Liars' Paradox

by Taylor Stevens

She’d snuck out exactly twenty-five hours later and headed into the wild alone.

  She hadn’t figured Santiago would spend a lot of time looking for her.

  That had been a slight miscalculation.

  Jill burrowed into her hide and nibbled on the last of her stale bread.

  Since traps weren’t an option right now, she’d have to wait till full dark, when everything went quiet, to try hunting. She stretched out, let delicious drowsy sleep take her, and jolted awake to a voice in the distance, an unmistakable voice.

  Jill froze, heart pounding, and she searched the dimming evening light, not sure if she’d really heard what she’d thought she’d heard or if maybe she’d hallucinated.

  But there it was again, this time a little closer, calling in Russian, her mother tongue, the language Clare used when she didn’t want to risk Spanish or French being understood by the people around them.

  Reality kicked in.

  She rolled to her knees and scurried, squirreling away supplies as silently as she could, covering evidence that she’d made camp here, embarrassed that Clare might see her like this.

  That voice bounced through the underbrush again, far and near at the same time, and perfectly clear. “We know you’re out here,” it said. “Do not make me track you down.”

  Jill hurried to finish loading her bag. She dragged the pack out after her and brushed leaves across the floor of her hide to obscure the campsite. Then she scampered into the falling night to get as far away from the voice as possible.

  Her water pot was toast.

  Her traps were lost.

  She counted the slow, painful distance in her head and, when she couldn’t afford to wait any longer, routed around a tree and came out the other side standing.

  She walked a slow, slow tromp back the way she’d come.

  Clare called her name again.

  Jill yelled back, “I’m on my way. Can’t you see me?”

  The forest went quiet. Flashlights beamed in multiple directions.

  Jill kept walking and let them find her.

  Clare came toward her, a ghost looming in the night, with Santiago to her right, Jack at her left, and a dozen other men and women with cheap camouflage and machetes and guns at her back. She stopped when she was nearly chest to chest with Jill.

  “Yuliya,” Clare said. “What have you done?”

  The words weren’t a question but a condemnation and a horrible promise.

  Jill withered under the glare, then squared her shoulders and stood defiant. Clare had been missing for more than a month and wanted to know what she had done?

  Jill said, “I’ve been surviving, and I’ve been invisible, and you should be proud of how well I’ve succeeded, but no, you’re pissed off, just like you always are.”

  “This,” Clare hissed. She thrust her hand in an arc, pointing toward the forest. “This is attention we don’t need.”

  Jill cocked her chin up. “You ran off,” she said. “You ran off and left us. Left me and Jack with people we don’t even know, and never bothered to send word you’d be late or that you were even alive.”

  “You can’t understand,” Clare said. “Hopefully, you’ll never have to understand. Don’t repay sacrifice and love with disrespect.”

  Jill crossed her arms and clenched her jaw. “You’ve never loved us.”

  Clare’s lips pressed tight, and her skin changed color, and Jill knew she’d gone too far but couldn’t stop now. Louder, she said, “You don’t even know what love means.”

  Clare’s right hand lifted across her chest toward her shoulder, and for the first time then, or ever, she backhanded Jill across the face.

  The blow knocked Jill on her heels, and blood, warm and sticky, trickled down her lip. Her throat burned. She wanted to scream and cry and hit and yell.

  She wanted to be hugged. She wanted Clare to tell her she loved her.

  Instead, she stood tall, fists clenched, and glowered.

  Clare studied her, and turned away. To Santiago, she said, “Get her back to camp and get her cleaned up.”

  Jill watched Clare go. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Jack. She wouldn’t be able to bear it if he mocked her, and she might crumble if he gloated.

  Santiago reached for her arm with his big, meaty hands.

  Jill yelped and dodged his grasp.

  He lunged at her, swearing and angry, and she slid aside again.

  She didn’t care if Clare had returned, didn’t care if the whole world hated her, she still wasn’t going back of her own free will.

