Trust Me When I Lie

by Benjamin Stevenson

  “My friend. I lied. She’s not in jail.”

  Alexis wrapped her scarf around her neck, leaned down, and gave him a kiss on the cheek. Whispered in his ear. She had a late-night phone voice, husky with a slight rasp from the beer. A voice that told secrets.

  “Best case of cigarettes I ever bought.”

  Chapter 4

  Piled up on one end of Jack’s kitchen table was the contents of his pantry, a meager haul. A bag of flour. That would be useful. Five tins of tomatoes. Sugar. Ramen noodle packets. Salt and pepper shakers. Pasta taken out of the packet and sealed in a jar. A squeeze bottle of honey. A bottle of tomato sauce, which had barbecue sauce in it. A bottle of barbecue sauce, which had God knows what in it. To say Jack’s food supplies were scant would be understating it. The contents of Jack’s pantry had all the makings of a cookbook: Jamie Oliver’s Depression in Fifteen Minutes or Less.

  The crockery and cutlery were piled on one of his kitchen chairs. It was past midnight, but he couldn’t stop running through Eliza’s murder. The shoe, hidden in the back of his closet, played on his mind. He’d paced the house, room to room, but that hadn’t helped distract him. The house yawned, open and empty. No doors.

  That wasn’t true. There were seven of them, all white, wooden single doors, stacked against the wall in his garage. His dad had taken them off the hinges years ago. Jack kind of liked the space, so even when he was allowed to put them back up, he didn’t. But that meant that in the middle of the sleepless nights, he felt like he was walking through some abandoned place. Nowhere to hide away. He’d turned on the television, and in the very first commercial break, there’d been an ad for his show, which was playing repeats on the digital channel.

  Who really killed Eliza Dacey?

  The shoe grew heavier in his mind every day. Jack knew what it was like to make a decision that you couldn’t take back, even if you wanted to. Some small, inconsequential choice that grew and grew into something monstrous when everyone was watching. Why had he been fine with hiding the shoe before? Because it was before there was hope for a formal retrial? Because it was before Jack began to doubt Curtis’s innocence? He didn’t need to know who killed Eliza, but he did need to convince himself that Curtis hadn’t.

  Jack picked up the flour as a realization thumped him in the chest. If the shoe was planted, then it was by someone who wanted to keep Curtis in jail by stacking up the evidence against him. Someone with access to the victim’s clothes. Only one person fit that criteria. Could Eliza’s killer, free and unsuspected, have put it there? It must have been planted to be found so late in the piece. Four years on. And, in that case, by helping free Curtis, Jack was doing the right thing. Because then the police might have a chance to catch the actual killer.

  And turning in the shoe might be what the killer wanted anyway.

  Jack dumped the flour on the table and spread it out to the edges with his hands. He needed to look at things from a new perspective. Then he poured half a bag of sugar in a straight, horizontal line, bisecting the bottom third of the table. That represented the main road running through Birravale. He evened out the flour in the top two-thirds and traced crude boundaries. One large paddock for the Wades, taking up most of the center of the table. He took a bowl and placed it in the center of the paddock and a slightly larger plate next to it. The bowl was the domed, glass restaurant; the plate was the homestead. In the top right, west geographically, of the flour, he drew new boundaries: Andrew and Sarah Freeman’s property. Another bowl was their house, and two tins of tomatoes their wine silos. In real life, the silos had been repaired. He used more sugar to fill in the Wades’ driveway. Dotted along the main sugar-road, he dispersed cups and saucers. The old cinema. The bakery. The few houses clumped together.

  He stepped back to examine his miniaturized bird’s-eye view of Birravale. Checked the helicopter photos. He had it about right. Forgot the grapevines. Laid down some parallel lines of spaghetti.

  He walked his fingers back and forth near his artificial fence line in the northwest corner. Small divots in the flour. Eliza’s footsteps. Maybe her last ones. Maybe completely irrelevant, just a random cluster of her cigarette break. Maybe not even hers. He took the saltshaker and placed it on the plate-homestead. That would be Curtis. He allowed himself a chuckle. Salt, the embodiment of evil. He opened a pack of ramen and lifted the noodle cake out. That would be Eliza. Too big—bad for scale. He snapped her in half. Better. He placed Eliza-Ramen at the end of one of his strands of spaghetti-vines. Near where the old restaurant—since knocked down—would have been, Jack observed from his new vantage point. Eliza’s final resting place.

