The Perfect Liar

by Thomas Christopher Greene

  “Thank you,” Susannah said.

  “For what?”

  “For this, for all of it.”

  “I like seeing you this way.”

  “Walk with me.”

  Looking to the left, she could see other houses, tucked here and there among the brush on the top of the dunes, houses lit with single lights, but to the right, the land rose up gradually away from their own. Off to the right of the deck was a small path in the sand, through thorny low bushes.

  Susannah led Max on this, up a small slope in the dark, and they came through the brush and suddenly they were on top of the cliff, high above the beach, and the moonlight was bright enough that they could see the edge in front of them clearly. A small sign on the ground said WATCH YOUR STEP, NO GUARDRAIL.

  She stopped here. Max came alongside her. Susannah looked down and even in the dark she could see how insanely far down it was, and she told herself to ignore it, to look straight ahead, to watch the stillness of the black beyond and the highway the moon beat across the ocean.

  Max slid in next to her. She felt his arm come around her and she turned her head to his and he leaned down and his lips met her lips.

  He looked at her hard, the way he did when he meant something. “Have you ever seen anything more beautiful?” She felt his arm stronger against her back, securing her.

  “No,” she said, and despite herself she started to tremble.

  “Are you cold?”

  “I’m fine.” Susannah pointed south down the coast. “How do you get to that lighthouse?”

  Max peered that way, as if studying it, then he took his arm away from her for a moment and stepped forward. “I think—”

  She did it, pushed him as hard she could, slamming into him, then falling to the ground herself. The key was the surprise of it all, the push he wasn’t expecting, the half stumble, the reach back but all his weight was moving forward and it was too late.

  Susannah scrambled to her feet and watched him fall. His arms out, grabbing nothing but air. Max was falling away from her like a snow angel that disappears, until he was completely gone.

  She was too far away to hear him hit the sand.

  TWO MONTHS LATER

  DETECTIVE DOLORES SCOTT STOOD ON the side of a mountain in the Adirondacks on a hot day in August. The wool of her uniform against her skin was driving her nuts, as it often did in summer. So was her hat. Shouldn’t it have been cooler given how high they were? She became aware of the sweat in the place where her brim met her forehead, but she’d be damned if she let any of these New York State troopers in their gray uniforms know that. They all towered over her. And seemed fine in the heat.

  “Bit out of your jurisdiction, Detective,” the captain had said to her when they arrived at the house in the late morning, the least subtle thing ever, their arrival, a line of state troopers and vans moving down the only road that came through the small mountain valley and then up the long single-lane driveway.

  “Just a bit,” she said.

  “You’re sure he’s here?”

  “Oh, he’s here.”

  She watched as the troopers spread out across the land, starting on the part that rose sharply up away from the right of the house, steep forest walls heading toward the summit. Of the six cadaver-sniffing dogs, five were German shepherds and one was a yellow Lab. A trooper held each one by a leash.

  In front of her was the house, if you could call it that. It looked more like an Austrian inn.

  “Can you believe people live like this?” she said to the captain from New York.

  “I’ve seen enough of it.” He walked away from her and over to where the land fell away, the long valley in front of him, mountains rising up all around.

  Dolores Scott ignored him—she was used to it by now, all these men in law enforcement who were sexist and dismissive without even trying. It was part of the culture. Instead, she thought of Susannah while she listened for the bark of the dogs.

  She thought of the call that came that day in July—not the first one that led her to this place—but the second one, the panic in Susannah’s voice. The rush of words as she tried to explain what had happened, the sound of the wind blowing on the beach that made her hard to hear, the beach where Max lay broken and dead on his back.

  Dolores stopped her. “Susannah, listen to me. Are there marks on him from you? Did you scratch him or anything?”

  “No, no. I don’t think so.”

  “Susannah. He jumped.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “Susannah, Max jumped. He killed himself. Say it back to me.”

  Susannah did.

  “Now make the call. And say only that. He jumped, okay?”

  “What do I tell Freddy?”

  “The truth. That Max jumped. And why. You know why, Susannah, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because I know everything, right? He was going to go away for a long time.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Make the call.”

  I would have pushed that motherfucker off that cliff, too, Dolores thought. Happily.