  Santiago caught her arm, gripped it tight, and tried to grab her waist.

  Jill fought, kicking and swinging.

  Jack stepped between them. He put a palm on Santiago’s chest.

  “No,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

  Santiago let go. Jill fell backward and hit the ground hard. Jack stretched a hand to her, offering to help her up. She recoiled and scrambled away.

  He followed her. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll go together.”

  “No,” she whispered.

  “Together,” he said, stretching the word into three strong, emphasized syllables. “And anything Clare deals you, she’ll have to deal me, too. Together.”

  CHAPTER 12

  JACK

  AGE: 26

  LOCATION: DERIDDER, LOUISIANA

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: USA

  NAMES: JONATHAN THOMAS SMITH

  CONSCIOUSNESS ROSE IN DISJOINTED SEGMENTS, FIRST WITH THE SICK sweet smell of weed, which made him want to vomit, and then pounding in his head, which made him want to die. He fought weighted eyelids and blinked against a predawn gray just bright enough to set off the neuro-jackhammer. He squinted past the pain.

  Senses engaged one by one, treating him to cramped muscles and aching joints, seat cushions and window panels inside a car he didn’t recognize. Ready-to-eat meals and bottled water were on the floorboard beside his hand. His fingers fumbled and grasped plastic, and he groaned his way up to where he could saturate the desert in his mouth.

  Swallowing hurt, but the water cleared some of the fuzzy and dulled the headache enough to let him open his eyes. He focused on the windshield and then through the glass, where a shadow on the hood tightened into Jill’s silhouette.

  A faint spark of orange in her hand explained the smell.

  Beyond her loomed the outline of a large brick building, its white dome starkly bright against the sky’s creeping light. Other shapes and shadows lined the streets around them, but the courthouse was enough to let him know where they were, and the gut punch of recognition made him wish he could crawl back into oblivion, get a rewind on life, and wake up somewhere else.

  He opened the door and, legs still shaky, found solid ground.

  He placed his hand on the car for balance. His foggy brain registered the light gray paint and then the vehicle itself—a Camry, ubiquitous and invisible, exactly what Clare would have had them drive—and he puzzled over where it’d come from and how Jill had managed to get him into it and what she’d done with the truck and if she’d left the Tesla where he’d parked it.

  Jill, staring at the courthouse ahead, hadn’t turned when he opened the door, and didn’t turn as he approached. She took a drag and, when he was near, said, “Seemed the appropriate place to come.”

  Jack plucked the spliff from her hand and tossed it as far across the lawn as his stiff and aching joints would let it fly. “You’re crazy for smoking that here.”

  She answered with indifferent silence.

  He eased down on the hood beside her, engine still warm beneath him.

  Jill pulled her knees up, wrapped her arms around them, and finally looked at him. He met her gaze and wished he hadn’t.

  She sighed and went back to staring.

  Of all the places Jill could have driven, she’d taken them home—or at least as close to home as home had ever been, considering the two years they’d spent under Raymond Chance’s roof was the longest they’d eve
r stayed in one place.

  If Ray’d had a middle name, it would’ve been Second.

  He’d had another name and another life once and, like them, had been severed from whatever came before. He was the closest they’d ever find to a living dead man.

  Staying dead, he’d said, was the best way to stay alive.

  Clare had dropped them off on his doorstep when they were sixteen: no warning, no promise to come back, just “By the way, you’re staying with Ray now.”

  It mattered, he supposed, that she’d chosen someone they already knew and liked, that she hadn’t left them with strangers from her past the way she’d so often done before, but gratitude to that degree was hard to feel in the face of abandonment. They’d stood on Ray’s wraparound porch, backpacks at their feet, watching the tires of her Bronco bump between stands of pine along the potholed road until the taillights vanished. Reality had sunk in right about the same time the shock had worn off.

