Two Truths and a Lie

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  Was the seed planted then?

  After that, she spent hours at her computer, getting lost in what she found. Rabbit hole after rabbit hole. Madison Miller didn’t come back, and she fell out of the news cycle. But there are dark places on the Internet where stories never die, and where they morph into conspiracy theories. Madison Miller was kidnapped to be part of a sex trade operation run by a ring of South Americans. Madison Miller was a drug dealer, a porn star, a Russian operative, a garden-variety runaway.

  Sherri couldn’t stop, and she couldn’t stop, and she couldn’t stop, because she knew that Madison Miller was none of those things. She was somebody’s sister and somebody’s daughter and Bobby had said himself, Sherri had heard him: she’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  She couldn’t shake the thoughts. They swirled around her like tumbleweed. They were with her always, her quiet, evil companions.

  And then, seventeen days after Madison Miller disappeared, a dog walker found her body.

  Rebecca told Sherri that if she wanted she could bring an appetizer to share. Sherri worked all morning on individual Brie bites made in a mini muffin tin with phyllo dough. Each bite had a little dot of pepper jelly inside, like a friendly surprise. She’d found the recipe on an app Katie had kindly downloaded onto her phone. Once they got their lives in order, Sherri vowed to use the app more often.

  Rebecca had explained to Sherri that the town of Newburyport did not have fireworks on the Fourth of July; instead the town celebrated something called “Yankee Homecoming” at the beginning of August and did its fireworks then. However, there was a group going out on Gina and Steve’s pontoon on the Fourth, as it fell on a Saturday. Sherri should come.

  Sherri’s first thought was Hell no. She wasn’t going to leave Katie at night. But then Rebecca said, no worries, Katie could stay with Morgan until Alexa got home from work at seven thirty, then Alexa would keep an eye on them. It would give Alexa and Katie a chance to get acquainted before Sherri’s first full work shift.

  “Doesn’t Alexa have plans? On the Fourth of July?”

  No, said Rebecca, she didn’t seem to. She acknowledged that that was unusual, and looked troubled for a moment. Alexa’s boyfriend was out of town, Rebecca said.

  Sherri debated for a long time about what to wear. She didn’t want to dress too much like her old self, but she didn’t really want to be her new self either. In the end she chose white jeans and a flowy navy blue tank top that she hoped whispered upscale nautical but worried screamed Marshalls.

  Once on the boat, which was docked near Michael’s Harborside restaurant, Sherri counted six couples, plus herself and Rebecca. So not the whole squad then. Some people must be on vacation, or busy with extended families. At least half the women were wearing white jeans, and this felt like a small victory to Sherri. She had never met the husbands before, and Rebecca introduced them quickly—SteveJoeDavidHenryMattOtherJoe. They all looked more or less the same, like overgrown frat boys gone a little thick, and she felt a sharp pang of nostalgia for how she and Bobby used to make heads turn when they walked into a party together. Bobby had never let himself get soft.

  But never mind all that now. She accepted a drink in a red cup that somebody handed her, and she took a sip. “Delicious,” she said. She attempted a friendly laugh but it came out more like an awkward squeal.

  “Tito’s and blueberries with just a touch of tequila,” said Gina. She took the Brie bites from Sherri.

  “I didn’t get a chance to make anything,” Rebecca told Gina. “I’m so sorry! The day got completely away from me.”

  Gina and Rebecca exchanged a glance that could possibly have been described as frosty.

  “Well, these look phenomenal, anyway,” said Gina, peering at the Brie bites.

  With that endorsement, Sherri began to relax. The seats were like giant cozy couches, and there was a dark green canopy covering the captain’s chair. Steve was at the helm. The pontoon began to glide in a stately manner down the river.

  Rebecca sat on one side of Sherri. On Sherri’s other side was a husband. (One of the Joes? David?)

  Rebecca leaned over and said, “Joe, Sherri’s new to town. She came from landlocked Ohio, and yes we all feel bad for her, but now she’s found her way to the right part of the country. She’s never eaten a whole lobster, you know! We’re going to rectify that soon. Can you give her a little bit of a geography lesson?”

