Trust Me When I Lie

by Benjamin Stevenson

  Jack hadn’t thought it would be quite so obvious. Then again, a murder ripples through a small town in ways it doesn’t in big cities. Alexis was probably already banished from the features section. But Eliza had burned a scar through this town like fire through snow, and that takes a long time to heal. Four years hadn’t been enough. And here was Jack, ripping the bandage off again.

  His last resort was the bed-and-breakfast. The light was fading now, and the cold was creaking through him. The B and B was a two-story house, roof sagging with age, but freshly painted. A swinging sign on the letter box had a phone number on it. Jack didn’t bother calling it; he hopped up the wooden stairs and knocked on the door. He heard a screen door rattle. The woman who opened the door did a double take. She was elderly and wore a lot of makeup. Sagging with age but freshly painted.

  “Do you have a room?” he asked without giving his name. Crossed his fingers.

  “How many nights?”

  Alexis’s funeral was in two days.

  “Don’t know. Just start with two,” he said.

  “I’ll see what I can do.” She shuffled inside, disappeared behind a door. Jack took two steps in, stood on the rug but close to the door. She hadn’t said no, which was a good sign, but she hadn’t said yes yet either. It didn’t seem like she’d recognized him, but elderly women did passive aggression better than pub owners.

  “I have two nights,” she called. She came back into the room with a red-covered book, filled with neat, ruled lines and looping cursive. “Four hundred.”

  “Two hundred a night’s a bit steep,” Jack said, though he knew it was pushing his luck.

  “Is it? Gosh, sorry. Four hundred per night. Eight hundred total.” She didn’t look up from the book. “I’m guessing everywhere else is full. Special rate for you, Mr. Quick.”

  Jack felt his shoulders drop. He imagined the motel and pub owner calling her up, agreeing to run him around, jack the price up, split the profits. She’d be treating them all to drinks later.

  “I could go to Cessnock,” said Jack. “It’s not that far.”

  “I suppose it isn’t.”

  “I suppose the motels are full there too.”

  “They might well be.”

  “Okay, then. For four hundred, I hope the breakfast’s good.” Though he didn’t care about the food; he just wanted to needle her. “Credit card okay?”

  “Yes, we’re not Neanderthals out here. That was without breakfast, by the way. You want the breakfast rate? Another fifty.”

  “I thought this was a B and B. Without breakfast is fine.”

  “Oh.” She scowled at the book. “Have to give priority to the breakfasters. Premium bookings, you know?”

  “I’m getting the idea.”

  “Only breakfast specials left.”

  “Okay, nine hundred then.” That seemed to make her happy. She nodded, hooked a key off the wall, and gestured for Jack to follow her up the stairs. He couldn’t help himself. “Why let me stay at all?”

  She thought about this for a second, didn’t turn her head. “I’m not much of a fan of Brett Dawson, the bloke that runs the motel. You’ll do all right, helping me stick it to him.”

  “I’m leverage?”

  “Well-paying leverage.” She flashed him a dark look as she opened a bedroom door. She was reading him, he supposed, trying to figure him out. “Besides, the cops were here yesterday, and they let him go. I’m assuming you’re here to fix that.”

  “You mean you think Curtis did it?”

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “Do they?”

  “Bit late to be asking these sorts of questions is my guess.” She raised an eyebrow. Alexis was dead. A bit late, indeed. “We weren’t surprised, you know. They never fit in here, with their tacky restaurant and windfall fortune—everyone here works for their success.” Jack didn’t stop her to point out she’d just ripped him off nine hundred bucks for a room. “And then that dispute with Andrew Freeman. He’s a good man. That’s just nasty stuff, all of it. Of course, we were heartbroken when that poor woman was found. But”—she held open the door and gestured him inside—“I can’t say any of us were surprised.”

  “Were you here when it happened?”

  She paused in the doorway, keen to leave. Her response was sharp. “I didn’t see the murder.”

  “What about when Curtis attacked Andrew’s wine?”

  “I live here, don’t I?”

