A Perfect Lie

by Lisa Renee Jones

  “Why didn’t I just stay and answer questions?”

  “Tobey is not you, but he is the man who wants to be your future and in the White House. He has your back and ours.”

  “Why didn’t I stay and answer questions?” I repeat.

  “We hope that a little space and time means the mystery is solved, and you aren’t in the middle of this.”

  “She was my best friend—is my best friend. I’m in this. It’s going to get press.”

  “That I control and that means I need to know whatever it is that you aren’t telling me.”

  “I don’t remember anything after that drink, which is why I think I was drugged,” I say, “and—and maybe that is proof that someone intended to abduct me.” I leave out the part where I thought I was drugged by Danielle. That was wrong. It couldn’t have been Danielle. “Tobey saved me,” I add. “I’m sure he’s told you this, too. Danielle got in the line of fire. I just need to tell the truth.”

  “The police don’t need to hear that you were drugged. You left. Danielle stayed. And besides, Tobey says that you were perfectly fine when you left the bar and when he left you in your room. You stick to the story. You were worried about bad press and Tobey took you to your room. He said that he never even wanted to go to the bar for that very reason. Danielle convinced you to go. You left Danielle, in said bar, because it was a private club and she refused to leave. Understand?”

  I stare at him two beats, but I nod. “Yes. I understand.”

  “Repeat it.”

  “I was concerned about bad press for my father and Tobey, who tried to convince me not to go out at all, was quick to escort me to my room.”

  “Good. We’re going to repeat that story about a hundred times on this flight.”

  “Where is my father and what does he say about all of this?”

  “Back in Washington as far from Austin, and this mess, as I could get him.”

  “What did he say about—it all?”

  “He’s worried. About you. About Danielle. About this country.”

  In other words, he’s worried about his campaign.

  “Let’s review your story,” Terrance says, refocusing me on his expectations, which, of course, are really my father’s. “I left early. Tobey took me home. Danielle stayed at the bar.” I repeat the rest of the story. I take his questions as if they are that of the police. It’s a full hour later when he sends me to a seat in the back of the plane to rest.

  I choose a spot away from him, alone, which is how I feel right now. I’m terrified I’m going to be accused of murder, and I hate myself for even worrying about that when Danielle could be dead. But I am, and I have questions in my mind, questions about myself, and what happened last night. About my anger with Danielle, that I somehow know exists, but I can’t remember why. But I don’t let myself go there. I can’t go there now, because if I question myself, others might question me.

  Right now, I just want to get this police interview over and I find myself thinking through the perfect story Terrance has created. In doing so, I also find myself wondering, is a lie a lie if you don’t know that it’s not the truth?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  As I sat on that plane, the human will to survive flared inside me, and pushed aside thoughts of Danielle. I focused on what I must face in my near future: anticipating my police interview, as well as the confrontation with my father sure to await me in Washington. This lead me to something Terrance said to my father during one of the few debate preps I participated in, or rather sat in on. The dictionary defines a lie as “a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth; a falsehood.” In other words, while you do not control your destiny, you do control the lies that you tell. What I realized on that plane, is what I’ve known for a long time, but chosen not to see: growing up in politics teaches you that lies are avoided by the many versions of the truth. Or maybe it’s my father that taught me that lesson. Which brings me to another thing Terrance said to my father during that debate night prep: own your version of the truth. Believe it. Make everyone believe it. As I moved forward from the night in that Austin, Texas bar, starting with the moment the plane touched ground in Washington, I would begin to see the lesson in those words to be profoundly necessary.

  ***

  THE PAST…

  It’s nearly noon when the plane lands in Washington, and I meet Terrance in the center of the plane. “Are we going straight to the police department?”

  “Rudolf will escort you to the Ritz. You’ll be staying in a large suite with him.”

  My lips part. “You want Rudolf to stay with me?”

  “I don’t want him to. He is. For all we know, and as you’ve astutely pointed out, you might well have been the target last night. You get Rudolf until we determine if you were a target last night.”

  “I’m not staying with that man in a hotel room. That’s not a smart decision.”

  “Per the Secret Service, who we consulted, it is the right decision. Rudolf will be your shadow and dealing with such things is just part of this job.”

  “Only this isn’t a job for me,” I say. “It’s my life.”

  “It is your job, and like all royalty, you were born into it and you will accept the responsibility with grace and dignity. Are we clear?”

  “I have never done anything but stand by my father,” I reply tightly, reminded that every time this man plays nice with me, it’s also his job. “Even when I melted down over my mother,” I add, “aside from the teachers who saw my grades, no one knew. So don’t tell me how to handle things with grace and dignity. This has been my life long before you even knew my father. Going to a hotel and hiding out makes me look guilty.”

  “More like it supports a real fear for your safety by your father, and as I said, it’s what the Secret Service recommends.” His phone buzzes in his hand and he glances at it and me. “We need to move.” He hesitates and presses his hands to my arm. “This isn’t about your father. I want you safe. Okay?”

  What do I really say here? We both know it is, in fact, about my father. I settle on what gets me off this plane. “Yes,” I say. “Okay. I’ll need to pick up things at my apartment.”

