My Brother Called From the Ocean Floor, So I Hung Up novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Lobby

I didn't have much time.

I finished the copy to Joan first. My thumb found her contact, and I typed one line: KEEP THIS. DON'T OPEN IT UNTIL I CALL.

Then I put the watch in my sock.

"Kit," I said. "Stay up here. Don't open the door for anyone."

He sat up on the floor with his eyes wide. "Em."

"Not for anyone, not even Mom."

"What are you going to do?"

"Go down."

I took the stairs, not the elevator.

The buzzer had stopped by the time I reached the lobby.

My father stood just inside the glass doors with both hands behind his back.

Quist's security man stood on his left, huge and quiet. A second man in a dark jacket stood at the mailboxes.

My mother stood beside my father with her purse clutched against her stomach.

She didn't look at me.

"Dad," I said. "It's five in the morning."

"Your brother left the house at one." My father said it pleasantly. "His bus card pinged on the Ballard line. He has no coat, no phone, and he is not well. I'd like him back."

"He isn't here."

"Emmett."

"I haven't seen him since the interview."

My father smiled.

"You're a poor liar," he said. "You've always been a poor liar. It's the only thing I liked about you."

Behind me, a door opened.

A man in a bathrobe stepped out of the first-floor apartment with a coffee mug in his hand. He was about sixty, with white hair sticking up.

"Is everything all right out here?" he said.

"Family matter," Quist's man said.

"It's five in the morning."

"We're very sorry, sir."

On the stairs above us, a woman in running clothes stopped on the landing, looked at the three strangers in the lobby, and took out her phone.

A young father came out with a baby on his shoulder.

My father noticed the audience.

He changed.

It was beautiful to watch. His shoulders came down. His face went soft with worry.

"I apologize," he said to the room, in the voice he used on camera. "I'm Harlan Rask. My younger son, Kit, survived a terrible ordeal last week. He is not himself. He's walked out of our home in the night, and I believe his brother is hiding him."

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