The King of Lies

by John Hart

  “You’ll get my bill,” he replied.

  “Better send it soon,” I said.

  “You’re not going back to jail, Work. We both know how this is going to end. Alex is your man. Take what we learned to Mills and get her to check it out.”

  “Maybe. We’ll see.” I still had to talk to Jean. “Listen, about the bill”

  “It’s going to be a big one.”

  “Bigger than you think,” I said.

  He eyed me. “What do you mean?”

  I put my hands on the frame of his window, leaned against the car. “I need you to find somebody for me. It’s important.”

  “Your girlfriend?”

  “Her name is Vanessa Stolen. You know where she lives. I need to find her. I need to talk to her. I need . . .” My voice trailed away, then came back. “I just need her.”

  An overwhelming conviction came over me that she was dead. “She never leaves like this.” That’s the last thing the big farmhand told me, there by the tractor at Stolen Farm. “Not without making provision for her animals. She’d never leave them unattended.”

  “What about you?” I’d asked.

  “I just work here, mister. If she needs me to take care of things while she’s gone, she always calls. I’ve got my own place to look after, too. She knows that.”

  In my mind I’d seen them together, her body alive under his heavy calloused hands. I’d thought she’d given herself to him, and that her gift had killed the last, best part of me.

  “Just find her for me, Hank. There are things that need to be said.”

  “What else can you tell me about her? Anything that might help me find her. Family. Friends. Places she might go. That sort of thing.”

  “She has no family. She’s the last. I don’t know if she has any friends, and as far as I can tell, she rarely leaves the farm. The place is her life.”

  “When did you see her last?”

  “Right before I was arrested.”

  “I hate to ask this,” Hank said. “But is it possible that she doesn’t want to be found? People get to that point, Work. Sometimes we just need to disappear for awhile.” He looked away, as if he had to in order to finish his thought. “You’re married. You were arrested for murder. Maybe the fling wasn’t worth it anymore. Maybe the cost was too high.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” I said. “Don’t try to make it like that.”

  “Take it easy, man. I see it all the time. I had to ask.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  Hank just nodded, still not looking at me, and an awkward silence formed around us. He looked at his watch. “It’s late. I’m going home. But I’ll look for your missing friend tomorrow. Okay? I’ll find her.”

  “You’re a good man, Hank. I appreciate it.”

  “I’ll call you later.”

  He rolled up the window and drove away; and it was only then that I noticed that Barbara’s car was gone. I walked into an empty house and found another one of her notes on the kitchen counter. She was staying at Glena’s house for the night.

  I was too keyed up to sleep. For it seemed increasingly possible that Alex was responsible for Ezra’s death. She’d killed her own father. Why not mine? But there was more to the story, and I wanted to know it all. I had to. It felt like a piece was missing. Once I had it, and once Hank found Vanessa, then I would go to Mills. But not before.

  I turned on my computer and did a white pages search for East Bend, North Carolina. I found two Temples listed, a husband and wife and a Rhonda Temple. I wrote down her address. Then I realized that I had no vehicle. Mills had impounded the truck when she’d arrested me. I considered waiting until morning, but I could not face six hours awake in that depleted house. In the end, I called Dr. Stokes. He met me at his back door. He had on striped pajamas. His hair was in disarray.

  “I’m sorry to wake you up, Dr. Stokes, but it’s kind of important.”

  He waved away my words. “I said I’d help and I meant it. Plus, it’s been a long time since someone called me with an emergency in the middle of the night. I kind of miss it.” He stepped out of the house and we stood on the concrete driveway. He looked small under the porch light. “Which car do you want?” He gestured at the two cars parked there, a dark blue Lincoln and a wood-paneled minivan.

  “Whichever. I don’t care.”

  “Then you’d better take mine,” he said. He walked back inside and came out with a set of keys. He handed them to me.

  I looked at the Lincoln. It was large and polished. I knew that it would be fast. I gestured toward it as I spoke. “I’ll take good care of it,” I said.