  “Ohio!” said Joe. “I lived in Ohio until I was ten.”

  “I didn’t know that!” said Rebecca.

  Sherri flushed and ducked her head. This was okay: she was fine. She had prepared for a moment like this. Redbrick, she thought. Livingston Park. Carpenter Street.

  “Cleveland,” Joe said to Sherri. “Well, just outside.”

  Relief washed over Sherri. She tried to make her voice sound regretful as she said, “Oh! Too bad. We lived outside of Columbus. I don’t know Cleveland very well at all.”

  Joe pointed out to Sherri that they were moving toward Amesbury, away from the mouth of the river that led to the open ocean, and that the pontoon was for inland use; Gina and Steve had another boat for the open ocean. “There’s Brooke and David’s dock,” he said, pointing. “And straight ahead is the Rocks Village Bridge, which connects West Newbury to Merrimac and Haverhill.”

  “Got it,” Sherri said. She looked around and was able to appreciate the beauty of the summer evening. The threads of color still tangled in the sky. The riverfront houses with docks and boats tied up at the docks. A lone kayaker. The smell of silt and salt and summer. The Brie bites were going like hotcakes—the plate was almost empty. “I feel like I’m in a floating living room,” she said. Joe chuckled appreciatively: another small victory.

  The pontoon glided; somebody refilled Sherri’s red cup; people were laughing and talking and it was all very festive. A motor boat passed them going the other way and passengers on both boats waved at one another. Sherri waved too: why not? It was the Fourth of July. The lavender evening was gorgeous. Joe had laughed at her joke. She was doing fine.

  Then, almost as suddenly as a curtain dropping over a stage, darkness descended. The little bit of light left in the sky was gone.

  And, bang, came a sound, bang bang bang. Each time, Sherri’s heart jumped a little bit more.

  She turned away from Rebecca. “I thought you said there weren’t fireworks?” she said. If there were no fireworks, it must be gunshots. She fumbled in her bag for her cell phone. She had to check on Katie. She had to check on Katie. But there were no bars on her phone: no signal.

  “Not in Newburyport,” said Rebecca. “Those are the Amesbury ones that we can hear. Are you okay, Sherri?”

  “I need to get off the boat,” Sherri said, softly at first, and then, because she couldn’t help it, more urgently. There were no walls surrounding her, but somehow it felt as though they were closing in on her anyway. Her stomach lurched; her brain and heart lurched. She didn’t care who heard her, or what they thought of her. She cared only about Katie. “I don’t have a phone signal. I need to get off the boat,” she said, to Rebecca, but also to anyone who was listening. “I need to make sure Katie’s okay, I need to get off the boat. I need to get off the boat!”

  30.

  The Squad

  Nobody had a good cell signal out there. Nobody. It’s a river! Cell service is unreliable. Eventually, Rebecca calmed Sherri down, and we finished the pontoon ride and went back to the dock. But seriously. Talk about a mood killer.

  Somebody, we can’t remember who now, said they thought they’d seen Sherri flirting with Joe. And that maybe he was flirting back. After the year that Esther had, and that thing with the office assistant, believe us, that was the last thing that Esther needed to worry about. They were still in therapy!

  On another note, that was the night all of the girls were at Brooke’s house. They were going to swim and watch a movie. Brooke’s sister was there to watch over them. And where was Morgan? At her own
house, with Katie and Alexa. Who had, what, nothing better to do on the Fourth?

  It was almost like they were trying to exclude themselves.

  31.

  Alexa

  Alexa hadn’t heard from Cam since the not-Dave Matthews concert. Fine, she thought, when she allowed herself to think about him at all. He was probably busy finding homes for orphaned puppies. Which was fine. She had a lot of work to do on Silk Stockings, and also to get ready for her move: she could afford no distractions.

  On her way to Olive Street to babysit for Katie Griffin for the first time, she checked her phone anyway. Nothing from Cam. (She didn’t care.) Nothing from Tyler either. Not that she was surprised by that; she did blow him off the night before he left for Silver Lake. She had checked his Instagram a couple of times to see if he’d posted anything from Michigan, but he hadn’t. Caitlin hadn’t tried to make any more overtures since lunch at Popovers, and Alexa hadn’t reached out to Destiny.

