Trust Me When I Lie

by Benjamin Stevenson

  It made sense. This was what Jack did.

  Did.

  Not anymore.

  That part of him was emptied out and left a shell in a bathroom in Birravale.

  “Back. The. Fuck. Off.”

  Ted looked surprised. Squinted. Thinking. Calculating how hard he had to push Jack to get him over the barrier.

  “Curtis is dead,” Jack said, “and I got him out of jail. And I was wrong. It’s not that I didn’t see it. It’s that I didn’t want to see it.”

  Ted nodded cautiously.

  “I know Curtis killed Eliza; I’ve known the whole time, but I was too arrogant to accept it,” Jack continued.

  Tension seemed to slide out of Ted’s shoulders and dribble down to his fingertips—pleased that Jack had come around.

  Then Jack said, “But I also know he didn’t kill Alexis.”

  For the first time, Ted looked like he understood. “I kind of hoped you’d figure it out,” he said, took a breath to say something else. Then a new voice echoed through the concrete forest.

  “Hey!”

  Lauren. From the stairwell. And then she was running. Things would happen quickly now. Ted saw her, then whipped back to Jack. His expression went from one of negotiation to one of contempt. His chin drawn up in a snarl. But the words, when he spoke, weren’t barked. They were quiet, accepting. Defeated.

  “You know.”

  Jack nodded.

  “I know,” Jack said, holding the ax out in front of him. Come on, Lauren, he willed. Run faster. Get there. “We know everything. And now we have the ax, we’ve got everything we need.”

  Jack saw something in Ted’s eyes. That he knew he was trapped. That this was the end of it for him. Fear.

  Then he moved, faster than Jack was expecting. He grabbed the head of the ax and twisted it. Jack felt it turn, useless in his sweaty palms. He pulled back. A tug-of-war over the ax. Ted had a grip on the metal head, fingers curled over the silver blade. Jack gripped the handle tighter. But his palms were sliding over the wood. Splinters bristled into his fingers. Ted was pulling hard. Jack was running out of handle. He jabbed it twice. Pushed Ted’s palms back into his chest. Then he had an idea. He dropped to his knees and jabbed again. The height differential and the unexpected lack of tension combined to jolt Ted forward and, when his elbows folded, Jack pushed upward and the ax head clocked him under the jaw. Ted stumbled sideways, into the car.

  Jack stood. Ted grappled with the flank of the car, holding himself up. Hurry, Lauren. Ted’s scrabbling hands found what he was looking for. He yanked the handle and swung open the door. Then he leaned back and kicked it. The door cleaved the two of them apart, pushing Jack backward. In surprise, he dropped the ax. Ted was on him. Shouldering him off the weapon like he was over the top of a football. Jack reeled into the car. Took a second. Looked up just in time to see the silver head of the ax soaring toward him. Jack recoiled, forearm on his brow. Ducked. He felt air rush over his head. Heard a loud shattering. Flecks of glass tinkled on his head. He kept moving backward. He looked up. The ax was swinging again, this time lower. Jack scooted backward on his bum. Palms flat behind him. The ax wrenched into the door in front of him. Ted set to levering it free, a squeal of metal, a long gash in the panel. Ted straightened, took a step sideways.

  Jack realized in horror what was going to happen next.

  Ted had repositioned himself so Jack was in between him and the car, on the ground. And Ted had given up swinging sideways. He was swinging downward. Jack might get his head out of the way, but he couldn’t move his whole body. He had nowhere to go. Ted raised the ax. Jack raised his arms together in a cross above his head, as if his thin wrists offered much defense.

  Then Ted was thrown off balance. Lauren, barging into the side of him. She grappled, trying to pin Ted against the car. The ax clattered onto the concrete. Jack scrambled to his feet. Grabbed at parts of Ted. Whatever he could. It was a messy fight. Hands. Fists. Hair. Everything a flurry. Then he was pushed, hard, and felt the concrete break his fall. He saw Lauren struggling, also knocked down. Ted was roaring with pain, clutching at his jaw. She must have hit him. Lauren, bent over, facing away from the fight. Ted lunged at her. Then Lauren pulled herself back up, pivoted her whole body, and Jack realized why she’d been stooped over.

