Trust Me When I Lie

by Benjamin Stevenson

  “You scared?” Liam played his ace. The Achilles’ heel of any ten-year-old: You scared?

  “I’m not scared. Dad says—”

  “Dad says lots of things. That’s his job.”

  “I am not scared.” Jack braced his feet to shoulder width, trying to assert himself.

  “People aren’t scared of heights, Bro,” Liam said. “They’re scared of the ground.”

  “We should come back another day.”

  “Suit yourself. Stay here. I’ll be back.”

  “Wait—”

  But Liam had already levered himself into the gap. He dried his hands on his shirt. Then he shouldered the rock, twisting his weight until he had one foot up. Liam was tall; he’d always been good at this part. Jack squeezed his eyes tight. They felt hot. He wasn’t scared, he told himself. He’d just spied the clouds coming in from the right, and at the very least he didn’t want to ride home in the rain. And if it rained while they were up there, how would they get down? His eyes stung. He wasn’t scared. He opened his eyes.

  Liam was halfway up already, folded into the crease, soles flat on the wall, knees on his chin. He reached out a hand.

  “Last chance—you coming up or not?”

  Chapter 13

  Jack had been inside the Wade house before, to interview Vincent and Lauren during filming.

  But it still struck him with the same sense of déjà vu he’d felt the first time—a place he’d never been but knew intimately from poring over crime scene photographs. He knew the carpet in the bedroom had been torn up and replaced in the left corner years before. He knew that the cornice in the lounge room shielded a slight crack rippling through the drywall. The doorways he knew especially. His team had built a silicon hand and slammed it in every door, trying to match the finger wounds.

  Curtis led him into the sitting room, and Jack absentmindedly flicked on the light as he stepped over the threshold. Just like his familiarity with Alexis, knowing her from videotape, he knew where every light switch, every scuff was. He’d seen every inch of this house before. At 100x zoom, in 4K HD.

  But this time the walls didn’t glow blue with black light and the hallway was clean of plastic yellow numbers.

  Curtis shot him a look that implied he would be the one choosing whether the lights stayed on or off in his house, but he didn’t say anything. Jack sat on the frayed couch (he felt comfortable sitting on this couch—they’d scoured it for splatter) and Curtis shuffled off.

  Jack heard clinking from the kitchen. He took his time alone to look around. Off-white carpet. Dark wood furniture but nondescript. Mass made. Everything here was cheap. The couch he was sitting on had a broken beam, and the cushion threatened to swallow him. Jack shuffled forward, perched on the edge. The bottom of the couch had a thin red stain on the skirting. That had excited the police at first. Until they’d tested it: wine. With the winery placed as it was, between the Freemans’ and the town, it bore the brunt of the wine damage. The Wades had refused to replace the couch. They’d only replaced the carpet out of absolute necessity. Defiance, Jack figured. Curtis didn’t want to admit the damage he’d caused, even to himself.

  The house smelled clean, as if bleached. Scientific. It was almost unnaturally neat, a side effect of being pulled apart and put back together again by so many forensic teams. Residue of fingerprint dust and luminol was soaked into the walls and the carpet. All of this was long gone, of course. But four years hadn’t been enough to make it feel like a home again. Eliza might not have stained this house, but suspicion had.

  Curtis came back with a plastic tray laminated with watercolor drawings of cats. On the tray was a fancy, white teapot; two maroon, yellow, and blue mugs with football team logos; and a small saucer of milk. A collision of finery and practicality. Curtis was doing his best to put on a show of civility. He set the tray down on the table between them and lifted the teapot. It rattled in his hand. The courtesy was a thin shield for his discomfort, poking through in his shaking hand.

  “Tea?” Curtis said.

  It felt absurd. An ex-convicted killer who might have killed again, whose hands were supposedly more comfortable wrapped around a wine-stained ax handle, was instead holding a delicate teapot. A seriously messed up tea party. Jack managed a nod.

  “I reckon I owe you this conversation, Jack, but I don’t want to be pulled into anything here. You and me, we’re square,” Curtis said while pouring. The growl was familiar.

  Jack nodded again.

