Betrayers(32)
“You sure about that?”
“I believe them,” she said, but there was something in her voice that made me think she might not be completely convinced.
“Did the person ask you what happened to the cocaine?”
“Yes.”
“What did you say?”
“I told them. How Mom found the box . . . everything.”
“Were they upset?”
“Sort of.”
“Did they want you to get it back? Turn it over to them?”
“No, they’re not like that. They don’t have any idea who it belongs to.”
“Ask you not to tell us their name?”
“. . . Yes. But it’s not what you think. They don’t want anyone to get the wrong impression.”
“That they’re the one doing coke, you mean.”
“Yes. Because they’re not.”
“Emily, where did you find the box?
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Emily . . .”
“You’ll know if I tell you and I can’t . . . I can’t.”
“All right. You didn’t see it being lost, did you?”
“No. I found it afterward, later.”
“Then why did you think it belonged to this person you talked to today?”
Headshake.
“Did somebody else tell you who owned it?”
“No. I . . . saw it once before.”
“In this person’s possession?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you go to the person right away after you found it?”
“I couldn’t.”
“Why couldn’t you?”
Headshake. Like trying to pry out splinters with a fork.
I said, “Did you open the box before you brought it home?”
“No. Not until after I got home. I wish I hadn’t; I wish I’d never seen what was inside.”
“Would you have returned the box with the cocaine still in it?”
“I don’t think so. I might’ve just thrown it away. Or come to you and Mom, asked you what to do.”
“But once you were sure whose box it was, you felt you couldn’t do that.”
“No, I . . . No.”
“Why? Why is this person so special to you?”
“Please, Dad. Please. They didn’t do anything wrong, I didn’t do anything wrong, I don’t want them to be hurt.” The raspy breath she drew seemed to make her small body tremble. “I just want everything to be the way it was before.”
“That can’t happen, Emily.”
“I know it can’t,” she said, and she started to cry. Suddenly, without sound—tears leaking out of her eyes, glistening silver on her smooth cheeks. My immediate impulse was to go around the desk and take her in my arms, hold her, tell her everything would be all right. But it was the wrong thing to do; the time for comfort and reassurance was after confession, not before.
I left her alone, went and sat in my chair in the living room, and tried to make some sense of the few little snippets of information I’d gotten out of her. She’d found the box somewhere, had seen it before and knew who it belonged to, but hadn’t known what was in it until she got it home. All right. But why had she later gone to him or her and promised to keep the person’s identity secret? Why so protective?
An idea occurred to me, one I should have thought of before. I’d locked the box in the mini-safe in Kerry’s and my bedroom closet; the little plastic vial was still in it, but the cocaine was long gone down the sewer. There was a strong halogen lamp on the desk in Kerry’s home office, a twin to the one in Emily’s room; I took the box in there, shut the door, switched the lamp on, and emptied out the cotton and the plastic vial. Then I rummaged around in the desk drawer until I found her big fold-out magnifying glass.
On the first squint through the glass I couldn’t make out anything on the inside or outside of the box except scratches, wear marks, and a couple of tiny dents. I looked again, examining both sides of the lid, all four outer sides, the bottom. Nothing. One more time—
Something.
I was holding the box at an upward angle, with one lower corner in the center of the lens. What had seemed like random scratches before, one on each lower corner edge, took on a different aspect then. And I was seeing what Emily must have seen when she studied the box as I was doing now. Smart kid—smarter in some ways than her sometimes slow adoptive father.
Initials. Two of them, etched into the soft bronze-colored tin, probably a long time ago, because handling and rubbing had made them virtually invisible to the naked eye.
Z.U.
My first impulse was to go back into Emily’s room and confront her again. Wrong move; I didn’t do it. She wouldn’t tell me who Z.U. was.