  “What was it like?”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “For nine hundred dollars, I should think I could trouble the hostess for five minutes of her time.” Jack said, his producer-voice creeping into his tone.

  “You ever seen six hundred thousand liters of anything all at once?” She shifted slightly, mild surrender. “What do you want to know? It came down the hill, poured through the whole town. It was all over the road. Stained it, actually; I swear it’s darker now. It even got into the wood here; that’s why I repainted the house. We swept it into the gutters, but there were pools of it, for weeks, lying around in potholes and gutters. In the heat, the town stank. Like it was rotten.”

  “And that was the last straw for most of you? With the Wades?”

  “You take an ax to Andrew Freeman’s wine vats, you take an ax to Birravale.”

  “Everyone feels like this?” He stepped past her into the room. Saw a double bed. The room was sparsely furnished, but there was a water heater bolted to the far wall and homely knitted blankets. It would be warm.

  “Of course. It was worse for some. Everyone with a cellar will tell you—and that’s everyone ’round here, mind you…”

  “Tell me what?”

  She turned to leave. “It was like the walls were bleeding.”

  The next morning, Jack woke, dressed, and stepped out early. When he opened the door, there was a plate on the carpet. On it, a single banana and a carbon-paper handwritten invoice. Breakfast. $50.

  Jack stepped over it.

  Now that he was here, he didn’t really know what he planned to do. Interview the locals? Wait for someone to confess? He knew how to edit a crime so it cut to credits at the perfect time, right when the heart was thrumming, so that, like an addict, you needed another hit. But actually solving one? How did people do that in real life? When there were no shortcuts or expository credits sequences to fill you in on what you missed last week? He needed a place to start. Fortunately, years in television had taught him what all good narratives started with. Conflict. Tension. You don’t start a series with everyone in harmony—you drop them in discordance. You disrupt them, kick a beehive, and then see what falls out.

  Jack had spent the night rewatching his show. He tried to view it from the prosecution’s perspective this time. Instead of dismantling the evidence, where it had been enough to merely show that there had been gaps, he now needed to fill those gaps. Wherever he’d called them out for making a leap—on placing Eliza at the Wades’, on the voicemail providing a motive, that the story she tried to sell pertained to Curtis Wade—he’d always looked to discredit the evidence, rather than present a counter theory. So that seemed like a good first step. What did Eliza know that she thought she could sell? Why had she been at the Wades’? Jack didn’t know where to start, but he figured he might as well go kick some beehives.

  Curtis Wade’s pebble driveway slipped underfoot. There were tire ruts equidistant from the edges, the gravel loose enough to leave no footprints. It had taken him about fifteen minutes to walk there from the B and B. He’d stopped shivering quickly, though the grass underfoot was yellow and frozen and cracked when he walked. The Hunter Valley was Mars. When the sun was up, it boiled—he pictured pools of stinking wine beside the road—but as soon as it dipped below the horizon, everything snap froze. Heaven and hell, all at once.

  There was only one media van at the base
of the drive. Blue and silver, with a satellite on top. Jack couldn’t see anyone through the windows; he assumed they were sitting in the back. The news crews had come here initially: there had been bustling crowds of jostling microphones, helicopter shots. Some intrepid reporter had hovered a drone with a GoPro attached over the house. Curtis had sauntered onto the patio, rifle at his side, and had a few shots at it. A sharpshooter he was not, and though that was great footage, it was the last time Curtis had left the house. The driveway was so long, all private property, that there was nothing left to do but skulk at the bottom of it. And after two days with no money shot of detectives leading Curtis, shackled, down that long drive, the experienced journalists had headed back, leaving behind a few interns in case something exploded. Alexis’s murder wouldn’t be solved here, nearly everyone had accepted. But Jack had nowhere else to start. The driveway was slightly uphill. Gum trees folded over the drive like arms reaching out from the dust. Jack was panting by the time he reached the front patio.

