The Liar of Red Valley

by Walter Goodwater

  When the tears ran dry and Sadie could finally speak, she thanked Abagail again.

  “We all need to cry now and then,” the nurse said. She handed Sadie a box of Kleenex. “You take as long as you need, but you can go whenever you’re ready.” She pointed to a chair in the corner of the room. Sadie’s backpack sat on it. “Your things are in there.”

  Sadie suddenly remembered the ledgers. “My books?”

  “All fine,” the nurse said. “You were wet to the bone, but those books were bone dry. Something special about them, I’d wager, but you don’t have to tell me a thing. Your mom was pretty protective of her book, too.”

  The nurse turned to go. Sadie’s brain was still waterlogged and took a moment to catch up. “Wait,” she said. “My mom had a book with her? In the hospital? Before she died?”

  Abagail nodded. “Never let it out of her sight. Wasn’t it in the package I left for you at your house?” She thought a second. “No, no, I guess it wasn’t. Huh. Sorry, I don’t know what happened to it, then.”

  Things in Sadie’s mind began to sharpen. Her mom had had her ledger with her at the hospital, her ledger with all the Lies she’d ever told. But then it had disappeared somehow before the nurses could collect it. Who would want to take her mom’s ledger? And who had the chance to?

  A realization began to prickle the back of her neck; a fire, sparking in her chest and spreading to her limbs. Like a window smashing in reverse, broken shards of memory began to knit themselves together. She swung out of the bed.

  “I think I do,” she said.

  The office was nicer than Sadie had expected. The chairs—both in front of and behind the big mahogany desk—were dark leather. One wall was covered by a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf, filled with Bibles of all translations, gilt-spined commentaries by Spurgeon and MacArthur, books on Revelation and predestination and effective evangelism in a post-modern age. The other wall was festooned with posters touting the armor of God from Ephesians 6 or the movie Braveheart or the Beatles. A window in the back looked out over the church grounds. The lawn was still mostly green despite the drought, though the parking lot was empty.

  She didn’t have to wait long. Pastor Steve came in, a well-practiced smile mostly hiding his confusion at finding her in his office, sitting in his chair. “I’m so sorry,” he said as he came in. “If we had an appointment, it must have just slipped my mind.”

  Sadie flashed a smile of her own. “That’s okay,” she said. “I didn’t have an appointment. I just woke up this morning and felt I needed to talk to someone. About God.”

  His smile shifted a little, became a bit more genuine. “That’s wonderful. I’m glad you came. Let’s talk.” He still seemed somewhat annoyed that she was in his chair, but he did his best not to let it show. Instead he sat on the opposite side of the desk and said, “Tell me what’s been going on.”

  “I’ve been having a hard time lately,” Sadie said. “My mom died recently, but you knew that, you were at the hospital that night.”

  Pastor Steve nodded. “Losing a loved one is always a difficult trial.”

  “And since then, things have been tough. Real tough. It’s left me wondering if maybe I need a little help.”

  “God is always ready and willing to help us,” Pastor Steve said. “We just have to be willing to ask.”

  “I do want to ask for help,” Sadie said. “But first I had some questions. I was hoping you could help me with them. Little things that just don’t make sense. I’m sure you hear this stuff all the time.”

  He steepled his fingers and nodded. “I can try.”

  “So Jesus could do miracles? Like, heal people and stuff? Magically?”

  “Well, it wasn’t magic,” Pastor Steve said. “His miracles were an expression of His Father’s power. They were meant to show us that Jesus was who He said He was: the Son of God.”

  “What about the Liar’s power?” Sadie asked. “You know my mom was the Liar of Red Valley, right? Now I’m the Liar. I’ve got power. Where do you think that comes from?”

  He winced a little. Oh, you didn’t like that question, did you? Sadie thought. Good.

  “I couldn’t say,” he said after a thoughtful pause. “I’m not certain where the Liar’s power comes from, but it does seem very different than Jesus’s miracles. It is possible that it is not a gift God meant for you to use. The world is full of temptation, but it is how we react to that temptation that defines us.”

