Simply Lies

Chapter 34

The sight out of the United Airlines jet window was a beautiful, soothing landscape with clusters of homes, some quite large in scope and ambition, but most were small, dulled jewels in a less luxurious chain. And then there were the farms situated along the legendary rolling Virginia hills. There seemed a peace and serenity to all of it.

Clarisse imagined real estate companies would use a drone to film it all and then put these images in their brochures to sell a dream that was only just a dream.

She turned away because the sight — and not the turbulence they were encountering — was making her sick to her stomach.

Dulles International Airport loomed in front of them and the jet touched down and finally slowed. She retrieved her suitcase from baggage claim, confident in her new identity pack: driver’s license, passport, and credit cards; she even had Global Entry based on an interview that had never happened, but a computer only spit out what was put into it. All professionally done and paid for. Easy if you knew where to get such things.

She rented a car, a neat little white convertible, and headed out. She had researched The Plains. It was rural and equal parts poor and chic. But not too many inhabitants. She would be noticed. She did not want to be noticed, at least not right now. But she had no choice.

There was money in the surrounding countryside, some of which she had seen from the air. She had read that Jacqueline Mars, of the Mars candy company, lived in The Plains. She was worth about $40 billion, she had heard, all from making people fat, diabetic, and dead prematurely.

But the town itself was strictly working-class. In May well over fifty thousand people came out to attend the Gold Cup steeplechase here. She imagined the local businesses prospered greatly during that time. Some of the outside dollars would stick here for a bit, like slick leaves on cracked pavement.

She drove slowly past the small pile of clapboard and shingles that Daryl Oxblood called home. It was a cracker box with a failing foundation, an adjacent lean-to where a dirty tan Ford F-150 sat, and a picket fence that was no longer white and no longer all standing up. Except for the truck, the place looked deserted. There was no smoke coming from the brick chimney, though the day was cold and windy. No lights on that she could see. The fenced-in paddock was empty.

As she gazed around she noted there were four homes on this short dead-end street, one next to Oxblood’s and two across the narrow, disintegrating macadam. Smoke was curling up from the chimney top of one of them while the other sat silent and dark. The home next to Oxblood’s had a Range Rover from the 1980s parked out front and a muddy ATV parked next to a tree. A horse whinnied from behind the structure. A crow flapped its wings and lifted off from the branches of a sprawling southern magnolia set in the front yard and taking up far too much space.

Clarisse parked her car and got out. She was dressed casually in jeans and low boots and a fleece-lined jacket. Her bag was slung over her shoulder. Inside the bag was a cylinder of potent pepper spray that she’d had in her checked bag. She never went anywhere without it. Because you just never knew who you might run into who would require an eyeful of it.

From her bag she pulled out an iPad. An element of cover but also a useful tool if need be. She slipped on fur-lined leather gloves. She stood next to her car and checked out the four houses: Oxblood’s and the other three.

She headed up to Oxblood’s place, approaching from the rear. She knocked but there was no answer. She peered in one of the windows and saw a dingy interior with furnishings that looked like carryovers from several generations back. She knocked on the front door and got the same result. There was a decrepit John Deere tractor parked right behind the house. It looked like it hadn’t been touched in years.

She headed to the house next door. There was permanence there, she concluded, not a trap.

I hope.