#1 bestselling author Brad Meltzer returns with The House of Secrets.
When Hazel Nash was six years old, her father taught her: mysteries need to be solved. He should know. Hazel’s father is Jack Nash, the host of America’s favorite conspiracy TV show, The House of Secrets.
Even as a child, she loved hearing her dad’s tall tales, especially the one about a leather book belonging to Benedict Arnold that was hidden in a corpse.
Now, years later, Hazel wakes up in the hospital and remembers nothing, not even her own name. She’s told she’s been in a car accident that killed her father and injured her brother. But she can’t remember any of it, because of her own traumatic brain injury. Then a man from the FBI shows up, asking questions about her dad—and about his connection to the corpse of a man found with an object stuffed into his chest: a priceless book that belonged to Benedict Arnold.
Back at her house, Hazel finds guns that she doesn’t remember owning. On her forehead, she sees scars from fights she can’t recall. Most important, the more Hazel digs, the less she likes the person she seems to have been.
Trying to put together the puzzle pieces of her past and present, Hazel Nash needs to figure out who killed this man—and how the book wound up in his chest. The answer will tell her the truth about her father, what he was really doing for the government—and who Hazel really is. Mysteries need to be solved. Especially the ones about yourself.
Release date:
January 31, 2017
Publisher:
Grand Central Publishing
Print pages:
368
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Jack Nash decides, at midnight on a Wednesday in the dead of summer in Los Angeles, that his daughter Hazel is ready for The Story.
He was six years old when his father first told him The Story. That’s Hazel’s age now—exactly six—and she’s wide awake, forever asking why and what: Why does she need to go to sleep? What are dreams? Why do people die? What happens after people die?
“You’ll know when it happens,” Jack tells her.
Six is the appropriate age, Jack thinks.
Five years old was too young. Five is how old his son Skip was when Jack told him The Story and it hadn’t stuck, didn’t seem to make any impression whatsoever. Which got Jack wondering: How old do you have to be to retain an event for the rest of your life?
That was the thing about memory: After a certain point, you just knew something. How you came to know it didn’t matter.
“Okay, here we go,” Jack says. “But promise me you won’t let it scare you.”
Hazel sits up on an elbow. “I won’t be scared,” she says solemnly. Jack knows it’s true: Nothing scares Hazel. Not when she can learn something. She’s the kind of child who would burn her right thumb on a hot stove, then come back the next day and burn her left in order to compare.
In an odd way, it made Jack proud. Hazel’s brother Skip wouldn’t touch the stove in the first place, always so cautious of everything. But Hazel was willing to give up a little skin for adventure.
“It begins with a mystery, a riddle,” Jack says, and he can hear his father’s voice, his father’s words, so clearly. Dad’s been gone five years now, but the memory of his last days is so vivid, it could have been thirty minutes ago. “If you figure the riddle out, you can stay up all night. If you can’t, you need to go to sleep. Deal?”
“Deal,” Hazel says.
“Close your eyes while I tell it to you,” Jack says, slipping into The Voice, the same one his own dad used to use, the one Jack now uses on his TV show, where every week he explores the world’s most famous conspiracies: Who killed JFK? Why did FDR have a secret fraternity known as The Room? Or his favorite during sweeps: Outside of every Freemason meeting, there’s a chair known as the Tyler’s Chair; what are its true origins and secrets?
It’s a show Hazel isn’t allowed to watch. Jack’s wife Claire worries the show will give Hazel bad dreams. But Jack knows that Hazel revels in nightmares, just like Jack used to: Something chasing you in your sleep was always far more interesting than fields of cotton candy.
“This story begins a hundred and fifty years ago, with a farmer,” Jack says as Hazel leans farther forward on her elbow. “The farmer woke up early one morning to tend his fields, and a few yards from his house, he found a young man on the ground, frozen to death.”
Hazel was fascinated by freezing—Jack and Claire constantly found random objects in the freezer, everything from dolls to plants to dead spiders.
“The farmer takes the body inside his farmhouse, puts a blanket on him to thaw him out, then goes and rouses the town doctor, bringing him back to look at the poor chap.
“When the doctor gets the dead man back to his office, he begins a basic autopsy. He’s trying to find some identifying details to report to the mayor’s office. But as he cuts open the man’s chest, he makes a surprising discovery…” And here, Jack does the same thing his own father did, and gives Hazel two brisk taps on the center of her breastbone, gives her a real sense of the space involved. “Right there, on the sternum and on the outside of his rib cage, he finds a small object the size of a deck of cards. It’s encased in sealing wax. And as he cracks the wax open, he finds a miniature book.”