  “We don’t want to alert anyone to your arrival. Order what you need on your father’s hotel account. They know to cover it and keep it nameless. Let’s get moving.” And that’s the end of the conversation, apparently. He releases me and turns, walking away and dismissing my concerns that are still alive and well. For instance, the fact that I told the police I was headed back here. He’s worried about me, my ass. This plan makes my father look like a concerned father, but how does it make me look to law enforcement? I guess that returns me to the truth that I cannot hide. There’s a reason I plan to go to law school outside Washington. My life is under my father’s control and he chose the Ritz for me.

  Terrance exits the plane and I head down the aisle to have Rudolf step into view, waiting on me near the door. I inhale with the certainty that he’s a spy for Terrance as much as he is here for my safety. I’m halfway to him when I have a flickering memory of me at the back door of the bar when Danielle grabbed my arm. I remember turning to her. I remember shouting at her, but I don’t know why. The memory, what’s there of it, is here and gone, and I blink to realize that I’ve gripped a seat and stopped walking. If Rudolf notices, his stony face gives no indication of such, and that works for me.

  I charge toward him and he backs into the galley to allow me to pass. Once I exit the plane, he’s on my heels, and I find Terrance climbing into the back of one of two black sedans. By the time I’m on the runway, his car pulls away and a driver opens the rear door of the second car for me. I settle inside, but after the door shuts, the man who’d held it open doesn’t enter the front. Rudolf does. A man I don’t know, but now have to trust with intimate pieces of my life. Until this is over, I’m being watched on a level that I want to reject, but am forced to accept. In other
words, while I try to figure out my version of the truth about last night, he’ll be right here supervising me.

  ***

  I ride the elevator to my suite with Rudolf by my side and I don’t attempt conversation with him. I just want into the room, where I can order room service, and shop for what I need to allow me to shower and re-dress. I need to be ready for whatever comes my way. We exit to my floor, and Rudolf, my guard, I decide to call him, since his name just makes me crazy, has my key. He pulls it from his jacket and hands it to me. “I’ll need to go in first, to ensure it’s clear.”

  “Which means anyone could grab me while I wait out here,” I point out.

  “The floor is secure.”

  “The codes on those elevators can easily be hacked.”

  His lips harden and his phone buzzes. He removes it from his pants, glances down at it, and then returns it to his pocket. Immediately after, he unlocks the door, and shoves it open, only to step back and motion me forward. “Ladies first,” he says.

  I’m no fool. I don’t mistake his sudden change of tune as a win. Instead, it tells me that call he took dictated this action. Perhaps he’s been told to stand down and my heart begins to race with why that might be. “Did they find Danielle? Is she okay?”

  “I’ve not been made aware of any changes.”

  I narrow my eyes on him but there is nothing to read in his infuriatingly blank, hard face. Determined to find out the truth myself, and do so in the privacy of a sealed bedroom, I hurry into the suite. Once I’m past the threshold, I enter a living area done in blue and cream, stopping dead in my tracks when I realize that I’m not alone. A man in a perfectly tailored blue suit is facing the floor-to-ceiling arched window.

  My father turns to face me, and as usual, his presence consumes the room. He’s a powerful man. He knows it. You know it when you’re with him.

  In unison, we step forward, both of us stepping to the opposite sides of a square coffee table, two navy couches framing us.

  “Daughter,” he says, a familiar reference I know is not one of endearment but rather a reminder of family obligation.

  “Father,” I say, giving him the obligatory response he’s looking for, and I wonder if I’m just noticing the deeper gray mixed with the blonde at his temples, or if it’s newly formed, and compliments of me. I’m quite sure he’d declare the latter to be accurate.

  “Terrance says that you don’t remember what happened to Danielle.”

  “I don’t,” I confirm.

  “You’re sure?” he presses.

  My defenses bristle. “You think I’m lying?”

  “I need to know the facts.”

  “I don’t know the facts. I know Terrance told you that I was drugged.”

  “You will not repeat anything about drugs beyond this moment,” he snaps, his blue eyes cutting. “The last thing I need is for that to get turned into you being an addict.”

  “Right,” I say bitterness seeping into my voice. “No worries about me or Danielle here. The only focus you have is me not making you look bad.”

  “You’re obviously fine and there is a big picture here that involves the entire country and beyond.”

  “And we can’t let my potentially dead best friend get in the way.” I don’t wait for a reply. “You do realize there is a bigger picture here, right? I might well have been drugged by someone who wanted to kidnap me”

  “Which is why you’re here in this room with a guard.”

  “And yet you don’t want me to tell the police the real story?”

  “What is the real story, Hailey?” he demands. “You were drugged and might have gone nuts and killed Danielle?”

  “I can’t believe you just said that to me,” I hiss.

  “This isn’t about guilt,” he replies. “It’s about where this could go and how bad it can get no matter what your good intentions. I’m protecting you.”

  “You mean you.”

  “Both of us,” he corrects. “We cannot risk you being turned into a fictional addict. As of right now, thanks to Terrance, this incident has been suppressed with the media. That won’t last but my hope is that you get through the law enforcement interview by the time it happens.”

