Chapter Thirty Five

Jo wedged her booted foot in the door, preventing Lacey from slamming it in her face. "You didn't think I'd make it that easy, did you?"

Lacey blew out a sharp, exasperated grunt, mildly intimidated to find Jo and Archie standing on her front porch shortly after eight a.m. She bounced a wary glance between the two of them. "What do you want?" she demanded impatiently, only to follow it up with an even more important question, "And how do you know where I live?"

Under different circumstances, Jo might have been amused by Lacey's confused irritation but, at that moment, she had more pertinent matters on her mind. Thus, she got straight to the point. "That's no important right now," she said, "Have you heard from Danny? He's missing."

Her swamping aggravation prevented Lacey from absorbing the last of that statement initially. "Why would I have heard from Danny?" she snapped, "He and I don't speak anymore."

"Are you sure?" Jo pressed a little fretfully, "He hasn't called you once?"

Refusing to be interrogated and already past the threshold of her patience, Lacey started to close the door again only to have her efforts thwarted once more, this time by Archie. He braced his large hand against the door and then his body, heaving forward and leaving Lacey no choice but to stumble aside so that he and Jo could enter. She sputtered in rage over their audacity.

"This is trespassing!" she cried furiously, "I'm calling the police!"

"God, Lacey! Get over yourself for a minute," Archie bit out tersely, "Do you really think we would be here if it weren't important? Now have you heard from Danny recently or not?"

"Not in over a month!" she spat, "We spoke briefly. I asked him not to call me again! That's it!"

She resented being forced to reveal even that much. Her life had been in a perpetual shambles for nearly four months. She and her mother were only just beginning to regain some quasi state of normalcy in the wake of Clara's unexpected passing. It had taken some work and time but Lacey was finally moving past the initial stage of anger and blame regarding her sister's death and settling into acceptance. That didn't mean, however, that she was ready to deal with anything concerning Danny Desai.

Lacey couldn't forget that it had been his car Clara had been driving the night she was killed. She couldn't forget the revelation that Danny had been high the night it happened. The details as to what had happened and why had been muddy in the beginning but as they became clearer in the wake of the accident, Lacey grew to resent Danny more and more.

According to Clara's friends, they had been on their way to see a movie at the local cinema when Clara had spotted Danny across the street in a park that was known for being a place for drug buys. They said that Clara had later blown them off in favor of staying with Danny and "seeing him home safely." Lacey could only imagine that her sister had taken it upon herself to become Danny's designated driver when she saw he was in no condition to drive himself. Knowing Clara, she had probably imagined she was doing Lacey a favor by taking care of Danny. She would later pay for her benevolence with her life.

It shouldn't have happened and it wouldn't have happened, Lacey told herself fiercely, not if Danny hadn't been high in the first place. Not if he hadn't been such a liar and so firmly entrenched in his denial. And not if she hadn't trusted him in the first place, even when everyone around her was warning her against it. Danny was to blame for what happened to her sister that night but she shared the blame as well. It was a truth that Lacey was still struggling to accept. Naturally then, having Archie and Jo show up at her front door uninvited and bring all of those conflicted feelings roaring to the surface again, was the last thing she needed.

Unfortunately, neither Archie nor Jo seemed to possess even the smallest amount of decency needed to accommodate her grief. It was clear from their belligerent stance that they had no intention of leaving without being forced to do so. They were going to force her to make a scene, Lacey realized. Jo, in particular, continued to question her rigorously, starkly impervious to how upsetting Lacey found the entire ordeal.

"What did you talk about when he called? Did he mention anything about Tara? Did he say anything about where he was going or what the plan was for his care?" she fired, immediately following up each query with another, "Did he give you any indication of what was going on with him at all?"

"I already told you," Lacey reiterated tightly, "We didn't really talk. I told him to stop calling me. He did. End of story."

Jo bit out a short, mournful curse under her breath and buried her face briefly in her hands. "Oh my god...this is not good, Archie," she muttered, "This is so not good."

Against her better judgment, Lacey found herself asking, albeit wearily, "What's not good?"

Archie drew a shaking Jo into his arms before addressing Lacey over her head. "We told you already," he said, "Danny is missing. We have no idea where he is right now."

Lacey frowned. "I thought he was in the hospital."

Jo lifted her head from Archie's chest then and took a second to compose herself before clarifying matters for Lacey. "He was in the hospital," she explained, "but his dad said that Tara were supposed to have him transferred to a rehab facility here in Green Grove. Archie and I checked. Danny's not there."

"So you got the wrong facility," Lacey considered with a shrug, "Big deal."

