Lie No More

  Terry Keys

  Lie No More © 2017 Terry Keys

  Copyright notice All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the author is unlawful piracy and is theft of the authors’ intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes) written permission must be obtained by the author tkeys15@yahoo.com.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Lie No More

  When the stakes get high enough – there is a killer inside us all. . .

  Mild mannered Candice Harstows day started like any other day. And then it quickly turned into a nightmarish hell that she couldn’t escape. With time running out and no one she could trust she sets a plan in motion that would change everything – forever.

  Our lives are always one decision away from being irrevocably changed forever. – Author unknown

  Prologue

  I want to start off by telling you about the second-worst day of my life. You’re probably wondering why I don’t skip this and just tell you about the worst day of my life, right? Well, just consider this foreplay.

  The second-worst day of my life led to horrors that I never imagined were possible. Which is why I should start here.

  It started out like any other day. My husband of twenty years, John, was already off to work. His law firm was busier than it’d ever been, and John was taking on more cases than he’d ever had to—which, among other things, had helped drive the wedge between us even deeper. Most nights now John worked late—really late. I’d come to expect it and had stopped waiting up for him many months ago. My friend Diane told me I was crazy for staying with him and that he had to have another woman. Said I needed to get one of those private investigators to check him out. John had been many things, and he wasn’t a saint, but I knew he wasn’t a cheater either. John was quite the flirt and had always been the life of the party, but I never doubted whether or not he was faithful to me. He loved me, and, most importantly, he adored our son, Max. Most couples who were married as long as John and me eventually drifted apart. If not all the way, at least a little bit. It’s just what happens. I still loved him, and he still loved me, and that was all that mattered. While I thought about it, I sent him a text that said, I love you.

  It was seven a.m., and I sat at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee, just like I did every day. Coffee in the morning, wine at night—two of my guilty pleasures. I stared out the window, waiting for Max to come downstairs. He rarely ate breakfast anymore, so I’d stopped fixing anything for him. I didn’t know whether or not it was a high school thing or just a Max thing, but I’d decided when the kid got hungry the kid would eat. He was six foot five and two hundred fifteen pounds, so clearly he was eating something. This was something hard for a mother to do—sit back and watch her almost-adult son make choices for himself. Well, maybe it wasn’t hard for most mothers, but it had been really hard for me.

  I wasn’t supposed to have kids. The doctors told me I’d never get pregnant. This was, of course, after John and I tried year after year. And then finally, when we stopped trying, I got pregnant with Max. One of those unexpected blessings.

  Two minutes later and right on cue, I heard Max thumping down the staircase. Before I knew it, he’d run over to me and smashed a kiss into my cheek. Max, like his father, was an attractive young man. His high cheekbones, deep dimples, and ocean-blue eyes kept him quite popular with the girls at school. I didn’t like it, but the women in my book club found my adolescent son quite the looker too.

  “Love you, mom. I gotta run,” he said, keys in hand and sprinting toward the door.

  “Love you too, son.”

  And like that he was gone. I waited for him to start his car. John, against my wishes, had gotten him a brand-new V8 Mustang. What teenager needs a car with a 350-horsepower engine? Then he’d souped-up the tailpipes—to help with gas mileage, he said—and I swear you could hear the kid coming from five miles away. Max was a good kid, but peer pressure was hard to resist, even for the best kids. I didn’t want to get that call. You know, the call so many other parents had gotten. Or the knock on the door—the one where you knew as you opened it that your child wasn’t coming home. Boys and loud, fast cars were sometimes toxic.

  It was Wednesday, which meant it was my day to do laundry for the first half of the day and then meet Diane for brunch at one thirty.

  I moved from room to room scavenging for clothes, towels, and anything else that needed to be washed. Both Max and John usually did a good job of bringing their clothes down to the laundry room. It’d taken a few years, but I’d finally trained them both. I headed upstairs to do a walk-through, just in case there was a stray here or there. There always was.

  John had left a pair of slacks on our closet floor. I picked them up and laughed out loud. Even after twenty years I still had a little more training to do.

  Remember, I started this story by saying this was the start to the second-worst day of my life.

  As I headed back down the staircase with John’s slacks in hand, I checked his pockets, something I always did before washing them. I didn’t find the usual spare change or stray business card this time. What I held in my hand was something worse—much worse. It stopped me dead in my tracks.

  My pregnancy with Max had been pretty rough. I was put on bed rest the last month, until Max was delivered via C-section. Dr. Lou strongly suggested that I get my tubes tied, which I had. So why was I holding an unused, unopened condom in one hand and an empty condom wrapper in the other? When John and I did have sex, we never used condoms. And we hadn’t had sex at all in at least five months.

  Suddenly the room was spinning and my head was pounding. I reached out for the banister, but it was no use.

  I’d seen people fall down staircases a million times on America’s Funniest Home Videos. I never imagined that it hurt so badly.

