Monday's Lie

by Jamie Mason

  “What is going on? I’m so sorry, Dee. I didn’t mean for him—”

  “You don’t need to be sorry. Everything’s ruined. He did it to himself.”

  “What just happened?”

  “Why are you even here?”

  “You called me!”

  “But how did you get here so fast?”

  “You have no idea where I was,” he says.

  “But—” No fully formed question is there. Not a quick one at least. “You have to get out of here.” I shove him back toward his car.

  “Dee, what the hell is happening?”

  “I can’t, Brian. There’s no time.”

  “You have to tell me at least this—what have I done?”

  “There’s no time. They must have sent someone by now. They’ll be here any minute. Will you trust me?”

  “I don’t know what that means.” He searches my face, working his stare deep into my eyes.

  “Are you looking for my mother in there?”

  “No. Not at all.” He decides something about me that I don’t have time to decode.

  I’m surprised that anything can add to the tidal ache in me. He has to leave now. “Brian, can you get to 911 records?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do that, then. I called them. Just before you came. Find the call. Then you’ll see. I’m so sorry. Go, hurry.”

  The first distant wail of sirens floats from far away through the dusty air.

  “But, there’s a guy in that other car. . . . What are you going to do? Are you okay?”

  “Brian, unless you want your early retirement blown all to hell and your whole life to be about this mess for the foreseeable future, just go. Go now. I’ve got this. I’ll talk to you soon. I’ll explain everything. It’s fine. I promise. You didn’t do anything wrong. Go!”

  He does. I run back to Jim.

  • • •

  “Ma’am! Ma’am!” The emergency dispatcher calls to me from the open line as I jam my thumb against the speaker volume.

  “I’m here!” I let the power of the last few minutes surge into my throat and carry my voice up into the manic ranges. Method acting, for sure. “He drove into some beams! Oh, God! His face. It’s Patrick. He’s killed himself.”

  “Ma’am, emergency services are en route. And an ambulance. Stay where you—”

  “The guy is here with me. The guy he hired to kill me. The hit man.”

  Jim’s eyes blaze with terror and questions.

  “Wha—” The dispatcher sounds as confused as Jim looks.

  “I can hear the sirens. Thank you!”

  “No! Ma’am, stay on the line. Keep this li—”

  I disconnect the call and drop out of hot drama into ice-cold anger. I scrabble over Jim, yanking at his bindings. “They’re going to catch you. I’m going to tell them that you ran, but they’ll be right on you. I don’t think you’ve got even that snowball’s chance in hell, but if you’ve got one, it’s right now.” I pull the knotted socks from his mouth and lower my face into his, gritting my teeth over having to talk to him at all. “And you might remember that I’m the one that gave it to you, you son of a bitch.”

  “What the hell is this? What are you doing?”

  “You have no idea how much I’d rather shoot you in the face until you’re all the way stupid and ugly”—I snatch up the paintball pistol from the seat and toss it through the still open driver’s-side window, into the shrubs—“but I don’t feel like being arrested for kidnapping today. Patrick’s dead. So is your contract. No payday for you. You’ve got a head start of maybe two minutes. Merry fucking Christmas. I suggest you get your ass in gear.”

  Jim rubs at the chafed corners of his mouth. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me, you asshole. You’d just better be glad I’m not my mother.”

  I scramble out of the car. The other door opens and closes, then another. Then Jim’s car roars to life and runs over my long shadow as I sprint for the front gate, scripting my story with the wind dragging the sound of sirens over me.

  32

  I almost had Patrick cremated, even though I knew he had wanted to be buried. With Jim on the run and a tinny 911 recording that is only slightly better than flimsy evidence, and not nearly as much of a smoking gun as I would have liked, I feel cheated. On the heels of that, I feel vengeful and mean. But Patrick’s parents have always been kind to me. I changed my mind at the ragged end of the window for him to be embalmed and left a check and a note under my mother-in-law’s windshield wiper instead.

