by Rachel Kane
“Look, it’s a blow, definitely, but I don’t think we should count the case over and done, there are still—”
“I’m not talking about the fucking case, I’m talking about me!”
My voice was so loud that pedestrians turned to watch as I stalked past.
“All right, look, you’re coming over here,” said Micah. “You’re not going to object, you’re not going to go home. Get over here. Now.”
“Fine.” I dropped the phone into my pocket.
Micah had his house to himself. It was one of those big Victorians on the other side of the park, with a view of the lake. Tonight all the windows were lit up, aglow with lamps, as though he’d turned his house into a beacon for me.
“Where’s Jerome?” I asked, watching Micah pour out the alcohol.
“Pottery class. Pottery. He says he’s trying to expand his horizons.”
I followed him to his couches. Folders were stacked high, forms and depositions and other papers, all laid out for a night’s work.
“Keeping busy while he’s gone, I see.”
He nodded. “The other way around, really. He’s gone because I’m keeping busy. But my little frictions with Jerome aren’t why I asked you over.”
I raised my glass and looked at the whiskey, looked through it, the room distorted and honey-colored. “Yes. You asked me over so I could talk about my feelings.”
“How is he doing?”
“Cam? I don’t know. I feel guilty just being here, instead of there. He needs me. But…he doesn’t want anyone nearby.”
My mind was still crashing around, trying to make sense of everything that had happened. So far, nothing really made sense, and part of that was because I was here.
Why was I in this room, with Micah, drinking a higher class of whiskey than I could afford, instead of back with Cam?
What kind of boyfriend was I?
I had been so eager to escape, and now the guilt was settling in, wedging itself between the rage and the hurt.
But Cam hadn’t wanted me there. And now that I wasn’t pounding cameras into dust, I could think about that a little more.
“I don’t understand why he didn’t want me to stay with him, to talk,” I said.
“Bruised ego,” suggested Micah.
“Shock. Pain. Fear that I was mad at him. I don’t know, it could be a lot of things, and I can’t know what they are, because he wouldn’t talk to me. Maybe I should just go back. Maybe if I force him to talk—”
“Force?” said Micah. “Given what he’s going through, that sounds like a really bad idea. Give him some time. This was…a surprising turn of events.”
The whiskey was smooth and sweet, totally at odds with how I felt. I wanted a drink that would hurt me. One that would kick my ass, tell me how useless I was.
“Damn, I don’t like feeling like this,” I said. I had to get up, move around, do something with this weird energy inside me. “Maybe I should call him.”
“Before you do, let’s get clear on a couple of things. Important things, for the case, but also for you.”
“The last thing I want right now is clarity. I want to fucking hide under a rock.”
He wouldn’t be deterred, though. “I realize that, and I’m not asking this to hurt you…but I think you need to talk about it too: These new charges from Secret Reader, are they true?”
That was an interesting question, wasn’t it?
Or maybe I meant a devastating one.
I was by the window, and I pushed the curtain aside just enough to look out.
The difference between Corinth and a truly massive city was the light. It never gets dark in a real city. Night falls, but before it can darken the sky, a trillion other lights take the place of the sun.
Corinth was dark. Oh, the buildings were lit, a thousand windows yellow and white with lamps and overhead lights. Signs glowed, streetlights cast their own pools of brightness, but all these lights seemed somehow isolated, like they never added together in that electric ambience a real city had.
Then there was the park. Even fewer lights there, it hung in the darkness with its own special brand of black, something rich and deep and wild. It felt dangerous. Like you wouldn’t want to walk through it this time of night. There might be monsters, wild beasts to tear you limb from limb.
That’s where I felt like I belonged. Where I felt I was standing right now, in a darkness I could not understand or fathom.
“Is it true, Alex?” Micah’s voice seemed so far away.
I shook my head. “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. It makes sense. There has always been something…off. How to describe it? My instincts said he was hiding something. I told myself I had to be wrong.”
“So you think she’s right.”
Closing the curtain, I turned back towards the warmth, light, and safety of the room. “That’s the fucked up thing. I don’t know if I believe it. He didn’t deny it, but there are other things…”
The way he was hesitant in bed. Sometimes he gave the impression of someone who had only recently obtained a human body, and was still not sure how it worked. Something about the joy of discovery, as though everything he did was for the first time.
You wouldn’t think it would feel like that, with someone who’d been a professional.
I don’t think I could’ve described that to Micah. It was too hard for me to describe to myself. It felt disloyal to Cam, to talk about that aspect of our relationship.
“Other things?” prompted Micah.
“I don’t know how to say it. If it’s true, I’ll be surprised. If it’s not true, I’ll be surprised.”
He was staring at me. “That’s not really helpful.”
With a shrug I said, “I’m not trying to be helpful right now. I’m just trying to work through all this. My mind is all confused. How do you help someone, when their response to pain is to wall themselves off and become distant?”
If anything, his stare had become harder, like he was drilling into me with his eyes. “Yes,” he said, “how do you help someone like that.”