  I was sure that it took less than five seconds for it to be over, but it felt like much longer.

  After I reached the bottom, I lay there for a second to try to gather my wits. Everything hurt. My head throbbed. Both of my legs ached, and my back felt like it’d been pummeled with a sledgehammer. I reached up to touch my lips and felt a trickle of warm blood ooze between my fingers. I touched my side and winced; apparently my ribcage had also taken a beating.

  Get your shit together, Candice, I said to myself. I lay there another five minutes at least, trying to make sure nothing was broken and that I wouldn’t fall again when I tried to get back up. My head was still swimming and I was seeing double. The pants I’d been holding were halfway up the staircase, and the condom and condom wrapper had both made it all the way to the floor.

  Slowly, I pulled myself up and tried to shake off the cobwebs. When I got to my feet, I looked over at the mirror hanging in the foyer. I eased toward it, afraid of what I might see glaring back at me. I closed my eyes, willing myself not to look, but then I took a second glance. I swallowed hard and struggled to take a breath. I didn’t know if it was from my fall or from the truth that I’d just learned, but the reflection that stared back at me was a shattered one, a jigsawed mirage of a crushed soul, my face a distorted version of what I’d last remembered it to be. My features, no longer defined, had become an abstract joining of pieces.

  I stumbled a few steps up the staircase and yanked the pants into my hand, the condom paraphernalia too.

  I’d left my cell phone on the table, and I could hear it chiming at me. I had two texts and a missed call, all from John.

  I forgot it’s laundry day. I’ll get the pants I left in the room. Just leave them – I’m sorry still in training I guess. lol

  And a second text that read, Did you get my text?

  I crashed down into the chair at the dinner table. Out of nowhere, tears started running down my face. I buried my face in my hands and cried until no more tears would come. Then I dry-heaved for another ten minutes, trying hard to catch my breath. How could he? How could I have been so stupid? I didn’t need to ask him any questions. Diane was right. She’d probably been right all along. I was the stupid stay-at-home wife and mother watching my piece-of-shit husband come home late every night without questioning a thing. And did that really matter anyway? Would that have stopped anything? Probably not. He’d just do a better job of convincing me that everything was okay.

  My eyes still watered. I had so many emotions pouring through me and so many questions. Who was she? How long had this been going on? Did he love her? Was he going to leave me for her one day? Was she younger than me? Prettier? Was it someone he worked with at the office?

  Our sex life hadn’t amounted to much. I knew that didn’t help, but it wasn’t an excuse. If he was unhappy, why didn’t he just leave? I’d tried to spice it up some. The videos I bought and the sexy lingerie did nothing. I didn’t understand at the time, but now it all made sense. And I guess I lied about it doing nothing. It had done something, all right. It’d made John laugh at me and call my ef

forts silly, which hurt even worse now. It did explain why he cared even less about our sex life now than he had before.

  I cried for another hour straight. I picked up my phone at least a dozen times, tempted to call John and tell him what I’d found. Then I thought about Max. Should I tell him? What would he say? I still loved John, but did this mean we were getting a divorce?

  Now you should easily understand why this was the second-worst day of my life.

  Every couple has secrets that they’ve stockpiled away. Most of the time it’s something trivial: someone spends too much money; someone secretly enjoys singing at the top of their lungs when they’re driving to work each day. John spent fifteen years in the military, and I knew there were dozens of things he couldn’t tell me. Dozens of incidents that he couldn’t or wouldn’t even talk about. I understood that, and I’d never pressed him. Some things are better left unsaid. But this was different. This was lies. This was deceit. This hurt. This wasn’t Jason Bourne top secret American intel—this was old-fashioned cheating.

  I sat at the dinner table for another thirty minutes or so, trying to decide what I would do next. Then I made a choice that I guess, looking back, may not have been the best. I decided I would tell no one. Not John. Not Diane. Not my son. No one.

  I wanted to know who this woman was. I wanted to see it for myself. I needed to see it for myself.

  I picked up John’s pants and put the unused condom and the used condom wrapper back where I’d found them.

  John had called two more times, clearly nervous about what he’d left in his pockets. Bastard!

  I texted him back with a picture of my face, letting him know that I’d fallen down the stairs but that I was okay. I explained that I hadn’t started the laundry and would leave his pants as requested until tomorrow.

  I assumed he would at least call to check on me, but he didn’t. I got a text back, a simple okay, and that was it. I scrolled back through the photos on my phone and took a second look at the one I’d sent him. My battered face should have alarmed him.

  I eased back up the stairs, my back throbbing with each step I took. I tried to arrange John’s pants in the closet, just as I’d found them.

  Then I fell to the floor and cried for what seemed like an hour. How had we gotten so far apart that it had come to this? Was this all my fault? How had I changed from the sexy woman he couldn’t keep his hands off of to the woman he no longer even noticed?

  None of it mattered now.

  I stood up and looked in the mirror. Stop your damn crying and do something about it, I told myself.

