Sliver of Truth rj-2

by Lisa Unger

  “So the FBI has been watching me since then, thinking if he was alive, if he would contact anyone, it would be me? Love, right?”

  He nodded. “Has he tried to reach you, Ms. Jones?”

  “Who?” I asked obtusely.

  “Max Smiley,” he said impatiently. “Your uncle, your father, whoever the hell he is to you.”

  “No,” I said, almost yelling.

  “There was an overseas call to your number the night before last at around three-thirty A.M.,” he said sternly, leaning into me.

  I remembered the call. Had forgotten about it until then.

  “There was no one on the line,” I said more softly. “I mean, whoever it was, they didn’t say anything. I thought it was Ace.”

  He looked at me hard, as if he were trying to see a lie in my eyes.

  “If you’re monitoring my calls, then you know I’m telling the truth.”

  “We’re not monitoring your calls,” he said, though I’m not sure why he’d think I’d believe him. “I subpoenaed your phone records this morning, trying to figure out why you went to Detroit.”

  “Can you do that?” I asked, indignant. “I haven’t broken any laws.”

  “If I thought you were aiding and abetting a wanted man, certainly, I could listen to your calls, have someone on you twenty-four seven.”

  “That’s a lot of time and money for someone like Max. Meanwhile, I still don’t get what this has to do with your missing couple.”

  Like the last time we’d met, he had a dark shadow of stubble on his jaw. I wondered if it was a look he was cultivating, something to make him look older, possibly unruly. He wasn’t like any of the other FBI agents I’d ever met. All of them had been stiff and clean-shaven, good boys with spotless records—or maybe that was just their shtick. Dylan Grace seemed lawless.

  “I mean I really don’t get it,” I said when he remained silent. “You see my name in a notebook belonging to this missing writer, right? So instead of calling me and interviewing me, you make some arrangement with my photo lab to steal my pictures, then you accost me on the street and haul me in? It seems like you overreacted a little. I was a perfectly logical person for her to call—I’m practically the poster child for Project Rescue.”

  He didn’t say anything, just kept those eyes on me.

  “Okay, so there’s more to it,” I said after a moment of the two of us staring at each other. I thought about it a few seconds longer. “You plugged my name into whatever computers you have over there and you found out I was already under surveillance.”

  He still didn’t say anything. It was pretty annoying.

  “That’s right,” I said as he stood up and moved toward the door. “You get to ask all the questions. What is it you want from me?” I asked.

  He opened the door. “Good night, Ms. Jones,” he said. “Sorry to have bothered you. I’ll be in touch.”

  “Just tell me one thing,” I said, getting up and following him out into the hallway. “That overseas call? Where did it come from?”

  “Why do you want to know?” he said, turning around.

  “Just curious,” I said. “Maybe it was someone I know. You know, someone innocent.”

  He considered it for a minute. Then: “London,” he said. “The call came from London. Know anybody there?”

  I shrugged. “I guess not.”

  After he left I tried to figure out what he’d gained by our conversation, and I couldn’t come up with anything. I’d received quite a bit of information, however. For the rest of the evening, I felt as if I’d gotten one over on Agent Grace. I wouldn’t figure out until later that he’d been the one to get over on me. He’d pressed all my buttons. Wind her up and watch her go.

  ABOUT AN HOUR later as I lay on the couch watching a rerun of Gilligan’s Island, trying and failing to block out for a while everything that had happened and everything I had learned, I heard the key in the lock and Jake walked in. He wore a black wool coat over a gray V-neck cashmere sweater I had given him and a pair of Levi’s I think he’s had for ten years. He spotted me on the couch and moved toward me. I sat up and then went to him, let him take me into his arms. He held me hard, put his mouth to my hair. I pulled off his coat and he let it drop to the floor as he pressed his mouth to mine. The only feeling I had in my heart was desperation, this desperate need to connect to someone, to know someone well. I let him back me into the bedroom, let him lift my sweater over my head and watched as he lifted his off as well. I put my face to his chest and felt the silky hardness of his abs and chest.