“What, me? You’re talking about me? I’m distant?”
“It took an act of Congress to pull you out of your garden to work on this case to begin with.”
“Yeah, and look where that got me. You want me to be less distant? Fine. How about this: I’m scared, Micah. I’ve told you a little about my time with David Black.”
“Very little.”
“But enough that I think you know what happened.”
He inclined his head. “You were defending a monster. It was a rough time for those of us who knew you. Some people questioned your ethics…I thought there was something else going on. Something internal, something psychological.”
“It was a bad, bad time. I don’t want to throw around terms like abuse…”
“You don’t want to think of yourself as a victim.”
“That’s it, right. Yet I came out of that experience with a lot of scars.”
Why was this so hard to talk about? It’s not like I was scared Micah would tell my secrets to anybody; he was a lawyer, he was used to keeping things to himself. Nor did I think he would really judge me for things that happened in the past; if anyone understood how closed-off I’d become after that, it was him.
But I hated to admit how I was feeling about Cam right now. No, strike that. How I was feeling about myself.
I poured myself another drink.
“You won’t understand this,” I said to Micah, “but sometimes I feel like I don’t deserve anyone in my life. Not lovers, not friends. Like I don’t deserve people who are truthful and good.”
This was uncharted territory, and I could tell Micah wasn’t sure how to process it. We might be good friends—hell, Micah was probably my best friend—but we didn’t talk. Not about things like this. I didn’t know how to process it either. I don’t even like words like process, like there’s something mysterious going on under the hood that you can’t understand.
“So you’re saying Cam lied to you. That Secret Reader is telling the truth.”
“I’m saying I don’t know. But I think David Black proved something to me. About how gullible I am, even though I like to think of myself as a hard-nosed realist. It’s not about Cam himself, you know? Did he lie? Maybe. Is he a bad person? No, I don’t think so, not at all. He’s a hurt person. But I don’t know if I can survive another person with deep secrets. Even if he has honest, good reasons for wanting to keep those secrets, I’m not sure I can survive the lies he has to tell to keep them secret.”
25
Cam
“A surprising turn of events there,” said Jess Hedley. “And you saw it here first on Murder Minute, where…well, where frankly we’re not used to a lot of shocking revelations about the writers we feature! Next up, my video review of Yasmin Parker’s latest—”
I clicked the stop button. Scrolled back to the beginning of the interview.
“Today we’ve got a real treat in store for you. He’s the master of what some call the pastry cozy—”
Scrolled forward.
“How were you influenced by your time as a rentboy?”
Rewind.
“How were you influenced by your time as a rentboy?”
Rewind.
I wasn’t listening to the words. The words were burned into my heart at this point.
What fascinated me was my face.
You could tell I had started feeling confident. I hadn’t realized it at the time, but I’d clearly been getting comfortable in the interview. An open, cheerful look on my face, that wasn’t put on. I was genuinely becoming engaged in our talk.
Then he asked the question, and it was like someone had hit the pause button on my personal being.
My face was frozen there, that cheerful look suddenly paralyzed, unmoving.
If you moved forward just a fraction of a second, you could see the reaction start in my eyes, the terror still just a spark, not yet consuming my entire body. Mouth smiling, eyes full of dread.
I got up from the computer, my back and knees complaining; I don’t know how long I had been sitting in that same position, clicking and clicking.
Walking into the bathroom, I looked in the mirror.
What did my face show now?
A certainty, I suppose. Before, I had been concerned about a disaster, but now it was really happening.
What came to mind was a flood. You see on TV there’s a flood watch, you start to worry. You can hear the rain outside. The fear grows.
But when the water starts coming into your house, your feelings change. It’s up around your ankles, and you realize it’s not fear you’re feeling, not anymore. It’s something else, something darker.
Here was my past, all my secrets, flooding around me like black water.
What did my face show now? That I was drowning.
“Don’t,” I told Eli, when he offered to come over.
“Are you sure? I don’t like you being alone in this. Where the hell is Alex? He should be by your side.”
I looked around the apartment. Over in the corner was the trashcan, now full of little bits of camera.
Where had Alex gone? I didn’t know. He’d made an escape.
I didn’t blame him. Hadn’t I practically kicked him out by refusing to talk to him?
“Why should he stay here?” I asked. “I’m honestly surprised you even called, now that you’ve seen what happened.”
“Oh, come on. Do you think anyone believes that nonsense?” He laughed. “You’re too much of a damn snob for that kind of thing, everybody knows that. These internet people, they’ll say anything to score a point off you. Your friends all know it’s an ugly lie, and I think your readers will too.”
I looked over at the computer. That was an interesting idea, wasn’t it? The idea that people would see this latest accusation as an unfounded attack. That people might just not believe it.
What a nice world that would be to live in.