  He felt he must be missing something. But, sloppy as the police had been, they had searched the property. Hadn’t found blood. Hadn’t found much of anything. Neither had he. It was as odd as it seemed. And nowhere else to look. Why was she there? Where was she going? Unless she could fly or dig through the ten tons of concrete where the old restaurant supports had been filled in, it looked as if she’d just appeared.

  Next, two tea bags on the plate-homestead. Peppermint for Lauren, Curtis’s sister. Earl Grey for Vincent, their father. Lauren and Curtis’s mother had died during Lauren’s birth, so it was just the three of them. He traced out the small patch of bush, unowned land, between the Wades’ and the Freemans’.

  Finished, he admired his handiwork. He had a dead body, a cluster of footprints, and the place where he’d found the shoe—all so far away from each other as to be completely useless.

  It was immediately evident that Eliza couldn’t have been at the fence, walked into the middle of the vineyard, severed two fingers, undressed, lain down, and died, without anything happening in between. The prints tapered off from the cigarette stamping, Jack remembered, fading as the ground firmed and turned to gravel. The walk uncompleted. Ominously, fading out in the direction of the homestead.

  So, Option One: She’d walked in off the road, up the driveway, walked along the northern fence, had a puff, and then gone inside the homestead. Once inside, someone had killed her and carried her back out to dump her. The trick here was that the exact walk through the vineyard was what Andrew Freeman and Ian McCarthy had driven over on their way to the body. With that interference, it was impossible to prove someone carried the body down there. It was also impossible to prove they hadn’t. Ted Piper’s favorite, Option One. It had, in part, sent Curtis to jail.

  But why would Curtis leave the body out in the open, pointing straight back to him? Why would he call the police first? Why was Eliza even there in the first place? And even with the tire prints, not a single useful footprint, boot or bare. The killer had got lucky with the sloppy police work, but, still, it looked as if she’d been placed there without a trace. It had the actuality of a murder but the feel of a frame-up. Everything just felt out of place, like a bookshelf with a single book backward. And behind every question, the fact that the initial evidence was gathered shoddily. Four years on, it was hard to pull the truth from that. This had been his line in the show, and it would maybe, in part, get Curtis back out again.

  Option Two, then. She’d come in off the road, walked through the property, had a cigarette at the only place muddy enough to leave prints, and walked back down the driveway safe and sound. Afterward, someone had killed her and brought her back.

  Maybe she had been there and she’d tried to hitch from the road. He moved the noodle cake to the roadside, playing it out in his mind. If someone had slowed to pick her up and killed her right there, it seemed inefficient to haul her over the fence and carry her into the property. Not to mention difficult. Jack had rolled his ankle jumping the fence, and he wasn’t lugging a dead body at the time. Plus, in perhaps the only piece of real evidence the prosecution had, Eliza had left a voicemail message on a journalist’s phone—Sam Culver of Discover! magazine—the afternoon before she disappeared, saying she’d found something weird in Birravale. This seemed
to point to motive, but Eliza hadn’t been sure whether what she’d discovered was technically illegal and had been looking to sell her story rather than go to the police. When Sam had called her back the next day, she hadn’t answered, and he’d forgotten about it. Eliza had known something she shouldn’t—that much was clear—but no one could figure out what or who it involved. What’s more, Discover! was a trashy tabloid. Who kills over a puff piece next to “My Ex-Wife’s Hamster Gambled Away My Inheritance”? Still, predictably, the prosecution clung to this as proof of premeditation, that someone may have had motive. To their credit, they had to cling to something. If it was a random hitchhike killing, there was really no prosecutable case. She could have been killed anywhere, by anyone. Jack thought about this young girl hitching a ride. Bright halogen eyes approaching from the dark, slowing. A white girl in a car’s headlights looks just like she does on an autopsy table. Scorched. Colorless.