  The news coverage of the showdown at Carlisle Inc. isn’t what I’d braced myself for. The story has been downplayed, almost grayed out for maximum blandness. I waver between grateful and suspicious.

  Our friends have been artless in their comforting, dancing with the two left feet of curiosity and unease. I have enough frozen casseroles to get me through an apocalypse, but they all came in disposable pans. No one wants any jinxed thing back from me. I can hardly blame them. My brother is furious with me. The neighbors stare while trying to look like they aren’t staring. I float through a life I don’t recognize.

  Today, I’ve come to lunch at the food court. I’ve come every day for a week, scanning the crowd while trying hard to be like my normal neighbors and not look overmuch as if I am scanning the crowd. I’ve held a book the whole time, each time, and have got not a lot of words off the page and not a lot of food down my throat either. Wavy, dark hair always tugs at my peripheral vision. So do well-cut jackets and tall men in jeans.

  It’s Tuesday and chilly. I get up from my chair, annoyed with myself in a way that is growing less vague. I’ve lost weight that I can’t afford to. I’m not sleeping well. I flick my long sweater from off the back of the chair and notice an envelope sticking up from the gaping front pocket of my purse.

  It’s unaddressed and nearly flat. A single sheet of paper is tri-folded inside.

  I heard the recording. You didn’t do anything wrong either. Well played. And thank you. If you ever need anything . . .

  • • •

  Then along came a spider. Most literally. A light brown spider just rappelled from the ceiling and landed on my desk next to my right hand. I’d listlessly been clicking through this and that on the Internet with no direction beyond the stupid pull of whatever caught my eye next. I meant to be here for fifteen minutes. I’ve been scrolling for an hour and fifty. That spider just scared the hell out of me.

  I clap my empty teacup over it and fish out one of the sturdier card-stock flyers from the recycle bin to slide under the whole works. I take my catch to the door, balancing it in my less than reliable left hand, and imagining the cascade of wobble-crash-scream that is going to send this harmless creature running up my arm and probably to its death by flail.

  “Freer than me,” I say, crouched on the stoop. Predictably, I burst into tears. The spider flees.

  My mother’s phrase plays through my mind in some of the languages she’d taught us to recognize. Freier als ich. Plus libre que moi. Friare än mig. Svobodnejší než jsem já.

  Back at the computer, a new tab brings up an appealingly empty search bar. There is no need to type her name. I’ve done that before, so many times, and all I’ve ever got in return was a lovely pain in the ass from the past, who also happened to be a hero.

  Why not this?

  I type, Freer than me. Google coughs up nearly 7 million hits of, as far as I can tell, nothing I care about.

  I put quotation marks around it and scan a narrowed-down list for a few pages. Still, it goes on forever. That phrase was particular to my mother and to our family, and in more ways than I had known just a few short weeks ago, but “freer than me” isn’t an impossibly unusual concept. Other people sigh over what is fair between the haves and the have-nots in everything, surely also in the freedom department.

  Everyone weighs everything in the scales of covet, sometimes most particularly the idea of being free. There is certainly freedom in all the th
ings that everyone wants, all the things they tell us we should be. Who is smarter than me, who is prettier than me, faster than me, richer than me? And then my peculiar jealous question: Who is more normal than me?

  But not all that many people were ever balancing themselves against a spider.

  So I slide the arrow up to the search field and roll it to the inside of the end quotation mark. Click. I type, + Spider.

  I hit Enter.

  There’s one result.

  I read the preview on the search page and break into a cool sweat.

  Once upon a time . . .

  The website is an anonymous, leave-a-message, confessional bulletin board, a place to purge a secret or to declare a truth—a love, a fault, an apology. It’s a forum to make any of these things feel a little more real than it did when it was only a silent something jailed inside your head. It’s an ocean of electronic letters in bottles.

