“What did you tell your grandmother?”
Chapter Eight
Two floors above the wine cellar, in a circular turret on the western wing of the massive estate, Dash Maynard and his wife, Delia, sat in burgundy leather wingback armchairs in front of an oversized fireplace with ceramic “white birch” logs and gas-fed flames. This room, an addition they’d put on three years ago, was the “Beauty and the Beast” library and featured floor-to-ceiling built-in oak bookshelves with a rolling ladder on copper rails.
Dash Maynard read a biography on Teddy Roosevelt. He loved history, always had, though he had no interest, thank you very much, in being a part of it. Before he hit it huge with the both famous and infamous self-help talk show The Rusty Show and then in a new genre that the networks dubbed “upscale game-ality” — an awkward blend of “game show” and “reality” — Dash Maynard had been an award-winning documentary filmmaker. He’d won an Emmy for his searing PBS short on the Nanking massacre of 1937. Dash loved research and interviews and on-location filming, but he’d excelled in the editing room, able to take countless hours of video and turn it into a compelling narrative.
Delia Reese Maynard, the chair of the political science department at nearby Reston College, read through student essays. Dash liked to watch her when his wife read student papers — the furrow of the brow, the thinning of her lips, the slow nod when she got excited about a section. Over the summer, Dash and Delia — Double Ds, some jokingly called them — had celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary by taking their sixteen-year-old son Crash and their fourteen-year-old twin daughters Kiera and Kara on their yacht through the Baltics. During the day, they’d set down the anchor in a secluded island cove to swim and jet-ski and wakeboard. In the afternoons and evenings, they toured ports of call like Saint Petersburg and Stockholm and Riga. It had been a marvelous trip.
Dash thought of that time now, that family vacation away from this damn country, as the calm before the storm.
They were lucky people. He knew that. People liked to classify them as “Hollywood elites,” but Dash had been born and raised in a modest three-family town house in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Both his parents had taught at Hunter College’s main campus in Manhattan. Dash’s name came from his father’s favorite author, Dashiell Hammett. He and Delia first bonded — really bonded — over old mystery novels when they browsed first editions of Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and of course, Dashiell Hammett at a used-book store in Washington, DC. At the time, the two barely paid political interns working on Capitol Hill couldn’t afford any first editions. Now this very room housed one of the greatest collections in the world.
As they say, life comes at you fast.
Dash and Delia had spent the last ten years, since Dash’s production company had really hit it big with a prime-time show where big-name celebrities disguise themselves as “ordinary” Americans and live amongst them for six months, trying to balance the fame and money thing with the core values of family and study that they both revered. It was a constantly evolving calibration.
The balance had worked for the most part. Sure, Crash was a little spoiled and acted out, while Kiera had some mild issues with depression, but that seemed to be the norm today. As a couple, Dash and Delia could not have been closer. That was why nights like this — his son throwing a small party downstairs while his parents enjoyed the quiet of each other — meant so much to them.
Dash loved this. He reveled in it. He wanted to live the rest of his life this way.
But he couldn’t.
There was a knock on the library door. Gavin Chambers, a former Marine colonel who now worked in the ever-expanding private security industry, stepped into the room before Dash had a chance to say, “Come in.” Chambers still looked the longtime Marine — the buzz cut, the ramrod posture, the steady gaze.
“What’s the matter?” Dash asked.
Chambers looked over at Delia, as though maybe it would be best if the little lady left. Dash frowned. Delia didn’t move.
“Go on,” Dash said.
“A television report just aired,” Chambers said. “There’s a young girl missing. Her name is Naomi Pine.”
Dash looked at Delia. Delia shrugged.
“And?”
“Naomi goes to school with Crash. They are in several classes together.”
“I’m still not sure—”
“She’s been communicating with your son. Texts mostly. Also the journalist who reported her missing just now? Her name is Hester Crimstein. Her grandson Matthew is downstairs with Crash.”
Delia put the student papers down on the side table. “I still don’t see how this connects to us, Colonel.”
Chambers said, “Neither do I...”
“So?”
“...yet.” Then for emphasis, Chambers repeated the sentence: “Neither do I yet.” He stood at attention and stared straight ahead. “But with all due respect, I don’t believe in coincidences, especially right now.”
“What do you think we should do about it?”
“I think we need to talk to your son and figure out his relationship to Naomi—” His phone buzzed. He put it to his ear with a snap, almost as though he were saluting a superior officer. “Yes?”
After three seconds, Gavin Chambers pocketed the phone.
“Don’t leave this room,” he told them. “There’s been an incident.”
Racing along Skyline Drive toward Maynard Manor — man, what a pompous name — Wilde hoped to feel his phone buzz with another text from Matthew.
It didn’t.
The last text just kept coming back to Wilde, taunting him: Something bad is going down.
Wilde might not go with his gut — that was what he’d told Hester — but as he turned into the manor’s driveway, every instinct told him that he should pay heed to that message.
Something bad is going down.
Maynard Manor sat atop thirty acres of disputed mountain the Ramapough people claimed as their own. There were barns for a dozen horses and a track for steeple jumping and a pool and a tennis court and who knew what else. The centerpiece was an enormous Classical Revival Georgian home, built by an oil tycoon in the Roaring Twenties. The upkeep on the thirty-five-room estate had been so steep that the manor had fallen into disrepair for nearly a quarter century, until Dash Maynard, mega television producer and cable-network owner, and his wife, Delia, swept in and brought the place back to its former splendor and then some.
From the ornate gate where Wilde had to stop, the manor house was still a solid quarter-mile drive up the mountain. Wilde could see some distant lights, but that was about it. He pressed the intercom button while checking his phone, hoping maybe he just didn’t feel the buzz.
Nothing from Matthew.
He sent another text: I’m at the guard gate.
“May I help you?” the intercom said.
Wilde had his driver’s license out. He held it up to the camera.
“I’m here for Matthew Crimstein.”
Silence.
“Matthew is a friend of Crash’s.”
“What’s your relationship to him?”
“To Matthew?”
“Yes.”
Odd question. “I’m his godfather.”
“And what is the purpose of your visit?”
“I’m here to pick him up.”
“He arrived in Mason Perdue’s vehicle. We were told that he was leaving with him.”
“Well, the plans have changed.”
Silence.
Wilde said, “Hello?”
“One moment, please.”
Time passed.