How nice, to be able to say, that’s ridiculous, I don’t know what Jess was talking about, clearly Secret Reader had given him that question, clearly she somehow knew ahead of time I was going to be on the show, and wanted to plant one more attack, I don’t know where she’s getting all this, she’s clearly unhinged.
Except for one minor problem: I didn’t know whether she had proof.
I realized, that was the thing that was bothering me right now. Because of course I could lie. I could go online right now and proclaim my innocence. Call her crazy, call her a liar.
Like one of the suspects in my books, who would angrily tear down Katie’s case against him. He’d explain to everyone how she was clueless, not a real detective, just an amateur meddler who got involved where she didn’t belong, and how could anyone ever believe her…
…and then she would bring out the evidence. The hard evidence that proved her case. A ribbon smeared with mud. A key with a bloody thumbprint. The croissant with the faint smell of bitter almonds, loaded with deadly cyanide.
That’s what I was afraid of right now. Because yes, behind that certainty that my life was over, there was still fear. Fear that there was more to come.
The proof.
And then there would be no denying things. No hiding from them anymore.
“You’re being awfully quiet, Cam.”
I looked at my phone. “Sorry. I’m going to hang up now, Eli.”
“Wait, come on. I’m telling you, we all know she’s lying. She is lying, right? Cam? That can’t be true, right?”
“Goodbye, Eli.”
My apartment was a lonely place. The internet, though, was crowded, full of people with opinions about me. I returned to my chair, put my hand back on my mouse, and began to scroll through comments. So many comments.
I missed Alex.
I needed him. Needed to feel protected from all this.
He’d broken that camera in a rage over what had been done to me. Then stood there, trying to figure out what he could do to help. I hadn’t given him any hint. It had hurt too much.
But now I wanted him here.
Do you really, though? Are you willing to tell him the truth, now that it has been splashed in front of the world? Or are you going to claim it was all a lie, like nothing ever happened?
How could he trust me at all? Nobody could. Not knowing that at any moment, Secret Reader might dredge up one more fact about me.
I had to come clean. I had to tell him everything.
Except that was pointless. I’d look like a liar. Like I’d been withholding things from him all this time. And he would get angrier and angrier at my inability to be honest, he’d see it as a betrayal, and then he’d leave.
Maybe it would be better to let things lie as they were.
Just never call him back.
Because this was really it, wasn’t it? This was the true fear, that I would never, ever have anyone in my life. Eventually either the truth would drive them away, or the lies would.
I wasn’t a good person. My truth was a bad truth, my lies were bad lies.
The thing is, I couldn’t sit here all night listening to my own thoughts. I couldn’t agonize all by myself. I couldn’t bear it.
I pulled out my phone.
Could I talk to him? Could I confront the truth?
Would I just end up lying to him again?
For a long time we didn’t talk. His arms were around me, and he wouldn’t let go. The darkness of the park at night surrounded us, along with its silence, just the sounds of cicadas and crickets, the soft hiss of a night wind off the lake rustling the trees.
I held on to him. I didn’t say anything, I couldn’t, there were no words left in me. Burying my face in his shoulder, I breathed in his scent, tried to take comfort in his strength, the way I had before.
There was no comfort. He was trying, but I could feel his tension, his pain.
“Look, I have no right to ask this—” he began, finally, after our embrace had e
nded and we had begun walking over the bridge in the park, the stream that connected the koi pond to the lake.
“If anyone has the right to ask, you do,” I told him.
“Is it true?”
I paused on the bridge, and looked at the black water. This time of night, you couldn’t see the fish or turtles. It might as well have been the night sky itself down there.
Too bad it wasn’t a long drop. I could have thrown myself off the bridge and never had to worry about answering another question, ever again.
But the water here was shallow, and the drop just far enough to sprain an ankle.
A minor pain, really, compared to what I was going through now.
It would be so easy to lie. It came naturally at this point, didn’t it? My whole life was a carefully constructed facade so that no one could see the real me. It was easier to keep that going, than to tear it all down.
Yet this was the test. How could I ever know how someone would react to my story, unless I told the truth? All my life I’d felt like I couldn’t be loved, couldn’t have anyone close to me, because of all this history. If they ever found out, they’d leave me in a second.
It was time to test that theory. The theory I’d based my entire adult life on.
I’m trusting you to do the right thing here, I said silently to Alex, before taking a deep breath.
“My life hasn’t been easy,” I said. “I’ve done things I’m not proud of. Yes, I took money for sex. It’s just as sordid as it sounds.”
Alex was absolutely silent beside me, looking out into the night. The moon touched the edges of his face with silver. I could hear him better than I could see him, the catch in his throat, the hastening breath.
“I wish I could dress it up,” I said. “Make it seem like something else. Like maybe they were paying me for companionship. The boyfriend experience. But no. Nothing so urbane. Older men liked me because I was young and skinny and blond, and that was it. A few dollars for a few minutes of self-loathing and disgust.”
“Not that it matters, I suppose,” Alex said in a soft voice, “but how often are we talking about? Once or twice? Or had you made a career out of it?”
