Beautiful Lies

twenty-six

I got out of there as fast as I could. Looking back, I realize there were a thousand questions I should have asked Dr. Hauser—a real private investigator wouldn’t have freaked the way I did and bolted—but I didn’t know how long I could hold that fake smile and nod my thanks for his help. I felt like there was a siren going off in my head and I was walking on one of those fun-house floors that jolt and tilt. So as soon as he handed me the number, I left. I didn’t ask him about Jake, about Project Rescue.

I yanked the crumpled door open on the Jeep (it still opened and closed but not without effort) and climbed inside. I sat there a minute in the cold. It was growing dark outside now and the snow that had started to fall was growing heavier. I turned the engine on and realized as I reached to put the car into reverse that I didn’t have any idea where to go next. I fished my cellular phone out of my coat and dialed.

“Salvo.” He answered before the second ring, his voice gruff, tired but officious.

“It’s Ridley Jones.”

A sigh, then silence. “You tipped him off. And now he’s gone.”

I didn’t respond to his statement. I wasn’t going to incriminate myself, but I didn’t feel like lying anymore, either. “Is his car still impounded?” I asked instead. That was the reason I’d called, or one of them. I had to know whether Jake had tried to kill me.

“What?”

“The Firebird,” I said, sounding a little snappish, tense. “Is it still impounded?”

He was quiet for a minute. “We never impounded his car, Ridley.”

My heart sank a little further in my chest and I fought back tears of disappointment and fear.

“I’m in trouble, Detective Salvo. Someone tried to kill me.” My voice sounded odd, even to my own ears, tinny and strained. Even then, I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to say, I think Jake tried to run me off the road in his Firebird.

“Come in to the station. I can’t protect you if I don’t know where you are.” He sounded calm and concerned, gentle. But I didn’t trust him, either. Maybe he was just trying to coax me.

“I need to find out what’s happening to me,” I said, trying to sound firm and together. “Did you look into those missing kids I told you about? Or were you just humoring me?”

I heard some papers rustling in the background. “I did some nosing around, just because I said I would. All the parents are dead…except for Marjorie Mathers, mother of Brian. She’s serving a life sentence for murder at Rahway State Penitentiary for Women.”

“Doesn’t it seem odd to you?”

“What? That all these kids went missing and were never found? Sad to say, it happens more often than people want to admit.”

“Okay. But then most of the parents die?”

“Well, I mean, these are what we call high-risk people. You know, their lives and habits put them in dangerous situations. Drug addicts, right? Drinkers who don’t think twice about getting into a car. People who get in bar fights. I mean, think about it. People like you, Ridley, are low risk. You obey the law—up until now, anyway. You’re responsible to yourself and the people around you. You’re less likely to meet with a violent and early death because of your choices. If you’d had too much to drink, you’d probably choose to get a cab or call a friend than get behind the wheel. A choice, which, poorly made, might result in your death and the death of three teenage girls…or not.”

Choices. We were back to that, the things that determine the course of your life. Was it that simple? Some of us are high risk and some of us low? Some of us made bad choices and some of us made wise ones? And these choices determined whether we were happy or miserable, healthy or unhealthy, loved or unloved? I had to wonder, What informed these choices? The obvious answer is our parents, the people who loved or didn’t love us, raised us well or poorly. There were other factors, of course. But did it just come down to whether someone loved us enough to teach us how to make the right choices for ourselves?

No. It’s not that simple. Life never is. I mean, look at Ace and me. We were raised by the same people in the same house. Totally different outcomes; we’ve made totally different choices in our lives. Like I said, how you were raised is part of the big picture. It’s one important factor in a million. But in the end, it’s not just the big and small events that make you who you are, make your life what it is, it’s how you choose to react to them. That’s where you have control over your life. I believe that.

“So what about these kids? Their parents were poor—high risk, as you say. Everyone who might have loved them is dead. No one ever figures out what happened to them. And, oh well?”

I heard Detective Salvo sigh again on the other end of the phone. “It was thirty years ago. I’d say the trail has gone cold.”

“If someone was alive to love those kids, they’d still love them even thirty years later.”

“Now you sound like Marjorie Mathers.”

“You talked to her?”

“I told you I’d look into it.”

“And?”

Another heavy sigh. Or maybe it was that he was smoking, releasing these sharp exhales. “She says two men dressed in black with masks over their faces came in that night and took her boy. She thought her husband had hired them because they were duking it out over custody. She claimed he abused the kid and she was gunning for full custody and supervised visitation only for the father.”

