Lies Like Poison

by Chelsea Pitcher

  “You aren’t weak,” Jack said, as Lily backed toward the living room. She mouthed Dr. Holloway to Jack, slowly pulling out her phone.

  “I am weak,” Raven murmured, his gaze trained on Jack. “That’s why you always tried to protect me. You thought I couldn’t protect myself.”

  Jack took another step, his heart hammering. His stomach clenching. “I didn’t protect you because you were weak. I protected you because I wanted you in the world.”

  Raven’s face crumpled, tears spilling freely down his cheeks. “Why?”

  “Because the world is better with you in it. And I have always loved you, Raven. Just like you’ve always loved me.” Jack took three more steps, his arm outstretched. “You don’t have to do this. Your mother wouldn’t want this.”

  “My mother is gone.”

  Jack’s fingers grazed Raven’s cheek. He trembled at the touch, leaning forward, and the shears slipped a little. “We’ll replant her roses in the garden. We’ll make her spiced cider in the fall. We’ll fill the house with her memory, just like you already started to—”

  “I didn’t do that,” Raven interrupted. “That was my dad.”

  “Fine, then we’ll help him,” Jack said, unfaltering. “We’ll put all her pictures back in the frames. And every time I look into your eyes, I’ll see the same light I saw in hers.”

  “You will?” he said reverently, a whisper.

  “Yes.” Jack cupped Raven’s face in his hands. Raven shuddered, silent tears giving way to a sob. “But that light will go out if you don’t let go.”

  The shears clattered to the floor. So did the man, gasping and rolling onto his side. Raven slumped into Jack, and Jack’s arms encircled him, holding him close as Lily returned to the room. Her eyes were dry. Jack knew she was trying to be brave. Maybe she would wait until she was alone to break down, or maybe she would wait until Belle had been released and they were wrapped in each other’s arms. But sooner or later, the rage would come. The anguish. The grief.

  Pain couldn’t be outrun. It was a wild, snarling creature in the forest, indiscriminately stalking its prey. There was only one way to survive it. You had to call out for other voices in the tangled woods. You had to reach for careful hands and let them pull you to safety, away from gnashing teeth and curling claws. And then, when you were strong enough, you had to reach out your own trembling hands and pull other people out of the darkness.

  That was the only way to weaken the pain. The only way to defeat a monster that left no footprints. And now, as tears slid down Lily’s cheeks, Jack and Raven pulled her into their embrace.

  24

  The Beauty of Bolt Cutters

  Belle was free of her prison, but she didn’t feel free. The elegant Tudor cottage should’ve seemed enormous after spending three days in a cramped cell. She should’ve spun around in the library like a girl in a storybook, arms outstretched and fingers never brushing against the walls.

  Instead, she stood before the door to the attic, a pair of bolt cutters in her hands. She’d learned some things in juvenile detention. A plastic utensil could be used as a weapon in a pinch. The sharp blade of a knife could slide a lock out of place. And if you found yourself in front of a chained attic door, the average garage would hold the tools you’d need to break through them.

  Belle broke through the chains in five minutes flat. They clanked on the floor, lifeless and dull. Then she was stepping over them, opening the creaking attic door. A dusty staircase led to the top.

  One step followed another, and soon Belle was passing through a smaller door. The ceiling jutted up at a slant. She had to hunch over as she moved toward the center of the room. Then she just stood there, heart hammering, as she took in the contents of the attic.

  There was a bed shoved into the corner. The lavender lace covering had lightened to gray, and bits were eaten away by moths. The pillows looked misshapen, as if they’d been slept on by trolls. A smattering of pale, faded stuffed animals sat beside the bed, but the most interesting part of the bedroom was the board strung up on the wall. Belle’s fingers vibrated as she reached out to touch it. Breathing came with great difficulty. Her adoptive father had to be a serial killer, because why else would he have pinned this little girl’s face on his wall over and over again? Why else would he have tacked up articles about her disappearance? The only things missing were red bits of string connecting one article to the other.

