The Truth of Yesterday (18 page)

     Once I had him in my sights, Novak's training took over and my mind was free to go back to worrying at the situation with Micah like a dog with a bone. The question loomed up once again. Was I in love with Micah? I enjoyed being with him. I missed him when we weren't together. I was undeniably attracted to him. Was that love? What was love? I'd loved Asher, and probably always would, but it was so difficult to define. What I felt for Micah felt different from what I'd felt with Asher. Did that mean I loved Micah less or was it different every time? And if I did love Micah, didn't that mean I should be willing to accept him as he was? Why was I having such a hard time with this anyway? It's not as if he was a killer-for-hire or something that actually hurt anyone. While the morality of being an escort could be argued, it all depended on whose code of morality you were using. Being an escort was perfectly legal in some countries and even right here in the
US
in
Nevada
. And more importantly, he wasn't an escort now. I was pretty sure I wouldn't be able to handle dating someone who was still working as an escort. I was too insecure for that.

     Maybe that's what this all came down to, insecurity. Was Micah comparing me to all those other guys he'd slept with when we were in bed? If so, I was sure I couldn't even begin to measure up. I didn't even know what I was doing. Why was Micah even interested in me? I was just a dumb kid from nowhere. He was a talented, bright, hunky, sophisticated man. What if he got tired of me one day and just up and left me?

     I was so caught up in that train of thought that I didn't even notice when Jake turned off. I just suddenly realized he was no longer in front of me. I had no clue when he'd turned off or where. I let loose with a string of curses as I pounded the steering wheel in anger.

     
Great, just great
, I fumed. I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. This was not turning out to be a good day.
Maybe I should just drive home and lock myself in my room for the rest of the day,
I thought glumly. Jake was definitely gone and I had no idea where he was going. That thought spurred another thought, I might not know where he was going, but I was pretty sure where he wasn't going. We had been driving in the opposite direction of his house. Maybe now would be a good time to search his room, assuming I could manage to stay focused on the job at hand and not allow my thoughts to distract me again.

     I turned the car around and drove towards Judy and Jake's house. When I arrived, I was pleased to see that my luck seemed to be changing; Jake's car was nowhere to be seen. Better yet, Judy's van was parked by the house, so that meant she was home. I parked behind the van and Judy had the front door open before I was even completely out of the car.

     Judy had never been married and as far as I knew, had not been lucky in love. She'd gotten pregnant as a young teen and moved away to raise the baby,
Dashel
, by herself. She'd gotten pregnant a second time after her brother-in-law, Jake's father, forced himself on her. That baby was Jake. She'd ended up allowing her sister to adopt Jake and raise him as her own. It turned out that her brother-in-law had not only been a rapist, he was also abusive to his older children. The oldest son, Todd, had snapped and killed Seth, another boy, and his own sister before trying to kill Jake, Asher and me. I'd shot and killed Todd to protect Jake and soon after the people who had raised Jake from birth killed themselves in a double suicide.
All that was left of Jake's family he and his little brother, Jamie.
Asher's parents had adopted Jamie and Judy had come back for Jake. She'd moved Jake to
California
where she lived with her older son, Dash.

     Now that Dash was studying in
Australia
, Judy had decided to move back to
Maryland
to be closer to her only remaining family, Asher's parents. She'd started renting this little house a few months ago. It wasn't big or fancy, but then, they didn't need much space for the two of them. Judy had worked miracles in the yard in the short time she'd been there, though. The yard was a riot of color, even this far into October. She'd planned the gardens to look very natural, so that you could barely tell where the lawn left off and the gardens began.

     “The yard is beautiful,” I told her as I walked up the flagstone path she's laid through the midst of the flowers.

     “Thanks, it relaxes me,” she said. “You haven't found anything out.” It was a statement, not a question but I answered it anyway.

     “Not yet,” I was thinking I could search his room while he isn't here.”

     She nodded silently and held the door open. “I hate doing this,” she said as I stepped inside, “but I can't just stand by and do nothing. I know something is wrong; I just don't know what. It's killing me.”

     The anguish in her voice was so strong it stopped me in my tracks. I turned to face her and found myself hugging her spontaneously. “I'll find out what's going on,” I promised her.

     “Please do,” she said, barely above a whisper.

     I pushed the door to Jake's room open with a twinge of guilt. It was one thing to snoop through a complete stranger's personal belongings, it was quite another to be doing it to a friend. I felt like I was violating a trust between us.

     The room looked like any typical teenager's room. A few posters were plastered on the wall, one advertising Showtime's Queer
As
Folk and a couple movie posters. Dirty clothes were scattered about, wherever they'd landed when Jake had removed them. A dirty plate sat on the floor and nearby a glass lay on its side, a dried skim of milk inside it. The room itself was on the small side and most of the floor space was taken up by a double bed, a dresser, a desk, a bookcase, and an entertainment center that held a TV,
VCR
,
DVD
and a game cube. I whistled softly at the electronics. That had cost a bundle and I somehow doubted Judy could afford all that, so where had it come from? I made a mental note to ask Judy before I left.

     Where to start? I asked myself as I surveyed the room. I chose the desk and started opening drawers and sifting through the contents, trying to leave as little sign that I'd been there as possible. I hadn't done many room searches, but I'd helped Novak a few times. I couldn't help but smile a little as I remembered my first search I'd done last summer. I'd found a stash of illegally filmed videos of certain local officials caught in rather compromising positions at a sleazy motel. The manager had been taping people with hidden cameras for his own pleasure; the fact that it also netted him a lucrative side-business blackmailing the folks on the tapes was just icing on the cake. We'd called in the cops and he was promptly arrested. Last I heard
,
he was in jail-where he belonged.