  “So if I was a member of your church, I couldn’t use the Liar’s power?”

  “That would be between you and the Holy Spirit.”

  “I had another question.” Sadie leaned forward in her chair and put her elbows on the smooth desk. “If God is all-powerful, then why do so many bad things happen? The world is pretty rough out there. Couldn’t He just stop that fire that’s coming down on Red Valley, if He wanted to?”

  “The Lord works in mysterious ways, I’m afraid,” Steve said. Now they were on more familiar ground, so this answer came easily. “I wish I knew why He allowed good people to suffer. If I were Him, I’d put out that fire and cure everyone’s cancer and make sure everyone had enough food to eat.” He spread his hands. “But He has a bigger plan, one we can only guess at.”

  “So that fire,” Sadie said, her lips tightening as her feigned civility started to crumble, “and cancer, are part of His plan.”

  “I know that’s hard,” he said. “Especially losing your mother like you did. But He can make beauty from ashes. He can redeem our suffering. I don’t understand it entirely myself, but He asks us to trust Him. That’s what faith is for.”

  “Faith,” Sadie repeated. The word tasted sour on her tongue. “God creates us and puts us in a world full of suffering because somehow that suffering is useful to some secret plan of His. And then if we say that that seems like a real dick thing to do, He tells us we just need to have faith that He’s really on our side.”

  Pastor Steve wasn’t smiling anymore. The conversation wasn’t going how he’d hoped, and now his patience at her intrusion was waning.

  “These are hard truths,” he said. “Mankind has struggled with them for hundreds of years. I doubt we’ll resolve them this morning.”

  “I just had one more question,” Sadie said, shoving her anger down, at least for a moment. “And then I’ll let you go on about your day. I’m sure you’re very busy.”

  “Please,” he said. “Go on.”

  “The virgin birth,” she said. A muscle under his right eye twitched slightly. “That one just seems so weird to me.”

  “Well,” he said, “it is weird to us, because it is unprecedented. God wanted the world to know that Jesus was the real deal, so He broke the rules just once to tell everyone that this was important.”

  Sadie tilted her head slightly. “So a miracle like this hasn’t happened before or since?”

  “No,” Pastor Steve said. His eyes narrowed slightly. “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “So if a girl is pregnant, then that’s because some dude did his thing.” He reddened slightly at that and she didn’t give him a chance to respond. “Say, for instance, a girl in this church, who grew up in your youth group, then started volunteering at the church during the week when no one else was around. Pretty girl, nice girl. If a girl like that got pregnant, then that wouldn’t be a miraculous event, right? That would be very explainable, though very inconvenient.”

  The leather creaked as his hands tightened on the arms of his chair. “I’m not sure I know where these questions are coming from.”

  “Then let me spell it out for you, Steve,” Sadie said. “I think you had sex with Courtney Barber. Like some idiot sophomore, I think you got her pregnant. That was a real problem, you being her pastor and all. I think you told her it would be best for everyone if she aborted the pregnancy, but Courtney had been in this church her whole life, listening to you talk about how sinful that sort of thing was, so she didn’t want to go along with it. The problem is, pregnanc
y can only be secret for so long. So I think you took her to see my mom. I think you made Courtney put her blood in my mom’s book to hide the pregnancy—just for now, I’m sure you said. Just until we can work this out.”

  The pastor’s face hardened. But Sadie’s face had hardened too, and she was just getting started.

  “That’s the thing, right? With the Liar’s Price. If you told the Lie about her baby bump, that would have cost you a lot, because it is harder to tell a Lie about someone else. So you made her do it. How many sermons had you preached on the evils of witchcraft and sorcery? And then you made her come see the witch. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The Lie hid the pregnancy, but it wasn’t going to hide the baby. So after all that, you finally convinced her to make it all go away.”

  Sadie pictured Courtney’s face when she’d seen her outside of the diner, the emptiness behind her eyes.