  With this thought came clarity. Edwin Drake wasn’t celebrating a murder. He was trying to solve a mystery, Belle realized, as her eyes scanned the headlines. Almost two decades earlier, a little girl had gone missing while walking home from Rose Hollow Elementary. Reporters speculated on what had happened to her. Someone could’ve pulled up in a windowless van. Someone could’ve dragged her into the woods. A number of horrifying scenarios flooded Belle’s mind until her vision started to glaze.

  Edwin’s daughter had been stolen.

  In the twenty years that followed, the police had never found a trace of her. Not a single lock of hair or a fingernail. Not a tooth or a piece of clothing. One day she’d been in this room, cradled in her father’s arms, and the next she’d ceased to exist in his world.

  Belle slumped onto the bed, lifting a faded blue tiger from the floor. Half his stripes were gray. The other half, cornflower blue. Had he been vibrant once? Sapphire and white until someone had smothered the color right out of him? Had the girl been smothered too? Belle couldn’t help but wonder as she stared down at the toy. These kinds of thoughts, well, they had a way of burrowing into your mind. And Edwin had spent a decade alone in this grand house, envisioning all the ways his daughter had been killed.

  A sob welled up in Belle’s throat, not only for the girl that had been stolen, but for the life that had been stolen from her as a result. She’d never walked home from school alone. She’d never ambled through the rose gardens in the center of town, leaning in to whisper in a friend’s ear. Better safe than stolen, Edwin had told her when she’d wanted to go to a birthday party in the sixth grade. Better hidden than gone.

  There was a creaking on the stairs. Belle’s breath fluttered, the sob stopped up inside her like a bottle stopped up by a cork. Her gaze flicked to the turning doorknob. Edwin was supposed to be at the store, gathering ingredients for a celebratory dinner. If he caught her in his daughter’s old bedroom, she didn’t know how he would react.

  She braced herself for the worst.

  Then a girl stepped into the room, and Belle rose to her feet, stumbling forward. Lily met her in the center of the attic. Strong arms encircled her, and Lily’s breath was warm on her cheek.

  They held each other tightly and didn’t speak.

  Slowly, they pulled apart, and Lily looked down at her hands. “I know you’ve heard everything by now. That I stole the flowers from your garden. That I brought them to Raven’s house. If you hate me, I would under—”

  “I could never hate you,” Belle said. Without a word, she led Lily back to the stairs, and they descended together, following the hallway to Belle’s room.

  Lily sat down on the bed. Meanwhile, Belle began pulling clothes out of her drawers, piling them on the floor. Soon, the pile was up to her knees, and she strode to her closet, removing a suitcase from the highest shelf.

  “What—” Lily began, but Belle cut her off.

  “You’re free of the facility,” she said, folding a black lace dress and setting it lovingly in the suitcase. In spite of everything, she appreciated what Edwin had given her. A wardrobe worthy of a princess. A bedroom fit for a queen. And a house that had felt like a castle in a fairy tale, until she’d realized how easy it was to be trapped inside those walls. Beautiful doorways held no value when you couldn’t walk through them.

  “Raven’s free too, because with Evelyn gone, he and his dad can actually be happy. So can Jack, since Jack and Raven have always looked after each other. Even before I came along,” Belle added with a sad smile, because maybe, deep down, she’d known t
heir story would end without her. She’d never really belonged with them, like she’d never really belonged in this house.

  But she belonged with Lily.

  “I can’t stay here anymore,” she pushed out in a rush, piling clothes into the suitcase. “I’m not going to disappear on Edwin. I would never do that. But as long as I’m here, he’s going to do everything he can to keep me safe, and I don’t want you to have to sneak over in the middle of the night. I don’t want to sneak out—”

  “You want me to sneak over?”

  A twitch in Belle’s lips. She turned to see Lily looking at her, a light in those blue eyes. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you have snuck over,” Belle pointed out. “It didn’t end well. The cops showed up at my door.”

  “It began well,” Lily reminded, lying back on Belle’s bed. “You held me all night. And even though there wasn’t time for much else, it was the best night of my life. Until the arrest.”

