Premeditated (16 page)

I was no better at backtracking with that thing to find my mistakes than I was at trying to figure out where I’d gone wrong in anticipating Brooks’ next move. Mainly because I kept waiting for moves he never got around to making. He didn’t even take his hands out of his pockets until he needed them to open the door and let us outside.

We left the house through a different door from the one we’d come in, so I figured that unless he was kicking me out the servants’ entrance or something, he wasn’t planning on taking me home yet. The door he chose led to the back of the property, where the mansion’s shape created a courtyard framed by stone walls covered in ivy, and an unquantifiable heaviness to the air itself that defied anything living to move through it.

A cobbled path lined with flowers and old-fashioned iron lanterns weaved through a place that could have been an exhibit at the botanical gardens. It even had a bridge and a shallow pond full of oversized goldfish.

Brooks ignored the marked walkway and turned past a set of stone benches, cutting through a hedgerow. I followed, not
sure where we were going but hoping that if I kept up with him, we’d end up somewhere productive or informative.

But we weren’t really going anywhere, and we were getting there at light speed. He stopped, as though he’d hit a wall I couldn’t see or reached the end of an invisible choke chain, pivoting on his heel and heading back the way we came. He’d only gone a few steps when he did it again, pacing the same line over and over.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m perfect, haven’t you heard,” he snapped back. “No problems in my world.”

Piles of dark steel clouds painted everything with the surreal, hyperpigmented appearance that happens right before a storm, so the trees were a little greener, the stone a little brighter. Brooks stood against the sky with an outline to his clothes and skin as though he’d been cut out of reality.

He kept pacing, tightening the line as his movements grew more erratic. He couldn’t keep his hands still; they clenched and unclenched, pulled at his sleeves, wiped at the back of his neck. I think if there’d been something handy other than me or walls that would have broken his fists, he’d have punched it.

“Everyone’s got problems,” I said. Though to be honest, I wouldn’t have believed that before seeing him with his dad and feeling how one look from the man could knock the wind straight out of your lungs and the warmth off your skin. Brooks really did seem perfect when he wasn’t at home … if I discounted everything I knew about him and Claire and who knew how many girls just like her, of course.

“Sometimes that house is so dense I can’t breathe,” he said.
“I have to get out and into the open air or else I’ll suffocate under the shellac.”

“At least you’ve got a good place to think when you want to get out,” I offered. “This place is gorgeous.”

Everything was pristine, fairy-tale unreal with the added effect of the prestorm lighting, and expertly manicured. The flowers grew in neat rows, color-coordinated so that they were darkest to the back, toward the house, and lightest in the front, creating a cascade. The last blooms of the summer’s trumpet vines still stood out in bright orange and white against the climbing ivy, and all the different floral scents mixed with the first hint of a coming rain. Things couldn’t have been more exact if a genie had popped up and someone wished for a secret garden.

“He built it for Mom, but it’s nothing but another image that has to be maintained,” Brooks said, grabbing the nearest flower and yanking it off its stem. “These plants, this lawn, those stupid paintings upstairs … are all meant to remind me who I’m supposed to be. Everything here is arranged and pruned and groomed and so perfectly placed that sometimes I want to break a window just to prove to myself it’s real and not some never-ending nightmare I can’t snap out of.”

He crumbled the flower in his hand and let it fall in a browning clump of ruined petals.

“I can’t figure him out. Sometimes he acts like he hates me; others it’s like he’s forgotten I exist … and I shouldn’t be dumping any of this on you. Sorry. You’ve got enough to deal with.”

“I don’t mind listening.” I could taste the betrayal on my tongue as I said it. I
didn’t
mind listening, and I couldn’t quite convince myself it was because I wanted to hear him run his
mouth about everything wrong with this life. The offer was real, and I hoped Claire would forgive me for it. “And I doubt your dad hates you.”

“Let me put it this way—he was using his nice face because there was a stranger in the room and he didn’t want to be rude.”

