Liars' Paradox

by Taylor Stevens

  This wouldn’t be the first time Clare used strange distraction and upturned strategy to throw them off. Too many years as a pawn in too many of her stupid games told him the hill would be watched by an unseen enemy waiting for curiosity to pull him in. So he’d moved on, circling and searching.

  Jill had gone in the opposite direction, working the same hunt from the other side.

  The big bur oak came into view, a vantage across the open space that he’d used more than once for pursuits of his own. He studied the branches, scanning higher until he found what he expected, and knew he was right.

  Hired hunters were so predictable.

  He pushed on, tree to hill to brush to dip, scouting for others.

  Silence met him, silence and the constant buzz of insects and the slow return of birdsong and the subtle sounds of nature coming out of hiding. He reached the oak, and Jill, leaned up against it, arms crossed and cocky, as if beating him there had meant winning a round. She handed him a strand of black nylon thread and jutted her chin toward an upper branch.

  She’d have done one better by staying clear of the site altogether.

  He crouched and traced his fingertips against indents in the earth.

  Only one pair of boots, come and gone.

  Jack stood.

  His gaze traveled between the trees, out to the clearing.

  The marksman wouldn’t have abandoned a clean line of sight like this unless he’d been compromised or believed he was outmatched, and for that, he’d have had to have been working alone. That was one more detail added in the round-robin chant of inconsistencies that kept his brain itching.

  Explosion.

  Silent dogs.

  Clare’s absence.

  Helicopter.

  Single shooter.

  The breeze blew. The humidity rose.

  Jill said, “I’m tired of this shit.”

  Jack didn’t answer.

  She turned for the clearing. “I’m taking a look.”

  He watched her stride into the open, naked legs scabbed and garish in the daylight, waited until she’d gone halfway before following in a hot, thirsty slog across wasteland that had until last night been vibrant and life-filled irrigated pasture. He reached her near the hilltop, and they stood in silence, staring over the twisted, charred remains of appliances and bathroom fixtures at the bottom of a gutted crater.

  Memory laughed at the present, jarring in its impossible contrast. Last time they were here, it’d been Christmas.

  Clare had been a shadow against the windows then, waiting on the doorstep, with a moth-eaten sweater sagging off one shoulder, an AR-15 in her hands, and muck boots on her feet, looking like an older, harder version of Jill, with a deeper tan from all the time spent outdoors. She’d smiled, set the assault rifle, butt down, against the wall, and thrown her arms wide, as if she’d expected they were just as happy to see her as she was to see them. He never did understand that. He’d kissed the top of her head, fragrant with tree sap and sweat.

  All he smelled now was dirt and smoke, and all that remained of the house and the hand-built furniture—the result of years of callus-causing labor that Clare credited with keeping her stable—was shredded and strewn across the homestead.

  The rest of the place hadn’t fared much better.

  Her forty-year-old Bronco, usually parked under a metal carport, lay on its side at the base of the hill, front smashed and windows blown out. The carport itself was a twisted mess of severed legs and missing pieces a hundred feet back.

  Sand covered the ground in a fine patina that made it difficult to see tracks, but even still, there didn’t seem to have been any movement other than foot traffic, which meant Clare hadn’t likely left the property to make her calls, and that, in itself, was the biggest inconsistency of all. One didn’t just decide after nine years of paranoid off-the-grid living to use a cell phone from home—not without anticipating the consequences—and for Clare that would have meant abandoning the homestead.

  Jack uncapped the water he carried, glugged down most of it, and offered the rest to Jill. She curled her lip, as if drinking after him would give her the cooties.

  He tucked the bottle away and his gaze tracked over the barn, which was still standing, fully open and visibly empty. Same for the coops and pens.

  Jill said, “We should have her committed.”

  The words jarred his train of thought, and it took a second to rewind.

  He said, “A hospital couldn’t hold her. Not even that kind.”

  “Then, we could get her arrested.”

  “She’d find her way out of prison, too. She’s already been a fugitive for twenty-seven years, so it’s not like that would change anything.” Jack tossed a pebble into the crater and watched it bounce to the bottom.

  He said, “What if this whole thing wasn’t training?”

  Jill’s expression turned dark, shouting with hate and hurt.

  Jack nodded toward the empty, dust-covered pens and coops. “She got rid of the animals. I can see her letting them go if she thought she had to run again.” He motioned beyond the farthest coop to a brown-gray lump lying lifeless in the dirt. “I can’t see her killing Mack.”

  Jill followed the direction of his finger, bit her lip, and drew blood.

  Mack had been the first of Clare’s dogs and her favorite. She would never have taken the others and left him here, but if he’d been alive during the firefight, they would have heard him, which meant he was dead before they’d got here.

  Jill crossed her arms and turned back to the crater.

  “No,” she said. Her eyes rose and met his. “No, that’s exactly the kind of narcissistic, delusional, Munchausen thing Clare would have done.”

  “She loved that dog more than she loved us.”

  “That’s not saying much. She never loved us.”

  “She did in her own kind of way.”

  “Stop defending her.”

  “I’m not defending her.”

  “Then shut up. Just. Stop. Talking.”