  She was picking up the ax.

  She swung it with all her strength. Like the sword of a warrior, gaining momentum from the pirouette of her swing. There was no grace or aim; she was swinging blindly and hoping.

  The ax hit Ted in the stomach with a wet thuck.

  Lauren’s hand went straight over her mouth. She let go of the handle, which stayed erect in the air. Ted clutched at his gut with both hands, holding the steel head in place. As if it might help keep his guts inside. For a second, there was no blood. Then it started pulsing through his folded hands. Dripping from his knuckles. Thick, red stars on the concrete. Spilt wine. He breathed out heavily through his nose, blinking incessantly, as if trying to capture some final moments, his eyes a camera with a jacked-up shutter speed. He took two steps backward.

  Then another, slightly wobbling, step backward.

  Jack was up and over to him quickly, to stop what was about to happen, but Ted had backed up too far. He backed into the railing, lost his balance, and started to tip. Jack wasn’t there in time. Ted let go of the ax head just long enough to reach out to Jack’s extended arm, but Jack felt nothing but the feather of his fingertips.

  Ted toppled backward. Into the air. Into nothing. He dropped out of sight.

  Jack realized he was crying.

  They may as well have been Liam’s fingers, scarred as they were into him. He looked down at the inside of his wrist: a smear of blood, four streaked lines. He’d almost had him.

  From below, someone screamed.

  S01E07

  Mid-Credits Sequence

  Exhibit A:

  Size 9 women’s running shoe. ASICS branding. Pink, silver trim. Confirmed to belong to Eliza Dacey, victim in the State of New South Wales v. Curtis Wade murder trial, 2014, and retrial 2018. The defendant is accused of harboring this evidence which resulted in the miscarriage of justice against Curtis Wade. Indirectly, this resulted in the death of Alexis White.

  Handwritten Note: Don’t see accessory in the White murder playing out here without intent. Obstruction to a murder investigation is sufficient for prosecution’s aims. GH

  Epilogue

  February

  The meals come on a schedule here. Can’t unscrew these doors.

  The prosecution had taken it fairly easy. It had been a challenge to find someone willing to represent him, given the lawyers he knew had both ended up dead, after all. The man who’d come on board, Greg Hanson, had been thorough if unremarkable. He had proposed that Jack’s intent, while criminal in nature, couldn’t be tied to the new murder, and the court had accepted this. Perhaps it was just too embarrassing to drag it out. Ted’s death was ruled self-defense, muttered deservedly, as Lauren had taken the stand and admitted to swinging the blow that killed him. Ted’s guilt in Alexis’s death helped both their cases. The evidence against him mostly in the back of his car. Not only the ax, but files not unlike Jack’s own, all on Alexis: building his own narrative. He’d also told Vanessa he had something big—he’d promised her an exclusive next week. He would have been planning on unveiling the ax on her show, Jack realized in retrospect. That was why he’d brought it to the station. But he’d realized at the last minute, maybe when he’d heard Curtis had been killed, as he’d said to Jack: The ax, it’s not enough. He was waiting on the final pieces to frame Curtis, which was why he’d tried to talk Jack into helping him. So justice was served for Alexis in a way. Case closed. It’s easy to try the dead.

  Jack took it on the nose. Two years. Obstruction of justice. Interference with a murder investigation.

  He didn’
t mind it. The other prisoners looked up to him. Minimum security, so not in with the James Harrisons of the world. In fact, James had to be taken to a different prison entirely; he’d been moved to Goulburn. But the inmates still looked at Jack as the ear they needed.

  The food wasn’t so bad inside either. It was on a schedule, so that helped, just like the hospital. And food was like a gift in here—to spurn it made you look ungrateful. It could get you offside. Besides, keeping people up at night was frowned upon. The echo of vomiting in his single silver toilet, the smell—nothing there to ingratiate himself with his fellow inmates. He wasn’t better—you’re never better—but the regime had unexpected positives. He’d even put on a little bit of weight, the green tracksuit hanging off him less than when he came in.