  Dr. Stokes chuckled. “That’s Marion’s car, Work.” He continued to shake his head. “I drive that one.” He pointed at the minivan. It had to be nine years old.

  “Oh. Okay. I’ll be back by midmorning.”

  “Take your time. I have no plans tomorrow.”

  I found the town of East Bend at 2:30 in the morning. It was a bump on Highway 67, thirty miles outside of Winston-Salem. There was not much there: a restaurant, a real estate office, a few convenience stores. I walked into the only store that was open, bought a cup of questionable coffee, and asked the clerk if they sold maps of East Bend. He was probably twenty, with long hair under a camouflage hunting cap. He laughed at my question.

  “That’s a good one,” he said. “I’ll have to remember that one.”

  “I’m looking for Trinity Lane,” I said as I paid.

  “You’ll never find it.”

  “That’s why I’m asking for directions.”

  “It’s not a real road. That’s why you won’t find it. It’s just a dirt road, the kind where they let you make up a name for it, but the sign is blue instead of green. That’s how you can always tell if it’s a real road or not. Green means real. There’s an e in both of them—green and real. That’s the best way to remember.”

  “There’s an e in blue also.”

  “Shit. You’re right.”

  “I’m looking for a woman named Rhonda Temple.” He didn’t answer me. He stood behind the counter, patted his belly, and stared back. “I don’t mean her any harm, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  He laughed again and showed his stained teeth. “You can kill her, for all I care. That woman is without doubt the meanest bitch I ever did meet. What do you want to talk to her for?”

  “Was she in a fire seven or eight years ago?”

  “That’s her.”

  “That’s what I want to talk to her about.”

  “Hell, everybody around here can tell you about that. That crazy kid of hers set the place on fire. Cuffed her old man to the bed and left him to burn.”

  “Alex.”

  “Naw. Not Alex.”

  “Virginia, I mean. The daughter’s name is Virginia.”

  “That’s her.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “Not really. She was only a year or two older, but she was damaged goods. She was like fourteen when they sent her away.”

  I leaned on the counter. “Any idea why she did it?” I asked.

  He lifted his cap and scratched his head. “Just mean, I guess. And crazy as a shithouse rat.”

  “So how do I find this woman’s house?”

  “Oh. Go on down that way and take a left at the blinking yellow. Look for the blue sign on the left, a dirt road. She’s at the end of it.”

  I looked at him. “I thought you said I’d never find it.”

  “Well you wouldn’t have if I hadn’t told you. You going down there tonight?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I haven’t decided.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t if I were you. Going down blue sign roads at three in the morning is liable to get you shot.”

  I thanked him and turned to leave. “Hey, mister.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t let her scare you.” I waited for something more. “She’s ugly as shit.”

  As much as I wanted to speak with Rhond
a Temple, mother of Virginia Temple, aka Alex Shiften, I knew that the store clerk had a point. I sipped coffee in the parked car and thought about how I would handle it. I thought about Dr. Stokes and his feelings on faith, hell, and the chance of salvation. Eventually, I dozed.

  I found Trinity Lane at a few minutes before seven, right where it was supposed to be, although I almost missed it. At some point, a car had hit the blue sign and now it leaned at an angle, twisted and almost hidden in the scrub growth that bordered the two-lane blacktop. Trinity Lane itself was a rutted dirt track, a gash in the wooded verge. It curved away before me, a dim alley in the weak morning light. I passed derelict single-wides as I moved deeper into the woods. Some were burned out, others simply worn down and abandoned. Fiberglass insulation hung from places where siding had been stripped away, and rusted appliances bled slowly into the weed-choked red clay. It was a dismal place.

  The road ended five hundred yards in, at the rear bumper of a twenty-year-old Dodge Omni. It was parked in the bare dirt yard of the last trailer, a single-wide with a satellite dish beside it. I climbed warily from the car. There was a refuse pile behind the trailer, at the point where the land fell away to the river. A few lifeless items hung from a clothesline. A light burned behind one of the windows.