  They had never found what cut off her fingers. What strangled her. Maybe they were in the trunk of a car, thousands of miles away.

  Hang on. Something wasn’t right. He took a mixing bowl and flipped it, placed the Freemans’ tomato-tin wine silos on top of it. Better—it hadn’t been right being flat. It was uphill. He got down on his knees, eye level with the table. He imagined the bush blocking out most of the silos from the position of the body.

  Shuffling on his knees, he moved—used to kneeling, his knees clicked with familiarity—counterclockwise around the table, and now he could picture seeing the wine silos in full.

  He stood up. He was directly in line with the clump of Eliza’s footsteps. At that point, she would have been able to see the Freeman house. She’d been having a cigarette, stamping her feet from the cold, in full view of Andrew and Sarah Freeman’s homestead up the hill.

  Had they seen her? Minutes before, supposedly, she died? Disappeared from the earth and reappeared, barefoot, two hundred meters away?

  Jack shook his head. Of course, this all assumed the footprints were made on the same night as the murder. And that they were even hers (he still clung to this doubt). And it still didn’t explain the dumping, the lack of physical evidence. Curtis’s house had been checked, and there hadn’t been a scrap of evidence there.

  Andrew and Sarah hadn’t mentioned seeing Eliza in their testimonies. But maybe they’d been asleep. Out. Maybe no one actually asked them. Besides, did a single glowing ember stick in the mind?

  He looked at his playground of Birravale. There wasn’t enough there to prove a man innocent. But there wasn’t enough to prove him guilty either. Nothing he knew proved anything, and it wasn’t worth potentially burning his career by raising more questions. In criminal law, the onus of proof was always on the prosecution, not the defense.

  Jack took the Eliza-Ramen noodle and put it on the plate-homestead next to Saltshaker-Curtis. He covered them with a bowl, masking them from view. As if Curtis and Eliza were in the bowl-house together.

  “Did you go inside that house, Eliza?” he muttered. “What happened to you?”

  He whacked the table in frustration. Everything clinked. A small puff of flour rose up and tickled his nose. He was tired now. At least the mental exercise had done that. He’d clean up in the morning. The food would go to waste. He didn’t care.

  He would keep the shoe quiet. It proved nothing. Nothing added up the way Ted Piper and his team said it did. And Jack couldn’t keep focusing on this. He had a new show to start working on, money to make, and his health to consider. He could feel the stress building. He didn’t want to get sick again. The only way to move through this was to accept his mistake—grieve for it, Alexis would say—and leave it behind.

  Sure, Jack’s version didn’t stack up either. He still didn’t know who had killed Eliza. But looking at the table in front of him—at the upturned bowl that hid Eliza and Curtis inside that house—there was doubt. Just a flicker. An ember in the dark. Just enough.

  He took the bowl off Salt-Curtis and Eliza-Ramen, left to their hidden mysteries. He must have hit the table harder than he thought, because it was all disordered now. The saltshaker had fallen over and shattered the noodle cake.

  Coincidence, thought Jack.

  He walked back through his doorless house and finally into bed. Even still, he couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t get the image out of his head of the mess on the plate. Of Eliza, broken into pieces.

  Did you go inside that house, Eliza? What happened to you?

  Eventually, sleep took him. Decision made.

  The lies you can live with.

  Chapter 5

  September

  Jack scratched his chest. They always put the tape right on the hair, and then the lighting made the sweat pool around it. The sound guy came over and whacked Jack’s hand, pointed at the lapel mic poking through Jack’s top button and then at his own ear. Jack nodded. He knew what that meant. Stop fucking up my sound, amateur.

  Ted Piper sat across from Jack. They hadn’t sat in an official interview together since Jack had blindsided Ted on the original podcast. Ted had refused to take part in the TV show, so Jack had had to build his character through preexisting interviews, courtroom footage, and press conferences. The prosecutor wore a sharply cut blue suit. It fit him perfectly. Jack tugged at his own shirt. It was collared, but he’d forgone the tie, which he was regretting now, if only so he could neck himself if it didn’t go well. He smoothed his shirt over his stomach, which seemed to have inflated since he’d chosen the shirt this morning. He felt ill. Live national television. He was never good at live stuff. Why had he had breakfast? Never eat before a show.