“Would it even fit there?”
“Remember Grandpa’s pacemaker? It’d fit. It’s pocket-sized.”
“What kind of book?” Hazel asks, eyes still closed.
“A bible. A small bible, perfectly preserved by the wax. And then, the man…opens…the…bible…up,” Jack says, laying it on thick now, “and sees four handwritten words inside: Property of Benedict Arnold.”
Jack stops and watches Hazel. Her eyes have remained closed the entire time, but she keeps furrowing her brow, thinking hard. “So?” he says. “How did it get there?”
“Wait,” Hazel says. “Who’s Benedict Arnold?”
Don’t they teach anything in school anymore?
“He was a soldier,” Jack says. “During the Revolutionary War.”
“A good guy or a bad guy?”
“A complicated guy,” Jack says.
“Was the bible put in the man’s body after he died?”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“There would have already been a wound on his chest.”
“Was it his bible? Like, did he own it?”
“I don’t know,” Jack says, thinking, Well, that’s not a question I’d ever pondered. Hazel’s eyes flutter open, then close again tightly. She’s checking to see if he’s lying.
Hazel stays quiet for thirty seconds, forty-five, a minute. Then, “Why does it matter how it got there?”
“Because it’s a mystery,” Jack says. “And mysteries need to be solved.”
Hazel considers this. “Do you know the answer?”
“I do.”
“How many guesses do I get?”
“Three per night,” Jack says.
She nods once, an agreement sealed. “Okay,” she says, “lemme think.”
Jack stays with her another ten minutes, then heads to his own bedroom, where Claire is up, reading. “Did you get her to sleep?” Claire asks.
“No,” Jack says. “I gave her a riddle.”
“Oh, Jack,” Claire says, “you didn’t.”
* * *
Hazel waits until she can hear her father and mother talking down the hall before she opens her eyes.
She gets up, walks across her room, opens the closet where she keeps her stuffed animals. The fact is, she doesn’t really care for stuffed animals, thinks they’re kind of creepy when you examine them closely: animals with smiles and fake shines in their eyes, no teeth, no real claws either. She quickly finds Paddington Bear, undresses him from his odd blue rain slicker, fishes out a pair of scissors from her desk, and then, very calmly, cuts open Paddington’s chest.
Inside is nothing but fuzz, white and clumpy. It’s nothing like how she imagines a body will be, but that doesn’t matter. She pulls out all of the stuffing, leaves it in an orderly bunch on her bedroom floor, and then fills Paddington’s empty cavity with a Choose Your Own Adventure paperback, the one where you pretended to be a spy, but where you mostly ended up getting run over by trucks. She then packs the bear back up with stuffing, staples his fur back together, makes Paddington look smooth and new and lovable, then puts his jacket back on. Adjusts his red cap.
Hazel then tiptoes out to the kitchen, finds the stepladder, and slides it in front of the freezer. As she climbs up and examines the few packages of frozen food, she decides Paddington would be best served back behind the old flank steak that’s been in the icebox for nine months now.
When her father asks her how the hell Paddington Bear ended up in the freezer, disemboweled and filled with a book, she’ll give him her answer. It’s impossible, she’ll say.
Nothing is impossible, her father will say, because he is a man of belief.
Then it must have been magic, she’ll say.
There’s no magic, he’ll say.
Then it must have been a person, trying to fool you, she’ll say.
And she will be right.
1
Summer, Utah
Now
Let’s see what this old bruiser can do,” Jack Nash says. He’s behind the wheel of his ’77 sky blue Cadillac Eldorado with a trunk big enough to lie down in, and he’s hurtling down Highway 163 through the Utah desert. It’s not even 10 a.m. and Hazel’s sitting next to him, Skip’s in the backseat. There’s a lifetime of polish and pain between them all. But isn’t that how it always is? He presses the gas and the Caddy thunders forward.
“Maybe take it down a notch, Dad?” Skip says. Jack catches a glimpse of his son in the rearview mirror. He’s looking a little peaked. Thirty-nine years old and he still gets carsick. “You get a ticket at your age,” Skip adds, “you’re liable to lose your license.”
Your age. How old does Jack feel? In his mind, he’s still in his thirties—sometimes he feels like he’s a teenager even—but Jack knows his brain is a liar. His body has been telling him the truth for some time now. No one ever says seventy is the new forty. Seventy…that’s the line where if you die, people don’t get to say it was a tragedy.