  “Why? Because it’s easier to believe she was crazy than to believe she was right?”

  Jill growled, kicked the dirt, picked up a rock, and threw it into the pit.

  Jack knelt, tossed another pebble in, and let her have the silence—took the silence for himself, really—because the conflict tearing at her also tore at him.

  Believing Clare was sick had always brought sense to the madness and excused the pain. To broach the idea that this wasn’t Clare’s doing was to admit that maybe Clare had been telling the truth, that she wasn’t psychotic and delusional and, worse, that her actions weren’t the by-product of a pathological mind, which meant they had a mother who knew exactly what her actions had cost them and had made them suffer, anyway.

  No child, no matter how old, wanted to face that prospect.

  Jack traced a finger through the dirt and followed that thought into the present.

  There wasn’t a chance in hell that a group of armed, funded, and well-trained men had shown up on her property by random chance. Something had pointed them here, and if that something wasn’t Clare herself, then what?

  Jill sat down with a huff and thumped her purse into the dirt beside her.

  Jack looked at her, then at the crater, and then at her again.

  She caught him staring. She stared back and said, “What?”

  “Did you do this?” he said. “Did you bring this down on her?”

  “What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know exactly what it’s supposed to mean.”

  “Humor me, jackass.”

  “Clare might be a whacked-out nutjob, but the one thing she’s been straight up consistent about our entire lives is leaving no trail and keeping us invisible. Then you start working favors, driving flashy cars, and blowing money like a trust-fund baby, and next thing we know . . .” He paused and thrust his hand in an arc around the destruction. “Boom.” He stood and towered over her. “What. Have.
You. Done?”

  Jill lurched to her feet and matched him posture for posture. “So now not only do you side with her, you blame me for whatever shit she’s pulling?” She shoved his chest and followed that with another push. “Have you lost your goddamn mind?”

  Jack took a step back to maintain footing.

  He said, “Answer the question.”

  “This has nothing to do with me!”

  “Pretty defensive for someone who’s not guilty of something.”

  “Fuck you, John.”

  “Thank you for making my point.”

  She came after him, raging, unthinking.

  He sidestepped, held up a finger in warning, and said, “Touch me again . . .”

  She stopped. Chest heaving, fists clenched, jaw tight, she glared.

  He backed out of reach, crossed his arms, and glared right back.

  Last thing she wanted right now was to be on her own.

  She could pretend she didn’t give a crap about what happened to Clare, but that didn’t make it true. Unresolved issues didn’t vanish when the root cause did.

  He was the brains, she was the brawn.

  She was impulsive, and smart enough to know it, and smart enough to know that she needed his ability to think and reason. He didn’t have a lot of cards to play, but the one that mattered was worth a lot.

  Jill turned her back, and he turned his to her.

  He dug the burner from the tool bag and powered it on.

  If Clare was going to contact them, the burners were how she’d do it.

  The phone booted. No calls. But she had called, hadn’t she?

  She’d been adamant that they get to her by three.

  He said, “Where’s your burner?”

  Jill, her back still to him, said, “Together with my shoes, dickwad. Where else do you think it’d be?”

  He tucked the device back into the bag.

  First step in clearing out the variables would be to get to her burner.

  He turned and motioned toward her purse. “Let me see your phone.”

  “Why?”

  She’d charged it while they were driving and hadn’t powered it on since. He said, “We’ve got enough on our hands without having to deal with the cops, too.”

  “I said I’d take care of it.”

  “Do it, then.”

  “I’ll get to it.”

  “Now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you don’t, I’ll walk off this property and leave you to figure out how to deal with this crap on your own.”

  “Go,” she said. “I don’t need you.”

  Jack picked up his rifle and shouldered his bag. Four strides into his descent, she yelled, “Fine!” A phone thumped hard between his shoulder blades.

  Jack knelt, picked up the device, and plodded slowly back up the hill.

  He held the phone out to her. She grabbed it back.

  He watched over her shoulder while she wrote a text, and waited to confirm she’d sent it, and said, “Get your stuff. We’re walking.”

  CHAPTER 9

  JACK

  AGE: 8

  LOCATION: ZURICH, SWITZERLAND

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: AUSTRIA

  NAMES: JOHANNES STEINER

  THE APARTMENT WAS HUGE—A WHOLE BEDROOM AND A FULL BATHROOM and a living room and a kitchen—and the water in the taps came out clean enough to drink without boiling first, and there weren’t any bugs in the food. This was like a fairy tale, except without a happy ending, because they’d leave soon, and there was no telling where they’d go next.

  He went back and forth like that as he paced the hallway—eight steps forward, eight steps back—and then he eyed the watch on his wrist and paced some more.

  Jill sat on the couch with her legs scooched up, watching him over the top of some stupid book about a wizard boy who wore circle glasses. Boring. All her books were boring compared to encyclopedias, which was why Clare had got him Encarta, a whole library on a few computer disks, which he didn’t have to leave behind the way his sister did with her dumb paper rocks.

  Jill said, “She’s not coming back.”

  Jack ignored her.

  Maybe Jill was right, maybe she wasn’t. With Clare, there was never any telling, and he wanted to be sure she was gone gone before he turned on the television.

