Chapter Twenty-Three
Sasha
Roxie is standing on her front porch, crying, when Sasha and Drew arrive. Drew jumps out of the car immediately and rushes
to her.
“Rox, what happened? My mom will tell the school there was an emergency if you got busted,” Sasha hears him say as she approaches
them.
“It is an emergency. My mom’s gone,” Roxie says, shivering and hugging herself inside her hoodie, against the biting wind. She turns
around and goes inside, and Sasha and Drew follow. Roxie starts pacing, talking a mile a minute. Sasha thinks about how bizarre
Andi’s been acting and immediately knows this can’t be good.
“She tried calling me and then texted me to call her, and I did, but she didn’t answer, so I didn’t worry about it at first. She’s always at the VA on Wednesday mornings, so I thought it would be safe to come meet you here, but . . . then I realized our folder’s gone.”
“Oh,” Drew says, sitting down on the armchair behind him. “Shit.”
“What?” Sasha snaps.
“There’s just a lot of . . . everything in there. All our work. Evidence,” Drew says.
“My Facebook is open on my computer . . . my last conversation with you that says to meet you at your dad’s is up on the screen,”
Roxie says. “She probably figured out who your dad is from all the papers in the folder. But she wouldn’t know where he lived,
and even if she did and she was driving there or something, she’d answer my call. I don’t know what she’d do when she saw
all of this—if she’d go to the smoke shop or any of the other people we investigated for answers—but if she did, she could
be in trouble . . . and it’s our fault.”
“Maybe she found it and went to the police,” Sasha says, but then she pulls out her own phone and sees missed calls from Andi,
and a chill runs through her.
“I called the police,” Roxie says. “I told them I couldn’t reach her. She didn’t call them or go in, and they told me I have
to wait to see if she turns up at least till later today until they’ll worry about it or take a report.”
“Let’s not panic,” Sasha says. “The folder’s gone. You can’t show it to me, so tell me. What the hell did you find that’s
so scary? You need to explain everything. Now.”
Roxie sits on the sofa and buries her head in her hands. Drew looks to her and then back to Sasha. After a moment, he sighs
and nods. Then he starts explaining.
“Dad came to the Labor Day cookout thing. When the car blew up. I saw him.”
“What?” Sasha snaps. As far as she knows, Raff hasn’t left his house in a few years. He’s not capable of getting around. He turned agoraphobic, she assumed, or was too lost in his addiction to make any attempt at a life outside of that prison he created for himself.
“He was parked down the hill, and I went and talked to him. I was shocked to see him there. Roxie was with me,” he says.
Sasha’s mouth is hanging open. She slowly sits on the edge of the coffee table and stares at her son, listening intently.
“He was drunk,” Roxie adds, as if the detail was necessary.
“Some guy he knows drove him, and he got out of the car and was crying, saying he’d do anything to get you back. I didn’t
let him go up to the party. I told him to go home.”
“What?” Sasha repeats in a whisper to herself, because this is so hard to imagine from Raff that she doesn’t know what else
to say.
“I thought he meant get you back—you know . . . romantically, but then after the bomb, I thought he meant revenge. That’s why I asked you if you thought it
was meant for you. He was so blasted that day—like more than usual. Maybe he got some drug from the meth head–looking guy
with him, I don’t know, but I thought, what if it was him that did it and he got the wrong car?”
“He would never do that,” Sasha mutters, but then Drew’s question from earlier buzzes in her ears. Did you pay for it? After all this time, is Raffy harboring hatred for her because he did prison time and she went and got remarried and still
has a life? No. That just can’t be.
“The friend was some drunk he met in AA. Ironic,” Roxie pipes in. Sasha looks to her, wondering how in the world this teenage girl knows more about her husband than she does. It’s impossible they should know any of this.
“Dad was hollering and falling over, and the rando guy helped me get him back into the car and said something to us like,
‘This is how you treat him after all he’s been through? He did his time, leave him be,’ or something like that and I didn’t
know what that meant, so . . . then I looked him up. I googled Dad’s name. I never thought about researching him before for
any reason, but then it all came out, so we went out to his house. I felt sorry for him—for what had happened to him. It finally
made sense that he is the way he is, and I felt bad.”
Sasha holds her heart and tries to understand Raff’s behavior. He would do anything to get her back? She’s there at his house
helping him all the time and he’s never said anything like that. It’s like an unspoken pact they’ve made—to never talk about
the past. She wonders why he would act like that—leave the house, have a meltdown.
And it’s like Drew read her mind, because he says, “Like I said, he was on something—that guy he was with was a total tweaker.
Dad told me half the people he knows in AA do drugs instead. I think that’s why he was losing his shit and also why I wondered
if he was capable of the bomb thing. ’Cause he wasn’t himself.”
Sasha remembers the construction paper she found, shaped like a bomb. “The school threat,” she says, looking between Drew
and Roxie.
“That was me,” Roxie says, “but it wasn’t a threat. It was a diversion.”
Sasha stands and walks a few feet away, looking out the window for a moment, in disbelief at how deep these two are in—bomb
threats, withholding evidence.
“You both thought creating more fear and chaos was gonna stop people from worrying about the car bomb? That it would change the investigation?” she asks, because even though that seems like it could be teenage logic, these kids are smart and embedded in this. That seems risky and kind of stupid.
“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 all leap.
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 . . . it was. It was a piece of it. The edges of what was left were burned,” Roxie says.
“Jesus,” Sasha whispers to herself, unable to think, unable to 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 protect her.
“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 . . .”
And then she rushes out the door and jumps in her car and screeches away to race to Raffy’s house before the world implodes
around them both.