“Just keep an eye out for cops,” Jack says.
Hazel rolls her eyes, rubbing absently at a small knot on her forehead, a bruise just below her hairline. A wound from a fight she’ll never talk about.
“The speedometer only goes to eighty-five?” Hazel asks.
Jack rolls his eyes, knowing all too well how easily his daughter finds trouble. But that was the nice thing about these old cars built to go fifty-five. Eighty-five seemed extravagant. Cars these days went to 140, 160, sometimes 170. Or their speedometers did, anyway. A false sense of a new horizon, that’s what that was.
This stretch of the 163 is one of Jack’s favorite swaths of land. It’s all red today, from red sand to red glare, everything the color of dried blood. It’s the beauty and grace of the natural world: The massive sandstone spires are the result of millions of years of erosion and pressure, alongside the forbidding truth of the desert, which is that you’re always one wrong move from something that could kill you.
A rattlesnake.
A scorpion.
Even the very air itself, which could end you with heat or cold, it didn’t discriminate. Out here, dying from exposure was just dying.
Beautiful. Made you feel alive.
The first time Jack and his kids were here was decades ago. Same car. Back then, Claire was up front next to him, both of the kids in the back, the tape player screaming out the Rolling Stones, Jack’s favorite band. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” was his song, of course.
Skip was a teenager and in the midst of another season of The House of Secrets alongside his famous father. From the start, everyone knew it was a ratings ploy, like introducing a new baby on a sitcom, and like the worst of those, they started calling Skip “Scrappy” from Scooby-Doo. Still, it put his face on posters in Tiger Beat. A mistake? Probably. No, surely. But Skip loved it. Hazel was just a kid, but ready for the world…just a world different from the one Skip was living in.
They’d driven from Los Angeles to Zion to Bryce to Moab, Claire’s hand on Jack’s thigh, tapping out the beat. If he concentrates, he can still feel it there, bump-bump-uh-dun-uh-duh-dun-uh-duh, But it’s allll right now…
Jack eases off the accelerator. “We need to talk,” he says, “about the future.”
* * *
Jack Nash has three rules. He came up with them when he started in TV news, before he got into the mystery business. He’d read a bunch of autobiographies and found that every successful person had some sort of code.
The first was that there was a rub in every deal—a snag or a drawback; there was always a catch. Once you understood that, there were no bad deals.
The second was that nothing goes missing. Everything is somewhere.
This was actually a rule of Claire’s, from when the kids were still young. Whenever they said they’d lost something—a toy, the dog, their favorite shirt—she very calmly explained to them that just because something was gone didn’t mean it’d ceased to exist. But then Claire got sick, and he couldn’t help but wonder if that rule needed some amending, because while she was still there, she began to disappear a bit every day. First it was her hair. Then her teeth. And then one morning, he woke up and she was gone entirely.
For a while he still felt her presence in the house, like she was just in the other room, or out in the yard, and he’d absently call out to her, habit somehow getting in the way of grief. Eventually, that feeling went away and now Jack only feels her in the place between sleep and waking, can almost feel her sitting on the edge of the bed, watching him.
Claire’s been gone ten years now. How Jack wishes she were here. She’s somewhere. Jack knows this. He found her in the first place, he’ll find her again. He thinks maybe he’s closer to her now than ever, particularly with how every day he feels a little shorter of breath, how there are days when he can’t feel his fingertips. His doctor told him it was a blood flow problem.
He needed to take his meds.
Eat right.
Get exercise.
Slow down. He got a second opinion, a third; they all told him the same thing. Can’t feel your fingertips? Take a nitro. The nitro doesn’t work, call 911. Can’t get to a phone? Get right with your soul.
He was trying by practicing his third rule: Honor the people who love you.
Jack realized early on that rules one and three didn’t quite work together. Sometimes the rub is that the people who love you wouldn’t recognize your logic, not when it comes to matters of business. So maybe they aren’t rules, Jack considers today, all these years later. Maybe they are truths.
And the thing about truth, well, it doesn’t always need to be fact based.
Indeed, when Jack picked his son up in Las Vegas, where Skip had been signing autographs at a convention, and where he’d been living—“for tax purposes,” Skip told him—and when Hazel flew in from some anthropology conference, Jack wasn’t even sure if he could go through with his plan to lay it all out. It was an anniversary trip, he’d told them, for Claire, which got both of the kids to grudgingly agree to check out of their own lives for a week. But the fact was, he wanted to put a bow on another part of their lives too.
