The First to Lie

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

  “El?”

  Gabe had turned to her—who knows how long he’d been watching her? He’d called her El. “Yeah?”

  “I’m still thinking about Brooke Vanderwald.”

  “Listen. How about I just ask Meg? I’m happy to.” Ellie offered.

  Gabe checked his rearview, then flicked a dismissive glance at her. “Sarcasm is unnecessary, Ellie.”

  “No, I’m serious,” she said. “Say Brooke Vanderwald created a new persona as an annoying and incompetent TV producer wannabe. Who just happened to show up where I work, and just happened to work with me, a reporter working on an exposé about her family’s company. But hey, wouldn’t that make our job supereasy? She can get us all kinds of Pharminex secret papers and in-house documents. Awesome. Doing it. Wanna come with when I ask?”

  “Wanna get out and walk?”

  “But see what I mean? I agree, I do, it’d be great. Even amazing. But … so unlikely.”

  Gabe waved her off. “Okay. Fine. No more Meg is Brooke. Meg is Meg. But we still need—”

  “A plan.” Ellie mentally reviewed her past appointments, the doctors’ offices, analyzing which ones seemed like possibilities. She had to start somewhere. “That’s why I’m thinking Newton. There’s a clinic on Route Nine there I can check out. And just so you don’t get all focused on what we say we’re doing, let me remind you what we are doing. We’re looking for victims. For information. For documentation of the company’s deception and greed. For the death sentence for P-X. And Gabe?”

  “Yeah?”

  “No matter what Detta and Allessandra insist, you’ve got to believe they’ll go to any length to stop anyone from exposing them. They rehired me, remember? To spy? And they admitted I’m not the only spy, as poor duped Nora found out. So gotta wonder who else is on their payroll?”

  Gabe steered the awkward turn onto Storrow Drive, the patchy faded grass in front of the half-domed Hatch Shell on their right, and past that, the Charles River, with the mismatched architecture of MIT looming in the distance across the white-capped water. Storrow Drive, too curvy, too narrow, and too crowded, was a traffic minefield of potholes and aggression.

  “Any ideas? Damn it! Hey! Watch it!” Gabe swerved right to avoid a careening Boston cab, its rear fender dented and trunk taped closed, speeding bat-out-of-hell in front of them. “Moron.”

  Ellie’d grabbed the door handle, eyes wide, as a scene—from what movie?—unspooled in an instant through her mind: a flickering half-memory of snow and squealing brakes and skidding tires and a sound that somehow made her sad.

  She stared out the windshield as the cab disappeared, thought about how quickly a life can change, one stupid cabdriver or a—

  “Gabe,” she said, staring straight ahead. “Kaitlyn Armistead.”

  “The one who got killed?”

  “Yeah. But Gabe? It was my fault she died.”

  CHAPTER 34

  ELLIE

  “I … don’t feel well. I need to stop for a minute.” Ellie pointed Gabe toward the Kenmore off-ramp. “Take that exit. Can you?” She tried to gulp away the rise in her stomach, the sick regret that made her dizzy and seemed to cloud her vision. She buzzed down the Jeep’s window, hoping a blast of spiky cold air would shock her brain into clarity.

  Gabe turned, then pulled into a metered parking space on the fringe of Kenmore Square. College students jostled by each other on the sidewalk, in jeans and brazenly coatless, lugging massive backpacks and glued to their screens. A halfhearted snow sifted from darkening clouds, melting as it hit the windshield.

  “Are you okay? Should I take you to a—”

  “I’m fine, just need a second.” Ellie rested her forehead against the cold glass of the passenger window. Closing her eyes, she tried to reimagine her visit to Dr. McGinty’s office. But she couldn’t tune Gabe out, leaving him baffled and attempting to decipher her actions.

  She took a deep breath and turned to face him, hoping she’d settled a nonparanoid expression on her face. “Kaitlyn Armistead. I met her, the day before her accident, in the doctor’s office. McGinty. I was there as Nora the sales rep, but Kaitlyn didn’t know that. And I was sort of pretending with her, commiserating. Hoping she assumed I was a patient. Allowing her to think so. Encouraging it.”

  “Okay.” Gabe turned off the ignition and shifted his body to look at her, one arm draped over the steering wheel. “As part of your TV investigation.”