  “Or that Danielle shows up alive?” I challenge.

  “Of course, that’s what we all want to happen,” he says, his tone agitated, “which is why law enforcement is pushing to talk to you today. They want you to help them find her.”

  “I can’t help at all and how am I going to explain that? We just determined that I can’t tell them that I was drugged.”

  “You say what Terrance told you to say. You didn’t want to be in that bar, didn’t stay, and when Danielle wouldn’t leave, Tobey took you home. Don’t go off that script.”

  “I want this over with. What time is it happening and where?”

  “Here. With Bob Nickels present.”

  “Your attorney,” I breathe out. “I need an attorney?”

  “Danielle is missing,” he says. “There was blood. It’s standard for anyone in your high-profile position to protect themselves.”

  “It makes me look guilty,” I say, going back to that concern.

  “It makes you smart enough to know that I have political enemies that would do anything to take me down, and that means you.”

  “Are you suggesting someone would kill Danielle and frame me?”

  “I’m telling you that when your father may soon be the most powerful man in the world, there are enemies who want blood. People can get hurt.”

  “She can’t be dead.”

  “We both know that’s not true,” he says. “People die, often without warning.” His tone is cutting, the reference obviously to my dead mother. His damning blame, a round-about explanation as to why I don’t deserve sympathy or words of comfort. “Give me your phone,” he adds.

  My brow furrows. “What?”

  “We can’t risk it having anything on it that might hurt us. It’ll be cleaned and returned.”

  “No I—”

  “Give me your phone.”

  I suddenly regret not looking through it more closely before now. Why didn’t I look through it for clues to last night? “I’ll check it,” I promise quickly, feeling stupid when I’m many things, but stupid is usually not one of them. “If there’s a problem—”

  “Danielle,” he bites out. “I do not have time for this.”

  “What if the police ask for it?”

  “Tell them you gave it to my security team,” he says, without missing a beat. “If they want to know why, tell them you were told it was a precaution to ensure your safety. Any further details they request on the matter, should be referred to Terrance.”

  I purse my lips, but I unzip my purse, remove my phone but I can’t let it go without confirming that there is nothing on it from Danielle that I missed earlier. I glance at my text messages, and the last thing from Danielle is the joke about doing my step-brother. “Hailey,” my father snaps.

  I quickly check my phone log for Danielle as well, and when there are no calls in the timeframe in question, I hand my father my phone. “What was that about?” he demands.

  “I just needed to know I didn’t miss a message or call from Danielle.”

  He arches a brow. “Did you?”

  “No,” I say. “There’s nothing from her after the debate ended.”

  He doesn’t comment or react. He just pockets my phone. “Get yourself cleaned up and ready for the interview. Rudolf will let you know when it’s time.”

  Just as I thought. Rudolf will let me know.

  He steps around the table and heads for the door. I stand there. I listen to his footsteps and I don’t turn around. If I do, I might shout at him and I have plenty to shout. I’m angry. So very angry and not just about this. About five years of him treating me as crappy as he is today. So yes. I really want to shout at him, but I don’t. I’m trained. I know that a future Fir
st Daughter does not shout or demand. That would be undignified. It would be too raw, too real, too close to my version of the truth that my father could not handle. He doesn’t want to talk about our personal baggage or how that’s affected me on a normal day. Today is not normal, and he doesn’t care about anything but making last night go away. And that seems to mean Danielle.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  How do you decide who is a best friend?

  Loyalty? Trust? Love? I used to believe all of those things and more were a part of that sacred bond. I’d certainly proven myself to Danielle. I know what she did the summer we were in Europe and my silence constitutes my “best friend” status, right along with my own version of guilt. It also constitutes a secret so damning that back then, and for years after, I couldn’t think about it without freaking myself out and I did think about it often. It haunted me, tormented me. Gave me nightmares. Obviously, that was before I accepted the destiny parts of our lives, that we cannot change, but eventually, the human survival instinct kicked in and I found a way to lock that memory away. It was how I stayed “best friends” with Danielle.

  That is until she disappeared.

  I won’t say that I didn’t worry about Danielle. I did but it wasn’t that simple and cut and dry. There were complexities to my thoughts, layers to who and what we were together that reached beyond one night. Among them, I’d begun to obsess over the idea that she’d drugged me, the very person who’d kept a massive secret for her, at what could have been my own demise.

  Spoiler alert: I would never prove that she drugged me, but from the moment I woke up in that hotel room in Austin, Texas, with her missing, on some level I declared it to be true. Therefore, every action I took, every question in my mind that would follow, would be shadowed by that certainty. What had she done to me and what had I done to her?

  ***

  THE PAST…

  I stand in the middle of the hotel room and listen as my father opens the door. Immediately after, he and Rudolf exchange muffled words, no doubt about my containment. Despite the fact that it’s most likely the best choice before me, I resent how it was handled, as if at twenty-two years old, I’m nothing more than a dog that must be obedient or be punished. Actually, he treated our family dog when I was growing up better than he does me.