  Congratulations, Alexa, she told herself. You have successfully alienated just about everyone.

  Sherri and Katie lived in one half of a two-family on Olive Street, not far from the high school, where the houses were crowded together and the sidewalks a little crumbly. Could Alexa have walked to Olive Street from her home on High Street? Yes. But did she? Nope. Alexa had never been one to walk when she could drive.

  Alexa expected that Sherri would be like most of her mom’s friends, with good hair and well-groomed eyebrows and a decent sense of fashion, at least for an older person. But Sherri was wearing khaki pants and a polo shirt with a logo on it, and her drab hair was in a low ponytail.

  Sherri told Alexa that when they first moved to Newburyport she left Katie alone when she went out to dinner, but that Katie got a little freaked out because of all of the creaks and groans the old house made.

  “I told her it’s just the house settling,” Sherri said. “But you know kids.” She lowered her voice to a whisper and added, “She thinks the house is haunted. Which obviously it’s not. But we’ve had a lot of changes lately. It’s been”—she raised her eyes to the ceiling, as though selecting the perfect word, but produced only—“hard.”

  “I get it,” said Alexa. Alexa knew Katie’s parents were recently divorced. She reminded herself to be extra kind. Alexa refrained from saying that the house probably was haunted, because it was her belief that most of the older homes in Newburyport were. She knew that her own house was, but she thought that the spirits that haunted it were most likely friendly, especially in her bedroom. More than once she had woken in the night to sense a warm, comforting presence surrounding her, almost like somebody had laid a light blanket over her sleeping body. When she turned on the light she saw nothing, and the feeling disappeared. She tried to tell Tyler about this once. He said, “I’ll show you a warm comforting presence in your bed, bae,” and after that she didn’t talk to him about it, or to anyone.

  Sherri departed, and Alexa turned her attention to her charge. She was hoping Katie went to bed on the earlier side; Alexa had some research on L.A. apartments to do. There were so many different neighborhoods! Four hundred and seventy-two, she’d learned online. She knew the Valley would be too hot, and downtown L.A. too crowded, but that was as far as she’d gotten in terms of ruling out areas. There was Echo Park and Pacific Palisades and Koreatown; there was San Pedro and Fairfax and Santa Monica and Topanga Canyon. Each of these names tasted exotic on her tongue when she said them aloud in the privacy of her own bedroom. Playa Vista. Sunset Junction. Los Feliz.

  Katie was as efficient and self-contained as a Roomba, a nice change from Morgan’s overparented other friends. When Alexa asked her what she’d like for dinner Katie told her she’d made herself some pasta with a little bit of butter and cheese before her mom left, and that she sliced some red peppers to make sure she got her vitamins. Alexa was not sure that Morgan was familiar with how to boil water, never mind slice a pepper. She was impressed.

  Katie settled down to watch Cupcake Wars in the living room and invited Alexa to join her. The living room was so small that Alexa had the impression that if she sat down her knees would knock up against the television set—and she had topped off in ninth grade at five feet, five inches.

  “I’ll join you a little bit later,” she told Katie. “I just have a couple of things I need to take care of.”

  She left Katie immersed in the wars to go on a little snoop. Back when she used to babysit, the snooping was the best part of the job. In the past she’d found vibrators and porn magazines (old school!) and stashes of cash and photos of old girlfriends and boyfriends. In one case, she found the photo of an old boyfriend of a dad who was happily married to a mom. She’d found antianxiety meds and baggies of weed and hidden credit cards. Most people, it turned out, were hiding something from the people they love. She’d never done anything with any of her discoveries; she’d held them in a secret place in her mind, coiled like a coral snake, ready to strike.

  Alexa headed up the narrow set of stairs that led to the second floor. The painted banister was peeling. It could totally be lead paint, in a house this old, so just in case Alexa didn’t touch it. Her own house had been professionally de-leaded.