  “Are you okay?” he asked as he crawled on top of me on the bed, the frame creaking lightly beneath us. I could hear the television in the other room, see its blue flicker. I felt the heat of his body, watched his muscles flex and relax as he moved. I could smell the scent of his skin.

  “Yes,” I breathed, putting my hands to his face. I felt the smoothness of his clean-shaven jaw, the ridges of his cheekbones. Everything about his face was so beautiful to me; when I looked into his green eyes, I could see his goodness, his strength. I loved him so much. It didn’t change all the reasons we couldn’t be together, but it kept me returning to his body, kept my skin seeking his skin over and over again in the sad dance we did.

  The light coming from the doorway cast our shadows huge on the far wall, as the rest of the clothing that separated our flesh found its way to the floor. I let him take me hard, felt the need of his body and the greater need within him rocket through me, recognized the same need within myself. The song says that love is not enough (and we all know how true that is), but in that moment, in the electric pleasure of our lovemaking, in the sating of that awful need, I could almost believe it was enough and more.

  “I WENT TO Detroit,” I said to him as he lay beside me, hand on my belly. “I talked to Nick Smiley.”

  He didn’t seem surprised. Nothing I ever did seemed to surprise him. It was as if he’d already read the script of my life and was just waiting for events to unfold.

  “Did he talk to you?” he asked, pushing himself up on his elbow. He seemed to be looking at a spot behind me somewhere.

  “He did,” I answered.

  “He’s crazy, you know,” Jake said after a minute. “Like clinically. Been in and out of psychiatric hospitals, has taken lithium for most of his adult life.”

  I kept looking at his face; it seemed very still. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying forget about all of this,” he said with a sigh, finally meeting my eyes. “You said last night that you wanted to move on. Why don’t you? I’m going to try to move on, too.”

  “But the medical examiner’s report and Myra Lyall’s disappearance…” I said, incredulous, thinking of all the meticulous and obsessive notes in that file.

  He nodded. “That ME was incompetent; made numerous mistakes throughout his career. Myra Lyall…no one has ever found anything to link her disappearance to any of the stories she was working on. Her landlord has strong connections to the Albanian mob. He’s going to get four times what they were paying for that apartment—these days that’s as good a motive as any.”

  I didn’t say anything, just watched his face. There was something strained and fatigued about his expression, something about the corners of his mouth, the lids of his eyes. “The NYPD is looking at the landlord now,” he said. “They’ve moved away from the stories she was working on.”

  “This is an FBI case,” I said, sitting up and pulling the sheet with me. “This is why they yanked me in.”

  “Well, the FBI stuck their nose in when the NYPD found the Project Rescue connection, and maybe they’re working their own angles, still looking for someone to hang, like you said. But I know the cop that’s working the case, and he says they’re looking hard at the landlord.”

  “The ME who processed Max’s body was murdered,” I said. He didn’t meet my eyes; a muscle worked in his jaw.

  “He had a car accident.”

  “The brake lines were cut.
”

  Jake issued a little laugh. “That’s not a very effective way to kill someone. Besides, a very cold brake line could snap cleanly enough to look like a cut.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even know if that was true or not.

  “I mean, it leaves a lot up to chance,” he went on in the silence. “There’s no guarantee that a car accident would be fatal.”

  I shrugged. This was such a one-eighty, such a complete role reversal from his usual stance about this topic, that I was caught off guard, didn’t know what to say.

  “If you really want someone dead, you shoot him,” he said. “Even if you want it to look like an accident, you throw him off a building or push him in front of a train. Brake lines? If they’re cut, the fluid leaks out and eventually they stop working, but you’d never know exactly when. It’s unreliable.”

  “You seem to have given this a lot of thought.”

  He sighed again and lay down on his back, put his hands behind his head.