  The coroner ruled that the death was consistent with suicide (also with his being shoved), but after Susannah told the Massachusetts State Police what had happened, and Dolores backed it up with phone calls both to the state police and the Barnstable district attorney, no charges were filed. There was no case. Nothing could be proved. The path of least resistance, once again, was the right one. No one wants a fight that cannot be won. The DA ruled that Max had killed himself.

  Remarkably, and a circumstance that surprised Dolores that it did not bring more attention to Susannah, Max’s death was exactly 366 days after he had signed his contract with the University of Vermont and accepted a life insurance policy that came with the position. The policy was for $250,000 and did not cover suicide in the first year but did in subsequent years. Had Max leaped off a cliff the day before, Susannah wouldn’t have gotten a thing.

  Dolores learned all this a week later, sitting on the porch of that big house Susannah and Max had near the college. Susannah had made them tea. She looked surprisingly well. She looked rested. It was a warm day but a soft midsummer rain fell. Freddy ran up on the porch and past them, stopping only briefly to say hello before he went through the door and clomped up the stairs.

  “He took it all okay,” Dolores said, more of a statement than a question.

  “Yes. He wants to go. Like me. He can’t wait to leave.”

  “But he loved Max.”

  “Yes.”

  Dolores, watching Susannah, admired her, what a great beauty she was, and how under all that fragility, like a body under thin ice, lay the unbroken spine of a strong woman. They can bend us, Dolores thought, but breaking us takes more than they got.

  Dolores saw Susannah steel herself, almost imperceptibly, before she spoke.

  “But he’s learning too young how fickle life is.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Go back to New York. Get a place. Start over.”

  A few days later, Dolores had another conversation, on another porch, a block away with Joanie Hammer, who was also planning to move, but back South, to Atlanta, where she had family.

  Dolores told her what she knew and what she didn’t know. She said that she thought Max had killed David but she could probably never prove it. She told Joanie she had discovered that Max was operating under an assumed name and an assumed identity, that he had never gone to art school, and that he had probably never even graduated high school. He had used another man’s transcripts from CalArts, a man she believed Max had killed many years ago.

  David must have discovered this somehow, and desperate to keep it secret, Max had killed David. Dolores told Joanie she was determined to find out what had happened to the original Max W, and that she was working with the New York State Police to get a warrant to search the house and land in the Adirondacks.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Joanie said.
/>   “I thought you should know.”

  “Will it bring David back?”

  “No.”

  “And Max won’t pay for it either.”

  “No.”

  “Then fuck you.”

  “I’m sorry.” Dolores meant it, she was.

  “I know. I’m sorry, too. I know you’re just doing your job.”

  Now, standing in front of the great house framed by higher mountains, Dolores watched the policemen and their dogs as they fanned out across the woods. They moved methodically, a phalanx of cops, dogs bent toward the earth, through the trees.

  MIDAFTERNOON, DOWNHILL FROM THE HOUSE, on a small plateau before the land plummeted down toward the rural highway far below, the dogs began to bark as if their lives depended on it. First one and then they all converged on one spot between two tall pine trees. They dug as if they were searching for a cure until they were pulled off and then they kept barking until they were led away.

  Troopers taped off the spot and within an hour the remains of Maxwell Westmoreland, missing for twenty-plus years, were exhumed. Identification would have to wait for dental records, but there was no question who lay there.

  “Well, you were right, Scott,” the New York captain said to her on the porch. “Congratulations.”

  “There’s no winners in this one.” She meant it.

  ONE YEAR LATER

  THEY HAD A NEW LOFT, on Mercer Street in SoHo, a funky place with high ceilings and big windows and lots of light that streamed in all day. It was lined with art and design and architecture books, in bookcases that rose from the floor to the ceiling, and the two bedrooms were alcoves separated from the rest of the space by curtains. The kitchen had an old French cast-iron stove with tiny ovens and heavy doors that was far more charming than it was practical.

  The apartment belonged to an artist that Lydia knew who was on a Fulbright in Italy for a year and willing to sublet cheap for the right person who would look after the dog, a Jack Russell named Pablo, so quiet he was practically invisible, spending all day sleeping on the couch, often half under blankets. Susannah loved the place, and on this night in September she knew it would come to an end—they had four months left—but she couldn’t think about that now. She was learning to live in the moment.

