Behind the Lie, page 28
The third officer said something to the fourth and squeezed past the hanging steel door back toward the rest of the house.
Laney, still on her knees and her arms up, looked at the fourth cop, then at Vera. Vera had turned her face so that one cheek lay in the dirt, her smooth, perfect skin grimy, her breathing heavy. “He’s on the stairs?” she asked.
Laney nodded.
Vera’s eyes closed and her mouth thinned.
“I told you it was over,” Laney said, and lowered her arms, sat back onto her butt, extending her legs in front. Her arm throbbed, and she pressed it against her middle. “You could have saved us some hurt if you listened.”
Vera opened her eyes, swollen now, red. “I told him I’d buy him time. I told him to get away.”
“Well, if you wanted him to get away, maybe you shouldn’t have shot him in the ass. Just sayin’.”
Vera’s mouth twisted. “He was going to kill that idiot Oliver. How else could I stop him?” She breathed out, color draining from her face. Breathed in. Then, “He’d never killed anyone.” She turned her face to the wall. “His soul was clean.”
“News flash,” Laney said, “not so clean. He tried to kill me and my son, and I saw the kids that escaped from here. Looks to me like he didn’t mind if they died.”
“All me,” Vera said. “Our agreement.”
Laney bent forward. “What are you talking about? What agreement?”
Vera was quiet. When she spoke next, her voice was thin, faraway sounding. “It’s different. Taking a life versus letting a person choose a path. The kids chose a path.”
Laney scoffed. “You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s splitting hairs.”
“He has faith.” Wheeze. “He believes in God.” Wheeze. “Not splitting hairs if you believe in God.”
“You’re crazy. You’re telling me you shot your husband to make sure he gets to heaven? You’re insane.”
Vera sucked in a long breath, held it. Her back twitched as she exhaled. “It was our agreement.”
Laney looked up at the cop standing in the doorway. He was the youngest of the bunch, still fit, his uniform loose under the gear on his belt.
“What happened?” she asked. “Up there?”
He blinked and his cheeks reddened.
“You shot her, didn’t you?”
The flush spread to his nose and forehead. “I saw”—he cleared his throat—“she was injecting a girl. She didn’t stop when told to stop. She—” He was nearly crying, and she felt a stab of empathy. This was one aspect of law enforcement she didn’t miss. “I thought she was going to stick one of us. She ran at me with the—” He stopped again.
Laney nodded. “And the victim?” She meant the girl the cop stopped Vera from injecting. She was losing track of the victims in this mess.
The cop shook his head, his eyes as red as his face now. “I don’t know,” he said. “Emergency Services is on the way.”
“May I?” She gestured at Vera.
He shrugged, uncertain, and she took that as assent. She inched toward her adversary and bent, then touched her neck. Vera’s skin was cool and clammy, her pulse faint. Laney felt wetness under her knees, and when she looked down, she saw she was kneeling in Vera’s blood. A widening pool of it.
A roar of motors neared the house, and she got to her feet.
“I’m gonna—” She pointed at the broken metal door, and the cop shrugged again.
Yet another set of stairs took her to an airy kitchen, and she walked through it toward a spacious and now filthy parlor, which opened out to a porch and then the sloping lawn she’d last seen from the mainland.
Three emergency boats were nearing the island, and she stood back to let the paramedics rush up the stairs, followed by more police and Crime Scene.
Over the next hour she watched seven stretchers carried out and placed on the boats, then ferried across and deposited into waiting ambulances. At some point, the coroner’s white van emerged from the foliage on the mainland’s shore.
“He’s gone,” said a voice behind her, startling her.
She turned to see one of the older officers who’d gone into the tunnel an hour ago. “What?”
“We found the female with the chemical burns, but not the guy.”
“You’re kidding me.”
He narrowed his eyes at her.
“I tied him to the railing.”
He looked out at the glittering water. “Well, I guess he untied himself. What did you use?”
She felt the criticism like a burn and didn’t answer. The tunnel had at least one misleading passageway she knew of; she’d gotten lost herself. It was hard to imagine Step untangling himself and descending those stairs, then hiding, as hurt as he was. But obviously that was what he’d done.
“He’s going to come out one of the exits eventually,” she said. She didn’t ask if they’d plant patrol to wait for him. It wasn’t her place to ask.
The officer grunted and turned on his heel, leaving her to her thoughts.
CHAPTER
49
Laney
LANEY FOLDED SHORTS, polo shirts, a few T-shirts, and a swimsuit into her duffel bag. Then she took a pretty summer dress off its hanger and folded that in too, and a khaki pencil skirt. Then she took them out. Then she shoved them in again and a second dress to boot.
Then she stomped her foot and stormed out of her room and across the hall into Alfie’s room.
“Are you done packing?” she asked.
Alfie was lying on his bed, earphones on, iPad propped against his knee. He eyeballed her, took off his headphones, and pointed to his own duffel bag, zippered and neatly stood at the foot of his bed.
“You packed your swim trunks? Sunblock? Deodorant?”
He rolled his eyes and then glared at her. Yes, he was right. They were going for only three days, and she was overthinking the whole thing. And it wasn’t like they were going to another planet but only to the Jersey shore, where the Boswell family owned a beach house and the Boswell brothers took turns staying during the summer months.