  “Exactly.” Ellie nodded. “We talked about both having red hair, and books we loved as kids, and she finally confessed her husband was pressuring her about her difficulty getting pregnant. Judging her. She was so unhappy. It was way too much information, but it’s a doctor’s office, so people—women—feel as if they already have common ground. Which they do. Kind of a sisterhood of confidentiality. A circle of trust.”

  Ellie closed her eyes again, briefly, recalling her deep and honest sympathy for the woman. “So I thought, great. I was focused on my story. Saw everything through my own filter. I felt lucky. Maybe I’d happened on a potential source. I felt brave. Like an enterprising reporter.”

  Gabe nodded. “You thought she might be the person you needed.”

  “Yeah. And she seemed eager to talk, so I tried to draw her out. I was calculating, planning my next move. I thought—Jackpot. A victim.”

  In the side mirror, Ellie saw a blue-uniformed traffic enforcement cop strolling up the sidewalk toward them. “We’re going to have to pay or move, I bet,” she said. “He’s a block away, but here comes the parking goon.”

  “We can deal with that. I have quarters. So. Kaitlyn Armistead.”

  “Almost everything I said to her was a lie, or using truths to tell lies. And that’s bad enough. But maybe someone was watching us. Seeing me, Nora, talking with her. And…” She didn’t want to talk about this, but needed to face it. “Like I said. The crash. It’s my fault.”

  A staccato rap on the window. Ellie’s heart lurched. A cop. Ellie was so rattled she first pushed the button to lock the door instead of the one that buzzed down the window.

  “Move it, you two.” An annoyed face in a blue-billed cap dared Ellie to protest. He flashed a booklet of rectangular orange tickets at them. “Once I start writing this, it’s twenty-five bucks. Your call.”

  “Sorry, Officer,” Gabe said. “She’s upset, and we’re—”

  “Whatever.” The cop cut off his excuse. “Like I said. Move it.”

  Gabe had already pushed the ignition and clicked on the wipers. He shifted into reverse. The cop brandished his ticket book at them as he stalked away.

  “Ellie?” Gabe eased them into traffic. “Why is it your fault?”

  “She called me.” Ellie heard the sorrow in her own voice. “From her car. And I was on the phone with her … when she crashed. She needed someone to talk to, I guess, about her test results. Someone who understood. And that’s what I mean. I feel terrible. I keep thinking—if I hadn’t given her my card, she wouldn’t have called. Then she wouldn’t have been distracted. Then—”

  “You cannot go there, Ellie,” Gabe said. “No. The dominoes that fall in the world—we can never predict. That was a moment in her life, a collection of moments. Of her history. You did not make that happen.” As they stopped for a light, he turned to her. Put one gloved hand on the arm of her coat, a brief touch. “Ellie? You did not cause that.”

  As the light changed, she tried to organize her brain, see if she could make sense out of it. But nothing made sense. It hadn’t, not for years, no matter how normal she tried to be.

  “Kaitlyn told me about her life.” Ellie stared out the windshield, remembering. “I believed her. Every woman in that doctor’s office wants kids, and every one of them is having trouble with that. Who would make up something so tragic?”

  Gabe glanced at her. “You want me to answer that?”

  “Okay.” She acknowledged reality. “You got me.”

  Gabe paused at a stop sign, then continued through the i
ntersection. “But the key is, no one could have predicted she’d call you—Nora—as she crashed.”

  “Exactly. Exactly.” Ellie’s gesture of agreement was so expansive that she whapped one hand on the closed window. “Ow. But Pharminex, you know? They’re vulnerable now. If they thought Kaitlyn would call the media, as she threatened McGinty she would—maybe they decided to shut her up. And whether she was simply scared or injured or even killed by it—they knew that ‘accident’ would put her out of the picture. Another of their risk-benefit calculations.” She nodded, thinking, imagining. “But the fact that she called me—that was the puzzle piece they could not have predicted.”

  “Could Pharminex know she called you? I mean, Nora?”

  “I have no idea.”

  They drove past the Brookline Reservoir, its high ridged edges providing a safe path where stalwart joggers ran their daily diameters beneath the bare branches of trees that in a few short months would be lush and green. Today’s runners were ashen-faced, in soggy hooded sweatshirts, trudging through the wintry day.