  The house itself was older than the restaurant, which Jack had observed with awe, about three-quarters down the drive, the frozen windows adding a hint of extra sparkle in the morning light. Fifty meters farther on, the house itself had no such spectacle: a stone chimney stack, timber walls, and dirty windows. A kelpie slept on the porch. Wilted plants hung from the front awning like corks on a bushman’s hat. There was a garage with the door folded up. Jack could see a tarnished hatchback inside, jaw open and engine exposed. A pickup truck, much shinier, in the other parking spot. He also caught a glimpse of a messy tool bench. A dirt bike.

  Jack took a few long breaths and stepped onto the porch. He stood in front of the door and steeled himself. He wondered if Eliza had done the same thing. Did you go inside this house, Eliza? What happened to you?

  The kelpie lifted its head momentarily and then rested its jaw back on its paws. There was yellow, crusted mucus around its mouth and eyes. It reminded him of himself. A dog with no bite.

  He knocked on the door.

  There were thuds from inside and then the jangling of a lock. Curtis opened the door. He was wearing shorts and a tank, graying wiry hairs spindling out from his chest like the head of a worn toothbrush. His mustache was stiff and gray; you could have polished a shoe with it.

  “Well,” he said, “we got a lot to talk about.”

  S01E04

  Cut

  Exhibit C:

  Message Received, 03/20/2014, 4:52 p.m.

  Hi. Um, Sam? You don’t know me. My name’s Eliza. I’m from England. Right, you probably don’t need to know that. I’ve been living and working in a town called Birravale for the last six months. Anyway, *inaudible* I’ve found something here. I thought you might be interested. I figure it’s one of those things that might go viral, people would share it, you know? Might even be, I don’t know, illegal? Either way, it’s pretty weird. Could be a good feature. So, you know, do you buy stories? I can’t tell you any more until we talk figures. Call me back?

  Chapter 12

  Previously

  Wind tore past Jack’s ears as he tried to keep up, but even standing and pumping his legs as hard as he could, his pedals spun, frictionless. They whipped around, rapping his calves, grazing the skin with tiny metal teeth. The ground dipped, his stomach held in the air for a second, and they zipped through a stagnant puddle. Mud shot off Liam’s back wheel and sluiced up his spine. Jack felt the same wet shock to his T-shirt as he followed a second later. Then the ground was tilting up again, and they were out of their seats again, piston legs. The sunlight was dappled by the overhanging eucalypts.

  Liam outpaced him, not only because he was older, but because he had a newer bike. He’d been raving about these things called gears that apparently made riding easier. He had brakes on his handlebars too. Ones that you used with your fingers. Jack still had to lock his pedals backward to skid to a stop. Liam had let him ride the new bike once, telling him to squeeze softly. Jack, of course, had ignored his advice and gone straight over the handlebars, with Liam collapsing in laughter. Jack didn’t ask to borrow his brother’s bike again, but trailing him up the hill, he wished he had some of those magical gears.

  Liam was at the crest now, yelling down at him. “Get there, Jackie. Come on. Get there. Get there!”

  That was Liam’s favorite thing to yell at the football players—either on the TV or when Dad found a game to take them to in the city. Get there! Who cares if you got crunched over the top of the ball, provided you got there. Liam’s assistant-coach career was famous around the house.

  Jack focused on the ground, watching his front wheel slide occasionally left and right when hopping over a rock. Liam was right though. In this case, there was only one way to the top, and that was up. Jack counted the number of times the orange patch on his front tire—from two weeks ago when he’d run over the remnants of a Carlton stubby bottle—passed under his handlebars. No way but up. Get there.

  He made it, panting, to the ridge. Liam was coasting in circles, with his body on the left side of the bike, both feet perched on the single pedal, occasionally dropping his outside foot to paddle the ground. The playing card lodged in his back spokes thrummed lazily.

  “Nice of you to join.” Liam swung past him.

  “That hill got bigger, I reckon.”

  “Or you got smaller.”

  “Can I have some water?”