  “No cameras,” said Curtis.

  “This is for me.”

  “It always was.” Curtis added milk, dropped a teaspoon in the first mug with a clatter, and pushed it over to Jack. Both mugs were the same team, from Brisbane. The Wades used to live up north.

  “Do you miss it up there?”

  “Byron? Well, the weather, of course. But not the tourists. I’d say I like the peace here better, but”—he waved a hand—“you know.”

  “I’m surprised you came back.”

  “I’m not hiding.”

  “No. It might be easier to get away though.”

  “Now I’m getting framed for murders in Sydney too.” Curtis shrugged, blew on his tea as if discussing sport or weather. “So it doesn’t seem to matter where I go, really.”

  “You still think you’re getting framed?”

  “Well, I didn’t fucking do it. So yeah.”

  “Statistically, being framed for one murder is low enough odds,” Jack said, “but being framed for two?”

  “It’s the same guy. Just means they really hate my brother.” A voice came from the hallway. Lauren Wade had appeared, one leg crossed behind the other, leaning against the doorjamb. She had long, black hair; it fell across her flannel shirt. She wore jeans and no shoes. Despite the age gap, the family resemblance was there—the Wade charisma—but she was slight, long limbed. Her arms were folded. Watching the interview footage from the original investigation, Jack had felt sorry for her: a sixteen-year-old shouldn’t have to see such things. But she was different here, on the other side of womanhood, relaxed against the doorway, her voice firm and confident. She didn’t invite pity. “What’s more likely—that two people in this town are running around murdering people, or that it’s just the one killer and they’ve found themselves a good scapegoat?”

  “You don’t think it can be two killers?” Jack asked.

  Curtis was leaning forward, listening to his sister.

  “I think a copycat is pretty unlikely. Remember, too, they never caught the first guy.”

  They might’ve, thought Jack. He just poured me a cup of tea.

  “Statistically ridiculous.” Curtis echoed Lauren, mimicking her larger words. The word statistically, with its hard consonants, rattled through his teeth like a playing card in a bicycle wheel.

  “Like I said,” continued Lauren, “strikes me that it’s the same killer both times. So you just need to catch him.”

  “You’ve met?” said Curtis, apologetic as if introducing friends at a party. Lauren and Jack both nodded. “You should thank her, you know. She said you’d come here, said I should talk to you.”

  “Thank you,” Jack said to the doorway. Lauren just flicked her wrist. She’d said her piece. “Why wouldn’t you want to talk to me?” Jack turned back to Curtis. “I got you out.”

  “And you seem really happy about that. Fuck man, I feel like we’ve slept together.” He made to move quickly, an arm extended. Jack flinched from the incoming hit, but when he looked up Curtis had barely moved at all. He was meters away. “Could you be more uncomfortable?”

  “This is hard for me.”

  “I’ll bet. You knew Alexis, so it’s different now that you care about the case and not the money.”

  “It was never about the money. You’re right though. It does feel…different.”

  “Did you fuck h
er?”

  “Curtis,” Lauren admonished from the doorway.

  “It’s okay,” Jack said. “No. We were more colleagues than friends, actually.”

  “I ain’t a psychologist,” said Curtis, “but you’ve come all the way out here to try and solve the murder of a woman you barely knew. The only person who’d do that is one that feels responsible for getting her killed. Or one who’s fucked her, depending on the pussy.”

  Jack didn’t respond. He gripped his mug tightly, letting it warm his hands. He felt light-headed, hungry, not up to a verbal sparring match. Sometimes his hunger made him sharp, and sometimes, like now, it just made him tired. He regretted not eating that expensive banana. Curtis reclined in his chair. Barely perceptibly, Lauren shook her head. If Curtis was telling the truth, and she’d insisted he let Jack in, she was disappointed in the direction the conversation was going. What did she have to gain from Curtis talking to Jack? That was a better way of looking at the room. What did everyone have to gain here? Curtis was, as always, petitioning his innocence. But Lauren? She didn’t buy the copycat theory. If she thought it was a serial killer…was she here because she was afraid?

