The Liar's Girl

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  Up ahead, a uniformed Garda stood sentry outside a large door. It had been painted magnolia, but a long time ago. There were more chips missing than there was paint, and the bottom inch or so had been scuffed clean revealing dull steel. A small window of reinforced glass was set into the door at chest-level.

  Standing beside the uniform was Shaw.

  “You’re late,” he said to Malone. To me, “I thought you might be having second thoughts.”

  Fizzy stress was flooding my veins. All of a sudden this was too real, too fast, too happening.

  I hadn’t thought it through. I saw that now. I’d come here on a whim. It hadn’t seemed real; I’d just been going through the motions.

  But now Will was on the other side of that door.

  And I couldn’t go in there.

  I was too scared to.

  “Listen to me, love.” Shaw stepped closer and clamped a rough hand on my shoulder. I could feel his breath on my cheek. “He looks the same. He acts the same. He will sound the same. Don’t be expecting a forked tongue or red eyes. Don’t expect a monster, even though that’s what he is. He’ll seem normal, because that’s what these bastards do. They pretend.” His fingers had started to pinch. “So when you’re in there, keep that in mind. Keep in mind what he did.” Shaw dipped his head to whisper something in my ear, so quietly no one else in that corridor could’ve heard it. “Remember what he did to Liz.”

  As if I had the pleasure of ever forgetting.

  Shaw stepped away, but kept his eyes on mine.

  Malone nodded at the uniform who moved to unlock the door.

  “Wait,” I said to him. “I’m going in now? Don’t you need to talk me through this first? What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to say?”

  The magnolia door was opening outward, slowly revealing what lay beyond.

  “All you need do is go in there,” Malone said, “sit down, and listen to him. In ten minutes’ time, Garda O’Neill here will knock on the door.”

  A sizeable room, like a classroom or meeting room, with three rows of desks, all facing the back wall. Windowless, lit by harsh fluorescents, one of which was blinking on and off. A yellowing poster about teamwork hung from the far wall.

  Stop. Wait. Wait just a second.

  The walls were the same sickly yellow as the corridors.

  Hang on. Please. I’m not ready for this.

  O’Neill stepped back and—

  Wait—

  Will.

  Sitting at the table in the far-right corner, facing the door. A small figure, hunched over, looking lost in the big room.

  I stepped inside.

  A man in medical scrubs was standing off to my right, leaning against the wall with his arms folded. He nodded at me, just once, and then he looked to Will.

  Then I did too.

  Will’s hair was darker than I remembered, more brown than blond now, and dull. It was still in the same style, though: short on the sides, longer on top, coarse and unruly when left to its own devices, as it was now. His skin seemed so pale it was practically translucent, like a vampire’s. I could see the blue-green of veins running beneath it. He’d filled out. You could see it in his shoulders, down the arms. He’d lost all his sharp angles, swallowed them up with muscle and strength. And his face …

  His face. Both so familiar and completely foreign. Older, obviously. Bearded now. But still him.

  Still so open and so kind and so Will.

  The old Will. The fake one.

  I met his eyes.

  He looked at me blankly for a second, then his mouth fell open.

  I took another step forward.

  I couldn’t believe I was doing this. I couldn’t believe that was him, right there, in this room, with me. That I could feel his presence. That we were in the same room, just feet away from each other, after all these years.

  That I’d agreed to this.

  I wanted to see him. I wanted to see how he was. Curiosity, call it. But standing in that room, feet away from him, I realized that I hadn’t thought much beyond that.

  I didn’t know what would come next. I didn’t know what to do now.

  And then came the voice.

  The one I hadn’t been able to recall but which now brought everything straight back, all of it, the past a wave whose approach I’d been ignoring since last night, building strength all the while, coming now to crash down on me and knock me off my feet.

  “Oh, Ali, thank God,” Will said. His voice cracked on thank, and his eyes were wet with tears. “Thank God you came.”

  alison, now

  My heart was hammering so hard in my chest I feared my sternum wouldn’t be strong enough to contain it.

  I was a keeper of secrets. There was no one in my life who knew all of me. Everyone at arm’s length, at least. I’d designed it that way. I liked it. But now here I was, sitting across from the first and last person who’d been allowed to know everything, who’d seen things I hadn’t even shared, hadn’t even known about myself, and the thought of it all being there in his head, ready for recall, was excruciating.

  His presence was a laceration and I was already bleeding out.

  “I can’t believe you’re here, Ali,” Will said. “This doesn’t feel real.”

  That makes two of us.

  I didn’t know what to do or where to look. I dropped into the free chair and tried to fix my gaze on a shoulder of his white T-shirt, but soon wandered onto the collar of it, and then further again onto his bare skin. The knot of dark hair in the depression at the base of his neck.

  A memory of me, pressing my fingers against it.

  “Ali, it’s okay. It’s me. It’s just me.”

  I moved my eyes to the tabletop. His hand resting on it, palm down. Pale skin, short square nails, tributaries of bright blue veins. I’d held that hand. Watched it touch me, tenderly. Felt it inside of me.