  Ellie worried a fingernail.

  The day she’d met Kaitlyn. Ellie played back her memory video. The defeated woman in the expensive Uggs. The dreamy one with the earbuds. Cashmere shawl and dark glasses. Dr. McGinty’s waiting room—beige chairs, blocky coffee tables, aging magazines, a glossy philodendron.

  “For someone to see Kaitlyn and Nora-me talking, it had to be a person in that same waiting room at that same time. Or around there.”

  “And not your pal Meg.”

  “Meg? No. I’d have seen her. I have to believe that. And Meg working for Pharminex and Channel Eleven? Who would do that?”

  Gabe burst out laughing as he navigated the hub-and-spoke intersection of Newton Center, past pizzerias and coffee shops and ice cream places. “I won’t dignify that with an answer, Ellie. Or Nora. Or whoever you’re being this particular moment. But for the record, that’s precisely what you’re doing, isn’t it?”

  “All the more reason it’s absurd.” Ellie leaned forward and flapped down her sun visor to adjust a contact. She peered into the tiny rectangular mirror, blinking. It still surprised her to see the glamorous auburn-haired Nora looking back. Meg as Brooke Vanderwald. She flapped the visor back into position, then turned to Gabe.

  “What’s your deal with the Vanderwalds, anyway? A couple days ago you had a theory about Nora being part of the family.” She fluttered her eyelashes, playing coquette. “Which now, you realize, is absolutely—”

  “Is that your phone buzzing?” Gabe cocked his head at the back seat. Ellie reached over and grabbed her tote bag, which now sounded like a hive of angry bees. She’d switched her cell to vibrate for the Detta meeting, then forgotten to turn the ringer back on.

  She looked at the ID.

  “Meg,” she announced.

  Gabe raised his eyebrows melodramatically. “Or … whoever.”

  She ignored him. “Hi, Meg. I’m putting you on speaker.”

  “Where are you?” Meg’s voice piped through.

  “In the car. Where are you?”

  “At the station with Warren. He’s wondering when you’ll be back here.”

  Ellie slashed a kill-me-now finger across her throat but made her tone cheerily acquiescent. “On the way.” She had to keep the morning’s assignation at P-X under the radar. And wondered how Meg had finessed her own absence. “Anything up? Whoa!”

  She grabbed the door handle as Gabe swerved the Jeep into a gas station, pulled to the curb, shifted into park. Ellie, regaining her balance, held the phone up, speaker toward both of them, as if it were a third person in the front seat.

  “A Pharminex employee was killed or is dead, something like that.” Meg’s voice came out as a whisper this time.

  A siren screamed by, a police car, its blue lights cutting through the gloom. Ellie stared at the cell phone. Gabe, frowning with concern, settled his hand on Ellie’s shoulder, then took it away.

  “What does that even mean, Meg? Killed or dead?” Ellie’s brain raced to understand this, shuffling names and possibilities.

  “I don’t know the whole thing. I was in the newsroom, getting printer paper. Warren was at the assignment desk and some producer was on the phone with the police. Someone said ‘Pharminex’ to someone, it’s breaking news, and Warren wants you back here. I’m—I don’t know anything else. We’re finding out.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  “Just come back.”

  “When did—” Ellie persisted. But the line was already dead. She switched on the radio as Gabe eased back onto the highway.

  “Let’s see if there’s news,” she said, twisting the dial. “What if—”

  “I hear you,” Gabe said. “I’ll get us there soon.”

  Ellie, impatient, turned through the static, searching for news, but now, at 11:35, there was only a blur of high-decibel sales pitches and annoying jingles, relentless guitars and endless political talk. She snapped the radio off and flopped against her seat back. Stared out the windshield.

  Kaitlyn Armistead was dead. And now so was someone else. She thought of the Pharminex employees she knew. Detta and Allessandra. The chic and ambitious women she’d met in training class, Jenn and Gerri and Christine and Lydia.

  The heater in Gabe’s Jeep struggled to keep up with the weather, puffing heat on only one of her knees, leaving her nose freezing and her fingers almost numb. Gabe. She wrapped her arms across her chest. Was he another puzzle piece?