  Sherri’s room revealed nothing. There was a double bed made up neatly, with a patchwork quilt folded in thirds at the foot of it. There was a dresser and a nightstand, and the nightstand drawer was empty. Who had empty nightstand drawers? The absence of secrets felt like a secret unto itself. The closet was small, the way closets were in these houses, with non-fancy wire shelving, the kind you bought at Home Depot and that left marks in some of your shirts if you weren’t careful. Four pairs of shoes were neatly lined up on one of the shelves. Who, Alexa wondered, had only four pairs of shoes? It looked like the closet of a nun.

  One bedroom was empty—like, literally empty, nothing in it, and Alexa thought about how her mother would have turned it into some kind of funky home office with maybe a standing desk and a few succulents from Sage. Well, Sherri was a single mother, a working mother, so no surprise that she hadn’t quite gotten around to interior decorating just yet.

  Alexa progressed to the third room, which was clearly Katie’s. It was messy in the way that Morgan’s room was messy, with scattered bottles of nail polish on the floor, probably not closed all the way, and a paperback open on the bed. The dresser drawers were closed only partially, with pieces of T-shirts and pajama bottoms sticking out of them. On the pillow—the pillow! This was so something Morgan would do—was an uncapped marker, and Alexa reached for it. She saw the cap on the nightstand, which was on the far side of the bed, and as she was reaching for it she put her hand on top of the pillow to steady herself. There was something hard under the pillow (Morgan would do that too, leave something weird under the pillow—a contraband snack, maybe, or a copy of The Fault in Our Stars, which she’d been told she was too young to read until at least seventh grade) and before she could even think about what she was doing Alexa slid the object out.

  It wasn’t a snack. It wasn’t a copy of The Fault in Our Stars. It was a composition notebook with a black-and-white marbled cover, very similar to the “grief journals” her mom had bought for Morgan. Don’t open it, Alexa told herself as she was opening it. Don’t you dare open it, you know that bad things happen when you stick your nose places it doesn’t belong. In eighth grade, for example, she sneaked on to Google Docs and read Mia Rosenberg’s narrative nonfiction draft and found out it was all about how angry she was at Alexa for stealing her boyfriend, Elijah Connor. In fairness, Elijah Connor had never cared that much about Mia, and everybody knew it, and anyway Alexa only dated him for two weeks because he turned out to be really, really boring.

  And it was not like it was a diary, for Heaven’s sake! It was probably full of math equations. Diaries of eleven-year-old girls were typically pink and hardbound and closed with those tiny padlocks with keys that went missing all the time. This was just a notebook. Alexa would prove it, by taking a small peek
inside.

  The first line on the first page said, “I’m not supposed to write any of this down. I’m not even supposed to talk about it.”

  “Alexa!” Katie called from downstairs. “Where’d you go? Alexa! They’re going to announce the winner!”

  Alexa slammed the notebook shut. Was there actually something interesting going on in this drab little half-house? She called, “I’ll be right down!” and tucked the notebook back under the pillow. She wasn’t sure if Katie heard her so she yelled, “Coming!” even louder, and instantly there came a banging from the other side of the wall. Ghost, or neighbor? She wasn’t sure. She banged back, three times, and after that there was only silence. Probably a ghost.

  She hightailed it down the stairs and into the living room to see who won the cupcake war. It was not yet dark, not even really twilight, and there was no need to turn on either of the mismatched table lamps that sat on the elderly tables in the living room. Even so, Alexa found that she was suddenly considering Katie Griffin in a whole new light.

  While they were watching, there came a knocking at the front door. Katie and Alexa looked at each other, startled.

  Outside the door stood a shriveled specimen of a woman. She was holding a small dog with giant ears. The woman made Alexa think of what would happen if somebody took a walnut and glued it on top of an old rag doll. She was looking at Alexa sternly.

  “Can I help you?” asked Alexa. She had no problem being stern right back.

  “Noise!” the woman said, her face crumpling into even more wrinkles, if that was possible.

  “Excuse me?” Alexa couldn’t stand looking at really old women up close. It was depressing. Supposedly their tiny little eyes contained the wisdom of the ages or whatever, but all Alexa saw was a complete lack of collagen and the absence of an actual neck.