CHAPTER 73

It was another hour before we heard from Grayson again, and Oren spent a good chunk of that time calling in favors on the West Coast. I wasn’t the only one concerned about the safety of a Hawthorne anywhere near the town of Rockaway Watch.

When my phone did ring again, Grayson was less than happy about the security detail that had descended on him.

“Did you find him?” Jameson squeezed in beside me to talk to his brother. “Jackson Currie?”

“He has a very colorful vocabulary,” Grayson reported. “And the land near his shack is booby-trapped.”

“Father and his investigator ran into similar issues,” Zara said behind us. “They never got a word out of the man. Grayson, you should come home. This is a fool’s errand. There are other leads that we could follow.”

In any other circumstances, I would have asked what those leads were, but all I could think was that Toby had told my mom to go to Jackson if she needed anything. That seemed to suggest that if my mom had shown up, he would have opened the door.

“Can you get close enough to put me on the phone with him?” I asked.

“Assuming no one tries to restrain me…” Grayson glanced pointedly back over his shoulder at what I could only assume was his security detail and then turned back to look straight into the camera—straight at me. “I can try.”

Jackson Currie’s shack really was a shack. I would have laid money that he’d built it himself. It wasn’t large. There were no windows.

Grayson knocked on what appeared to be a metal door. Then again, maybe shack is the wrong word, I thought. What Jackson Currie had built was closer to a bunker.

Grayson knocked again, and all he got for his effort was a large rock chucked at him from somewhere up above.

“I don’t like this,” Oren said stonily.

Neither did I, but we were so close—not just to Toby but to answers. I have a secret.…

I knew so much now that I hadn’t before. Maybe I knew everything. but I couldn’t help feeling like this was my chance—maybe my last chance—to know for sure, to know my mom in a way that I’d never known her before.

To understand what she and Toby had.

“See if he’ll talk to me,” I told Grayson. “Tell him…” My voice caught. “Tell him that Hannah’s daughter is on the phone. Hannah Rooney.” That was the first time I had said the name my mom had been born with. The name she’d never told me.

The image on the phone screen went blurry for a moment. Grayson must have lowered the phone. I heard him in the background, yelling something.

Talk to me, I willed Jackson Currie from a distance. Tell me anything and everything you know. About Toby. About my mom. About whatever it is that Toby left with you.

“I told him.” Grayson’s face came back into focus. “No reply. I think we—”

I never got to hear the rest of what Grayson thought, because a moment later, I heard the distinct sound of metal on metal. Dead bolts, I realized, being thrown open.

Grayson turned the camera in time for me to see the metal door creak open. All I saw at first was Jackson Currie’s enormous beard—but then I saw his narrowed eyes.

“Where is she?” he grunted.

“Here,” I said, my voice verging on a yell. “I’m here. I’m Hannah’s daughter.”

“No.” He spat. “Don’t trust phones.” And just like that, he slammed the door.

“What does he mean, he doesn’t trust phones?” Jameson demanded. “What’s not to trust?”

My thoughts were elsewhere. We knew now that Jackson Currie would talk to me. He wouldn’t talk to Grayson. He hadn’t talked to Tobias Hawthorne’s investigators. He was paranoid and pretty much a shut-in. He didn’t trust phones.

But he would talk to me—in person.

“I’ll call you back,” I told Grayson, and then I placed another phone call—to Alisa. “I’m allowed to spend three nights per month away from Hawthorne House. So far, I’ve only spent one.”