“I’m done,” Jack says. “I’m ending the TV show.”
“What? Why?” Skip asks.
“Time to live like a normal person.”
“Isn’t it a little late for that?” Hazel says.
Probably, Jack thinks. “Maybe I have fifteen years left,” he says. “I’d like to enjoy them.”
“Don’t say that,” Skip says. “Soon as you put a number on things, you start counting toward it. That’s bad juju.”
Now Jack was the one rolling his eyes. Skip. A childhood nickname that stuck. No man should enter his fifth decade still saddled with a nickname, Jack thinks, unless it’s something like Alexander the Great, except even Alexander the Great was dead at thirty-two. Skip’s real name was Nicholas, but it was Jack’s own father who’d crowned him years before. As in, Maybe it will skip a generation.
“You’re finally being smart. You should’ve done it years ago,” Hazel says. “You outlasted Jacques Cousteau. Go ahead—pull the plug and enjoy.”
Hazel. She’d taken after her mother in so many ways that it was often hard for Jack to be around her anymore. Her face, her voice, even her hand gestures, reminded him of Claire so much that it hurt to be near her. They also had the same temper—and the same reckless attraction to destruction.
How many times had Jack been woken by the police, Hazel in the back of a squad car? How many phone calls had he made, even in the last year, to keep charges from being filed against her for assault…or mayhem…or whatever charge the police wanted to hang on her? Jack tried to harness it—in his line of work, especially the parts of his life he hid from everyone else, fearlessness was what kept him alive. But then Claire saw what he was doing, and that was the end. I will not let you put her in that business. Over the years, Hazel had found her own business. She was a pilgrim, a professor, and never exactly risk-averse.
“But the fans…” Skip said.
“Don’t,” Hazel warned, her temper already showing. “When was the last time the fans were ever happy?”
She was right about that too.
For the first few seasons, it was enough to find some old NASA employees who swore the moon landing was fake…or the woman who woke up one day and suddenly could speak Latin. All Jack had to do was nod and show that perfect amount of empathy. Just because something seemed implausible didn’t mean it wasn’t true.
But then people started to need more, something a bit less static. And that meant Jack had to go into the field, begin actually investigating the mysteries of the world, even solving them when he could. That was the thing about the mystery business: Every now and then, you had to unravel one, or else the viewers would begin to think everything was fake, or, alternatively, that the world really was a series of vast, unending conspiracies meant to keep them from knowing the truth.
That’s what it always boiled down to. People weren’t happy unless they believed at least part of the world was some grand hoax. It’s what had made Watergate so compelling. Everything everyone suspected was true: Government was corrupt, the world was being manipulated, nothing was on the level…and it took a couple of guys named Bob and Carl to figure it all out. But as Jack knew, most times, mysteries didn’t have satisfying endings. Like the death of JFK. No one wanted to believe Oswald acted alone, because then that story was done.
The world was so different now. Anyone could see anything. And the government? Between the robots, drones, and Navy SEALS, they had more people working for them than against them. Whatever Jack Nash could find hardly mattered. He was a cog. The machine was so big now, it could withstand a few loose screws.
“Can you even be happy?” Skip asks. “Away from it?”
As soon as he found the book. No, not just a book. A bible. The bible. It was so close to him now. If he closed his eyes, he could see it, right in front of him, there in the desert, swirling in the wind.
“That’s the last mystery,” Jack says, his words slurring.
“Dad, you all right?” Hazel asks quietly. She’s looking at him strangely, he thinks. Like she’s studying him, cataloguing him, breaking him into parts, like she does. She puts her hand on his elbow. “You look flushed.”
“Never better,” Jack says. Outside, the desert suddenly blooms white, the sand so luminous that it reminds Jack of the Sahara. “There’s something else I want to tell you.”
“We know, Dad,” Skip says. “Honor the people who love you. You’ve told us a million times.”
“Your color isn’t good,” Hazel says. “Your face is red. Why don’t you pull over? Let me drive.”
“Everything is red here,” Jack says, but no, no, it’s white now. Everything awash in light. Is he on a beach? He thinks he might be. The salt on his lips. The waves in his ears. Yes. He’s not driving a car. He’s asleep on some further shore. Wasn’t he about to say something?
“Dad!” Hazel shouts, grabbing the wheel. “Dad, can you hear me!?”
He feels the waves settling in his chest, not a bad feeling, no. The light has turned from red to white to a brilliant yellow, the desert transforming right before his eyes. Do the kids see it? They must. They must see it.
He hopes they finally do.