  Clare would send for them sometimes—a Christmas break here, a month out of summer there—and would always ship them back to DeRidder, to the man who would become the closest thing they had to a father. Jack got why Clare had left them, but never did understand why Ray had agreed to foster. Ray wasn’t what most would see as the fathering type: an ex–something or other who’d never married or had kids of his own, he was dangerous like Clare, though only half as paranoid and not as crazy.

  To Ray’s credit, he’d spoken a language they could understand, because he’d seen the types of things they’d seen and worse, and he’d done his best with two angry, resentful kids who were each capable of killing a neighborhood and making it look like an accident. He’d fed their need for gunpowder and poison, had endured the grief they gave him with humor and patience, and it was he who’d taught them how to navigate a boring, staid, rule-filled world they weren’t raised to live in.

  Jack adored the man. Jill respected him.

  None of that lessened the impact of being unworthy of their mother.

  With effort, Jack had managed to make it through high school. He’d stayed in touch with Ray and visited now and again, keeping away for reasons that had nothing to do with Ray and everything to do with Clare. But Jill had gone off the rails early, drinking, drugging, and burning through boys as if she were the last woman on earth.

  Ray had put up with her longer than anyone else would have and had finally thrown her out at gunpoint when she was seventeen.

  Jill hadn’t spoken to him since.

  Transitioning to a small town wouldn’t have been easy for any outsider, much less for two wild creatures who’d never sat in a classroom or regularly interacted with non-sibling age-mates and for whom the local language and customs were strange and foreign. Getting through hadn’t been without its troubles, and perhaps a house fire and maybe a car accident or two before trouble learned to steer clear, so it would’ve been easy to write off Jill’s behavior as the by-product of all that.

  Maybe part of it was, but mostly not.

  Far as Jack was concerned, DeRidder was just another battlefield upon which an emotional contortionist had unleashed psychological warfare until she got bored. The real battle was with her mother. Everything Jill did was to punish Clare, and for that, the only option was escalation, and that was the only war she couldn’t win.

  Jack didn’t blame Jill, he blamed Clare.

  Even Ray blamed Clare.

  Jack said, “You think Ray had something to do with Clare’s disappearance?”

  “I don’t think there was any disappearance, but Ray’s the only other person who knows where she lives, and if anyone has a clue about what she’s up to, it’d be him.”

  “You’re a brave woman for coming back.”

  Jill slid off the hood, stretched her arms over her head, and breathed deep. “Time to let bygones be bygones,” she said.

  “You bring the guns?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Everything’s in the trunk.”

  “So much for bygones.”

  “It’s been a long drive, and I hate being back. I’m not wasting the trip.”

  “You let him know you’re coming?”

  She gave him a dismissive, withering look. The one that said she wasn’t an idiot while simultaneously calling him one.

  Jack turned back to the courthouse.

  There were reasons to argue with her and more reasons not to.

  If Ray had had anything to do with Clare’s disappearance, announcing their arrival would be a bigger mistake than coming at him blind after years of estrangement, but doing it Jill’s way meant they were going to need the guns.

  Jack patted the hood. “Whose car? Is it clean?”

  Her lips turned up. In the shadows the gloating looked evil. “There’s so much you don’t know,” she said. “I like it that way.”

  A knot of angry frustration spawned inside his chest.

  He said, “Where’s Clare’s truck?”

  “With the Tesla.”

  “At the Walmart?”

  “Nah.”

  “Where?”

  “I got it handled, okay? Let it go.”

  The frustration grew, enveloping his heart and lungs and pounding his throbbing head harder, making it more difficult to think. Jill knew how to hold him hostage, knew even better than Clare how to trip him off his game.

  He rubbed his thigh, still sore and bruised from where she’d jabbed him.

  His only recourse in the moment was to deprive her of the pleasure of knowing she’d won, but he’d find payback, and when he did, it’d be a bitch.

  He stood and walked for the front passenger door.