  “But it didn’t all go away,” she said. “There was still a Lie written down, in a book, that my mom had in her hospital room.”

  “I think it’s time for you to leave,” Pastor Steve said, in a very unpastoral voice.

  “No, that’s not how this is going to work. I know you’re probably used to telling women what to do and them listening,” she said, “but I’m not in your flock, pastor. So now I’m going to tell you what to do, and you’re going to do it.” She interlaced her fingers and stared him down across his own desk. “Give me my mom’s fucking ledger.”

  “What? Why would I have it?”

  Sadie sighed. So that’s how we’re going to do this. She pulled her ledger out of her bag. “Do you know what I can do with this, Steve? You talk about Hell on Sunday morning, but you don’t know what Hell is, not yet. But I’ll show you. Eagerly. I didn’t always like Courtney, but she deserved better than you.”

  A long, hard silence gripped the pastor’s office. He glared at Sadie with a new-found and remarkable fury, but she was pleased to discover she didn’t care. She’d stared down the King and faced the River; who the fuck did Pastor Steve think he was, next to that?

  “I didn’t mean for…” he started, before trailing off. “I just…”

  “Please, go on,” Sadie said. “Tell me all about your good intentions.”

  Without saying another word, Steve stood up and walked over to his bookshelves. He removed a red-leather-bound commentary on the Book of Romans and then reached through the gap it left. After a moment, he held up a book that Sadie knew very well. Sadie got up and reached for it, but at the last moment he pulled it back.

  “You won’t say a word about this to anyone,” he said in a low, angry voice. “Not a word.”

  Sadie smiled, then snatched it out of his hand. “I’m the Liar of Red Valley,” she said sweetly. “Keeping secrets is my job.”

  “I was only thinking of Courtney,” he said. “She’s been through enough already.”

  She made for the door as he went behind his desk. “Danny,” she said. “He was in your youth group too. He used to be Courtney’s boyfriend.”

  Steve slumped into his chair. His face had lost all semblance of color. “So?”

  “So his family is probably on your prayer chain,” she said. “He knew when my mom died.” He’d known where they lived, what her mom’s ledger had looked like. Now Sadie understood. Danny had been there, offering moral support, when his ex-girlfriend had to go see the Liar. A shoulder to cry on. And then he’d seen a chance to make her shameful secret go away.

  “Sure,” he said. “So what?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Sadie said as she opened the door. The air in the office had become a little stuffy, so the cooler air outside felt good on her face. So did the feeling of her mom’s ledger in her hand.

  “Oh,” she said as she was halfway out the door. “You can probably hang up your phone now.”

  Steve shot up and stared at the phone on his desk. The red light indicating the speaker phone was lit up.

  “Who…?”

  Sadie smiled one last time. “We just left a very long voicemail message for your wife. I wonder what she’ll think of it. Anyway, have a great day, Pastor Steve. God bless.”

  Sadie walked down from the First Church of the Risen Christ to a little park she remembered her mom taking her to when she was little. She sat at one of the picnic tables under the shade of an old cottonwood tree. In the nearby playground, toddlers chased each other around under the watchful eye of exhausted-looking mothers. Sadie placed her ledger on the table, and her mom’s next to it.

  Okay, Mom, she thought. Sorry it took me this long. It’s been a bit of a week, so I hope you understand.

  She wasn’t sure what she’d find in the ledger. Probably more questions than answers. But whatever was in there, it just felt good to have it, like some small part of her mom had been restored. Like some part of herself had been restored.

  She opened the ledger and flipped through the pages. There were hundreds of Lies in there, spanning decades. So many words, so many marks of blood. Her flipping stopped when her eyes caught on something. The entry was from about six months ago, and unlike most of the others, it spanned multiple lines.

  I don’t have cancer.

  I don’t have cancer.

  I don’t have cancer.

  I don’t have fucking cancer!