  Belle turned to look at her. The suitcase was full, and she could join Lily on the bed if she wanted to. Lily’s blond locks were splayed out on the pillow. She was wearing a bulky sweatshirt, not unlike the ones that had been handed out at the detention center, and Belle wanted to guide it off Lily’s body slowly, seeing her girlfriend for the first time. With nothing between them. They had done more than hold each other the night Lily had slept over, but that had mostly included kissing and very timid touching. Lily had kept her clothes on. After a lifetime of being hidden, it was difficult for her to let herself be seen.

  That was something Belle could understand. Edwin had taught her to hide her vulnerabilities, until it looked, to the outside world, like there was no softness inside her. She threatened people with the flowers in her garden and kept her fingernails sharpened to points. Everything about her was a weapon.

  Everything but her heart.

  Belle walked over to the bed, but instead of reaching for Lily, she reached for the hammer in her bedside table, the one Raven had given her in middle school. It took mere seconds to pop up one of the floorboards. Then she was pulling out the letters she’d stolen after Raven had gone to boarding school. Letters from Raven. Letters from Jack. She knew what she was risking, showing these letters to Lily, but she didn’t care in that moment.

  She wanted to be seen.

  “I started stealing these on my lunch break,” she admitted, handing Lily one of the letters. “Edwin drives me to school and picks me up, so lunch is the only time I have to wander during the day. I never go very far, but one day, after Raven left town, I noticed the mailwoman at the end of Jack’s block. I don’t know what came over me, but the next thing I knew, I was creeping up to Jack’s mailbox, pulling out a letter to Raven. Then I just… hung around until Raven’s letter had been delivered. I did this every day for weeks, until they stopped writing to each other. It was easy.”

  “See also: illegal.”

  Belle shrugged, ignoring the heat in her cheeks. “We were going to kill a person, and you’re worried about mail fraud.”

  “We were never going to kill my mom.” Lily pushed onto her elbows. “We were just scared of her, and we didn’t know—”

  “I knew what to do.” Belle slid one of Jack’s letters out of the envelope. Together, they read the large, messy handwriting that Belle had committed to memory until she could imitate it:

  I don’t think you want to hear from me at this point. I think you want to forget what happened between us, because it was too much. Or too soon. I’d never touched you before, and I wanted to make up for lost time, before we had no time left.

  I’m sorry for that.

  But I’m not giving up. Tonight, I snuck over to your orchard and I climbed into the tree where we first met. I sat there so long, the day darkened to evening, and I thought I saw you in the distance. I thought I caught a glimpse of your curls and it startled me so badly, I almost fell out of the branches. But it wasn’t you. It was your dad, holding his pruning shears and wearing his pruning gloves. He was halfway up a tree, trimming branches, and it broke my heart to see him doing what we used to do together. I was so angry in that moment, and so disappointed it wasn’t you.…

  Belle turned the page over for Lily, so she could keep reading. This next part was important. It was the crux of her plan. The fruit of a year-long labor, of practicing over and over again until her hand cramped up. She held her breath as Lily read the backside of the letter:

  I thought he deserved to suffer for sending you away. I thought his new, beautiful wife deserved to die on the kitchen floor, a cup of poisonous tea swimming in her veins.

  Lily sat up, the blood draining from her face. “Jack was planning to kill my mom? All this time, I thought Jack was the noble one.”

  “Lily.”

  “My dad swore he didn’t do it. Even after Dr. Holloway called the police, and I admitted that I was with you at the time of the murder, my dad swore he didn’t poison—”

  “Lily. Jack didn’t write this.” Belle turned over letter after letter, revealing no writing on the backs. “Jack only wrote on one side of the pages. After I’d learned to imitate Jack’s handwriting, I wrote the part on the back.” Carefully, she procured a packet of poppy seeds from beneath the letters. “I was going to poison your mom with poppies, and then I was going to plant this letter in Jack’s room so the police could find it. Jack would be arrested. Raven’s heart would be broken. And you would get out of the facility.”

