Chapter 2 The Missing Brother

I got home to South Philly at a quarter past seven with the sun in my eyes and Adrian's handwriting burned into my brain. I was already composing the lie I would tell Keisha. Nothing happened. I took the picture and left.

Our apartment is on the second floor of a row house on Wharton Street, above a laundromat. It smells like detergent and my mother's fried plantains, even years after she died. I climbed the stairs thinking about coffee.

The door was open.

Not broken. Opened politely, with a key or a very good pick. Inside, the place had been turned over with care. Couch cushions slit. Drawers on the floor. The kitchen table, where Danny's tuition bills had been, was bare.

"Danny?" My voice cracked. "Danny!"

His room was worse. The mattress stood on its side. His mechanic manuals lay in a heap. His cheap headphones, the ones he wore everywhere, were crushed on the floor.

His bed had not been slept in.

I called his phone. It rang once, muffled, from the wreck of his closet, and I dug it out from under a pile of jackets. A text waited on the screen from a number I didn't know.

Mari, if you get this, don't go to work. Don't trust anyone at the hotel. Not even Dolores. I'm sorry. D.

It had been sent at 3:14 that morning.

I did what I always do when my life falls apart. I cleaned. I could not help it. I stood in the closet and shook out jackets one by one, because if I stopped moving I would scream. In the pocket of his gray hoodie, my fingers closed on something thick.

A bank envelope. Inside were fifty crisp hundred-dollar bills.

Five thousand dollars. More than my brother had ever held at once. Danny had a part-time job and a scholarship application. Danny did not have five thousand dollars.

I sat on the floor with my back against the slashed mattress and put it together the way I put together a room. The same night someone had paid my brother, he had run. The same night I had been in a penthouse, men in suits had been running through the lobby.

I thought of the shape at the wall. The peppermint. The latch.

I thought: Nobody is going to believe I was only there for a picture.

My phone rang. Dolores. Head housekeeper, forty years at the Harrow, a small, round, tireless woman who had taught me to fold a fitted sheet like origami.

"Mari." She was whispering. "Where are you? Don't say. Listen. They have been through the hotel since six this morning. Four men, then ten. They are asking for a girl in a gray uniform. The girl from forty-one."

My knees turned to water. "Dolores, I didn't..."

"I don't want to know what you didn't. Your locker has been opened. A man named Rafe is in the break room with a list. If you come in today, he will put you in a car."

"Who is Rafe?"

"Child," Dolores said, very gently, "do you know whose suite that is?"

I closed my eyes. "No."

"Then it is better you do not. Go to your cousin in Camden. I will find Danny."

"Danny's missing."

A long silence. "Oh, Mari," Dolores breathed. "Oh, no."

I thanked her and hung up. I stood on the landing with five thousand dollars in my pocket and my mother's voice in my head. You never leave a Santos behind.

My mother said it in Spanish, usually while handing a stranger a plate of food at our door. Our whole family was built on it. When she got sick, Danny was fifteen and I was twenty, and I learned what it meant to be the one left standing in a hospital hallway, signing papers, promising a boy that everything would be fine. I had made that promise again every night since. I was not about to break it over a gray uniform and a dare.

I did not go to Camden. I put my uniform back on, because I could not think of anything braver, and I took the bus to the Harrow, because the only way to find my brother was to find the people who were looking for me.

The staff entrance was quiet. The basement smelled of bleach and steam. I walked past the laundry, past the time clock, past the green lockers. Mine hung open and empty.

The man on the bench beside it did not look up. He was very big, with scarred knuckles and a face like a closed fist.

"Miss Santos," he said politely, in a voice like gravel in a bucket. "Mr. Castellane would like a word."