Truth Be Told (Jane Ryland)

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

  Because reality could create problems.

  What if Aaron got wind of her visit? Would he have something on her? Or would she have something on him? The girl, Maddie, was waiting for an answer. Lizzie needed answers, too.

  “It’s about the rent,” Lizzie said. The words tumbled out almost before she realized. “I’m checking, routine, to see if we have the correct address where you’re sending the rent check. Can you confirm it?”

  Lizzie hoped the girl’s definition of “confirm” didn’t include Lizzie having to provide something for her to confirm.

  Maddie nodded her head. Like she was eager to help. Good.

  “Oh, no prob. We send it to, like, a post office box in Boston. I don’t have the exact-exact place, you know, because Frank, he lives here, too, always pays it, after we pay him. So, um…” She brightened. “I could have him call you?”

  “Who at the post office box? I mean, can you confirm the name on the P.O. box?” Lizzie was Miss Helpful. Miss Unthreatening.

  “I can look,” Maddie said. “Want to come in?”

  She did, and she didn’t. Decide.

  She did. Lizzie took a step across the threshold as the girl scurried away. Two laptop computers were open on a coffee table, a big-screen TV on mute, showing some music video with singing dogs and what must be hookers on motorcycles. Music continued from upstairs, louder now, thumping through the ceiling. Certainly several people were living here. Why? How? And if the house was sold, why did Aaron still have the keys?

  Maybe they hadn’t changed the locks. But still, even if the sales and transfer paperwork was delayed, it shouldn’t be this delayed. Certainly Aaron would be interested in hearing about that. It wouldn’t be Aaron’s fault, of course, he didn’t handle the sales end of it.

  Problem was.

  Would those questions domino onto her own … “activities”? The housing market was coming back, all the analysts agreed. Not a full recovery, but the outlook was positive. What if they started auditing the foreclosed properties and the transactions connected to them? Would the audit fingers reach into her files? They might. They would. They definitely would.

  Best to leave it alone.

  If the numbers were taken out of her control, it would ruin her plans. Ruin her families’ lives. Because they were her families now, and no way near recovered. They needed her, relied on her.

  “Might be upstairs.” Maddie came back into the foyer, empty-handed. “Two more seconds.”

  Lizzie blew out a breath as the girl trotted up the stairs. An array of running shoes, laces dangling, lined each step. Maddie kicked a pair out of the way as she came back down.

  Lizzie’s mind computed risk and reward, curiosity versus consequences. She’d simply imagined the place would be empty. She’d overanalyzed, like she always did, and now, bottom line, it put her where she had no business being.

  “Sorry, I’m no help at all,” Maddie was saying. “But seriously, I can have them call—”

  “Never mind,” Lizzie said.

  23

  “So where is he, Sherrey? Yeah, I’ll hold.” Waiting for Bing to finish whatever he was doing, Jake eyed the array of documents and files he’d spread across Nate Frasca’s desk and office, wondered how fast he could put everything back in place, wondered how fast he could change his plane reservation, wondered how life managed to throw a monkey wrench into his plans at every damn turn.

  He almost laughed, though humor was the last emotion he felt. A monkey wrench? What his grandfather used to say. Grandpa was on his mind a lot these days, as Lilac Sunday loomed.

  Sherrey had told him there was another dead body near the Arboretum. Five days before Lilac Sunday. Boston would go ballistic.

  Jake was on the verge of ballistic himself.

  There had been not one thing in Frasca’s elaborate files that pointed to any established reason Gordon Thorley should be suspected of making a false confession. The more Jake turned pages, the more he’d warily allowed himself to believe that this guy might be the solution to the crime that’d haunted his city—and his family—for twenty years.

  Jake had listened to the rumble of D.C. spring thunder as, page by page, he delved into the documented world of fakers, phonies, liars, and losers. Even the clinical cop-and-doctor speak was unable to disguise the torment—or manipulation—that would drive an innocent person to confess. But there was nothing in all the science, nothing in all the precedent or patterns, that explained Thorley.

  He’d come here looking for answers, looking for some magic piece of paper that would slam Thorley into an understandable category, make him another sad but predictable loser.