I nearly choked. Not from what
he
said, but because of what
I
almost said. It was a Brucey response, an inside joke, actually, from one of his old black-and-white movies where the censors operated like Uncle Paul and wouldn’t let people use real curse words. Something like “jeepers” or “yowza” wouldn’t have made sense to Brooks, except maybe to make him laugh, but to me it was a warning. Either I was slipping too far into character, or he was breaking through my best efforts to maintain nothing but contempt for his existence.

“He can barely look at me most days; the others he avoids me altogether. I know why … I mean, it’s no secret I look more like her than him. Everyone who knew her says it.” He bent down, scooping a few small rocks into his hand, and started throwing them at the side of a garden shed painted like a cottage. One would hit and clang off the side and he’d throw the next one harder, until he looked like someone pitching the World Series.

“How long’s she been gone?” I asked as my nerves knotted up. I let my eyes stray back to the bruise on his leg and the scratches on his arm and face. Brooks was about the same size as Dex, and I already knew how difficult it was to get away from Dex when he wanted to follow. If Brooks really did have a temper, and decided to act on it …

Having his dad around wasn’t such a bad idea anymore.

“Almost five years, and he still acts like she’s going to join us
for dinner. I think that’s why he’s made it his life’s mission to make sure I’m never happy. He can’t stand seeing her smile on someone else’s face; it ruins his illusions.”

Something clenched inside my chest. My hand was reaching out to touch his arm before I could remind myself he didn’t deserve my pity. The barrier I’d put up in my brain to keep track of all Brooks Walden–related information had begun to collapse, and he was bleeding into the part reserved for people who weren’t sociopaths in the making. I should have been cheering for the knowledge that his life wasn’t the nonstop carousel of sunshine and rainbows everyone thought it was, or that the universe hadn’t completely let me down and he was paying for the things he’d done.

Instead, I nearly hugged him.

Hate’s a difficult thing to maintain in the context of actual events that blur the black-and-white lines. Absolutes are easier.

“He can’t hate you,” I said. “If he did, he wouldn’t have stayed here. He’d have packed you up and shipped you back to wherever it is he came from.”

“I used to think that, too. Then I realized doing that would mean showing up in public with his American son, and he wouldn’t do that. My voice grates his nerves. He says it’s unrefined.”

“I like your voice,” I said—another cringe moment.

Brooks must have taken my self-flagellation as embarrassment because he looked down, too, and grinned. His ears turned pink.

As he started to speak, likely to tell me what a bubble-brained idiot I’d turned into, the color that had crept into his face left it, leaving him pale and blank. A cold, fat raindrop
landed square on my forehead; another hit my hand when I opened it flat to make sure the first one was rain and not me getting dive-bombed by a bird.

“We need to get back.” Brooks slipped past me and walked quickly back toward the house. “Storm’s coming. We should get inside.”

“It’s barely sprinkling.”

“Come on.”

The few intermittent drops picked up into a steady pitterpatter against the grass and stone, with just enough space between impacts that what fell dried on contact before the next drop could reinforce it. Still, Brooks sped his pace to a jog, turning toward the nearest door and ducking inside just as it started to pour. He shut the door behind us, leaning against it, shaking and unable to catch his breath.

“Brooks?”

“I’ll be fine, just give me a minute.”

Beneath his feet, where he was leaned against the door, water began to pool, darkening the cement floor. It touched his shoe, and he launched backward, farther into the room.

“Is this seriously because of the rain?” I asked. Even the Wicked Witch of the West didn’t hotfoot it away from water that fast.

“I told you—I don’t like water.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t think you were serious about the whole skipping puddles part of it.”

“Well, I was! Sorry. Let me catch my breath, okay?”

This was more than someone needing a pool float to go in the deep end; this was serious, book-a-spot-on-the-couch, psychiatrist territory. That annoying sting pricked my chest again,
and there was no sense hoping for a heart attack. I felt sorry for the creep.

“I know how this looks,” Brooks said. “And in my mind, I know it’s stupid, but I can’t help it. I almost died in that hospital when I was a kid, and somehow that rewired my reflexes to treat water like poison.… Go ahead and laugh.”

“I don’t find it funny.”