  The words blurred behind Sadie’s tears. Her mom’s pen had been pressed so deeply into the page that the paper had nearly torn. These weren’t the words of someone trying to hide her affliction because of vanity or pride; her mom just wished she could tell a Lie to make it go away. But the Liar’s gift had its limits. To all the world she looked healthy, but inside she knew that wasn’t true. Inside she was slowly, painfully dying. Alone.

  I’m so sorry, Mom.

  Sadie flipped the page. And there found a Lie that made the world start to spin.

  It was dated a few months ago. The blood that sealed it was darker than the rest, almost black. And she had to read the words a dozen times before her brain would agree to let them in.

  The King of Red Valley is alive.

  Sadie’s heart pounded. Her skin crackled and was somehow hot and cold at the same time. The King of Red Valley is alive, her mom had written. Which meant that the King was really dead. Then what was that thing she’d talked to, the thing they were hoping would save them? A Lie.

  Well, holy shit.

  She was about to close the ledger when she noticed some folded papers tucked in the back. She turned to that page, where her mom’s Lies stopped. She recognized her mom’s handwriting on the papers, so she pulled them out and started to unfold them, but then her eye caught on something and the papers fell from numb fingers.

  It was her mom’s final Lie, dated the day she’d died.

  I have a daughter and her name is Sadie.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  On the north side of Red Valley, the fire reached the first buildings. They had long been evacuated and the firefighters fought hard to save them, but the flames couldn’t be stopped. The houses blackened, then lit up in orange and red. Smoke and ash rose high over town.

  The hunter waited. They had accomplished much through the night. Many of the King’s people had been taken, consumed. The hunter could feel the new power in its veins; it had fed well. But the night was only so long and the King was not without fight yet. Caution was necessary. So it would wait, patient in the hunt, for the sun to go down again. And when it did, the hunter would hunt again. And the King would fall.

  A heavily laden semi-truck crested the Sierra Nevadas just outside Donner Pass. A woman sat behind the wheel, unblinking eyes staring down into the valley below. Not far now.

  Sadie thought she was going to puke. There was a ringing in her ears that was only getting louder. And the corners of her vision were going black, hiding away everything except the impossible words on the page in front of her.

  I have a daughter and her name is Sadie.

  It wasn’t possible. It made no sense. It was fucking insane.


  I have a daughter…

  Her mom’s final Lie.

  No. No.

  I’m real. I’m alive. I’m not a Lie. I’m…

  She had memories. Friends. A life. A job. A place in this world.

  But as she reached for those memories, the proof of a long, real childhood, they slipped away, suddenly elusive. Had she really gone to Disneyland? Had she really played in the trees around their house? Or were those someone else’s memories? She had a friend, true, but not many. Most people in Red Valley had ignored her, at least until she became the Liar. And the Treehouse Diner seemed to be getting along fine without her on the schedule. She pictured her bedroom, before the flames had burned it away. That had been hers, right? But there were no posters on the walls. Her old toys and drawings had been thrown out. What about that place had really been Sadie’s?

  Sadie… even seeing her name written down was jarring, like the spelling was weird or she hadn’t ever seen it before, only heard it in her own mind.

  No, she thought. This can’t be true.

  But the Lie was there. Unmistakable. No, no.

  The pages that had been inserted into the ledger fluttered in the breeze. Sadie caught them before they could slip away. Her mom’s handwriting called to her. Not knowing what else to do, she picked them up and began to read.

  To Sadie:

  Man, I can’t tell you how weird it is to write that. I’m writing a letter to my daughter. Who doesn’t exist yet. And who I’ll never meet. Life is such a fucking trip sometimes. I can’t even imagine what this is going to be like for you. I guess that’s why I’m writing this, to give you the best shot at not going insane. Let’s see how I do.

  Hi. My name is Emma, and I’m the Liar of Red Valley. And, I guess, your mom?

  I honestly don’t know how much of this you’ll already know. I’ve never told a Lie like you before. I tried to imagine you with everything that you’d need to be successful, but like any parent, I’m guessing I’ve screwed you up more than a little.