  “Be careful what you wish for,” Jake said out loud.

  Be careful what you wish for. His grandfather had said that, so many times. He’d explained to teenage Jake, in those mosquito-swatting summer evenings at the Cape cottage, what happened when cops wanted a solution too much.

  Grandpa, who wore his badge even with his khaki shorts and boat shoes, also confessed the sorrow, the disappointment, when the cops failed. Telling a family their loved one had been murdered, that was the first hell of it. The only redemption, Grandpa had said, blasting more lighter fluid on the sizzling charcoal or turning the bluefish the two of them had just caught, the only redemption was when they could tell a family—we got him.

  He’d never gotten to give Carley Marie’s family that news. Even at age fourteen, Jake knew his grandfather blamed himself for that. Died blaming himself for that.

  A splat of rain hit Frasca’s picture window, and then another. This time Jake could see the lightning before he heard the thunder, Sherrey’s speaker-amplified voice barely louder.

  “Thorley is in the wind.” Sherrey sounded full of triumph. “Means that bottom-feeding lawyer used a technicality to make us let the bad guy go. I oughta make fricking Hardesty tell the victim’s parents.”

  “I’m headed to the airport,” Jake said. “We’re gonna get him.”

  It had to be connected, another dead girl in the Arboretum, right before Lilac Sunday. Was Thorley crazy? Or determined? Either way, a suspect. The suspect. “His sister, his family, his parole officer. Someone knows where he is. We’ll find him.”

  He stopped, remembered another of his grandfather’s warnings. Don’t jump to conclusions. “This is Boston, though. Someone gets killed every week. Even Lilac Sunday week,” Jake said. “But yeah. We need to talk with Thorley.”

  “Count on it,” Sherrey said. “Soon as we find the jerk.”

  The dial tone buzzed over the speaker.

  Jake stashed his phone, zipped his briefcase closed, stepped into the reception area.

  “Miss Cardenas? Will you tell Dr. Frasca I had to go? A case heated up and—I’ll be in touch. Maybe from the airport.”

  Frasca’s secretary took off her headset, raised one eyebrow at the window. Jake could hardly see the park now, the rain now gushing in rivers down the slick glass, muddling the spring day into incomprehensible green and brown. “Good luck with that,” she said. “I’ll call a cab.”

  He perched on a side chair, close as he could to the door. He needed to go.

  It wasn’t the cops’ fault that they’d let Thorley loose. Peter Hardesty had barreled in, all law books and legal threats, demanding his innocent client be released. Jake looked forward to confronting this guy. Finding out how he slept, knowing what he’d done.

  What he’d done?

  Jake listened to the rain, realized what brought them to this turning point in the story. He tried to stop thinking of it, but there was no ignoring it.

  If Gordon Thorley killed someone else—strangled her, Bing had said—that innocent victim could be the proof Thorley was the Lilac Sunday killer.

  But how did they get that proof? The cops had let Thorley go.

  Jake had let him go.

  They might catch a murderer. But to do that, the police had allowed someone else to be killed.

  * * *

  “Where
were you, Lizzie? I was worrying about you.”

  Lizzie looked up from her spreadsheet, saw Aaron silhouetted in her office doorway. Where was Stephanie? Weren’t people supposed to make appointments? Aaron took up the whole doorway, one hand braced against each side, suit jacket flapping open, blocking her view of the reception area.

  “When?” She didn’t stand, it was all she could do to stop herself. But this was her territory. As long as she stayed in her desk chair, she was in control.

  “This morning. Up till half an hour ago.” He didn’t move either.

  “Why?”

  “Because of last night.” This time, Aaron took a step closer.

  Lizzie could see—what, contrition? On his face.

  She had had practiced, mentally, for this moment. “What about it?”

  “It was your fault.”

  “My fault?”

  Aaron took another step into her office. Reached behind him. Put his hand on the doorknob. Pulled.

  Lizzie heard the hiss of the door closing over the thick pile carpet, heard the click of the latch.

  “Your fault for being irresistible,” he said.