2
Los Angeles
Eight days later
“—azel-Ann? Hazel-Ann, can you hear me?”
Hazel-Ann Nash blinked through the darkness, squinting at the blinding light.
“She’s alert!” a man called out. White coat. Doctor. Hospital.
The doctor was shouting questions in her face, but as she anxiously glanced around, her eyes…Why weren’t her eyes working? It was like they focused only for a second, pinging from the bed she was in, to the dead TV, to the hand sanitizer on the wall, to the whiteboard with the handwritten words:
I am Hazel-Ann Nash and I am feeling _______.
Was that really her name? Hazel-Ann? Something was wrong. How could she not know her name?
Her heartbeat pulsed in her tongue, her gums, her ears. Her instinct was to run, though that didn’t make sense. Why would you run from a hospital?
“Can you feel this, Hazel-Ann?” the doctor asked, stabbing parts of her body.
The problem was she could feel everything. She wasn’t entirely sure why she was in a hospital, though judging from the way every part of her felt as if it had been set on fire and then extinguished using a brick, she guessed she’d been in some kind of accident.
“Can you feel this, Hazel-Ann?” the doctor asked. He poked the bottom of her foot.
“Hazel,” she blurted, suddenly sure of only one thing. She didn’t like being called Hazel-Ann. She ran her tongue over her top teeth. They were all there. A couple of jagged edges. That wasn’t good.
The doctor was about her age, thirty-five, maybe a few years older. As he leaned over her bed, Hazel could see that he’d missed a spot while shaving that morning. Right above his Adam’s apple was a clump of long hairs. She wanted to reach up and yank them out, show him how it felt to be yelled at and stabbed, but her arms were immobilized, hooked to a latticework of IVs. And besides, the doctor had kind eyes, deep blue.
“Hazel,” he said, “do you know where you are?”
Did she? Where had she been that day? Utah. Yes. Monument Valley. With her brother…Skip, his name was Skip—and her father, Jack.
She could remember eating fry bread at a highway stop. A Navajo man dusted it with cinnamon and slipped them a few extra pieces when he recognized her father—the famous Jack Nash—from his forever-running TV show, The House of Secrets. As they ate, her mother was in the dirt parking lot, banging the horn from the passenger seat—
No.
Wait.
Her mother was dead. Ten years now. Brain cancer. She could remember her mom in the casket, could remember the sun so hot that day that everyone at the graveside was sipping ice water from red Solo cups.
But that wasn’t today, couldn’t have been today. It was as if there were two memories occupying the same space.
“Moab?” Hazel said.
The doctor turned toward a nurse Hazel hadn’t noticed before, or maybe the nurse had just walked in. Nothing was firing right. The nurse wore a blue V-neck smock and had a clipboard in her hands, but she was just staring at Hazel with honest concern. Hazel’s father once told her that if she was ever scared on a plane, all she had to do was look to see if the flight attendants seemed worried. If they did, buckle up.
“I need a seat belt,” Hazel blurted, though she hadn’t meant to speak. Her voice sounded all wrong.
“Hazel, you’ve been in a car accident,” the doctor said as Hazel noticed he had a bit of pepper stuck above one of his incisors. It was all she could focus on, that lack of attention to detail, the failure to realize that he’d left a mess in his own mouth. “Do you remember anything about an accident?”
She could see her father’s hands on the steering wheel of his Cadillac, Skip reaching for her from the backseat, the smell of her father’s ever-present mint gum.
“What hospital is this?” she asked, hearing her voice shake.
“UCLA Medical Center. In Los Angeles. I’m Dr. Morrison. I’m taking care of you. Everything is going to be just fine.”
Los Angeles was where she’d grown up. She knew that.
“What else do you remember?” Dr. Morrison asked. His tone made Hazel feel there was something bad in the answer.
“I need to see Skip,” she said.
“We’ll let him know you’re awake again.”
Again.
“How long have I been out?”
“Intermittently,” he said, “for eight days.”
Her heartbeat pulsed faster than ever. Nothing made sense. Maybe she should run. But she could hear her dad’s voice. Nothing good comes from panic. Old instincts kicked in. Look around. Examine. Assess. She turned to the nurse, trying to gauge her reaction.
“I need to see my father,” Hazel demanded.
“Everything is going to be fine,” Dr. Morrison said for the second time. “Can you tell me what you do for a living, Hazel?”
“Anthropology professor. At San Francisco State,” she said. Yes. That’s right. That’s where she honed her skills. Examine. Assess. “I stu. . .
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