  The link on the search page zips to a post, a quarter of the way down the screen, buried in the pages upon pages that make up the site. The username was simply AV. Annette Vess. I close my eyes. The message is a few paragraphs long. I don’t want to start it because I don’t want it to be over. Whatever it says, I can only read it for the first time once.

  I open my eyes.

  Once upon a time . . .

  There was a girl of pluck and a boy of sixes who grew up to be extraordinary people. If either of them ever reads this, then it means they’ve gone looking.

  And if you’ve come looking, either of you or both, I hope it doesn’t mean you’re troubled, but I’m thinking that you might be. And if so, I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry if whatever is wrong has you thinking of me because I’m the cause of your concern. But, I’m even sorrier if it has nothing to do with me at all, and that you’ve come looking for me out here in the pixels only because I’m not there with you now.

  Sadly, I know that there is plenty in this world that you can’t handle. But it’s really not all that sad, because if you can’t handle it, then nobody could have. I lasted long enough to know that. You are both so capable and beautiful, you made it easy to do the best I could. If you could know how grateful I am for that . . .

  For the problem at hand, try this: You know what to do, my darlings. And if you don’t, do what you think you’d do if you were exactly the person you wanted to be.

  Take care of each other and be happy, not sad, when you set a spider freer than me. My love for you is here, it’s there, it’s everywhere. . . .

  I click her username without hope. There are no other messages.

  33

  Our house, or my house, I suppose, sold quickly. I’ve just returned to my office from the closing, and Jill rings my desk from her office up front before I can get settled in.

  “Um, your uncle’s here to see you?” Her voice is full of doubt.

  “Terrific. Can you just direct him back here, please?”

  He bulks up the doorway a few seconds later.

  “Hi, Dee.”

  “Hello, Paul.” I don’t like his towering over me in my seat, so I stand and offer my hand for a strictly business greeting, but he twists it over and kisses my knuckles before I can pull away. It wouldn’t have been easy anyway; his grip is a vise. “Security let you right up here, huh, just like that?”

  “I’m good with security guards.”

  “I imagine you are.”

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been by sooner. I mean, I heard what happened later that same day.”

  “Well, there’s a surprise.” I resist the urge to scrub the back of my hand against my slacks to be rid of the vaguely cool spot his lips have left.

  “But I wanted to give it some time. Give you some time.”

  “How unexpectedly thoughtful of you. Are you going soft in your old age?”

  “You’re never going give me a break, are you, Dee?” He laughs. “Or the benefit of the doubt?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Okay, well, here’s a softball then, just to get into your good graces and to prove that I come in peace. I’d like to help you in this tough, confusing time. You must be rattled. What can I do for you? Do you have any questions for me? Can I help you with anything that you need to know to settle your mind?”

  “Fine. I’ll bite. Did you massage the media after Patrick died? After what he was accused of ?”

  “I like that word massage.”

  “So you did.”

  “I just said it was a nice word.”

  I sigh. “You know what? Never mind. I’m just going to go with that you did and made it all go away, and I’ll say, in hindsight, thank you. I think it would have shattered my nerves.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t do to have your name splashed all over the papers, now would it? Is that all the questions you’ve got?”

  “No, but it seems kind of pointless.”

  “Do you want to try me?”

  “Oh, sure. Why not? I’ve got nothing better to do all day. Did you know that Patrick was looking into having me killed?”

  “No. That sort of thing is not really our pond. That’s just freshwater and we’re more, um, what you might call deep-sea fisherman.”

  “Oh my God. That sounded like almost a straight answer, Paul. Bravo. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

  “Brian doesn’t know I’m here, by the way. He says he doesn’t know about any of this either, in case you were wondering.”

  “I wasn’t wondering.” I approve of my cool, unquavery delivery after he zapped me with news of Brian, now obviously a known mutual acquaintance somehow.

  Paul laughs. “You are almost an excellent liar. But try not to work a hole into your head, having to believe your own bullshit. It makes the whole thing feel too much like work.”

  “So, what is it for you, then, Paul, all the lying? Sport?”

