The Last Lie

by Stephen White

  “What are you thinking? Brasserie Ten Ten? The Kitchen?”

  Not quite. I’d been thinking I had a nonintrusive way of discovering how strong she was feeling. But I said what else I was thinking. “Actually, I was thinking Salt.”

  “That sounds great. You want to park at your office? Why don’t you drop me off at the restaurant first? I’ll get us a table.”

  I dropped Lauren off on the west edge of the Downtown Mall before I weaved over to Walnut to park at my office. By the time I hustled back to Pearl Street, Lauren was seated at a table by the windows that fronted 11th. I leaned over and kissed her on the lips. As I pulled away from Lauren’s face, I thought I noted a novel scent on her neck, perhaps the slightest trace of a new perfume.

  At another phase of our relationship together I would have told her that I liked the fragrance—in fact, I did like it; the new scent was alluring. But in the wake of the revelation of her infidelity in Holland, the novelty of my wife wearing a new perfume could be cause for fresh suspicion. Or it could be a subtle plea on her part that she wanted us to turn the page to something new.

  Or it could be she just wanted to try a fresh scent.

  Only a week before, as I made our bed, I’d spotted Lauren’s handwriting on a solitary sheet of paper on her bedside table. The paper had been torn from a notepad from the Boulderado Hotel. The note she’d written said “Elliot,” and was followed by “303” and seven more digits in an unfamiliar cadence that likely indicated a Colorado mobile number. I knew the odds were high that the Elliot in question was Elliot Bellhaven, one of Lauren’s superiors at the DA’s office. I assumed the number was for Elliot’s cell.

  What I didn’t know was why the Boulderado Hotel notepad was the location that Lauren had chosen to write down the number. Most likely, she’d used it because it was handy. I could think of ten benign reasons why hotel stationery had been handy at the moment that Lauren had needed to jot down the number.

  I could also think of one malignant reason.

  It had taken me most of two days to reject the malignant option. I’d ended up exhausted by the emotional effort. I could not stand how much work it took at times to tamp down my doubt.

  “This is a nice treat,” she said as I sat down, my thoughts about her new perfume still my own. I feared that the labor that would be required to move the mystery of the new perfume onto the neutral shelf alongside the Boulderado notepad would psychologically annihilate me.

  “Yes, we should do this more often,” I said.

  The perfume found my nose again. I needed a distraction. Our lunch would be only my second meal at Salt, which hadn’t been open long. I looked around the compact restaurant, which I was seeing for the first time during the daytime. I couldn’t help but notice the narrow confines and recognize how little actual physical space almost two and a half million dollars had purchased on this prime corner in downtown Boulder.

  Salt’s footprint was a tiny fraction of the size of the Camera property across the street. The value of the land Raoul was considering buying? Had to be astronomical.

  I couldn’t tell Lauren about what I’d learned during my supervision with Hella. As an alternative, as casually as I could, I asked, “Have you heard anything from your office that might explain why the detectives were at our house on Saturday? I still haven’t figured that out.”

  She sipped some water. She straightened the napkin on her lap. She seemed uncomfortable with my question. I also thought that she seemed like she didn’t want to appear uncomfortable with my question. She said, “Nothing I can talk about. Sorry. You understand, right? Sometimes, I just can’t discuss . . . things . . . that happen at work. Same thing with you and your patients.” She shrugged, mostly with her left shoulder.

  She had no way to know that our many years together had taught me to trust her one-shoulder shrugs just a little bit less than her two-shoulder shrugs. The one-shoulder shrugs had reliably proven to be less sincere.

  On another day, a day when I hadn’t heard the recitation of facts, once removed, from one of the alleged participants in the events of Friday night, I probably would have simply nodded agreement to my wife—what she’d said was certainly true, although I was withholding judgment about how honest it was—and allowed my line of inquiry to expire.