  She forced herself to eat, more for Freddy than anything else, some Chinese takeout brought to the door. Then they dressed. Freddy had put up a fight at first but gave in eventually. She marveled at him when he emerged from his bedroom with the outfit she had chosen for him: a black suit coat over a black T-shirt, dark jeans, and white sneakers. He had pierced his ears a few weeks before, and he wore silver stud earrings in each, and his hair had grown longer, dark and rich and full and falling almost to his shoulders in the back.

  “You are so handsome,” she said.

  “Quit it.”

  Susannah wore a black dress, of course. Tight. That morning she had gotten her hair blown out and she splurged and had her makeup done, too, as if she were getting married or something.

  They rode an Uber uptown, a black Chevy Suburban. Freddy had his earphones on. Susannah’s phone rang and it was Rose, the noise behind her promising what was to come, her voice full and excited.

  “Hey, girl,” Rose shouted, “you ready?”

  “I am,” Susannah said calmly.

  “Where are you?”

  Susannah looked past the driver and out the windshield in front. “Crawling up Sixth.”

  “Well, get here. Awesome crowd, honey.”

  “On my way.” And Susannah was, in more ways than one. She felt that.

  The Garabedian Gallery took up the first three floors of a prewar granite building on Madison Avenue. The Suburban double-parked out front and Susannah and Freddy got out. For a moment, before the entrance, Susannah stopped, and Freddy stopped next to her. She reached down and took his hand in hers and he didn’t pull away, but allowed this. Her eyes ran up the building to the second floor, the smaller of the two main galleries. She could see people huddled together, shapes and champagne flutes extended. She took a deep breath and said to Freddy, “Let’s do this.”

  They came in the main entrance and then over to the large elevator and rode up one floor. The elevator opened right in the middle of the gallery, polished wood floors as far as you could see, white walls, white ceilings, the large windows on the front. And there, right in front of them, was a giant photo of Susannah next to the words:

  SUSANNAH GARCIA

  THE MAX PAINTINGS

  OIL, ACRYLIC, MIXED MEDIA

  Lydia, with her nearly uncanny ability to know how to move around a room, got to her first. There Lydia was, all flowing white, taking Susannah’s hand, and saying to her, “Darling, it’s already a hit. You are ascendant.”

  For six months, and for the first time since art school, Susannah had painted. It was as if something had broken within her, and all day when Freddy was in school, and sometimes deep into the night, she painted in a state of near mania. The more she put on canvas, abstract portraits of Max, MURDER written boldly in bright red paint on some of them, the less she felt afraid, and the less she felt alone.

  It was Rose’s idea that Lydia come look at them. Susannah was smart enough to know that while Lydia’s over-the-top enthusiasm was about the paintings, it was more about Max. He had become more famous, or infamous perhaps, in death than he had been in life. A Vanity Fair article from the winter after his death, titled “A Modern- Day Talented Mr. Ripley Exits the Stage,” told the story of his meteoric rise from homeless teenager to art-world darling. Everyone was talking about it.

  So what if Susannah was Yoko Ono to his John Lennon? Did it matter?

  Not tonight, Susannah decided. She leaned into the party as if it were a breeze.

  “So many people are dying to meet you,” Lydia said.

  “Bring me to them.”

  ALSO BY THOMAS CHRISTOPHER GREENE

  If I Forget You

  The Headmaster’s Wife

  Envious Moon

  I’ll Never Be Long Gone

  Mirror Lake

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THOMAS CHRISTOPHER GREENE is the author of five previous novels, Mirror Lake, I’ll Never Be Long Gone, Envious Moon, The Headmaster’s Wife, and If I Forget You. His fiction has been translated into thirteen languages. In 2008 he founded Vermont College of Fine Arts, a top-rated graduate fine arts college, making him the youngest college president in the country at the time. He lives and works in Vermont. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  The First Note

  The Second Note

  The Third Note

  Two Months Later

  One Year Later

  Also by Thomas Christopher Greene

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE PERFECT LIAR. Copyright © 2019 by Thomas Christopher Greene. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Cover design by Young Jin Lim

  Cover photograph © Alma Gonzalez / Arcangel

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Names: Greene, Thomas Christopher, 1968- author.

  Title: The perfect liar: a novel / Thomas Christopher Greene.

  Description: F
irst edition. | New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018029125 | ISBN 9781250128218 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250128041 (ebook)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3607.R453 P47 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029125

  e-ISBN 9781250128041

  Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

  First Edition: January 2019