“Get out,” Sadie said. She held the knife as tightly as she could, but still it trembled. Her mouth was dry. A foul taste was rising in her throat. She tried to think, tried to decide, but the demon’s bloodthirsty laughter filled her head and rattled her brain, like it was inside her, not Danny.
“Kill her,” the demon whispered. “Kill her.”
“Go ahead and try,” Sadie said. Her vision had gone dark around the edges. All she saw was the shaking tip of the knife and Danny’s glowing eyes. She hoped her words sounded strong, because inside she was cowering, crumbling.
“I’m going to get those books,” Danny said softly. “One way or another. I’m trying to be nice here. If I have to come back with my friends, you’ll see they aren’t so nice.”
“Come a little closer,” she said, raising the knife up a few inches, “and you’ll see I’m not so nice either.”
“Oh, I like her,” said the demon. “Let’s find out what her liver tastes like.”
Danny stared hard at her, but didn’t approach. His too-long fingers agitated against the side of his legs, nervous energy desperate to get out. The unnatural light in his eyes flared brighter. The demon howled. But then Danny glanced away, toward the door, and Sadie realized he wasn’t going to attack.
“I need the books,” he said one last time.
“Get out,” Sadie repeated.
The light in his eyes faded a little, then he shoved his twitchy hands into his pockets and made for the door. The demon just laughed and laughed. A moment later, they were gone, but the laughter hung in the air for a long time after like the smell of smoke.
Chapter Four
When she was sure the Laughing Boy wasn’t coming back, Sadie went back to the kitchen and threw the knife into the sink. The sound of metal on metal scraped her nerves and tore the threads of her resolve. Her hand, still cramping from her unyielding grip on the handle, shot to her mouth.
Oh, god, she thought when there were no other words left in her head. Oh, god.
She abandoned the sandwich and went to the front door and checked the locks. A distant part of her brain knew she was ravenously hungry, but there was too much acid in her gut and her head to even think about eating. She stumbled into the bathroom. She stripped off her sweat-damp clothes, turned the shower up as hot as it would go, and sat in the bathtub, letting the water scald her and hide the tears. She stayed there a long time, long enough to drain their temperamental water heater. Eventually she shut off the lukewarm water and dressed in the dark.
She went gingerly into her mom’s room. The Laughing Boy had torn out drawers and scattered clothing and jewelry everywhere, but Sadie just stepped over the mess. She pulled back her mom’s comforter and got into her bed. She remembered sleeping here with her mom when she’d had a bad dream or when the wind howled too loudly outside. She remembered the feel of her mom’s arm over her, holding her, guarding her.
She pressed her face into her mom’s pillow. Her scent filled her nostrils.
Sleep came easily.
Sleep ended abruptly with a hard pounding on her front door. Sunlight slanted through the blinds. How long had she slept? Not long enough. Though her whole body hurt, Sadie crept from the bed to the window and peered through the blinds. A sheriff’s car waited outside.
Panic jolted her the rest of the way awake. Why would the sheriffs be here? “Just a minute!” she yelled as she ran to her room and threw on some clothes.
She returned to the living room. The sheriff’s deputy thudded on the door again and Sadie reminded herself to breathe.
She opened the door just wide enough for her face and nearly swallowed her tongue. The man on her porch was big, with a bright red mustache. He wore the usual khaki-colored uniform, though with fancier gold decorations shining on his shoulders. His badge gleamed on his chest. He had a brown broad-brimmed hat, polished black boots, and a hard, veined face. Sadie recognized him from his election posters glaring all over town. This wasn’t a deputy standing in front of her; it was the goddamn undersheriff himself.
“Can… can I help you?” Sadie asked as she tried to regain her balance.
“Ma’am,” he said, nodding his head toward her. He towered over her, blocking out the sun behind him. She thought he might have to stoop to come through the doorway. “My name is Undersheriff Hassler. Would you mind if I came inside so we could have a chat?”
Sadie’s hands tightened involuntarily on the door. She forced her lips into the hint of a smile and asked, “What is this about?”