  Before and after it had smashed five skulls onto the cold, hard ground. Lifted young, broken bodies into freezing black water. Pushed them under and down, down, down.

  “Ali, please. Look at—”

  “We don’t have very long.” I instantly regretted my choice of pronoun; the intimacy of it left a streak of hot pain hanging in midair between us. To compound this, I’d sounded small and weak. It was that that made me finally look at him, as if I could compensate for the timidity of my voice with the focus of my gaze.

  The man sitting in front of me was Will, but he wasn’t the boy I’d loved. No. That boy had died the day Will confessed, if he’d ever existed. The problem was that the man sitting in front of me looked and acted and sounded just like that boy’s ghost.

  And I could remember exactly how it felt to be his arms. Safe. Warm. Wanted.

  The memory was like an open wound.

  “Your voice,” Will said. “I’d forgotten it.” He smiled sadly. “Voices are hard to remember, aren’t they? How are you?”

  I didn’t answer. Where to begin?

  “You live abroad, right?” he went on. “They wouldn’t tell me where ...” Will nodded, once, like he understood why I wouldn’t tell him where either. “Are you …? Are you married? Do you have kids?”

  I opened my mouth to say no, then stopped. Because I didn’t want him to know that that was the answer. And then because I was angry at him, suddenly furious, hot with rage. Because he was the reason the answer was no.

  Did he really think I’d escaped all this intact? That I could love him and he could kill people and then I could just go on and live a normal life? That I could have those things now, no harm done? Didn’t he realize what he’d done?

  Pressure was building at my temples.

  “The Gardaí,” I said evenly. “You told them you know something about the new cases. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Ali, I’m … I am s
orry. Really. For all of this.”

  A beat of silence passed.

  “Why did you do it?”

  The question had been on my mind for the last ten years, and on my lips since I’d walked into this room. I hadn’t planned to ask him it but now I realized that, on some subconscious level, the opportunity to ask was why I’d come to Dublin. Not to do the right thing, but to find out why Will had chosen, all those years ago, to do the wrong one.

  Five times.

  And, after each time, he’d come home and tell me he loved me. Convince me that he did. That he could.

  The liar.

  But Will acted like he hadn’t heard. “Who told you?”

  “Told me what?”

  “That I was … That I’d been charged.”

  It was uncomfortably warm. I could feel trickles of moisture clinging to my temples and sitting under my eyes. I slid a finger up under my glasses to wipe them away.

  “I don’t want to talk about back then,” I said.

  “You’re the one who just asked me why I did it.”

  “And you haven’t answered me.”

  “This is part of it.”

  “What is?”

  “Who told you I’d been charged?”

  I sighed, frustrated. “What can that possibly have to do with—”

  “It’s why it had to be you,” Will said softly. “Why this had to be.”

  The room started to feel as if all the air had leaked out of it, like there’d been a finite amount and now we were nearing the danger point. I imagined an alarm sounding, imagined me having to rush out, to run away, and leave him here.

  “Shaw,” I said. “Shaw told me.”

  “And what did you think? Did you believe him? Did you think I could have done that?”

  “What has this got to do with—”

  “Ali, please.”

  I looked back at the man in scrubs, the nurse. He was leaning against the wall with his arms folded, watching us. He couldn’t have been more than ten feet away and, in this silent space, was surely privy to everything Will was saying.

  I turned back to Will. “You told the Gardaí you had information.”

  “I do. And I’m getting to it. Just … Please. Tell me, Ali. Did you believe them? Did you think I was guilty?”

  I really didn’t want to go back to that weekend, but I also wanted to leave this room. I needed to know what he knew.

  So now, I pulled open the door to it, just a crack.

  I thought it was my fault for not knowing. That Liz was dead because of me. That you couldn’t possibly have been capable of love, so everything with us had been a lie.

  And I thought that I couldn’t possibly have not known, and I couldn’t imagine you killing Liz, and I believed our love, so the Gardaí were as wrong as they could be.

  “I don’t remember,” I said, shutting it again. “It was a long time ago.”

  Will waved his hand, indicating the room. “You’re telling me?”

  “I don’t see how this matters. I’m here because you told the Gardaí—”

  “I know what I told the Gardaí!”

  The rise in Will’s voice instantly drew the attention of the nurse. I saw movement in my peripheral vision and when I turned, he’d taken a step toward us and was wearing a look of intense concern on his face.

  “It’s all right, Alek,” Will said, holding up a hand. “I’m sorry. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

  The nurse—Alek—frowned. “You sure?”

  “Yes. Sorry.”

  Alek lingered for a moment before stepping back again.

  Will looked back to me, pleadingly.

  I didn’t know where he was going with this, but I didn’t want to go with him. I also wanted out of that room. Him being in here, with me, right in front of me—it was pulling on that damn door, rattling it in its frame, threatening to yank it off its hinges.

  “I suppose,” I said, “I thought there must be something to it. They only charge people with crimes when there’s enough evidence to convict them. And you told them you did it. You’d confessed.”

  That had always been the worst bit, the deepest cut, because there was no getting around it. It couldn’t be explained away. My imagination had worked overtime to come up with innocent scenarios that accounted for almost everything else, but there was nothing to reconcile the fact that Will had told the Gardaí that he’d killed those five girls.