  The acrobat was still inside him. He always would be. But some days—often the days Peter visited, his Skype set up to a corresponding iPad in Liam’s room—the tightrope became a plank. The jester still wobbled, arms out, occasionally. But everyone wobbles.

  Jack was sitting at a steel table. It was a private room. Unlike James Harrison, he didn’t have cuffs threaded through an eye-ring in the center. Small privileges from the guards—nothing said, and not enough favor to piss off other inmates—but they nudged him with just enough kindness, in case he went on to make another TV show. The network had done season 2 without him. They’d gotten a lot of the facts wrong. Implied he and Lauren had slept together. That didn’t matter; it had been a blockbuster smash.

  These days, Jack produced a small underground podcast through the prison’s media facilities. Someone had arranged for him to have a handheld recorder. The premise was simple: he talked to the inmates. He only asked questions though. He didn’t edit it either; his interference limited to hitting Play and Upload. He let them tell their own story, didn’t tell it for them. The podcast was doing okay, he’d heard. But he didn’t check the download charts. He refused sponsorship, advertising money, though he’d had plenty of offers. Jack enjoyed making it, just for him. If people listened, that was a bonus.

  The door opened. His visitor was here.

  Lauren had come to see him a few times. She’d coped with all the death and pain admirably, rarely letting the trauma show in her. The whole of her adolescence had been bundled up in murder, and with those final two deaths, she was able to start afresh. It had been a few months since her last visit though. She sat across from him, tepid coffee in front of her. Non-scalding. He might get some favors, but he was still a criminal.

  “Andrew’s trial is next week,” she said.

  Andrew’s trial had taken longer than Jack’s because, in the end, none of the lawyers could agree on where the criminal charges lay for maybe seeing a murderer not exactly commit a crime. And Andrew’s confession to Jack was all they had, and Jack wasn’t seen as the most reliable witness this time around. Andrew’s version of events was much different, veering away from self-incrimination: the words out of his mouth were as built as his wine.

  But the upcoming trial had gripped the nation more than even the murders had, it seemed. Wine fraud captured the minds of the masses and the media in a way that two dead, fingerless women couldn’t even come close to. Easier to stomach, a 6:30 p.m. time slot. Well, said Lauren the last time she was in to visit, people love to watch a rich bastard burn. As Alexis had said, it was about what we were comfortable rebelling against. In this new age where social justice and social media intertwined, two dead women was horrible, sure. But fucking with a bottle of wine? That was a personal affront to every hardworking Australian! And that was great TV.

  Some might think it lucky that Andrew had stayed out on bail so long until the trial, but Jack thought Andrew would probably be willing his sentence forward. He’d treasure the relative safety of a prison cell. He’d ripped off some rich, powerful people.

  “And Sarah?” Jack said.

  “She turned a lot over to them. She’ll testify, I guess. I think a heavy fine rather than jail time awaits her, personally. As for the business…” She slid a finger across her throat. “Birravale Creek Winery isn’t a creek; it’s a dry riverbed now. They’re bankrupt. I think she’s started making soap.”

  “Soap?”

  “Artisan stuff. Platypus Soap, she’s calling it, or something.”

  He chuckled to himself. “Landmark, plant, or animal.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing. Soap maker’s joke.”

  “Okay.”

  “Lauren.” Jack leaned forward, the steel of the table cool against his wrists. “I’ve got a lot of time in here, and I still can’t get one thing clear. Andrew wouldn’t admit what he told me, up on top of his wine silo, to anyone else.”

  Lauren shrugged.

  “And here I sit now. Because I grabbed that shoe. All because Andrew Freeman fetched it and set a trail of bread crumbs for me to follow, to clear his conscience. But now he won’t talk about it.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “It’s incongruous.”

  “You’re starting to sound like my brother. What are you implying?”

  “Andrew knew that Curtis killed Eliza, but he never knew where she was. Just like everyone else, he thought that the cellar was filled with concrete. So how did he even get the shoe? There’s only one answer: he didn’t. You put it there, didn’t you? Her shoe?”

