Lies Like Poison

by Chelsea Pitcher

  Troy looked at me.

  I looked at him.

  His face broke into a grin. “You must be Lily,” he said, holding out an arm and looping me into an embrace. “It’s so good to meet you. You look just like your mother, wow. When you told me…” He turned to my mom, shaking his head in wonder. “She’s so beautiful,” he said.

  I beamed.

  My mother cringed, but a blush was spreading across her cheeks. Troy wasn’t stumbling away. He wasn’t stammering excuses about getting up early in the morning or needing to focus on work or going through a selfish period in his life. He liked me. I liked him.

  Our problems were solved.

  For the next few months, Troy and my mother got closer, and we had movie nights together, eating popcorn and laughing through ridiculous comedies. We made elaborate dinners. We went for walks in the rose garden in the middle of town. I never really thought about the fact that they were taking me on all their dates, because it didn’t feel that way at first. It didn’t feel bad, or wrong.

  Then one night, my mother went away to a conference one town away, and Troy showed up at our door with takeout from Paradise Gardens. My favorite. We sat on the living room floor and ate with our hands. At the end of the night, Troy led me to the bed that I shared with my mother and he tucked me in. He said it was very adult of me to stay home on my own without a babysitter, but maybe he should stay with me to make sure I was all right. And I said sure, because… it made sense. I was a thirteen-year-old in a bad part of town, and the locks on our door were questionable at best.

  Nothing happened that night. Nothing I could put my finger on, because he fell asleep soon after, and so did I. I remember dozing off to the sound of him snoring. But I woke up the following morning to the sound of my mother’s screams. She dragged Troy out of the apartment and into the hallway. She all but pushed him down the rickety stairs to the building. Then she hurried back to me, sobbing and telling me she was sorry. I promised that nothing had happened. I told her he’d only wanted to stay with me, because I wasn’t old enough to stay home alone.

  Over time, her sobs softened to rasping breaths. I cleaned the mascara from her eyes and made her some tea. She always liked drinking tea when she couldn’t calm down, the caffeine-free kind that slowed the heart rate instead of quickening it. “I will never let anyone hurt you,” she told me, over and over again, lifting her cup with a trembling hand. “I will never bring another man into our home.”

  And for several months, she didn’t. It was the two of us against the world again. But my mother didn’t seem to enjoy being alone with her daughter anymore. She was lonely. I could see it. When she started dating a widower named Stefan Holloway, she came up with a way to keep me safe without sacrificing her own happiness.

  She was going to hide me in plain sight.

  “Some girls develop early,” she explained, pulling out the sweaters she wore when she was pregnant with me. The oversize jeans. The layers of T-shirts. “It isn’t your fault, but if we don’t cover you up, men might think inappropriate thoughts.”

  “I’ll wear all the layers,” I announced, pulling on T-shirt after T-shirt. She giggled at the sight of me, like we were coconspirators. Spies, sneaking into the house of a king. It felt like a game. But after she married Stefan Holloway, and we moved onto the estate, my mother worried he might glimpse me changing after a shower. He might try to sneak into my room at night.

  My bed.

  And so, she suggested we monitor my meals. We were coconspirators again, plotting to keep Dr. Holloway from looking at me the way Troy had. Over the next few months, my curves withered like flowers drying in the sun. My ribs pressed against my skin. I looked more like a skeleton than a child, but even then, she jumped every time Dr. Holloway glanced at me. She jumped every time he glanced at Raven, who had his mother’s eyes and his mother’s laugh.

  I started to worry that she wasn’t protecting me at all. She was protecting herself. She’d lost her parents because of me. My father. Troy. When Raven started hearing his dead mom’s voice in the middle of the night, I realized how far she would go to keep Dr. Holloway’s attention. She’d torture Raven. She’d starve her own daughter. She’d kill us both, and pretend it had been an accident.

  Unless I killed her first.

  I hadn’t even acknowledged how angry I was until I found Belle’s recipe in the orchard. I’d been hurting for so long, and I’d been afraid to admit it. I blackmailed my way into the murder plot. Then Jack went behind my back and told the police Raven was in danger, and instead of getting my mother away from him, they sent him to a boarding school where he would be safe. I was left alone with the woman who’d been tormenting us both.

