Chapter 35
Then and Now
Once Alice went back to her bedroom—after Jake had told her he’d seen her return from the beach the night Gina drowned—she knew she’d never sleep with Jake again. That part of her life, the part with Jake, was over. Life was restarts, one after another, and some were good and some weren’t. Her life had first restarted when her mother got the settlement money and they moved to Kennewick. It started again when Jake arrived, standing over her on the beach, and she could feel the way he was looking at her. It even restarted after Scott Morgan told everyone at school she was a slut, and she decided it didn’t matter, that whatever they said couldn’t touch her. And now she would have to start again, because Jake thought she’d had something to do with killing her own mother, or letting Gina drown, when both those things had happened accidentally. They’d happened to her, not because of her.
Jake, in the days following, tried only once to get Alice back. She was in her room, the door closed, rereading Tender Rebel, a dumb romance novel she’d read many, many times. Jake knocked, then half entered, standing in the door frame.
“What’re you doing?” he asked.
She held the book up. “Reading.”
“Thought you might like to read a little in bed with me. It’s lonely in there.”
“I’m fine here, Jake.”
“Okay,” he said. “Just checking.” She remembered what he’d been like immediately after her mother’s funeral, the way he’d taken control of her. He’d become a different man now that she didn’t love him, or trust him, anymore. Her indifference gave her the upper hand, a fact she decided to file away.
“Jake,” she said, as he was departing.
“Yeah?” he said, a hopeful look on his face.
“I’m going to look for a new job. And a new apartment.”
“Oh.”
“I thought I’d let you know. In advance.”
She gave her notice at Blethen’s Apothecary and got a job as an office assistant at a real estate company. She stopped taking classes, since she was working full-time, and rented a one-bedroom apartment in a stucco building not far from the real estate office. It was quiet in the apartment, and she liked it. She made simple meals, and watched television, and on the weekends she’d go swimming at the Y.
Coast Home Realty grew, relocating to a new, larger office in a strip mall off Route 1A. Alice coordinated the move, even working with Caroline, the big boss, to design the new office, and when the company was firmly established in their new plush surroundings, Caroline asked Alice if she ever thought about getting her real estate license. “I hate to lose you as our office manager, but you’d be a good agent, I just know it.”
Alice had never really considered this, partly because the real estate agents, at least the ones who made the most sales, all seemed to have big, vibrant personalities. Alice told Caroline that she didn’t think so, but Caroline insisted. “You’re the hardest worker I’ve ever had in here. It just seems a shame that we can’t get you making some fat commissions.”
So Alice got her license, and two months later sold her first property, a starter home for a young couple, both schoolteachers, who had moved down from Orono. She celebrated by getting a larger apartment and a new car. She began to spend more time with Chrissie Herrick, another Realtor at the agency, who’d gotten her license when her second kid began grade school. Chrissie, a talker, reminded Alice of Gina, but a Gina that had life all figured out. She was happily married to a dull and faithful man, and was basically content with her lot. Chrissie’s favorite activity was telling Alice how pretty she was, and how she wanted to set her up with some nice man.
Alice let her have her way just once, more out of curiosity than anything else, and Chrissie and her husband plus Alice and a local divorcé who worked in Portland in insurance all went out to dinner. At the end of the interminable night, the divorcé walked Alice to her car, one hand on the small of her back, his thumb making circular motions. She imagined sinking her teeth into that thumb, the surprised look on his piggy face when the blood began to flow. But she didn’t do it, just quickly slid into her car, shutting the door and cracking the window enough to thank him for the evening. That night she lay in bed, ignored the ringing phone in her house that could only be Chrissie hoping for an update, and slid gradually into sleep, wondering if her life would ever start again.
Then she met Bill Ackerson, a suave New Yorker looking to relocate to Maine and open a bookstore. She knew he was attracted to her, and she thought he seemed to be a nice man but decided she wasn’t interested. When he next contacted her, he asked if she’d mind if he brought his son along to revisit some of the places she’d shown him before. He brought Harry, who looked just like his father but was almost beautiful, if a boy could be beautiful, with high cheekbones and wavy hair. He was so perfect that it almost hurt Alice to look at him. Something clicked in her. She didn’t know exactly what it was, but she knew that a new part of her life was just beginning.
Alice returned to Jake’s condo, pulled off the police tape, and tried the door. It was locked. She’d thought that would be the case, and removed a credit card from her purse, picking the lock the way she’d done as a teenager whenever she’d forgotten her key.
