Nola turned with a look of annoyance. “Liberace’s a lying manipulator—no different than my brother.”
“Maybe. When Liberace died, though, his finances were such a mess, they didn’t even realize he’d spent his life giving over six million dollars to fund scholarships for kids in the performing arts. Some of the endowments were permanent, and there were so many, even today, they still don’t have an accurate count of how many kids he helped.”
“That doesn’t mean my brother’s not a liar.”
“I’m not saying it does. But we all have a person we were and a person we are. It’s never a straight line between the two—and it’s certainly never a predictable one. Just because you read the first few chapters doesn’t mean you know everything that’s coming. Keep an open mind. If you’re lucky, there’s a plot twist.”
With a thump, the car hit a pothole. A blaze of pain shot up Zig’s back, but he never took his eyes off Nola.
“Liberace still sounds like a pain in the rear,” Nola said.
“Thousands of old women in sequined headbands and multiple rings disagree with you.”
For a half second, Nola looked like she was about to smile. She didn’t, but her hands did slide down the steering wheel to the five and seven o’clock positions. The shift in her posture was enough that Zig spotted, in her door’s storage well, a plain manila envelope.
Squinting, Zig saw his name handwritten in black pen in the corner. “Nola, what’s in the envelope?”
“I’ll show you after.”
“Show me now.”
On their right, they blew past a dilapidated redbrick building, the roof sheared away, the zigzag of missing bricks resembling a crumbling smile. The place looked like it’d been hit by a bomb.
“I was— It’s about Maggie,” she said. Zig’s daughter.
“Nola, what’d you do?”
“Ms. Waggs told me about the video . . . the one you were looking for . . . from the modeling agency . . .”
“If you found something—”
“A boyfriend. Liam Hudson. They called him Huddy, at least back then,” Nola explained, eyes again straight ahead, hands back up to ten and two. “From what I could find, he was a new kid. Moved from Oregon. For some reason, everyone said he could do a lot of chin-ups.”
“Did you know him, or—？”
“Just listen. He got there after I moved away. Apparently, at some point, Huddy asked Maggie out. They dated for a week or two, then he dumped her for Daniella Moran, a nasty little panty stain who’s now a corporate lawyer in Philly. That’s why Maggie was crying in the video. Every week, the head of the modeling agency would do ‘open mics,’ little interviews to give kids experience on camera, but really to get new sign-ups.”
“We’d never let Maggie sign up there.”
“She didn’t seem to care—she went with Daniella,” Nola explained, handing him the envelope. “You’ll see in the footage. Daniella goes first and mentions her new boyfriend. By the time Maggie gets onscreen, the employee who’s filming can tell something’s wrong. He asks if she’s okay, and the floodgates open about the breakup.”
Reaching into the envelope, Zig pulled out a DVD in a cracked jewel case. He was calm, which was the giveaway.
“You already knew,” Nola said.
Zig nodded, staring down at the DVD with the handwritten Post-it labeled SuperStars Modeling.
“Who told you? Ms. Waggs?” Nola asked.
Zig nodded again. “Though my ex-wife found it first, two days ago.” Charmaine was smart. She remembered the old camera store in the same plaza. CameraWorld. That took her back to the source—the daughter whose parents used to run SuperStars and started this whole mess. When Charmaine first spoke to her, the daughter said she’d already looked through all the videotapes. But when Charmaine called back, the answer was a simple question away: Among those old videos, do you happen to have a corresponding DVD? That was it. “That’s why the owners taped over the old video,” Zig explained. “Once they had the DVD, the original tapes went back in the camera.”