  Because of what I’d learned in supervision, that wasn’t another day. I said, “But you do know why Sam and the sheriff’s investigator were there?” She didn’t answer me right away. I said, “You can at least tell me if there is an investigation ongoing, can’t you? That can’t be a secret.”

  “I do know some of what’s going on. But it’s being handled higher up the food chain, so I’d really prefer not to say anything about an investigation. Or not.”

  “Why all the secrecy? I mean, it can’t be that big a deal, right? I haven’t seen anything in the news.”

  Lauren’s eyes went wide. “So much happens in our office that never hits the news, Alan. God, what our lives would be like at work if the public actually knew what we did every day. Innocent people can be damned by the taint of our attention. It wouldn’t be fair if we talked about . . . everything.”

  The public—that includes me—typically knows only what leaks from the district attorney’s office, or what goes to court, where a public record is created. Investigations that don’t lead to charges? We never know.

  “From where I sit,” I said disingenuously, “it seems like it’s blown over already. No one from the sheriff’s office has been back out to Spanish Hills. Mimi and Mattin seem to be out of town. Am I missing something?”

  She made a cute face, wrinkling her nose. “Things aren’t always as they seem.”

  A waiter came by. Lauren ordered iced tea. I asked for lemonade and iced tea. I refused to call the drink an Arnold Palmer.

  The waiter said, “An Arnold Palmer?”

  I said I would just have lemonade. He left. “Please?” I said to Lauren. “Just give me a hint.”

  “This isn’t like you, Alan. Usually when I tell you I can’t talk about something, you let it go.”

  True. “Usually, it doesn’t involve my neighbors. I think I have reason to be concerned about something so close to our home. If something significant happened across the lane, I want to know about it. We have kids to worry about.”

  Lauren gazed out the window. I had intended for it to be a hard argument for her to counter.

  “Okay,” she said. “Some allegations were made. The facts are in dispute.”

  “Allegations of . . . ? What? Poor seasoning? Watering down the booze? It was a housewarming.”

  “Please.”

  I lowered my already quiet voice to a whisper. “Sam was there on his day off. Is it a felony, Lauren?”

  “There are lots of different felonies.” Lauren was a polished litigator; she had great skill at obfuscation.

  I knew I was getting near the end of any license I had to continue to press her. “Are our kids . . . in any jeopardy? Are we? Tell me that.”

  Lauren hesitated. Her hesitation, more than anything else she’d said, confirmed for me that Burning Man Lady’s recitation of the events on Friday night might have some approximation to the truth.

  “It’s better that you don’t know any of this, Alan. Trust me. It’s become . . . involved. You know what lawyers can be like? Well, in this situation we’re talking big-time lawyers. If any of this leaks it will get ten times worse.”

  “Is Mattin one of the big-time lawyers?”

  She lowered her voice to a whisper and opened her purple eyes wide. “I expect all this to blow over. Okay?”

  “Really?” I said. I was very surprised.

  “Yes. Now will you leave it alone? Please? I’ve already said more than I should. Let’s enjoy lunch.”

  I was in the strange circumstance of knowing way too much, and altogether too little, to stop with what I had so far. I really wanted to know what Lauren knew that caused her to believe that an allegation of rape would evaporate lik
e the aftermath of a routine July thunderstorm.

  I pushed just a little more. “Does Diane know what happened? Were she and Raoul there when whatever went down, went down?”

  “Can we talk about something else? Please?”

  I would have to go to Diane for more information. For me, going to Diane for information was like going to Tiffany for diamonds.

  Lauren and I hadn’t had a chance to talk about my meeting with Raoul over the weekend. Every time I’d started to bring it up with her, it seemed that something had intruded. The phone rang, the kids—something.

  I said, “My meeting with Raoul? Did you know the Daily Camera property is for sale? The whole thing?”

  She immediately looked down the length of the narrow dining room toward the restaurant windows that fronted Pearl Street. She looked back at me. “I heard rumors a while ago that some Denver developers were interested,” she said. “The guy who did that high-rise condo near the convention center? You know the one I’m talking about? Him. But I thought that deal fell through.”

