I thought about little Nash watching Skye with his baby brothers, watching her give them away. And then I thought about Libby taking me in.
“You get Xander’s nine-one-one?” Jameson asked his brother.
“Sure did,” Nash drawled.
“Nine-one-one?” Libby frowned. “Is Xander okay?”
“He needs us,” Nash told my sister, allowing the puppy to lick his chin.
“We each only get one a year. A text like that comes in, it doesn’t matter where you are or what you’re doing. You drop everything and go.”
“Xander just hasn’t told us where to go yet,” Jameson added.
Right on cue, Jameson’s phone buzzed; Nash’s, too. A series of texts came through in quick succession. Jameson angled his phone toward me so that I could see.
Xander had sent four photographs, each containing a little drawing. The first was a heart with the word CARE written in the middle of it. I scrolled to the second picture and frowned. “Is that a monkey riding a bicycle?”
Libby moved toward Nash and took his phone from his pocket. There was something intimate about the action—the way he let her, the way she knew he would. “The monkey appears to be saying EEEEEE! ” Libby commented
Nash looked at the picture. “Could be a lemur,” he opined.
I shook my head and looked at the third picture: Xander had drawn a tree. The fourth picture was an elephant jumping on a pogo stick, also saying EEEEEE!
I looked at Jameson. “Do you have any idea what this means?”
“As previously established, nine-one-one means Xander is calling us in,” Jameson said. “By Hawthorne rules, this summons cannot be ignored.
As for the pictures… work it out for yourself, Heiress.”
I looked at the pictures again. The care heart. The animals yelling Eeee.
“Tree’s an oak, if that helps,” Nash told me. The puppy barked.
Care. Eee. Oak. Eee. I thought—and then I put it all together. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I told Jameson.
“What?” Libby asked.
Jameson smirked. “Hawthornes never kid about karaoke.”
CHAPTER 46
Five minutes later, we were in the Hawthorne theater. Not to be confused with the Hawthorne movie theater, this one had a stage, a red velvet curtain, stadium and box seating—the whole shebang.
Xander stood on the stage, holding a microphone. A screen had been set up behind him, and there must have been a projector somewhere because “911!” danced on the screen.
“I need this,” Xander said into the microphone. “You need this. We all need this. Nash, I’ve cued up the Taylor Swift for you. Jameson, get ready to break out those dance moves because this stage is calling your name, and we all know that your hips are utterly incapable of falsehood. And as for Grayson…” Xander paused. “Where is Gray?”
“Grayson Hawthorne skipping out on karaoke?” Libby said. “I’m shocked, I tell you. Shocked. ”
“Gray has a voice so deep and smooth that you will shed literal tears as he sings something so old school that you will come to believe he spent the 1950s wearing the most dapper of suits and hanging out with his bestie, Frank Sinatra,” Xander swore. He swung his gaze to his brothers. “But Gray’s not here.”
Jameson glanced at me. “You don’t ignore a nine-one-one text,” he told me. “No matter what.”
“Where is Grayson?” Nash asked. And that was when I heard it—a sound halfway between a crash and the shattering of wood.