Vanished by Joseph Finder Page B

Maybe it was the fifteen-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, or whatever they were, which I wasn’t used to. Too slippery.
    More likely, though, it was because I was on alert for any noises that might indicate someone was trying to break in.
    I found myself thinking about my brother. About our childhood bedrooms, which we insisted on being right next to each other’s. When, given the size of our house, we could easily have been separated by half a mile.
    For most of our childhood, we were best friends. We shared almost everything. We were brought close by the weird isolation imposed upon us by my father’s money. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say, by the way my father chose to live, since I’ve known rich people who are vigilant about giving their kids a normal life. They send their kids to public schools, they conceal their wealth as best they can, they drive ordinary cars and live in ordinary houses.
    But not Victor Heller. He was a brilliant wheeler-dealer who rose from a working-class background to rule Wall Street, and he wanted everyone to know it. Hence the estate in Bedford, with the horses and stables and clay tennis courts and the collection of antique roadsters. For years he commuted to and from work in his own Sikorsky helicopter, which landed on a pad in our backyard, until the town authorities took him to court to make him stop.
    Mom was the prettiest girl in his small-town high school, with looks that rivaled Grace Kelly’s, and her early photos confirmed it. Victor Heller won her over by the sheer brute force of his charisma, by his indomitable will, his outsize ambition.
    To the world, she seemed to be the perfect society wife, though she was anything but. She was too smart to play the role he’d assigned her—arm candy and cheerful volunteer for the charities he supported. Her chief pleasure in life was being a mother, yet Victor made sure she wasn’t around much to enjoy it. He insisted she go to all the dinner parties and balls and weekends in Verbier or Mallorca or Lake Como, though she never seemed to take pleasure in any of it.
    As a result, Roger and I spent more time with our nannies and gardener and caretaker and household staff than we did with our parents. This didn’t make for a great childhood, but it did at least bring us together. Roger and I were born less than two years apart—eighteen months, a closeness in age that could have made us intensely rivalrous. Instead, we were more like fraternal twins. We did everything together.
    Our personalities couldn’t have been more different, though. I was the rebel, the troublemaker, and the athlete. Roger was the intellectual, far more bookish, basically a solitary type. Yet he was also a troublemaker in his own quiet way. One of our housekeepers called him Eddie Haskell. We’d never seen that old TV show Leave It to Beaver, but years later when I saw a couple of reruns on late-night TV, I realized that our housekeeper really hadn’t liked Roger. Eddie Haskell was an unctuous, conniving brown-noser. He was the two-faced character who’d politely compliment Mrs. Cleaver on her lovely dress while instigating some evil prank that would inevitably get her son, the Beaver, in trouble.
    Roger wasn’t as bad as Eddie Haskell, though, and I wasn’t the Beaver.
    Still, Roger did enjoy tormenting me with magic tricks. He spent a lot of time at a magicians’ supply house in the city called Tannen’s Magic, and he was as good at sleight of hand as I was at throwing a pass. There was one trick he liked to do that I never figured out. It involved sticking his thumb through a hole that he’d cut into two blue cards stuck together, then sliding a red card between the blue cards like a guillotine, apparently slicing through his thumb. I’d beg and plead, but he’d never tell me how he did it.
    My brother was a skilled amateur magician, but his greatest talent was always keeping secrets.

20.

    I was lying in bed, staring at the cracks in