Archie negated that assumption with a curt shake of his head. "That's what we thought too," he said, "So we checked with Mr. Desai again to make sure we had the right place and he stonewalled us."

"Stonewalled you?" Lacey echoed in confusion.

Jo nodded. "He told us that Danny was no longer our concern and to stop calling him."

Lacey expelled a short, humorless laugh. "Are you really surprised that he said that after what you and Archie pulled? You manipulated his entire family! You're lucky he didn't sue you for fraud!"

"He didn't seem to have a problem with that when he was asking me to sit with Danny after the accident," Jo pointed out tersely, "He was more than willing to have me around then! Now suddenly I'm persona non grata? It doesn't make any sense!"

"I don't have any answers for you. That's something you're going to have to take up with Mr. Desai," Lacey replied in a dismissive tone, "In the meantime, that doesn't mean that Danny is missing. It just means his father doesn't want you to know where he is. Considering the circumstances," she concluded with a disdainful sniff, "I don't blame him." She gestured toward the door before pulling it open for extra emphasis. "Feel free to leave now."

Archie sneered at her. "You really don't get it, do you?" he bit out, "Something bad might have happened to Danny. No one has seen or heard from him since he left the hospital. His cell phone is out of service. It's like he just disappeared off the face of the earth!"

Lacey found herself unexpectedly chilled by the disclosure. She deliberately pushed the front door shut before pivoting to face them again. "What do you mean is cell phone is out of service?" she asked with a nervous laugh, "Do you mean he's not answering your calls or that they're going to straight to voice mail or that..."

Jo cut in to explain before Lacey could continue to theorize. "I mean that when we call, we get an automated message that says the account no longer exists."

"What?"

It was in that moment that Jo knew that she had gained Lacey's full and undivided attention. "That's what we've been trying to tell you, Lacey," she said urgently, "I think something really bad has happened to Danny."

An icy tendril of fear trembled down the Lacey's back and her immediate response to the sensation was to fall into denial. "No, that's crazy," she muttered, "Maybe he just changed his phone number. People do that! People change their numbers!"

"Has he contacted you to tell you that?" Jo pressed a little desperately, "Do you have any missed calls from strange numbers on your caller i.d.? I doubt that he would call Archie or me to let us know that but he would definitely call you! Can you check?"

Lacey disappeared from the foyer before she even finished asking the questions to retrieve her cell phone. She reappeared several minutes later, scrolling manically through a month long list of missed calls and past texts, her heart sinking a little when she found herself familiar with each one of them and not one of them was Danny's. She even went so far as to call him directly, the first time she had dialed his number in many months. Lacey cringed when she received the same computerized message Jo and Archie had warned her about.

"No, no..." she muttered to herself anxiously, "...This doesn't make sense. Why wouldn't he call me? He would call me."

Now it was Archie's turn to curse aloud. "Then that proves it," he said to Jo, "Something must have happened to him. You said that Danny was desperate to explain himself to Lacey. There's no way he'd change his number without, at least, letting Lacey know. He'd want her to be able to contact him when she was ready. We have to go to the police right now."

"Wait!" Lacey cried when they turned to leave, now as eager to have them stay as she had been to kick them out, "Are you really going to report Danny missing to the police on evidence as flimsy as that? I'm not saying there's no reason to be worried but what if his family denies it? You'll look like lunatics!"

Jo spun back to face her, incensed by the question. "So are we just supposed to stand around and do nothing?" she snapped, "Is that what you're suggesting?"

"I don't know really know what I'm suggesting right now, Jo," Lacey admitted helplessly, "But don't you think it's going to be a little strange when you go to report Danny missing to the police when his own family hasn't done so? The cops will never take you seriously!"

"They won't have any choice but to take me seriously after I tell them that Tara Desai pushed me down the stairs and made me lose my baby," Jo declared.

For the second time in a near ten minute interval Lacey found herself figuratively stumbling around in shock. "What? Are...are you kidding me?" she breathed, aghast, "Why would you tell them something like that?"

Archie answered on Jo's behalf when Jo appeared to emotional to speak. "Because it's true."

"Since when?" Lacey snorted incredulously.

"Since always," Jo bristled thickly, "Only I didn't remember what happened until everything started coming back to me a few days ago."

"Everything like what?" Lacey asked in a weary tone.

An unspoken nod of agreement passed between Jo and Archie before Jo addressed Lacey again. "Tara found out about the baby," she confessed softly, "She started blackmailing me shortly after I moved in with them. She wanted me to help her make inroads with Danny and, in exchange, she said she would keep the secret about my baby's paternity."