  “Exercise.”

  I say nothing.

  “Ah, come on, Dee. You’re allowed to be in cahoots with your own tongue. It could save your life someday. You never know.”

  Deep and well out of sight, which was the only place I’d allow it, a chill chases a dread between my shoulder blades. That sounded like something my mother would have said.

  “Brian sends his love.”

  “Not by way of you, he didn’t.”

  Paul drops his gaze and smirks at the crease cresting the knee of his trouser leg. “Well, I’m sure he meant to.”

  The lull is uncomfortable and pointless. So I throw myself into it just to get it all over with. “I’m guessing you came here for a reason, Paul. And I’m almost thinking I know what that reason might be.”

  “Oh, do tell.”

  “Not a chance. Speak now or change your mind. Of course, you can always just take the high road and say you stopped by to tell me how sorry you are for my loss. Either way, let’s wrap this up. I am actually a little bit busy. I’m meeting Simon in an hour and twenty minutes, and I have a few things to do before that.”

  “Yeah, when your brother finds out, he’s not going to be all that pleased that I’ve come to see you.”

  I roll my eyes and chuckle through my nose. “Simon hates your guts. So I won’t tell him if you don’t.”

  “He is really good at singing that tune, isn’t he? Do you ever think maybe it’s so he doesn’t have to talk about me at all?”

  “I know my brother. Nice try, though.”

  Paul stares at me long enough to raise the fine hairs on my arm. His smirk shows that he knows it, too. “If you say so.”

  He sits down in the guest chair opposite my desk without having been offered the ease. “Well, I’ll get to it then. They picked up some guy named Jim. I think you’re acquainted with the fellow? Anyway, they caught him trying to get out of the country on a fake passport. I read his interview transcripts. Hell of a story he told. Hell of a story. Then, wouldn’t you know it, somehow he escaped custody during a routine transfer. It was the darnedest thing. His whereabouts are unknown.”

  “I
s he coming for me?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Um”—Paul punctuates the delay with a small, satisfied smile—“not as such.”

  “But you know where he is.”

  “We’re in touch.”

  “I see.”

  “Fascinating guy, that Jim.”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “If his story is to be believed, you broke up a murder-for-hire ring with just an afternoon of poking around and a paintball gun. All with zero training.”

  “Shhh. Will you please keep your voice down?” I close the door to my office. “I am trying to get things back to normal around here. I still have to live in this town, you know.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “And I thought you said this pond wasn’t salty enough for you.”

  “It wasn’t until you went swimming in it. Vess is a particular name with particular connotations. I got curious.”

  I ignore him. “And anyway, you and I both know I’ve had plenty of training.”

  Paul grips the armrests and heaves the chair a half turn from the front of my desk and stretches his legs out, ankles crossed. “Do you know they’ve tied fourteen hits on the Atlantic coast to this ring already?”

  “No. They won’t tell me anything.” He’s gained advantage again, lolling in my guest chair as I stand off to the side not knowing what to do with myself. I take my seat again and enjoy the span of my desk between us.

  “Well, it’s big. There’s even a ruckus at the phone companies. Until the ‘special projects’ department over at Carlisle had the clever idea to give each of their ‘special’ customers one of their own phones, for the duration of said ‘special project,’ they were paying techs to delete records in the databases. Ergo, a whole new branch of charges and red tape. It’s a mess.” Paul leans in on the too-polished wood of the armrest.

  My desk, my whole office even, suddenly seems fussy and prim. I nudge a short stack of papers out of its finicky geometry, peering over it as if there were something urgent for me printed on its top sheet.

  Paul pays no attention to my pretend distraction. “You could have access to whatever you wanted to know if you came to work for me.” He’s struck a tone without trying, at once flattering, conspiratorial, and with more than a hint of a dare. The snake in Eden probably had a dose of the same schooling. “You could use a fresh start, Dee. Get out of this silly place, for one thing.”