  “And those articles from the London Times and the BBC online,” I said. “What does any of that have to do with Max?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I don’t know. I was just searching the Web for information on missing children, looking for leads, possible connections to Project Rescue. I was casting, Ridley. Looking to see if what we know is just a small piece in a bigger puzzle.”

  “And?”

  “And you know what? It isn’t. And you know what else? When I thought about those articles, it gave me some perspective. The things that happened to me, okay, they were bad. But not as bad as what happened to the girls and the kids in those articles. I’m still here. We’re still here.”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t believe my ears.

  “You were really upset last night,” he said to the ceiling. “After you left, I realized for the first time how much I’d been hurting you, how I was keeping you locked in this thing. Instead of looking for reasons to keep digging, I tried to look for reasons not to. And these are the things I came up with. Max is dead—you’re sure of this. No one is going to pay for Project Rescue. It’s unfair, it’s unjust, but it’s not for me to bring justice. I’m going to ruin what’s left of my life with this.” He turned to look at me. “And I’m going to lose you, if I haven’t already.”

  It sounded so good, exactly what I had wanted to hear from Jake for so long. I could almost sink into it and believe we would be okay after all.

  Whether he was trying to protect me from something that he had learned, or trying to find a way to let me off the hook once and for all, or trying to fix our broken relationship, I didn’t know. But I knew with a stone-cold certainty that he was lying. I knew then, too, that he’d never give up looking for what he thought was justice until he found it or until it killed him. I wasn’t sure he cared which.

  “Have I?” he said, sitting up and pulling me to him. “Have I lost you?”

  I wrapped my arms around him and let him hold me tight. “I don’t know, Jake. I really don’t.” I was a liar, too. Liars in love.

  WHEN I WOKE up in the morning, Jake was gone. There was a note on his pillow: Had to go. I truly love you, Ridley. We’ll talk later. Something about the note and his scrawl on the piece of paper that he’d taken from my desk chilled me.

  When I walked into the kitchen, I saw without surprise that his file was gone.

  7

  You’ve probably noticed that I don’t have any friends. It wasn’t always that way. I had many friends in high school. In college I knew lots of people, got along well with my roommates, had a few boyfriends. I had a handful of close female friends—you know, the kind of people you spend all night talking to, eating tubs of frozen yogurt with, reading one another’s tarot cards. But I’m not sure I ever spilled my guts the way they did. I didn’t have a whole lot of angst when it came to boys. To be honest, I think I caused more heartbreak than I endured. At that time, I didn’t really have any pain relating to my family, except for Ace, and that was a secret I guarded carefully. Maybe I held back, didn’t give as much of myself as I could have. Maybe that’s why those relationships fell away over the years.

  I did keep in touch with a few people I knew after college as we all moved from our bohemian academic existence into the workforce. There was Julia, a tough-talking, martial-arts-studying graphic artist; Will, my guitar-playing friend and sometimes lover; Amy, a perky, sunny person who went into publishing. But one by one, these relationships started to fall away. Julia and I seemed to be in some kind of competition that neither of us could ever win. Will always wanted more from me than I wanted to give. And Amy disappeared into a relationship with an overbearing Italian guy and seemed to just stop showing up.

  There were other reasons, too, why I seem not to have any enduring friendships. Of course, Ace has always taken a lot of my energy. I’ve always been unusually close to my father, precluding the need for a confidant. Then there were my years with Zack, who wasn’t a very social person; we stayed in a lot. Then there was the whole Project Rescue thing, then Jake. Don’t get me wrong; I have plenty of acquaintances, colleagues. I get invited to lots of parties—professional parties, that is. But as for real friends, friends of my heart? I guess there’s no one but Jake and my father, and obviously those relationships were seriously challenged.