"You lying, selfish bitch," Lacey muttered in disgust, "How could you do that to Danny? Do you have any idea how much he trusted you?"

"I'm not proud of what I did to him," Jo replied with genuine contrition, "I was desperate and scared and I just wanted Danny to love me. So, I agreed to her terms. But Danny was very resistant to trusting her. It was like he believed she was pure evil."

"With good reason," Lacey snapped, "You have no idea what kind of hell that woman put him through!"

"I know..." Jo acknowledged in a humiliated whisper, "I know what I did was wrong. I'm not trying to make excuses for myself. I'm only telling you what happened and what I was thinking at the time." Lacey accepted that with a reproachful nod for Jo to continue. "Anyway," she began, "as time went on Tara started to get impatient with me because Danny wasn't coming to heel as quickly as she wanted him to. She blamed me for that. She kept threatening to tell Danny about the baby if I didn't get him to trust her.

"And then, just as I was thinking that things couldn't possibly get any worse," she continued, sparing a brief sideways glance filled with apology at Archie, "Archie showed up out of nowhere and confronted me too. I felt cornered and it didn't help that Danny called in the middle of all of that to tell me that he wanted a paternity test done. It was like everything was falling apart all at once." She leveled Lacey with a penetrating look. "I can only assume that you put him up to that."

Lacey met her eyes without a shred of remorse. "Oh, poor little Jo, smothered under the weight of her own lies. My heart bleeds for you."

"I'm not blaming you," Jo maintained in a gruff tone, "I'm only trying to set the scene. It was an awful day. The point is," she further emphasized, "I was running out of options. I knew that I had no choice but to tell Danny the truth and when Tara came after me again I told her that. I told her that I would tell Danny everything about how she had been blackmailing me and how she intended to manipulate him out of his inheritance and that's when she pushed me."

"Are you sure?" Lacey pressed, her eyes narrowed in skepticism.

"I have no reason to lie about it."

Lacey scoffed. "You have every reason to lie and you do it as easily as you breathe."

"Are you saying that based on the here and now?" Jo asked her softly, "Or are you still living in the past, Suhad?"

Jo's unanticipated use of her past name had Lacey stiffening in surprise and suspicion. She bounced a cautious glance between Jo and Archie, her expression inscrutable when she said, "So I was right after all. You did know the whole time. This was all some elaborate plan you both had to get back at Danny right from the beginning."

"No, it wasn't," Archie retorted angrily, "Jo and I had no clue about our past until after Danny was arrested! We're only now beginning to understand just how deep our connection to him goes and we don't know why this is happening anymore than you do!"

Lacey said nothing in response to that but promptly asked, "Does Danny know?"

Jo confirmed with a short nod. "I told him when he was in the hospital."

"And? How did he take it?"

"He told me he wanted nothing to do with me and then cut me out of his life."

Lacey received a small bit of satisfaction with Jo's admission. "Good," she replied without a hint of sympathy, "It's a shame it took over three thousand years and two dead children before he finally wised up to you."

"No, it's not good at all, Lacey, because this isn't about what happened between us back then!" Jo snapped, "It's not even about what's happening right now! It's about Danny and what he needs! Don't you get that he has no one? Without me, Archie and you, he didn't have anyone to look out for him! He was alone and sick in the hospital and completely at Tara's mercy the whole time!"

"I think Danny's plenty capable of looking out for himself," Lacey muttered in a flash of bitterness though there was a part of her that was admittedly shaken by Jo's words.

Archie scowled at her, clearly pushed beyond his limited patience by Lacey's starchy attitude. "Didn't you hear what we just told you? Tara Desai is dangerous and she's crazy! She tried to kill Jo! She's the reason our baby is dead! And now we know for sure that she's been targeting Danny this whole time! Have you even stopped to consider what she might do to him...what she might have already done?" Lacey shuddered at the consideration, far more aware of the evils of which Tara Desai was capable than they knew.

"I get that you're pissed off at him," Archie went on in a brusque tone, "I'm pissed off at him too. I could write a book on all the issues between us! There's enough blame to go round and round but this isn't the time to hang onto our petty differences! Danny might be in real danger and he needs our help...all of us! We're not asking you to trust us, Lacey! We're asking you to help us!"

Lacey vacillated for a few, tense moments before finally acquiescing. "He once told me he thought Tara might be the high priest Amun," she revealed hesitantly.

Jo groaned in consternation. "God help us if that's true. Amun wanted him dead."

"So did the both of you," Lacey reminded them flatly.

"We never wanted him dead!" Archie snapped, "We only wanted to be together! We wanted a better Egypt!"