  Belle glanced up to find Lily peering at her, a soft look in her eyes. No hatred. No disgust. “Don’t look at me like that,” Belle warned, her voice low and hard. “Don’t look at me like I’m a savior. I almost poisoned a person.”

  “So why didn’t you? No one stopped you this time.”

  Belle shrugged, looking down. Tears sparked in her eyes. She was determined not to let them fall, until Lily’s hand slid over hers.

  A tear slipped from her cheek, landing on the letter below.

  “Why did you decide not to frame Jack?” Lily pressed, squeezing Belle’s hand. “Why did you decide not to break Raven’s heart?”

  Because you gave me back mine. Because you gave me a family, when I never thought I’d have a family again. Because Raven and Jack may have stopped loving me, but I never stopped loving them. I just told myself I had, because it hurt too badly to lose them.

  “Because I’m not a killer,” Belle said finally. “I don’t want to poison people to feel protected. And I don’t want to live in a cage of my own making.” A pause, as she met Lily’s gaze. “I want to let someone in.”

  “Then let me in.”

  Belle swallowed, wrapping her arms around herself. “What if something goes wrong?”

  “Something will definitely go wrong. But we’ll find our way back to each other, if that’s what we want. Is that what you want?”

  “Yes.” No hesitation this time. No pause. Belle’s body was racked with fear, her breath coming out sharp and fast. But this time, the fear wasn’t strong enough to keep her from doing what she wanted.

  Carefully, she guided Lily onto the bed. Lily’s body was languid. Her back arched as Belle crawled over her. “I will never let anyone hurt you,” Belle whispered into Lily’s mouth, just before she kissed her.

  Lily looked up, a light in her eyes. “And I will always protect your heart.”

  Then, a kiss. Belle tasted Lily’s lips, her fingers sliding into Lily’s hair, and there was nothing sweet or tentative about it. Lily was hers in that moment. Belle was Lily’s. And they would find each other, over and over again, because it was what they wanted.

  Belle wanted this.

  Her hand slipped under Lily’s sweatshirt, as if to lift it. Lily pulled back. “I can’t,” she whispered, her body gone rigid. “Just leave it on. Okay?”

  Belle nodded, working around the fabric, because she would always give Lily what she wanted. But an idea occurred to her, just as her fingers neared Lily’s heart, and she pulled back. “Wait here a minute.”

  Lily no
dded, too breathless to do much else. Her hair was disheveled. Her sweatshirt, bunched up on the left. She watched with curiosity as Belle strode across the room and riffled through the suitcase.

  “Here it is,” Belle said, returning to the bed. She held a bright amethyst slip in her hands, the exact color of the belladonna in her garden. She’d bought it to wear for Lily, but now she thought it might serve a greater purpose.

  “Put it on. If you want to,” she added, because Lily was eyeing the satin fabric with suspicion. “You’ll be covered, but you won’t be hidden.”

  With that, she turned around, facing the wall on the far side of the room. There was a mirror there, but she angled her gaze away from it. She could hear rustling at her back. A minute later, Lily’s soft voice trickled into her ear. “Okay. You can look.”

  Belle turned to find Lily half covered by blankets. She was wearing the bright amethyst slip, and she looked… more than beautiful. Honestly, there wasn’t a word for her, and Belle wanted to gather Lily in her arms so badly, kissing every inch of her body.

  Instead, she held out a hand. “Come here.”

  “Why?” Lily’s eyes narrowed. She hadn’t let go of the blankets.

  “Just come here for a minute. Please? I want to show you something.”

  Lily rose from the bed. She crossed the room shakily, and Belle positioned her in front of the mirror. “Do you know how beautiful you are?” Belle asked from behind her, wrapping an arm around Lily’s waist.

  Lily shook her head, gaze dropping to the floor. “I don’t want it. People will try to hurt me.”

  “They’ll try to hurt us if we’re beautiful. They’ll try to hurt us if we’re ugly. But you know what, baby? They’re the ones who are ugly. It doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

  She lifted Lily’s chin. “And you are crushingly, stunningly beautiful. You’re also sweet. Clever in a way that scares me. Braver than anyone—”