  “You’re right, Curtis.” Perhaps some slack in Curtis’s direction might loosen his tongue. “That’s why I’m here. I think that by making my show, I might have gotten her killed.”

  “Damn fucking right you did!” Curtis clapped his hands, then saw Jack’s expression. “Not like that, you idiot. I already told you I didn’t kill her. Copycat or serial killer, right? Well, how do you think they chose their newest victim? Your TV show. Credits play like a menu.”

  Jack hadn’t thought of that—that the show might have been the catalyst. There had been rabid fans. There were even T-shirts: TEAM CURTIS was black with white letters; TEAM ELIZA was the inverse. (“People just like to rally,” Peter said once, perusing the paper, which had a photo of the shirts clustered outside the court. “Doesn’t matter what the sides are.”) What if it was a fan so avidly on Team Eliza that they’d taken it on themselves to right some wrongs? And who better a target than the head of the defense? Apart from Curtis himself, he supposed. He thought about the pentagram sprayed on Ted Piper’s office doors, Alexis’s office closing, and reminded himself to check with both their offices for threats too. Curtis had a point; Jack had brought a whole raft of people into the public eye for scrutiny. Jack’s thoughts immediately went to Eliza’s parents, but he knew they were still in England—as sensationalist as it would be to have two seventy-year-olds hop on a plane to Sydney to commit a murder. People like to rally, Peter had said. But Jack disagreed: people loved to hate. The pleasure of choosing a side was only so you could hate the other one.

  “You think?” was all Jack could say to Curtis.

  “Fuckin’ buffet.”

  Jack knew to take Curtis’s theory with a grain of salt. As in prison, where Curtis had pointed the finger at Andrew Freeman over and over, his ideas had a familiar theme: anyone but me. It was the same as his default it-must-be-planted response when confronted with any physical evidence. A response that, Jack had read, was on the rise thanks to documentaries like his. Every criminal was now a victim of a huge conspiracy. You see, someone planted the knife in her, Your Honor.

  Jack had to change tack. “Tell me about Andrew Freeman.”

  “What about him?”

  “He set you up the first time.”

  “This town set me up the first time.” Curtis’s voice pitched slightly, and Jack knew he’d hit the one thing that always got him talking: Andrew Freeman.

  “Help me understand why.”

  “We never fit in here.” Curtis stood up, walked to the window, pulled the curtain back. Across the vineyard, thin ice glittered on the vines. Behind it was the steep hillside and, on top, the Freemans’ two imposing cylindrical silos. “Lauren and me. Our father. Apparently, you’ve got to be born into wine—you know that?” Jack didn’t, but he nodded. “We never came from money, let alone grapes. But when our old place sold up, we thought we’d make the change. We had enough to buy outright, so we moved here and built the restaurant.”

  Jack had heard this before, but he was content to let Curtis talk. Enough to buy outright. Curtis was understating it. A conglomerate had bought out his family’s Byron Bay land to build a resort. The true sale price was undisclosed, though Jack had propagated in his show that it had been astronomical. That was close to the truth. The Wades had lived on a secluded property and were hardscrabble battlers; they got by on odds and ends—gardening, housework—when they needed a bit of cash. But their land, passed down through the generations, meant they didn’t need to set their sights further. And then, literally overnight, because of luck and location, they were millionaires. It was all part of Jack’s narrative—creating the rift between Birravale and the Wades, the rich, cashed-up blow-ins who didn’t deserve respect. Once you force people to pick sides, you have hate. Once you have hate, you have motive. Jack created that. And it worked, despite being mostly bullshit. The problem was, Curtis clearly still believed it.

  Visually, it worked in the show’s favor too. The crime scene photos from inside this house of millionaires—with their cheap furniture and discolored carpets—seemed abnormal. Why spend so much money on the outside of your house and none inside? Something is wrong here, it seemed to say.

  “I was looking forward to it, moving here. We thought it would be fun, or interesting at the very least,” said Lauren. “Fifty percent success rate on that, I’d say. Hasn’t been much fun, but it’s sure been interesting.”

  “Elitist pricks,” muttered Curtis, closing the curtain.

