Revealing My Secret Identities! My Bros Are Speechless! novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Jacket
Lexi screams thief at Lena on the sidewalk, Sean says Lena is his sister, and Lexi slips her a note about the test.
By the time I got down four flights, half of the street had stopped to watch.
A woman with a laundry cart stood in the laundromat doorway.
Two men from the corner deli had come out with their arms crossed.
Lexi stood beside the SUV with one hand on the door, still in my jacket, and behind her a man in a gray suit held up his phone to film.
I recognized the suit.
He was one of the lawyers who had been standing by the window yesterday.
"There she is," Lexi said, loud and shaky. "That's her."
Lou came out behind me with his cap in his fist.
Cal came out behind him, and Sean last, with a dish towel still over his shoulder.
"Thief!" Lexi cried. "You took my mother's emerald necklace. You lived in my life for seventeen years and you took the one thing I was going to wear at my welcome party!"
Her voice cracked on the last word.
I had been called a lot of things in that house, but never anything like that.
"I didn't take anything," I said.
"Liar!"
She stepped toward me and caught the edge of my sleeve.
She pulled hard, and it tore at the shoulder seam.
Cal had her wrist before I saw him move.
He did not squeeze.
He just held her hand where it was, and said, "That's enough, miss."
"She's a thief!" Lexi said again. "Ask anyone!"
"The necklace is missing from the safe," the lawyer said, in a pleasant voice, still filming. "Mr. Thornquist has agreed to drop it if the check is returned today. Otherwise we call the police."
So that was why they had come.
They wanted the check back, and a video of me taking it.
I looked at Lou.
He had gone gray around the mouth.
He had seen how a check like that could be used against a girl with a name nobody on this block had ever heard.
"Miss," he said to the lawyer, "she's been in my house for one night."
"Then she'll have no objection to a search," the lawyer said.
I looked at the street.
Two dozen phones had come up, and not one of them was pointed at Queens.
"Fine," I said.
Lou said, "Lena."
"Search it," I said. "All of it. Here, in front of everyone, so there's no question."
Cal and Sean carried the first trunk down.
The lock was a gold one my mother had chosen.
Sean opened it on the pavement, and a line of neighbors leaned in.
Books.
Cardigans.
A winter coat, folded.
Six sketchbooks with a rubber band around them, which I took out of the lawyer's reach.
Cal opened the second trunk.
Shoes, a hair dryer, a framed picture of me at ten on a pony.
Cal opened the third.
Nothing in it but more books, and a toaster oven I had bought myself at fourteen, because I liked toast in my room.
"No necklace," the woman with the laundry cart said, very clearly.
"No necklace," one of the deli men said.
The lawyer lowered his phone.
"That's not the point," he said.
"It's exactly the point," Sean said. He had walked up beside him with the dish towel over his shoulder.
"You came to a family's door, called their kid a thief on a public street and filmed it. And she said search me. You want to explain that part to the cops?"
"I'm sorry," Lexi said, not loudly this time.
She was looking at me, not at the lawyer.
"She's mine," Sean said, to everyone and nobody. "She's my sister. Anybody else want to say something about my sister?"
Nobody did.
I could not breathe properly.
Nobody had ever said it like that, with nothing to gain.
The lawyer got into the SUV without a word.
Lexi was the last to follow.
She took one step toward the door, then turned around and walked back to me, fast.
She put a hand on my torn sleeve and pretended to smooth it.
Something small and folded pressed into my palm.
"I'm sorry about your jacket," she said, loud enough for the street.
Then she whispered, "Don't sign anything else."
She climbed into the SUV and the door shut.
I stood in the road while the neighbors drifted back to their carts and their cigarettes.
Lou picked up my picture from the pony, wiped the glass on his shirt and handed it to me without a word.
Cal started carrying the trunks back up.
When I got to the landing I opened the paper.
It was a phone number and four lines in a looping hand.
The necklace is in the safe. I watched Mr. Thornquist put it back this morning.
They needed a reason to take the check back and call you a thief.
Call me from a phone that isn't yours.
They have been lying to both of us.
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