Dark Secrets

Chapter 5

Amy made her way through the busy streets of Boyle Heights. Although the sun had already long set, the temperatures were still quite high, but despite the heat, Amy's stomach felt like someone had poured a bucket of icecubes inside of it. She barely noticed anything that was happening around her, not the teenagers playing softball in the street or the dirty, black cat that was making its way through the trash bins in the darkness; her thoughts too much focused on what the private investigator, Bill Harrison had told her.

Jason and she had had a brother. Or better, Jason had had a twin brother.

Amy shivered at the thought, and although there was no doubt it was true, it seemed inexplicable. According to Harrison, Jason had found out about their brother five months back. While he was clearing out their old house after their mother had died of a stroke shortly before, he had found one of her old diaries on the attic. Apparently, Mary Stratton had had two babies the day Jason had been born; but due to being only 19 years old and unable to feed two children at the time, she had decided to give one of them up for adoption. After Jason had discovered these shocking news, he had hired Harrison to find his twin-brother - who actually succeeded in doing so.

Rory Gardner, which was their lost brother's name, apparently had grown up in a complete different way to her and Jason. A father, an alcoholic who had left Rory's mother only months after the adoption. A mother who was helplessly overwhelmed with the task she had been facing: raising a baby on her own, with no job and not even the slightest help from her husband. The older Rory got, the deeper he got himself into trouble, and, with only thirteen, got busted for the first time for theft and threatening a shop owner with a switchblade knife. From there on, his life made its way even further down the downward spiral. Amy hadn't even listened to every single detail of his criminal life. What she remembered clearly was Harrison telling her the even uglier truth: when Jason and Rory finally met, Rory seemed to have felt like his life would change to the better; he had a brother with a career in law enforcement, with enough money and a place to live happily ever after. He and Jason had started hanging out whenever Jason's job at the LAPD allowed it, but soon, Jason got scared about how interested his twin brother had become in his life. He tried to bring some distance between them, and when Rory confronted him with an open thread against his own and Amy's life, Jason decided to cut him off, stopping to give him money to keep his head above water, thinking that finding his long lost brother had been a big mistake. When they met up one last time for Jason to say goodbye to Rory face to face, apparently something went wrong - Rory flipped, and in self-defence, Jason shot him. After he realized what he had done, he panicked, went back to Harrison, told him about what had happened - and the private investigator, who had enough contacts to the lowed parts of Los Angeles, had helped him to go into hiding.

That had been three months ago. The day before, considering to Detective Mendoza, Jason had quit his job.

But it was insane, she thought. She had been talking to him on the phone almost every day, even if only for a short time. He had asked her about how things were going for her, had been making jokes about how she would soon become a clutterer without him taking care of her, his little sister. Would he have done any of that if he had wanted to disappear from the face of the earth, let alone, killed a man?

Amy still couldn't process the entire story, but deep inside her heart she knew that everything somehow made sense. The dead man on the picture that Detective Mendoza had shown her. Everybody had thought that it was Jason, and Amy could understand why. She put her right hand into one of her pockets and pulled out the picture from the crime scene. The man in it definitely looked like Jason, although the pale colour of his face and the smeared blood that had flooded the bridge of his nose out from the hole inside his forehead made it difficult to be entirely sure. But the longer she stared at it, the more she slated herself for having thought for just one second that the man on the picture was Jason, her beloved brother. Around the man's face were dimples she had never seen on him, and there, just below his right nasal wing, was that a tiny mole? Jason didn't have any moles in his face, she was sure of it. Amy stopped in the middle of the street for a moment, breathed in the warm night air around her. All of a sudden, it hit her, and the relief of that revelation went through her as if God himself had just appeared right in front of her.

Her brother was alive!

On her face, a wide smile started to spread, and tears started flowing down her cheeks. She turned around with a beating heart and made her way to the LAPD headquarters that were just a few miles down the road. She needed to talk to Detective Mendoza right away, to tell him that they had all been wrong, that his friend, their colleague, was not dead after all. He needed to know.

She didn't notice the blond man standing a few meters away from her, hidden by a thick oak tree. His blue eyes had were shining as the moon was reflected inside of them, and when the distance between him and the Amy had become bigger, he slowly followed her, unseen by anybody.