  A memory, slipping around the door: Shaw perched on an armchair in my parents’ front room, shaking his head and saying, “You don’t want to know what he told us he did to them. What they must have gone through …” while my mother’s pale face glared at him furiously and my father grimaced like he was experiencing chest pain.

  “So you believed them?” Will asked.

  “I believed you.”

  “But you must have heard I’d been arrested before you heard I’d confessed?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied. “I don’t remember.”

  “You know me, Ali.”

  “Yeah, well.” I folded my arms. “I thought I did.”

  “It didn’t make any sense to you, did it? What they said I did. It didn’t then and it still doesn’t now. Am I right?”

  I didn’t respond. I was afraid to. Because he was right.

  But then, when would something like this ever make sense?

  “It didn’t make any sense,” Will said, lowering his voice to just above a whisper, “because it wasn’t me.”

  The silence that came after that seemed to pulse and throb. Or maybe that was just the pain inside my head, turning up the dial now as the seconds ticked by.

  “It wasn’t me,” Will said again. “I’m not the Canal Killer.”

  I looked at him for a long moment. Then I said, “When did you change your mind?” I hadn’t planned for it to come out in such a sarcastic tone, but I wasn’t sorry when it did.

  “I didn’t change my mind,” Will said, “I always—”

  “You confessed.”

  “Yes, but they made—”

  “And you pleaded guilty.”

  “I was advised to by my solicitor.”

  “And in ten years, Will, you’ve never once said this before.”

  “How would you know?”

  I hadn’t spoken to him since he’d been arrested. At first, I’d been desperate to, and it was a hysterical desperation. Screaming and wailing at my parents, sobbing for hours in my room. I remember feeling like I wouldn’t be able to take another breath unless I got to see him, until I could touch him and tell him that everything was going to be okay.

  But then he’d confessed.

  “So you don’t actually know anything,” I said. “I see.” I moved to go.

  “No, no, wait, Ali. Wait.” There was something new in his voice. Panic? Movement in my peripheral vision again: Alek coming toward us. “I do know something, Ali. I do. I … I know who killed those girls. The recent ones. It’s …” Will swallowed hard. “It’s the same guy who killed the girls back then.”

  I stood up then, the chair legs screeching against the floor tiles.

  “It wasn’t me,” Will continued, talking faster now. “It really wasn’t. It was him. And now he’s back. I think he went away after they arrested me, went somewhere else, laid low until he was sure I’d got the blame. But now he’s back in Dublin and back at it and I’d actually be glad about that, in a way, if it wasn’t for the fact that the first thing that the Gardaí say is not, hey, maybe this is the real killer and that’s why we couldn’t get all the facts to fit back then but, hey, here’s a copycat at work and I bet Will Hurley gave him the idea.”

  Alek reached us.

  “I think that’s enough for now,” he said to me. He jerked his chin toward the door, indicating that I should leave.
/>
  Behind me, I heard the handle of the door turn.

  “You have to help me prove this,” Will said. “You’re the only one I can ask. Ali, I need your help. I need … I need you.”

  No one but Will had ever said those words to me and I’d forgotten the effect they could have.

  Intoxicating, like a spell.

  For a moment, I felt frozen in place.

  “I didn’t want to do this to you,” he went on. “If there was any other way … But I don’t know what else I can do. If I say I’m sorry, they say what I’ve done is finally sinking in. If I say I’m not, they say I’m a cold-blooded killer who can’t feel remorse. I just don’t know what—” His voice cracked. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “Will,” Alek said, “come on, now. That’s enough.”

  “Time’s up,” a new, loud, authoritative voice said: Garda O’Neill’s, from behind me.

  I was shaking, my blood hot with adrenaline, and when I turned around to face him, I nearly fell into the poor guy with relief. He motioned for me to move toward the door and I gladly obeyed.

  “I didn’t want this,” Will said, calling at me over O’Neill’s shoulder now. “I didn’t want to bring you here. But you’re all I’ve got. You know me, Ali. You’re the only person who ever really did. And despite what you say, I know the truth. I know that you didn’t believe it. I know you didn’t because I’ve seen proof.”

  My cheeks began to burn.

  “Let’s get him out of here,” I heard O’Neill say, presumably to Alek.

  I stumbled out of the room, pulling at my jacket, shuffling desperately out of it. Everything was sticking to me. The hair at the back of my neck was damp. I went straight to the far side of the corridor and leaned my forehead against the wall there for a second. The bare cement was mercifully cool.

  I closed my eyes.

  A hand on my arm: Malone, gently turning me around, slowly leading me away.

  I let him bring me a few feet down the hall before I reeled on him.

  “What is this?” I said. “Why did you bring me here?” Malone looked confused and I remembered then: they weren’t listening. “He said he’s innocent. That the”—I made air quotes—“real killer is the one who’s out there killing those girls now. He’s … He’s—” I stopped to take a deep breath, to calm down. “He doesn’t know anything. This was all just a game. But you guys, you took him at his word and brought me here, brought me back into all this, and for what? Why?”