  I knocked on the aluminum door.

  The woman who opened the door was clearly the woman I sought. Her face and hands were severely scarred, not only from the fire but from the glass of the window she’d leapt through to escape the flames. The right side of her face, from the nose to the ear, was a textured nightmare, and long scars, puckered and white, crisscrossed her face. She had wild gray hair, thick glasses in pink frames, and a cigarette with a plastic filter on the end.

  “Who the hell are you?” she asked. “And what the fuck are you doing at my house this early in the fucking morning?”

  “Ma’am, my name is Work Pickens. I drove up from Salisbury. I’m sorry to bother you so early, but it’s very important that I speak to you about your daughter.”

  “Why the hell should I talk to you?”

  “I honestly don’t have an answer for that. You don’t know me and you don’t owe me. I’m just asking.”

  “You want to talk about my daughter? Are you a cop or a reporter or something?” She looked me up and down.

  “No. I’m none of those things.”

  “What are you, then?”

  I ignored her question. “Virginia Temple. She’s your daughter, right?”

  She took a drag on the plastic filter, studied me with reptile eyes. “She came out of me, if that’s what you mean. But she’s no daughter of mine.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “That girl was ruined by the time she was ten. She wasn’t my baby no more, even then. But when she did this to me, when she set the fire and killed my Alex, well, I decided then and there that she weren’t no child of mine. Not then and not ever again.”

  I couldn’t help but look at the scars, and I thought of what it must have been like to wake up engulfed in flame. “I’m sorry about your husband.”

  “Are you stupid?” she asked. “I don’t care about that worthless shit. He got what he deserved and I’m better off with him dead. I’m talking about my Alex.” Her eyes misted and she swiped at one of them.

  “Alex? I don’t understand.”

  “Alex was the only thing good in my life.”

  I stood there, confused. “Ma’am . . .”

  “Goddamn it. Alex was my other daughter, my baby. She was seven when it happened. That bitch Virginia killed her, too. Or didn’t you know that?”

  CHAPTER 30

  Rhonda Temple pretty much shut down after her outburst. She wouldn’t talk much at all, not about Virginia and not about why she’d done what she did. But she did tell me how Alex, her youngest daughter, had come to die. The story stayed with me on the drive back to Salisbury, and I knew that the time had come to confront Jean. I had to ask the question. I had to know.

  I parked Dr. Stokes’s car and walked to the entrance of the emergency room. I nodded at a doctor who stood smoking outside, then entered the brightly lit hospital. It was quiet, and for a moment it felt more like a mausoleum than a hospital. The triage nurse’s desk was empty. No one sat on the long benches or chairs in the waiting room. I could hear the hum of fluorescent lighting and the pneumatic hiss of the door as it slid shut behind me. I saw movement behind a glass partition, a flash of white coat, but that was it. The place was dead. So, feeling more like a ghost than ever, I passed through the reception area and into the long hall. It led me past vending machines, telephones, and the closed doors of the small hutchlike offices where low-grade administrators worked from nine to five. I found the bank of elevators and stepped inside. I pushed the button for the third floor.

  The nurses’ station on Jean’s wing was empty and I walked quickly past it. As I reached my sister’s room, a nurse turned the corner, moving toward me, but her head was down. She didn’t see me, so I went inside and closed the door. The room was dark after the hallway, but not entirely without light. Some filtered in from outside, and the monitors cast their eerie glow. I half-expected to find Alex there, and honestly didn’t know what I’d do if I did. Fortunately, she wasn’t there. I needed Jean’s attention, not another pissing contest.

  When I took Jean’s hand, it felt desiccated, as if she had bled out after all; but it was warm, and I looked down at her as I held it. Her eyes moved beneath her lids, and I wondered what she was dreaming about. Something bad. Her life was a nightmare. There would be no reprieve behind closed eyes. I wanted to wake her but did not. I sat in the chair by her side and held her fevered hand. Eventually, I put my head on the narrow margin of bed, and leaning forward, perched on that unyielding chair, I finally fell asleep.