It was dusk outside, and the interior of the condo was dark. Her phone had a light on it, and she used that to look around. She went straight up the stairs and into the bedroom, so unchanged since she’d last been in there that she could almost feel time falling away. She turned off her phone’s light and let her eyes adjust. The bed was made, loosely pulled together, and she ran her hand along the chenille bedspread. She remembered that her mother used to sleep in this room before she did, and then was suddenly alarmed to realize that she was nearly the same age as her mother was when she died. She shook the thought of her mother out of her head, and reminded herself of the reason she was here. Jake had taken pictures of her, many years ago, back when she hadn’t known any better, and she wanted to make sure they weren’t around for just anyone to find. When she’d lived here, he kept the photographs in a copy of James Michener’s Hawaii that was always on his bedside table. She should have taken them back then, but she had decided to leave that small memento to Jake. But now he was on the national news, and so was she. She needed to get those pictures back.
It took a while, but she found them in one of the hardcover books stacked on Jake’s dresser. She quickly riffled through them, marveling at the beauty of her young body. She stared into her own eyes in the photographs, wondering what that different person had been thinking. She put the pictures in her purse.
Walking back to her car, she noticed that there was a station wagon with a boat trailer next to her Volvo that hadn’t been there before. The vehicle gave her a bad but familiar feeling, as though she should have known whose car it was. But the feeling passed, and then she was annoyed by how far the trailer jutted out, and how hard it would be for her to navigate her own car out of the lot. Rounding the boat on its trailer, she could see two people still in the car, and decided she would ask them to move out of her way. But as she got closer, the light in the station wagon went on, the driver’s side door opened, and a familiar man got out.
“Alice,” Mr. Bergeron said, and stepped toward her, hand extended.
Then Alice heard a sound like a fuse being lit and her entire body stiffened. She felt herself trying to speak but no words came out, and she fell, the side of her head smacking the pavement. Her whole body hurt. Then her face was covered with a damp, sweet-smelling cloth, and the world went dark.
She jerked awake, her nostrils burning, her head throbbing, and something sharp pressing painfully into her back. There was the sound of water, and the world was rocking back and forth, and she thought: I’m on a boat. And then she remembered the parking lot, and Mr. Bergeron. She was nauseous, spit pooling under her tongue, and she shut her eyes. The darkness closed in, then her nostrils were burning again, and she shook her head, her body tensing.
“Hi, Alice. You awake?”
She tried to say something but all that came out was a groan. She opened her eyes again—the nausea had begun to pass—and found she was able to keep them open. She could see a sky filled with stars, the dim figure of Mrs. Bergeron crouched over her, her face ravaged by cancer, wearing a woolen hat on her head. Sitting up, Alice looked around, the twisting motion of her neck making her head hurt worse. They were far out in the ocean, the outboard motor silent, with no sign of land in any direction. Mrs. Bergeron slid back and seated herself across from Alice. Water sloshed in the bottom of the boat.
“Where am I?” Alice asked.
“This is right around where Gina drowned, more or less,” Mrs. Bergeron said. “I thought you’d remember it.”
“You know I don’t,” Alice said.
Mrs. Bergeron sighed, then coughed, four sharp, dry hacks that didn’t sound healthy. Alice knew she was dying from bronchial cancer, because Mrs. Bergeron had come by and visited her shortly after Bill had died. She’d confronted her about Bill’s death, telling Alice she knew she had something to do with it, just as she’d had something to do with her daughter Gina’s death twenty years earlier. It was disconcerting, the visit, but not surprising. Over the years, Vivienne Bergeron had accused Alice of being with Gina the night she had drowned many times. But for the previous ten years Alice had barely heard from her, and she had almost begun to believe that she’d never hear from her again. But Mrs. Bergeron had come to Grey Lady, wrapped in a too-big raincoat, the yellow skin of her face barely concealing the skull underneath. Alice had invited her in, listened to her rant, and, as she always did, attempted to be civil. She’d asked after her health, and Mrs. Bergeron said she had bronchial cancer, and was happy to leave a world where people like Alice Moss got away with murder. Alice wondered if the old woman’s mind was going, as well as her body.
“You can tell the truth now, Alice,” Mrs. Bergeron said from the other side of the boat. “It’s just you and me.” The wind off the ocean snatched at the faint words, but Alice could still hear them.
“Your husband,” Alice said, remembering him from the condo parking lot. “Where . . . ?”
“He’s a good and loyal man, my husband,” she said, her voice cracking. “I needed him to do one last thing for me, and he did it.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I am a little crazy, you know, I think. That’s on you, too, Alice. I was fine before you took my Gina away. I never beat it.”
“What are you going to do?” Alice said. Her mind was beginning to clear, and she realized that something was cutting into her left wrist. It was a pair of handcuffs, attached to a linked chain. She tugged at it. The chain was snaked through one of those large bodybuilding weights, a disc that looked like it was probably a hundred pounds, sitting on the middle seat of the old boat. The chain passed through the weight, stretching across to Mrs. Bergeron, attached to a handcuff around her wrist.