  And I knew what would happen next.

  One night, three months after Raven went away to boarding school, my mother laid out my nightly salad, and I just… refused to eat it. I wanted her to see what she was doing to me. I knew, by then, that I would never be small enough to make her feel safe around me. I would shrink and shrink until I disappeared entirely.

  I wouldn’t let her do that to me.

  I pushed my chair back from the table with a screech. I looked into her eyes as if to say: Choose your daughter. Choose me. Her jaw hardened and she grabbed me by the arm, pulling me out to the orchard where we could speak in private. “You’re being reckless,” she hissed at me. “Everything I’ve done over the past year, I’ve done for you. If you had any idea what it took to get into this house—”

  “You didn’t do it for me! You did it for yourself!” I was crying, hunched over between the trees. I caught sight of Dr. Holloway’s pruning shears in the dirt, and I thought of bringing them to my throat, showing her where all of this led. “You’re going to kill me.”

  “I would never hurt you.” A shadow crossed her face, her fingers still encircling my arm.

  “You hurt Raven. You hated him because he had his mother’s eyes, and every time Stefan looked at him—”

  “Baby, you’re delirious. You need to eat. Why don’t we take a look at your diet plan, and see if we can’t add—”

  “I’m not eating until you listen to me!” I jerked out of her grip, landing in a pile of leaves. The pruning shears glistened at me from the dirt. They winked at me, as if sharing a dirty secret.

  An ugly secret.

  I lifted the shears to my hair. “You say you want to keep me safe, but that isn’t what you’re doing.” One chunk of hair fell away, then another. My beautiful blond locks, decimated like the eyes in her photo album. Hacked. Slashed. “You want to hide my beauty so Stefan won’t want me. You want to make me ugly.”

  Moment by moment, strand by strand, I took my beauty away. I left it lying in the dirt. That’s how Dr. Holloway found me. Crouched over in the orchard, a pile of discarded locks at my feet. Bone thin and shivering in the wind. When my mother said, “She’s refusing to eat,” he didn’t ask for an explanation.

  He simply sent me away, just like he had with Raven.

  For the next few months, I lived in the Rose Hollow Wellness Facility, eating and sleeping to my heart’s content. I learned that I didn’t have to hate my beauty. I didn’t have to cower in the dark. Hidden away from my mother’s clutches, I was able to do all the things she’d never let me do:

  Play. Relax. Care about myself.

  I reconnected with my birth father and learned the truth of my past. He had left me as a baby, but only to protect me from the addiction that had ripped through his life like a tornado. He’d spent years getting clean. More years trying to find his way back to me. Only one thing stood in the way of us finally being a family, and if we could eliminate that obstacle, we could be together.

  And so, last Saturday night, I snuck over to Belladonna’s yard, where I wrapped my hand around a clump of flowers. I quietly liberated them from the dirt Then I went to see my mother.

  20

  The Delicate Art of Poisoning

  Lily’s breath came out sharp and fast as she finished her
story. She could still feel the belladonna wrapped around her fingers, leaving little lines of red after she’d yanked it out of the ground. Petals had stained her skin. Juice from the berries had slid under her fingernails, making her terrified of biting her nails in the days to come. She’d washed her hands over and over.

  But the fear had remained.

  Now, as she looked up to find Raven gaping at her, she tucked those hands into her lap. She was wearing her gloves. She’d been wearing them for days, so no one would notice that she’d scrubbed her hands raw. She should’ve worn gloves the night of the murder, but she’d never intended for her mother to get hurt.

  “I got to the house around ten o’clock,” Lily explained, and Raven’s brow furrowed. Jack cautiously joined them on the bed. “I sat in a chair and dropped the belladonna on the kitchen table. She found me like that on the way to her nighttime shower. Her hair was pinned in curls and she was wearing her white silk robe. Everything was exactly like it had been three years earlier, including the teakettle on the stove. I could’ve stuffed the flowers into it while the water was coming to a boil.”

  Raven winced, and Jack reached for his hand. But neither of them spoke, because they’d waited too long to hear this story.

