Chapter Thirty-Eight
Parker

Once upon a time Parker Lowell discovered that his twin brother, Taylor Hanson, was hiding something from him. And what did he do about it?

Not much, that’s for sure. I didn’t really know what I was supposed to do. It was pretty clear that I wasn’t expected to do anything at all and yet it seemed to be my move. Taylor hadn’t made many of his own and the ones he had made were mostly unintentional. Annie had made a few with those photographs she had. Like Taylor, she probably wasn’t even aware that she had made any moves at all. In either case, it was my turn. Something was telling me to take what I knew--everyone’s attitudes toward Annie Lawrence, finding Taylor at the cemetary that one day, the picture of the man in Annie’s garage, the empty room in Annie’s house, the pictures on the desk in that room--and figure something out from it.

There was a way everything fit together, I was sure of it. But I was also sure that whatever these pieces fit together to make, it was probably something rather obvious. And yet I was still missing it.

I kept trying to put two and two together, but couldn’t seem to end up with four no matter how I tried. How many different ways I tried to look at it, there was just something I wasn’t getting. Something I apparently wasn’t going to get unless I did the obvious.

And I wasn’t about to ask Taylor or Annie outright. What was the fun in saving myself from hours of laying in my bed in the guestroom, staring at the pages in my notebook blankly, waiting for it to get sick of my toilings and just shout out the answer at me the way Gina did when we were playing Trivial Pursuit and I was taking too long to come up with the right answer. But it wasn’t saying much. If anything, it was laughing at me. In some ways, I got the feeling Taylor and Annie were doing the same thing. They probably thought it was hilarious that even after nearly two weeks, I wasn’t in on whatever little secret they had. They were amused that I couldn’t figure it out and was too chicken to just come out and ask them.

Part of my fear was how to approach the subject. I couldn’t just come out and say, “So what the hell is going on?” like I wanted to so badly because that was just too easy to dodge. There were plenty of escape routes with that one that they could probably take advantage of if they wanted to. But I wasn’t all that great at subtlety either. I wasn’t one for trapping people into telling me things. No escape. No choice but to just say it.

Another part of my fear came from wondering if I really wanted to know. It didn’t seem to be any of my business, after all. No one had made an effort to say anything about it to me yet and maybe there was a very good reason behind that. Maybe it was something really awful that they all wanted to protect me from. None of them seemed to be handling the situation all that well, so who was to say that I would be able to handle it any better than they could? Maybe they didn’t want to cause that kind of (pathetically obvious) inner turmoil in anyone else.

Even still, wasn’t it my right to know?

For some inexplicable reason, I felt it was my right to know and that it was my job to figure it out. Or find some way of getting someone to tell me.

Until I got the balls to do that, though, I was left with me, myself, and what clues had been dumped in my lap over the past two weeks.

The most obvious of which was the attitudes toward Annie, the day we saw Taylor in the cemetary, the man in the picture, the empty room in Annie’s house, and the pictures on that desk in the empty room.

The pictures I wasn’t really all that sure of, the more I thought about them. If Annie was such a good friend of the family, was it all that unusual to have pictures like those in her house? The only thing unusual about their presence was the fact that they were all in one, empty yet lived-in bedroom. If there had been pictures of other Hansons in more normal, spread out spots around the house, then it wouldn’t be so weird that they were there. But the only picture of any Hanson I could find in a normal spot in the house was of Taylor with the Lawrences, a copy of which was in the empty room. Except the one in the room had Taylor kissing Annie’s cheek. Other than that, there was nothing. No pictures of any other Hansons, especially not one with Annie in the same picture, someone demonstrating open displays of affection toward her.

Probably the weirdest part of the puzzle was the man. There wasn’t anything to tell me that he even had anything to do with all this except the fact that Taylor and I looked like him so much. Not in the way we looked like each other. We were mirror-images of each other: same eye color, hair color and length, about the same height. But we only resembled this man in an eerie way. We weren’t carbon copies of him. There was just a similarity. A resemblance. The way a child resembles their parent. Closely.

But that brought me no closer to the edge of the darkness I had been kept in all this time. I felt like one of those characters in a bad detective movie where the people in the audience have figured out the answer to the mystery and are waiting impatiently for the character to do the same. Wondering how he could be so stupid as to not see something that was staring him straight in the face.

Damnit.

I was getting sick of thinking of all this, but there wasn’t much else to do in the silent house. Taylor, Zac, and I were the only ones there. Isaac had left that morning to drive around and Mr. and Mrs. Hanson had taken the little ones to see a movie. Zac was outside. Taylor was in his room. I was in my room. Alone. With my thoughts and my clues.

Of course, in the silence of the house, the unintelligible shouts coming from down the hall were only the more obvious and, startled, I sprang up from my bed to go find out what was going on. Glad for the distraction.

Save a suffering story.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Nine