  At some point, I, too, must have dreamed. I felt her hand on my head and heard her voice. How could you, Work? How could you do it? Her hand fell away, along with her words, but in the clairvoyance of dreams, I knew that she was weeping.

  When I woke, it was with a start. Jean’s skin was washed charcoal, her eyes twin slits of darkness, but then she blinked, and I knew that she was awake and had been watching me.

  “When did you get here?” Her voice was as arid as her hands. I rubbed my eyes.

  “Do you want some water?” I asked her.

  “Yes, please.”

  I poured some into the plastic cup on her bedside table. “There’s no ice.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She drank the water and I refilled her cup.

  I looked at the saline bag suspended above her, followed the tube to where its needle entered her arm beneath a white X of tape. It was easy to recall the red sea of her blood on the floor of our parents’ house. She’d probably be dehydrated for a week.

  I looked at her face, saw the slackness around her mouth, and wondered what she was on. Antidepressants, maybe? Sedatives? She saw me looking and turned away.

  I did not want to ask her the things that had to be asked. She was transparent, and I knew that I had never seen a more fragile person.

  “How are you, Jean? Are you holding up okay?”

  She blinked at me, and for an instant I thought she wouldn’t answer. She drew up her knees, puddled into herself, and I thought she was going to turn away from me, as she’d done the last time.

  “They say you saved my life.” The statement was utterly devoid of emotional context.

  They say your car is blue. Like that.

  I almost lied. I didn’t want her to hate me for doing what I’d done. “I might have,” I said.

  “Even Alex says it. She says you found me and put tourniquets on my arms. She says one minute later and I would have died.”

  I looked at my fingers, remembering the slipperiness of her blood; how hard I’d jammed those fingers into her neck, looking for a pulse. “You called me,” I said. “I came.”

  “That’s the third time,” she continued. I felt her movement and looked
up in time to see her turn her face away. “You must hate me,” she said.

  “No.” I put my hand on her arm, turned her back so that I could see her face. “Never, Jean. Don’t you ever think that. I could never hate you.” I squeezed her shoulder and said the words that should have come easily but never had. “You’re my sister. And I love you.”

  It was her turn to nod. She did so in fitful jerks as folds closed over her eyes like curtains and tears pooled on the shelf of her wasted cheeks before spilling down her face in two long, hot arcs. She swiped at the tears with one arm, scrubbing them away with the heavy bandage that covered her wrist. She opened her mouth to speak but then closed it, the words unsaid. Instead, she continued to nod. But I understood. The words were hard. That’s how we were raised.

  Do you need anything? I wanted to ask. More water? Another pillow? I meant to ask these things, but that’s not what I said. There was a larger question, a dangerous one. But it couldn’t wait any longer. I needed to know. I couldn’t go to Mills until I heard it from Jean herself.

  “Did you do it?” I asked.

  Jean looked horrified.

  “What?” Almost a moan, and the tears came faster, but I couldn’t stop. Every action of the past week had been based around my assumptions that Jean had pulled the trigger. I’d gone to jail for those assumptions. I now faced life in prison for them.

  “Did you kill him?” I asked again. “Did you kill Ezra?”

  Jean’s mouth gaped and then collapsed. “I thought you did it,” she said. It was her child’s voice, so vulnerable that I saw the truth of her words. She really believed that I’d done it.

  “Is that what Alex told you, Jean? Is that why you think I did it? Because she told you I did it?”

  Jean shook her head, hair moving over her eyes, coming to rest on her forehead. I saw that she’d pulled the sheet to her throat. Her eyes spilled confusion.

  “You did it, Work. You had to have done it.”

  “I thought you did it,” I said, and Jean rocked as if my words were bullets. Her eyes widened and she pushed deeper into the pillows that mounded behind her.

  “No.” She shook her head again. “It had to be you. It had to be.”