“Should we not go?” she asked.
He sighed and put his headphones back on.
She sat down next to him, and he sighed again and took them off again. She said, “Do you want to go?”
“Mom.”
“I mean, if you think you want to rest up before school starts, I get it.”
“Mom.”
“I’ll text Jack and tell him we can’t go.”
“I want to go.”
She chewed her lip. “Yes, of course. We haven’t been on a vacation in years. Never mind me.” She headed for the door.
“Mom.”
From the hallway, she stopped and looked at him. His expression was strange, and she realized it was because it was so adult. In that moment he wasn’t her teenage boy, a week away from his junior year in high school, but someone grown and clever.
He said, “It’s okay.”
“What’s okay?”
“I like Jack.”
Well, that was something.
Back in her room, she stuffed a lace-trimmed blouse into her bag, then opened a dresser drawer. Inside was a small perfume box, an exorbitantly expensive one she bought for herself when her divorce came through—on the advice of her lawyer—and never opened. A beat of hesitation, and she unfolded the cardboard, slid out the cut-glass bottle, and tipped a bead of the scent onto her fingers. It smelled expensive.
Oh, what the hell. She put it back in its box and buried it inside her duffel bag.
The invitation to the beach house had come a week ago, two days after the raid at the lake. She’d been at work, writing her final report on Bubba Gardner, her soul feeling light and clear. The boy was undernourished and hospitalized, but he was alive and, according to his mother, on the way to recovery. He and the boy with whom he escaped were talking to detectives, reporters, the FBI. Anybody who asked got an earful. Experiments with calorie restriction, medication, injections. They didn’t know what was done to them, had been half out of their minds for two-thirds of the time. But whatever they couldn’t name, their bodies told.
The girl, the one Laney had found in the tunnel, was worse, still not speaking. The first one to escape, the one with the blistered skin, Alyssa, had regained consciousness only the day before, and if she had anything to say, Laney didn’t know it.
Because the case spanned three separate regions, Sylvan, Havencrest (where Sunny River was even now being dismantled), and the Catskills, getting the full story was taking time. Throw in the backers of Calypso Technologies and that the alleged traffickers might owe allegiance to a different country, and the FBI entered the picture.
What started as a bizarre incident at a block party had onion-skinned itself to expose a dark and far-reaching organization, of which Step and Vera Volkin were only a small unit. Vera had died on the way to the hospital, and her body was still at the coroner’s. Five victims had been rescued from the house, though only two of them were in any condition to speak to investigators.
Step, Mona, and at least eighteen young men and women who had lived at the lake house—at least according to Bubba—vanished, spirited away in dark vans on that last day or gone through the tunnel.
Laney wondered if Step had crawled (she couldn’t imagine him walking in his state) down the stairs and hidden in one of the tunnel’s false passageways. Had he waited and then slithered along its dirt floor until he emerged into the nighttime woods? Or was there another passage? Another exit? She didn’t know, and from various silences surrounding the case, she believed none of the agencies handling it knew either.
She finished typing her report, uploaded it and the photographs she’d taken of Bubba in the forest and later at the hospital. She didn’t upload the one of Bubba’s mother holding him across her chest like a Renaissance Madonna, but she had it printed and taped to the wall of her cubicle.
She was about to open the file for her next case when Jack placed his elbows atop her cube separator and peered at her computer screen.
“Yes?” she asked.
“Do you have plans tonight?”
“For what?”
He stared at her, nonplussed. “Erm … I was thinking sushi.”
And still she was confused. “You were thinking sushi? About what?”
He lowered his eyes as a flush inched up his cheeks. “Laney, I’m asking you out to dinner.”
“Oh.” She looked back at her screen. Everything about this was not good. He was a colleague. He was the boss’s son. He was god-awfully handsome. And where had dating handsome men gotten her? Divorced and eighty thousand dollars in credit card debt, that’s where. Divorced and alone.
“No,” she said.
Jack slid around the edge of the cube and sat on a chair, then wheeled himself into her orbit. “Why?”
“We work together.”
“I like you.”
“You’re the boss’s kid.”
“I know you like me.”
“I don’t like you.”
“I think you do.”
He was right. She liked him. She’d liked him from the very beginning, even when she thought she didn’t. He was good at his job, and he was honest in a way none of the men she’d been close to had ever been. True, he’d held things back from her, just as she’d from him. But there was an earnestness in him that spoke of a fundamental decency.
“I’m a lot older and I have a teenager.”
“It’s just sushi.”
But then it wasn’t just sushi. The dinner turned out fun, a lovely evening by the Hudson, the food fresh and delicious. He had a sense of humor—a droll cleverness that made her guffaw into her beer.
“I like the way you laugh,” he said, after they’d both downed two large Sapporos.
They had to Uber to their respective homes, and the next day he asked if she’d like to go to the beach for the weekend.
“I don’t like leaving Alfie,” she countered, buttoned up again, on alert.
“I wouldn’t want you to. Bring him. There are four bedrooms. More than enough. He can bring a friend.”