  But maybe it isn’t any of these things, these external reasons. Maybe it’s me, the writer in me who always stands just apart, observing. In enough to belong, out enough to really see. Maybe people sense that about me, sense the distance I unconsciously keep. I don’t know. Whatever the reason, I find myself alone a lot of the time these days.

  I was thinking about this because I had to ask myself why I did what I did next. My guess: I had no place else to turn, no one with whom to talk all this out, no one to advise me against my next action.

  It was cold as I sat on the porch. I pushed myself back and forth on the wooden swing that hung from the roof and watched some kids play kickball on the street. They were all pink-faced and yelling, mostly boys with a couple of girls hanging tough. It was a pretty rough game—some pushing, a couple of trips to the concrete, some tears, but nothing too awful. I remembered those street games when I was a kid. There was something about that combination of excitement and physical exertion, some kind of electric charge that you don’t get much as an adult. Now everything that feels that good comes with some sort of baggage to weigh it down.

  I could see my breath cloud and my feet were numb. I’d waited a couple of hours, was prepared to wait longer if necessary. As the sun started to set, I saw her get off a bus on the corner and walk toward me. She looked thin and hunched over in a plain wool coat and a blue woolen hat. She carried grocery bags, her eyes on the sidewalk as she approached her house. At the gate, she paused, looked up at me. She shook her head.

  “I can’t talk to you,” she said. “You know that.”

  “The investigation’s over. You can talk if you want to.”

  She put down her groceries and unlatched the gate, walked up the path. I didn’t get up to help her. It wasn’t like that anymore.

  “Okay,” she said. “Then I don’t want to. I have nothing to say to you, little girl.”

  She looked drawn and pale as she unlatched the door. Black smudges under her eyes told me she wasn’t sleeping well at night, and something within me took a cold, dark victory in that. I didn’t get up as she unlocked the door and pulled her groceries inside. She closed the door; I heard it lock. I walked over and looked at her through the glass.

  “I know he’s alive,” I told her loudly. I didn’t really know that. I was, in fact, convinced that he was dead. But I wanted to see what her reaction would be.

  She brought her face close to the glass. I expected to see fear; instead I saw some combination of anger and pity.

  “Have you lost your mind?” she asked me.

  “You identified the body that night,” I said. “Why didn’t my father do it?”

  “Because he couldn�
��t bear it, Ridley. What do you think? He couldn’t stand to see his best friend’s face shredded by glass, unrecognizable, see him dead upon a gurney. He called me. I came and I spared him that.”

  “Why you? Why not my mother?”

  “How the hell should I know?” she snapped. Her eyes looked wild.

  “You’re sure it was him? Or did you lie about that, too?”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head. “You should think about getting professional help,” she said unkindly.

  I let a beat pass. I looked for the person I used to love, but she was gone in a way more total than if she had died.

  “What are you afraid of, Esme?” I asked finally. I was surprised to hear my voice infused with sadness.

  Her face went pale, I think more out of rage than anything else. And hatred. She hated me and I could see it, could feel it coming off of her in waves. “I’m afraid of you, Ridley,” she said finally. “You’ve destroyed us all and you’re still coming around with a sledgehammer. You should be ashamed for what you’ve done.”

  I laughed, fogging the glass between us. It sounded loud and unpleasant even to my own ears. I knew she believed all of what had happened was my fault. I knew my parents felt that way a little, too. It was amazing how this had become about what I had done to them. It was a staggering show of narcissism, but I guess it’s the same narcissism that allowed them to do what they did to all those children, to me. They would have needed to be utterly convinced of their own self-righteousness. It made me a little sick sometimes; I tried not to think about it. I think it was the single reason that Jake disbelieved my father’s claims of innocence, that he couldn’t forgive.

  Once upon a time, it would have hurt to know that Esme hated me. Now it just made me angry.

  “I’ll keep swinging until I know all the answers,” I said with a smile.

  “You do and you’ll wind up like that New York Times reporter,” she said with such venom that I took a step back. Her words set off bottle rockets in my chest.