  “She almost screamed when she saw me,” Lily confessed, and it had hurt to see her mother react like that. As if Lily were a ghost risen from the grave. Or a killer, broken free from an asylum. “She went for the phone immediately, and she’d dialed the facility’s number by the time I spoke. I only said two words: I wouldn’t.…”

  “Did she hang up the phone?” Raven asked in a whisper-soft voice.

  “She put it back in the cradle,” Lily said, remembering the sound of the click. Her mother had listened to her. Her mother had been scared. “She came and sat at the table, glaring at the flowers like I’d brought her a clump of weeds. But that disgust turned into horror when I told her about our plan to murder her. I described the blossoms we were going to weave into our garlands. The kitchen table, strewn with petals. By the time I’d finished, my mother was white as her roses. That’s when I plucked a berry from the belladonna and dropped it into her empty cup. I told her that I was going to move in with my dad, and if she tried to stop me—”

  “You’d poison her,” Jack said, and Lily nodded.

  “She wouldn’t know when. But if she ever tried to starve me again, or hurt Raven, I’d drop a poisonous berry into her soup, or her cider, or her wine. I’d get to her, and she wouldn’t be able to stop me.”

  Light flashed in Jack’s eyes. Was Jack horror-struck… or a little impressed? Lily couldn’t tell. But Raven was unmoved by her story, and he peered at her, his dark eyes narrowed into slits. “If you found a way to beat her, you didn’t have to kill her. You could’ve left—”

  “You did leave,” Jack realized, just as Lily opened her mouth to speak. “I talked to Belle at the detention center. She said you were together at the time of the murder. If you didn’t stuff those flowers into the teakettle before you left, that means…”

  “Someone else did it. But it couldn’t have been my dad,” Lily said. “I know what you’re thinking, and it makes sense to you, because you don’t know where he was that night. He checked me out of the facility. He left me when he was a teenager, and my mom didn’t think he was coming back, so she never filed for full custody. He’s still one of my legal guardians. Since the doctors knew I was doing better, they left me in his care, and he took me back to his house. We spent hours decorating my bedroom, and then we sat on the couch and ate ice cream. He fell asleep around nine thirty, and that’s when I snuck out. When I came back, hours later, he was exactly where I’d left him, snoring on the couch. He couldn’t have killed her.”

  “Lily.” Jack spoke softly this time, and that gaze was kind. Gentle. It stoked the fires in Lily’s chest, making her angry.

  She would not be pitied. “He couldn’t have done it,” she nearly shouted, not caring if Raven’s father heard her through the walls. “The next morning, I woke up to hear him talking to someone at the front door. The police were there, asking about my mother, and he told them I’d been with him the entire night. They had no reason to suspect us. No evidence linking us to the crime. Besides, once that detective found the Recipe for the Perfect Murder in the kitchen, and the belladonna missing from Belle’s yard, he figured he’d found his killer.” Lily scowled, fingers tightening to fists. “I would’ve given her an alibi if I could’ve, because I was with her for hours that night, but after my dad spoke to the police, it was impossible.”

  “Lily,” Jack said again, a warning this time. “He gave you an alibi so that he’d have one. I know you don’t want to believe it. That’s why you followed me around and took the video of me burning Raven’s clothes, right? You were desperate to blame someone else.”

  “You don’t understand,” Lily said, her voice cracking. “After the police drove away, my dad turned to me and started to cry. He said he understood what I’d done to my mother. He knew she’d been hurting me for so long. But he wouldn’t let anyone arrest me. He’d lie for me, and he’d say we’d been together the whole night, so no one would know that I—”

  Raven jerked out of Jack’s grip, inching toward Lily. “He thought you killed her? He said that?”

  Lily nodded, a tightness in her chest. Her father had looked so frightened as the police drove away. He’d clutched her shoulders, fingers digging into her skin. He’d bruised her. And he’d promised that no one would ever know that she’d poisoned her mother.

  No one would ever take her away from him.