“I’ve already done it,” she said, holding up her arm, showing it to Alice, rattling the chain. “There’s no getting out of these. The keys to the handcuffs are already on the bottom of the ocean. It’s over, Alice. It’s just you and me.” With her free hand, Mrs. Bergeron raised what looked like half a cigarette to her nose and inhaled deeply. Alice thought: smelling salts. It was what she had used to wake Alice up, and what she was using to keep herself going.
Alice’s body went cold. She shook her head, trying to concentrate on what was happening. The sloshing at the bottom of the boat was getting louder, and water was now licking at her ankles. “The boat’s sinking,” she said.
“It is. You don’t have much time. We have the same time now, the two of us.”
Alice tugged harder at the cuff around her wrist. “You can’t do this.”
Mrs. Bergeron smiled and she looked like a skull, her teeth too big for her face. “I am doing this,” she said. “You took my baby away from me, and this is my last wish.” She laughed weakly at this, then said, “It’s my ‘Make-A-Wish.’”
Alice stood, and took a step toward Mrs. Bergeron. The boat lurched, and her foot crunched through the hull. Water began to rush in.
“It’s no good,” Mrs. Bergeron said. “I couldn’t stop it if I wanted to. We are going to die together. The only thing you can do now is confess. I can’t make you do it, but it might make you feel better. It’s for you, not me. I already know what you did. I just want you to have the opportunity to know it as well.”
“Gina was a drug addict. She was nuts.”
The boat tipped hard to one side, and Alice gripped the edge as the bodybuilding weight slid off the middle seat and into the water. Her mind was rapidly flipping between shock at what was happening and a calculation of her odds. She wrenched at the cuff around her left hand, but it wouldn’t come off. She scanned the boat for anything that would help her float.
“Maybe she was, but that’s not why she died,” Mrs. Bergeron said.
“She was lucky to die when she did,” Alice said.
“That’s it, honey, tell the truth.” Mrs. Bergeron gripped the side of the boat as well. Her eyes were huge in her head. “There’s no way out.”
“I couldn’t have saved her. That’s the truth.”
“You were swimming with her, though, right?”
“There was nothing I could do. This isn’t fair.” The boat tipped, and Alice leaned hard the other way. “How did you . . .” she began. “How am I here?”
Mrs. Bergeron laughed. “I have less than a month to live, and I could have died in a hospital bed in pain, or I could take you with me. It was an easy choice, and I have a husband who was willing to help me.”
Alice started to lunge toward Mrs. Bergeron, but the boat turned over, and the two women went into the cold, salty water, the splintered boat drifting out of reach. Alice felt the pull of the weight on her left wrist. She desperately pawed at the water with her free right hand, then grabbed out at Mrs. Bergeron as though she could help her stay afloat. Together, they went under the surface, holding on to each other, almost hugging, as they sank.
I’m dying, Alice thought, and the thought was scary, but it was also so unfair. She had never hurt anyone in her life. Her mother’s face flashed through her mind, not as she was toward the end, but the way she once looked, back when she’d been pretty. She was on a beach, sun and the scratchy sand and a swarm of scary gulls. Alice held on to the air in her lungs as long as she could, the black water roaring in her ears.
And when she could hold out no longer, she opened her mouth and tried to breathe. It was seawater, cold and final, that filled her lungs.
About the Author
PETER SWANSON is the author of The Girl with a Clock for a Heart, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist; The Kind Worth Killing, winner of the New England Society Book Award and finalist for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger; Her Every Fear; and his most recent, All the Beautiful Lies. His books have been translated into thirty languages, and his stories, poetry, and features have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Atlantic, Measure, The Guardian, The Strand Magazine, and Yankee. A graduate of Trinity College, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Emerson College, he lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with his wife.
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Also by Peter Swanson
Her Every Fear
The Kind Worth Killing
The Girl with a Clock for a Heart
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
all the beautiful lies. Copyright © 2018 by Peter Swanson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable ri
ght to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Photograph on title page by Dana Ward/Shutterstock
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Swanson, Peter, 1968- author.
Title: All the beautiful lies : a novel / by Peter Swanson.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017024957| ISBN 9780062427052 (hardcover) | ISBN 0062427059 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780062791504 (large print) | ISBN 0062791508 (large print) | ISBN 9780062427076 (ebook) | ISBN 0062427075 (ebook)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3619.W3635 A78 2018 | DDC 813/.6--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024957
Digital Edition APRIL 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-242707-6
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-242705-2
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All the Beautiful Lies Page 26