Hassler tried to match Sadie’s smile and didn’t do much better than she did. “It is already getting pretty warm out here, miss,” he said, noticeably switching from ma’am. “I think we’d both be more comfortable in out of the sun.”
“Sure,” Sadie said, uncertain of what else she could say. “Come on in.”
The big undersheriff blacked out the doorway as he stepped inside. Sadie retreated across the room to switch on the swamp cooler, which chugged and gurgled and screeched before belching out a bolus of fetid air.
The undersheriff’s eyes traced slowly over the room in a manner trying too hard to look casual. “Lovely home you have here,” he said as he removed his hat.
Sadie fought the urge to scoff. “What exactly can I do for you, Mr. Hassler?”
“There was an incident last night,” he said. “An unfortunate incident that I hoped you could shed some light on.”
Sadie swallowed. The Laughing Boy had stood exactly where the undersheriff was now. Did Hassler know he’d been there? How could he? Unless he knew why Danny had come. And who had sent him. “An incident?”
“Yes,” Hassler said slowly as he completed his scan over her living room. “With one of my deputies in the hospital parking lot.”
Sadie almost breathed a sigh of relief into the undersheriff’s face. Of course that was why he was here. She’d nearly forgotten all about it. “Yeah, right,” Sadie said. “That was… pretty bad.”
“Pretty bad,” Hassler repeated with a sour face, like he didn’t care for the taste of the words. “A man lost three fingers and his livelihood. He’ll never hold a gun or shake another man’s hand again. He worked long and hard to wear that badge, and now he has to quit as a cripple.” His mustache twitched. “So yes, pretty bad, and since you were involved, young lady, I’d expect you to show some more respect for his sacrifice.”
It was no secret in town that Sadie’s mom had a temper. It was the kind of thing you didn’t really see coming. She could be all smiles and laughs one minute, but once you crossed the line, she’d hit you with both barrels. Sadie had been on the receiving end plenty of times, mostly deserved. And while she’d always told herself she wouldn’t grow up to become her mother, she could feel that temper now, a blue-hot burst of color in front of her vision that blotted out the bulky man who had come to lecture her a few hours after she’d watched her mom die.
“Do you know why I was at the hospital, Mr. Hassler?” Her mouth was tight, but the words found their way out anyway. “That wasn’t rhetorical. Do you know?”
“Yes,” he said after a heavy pause. “I heard about your mother.”
“I was there to watch her die, Mr. Hassler,” Sadie said. Bile churned in her gut and lent acid to her tone. “Yesterday I had a mom, now I just have a lot of shitty memories. And then to top it off, as soon as I walked outside, I ran into a pissing match between your cop and a King’s Man. So yeah, I’m real sorry that guy lost his hand, but with respect, sir, I didn’t do it, he brought it on himself, and we all got our own shit to deal with.”
They stared each other down across the tiny living room. The whining swamp cooler filled the room with noise and reluctantly cool air. The undersheriff had an ugly little smile on his face, the kind of look a man gets when he’s congratulating himself for not hitting someone who needs to be taught a lesson.
At last, Hassler shifted his feet and said, “I am sorry for your loss. I knew your mother by reputation.”
> “Yeah, well, everybody knew her by reputation.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Hassler said. “Just like everyone knows the King.”
Sadie felt a trap in there somewhere, and said nothing.
“Do you find yourself chatting with the King’s Men often, miss?”
“Nope,” she said. “That was a first.”
“Alright,” he said. “And have you spoken to him since?”
“No, but he did give me his card.”
“Did he now?” Hassler said. “May I see it?”
“I don’t think he meant me to share it.”
The undersheriff exhaled out of fleshy nostrils. “Young lady, that thing you spoke to at the hospital brutally attacked a deputy in the line of duty. He is a public menace, like a rabid dog. Something to be destroyed. Yet I get the distinct impression that you are protecting him.”