"And you left him bleeding to death on a battlefield in order to get it!" Lacey spat back.

Archie flinched at the seething vehemence in her tone. "I can't change what I did back then," he said, "I can only tell you that I'm not that man anymore. Jo and I aren't out to take anything from Danny! We're not trying to kill him! But Tara, who might very well be Amun, is!"

Unable to argue with him further, Lacey dropped her shoulders forward in defeat and confessed somewhat reluctantly, "In the weeks before the accident, Danny and I were looking for proof that Tara was the one who orchestrated our abduction when we were in New York. Danny was adamant that she was behind the entire thing."

Jo and Archie traded a thoughtful look before Jo asked, "Why exactly would he think that?"

"Because we heard them talking. The guys who took us had been hired by a woman and they hadn't been paid to just kidnap Danny. They had been paid to kill him. The only reason that didn't happen was because one of the guys got too greedy which left Danny and me with an opening to escape."

"Oh god..." Jo breathed in gathering panic, "Oh god...this is so much worse than I first thought."

"Why? What are you thinking?" When another furtive glance passed between Archie and Jo following her question, Lacey could feel herself getting angry because she sensed that they were withholding information from her while, at the same time, expecting her to divulge everything. She glowered at Jo. "What's going on? Just tell me already!"

"Are you sure you want to hear this?" the blonde pressed, "It's not going to be easy to talk about."

Lacey crossed her arms defiantly. "What are you thinking?"

"The night of Danny's accident," Jo began carefully, "the night your sister was killed, do you know why that happened?"

"Yes, I know why it happened." Lacey answered gruffly, blinking back the tears that immediately sprang to her eyes with Clara's mention, "It happened because my sister was driving a high-powered vehicle she couldn't handle because Danny was too impaired to drive it himself. She lost control of the car and they flipped into oncoming traffic and she was killed. That's what happened."

Jo shook her head. "That's not what happened," she whispered, "I overheard my parents talking about the details of the investigation into Danny's crash. They said that the police found that Danny's car barely had any brake fluid in it, like he had a leak or something and they were wondering if that could be a possible cause for the accident. Archie and I don't think that was a coincidence."

"What are you saying? You think that Tara tampered with Danny's car?" Lacey deduced in a shaky whisper, half in doubt, half in fear.

Archie dragged a shaky hand through his short, blonde hair and nodded in confirmation. "It's makes sense," he said, "Tara was responsible for having all the maintenance done on the vehicles in the house. If Danny's car didn't have enough brake fluid, it was because she wanted it that way."

"No," Lacey grunted, struggling with the theory, "There are a million reason why Danny's car might have been low on brake fluid. That doesn't mean that Tara was setting him up for a car accident."

"I think that she was," Jo interjected quietly, "I think that she planned for his brakes to give out eventually and for Danny to be killed in a car wreck. And later, when it was revealed that he had drugs in his system, she knew that the cops would probably write off the whole thing as Danny being reckless and high. Then she would finally have everything she wanted and Danny would be out of the way for good."

"That's insane."

"She was already laying the groundwork to take everything he had," Jo insisted, "Who do you think has control of Danny's personal bank accounts and the shares in his grandfather's company now? Tara. His father handed over everything to her! She was appointed as Danny's temporary executer right after his accident! She was trying to get Mr. Desai to declare him incompetent!"

"How do you know all of this?" Lacey asked suspiciously.

At that point, Archie spoke up as he realized that Jo was becoming increasingly more frazzled as the conversation wore on. "Mr. Desai told us," he said, "He said that, due to Danny's increasingly violent behavior and his drug use, he and Tara were taking steps to have Danny's shares in the company transferred over to his aunt."

"He said it was only supposed to be a temporary thing," Jo added once she had regained her composure, "That Tara would take control only long enough for Danny to recover from his accident and enter a drug treatment program but I know for a fact that Tara was never going to relinquish control to Danny whether he did 30 days or not."

Lacey had a difficult time buying into the idea of Jo being so altruistic which caused her skepticism to resurge anew. "And why would Mr. Desai tell you all of that?"

"Because he wanted us to testify on his behalf at Danny's competency hearing," Jo said, "He wanted us to tell the court that Danny was crazy so he could take Danny's inheritance."

"And what did you tell him?" Her tone suggested that she thought they would be only too eager to help Vikram Desai meet his goals. That fact didn't escape Jo's notice at all.

"We refused, of course!" she snapped, "God, Lacey! We love him too! You don't have the market cornered on that so get off your freaking high horse!"

"You love him? You have a funny way of showing it."