  I lowered my voice. “Raoul wanted to talk to me about the Camera, indirectly. He told me he’s part of a cabal that’s made an offer for the whole site, with plans to redevelop the Pearl Street side. They’re in due diligence right now. Everything I’m telling you, by the way, is covered by nondisclosure.”

  “And is that also why he wanted to talk with you about Walnut?” Lauren is smart. She has a prosecutor’s eye for the faint threads that tie seemingly unrelated events together.

  I said, “One of his partners wants to include the Walnut building in the deal. Raoul said he thinks it may end up being a crucial component to make everything work.”

  “I don’t get that part.”

  “Nor do I. But get this—he did tell me that if they can make this happen, he and Diane are buying one of the condos in the new building.”

  Her face brightened. “Really?”

  “The best unit, of course. Top floor, facing the Flatirons. The old West End Tavern view? They want a big terrace for entertaining. Diane wants a friggin’ gazebo.”

  Diane wanting a gazebo in the middle of downtown Boulder made Lauren smile. She said, “I know they talk about moving all the time, but I never thought they would really leave the mountains. I always thought they loved the Lee Hill house.”

  “Raoul’s tired of the long winters up there. They want to travel. They’d like someplace that’s easier to leave behind.”

  The waiter returned to take our lunch orders. Lauren was having trouble deciding between the pastas. The waiter was a chatty man who seemed like a guy who would have been content to talk the wonders of a fresh Bolognese sauce all afternoon. I learned much more about the lineage of the meat and the provenance of the milk than I wanted to know.

  Lauren indulged him for quite a while. I zoned out. My thoughts drifted to Burning Man Lady and the guest room. Ultimately, Lauren went with the mushroom fettuccine. I interrupted the waiter with my choice before we learned about the forest where the fungi had grown strong and prospered. He left in search of another patron to school about the menu.

  We sat silently for a while. It’s possible that Lauren and I had always had long interludes of silence when we were out alone as a married couple, but I didn’t think so. We were certainly having them with some frequency since Holland.

  The circumstances of Lauren’s MS exacerbation in Holland had wounded our marriage in ways I was determined to keep from being fatal. Those circumstances? The exacerbation caused paralysis of her legs that struck, almost biblically, while she was in the bed of the man who had fathered her first daughter sixteen years earlier.

  That man, father of a stepdaughter named Sofie whom I’d never met—his name is Joost—was the one who called to tell me that my wife was very ill.

  I had tried to convince myself that the silences that hung between Lauren and me in the wake of those events were a form of scar tissue from the serious marital wound we’d suffered. I feared at times that the evidence of the injury to our relationship would never really go away. I believed we could heal, but that the scar tissue would linger and remind. Could we deal with it? Survive it? Most days I believed we could.

  Most days are not all days.

  Lauren leaned forward. She took one of my hands in both of hers. “I have an idea. Don’t go all—It’s just an idea. I’m thinking . . . maybe we could do it, too. Buy a condo in the building across the street. I mean, if they can get it done. What do you think?”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Elevators?” she said wistfully. “For me? I know that’s selfish, but . . . I would love to live someplace that has an elevator. And us and the kids all on one floor? No maintenance. No snow to plow or shovel or rake off the roof. No lane to level. No critters to fence out. Even if it turns out that you had to sell Walnut, you and Diane could always find another office downtown, and if we were living on Pearl, you could walk to work. Think about that. The dogs would be close to the creek. When my leg gets stronger, I could start walking to work, too. It’d only be four blocks.

  “All the restaurants we go to anyway would be right outside our door.”

  Lauren had obviously given the idea of moving to a downtown condo some serious thought long before I mentioned Raoul and Diane’s plans at 11th and Pearl.

