FOR M ISSING S TUDENT A THLETES the headline read.

Police are asking anyone who knows the whereabouts of Michael Finch, 18, and Dexter Kohl, 18, to contact authorities immediately. Both young men are seniors at Mad River Regional High School, where Finch and Kohl were co-captains on the school’s regional championship-winning baseball team. They were last seen together on Friday, Sept. 20, parking at a trailhead in Mad River, embarking on a three-day backpacking trip. Anyone with information is asked to call the authorities.

Lisa sat back in her seat and re-read the article twice. The mention of baseball convinced her that Scott was connected to this story somehow. She wasn’t sure what it all meant, but she had a feeling it was going to be good news for her, and very bad for Scott.