  She shifted.

  “You knew I had it. That’s why you kept asking me if I’d told you everything. You were the one pointing me toward everything that suggested Curtis’s guilt. Devil’s advocate, you said. But we were on the same team, and you were trying to guide me without alienating your family? Is that right? Because when you told Andrew Freeman that you heard footsteps the night Eliza was found, you had to take it back. Even though you did actually believe it. But I understand—you were sixteen, and maybe your father convinced you that you’d done something bad, made you doubt yourself. And then the show. It would have started to make you nervous. You’re older, a woman now, and you saw a chance to correct your mistake. You wanted to make sure he didn’t—that he couldn’t—get out. And you gave me that option. The shoe wasn’t Andrew’s confession; it was yours. And I fucked it up for you. I’m sorry.”

  There was a long pause. The sound of the prison’s everyday filtered through the air, through the door. Prisons are like ships; they groan and they rattle.

  “Yes,” she said, “I heard him get up. In the middle of the night.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “After all this, you still don’t know how to listen. I know that he got up that night.”

  The way she said it again—I know—with such sincerity. Jack remembered her standing in her driveway, neck tilted upward at a passing cloud. We both want the same thing, you know? she’d said. I want the world to see what really happened to Eliza too.

  She knew.

  “That night, I think I finally understood that what Curtis was doing to me was wrong,” she said. “And I just knew that when he got up, that when he went down to the restaurant…I knew what he’d do. And I finally summoned the courage to tell Andrew the truth. Enough to get rid of him.”

  Partners, Curtis had chuckled, sure.

  And Jack suddenly knew why Curtis had killed Eliza. He had overheard her leaving the voicemail to Sam Culver, but he’d misinterpreted it. He’d heard her trying to sell a story to a tabloid. Something weird was going on in town. And she thought it might make some trashy news. And Curtis had thought she was talking about something else. Not wine.

  Her recoiling at Curtis’s touch on the porch, the night they’d traced Eliza’s steps. Something she said in Sydney, leafing through files: Dad let Curtis get away with anything.

  “Oh, Lauren—”

  Andrew, confessing on top of the silo: Someone had been in her room. A boy. She knew Curtis got up in the night, because he was in the bed with her.

  La
uren averted her eyes. Talked at the ground.

  “I thought I was ready. I wasn’t. I realized I would have to be the central witness in a major murder trial. I’d be questioned on the stand, and I’d have to tell the truth. There might be TV cameras. And I was ashamed. I was young, and it had been so long, and you feel like it’s your fault. And I didn’t want the world to see me like that. So I retracted my testimony.”

  “She didn’t get out of the hatch twice, did she?”

  Lauren shook her head.

  “Who do you think opened the door?” she said. “I swear, I tried to help her. Then he got her, and after that is when she found the hatch in the roof. If she’d just made it to the road… Why do you think he had a bed down there in the first place, Jack? Why? Fuck. You’re only the second person I’ve ever told this to.” She wiped her nose.

  The second person. Eliza? He didn’t have the heart to kill her, but he couldn’t let her go either. Until he had to. This was about keeping his abuse a secret.

  In a distant echo in Jack’s mind, he was sitting on the floor of the cellar. Two muffled gunshots. One in panic, but why the second? She’d finally stood up to her abuser. Blood dripping through the ceiling.

  Lauren must have been terrified, watching the show, that public opinion was changing. She couldn’t go to the police or confess that she knew about the cellar, or any of it, without revealing her shame. She’d tried to do it all without confessing. She’d tried to help Eliza escape on her own. She’d left Jack the shoe to find. Sitting on Jack’s own bed, she’d handed him the blueprints that showed where the old cellar was, begged him to look closely. With Curtis in jail, she was, at least, safe.

  “You let him out,” Lauren breathed. Tears tracked her cheeks. “None of this had to happen.” Such regret there. Then she stood. “I have to go.”

  “Lauren, wait.”

  “Why? I’ve told you enough.”