  “He must’ve been playing you,” Jack said, looking bereft without Raven to care for. Lily understood that feeling well. In order to get Belle back, she’d have to give up her father. How could she choose between them? How could she sentence either of them to life behind bars? She’d brought the belladonna to her mother. She’d given the killer the idea, and no matter what happened after that, she was complicit in the murder.

  “I can’t turn him in.” Lily shook her head. “Not after everything he’s done for me. Not unless I know for sure.”

  “You turned me in,” Jack snapped. “You forced me to burn your father’s file, and then you called the cops, and they dragged me—”

  “Belle said you were obsessed with Raven! She said you kissed him behind her back, and then you stole his clothes. After he got cleared to come home, Belle thought you killed my mom to keep him safe, and then you stole my dad’s file from my bedroom so you could frame him for the murder.” Lily looked up, her eyes laced with red. “It made sense. I knew where my dad was the night my mom was killed, but you don’t have an alibi.”

  “I was home!” Jack swallowed, cheeks flushing with heat. “And I stole Raven’s clothes because I missed him. I started wearing them because…” Jack trailed off, looking at Raven.

  “They made you feel close to him,” Lily whispered, her gaze flicking between them. “And maybe… they made you feel closer to yourself?”

  Jack’s head snapped up, his green eyes narrowing. “Why would you say that? Did you hear—”

  “I wasn’t trying to listen!” Lily held up her hands. “I came over here a few hours ago. I knew you’d been arrested, and I wanted to explain to Raven what I’d done. I wanted to explain why, but when I got to the house, I noticed the light was on in my room. I crept up the stairs quietly so I could listen outside my bedroom door. I thought you’d be confessing to murder. I didn’t know.…”

  Jack’s shoulders hunched, and Raven looped an arm around him, so easily. As if it were instinctual. “You had no right to do that,” Jack whispered, his voice hoarse. Shaking.

  “I know. I’m sorry! But after I heard your story about the vine you trailed across the attic stairs… after I knew why you’d called off the murder of my mom, I realized I had everything backward. You’re not the villain, Jack.”

  Lily crouched on the floor in front of the bed. She wanted to take Jack’s hands, but she knew it
would be invasive after everything she’d heard. Everything she’d done. “I don’t expect you to forgive me for calling the police. I’d just lost my mom, and I thought you were taking my dad away from me.” She swallowed, blinking back tears. She would not cry. She would not think about the life she was going to live if she lost both parents. The only family she’d ever had. “And I’m so sorry for stealing that secret from you. Ever since I met you, I wanted to be your friend, and if you’d told me who you are, I would’ve been so happy. But I should’ve let you come to me. And I should’ve come to you instead of calling the police.”

  “I don’t forgive you,” Jack said, still avoiding Lily’s gaze. “You shouldn’t have turned me in and you shouldn’t have…” A slight shake of his head, and then Lily found herself seared by those bright green eyes. That piercing gaze. “You have to get your father to confess. If we record his confession, we can get Belle out of juvenile detention. Will you help us?”

  Lily opened her mouth to speak, but Raven cut her off, rising from the bed. Nervous energy was emanating from his pores. Every cell, a vibration of terror. “Her father is dangerous. If he thinks she’s going to turn him in, he could lash out.”

  “I’m not afraid of him.” At that, Lily pushed to her feet. But instead of joining Raven in the center of the room, where he was pacing, she strode to the window, looking down at the roses below. “I haven’t been hiding the way Jack’s been hiding,” she told Raven, “but I have been cowering in the dark for years, trying to keep my mother from hurting me.” She turned, opening her pale pink purse. The movement was innocuous. Innocent. But Lily Holloway was neither of those things, and she pulled the rusty gardening shears into the light. “I’m not cowering anymore.”

  21

  Blood in the Snow

  They had three hours to put the details into place. Lily’s father didn’t get off work until four in the morning, which gave Lily and Raven time to track down the perfect rose. Jack, in the meantime, snuck into the guest rooms to check on the boys. Conner and Dylan were wide awake, turning their four-poster bed into a fort. Meanwhile Diego buzzed the sides of Flynn’s hair in one of the guest bathrooms, so that only the curls remained on top. Jack took one look at the end result and asked, “Can you do that to my hair?”