And that was what led to her duffel bag and the two pretty summer dresses plus a pencil skirt and the very expensive perfume on the inside of her wrist.
But really, she was just going for a few days, and only because why not, and not at all because this could lead to anything.
She was fine alone. Better than fine. She didn’t need Jack Boswell.
“I’m going to write Jack and tell him we won’t be going,” she yelled out into the hallway.
“Mom,” Alfie said from his room.
CHAPTER
50
November: Laney
IN THE DARKENED auditorium, a medley of big-band jazz and Broadway musicals bopped and thumped against the old walls, and Laney unbuttoned her sweater. A few hundred parents and siblings generated a humid heat that hung in a mist above everyone’s heads, shimmering to the music’s beat.
Laney, who only ever listened to rock and alternative, found herself enjoying the high school concert more than she expected. But then, she wasn’t there for the songs. Alfie was hard to miss, towering over the other boys, his thick curls adding at least an extra five inches to his height. He’d had two sax solos already and, according to the printed program, was to play a piece on the piano later (not that he ever shared that information with her ahead of time). To her, his musical ability seemed like magic, supernatural in its complete difference from her own skills.
For about three weeks in August, after the raid on the lake house and Mona’s disappearance, he stopped playing his instruments. Laney tried talking to him about it, would ask him to play for her, but he’d shake his head and close his door. Or leave for a bike ride and not come back for hours.
One night, over bowls of lo mein and fried wontons, she asked Alfie point-blank why he stopped playing music.
“I thought you loved it,” she said. “What’s going on?”
He put down his fork and looked at his noodles, his shoulders hunched. Then he said—slowly, as if figuring out his thoughts as he spoke them—“When I play, I forget about everything. I don’t want to forget Mona.” He rubbed his eyes. “I’m afraid to forget her.”
Laney nodded. “Makes sense.”
He raised his eyes at her. “Do you think she forgot about me?”
“Not a chance in hell.”
“Do you think I’ll ever see her again?”
“Stranger things have happened.” She put an extra wonton into his bowl. “Don’t deny yourself something you love, okay? Just don’t.”
He nodded.
Even so, it was another two weeks before he picked up his sax, and not until school started did he turn on his keyboard.
In the auditorium, her phone vibrated. She didn’t look at it. Wouldn’t look at it. It vibrated again. Then, five minutes later, again.
She looked.
I’m sorry, read the text from Jack. I got held up at work.
She turned off the phone. Their weekend at the beach had been nice because she loved the beach and there’d been a preposterous number of cocktails. There was one moment on the boardwalk, when the light had turned cobalt—sky, surf, sand, everything washed in blue—and Jack leaned against the railing next to her, so close their arms touched. A blaze of desire engulfed her and she felt her lips, her skin, her throat melting with it, and right behind came terror.
“What?” Jack asked, softly, uncertain.
Unable to speak, she turned on her heel and ran away. She ran the length of the boardwalk, all three miles of it, in her flip-flops, then veered onto the sand and into the now dark ocean, rooting herself into the sand as the waves crashed against her. The cold strength of it sobered her and cleansed her of both yearning and dread.
At work the week after, and for the next three months, she was polite, friendly. She bought him an occasional lunch, met him for a drink here and there, but more often than not she told him she was busy. Hell, she was busy. Made sure she was busy. She had her own cases, worked all hours, then wrote the reports, etc., etc. When she couldn’t plead work, she said, oh, Alfie needs me to drive him here or there. Rehearsals. Sleepovers. Boy Scout trips. There was no limit to the blocks she could put between them.
Tonight, though, tonight Jack was meant to be at the school. Had promised he’d be there for her, for her boy.
Despite her best efforts, she had been looking forward to seeing him, even though she’d already seen him at work earlier. She’d dressed up. Daubed on lipstick and a coat of mascara.
The concert ended on a raucous rendition of “Ode to Joy,” and Laney made her way outside to wait for Alfie, where the other families also waited, fanning their flushed faces and catching up with the latest gossip.
A light touch on her shoulder startled her—the tension in her muscles ingrained after years on the job—and she spun, only to face Holly, the out-of-context jumpiness making them laugh. She hadn’t seen Holly in months, and the sight of her, neat and carefully packaged in a mauve jacket and plum-colored jeans, opened something in her chest, as if allowing her to fully breathe in. She’d missed their easy conversations, the way she never felt she had to try.
“Hey,” Laney said. “What are you doing here?”
“Oh, my cousin’s kids are in the band.” Holly rubbed Laney’s shoulder, a light, gentle gesture. “Alfie was great! He’s such a sweet boy.”
Laney nodded. Somehow, they’d never really sifted through the summer’s events. Despite several texts trying to arrange a lunch date or cocktails, their lives continued on separate tracks, diverging further and further from each other.
“How are you doing?” Laney asked.
Holly’s face tightened around her eyes and mouth. “Oh, you know,” she said.
Laney, never being one for small talk, looked away, as if searching the crowd for her son.
“Hol, we’re going!” called out a large man behind them.
Holly smiled at Laney and put her arms around her. “I miss you,” she said into Laney’s ear, then pulled back and held her hands. “Stay in touch.”