Jo pinned her with a reproving look. "So do you. I'm not the one who abandoned him when he needed me the most." The girls squared off in a moment of embittered, accusing silence which was punctuated by centuries of mistrust and hatred before Archie stepped between them.

"Come on, ladies," he murmured, "This isn't helping. We need to focus on the issue here."

Lacey jerked a stiff nod. "Right. This is about finding Danny."

Following that acknowledgment, Jo resumed speaking. "So, around the same time Mr. Desai was asking for our help, I was starting to remember details about the day I fell. Not anything major but enough to know that Tara Desai was more involved than she had let on. I already knew that she couldn't be trusted so there was no way in hell I was going to help Mr. Desai give her everything that belonged to Danny, even before I knew what she did to me!"

"I'm sorry but all of this sounds a little too 'conspiracy theory' to me," Lacey sighed, "If Mr. Desai wanted to have Danny declared incompetent then he had more than ample reason to do so, starting with the fact that Danny attacked him and then went on to attack Archie that same day! Danny was becoming violent and unpredictable, not to mention the fact he was doing drugs again! Maybe Mr. Desai thought that he had no other choice."

"No, he wasn't, Lacey," Jo refuted softly, "Danny was not doing drugs again."

"Right. And next you'll be telling me that you think Tara drugged him too." Her sarcasm turned to incredulity when she realized that was exactly what Jo believed. "You can't be serious," she uttered.

"Lacey, you didn't see his face when he found out his tox screen was positive," Jo said, "He was genuinely shocked and angry. He was adamant that some kind of mistake had to have been made!"

"He was playing you," Lacey declared but the denial sounded weak even to her. She didn't know if it was because she truly had doubts or because she was so desperate to believe anything other than Danny's unintentional involvement in her sister's death.

"He wasn't! I saw it in his eyes. He was telling the truth. He was devastated when he realized that was what you believed, that you were probably blaming him for your sister's death."

Lacey couldn't help but recall the last conversation she'd had with Danny and the anguish she had heard in his voice when he was begging her to listen. She shook off the memory with a shiver. "So you're telling me that you think the reason my sister is dead is because of Tara Desai?"

"Yes!"

"I can't believe that," Lacey maintained, shaking her head in fierce denial, "The night of the accident Danny was seen at a park where people go to score drugs. If he wasn't using then why was he there in the first place?"

"Ask yourself this instead," Jo countered softly, "If Danny really bought drugs that night then why didn't the cops or EMS find anything on him when he was flown to the hospital? Why didn't they find any paraphernalia in his car or his pockets? There was nothing, Lacey! Not even a joint! Does that make any sense to you? Something else is going on here!"

While Lacey struggled within herself to find logical answers to those questions, Jo further drove home her point. "Lacey, think about it. You've become very close to Danny. You know him," she said, "Think about those weeks with him before the accident. Did he seem secretive to you? Did you catch him in multiple lies? Was he sneaking off at all times of the day? Were there unaccounted for blocks of his time that he was hesitant to explain? Because that's how Danny always acted with Archie and me when he was using."

Lacey inventoried those days in her mind as Jo spoke, mentally answering in the negative to each question she asked. "No," she answered after a short lapse of silence, "He was erratic and volatile during that time but he wasn't secretive.

"When I asked him if he was still going to see you, he was honest with me about it even though he knew I'd be pissed," she recounted, "He made no secret of the fact that he was drinking as a way to cope. And when I accused him on being back on drugs, he was genuinely offended. We got into this huge fight afterwards and..." She trailed off into hiccupping sobs, remembering all too vividly how that night had ended. The picture came into complete focus for her then, leaving her with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

She doubled over as a wave of nausea rippled through her, stealing away her breath with the force of it. "Oh God...he tried to tell me," she wept, "He tried to tell me and I wouldn't listen to him."

Archie reached over to pat Lacey's shoulder awkwardly, commiserative but, at the same time, feeling ill equipped to handle her grief. "You weren't the only one. We were all eager to believe the worst of him."

Lacey wrapped her arms around her middle and began to rock back and forth as her mind began to race anxiously. "What if he's hurt right now?" she choked mournfully, "He knew she wanted to hurt him. He knew she was out for him all along? Wh...What if she did it? What if...what if he's dead?"

Jo flinched at the consideration but shook her head in firm denial. "I don't accept that. Archie and I are going straight to the police with everything we know about Tara, fact, speculation, all of it! She's involved in his disappearance up to her neck and they'll figure that out. They have to figure it out."

Desperate to believe her, Lacey responded with a nod and then straightened slowly. "I'm going with you," she announced, reaching to pluck her jacket from a nearby coat rack, "I need to find out for myself if you're right about all of this."