  But what was I going to do? Hell, I didn’t even know who this woman was. I decided that I would go to lunch with Diane like I always did at one thirty on Wednesdays. I would attend the PTA meeting at Max’s school tonight. I would prepare dinner and leave John a plate in the microwave before I headed off to bed. I would leave him an I love you Post-it note on the fridge like I usually did too.

  Tomorrow I would find out who this woman was. And one day soon, I would kill her.

  Chapter 1

  When my dad and I are on good terms, I usually talked to him at least once a day. And every other day, at worst. But I hadn’t spoken to my dad in a little over a week, which was odd for me. My parents divorced when I was nine years old. The truth is, they didn’t really split; my mom left the three of us. My older sister, Jess, my dad and me. She never called or wrote us, not even on our birthdays or Christmas. I didn’t even know if the woman was still alive. We still don’t know why she left us. We know it wasn’t because of money, because we were pretty well-off. You see, my dad’s name is Gus Jones—the Gus Jones. Owner of Calpech Oil and Rigging. The company had just gone public and was valued at almost a billion dollars. So maybe we were a little more than well-off. After high school, Jess (who is two years older than me) and I both attended Texas A&M University, which was our dad’s alma mater. We’d both also gotten chemical engineering degrees.

  When John and I first started dating, my dad hated him. And now, after almost twenty-five years together and twenty years of marriage, he still hated him. He always said I was too good for John and that he didn’t believe John loved me. Until now, I just thought my dad was jealous because I’d found someone. Now I wasn’t too sure. The other thought I had was that maybe my dad just wanted me to be more like Jess, who had never married and didn’t even have a boyfriend.

  My dad had always wanted a boy. He wouldn’t dare admit it, but my sister and I always knew that. It didn’t bother me; most guys wanted a boy to do boy things with. Dad had tried to do that stuff with Jess and me, until we got to the age where it just no longer worked. He took us fishing and hunting, even taught us how to shoot guns. He coached our Little League sports teams. And we’d played them all—even a year of Little League football. It made us tougher in a lot of ways, I think. And right now, while most women would still be feeling sorry for themselves, maybe my tough, boy-like upbringing was helping me more than ever.

  I slowly undressed and pulled myself into the shower. The water made my face sting, and I could feel more cuts and scrapes than I thought I had. As I soaped my body and felt the weight of my breasts in my hands, more tears fell from my eyes. Why had I not been enough for him? I was no longer in my twenties or even my thirties, but I was in shape. I was certain there were dozens of men who would love to jump in bed with me. Or maybe I was kidding myself. Maybe I didn’t have it anymore.

  After spending forty-five minutes digging through my closet, I finally found what I was looking for. I pulled the skintight, spaghetti-strap, extra-low-cut blouse over my head. As I stared at myself in the mirror, I had second thoughts. What the hell are you doing, Candice? Take it off. You look . . . Well, my double-D breasts filled the blouse and spilled over the top. I didn’t know what look I was going for, but I looked good, if I said so myself. Next, I found the tightest jeans I could squeeze into. I’d been a size two when I met John, and now, all these years later, I was right on the cusp of being a size two again, thanks to my trainer, Julian. Close enough that fitting into those jeans was going to work. Barely.

  I slipped into my sexiest pair of spiked heels, grabbed my phone, snapped a selfie, and sent it to John.

  Heading out to meet Diane for lunch

  Usually he only responded back with “K”, so I was curious what today’s response would be.

  Two seconds later, my phone rang. It was John. I decided not to answer. Then, right on cue, I got a text.

  Wow you look great – can I come join you for lunch ?

  I replied. Wow back. Surprised you noticed. And no, only girls.

  You okay?

  Fine. Never been better. About to drive ttyl.

  I felt good about letting him see me dressed this way. And now I knew he’d be wondering all day if I’d indeed attempted to wash his pants. Or at least wondering why I’d decided to dress up.

  Instead of taking the Acadia today, I decided to drive John’s “weekend car,” as he called it. It was probably what he drove around in while looking for girls like whoever he’d used that condom with. Had this been a one-time thing with some girl he didn’t care about? Or was my husband having an affair? Did he love the woman? I felt tears welling up and fought them off. I didn’t want my makeup to run.

  I pulled up to Olive Garden and backed the red BMW 440i into a spot. I shut the engine off and climbed out. As I made my way across the parking lot, a car pulled up beside me. A younger man in his late twenties or early thirties had his window down.

  “Excuse me, but have we met?” he asked as his eyes wandered over me.

  I didn’t recognize him, but he was cute and obviously interested. I must admit, it made me feel pretty damn good.

  “Umm, no I don’t believe so. Unless you’re one of my husband’s friends. And if so, I apologize.”

  “Ahh. Husband, huh? That’s too bad. I had an entire evening planned for us—the weekend too.”

  I giggled before I knew it. I could feel my face reddening. “That’s very sweet, but yes, I’m married. You have a good day.”

 

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