He paused and cleared his throat. I heard him sifting again through papers.

“Thing was, you know, she didn’t call the police until the next morning. Claims she was knocked out by some drug and didn’t recover consciousness until the next day. But there was no evidence of that. The police didn’t believe her story. So both she and her husband were suspects. And she wasn’t very credible—had a history of depression and suicide attempts. Says in the report that she was hysterical.”

I laughed a little. “Wouldn’t you be?”

“So she killed her husband ‘by accident,’ trying to find out what happened to her son. But she got murder one, anyway. Jury didn’t buy it. And that was that.”

“Brian got lost again.”

“Yeah, I guess he did. They had the case open for another year. I can see from the file that they followed procedure.”

“For all the good it did,” I said. “What did she say when you talked to her?”

“She’s a little nuts,” said Detective Salvo unkindly. “I talked to her on the phone. She’s sticking to her story, anyway. Says a day doesn’t go by she doesn’t cry for her little boy, wonder where he is. She swears he’s still alive.”

“Let me ask you. Did she mention that a private investigator had been to see her awhile ago?”

The detective was quiet a minute. “Yeah, she did. How do you know that?”

“I’ve been following this trail and he’s been everywhere I’ve been so far.”

“Harley Jacobsen?” he asked.

I didn’t answer.

“What does that tell you?” he said.

I didn’t say anything. The last light had gone from the sky and I was sitting in the dark. The air blowing from the vents was tepid at best. I knew the car wouldn’t really warm up until it was moving. The dials on the dash glowed orange and green. The radio was turned down low, but I could hear a low murmur of voices coming from the speakers.

“Well, it tells me something,” he said when I didn’t answer. “It tells me you were the last stop on that trail, Ridley. That he followed it to you and he’s using you to get what he wants.”

The words hit me hard. I hadn’t really thought of that. It made sense now. Made sense like a lead boot in the stomach. I thought of him coming to my door that night, just after I’d received the letter from Christian Luna. I thought of the invitation I found at my doorstep, the bottle of wine and apology. Thought about the way I’d told him everything that first night. The man on the staircase. The second note and the newspaper clipping that he was so quick to identify. They lied. That’s what the note had said and I had wondered how anyone could know what my parents had said to me. He knew because I’d told him. My mind struggled with it all. I thought of Christian Luna. He was real; I knew that much. But who had killed him? Jake? Why would he do that? Why would he lead me to him and then kill him? It didn’t make sense.

“What does he want?” I said, more thinking aloud than really asking.

“I don’t know, Ridley,” said Detective Salvo, startling me. I’d forgotten I was on the phone with him. “But let me help you, okay? Just come on in and we’ll figure everything out.”

Gus Salvo was a nice man. He was a good cop, and though I didn’t doubt that he wanted to help me, my gut told me that he couldn’t, that I was on my own if I wanted to find out the truth. I was swimming in an ocean of lies and my instincts were the only thing keeping me from going under. So I hung up on poor Detective Salvo without another word and pulled out of the Little Angels parking lot. I drove the battered Jeep back to the city, watching out nervously for the Firebird and for cop cars all the way home.

I returned the Jeep to the after-hours drop-off lot, left the keys and the documents in the cup holder. I began walking out of there and the attendant, a young black woman with ironed hair, red and purple bejeweled nails, and the biggest gold hoop earrings I’ve ever seen, looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.

“You’re going to have to pay for that,” she said. “That car’s damaged.” She grabbed the paperwork from the car and started marking up the little diagram of a car with a red pen.

“That’s fine. You have all my information,” I said. I couldn’t care less. Before all of this I would have felt bad if I’d left a cigarette burn on the seat of a rental car, would have felt terribly irresponsible, but that seemed like a very long time ago and a very different Ridley. Now all I could think about was lying down. I went back to the hotel on Washington Square. I didn’t do any transportation acrobatics. I just walked; it wasn’t far from where I’d left the car.

I walked into the dingy lobby and got into the small elevator, exited on the third floor, which smelled like mold and mothballs even though it looked as if it had been newly renovated. I let myself into my room and climbed onto the stiff mattress with its scratchy comforter. I lay there in the dark for a second, my mind totally blank, my body numb. And then I fell into a black, dreamless sleep.