Sadie snorted a laugh. She knew better, but the anger was still inside her, burning her up. “I’m not protecting anybody. Not like the King needs me to protect him from you.”
“Is that so?” the undersheriff asked coldly.
“The King protects Red Valley,” she said. “I’d figure you’d be on the same side, not picking fights with him over parking spots.”
The undersheriff turned his head away and stared out the window, back south toward Red Valley. Sadie knew she was making him angry too and was surprised at how little she cared.
“The law protects Red Valley,” he said when he was done contemplating the horizon. “This isn’t some godforsaken wasteland. This is the United States of America, state of California. Got a president, governor, all sorts of politicians. And we’ve got laws. And the most important thing about those laws is that nobody is above them.”
“Not sure those laws were meant for things like the King,” Sadie said.
“Or the Liar?”
The question sent Sadie back on her heels. She knew it was probably time to stop talking, yet words just kept coming out. “You drive all the way up here to accuse me of something, Undersheriff Hassler? Or my mother?”
He smiled at her discomfort, showing off teeth stained by coffee and age. “Like I said, I know—sorry, knew—your mother by reputation.”
“So what?”
He came forward a few steps. Sadie was already up against the wall, so had no room to retreat. “When someone breaks the law, it is my job to prove it so justice can be served. That is the foundation of society. That’s what keeps places like Red Valley from becoming… unseemly. But when that same someone can drive up here and ask your pretty mother to write in her little book and make all the proof disappear, well, the foundation becomes eroded.”
“People asked her to make themselves look skinny without going to the gym,” Sadie said. “Or bring back their dead yappy little dogs. Not cover up their crimes.”
“Do you know every Lie your mother told?”
The question stung, but she pushed it aside. “No.”
“But she wrote them down, isn’t that right?”
Sadie’s eyes narrowed. Now it all made sense. “You don’t give a damn about your deputy and you’re not here for me to give a statement.” She shook her head. She was a little slow catching up to her new reality, but the rules were starting to make themselves clear. “You want my mom’s ledger, just like everybody else.”
Hassler tilted his head. “Everybody else?”
Shit. This was why you shouldn’t let your mouth say whatever it wants. “That wasn’t a denial.”
Undersheriff Hassler sighed. It was a sound of disappointment, and of resignation. “You’ve inherited your mother’s unfortunate disrespect for authority.”
“I thought you said you only knew her by reputation.”
He ignored that. “You are wrong, young lady, about a number of things. First, I care very deeply about my deputy and the loss he suffered. Second, I don’t give a damn about your mom’s ledger. I’m not interested in the kinds of scum who’d come up here and give their blood in exchange for covering up their sins. Those are symptoms. I’m after the cause.”
“And what’s that, Mr. Hassler?”
“The King,” he said. “I want to take down the King.”
Sadie wanted to laugh, but the way he said it gave her a chill instead. As far as she knew, the undersheriff wasn’t anything special—anything other—so why did he sound so confident that he could take down something like the King? Arrogance? Stupidity? Or something else?
“You see, I know a little about the history of Red Valley,” he went on. “And the modifications the King has made to the people here. The whole town is full of weird shit, but I don’t think the King gives his power away from the kindness of his heart. Everything he does—his so called ‘protection’ of Red Valley—is carefully calculated.”
Sadie doubted something as powerful as the King needed to bother with being careful around men like Hassler, but she kept that observation to herself.
Hassler lowered his head a little, like a bull about to charge. “So that leaves me with a very important question: Why’d he create the Liar?”
The books, Graciela had said last night. He doesn’t want anyone to read them. Must have something juicy in there, something real good.
“I wouldn’t know,” Sadie replied.
The undersheriff smiled those stained teeth again. “Neither do I. But I think I would very much like to find out. You see, I strongly believe everybody’s got a weakness, a way to make them hurt. Even things like the King. He’s just better at hiding it than most. He acts like he owns this town, but he doesn’t. He acts like he’s a god, but he ain’t. He’s got a secret and I think it is written down in those Liar’s books.”