     So far, my search of Jake's desk was turning up nothing more than a few bad test grades and one marijuana roach all the way at the back of the bottom left-hand drawer. God only knew how long it had been there, and it was hardly the kind of problem I suspected Judy was worried about. Hell, for all I knew, it was Judy's.

     The desk out of the way, I moved on to the dresser. There was nothing in any of the drawers except clothes. I'd never realized what a clothes horse Jake was, or how expensive his tastes were. Most of the clothes looked brand new or almost so. How did he afford to shop at these places? I was beginning to understand why Judy was so worried. The more I searched the more questions I had.

     I searched the closet-more clothes and a few boxes of outgrown toys and games-and under the bed, mostly dust. I lifted the mattress and looked under it, nothing. Next, I carefully looked through the bookcase, looking behind the books, and feeling along under the shelves. The only thing I learned was that Jake favored science fiction and seldom used the set of encyclopedias on the bottom shelf, the dust was so thick down there it had made me sneeze.

     Unless, I had missed something, which was entirely possible, the only place left to look was the entertainment center. I looked it over, there were only a few places that something could be hidden or kept. A small cabinet with doors at the bottom and a carved wooden box he'd placed on one of the shelves. I went to the cabinet first. I opened the doors and a small avalanche of magazines, video tapes, and photographs tumbled out, a motley assortment of XY, Teen People, EW, and gay porn. The magazines and videos I set aside after shaking them upside down to make sure nothing was hidden in the pages. All that fell out were subscription cards, but there were enough of those to paper the walls. I went through the pictures more carefully in case there was a clue in any of them.

     Most of them were of people I didn't know and the backgrounds often included palm trees, so I deduced that they had been taken while Jake was living in
California
. Towards the bottom of the pile, I started recognizing more of the people in the pictures. There were a few from family gatherings, the
Davis
clan at birthdays and holidays. The pictures of Asher caused a dull ache, but the ones that almost made me forget why I was here were the others. Ones that Jake must have been unable to throw away. One was a wallet-sized family portrait of Jake's old family, all dead now but Jake and Jamie. Another must have been taken while I was briefly dating Jake's sister
Gilly
; it was supposed to have been a cover, but she'd fallen for me anyway.
Gilly
and I were in the forefront, my arm tossed casually around her shoulder with Todd glaring from the background. And then there were several pictures taken at the huge Halloween bash Jake and
Gilly
had thrown the same year the photo of
Gilly
and me had been taken.
One showed Jake, Kane, Asher, and me in costume, mugging for the camera.
It wasn't a night I was all that eager to remember.

     The last one in the pile was the one that really got to me. I had no idea when it had been taken or who had taken it. It had the look of a photo taken without the subjects being aware it was being taken, even though they were looking directly at the photographer. It was of Seth and me. It had been taken at school, we were walking down the hall, and it looked like we had been talking before something had made us both look up. I didn't remember when it was taken; I hadn't even known there had ever been a picture taken of us together. For a moment, I was terribly tempted to slide the picture into my pocket-for selfish reasons-but I couldn't risk Jake noticing it was gone. I reluctantly returned it to the pile and then, after making sure I hadn't missed anything in the cabinet, shoved everything back in as near as I could get it to the way it had been when I'd opened the door. The way everything had just slid out, though, I wasn't too worried that he'd notice if anything out of place. I shut the cabinet doors on the mess and tried to shut the picture out of my mind as well. If only one was as easy as the other.

     I only had the carved wooden box to look through now. I stood up and lifted the lid of the box. As I sifted through the contents, I wondered if I was going to turn up absolutely nothing concrete. The box held nothing more than a few more photos, some discarded movie stubs Jake had kept as keepsakes and a few pieces of jewelry. The photos were of Jake's new family; Judy with her arms around Jake and Dash, Judy with her arms wrapped around Jake's neck, Jake and Dash posing comically for the photographer. All of it about as exciting and incriminating as mud.

     Then, for some reason, I took everything out of the box and picked it up. It was surprisingly heavy and a suspicion rose up in my mind. I shook it and heard a shuffling sound despite the fact that it was empty, or at least it appeared to be empty. A second, closer look showed that the outside of the box was a lot deeper than the inside. That could only mean one thing-a false bottom.

     I turned the box over in my hands and examined the bottom. It didn't take me long to see that the bottom was rigged to slide out. It was a snug fit, but I was able to move it with my thumbs far enough to get my fingers inside and push it open. When I saw what was inside, I almost dropped it. There was wad of money bigger than I had ever seen, and as I soon learned, made up of all hundreds. Where on earth had Jake gotten this? And more importantly, how had he gotten it? But that wasn't to be the last surprise the box held. There was another ticket in here. At first, I thought it was another stub, another keepsake, but on further inspection, I realized it was actually for an event that hadn't yet taken place. It was for the highly publicized AIDS Benefit Ball, a high-society function that I'd read about in the paper just last week. They were expecting everyone from the governor on down to be in attendance and tickets were starting at $300 each.

     Under the ticket was a picture that had been clipped from the newspaper. The grainy image showed an elegant looking man shaking hands with a state senator. The man was strangely familiar, but for the life of me, I couldn't place him. He was obviously some sort of big-wig, but I couldn't figure out who he was or where I had seen him. The bigger question was why did Jake have a picture of him hidden in this secret compartment?