  “Honestly, like a bunch of teenage girls,” Lauren added. “That animosity was there before Curtis chopped open the silos.”

  “They deserved it. Broke my windows.”

  Tacky. What the B and B matriarch had said rang in Jack’s head. The town hated the new restaurant because it was glossy, expensive, and, worst of all, new. Everything Birravale wasn’t. Someone had smashed Curtis’s restaurant windows, and so he’d gone and flooded their town with their own wine. Petty acts of escalating revenge. But how does that end in two dead women?

  “Okay, so I see the friction there, I do. But, honestly. Two women are dead. This isn’t some schoolyard rivalry. I’m just trying to understand why, if they hate you so much, they’d go to such lengths to frame you for not one, but two murders? Innocent women.”

  Curtis flinched. There was something. Even dead, he hadn’t forgiven what he saw as Alexis’s incompetent defense. He hated her. Maybe he was glad she was dead, even if he didn’t kill her.

  A tsk from the doorway.

  “What?” snapped Curtis. He turned back to Jack: “Four years.” As if that was an explanation.

  “My point is,” Jack said, “why didn’t Andrew just lead them here with pitchforks and torches. If murder is on the cards, why not just—”

  “Because they’re cowards,” said Curtis, and Jack was slightly surprised by how much he seemed to believe it. Jack blinked away his confusion. At the moment, both of them knew Jack was accusing Curtis of murder, yet here they were, talking around it, presumably for Lauren’s benefit. She was still there, casually leaning against the door. Not quite casual, Jack realized. Coiled. It was her eyes that gave her away—scrutinizing the room. Not casual at all but protecting her brother.

  Blocking the doorway too. Jack tried to ignore that. “Curtis, maybe Lauren should leave us in private?” said Jack.

  “She’ll stay. You think I killed them. She knows that, don’t ya, Sis?” Lauren nodded. “We can keep talking. It’s okay.”

  It was then that Jack remembered he’d actually told Curtis he had an extra piece of evidence. Curtis didn’t know what it was, or whether it was even incriminating, but was it why he’d let Jack into his home? Jack was now very aware of Lauren blocking the doorway.

  “Why are yo
u really here, Jack? The cops have already been through.” Curtis held out his wrists. “No cuffs. I’m a free man, and there’s no reason to charge me. I am”—he sounded the word out into syllables—“co-op-er-at-ing.”

  “I just—” he started, but Curtis held up a finger.

  “You’re here because you want me to have killed her. Because then it makes it all about you. First thing you did when you got here, said you think you’re responsible. But if I didn’t do it, and I didn’t, then it’s not about you anymore, is it?”

  “You should go,” said Lauren.

  “You invited him. He stays.” Curtis turned back to Jack. “I want you to face up to me, Jack. I think you’re still on my side a little bit. The cops saw I’m innocent straightaway. Yeah, I got motive. Help me out here. Why did I, hypothetically, kill Alexis?”

  Jack stared at his hands. Answered quietly.

  “Can’t hear you?”

  “Jail,” Jack muttered.

  “Huh?” Curtis had heard it that time, Jack was sure, but he wanted dominance. Prison tactics. Be the big dog.

  “Jail. You blame her for sending you there.”

  “You’re goddamn right I do. Oh…” He tapped a finger to his lips, his voice lilting with a high, mocking tone. “Hang on! I’m so angry about getting sent to jail for four years that I publicly murder my lawyer and arrange her body as a calling card, pointing straight back to me! Leading inevitably to… Come on, Jack, you know this one.”

  “More jail time,” Jack conceded. The motive was circuitous. It didn’t stack up. Then again, since when was Curtis strictly logical? The right kind of outburst…

  “Even the cops knew that, and that’s why I’m not in a cell. Stupidest fucking murderer out there. You think you’re all wrapped up in guilt she died, but you’re all wrapped up in this.” He reached over and flicked Jack on the forehead. His finger was sweaty, left a bead on Jack’s brow. Jack didn’t rub it away. Prison tactics. Don’t give in. “Bashed her head in too—they tell you that?”

  Jack shook his head. He hadn’t known the cause of death; he’d thought she’d been strangled.