  Ted’s smooth, professional beard was shaved in at right angles down his cheekbones. Jack toyed with where he’d cast Ted. Didn’t quite fit a drama, too smug to sustain a full hour’s attention. A deodorant commercial, Jack decided. Ted’s hair was slick, short cropped, and black with a scatter of gray. Good lawyer hair. Black meant youthful enough to be energetic, but gray meant old enough to be experienced. Looking at it, Jack became convinced his was too messy. He ran a hand through it. Before he’d finished, a woman with a can of hairspray appeared. She swatted his hand away and started spraying and pecking with her fingertips. She shot him a look. Stop fucking up your hair, amateur.

  Ted smiled at his discomfort. Damn it, thought Jack. His teeth were superwhite too. But his pants were too tight. No bulge. Small victories.

  They were sitting on a circular stage, in two padded, semispherical chairs. The type that had no armrests, so your hands slid awkwardly into your lap or your arms hung over the sides. Jack fidgeted, couldn’t get it right. Both his and Ted’s chairs were angled at forty-five degrees to an opposing seat—which was currently empty. That one was leather. Host’s privilege.

  Jack preferred interviews behind a desk. In the middle of a soundstage, he felt marooned. But this was less an interview, more an interrogation.

  Cameras and lights were placed around the stage in quarters, glass eyes pointing inward: tall hulking sentries. The stage floor itself was concentric circles: an inner brown rug; the outer circumference the exposed stage itself, a reflective black. It looked slick on-screen, but it was just shiny black plastic.

  All this for three people talking. Words will make you famous, Jack supposed.

  He wasn’t the only minor celebrity. Birravale too had quickly become infamous. Googling winery deaths even a year ago would only turn up a few hits: workplace safety accidents and an old Italian winery that tried to blend methanol with their sauvignon blanc and wound up killing twenty-three people and blinding dozens of others. Now, though, pages and pages of fingerless Eliza Dacey. Her death usurped the twenty-three haphazard Italians. Because Eliza was young. Eliza was pretty. Eliza was on TV. She mattered more. Her ghost was a soft cathode glow, now.

  “Gentlemen.” Vanessa Raynor stepped onto the stage. Casting notes: prestige actress. That one was easy. She gave both Jack a
nd Ted a double-clasped handshake. Her smile was warm, but the firm grip announced that she was in control. This was her show. Her stage. She strode back to her chair and Jack half expected her to let out a battle cry. Instead, she crossed her legs and put her hands on her knees. Perfect hand placement. Someone rushed up and henpecked her straight blond hair, ran a lint roller down her black blazer. “Thanks for being here.”

  “Thank you for having us,” Ted said.

  Jack just nodded. He was getting used to these shows, more comfortable in them, erring on the side of confident. His doubts were now buried in a shoebox at the back of his closet, and since the end of the series, he’d been on enough panel shows, speaking for Curtis, that he’d managed to talk his way into believing in his innocence again. Besides, he wasn’t here to vouch for anyone; he was here to show his face, get a good sound bite or two, and use the increased profile to renegotiate his deal with the network. Vanessa would ask him the same old questions about the same old murder. As far as he was concerned, that whole case, and everything with it, had run its course.

  “This is perhaps a bit different from what you’re used to.” She nodded at Ted. “Shall we put your hand on a Bible? Make you feel more at home?”

  Ted crossed his heart, leaned over, and smiled. “He’s the one you need to worry about. I always tell the truth.”

  “Mate, it’s fucking television,” Jack said, scratching at his microphone and avoiding the glares of the audio crew. “The only thing telling the truth on you is how tight those pants are.”

  One of the crew laughed. The hairstylist scurried off, and an assistant holding a clipboard stepped in. Blond, slight, midtwenties. All production assistants looked the same because they never made it into the middle-aged diversity of face and figure—once the glamour of television wore off, they realized how shit a job it was and quit. This one bent and whispered something in Vanessa’s ear.