A new fear crawled up Sadie’s back on spider’s legs. Had Hassler sent the Laughing Boy to get the ledgers?
“Those books belong to my family,” Sadie said.
“And you can keep them,” he said. “I just want to know what they say.”
“Did you ask my mom to see the ledgers? What did she tell you? Or were you too scared to get on her bad side?”
“I had hoped you might be more reasonable, but I’m starting to doubt that.”
“Some things are secret for a reason, Mr. Hassler.”
Hassler reached up and ran a meaty hand over his smooth chin. “I don’t believe much in subtlety, young lady. It just complicates things that should be simple. I think a man should say what he means. So let me say what I mean: I will get what I aim to get.”
An over-confident white man with a badge and a gun. How original, Sadie thought.
“Come November,” he went on, “the sheriff is going to retire and I’ll be elected as his replacement. Change is coming to Red Valley. Real change. We won’t need things like the King or the Liar anymore. Everybody has a weakness, after all. So you need to take a good long moment to reflect and ask yourself which side of history you want to be on.”
“Nice election speech,” Sadie said. She suddenly remembered how hungry she was and decided it was time for breakfast. “If you want to pick a fight with the King, that seems insane, but I’m not going to stop you. I’m not going to help you either. I don’t need him as an enemy. I’ve got enough to deal with on my own right now. Have a nice day, Mr. Hassler.”
“I don’t think you want me as an enemy either.”
“Are we enemies now? Because I told you no?” Sadie sighed as condescendingly as she could. “Maybe you need a few moments of reflection yourself, Mr. Hassler, if that’s all it takes. Hardly seems like the right attitude for the next sheriff of Red Valley.”
He stared at her, measuring her. He must have expected something else when he drove up here, that a grief-stricken girl would be easy to push around. Well, he’d discovered otherwise. She may not be the Liar—not yet, anyway—but you didn’t survive as the Liar’s daughter by being an easy mark.
“Thank you for your time,” Undersheriff Hassler said, replacing his hat on his head. “I look forward to our next meeting.�
�� He turned and went out the door and down the steps, his boots thumping heavy on the wood.
Sadie locked the door behind him. Her whole body was shaking with hunger, fatigue, and adrenaline. First the King’s Man shows up, then a Laughing Boy, now the undersheriff. All of them very interested in her mom’s books. None of them willing to go sniffing around until her mom was out of the way. Life had seemed so simple yesterday. She’d had problems, sure, but they were little things: getting to work on time, figuring out what to eat for dinner, accepting she’d never have much of a life outside of Red Valley. Now her problems weren’t so little, not anymore.
First, she called Graciela. “I need your help.”
“Say no more, chica,” came the quick reply. “I’m on my way.”
Second, she found the biggest bowl in the cupboard and emptied most of a box of cereal into it, and then drowned the little crispy oat squares in low-fat milk. She took her time eating it, chewing slowly, thinking. Planning.
Lastly, after washing her bowl and spoon—something her mom had always yelled at her for not doing—she methodically tore her house apart. Every drawer was opened, then emptied, then pulled out to check behind and beneath. Every shelf was cleared, every box dumped out. For the first time in her life, she was grateful that their house was small. She found broken pencils and ballpoint pens with chewed-on caps. She found old receipts and a couple cans of green beans that had started to bulge. She found little from her childhood; her mom had never been the type to hold onto crayon drawings or finger paintings. And her mom never liked how she looked in pictures, so they didn’t even have any photos on the walls. Even up in the attic, she found only a few moldy boxes of Christmas lights and tinsel that they hadn’t even bothered to hang last year.
And no ledgers.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you were good at hiding stuff, Sadie thought as she surveyed the mess she’d made of their house. That was kinda your thing. What a lonely life that must have been, to have everyone confide in you but no one trust you. Was that the fate that awaited Sadie now?
Graciela found her sitting in a pile of crap on her living room floor. She took in the chaos and Sadie’s grim face with wide, unblinking eyes.
The Liar of Red Valley Page 4