Hester continued: “Tonight, a local girl from Westville, New Jersey, is missing and needs your help.”
From the parking lot outside Ava’s condo, Wilde weighed his options. There really wasn’t much more to do when he thought about it. The hour was getting late. So Option One: He could just drive back to Laila’s house and gently pad upstairs to the bedroom where she’d be waiting and...
Yeah, did he really have to review other options?
To cover his bases, he texted Matthew: Where are you?
Matthew: At Crash Maynard’s.
Laila had told him that earlier, but he wasn’t sure he was supposed to know.
Wilde: Is Naomi there?
Matthew: No.
Wilde debated what to type next, but then he saw the dots dancing, indicating that Matthew was typing.
Matthew: Shit.
Wilde: What?
Matthew: Something bad is going down.
Wilde’s thumbs didn’t move as fast as he wanted them to, but he finally managed to type: Like what?
No reply.
Wilde: Hello?
The utopian image from Option One — Laila upstairs in that bedroom, warm under the covers, reading legal briefs — rose up in front of him so real he could smell her skin.
Wilde: Matthew?
No reply. The Laila-related image turned to smoke and drifted into the ether.
Damn.
Wilde started up the road toward Maynard Manor.
Chapter Seven
Matthew was in Crash Maynard’s enormous mansion on the hill.
The mansion’s exterior looked old and kind of Gothic with marble columns. It reminded Matthew of that snooty golf club his grandmother took him to because one of her clients was getting some kind of award. Hester hadn’t liked being there, he remembered. As she sucked down the wine — too much wine as it turned out — her eyes began to narrow. She glanced around the room, frowning and muttering under her breath about silver spoons and privilege and inbreeding. When he asked her what was wrong, Hester had looked her grandson up and down and said, loud enough for those nearby to hear: “You’re half Jew, half black — you’d doubly not be allowed in this club.” Then she paused, raised a finger in the air, and added, “Or maybe you’d be two tokens in one.” When an elderly lady with frozen dollops of snow-white hair made a tut-tut, shh-shh noise in her direction, Hester had told her to blow it out her ass.
That was Matthew’s grandmother. Nana never avoided a controversy if she could create one.
It was both mortifying and comforting. Mortifying, well, that was pretty obvious. Comforting because he knew that his grandmother always had his back. He never questioned it. Didn’t matter that she was small or seventy or whatever. His grandmother seemed superhuman to him.
There were about a dozen kids at what parents insisted on calling a “party” but was really just a gathering in Crash’s “lower level” — Crash’s parents didn’t like calling it a basement — which may have been the coolest place Matthew had ever been. If the exterior was old school, the interior couldn’t have been more state of the art. The home theater was closer to a full-fledged cinema with mod digital sound design and forty-plus seats. There was a cherrywood bar and real-theater popcorn machine out front. The corridors were lined with a mix of vintage movie posters and posters for Crash’s dad’s television shows. The arcade room was a mini replica of the Silverball, the famed pinball palace on the Asbury Park boardwalk. Down one corridor was a wine cellar with oak barrels. The other became an underground tunnel leading to a regulation-sized basketball court, a replica — lots of replicas — of the Knicks’ floor at Madison Square Garden.
No one ever hung out on the basketball court. No one ever used the pinball arcade. No one was ever really in the mood to watch anything in the movie theater. Not that Matthew had been here a lot. For most of his life, he’d been on the outs with the popular crowd, but recently, Matthew had wormed his way back in. Truth be told, he loved it here. The popular kids did the coolest things, like when Crash had that birthday bash in Manhattan. His dad had rented black limos to transport them, and the party had been in some huge place that used to be a bank. All the boys got to be “escorted” in by past contestants on Dash Maynard’s reality show Hot Models in Lingerie. A famous TV star had DJed the party, and when he introduced “my best friend and our birthday boy,” Crash had ridden in on a white horse, a real horse, and then his father drove in behind him in a red Tesla he’d given his son as a present.
Tonight most of the kids had ended up in the “regular” TV room — a ninety-eight-inch Samsung 4K Ultra HD hanging on the wall. Crash and Kyle played Madden video football, the rest of the gang — Luke, Mason, Kaitlin, Darla, Ryan, and of course Sutton, always Sutton — lay sprawled across upscale beanbag chairs as though some giant being had tossed them from the sky. Most of his friends were high. Caleb and Brianna had gone off to a room down the corridor to take their hookup to the next level.
The room was dark, the blue light from both the television and individual smartphones illuminating his classmates’ faces, turning them a ghostly pale. Sutton was on the right, uncharacteristically on her own. Matthew wanted to take advantage of that opening, and so he looked for a way to move closer to her. He’d had an unrequited crush on Sutton since seventh grade — Sutton with the almost supernatural poise and blond hair and perfect skin and melt-your-bones smile — and she was always nice and friendly and a sixth-degree black belt in how to keep guys like Matthew in the friend zone.
On the big screen, Crash’s video quarterback threw a deep pass that went for a touchdown. Crash jumped up, did a little celebration dance, and shouted at Kyle, “In your face!” This led to some halfhearted laughs from the spectators, all of whom were on their phones. Crash looked around as though he’d expected more in the way of a reaction. But it wasn’t happening.
Not tonight anyway.
There was something in the room, a whiff of fear or desperation.
“We need more munchies?” Crash asked.
No one responded.
“Come on, who’s with me?”
The halfhearted murmurs were enough. Crash hit a button on the intercom. A woman’s Mexican-accented voice said, “Yes, Mr. Crash?”
“Can we get some nachos and quesadillas, Rosa?”
“Of course, Mr. Crash.”
“And can you crush up some of that homemade guac?”
“Of course, Mr. Crash.”
On the screen, Crash kicked off. Luke and Mason drank beers. Kaitlin and Ryan shared a joint while Darla vaped with the latest flavors from Juul. The room had been Crash’s dad’s cigar room and they had done something to it so you couldn’t really smell the new smoke. Kaitlin passed an e-cigarette to Sutton. Sutton took it, but she didn’t put it in her mouth.
Kyle said, “Man, I love Rosa’s guac.”
“Right?”
Crash and Kyle high-fived and then someone, maybe Mason, forced up a laugh. Luke joined in, then Kaitlin, then pretty much everyone except Matthew and Sutton. Matthew didn’t know what they were all laughing about — Rosa’s guacamole? — but the sound had zero authenticity, like they were all trying too hard to be normal.