“You probably want to leave now, don’t you?” he asked. “I don’t blame you.”

“That would require going outside, and I’m not going to be the one responsible for your going into cardiac arrest.”

How’s that for irony? I had a perfect, believable, excusable means of dealing with Brooks, and I wasn’t going to take it. If I felt sorry for him, anyone else would, too.

“I guess this means you don’t spend too many summers at the Point, huh?”

“There’s other stuff to do there. So long as I stay out of the lake, I’m fine.”

And the pier was definitely out of the lake.

“Chandi and I used to catch the movie there every weekend. It was our own silly tradition.”

“But not anymore?”

“This year’s been rough on her. Family drama, you know?”

“I’m acquainted with the concept.”

“Thanks,” he said, “for the distraction. I can drive you home. If I’m in the car, it’s— Oh no …” He rushed to the window and pressed his hands and forehead against the glass, straining to see something in the distance. “I think I left the top down.”

“Maybe it won’t last long.”

“I hope not. Otherwise, we’ll have to take one of my dad’s.”

I hadn’t paid any attention to where we’d actually ended up when Brooks all but locked us in out of the rain. I assumed it was another part of the house I hadn’t seen yet, but the cement floors should have been a clue. It was a garage—twice as big as Uncle Paul’s and just as full. Only, where Uncle Paul had classic fixer-uppers for Dad and off-road toys for himself, these were all high-end, and mainly European, sports cars.

“The Beemer’s the only one that’s really mine, but the keys to the others are on the wall if I want to use one. Dad couldn’t care less.”

Brooks’ voice droned in the background while I went into a daze. Side by side, the cars in that garage represented the net worth of a small country. Any one of them could have paid for our old house. And one of them … one of them …

“Oh my God … this is a Bugatti Veyron.” I reached out to touch the two-tone black and silver piece of art on wheels but couldn’t quite convince myself that laying skin to paint wouldn’t make the whole thing burst and disappear like a stray thought bubble. I settled for drooling in awe. “My dad would kill just to be in the same zip code as one of these.”

“You’ve never seen one?”

“Mechanic shops in the-middle-of-nowhere western Oregon don’t service too many cars with sticker prices out of the five-figure range.” Most of them were in the four-figure range, actually. “Uncle Paul’s the only one in my family with money; once things with Claire are settled, this Cinderella’s going back in the ashes.”

“Your cousin Claire? The one in the hospital?”

“Yeah,” I said, carefully, and probably too quickly. “Does your dad actually let you drive this?”

“No one’s ever driven it, but he wouldn’t care if I did. He sort of went off the deep end after mom died and bought all this stuff. I don’t think he’s thought about it since. He says money’s meaningless, as there’s always more of it, and it’s worthless in the long run if you can’t use it to accomplish the things you really need it to do.”

I wondered if the thing it couldn’t do was save Brooks’ mom. Money sure hadn’t done Uncle Paul or Aunt Helen any favors with Claire.

“What’s that look?” he asked.

Inside, I was screaming at myself for not keeping my emotions on a tighter rein. I didn’t know what look was on my face, whether it was a smile or a frown or a thinly veiled desire for Brooks to fall headfirst into a vat of boiling motor oil, so I said the only thing I could. “You’re not what I expected.”

He couldn’t say everything I told him was a lie.

“Kill the car.”

I had been right about the rain; it didn’t last long—barely ten minutes, in fact. Ten long, grueling minutes that tested my sanity and forced me to hang on to my anger by sheer force of will under the onslaught of a perspective I never wanted. They were also ten minutes that produced a surprising stumbling block to my ultimate goal of turning Brooks Walden into a shell of his current self, because for those ten minutes he continued to make me wonder if the Brooks Walden everyone saw wasn’t a shell already. Learning his weaknesses was supposed to give me leverage, not second thoughts.

He knew who his father expected him to be, and who his friends needed him to be, and maybe even who he wanted to be, but the longer I sat on the cold cement of his garage floor, the more painfully clear it became that he was fast losing his ability to juggle the different personas or even find common ground between them.

Maybe that was what made it so easy for him to slip into someone so awful.