  Liam hopped off the pedal, trundled to a stop. He had a water bottle strapped to the frame, another fancy addition that Jack didn’t have. Liam tossed it underhand. Jack pulled the rubber top open with his teeth, the first mouthful tasting like an old car. Jack spat it. The second squirt was much better.

  “You refill this?” he asked.

  “Monthly.” Liam smiled. “Where are we going?”

  “You should see your back. Dad’ll freak.”

  Liam and Dad had just had an animated discussion about Liam removing the rear mudguard on his new bike. For aerodynamics, Liam argued. When he’d next got home with a gash of mud from his arse up to his collar, Peter said that he wasn’t allowed to sit on the couch until he’d washed. Liam, who’d wanted to watch Gladiators without delay, chose to stand in the lounge room. Peter was fine with that, as was his parenting style for the most part—he was happy to let the boys make their own choices and live with the consequences. His favorite saying was That’s not a threat, boys, it’s a promise. An hour later, with Liam still standing by the coffee table, Dad wafted past and sank into the couch with an indulgent sigh: How are those aerodynamics treating you?

  “It was worth it,” Liam told Jack later that night, his pale face peeking out from the top bunk. “The bike goes wicked fast.”

  “Swim?” Liam looked up; the sun was harsh, though some clouds were brewing. “We’ll dry.”

  “We rode up the hill for nothing, then.”

  “Not for nothing!” Liam spread his arms out as if showing off a kingdom. “For glory! For fame! Swim?”

  “All the way down to the river?” Jack grimaced. “Nah.”

  “Maybe on the way back. Up?”

  “Up.”

  Jack dragged his bike off the dirt road and leaned it in the shrub. Liam, careful of his paint job, carefully wheeled his Giant over to a small clearing, where he propped the bike upright against a tree. It was a bush bash from there, the two kids in a twig-snapping cyclone along a lightly cleaved path. Liam, ahead, peeled back the larger branches and held them for Jack, who took this as a brotherly courtesy before being whopped in the face with spring-loaded foliage. Spitting gum leaves and spiderwebs, he’d give chase until both of them were doubled over, panting and laughing. The farther they went, the steeper it became, and soon they were scuttling, hands and knees slipping over shale, kicking the big rocks and watching them gather clumps of soil as they caused avalanches down the hill.

  Black under fingernails, they reached the top
. A rock formation loomed above them. The top had been carved by the wind and rain into lumps that resembled knuckles. The Fist. They called it that because, from a distance, it looked like a giant curled hand, a sentient mountain just awoken, punching the sky. In the middle, there was a large crack that you could squeeze into, as if the whole thing had been struck by an ax. No matter how dry the day, the crevasse was always water slicked, fronds sprouting from the sides. The outside of the Fist was marbled and smooth from thousands of years of rain; there was no way to climb it. But if you put your back against one side of the crevasse and the soles of your feet against the other, you could shuffle your way up to the top. And, once up there, it was so high and so clear. Rolling waves of greenery like coral, shoals of birds wafting on thermals, everything rippling together as if joined in nature’s slow, rhythmic current. The boys loved it. On top of the Fist, they punched the sky. Is this aerodynamics? Jack asked once, spreading his arms and letting the wind ripple his T-shirt in his armpits. Kind of, Liam replied.

  The Fist was massive, and with its imposing, black, slicked-rock walls, Peter would have been much firmer with his punishment than a no-sitting-in-the-lounge-room rule had he known they were going up there. He’d probably have taken their bikes away for good.

  Liam had already poked his head into the fissure, rubbed his hand on one wall, inspected the grime, and cleaned the moss on his shorts.

  “Looks okay,” he said.

  “Looks slippery,” said Jack.

  “Huh?”

  “Dad says it’s pretty dangerous.” Jack looked up; the tops of the trees were rustling. “It’s getting windier. Maybe we should come back tomorrow.”

  “You’re the one complaining about coming all the way up here for nothing.” Liam rolled his eyes.

  “I know.”

  “And now you don’t want to come up?”

  “Dunno.” Jack looked at the ground.

  “Well?”

  “Let’s just go swimming.”