  Jill called after him. “If you’re right about Clare being taken, even if that means she’s been telling the truth all these years—I’m not saying I believe it, but even if it’s true—that doesn’t change anything else, you know?”

  He paused and glanced back. “How so?”

  “Clare maybe not being one hundred percent delusional and Clare being a sociopathic narcissist—they’re not mutually exclusive.”

  He nodded. Acknowledgment, not agreement.

  The possibility of Clare having told the truth all these years changed everything. He just couldn’t piece together how or why, especially not while he couldn’t fit the past twenty-four hours into a coherent portrait.

  He opened the door. “If I’m right, then we’re running out of time.”

  Jill slid off the hood and trailed around the other side.

  She took the wheel and headed out of town, driving south past cropland and the occasional farmhouse on Highway 27, a two-lane county road that connected a patchwork of smaller roads that cut deep into the Louisiana wild. They rode in silence, Jack shoving calorie-dense food into his mouth, while the lightening sky transformed colorless shadows into shades of green.

  Jill turned east.

  The sun crested and climbed higher.

  She pulled off onto an unmarked track, thick with untamed foliage and unchanged by time, and crawled the Camry up a graveled stretch that would eventually dead-end in a cul-de-sac outside Ray’s front door. She stopped forty yards in, just far enough that the car couldn’t be seen from the paved road and hopefully far enough out that Ray’s coonhounds and Catahoulas wouldn’t raise an alarm.

  She killed the engine.

  Hands in her lap, she paused. “How’s your head?”

  Concern would have been nice. What she really wanted to know was if he’d cleared up enough to strategize and shoot.

  He answered by stepping out of the car.

  Jill followed him to the trunk and watched as he took in the disorganized mess of weapons, ammunition, and supplies mixed in between their personal things. His assessment stopped with her tool bag, the whole reason they’d gone to her apartment and the reason she’d stabbed him with the needle.

  Jill pulled the burner from a pocket and handed it to him. “She hasn’t called this one, either.”

  Jack took the phone and held it tight, the weight
in his hand a miniature of the burden on his shoulders. Love and hate and obligation and want and fear and hope chased through his head. Clare was stronger, fitter, and in better shape than most men half her age. The only person he’d bet on going up against her was Jill, and that was because Jill was a lunatic trained by the lunatic. Clare could take care of herself.

  He picked up his rifle, ran the bolt.

  Clare was a pain in the ass and a horrible mother, but she was his mother, and it had now been a full day since he’d watched the helicopter leave her property, and still there’d been no sign of her or contact attempt from her.

  He drew in the fragrance of gun oil.

  Yesterday he would have sworn Ray would never do anything to hurt Clare. A lot had changed since yesterday.

  Jill crossed the gravel, AR-15 in hand, and disappeared between the trees.

  Jack zipped into a tactical vest and loaded the pockets.

  Tension and animosity faded, just as it always did when he and Jill were working. Only the objective mattered, and the same familiarity and birth bond that allowed them to torment each other so well made it possible for them to work as a single unit: no wire necessary, no need to articulate.

  They both knew what had to be done.

  He headed into the marsh, toward Ray’s three-bedroom cabin, testing the wind and following the dry ground. He stopped before breaking into the open and shimmied up a tree for a better vantage. Last time he’d been here, Ray had had project cars up on blocks, a shed under construction, and a carport crammed with tools and workbenches.

  The place was cleaned up and empty now.

  Fresh weather stain on the porch and new curtains in the windows said he was still around and suggested there might be a woman in his life.

  Jack moved the scope in a slow scan across the front, analyzing, measuring.

  At the edge of his vision, the curtain color shifted.

  Ray might as well have looked him dead in the face and said hello.

  Adrenaline surged in an immediate fight-or-flight response.

  He didn’t have time to think or plan. He let go and jumped, hit the ground hard, and rolled. A bullet spit into the trunk a few feet lower than where he’d been.