  Jill said, “You’re being a baby.”

  Jack stopped. “You’re the baby,” he said. “All grumpy because we’re going to move again.”

  “You don’t know anything.”

  He smiled just to tease her. “I know more than any stupid little sister.”

  Jill stuck out her tongue. “You’re the stupid one. And the little one.”

  He stuck his own tongue out and went back to pacing.

  He didn’t really know if he was older.

  At least once a month they’d asked Clare who’d come first. She’d never said, so he’d made Jill believe it was him, and that was almost enough for him to believe it himself. Maybe he couldn’t be sure about that, but he was absolutely sure they were leaving soon. Clare hadn’t said so, and she didn’t need to. It’s how it always was: Clare traveled to do favors, and when she returned, they’d pack up and leave, sometimes in the middle of the day, sometime at night, sometimes as soon as she walked in the door, sometimes a day or two later, but they always moved.

  Jill was silly for thinking it would be different this time.

  There wasn’t anything different.

  Clare had left with a kiss, a pat on the head, and the promise to be back in three days. Sometimes she returned when she said she would, sometimes she only pretended to leave. Sometimes she was days late. Once she was a whole week late.

  When they were little, they sometimes used to cry when she didn’t show up, but they weren’t little anymore. There was food, and they had books and schoolwork, and the tool bags were stashed in the coat closet beside the front door. They knew what to do in an emergency and knew not to leave the house unless there was one. Not because Clare didn’t trust them to take care of themselves alone outdoors, but because sometimes two kids without an adult attracted attention, especially if they didn’t look like they were from around here, and attracting attention was the worst of the worst of the worst things they could possibly do.

  He checked his watch again and groaned on the inside.

  Twenty minutes of pacing had really only been eight minutes.

  He had to wait at least a half hour. A whole hour was better.

  Jack placed his ear to the front door and listened.

  The stairwell was quiet, but Clare was quiet, too.

  She made sure you could never know if she told the truth, that way you were always guessing. Sometimes she said she was leaving as a trick to test their reflexes and training. The worst tests were always the ones he didn’t see coming.

  He paced some more. Twenty minutes.

  She was probably gone for real this time.

  He gave in to impatience, sat cross-legged in front of the television, and turned it on. CNN International showed images of bombing raids in war-torn Kosovo.

  From the couch behind him, Jill said, “Silly Mommy’s boy.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Your anxiety is pathological.”

  He turned around and glared. Jill used a lot of big words she didn’t understand, because she thought she was smarter than him.

  “I don’t have anxiety,” he said.

  “You’re still pathological.”

  “You mean pathetic.”

  “Pathological, pathetic, silly Mommy’s boy.”

  “Shut up.”

  She said it louder, like a chant. “Pathological, pathetic, silly Mommy’s boy.”

  He got up, crossed the room, and punched her in the mouth.

  He hadn’t meant to, really, it had just sort of happened on its own. He pulled his hand back and stuffed it in a pocket.

  Jill smiled a gloating smile. He wanted to punch her again.

&n
bsp; “Drawing attention,” she sang, smiling bigger. “Drawing attention, drawing attention, silly Mommy’s boy, drawing attention.”

  Jack sulked back to the floor in front of the television.

  Jill would tell Clare what he’d done and would gloat when Clare gave him training. Or Jill would keep quiet and hold it over his head. Either way Jill had won. He’d let her.

  That made him mad.

  Jack slept in front of the television. He ate in front of the television. For more than a day he waited and watched, and finally, patience paid off.

  The station went crazy with news of an airplane that had crashed near Canada. Important people had died on that plane. Jack would have needled Jill. He would have said, “See, I told you. I told you every time Clare does favors or hands us off to someone else for training and goes away, there’s a big event on the news.” But he didn’t want to make Jill mad, so the conversation stayed between him and the television.

  CHAPTER 10

  JILL

  AGE: 26

  LOCATION: NEAR AUSTIN, TEXAS

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: USA

  NAMES: JULIA JANE SMITH

  SHE PRESSED HER PALMS AGAINST HER THIGHS TO FORCE HER FINGERS into stillness, tipped her head to the window, and tried to ignore the world by watching the world go by. This made twenty hours of forced sobriety, and if ever she needed to dial down the real in real life, she needed it now.

  The screams from the purse beside her feet were only getting louder.

  Another fifteen minutes. She could hold out for fifteen.

  They’d be at her apartment, and she’d have privacy and a bathroom to herself.

  Her knee bounced. She stepped on the purse to make the jitters stop.

  Jack didn’t notice either way.

  He was focused on the road, both hands on the wheel, holding the speedometer steady at exactly two miles over the speed limit in an F-150 almost as old as they were. The truck had come courtesy of Clare.

  They’d detoured first to two of her hidey-holes, cleared them out of money and ammunition, and then followed the dry creek downstream and northwest across acre after acre of abandoned and overgrown terrain to the old Hatcher homestead, where they’d found the Ford under a dusty tarp in the teetering, weatherworn barn, which was pretty much all that remained of the once thriving working ranch that had been in the Hatcher family trust for generations.