“Greetings, Your Highness.” His friend in the booth behind him laughs like it’s Saturday Night Live.
“You’re hilarious.” I toss my paperwork and ID at him as his buddy walks around my car with a sniffer dog.
“Just you today, Your Highness?”
“Obviously.” I am not in the mood for their shit. I hardly slept last night. I stared at the ceiling and thought about Mackenzie’s face as she hurled those bottles at me. She looks like my secret friend, the Mackenzie who never cared about anyone or anything except me, but inside she’s like a different person. What happened to her in the last four years to make her forget me so completely? What’s left her with nothing but broken, violent rage in her eyes? I have to find out. I have to help her.
I want to be at school, where I might be able to talk to her. But I can’t today. Duty calls.
The guard can’t resist one final stunt, giving me a queen wave as he opens the gate and I drive to the visitor parking. At reception, I sign in and subject myself to the usual humiliating patdowns. Comedian Guard takes his time, makes sure to grab my ass as he searches me for contraband. Phone, keys, wallet, they all go in a tray to be collected when I leave – I surrender everything except the small leather pouch hanging off my belt. They all know what’s inside.
I’m led into the booths. It reeks of piss, and I resist the urge to pinch my nose. I did that the first time I came here, back when I was still a kid, and the guards never let me forget it. I settle into the hard plastic chair.
I wait.
A few minutes later, the door on the other side of the glass swings open, and two guards escort my dad inside.
I try to make eye contact with him, but I can’t do it. Even after four years, it hurts too much. I stare at a spot on the wall to the right of his ear. A dark stain, maybe blood? It was tough to tell in the dim light.
I’m made of glass. One word, one sound could shatter me.
He picks up the phone. “Son.”
I try to say something, but the words catch in my throat. He looks worse than last time. There’s a fresh cut across his hairline, and as he talks it opens, a dribble of blood running down his forehead. His eyes have sunken, and I think his nose has been broken again.
They don’t like rich guys in jail.
Especially not my father, Walter Hart, founder of Memories of the Hart, Emerald Beach’s celebrity funeral home. Anyone who was anyone wanted to be buried by my dad. For a while when I was seven or so, he even had his own reality TV show where cameras followed our family and filmed Dad creating these crazy themed funerals. Elvis and golf and Cinderella, complete with an enormous pumpkin-shaped hearse leading a procession down the boardwalk.
That was before the story broke. Before Walter Hart the affable Tennessee businessman who made grief fun was revealed to be giving people ground-up cement and animal remains instead of their cremated loved ones, and selling the bodies on the black market. Shortly after Noah’s mother killed herself, an FBI investigation blew Dad’s dirty laundry wide open, and it was my family’s turn in the spotlight.
Dad’s not having the best time in prison. Southern charm can only get you so far. Even murderers and rapists and drug dealers have grandmothers they cremated. Grandmothers whose body parts later showed up in laboratories and plastination exhibits when Memories of the Hart was investigated. The man sitting on the other side of the glass is the shell of my father – his skin doesn’t fit properly, like all the bluster and bombast has been sucked out through his eyeballs.
“Hi, Dad.” I force the words out. “I’m sorry it’s been so long.”
“That’s my boy, always got something going on, got a scheme brewing. Just like your old man. How’s that fancy school of yours?” He flashes me the white-toothed smile that used to grace billboards. Dad’s so proud he got me into Stonehurst, even though with all his civil suits I can now only afford to stay there because of a scholarship.
I suck in a breath. You can do this. Find the words. “It’s good, Dad. I’ve been made captain of the track team. We have our first state meet in a