  Gabe admitted he’d disguised himself as a doctor. Going undercover for some law firm, he’d said. Had he been there that day in McGinty’s office? Out of her view, watching her talk with Kaitlyn Armistead? She would have recognized him. She pursed her lips, thinking—wouldn’t she?

  She closed her eyes, trying yet again to picture it.

  As Ellie, she’d seen him as Gabe. As Nora, she’d seen him as Guy. You can’t fool someone you know; she’d pronounced that edict herself.

  He’d confessed he’d used a white coat as a disguise. Maybe today’s tailored suit and tortoiseshell glasses—his Gabe outfit—was another disguise.

  She watched him drive, his eyes focused on the road, almost obeying the speed limit, seemingly lost in his own thoughts. As he made the turn and headed back onto Beacon Street, Ellie felt a shiver. And it was from far more than the inclement weather and inadequate heater.

  CHAPTER 35

  ELLIE

  Ellie unlatched her seat belt as Gabe eased his Jeep into a parking space in front of her apartment.

  “Thanks, Gabe,” she said. She’d pretend she wasn’t suspicious. “I’ll do a quick change back into Ellie, then head to Channel Eleven. Quite the morning.”

  She looked at him as she gathered her tote bag and new Pharminex briefcase. He seemed thoughtful, his eyes softening as he watched her. Affectionate, the word came to mind. Or maybe it was more tactics. She thought she’d been the first to lie in this relationship. But maybe he’d been the first. Maybe the first lie was only the beginning.

  “Thanks for everything,” she finally said. She was on the way to hear bad news. Someone at Pharminex was dead. “I’ll let you know, soon as I can. And text me if you find out anything.”

  “Take care.” He leaned toward her, and she felt the heat rise to her face. Was he going to kiss her? Here? Now?

  He reached down beside her, picked up a glove from the floor. “You’re gonna need this,” he said. “Whoever you are.”

  It took a moment, a breath, for her heart to slow down. To make sure her voice was normal. In that one frozen second of uncertain silence, as he handed her that one leather glove, identities and motives seemed to blur into pure desire.

  And then, just as quickly, it evaporated. She’d fallen for him as Guy. But Guy wasn’t real. And the real guy, Gabe, might simply be as adept with his seduction skills as he was with changing identities.

  “Thanks,” she said. Why did she keep thanking him? She shifted into all business, gra
bbing her stuff and hopping out of the front seat onto the snow-dusted sidewalk, not risking any personal gestures. Any personal anything.

  “I’ve got to become Ellie in about thirty seconds,” she told him. “So, thanks. See you later.” Damn it. She’d thanked him again. She closed the door, started to walk away. When she heard the buzz of the passenger side window, she turned back.

  “Ellie? I’ll take you,” Gabe offered as the window opened. “You change. I’ll wait.”

  Not a chance. “That’s okay. Really. Go.” She waved him away. “Go to your real job. I’ll let you know.” She took a step toward her apartment, then turned back. The window was still open. He was still watching her. “Gabe? Thanks for this morning. You rocked it.”

  “You did too. And yeah. We’ll plan. Call me.” The window buzzed back up, and the exhaust from the Jeep plumed as Gabe drove away. He’d not only accepted her double life, he’d actively participated in it. And that imbalance, that thumb on the scales, left her staring for a moment at the empty street.

  Gabe was the only person who knew her as both Ellie and Nora. She’d ceded him that power—well, in truth, he’d taken it. Whether that would be her downfall was still to be determined.

  Despite what she’d just told him, she was staying Nora.

  Twenty minutes later, after a call to Uber, and then one to Warren, she stood on the sidewalk across from Pharminex and tried to formulate a plan. Her news director had zero details on the death—so she’d told Warren that instead of coming to Channel 11, she’d go straight to Pharminex. See what she could find out directly. Warren didn’t need to know she was working this story undercover as Nora, but Nora gave her access. As Nora, she could find out who was dead, and why and what that meant. Then Ellie could expose it to the public.

  “Brilliant,” she said out loud to the gathering snow. She’d just talked to her boss dressed as Nora and pretending to be Ellie. Double duplicity. She was getting good at this.