  The possibility of us leaving our current Spanish Hills house had come up before. After I got back to Boulder from Israel with Jonas, and we learned that Adrienne wished for us to become his parents, Lauren and I briefly considered trying to swing a deal to move into Peter and Adrienne’s farmhouse to accommodate our suddenly larger family. We quickly realized that financially it would be a monumental stretch. Even if we could find a way to make the numbers work, the big house was on three floors, with a laundry room all the way down in the walk-out basement. Given Lauren’s mobility problems, a three-story home made no sense for us as a family.

  “I’m sure that whatever Raoul and his buddies will end up building across the street is way out of our league, Lauren. Financially. You know what the new condos sold for on Walnut and on Canyon. We can’t manage that. And this location is even better. And we would need three bedrooms. Or four. I don’t see how it could happen.”

  “Even if we sold Walnut and Spanish Hills?”

  “We own only half of Walnut. And we have a healthy second to pay off in Spanish Hills.” I reminded her that we did the remodel and the garage with borrowed money.

  I took my own temperature. I thought my voice sounded normal. I considered that quite a feat considering that I could feel my heart galloping—the hooves of a passel of horses pounding against my chest wall—at the mere thought of selling my sanctuary in Spanish Hills. Spanish Hills was home. For me, it was special. I’d rented it long before I bought it. Apparently not so much for Lauren. I fought to keep my panic from infecting the conversation.

  She released my hand. She looked away briefly. Sipped some tea. Fiddled with her silverware. “What if we sold the rental house, too? The current tenants have been wanting to do a lease/purchase. Could we make it work then?”

  The rental house was the bungalow Lauren owned when we met. It was on a quiet street on The Hill, the neighborhood tucked between the university and the sudden rise of the Rockies on Boulder’s western boundary. The house was small but in reasonable repair. The block was quiet and far enough from the university that the street wasn’t attractive as student housing.

  From the time we started living together, we had used the little charmer for rental income. In the intervening years, Boulder’s real estate values had skyrocketed. Although prices had stabilized during the grand recession, the housing shock hadn’t taken as much of a toll on prime real estate in Boulder as it had in other areas of the state. The financial bottom line was that, despite a small remaining mortgage, there was a lot of equity waiting to be tapped if we sold the house on The Hill.

  “You are serious?” I said.

  She sat back, folding her hands in her
lap. “Our house has become difficult for me. With the stairs especially, the laundry in the basement, and the garage being separate from the house. Grace has started making noises about wanting to move to the other room in the basement to be closer to Jonas. Having both kids down there will make things even harder.

  “The kids are growing up. They don’t run out to play in the fields anymore. They are doing more and more things at school and in town. We’re on the road with them constantly because we live so far out. It would be so much more convenient to be in town.”

  My most compelling counterarguments, I knew, were sentimental and personal. And they were, ultimately, selfish. I swallowed them. Lauren was telling me something important. I told myself to try to hear it.

  Instead of arguing, I said, “This is a lot to consider, Lauren. A lot. You’re suggesting we sell everything? The Walnut office, Spanish Hills, your place on the Hill?” We still called it, all these years later, her place. “And then we would use all the money to buy a condo downtown? One we’ve never seen, that doesn’t really even exist except in a developer’s imagination.” She smiled. I said, “You’re talking changing everything at once. New schools for the kids. A completely new lifestyle. Everything . . . would change.”

  “Not everything,” she said. “Just some things. Okay, you’re right, maybe most things. A fresh start, Alan.”

  The prospect didn’t cause her the vertigo I was feeling. She was able to consider the upheaval that was on the table without any apparent trepidation. But trepidation is all I felt at the prospect of those changes.

  I realized at that moment that Lauren’s grand plan wasn’t a series of real estate moves. Or a simple change of lifestyle. Or even a practical plan to find a home that acknowledged her disability.

  The most important thing she was trying to do was create a fresh start.

  For us.

  13

  When I got back to my office after lunch, I left Diane a note. The old-fashioned kind, in an envelope, affixed to her office door with tape.