  Another step. Another. He faced her across her desk, his palms flat on the surface. She saw his blue college ring, his white cuffs under the navy blazer, his yellow tie touching a file on her desk as he leaned toward her.

  “Your fault,” he said. “Your fault for being fabulous.”

  She sat back, put her fingertips on the desk. With the toe of one foot, inched her chair away.

  “Your fault for being—”

  A rear wheel of her chair hit a stack of files on the floor. She couldn’t get any farther away from him.

  “Your fault for being here. In my life.”

  He couldn’t possibly mean this. He was such a—could he?

  “Aaron, I—”

  “Lizzie, I’m a jerk. I am. Can you give me another chance? Everyone deserves another chance, right?”

  She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, but it didn’t stay there.

  Another chance? Well, they did, of course. Of course they did. No one was perfect. She certainly wasn’t. A real person had faults, and who was she to judge? “Another chance” was what she gave her clients every day. Maybe this would be not only a second chance for Aaron, but a second chance for herself. For her future.

  “If you put it that way…,” she began.

  “I’ve never met anyone like you.” He still leaned on her desk. She could smell the citrus and musk and whatever he wore, masculine and leathery and unfair.

  Lizzie tried to figure out what to say. Could he be sincere? How could anyone ever tell? Numbers were easy for her. Words, not so much. People, not at all.

  “Can we try again?” Aaron asked. “Tonight?”

  “I … guess so,” she said. She didn’t like to guess, wasn’t a good guesser, but unlike her precise numbers, sometimes life was unpredictable. It suddenly made her feel, what, free? To think so. Take a risk, she thought. For once.

  “Tonight?” Aaron was saying. “Lizzie?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  Aaron pulled out his cell phone, seemed to check something. “By the way…” His voice trailed off, his eyes on the cell phone screen.

  “Yes?”

  He clicked off his phone, closed his eyes for a fleeting second. “Lizzie? I’ll make it up to you. I will. But do you have my keys?”

  The keys. The keys he’d, well, maybe he’d actually dropped them. By mistake. In disappointment.

  Maybe.

  The keys that had sent her to Maddie Kate the college student. And the not-empty house.

  Aaron’s phone beeped, a text signal, and he pulled it out again.

  The keys. They were in her purse, under her desk, and now felt like they emitted a radioactive glow, some sort of unmistakable signal she was hiding exactly what he wanted.

  How was she supposed to react? If she returned the keys, she could please him. That was never bad. His one-liners were pitiful, but was she being picky again? It wasn’t like she had other plans.

  “Yes,” she said. “I do. Have them.”

  There was something in Aaron’s face that let her know she’d done the right thing. But she had one more thing she had to check on—sorry, Aaron, but she did.

  “They’re at my house,” she lied. “I can get them for you later today, but—”

  “Tonight then?” Aaron was texting and talking at the same time. Shouldn’t he be paying attention to her? She tried not to change her mind, now that she’d said yes. But he wasn’t helping. Or was that picky?

  “Your place?” Aaron was saying as his thumbs moved across the keys. “We can text about what time.”

  “Okay.” Lizzie drew out the word, knowing when she finished saying it, it was decided. Maybe a lot more than tonight was decided. “Okay.”

  24

  “Keep a secret about what?” Jane tried to predict what Peter was really asking her. He certainly knew she’d lost her Boston TV job by keeping a secret, a heartbreaking lesson about terrible bosses and television’s terror of lawsuits. She’d protected a source—as she had promised. Done nothing wrong. After the jury’s defamation decision, she’d been fired from Channel 11, right when she was making a name for herself in television. That disaster changed her life, but not her devotion to journalism and the sanctity of secrets. Every story had a secret at its core. “Of course I can keep a secret.”

  They stood in the Register’s postage-stamp “visitor” parking lot, on the way to—somewhere. Peter said he’d explain as they drove. Jane was also struggling to jettison her envy over Chrystal Peralta’s plum assignment, and focus on her own work. “You’re too competitive,” her mother always told her. Was there such a thing?

  “Sorry to be so circumspect,” Peter was saying. He smiled. “It’s a lawyer thing, right? I’m trying to gauge what I can tell you without breaking the privilege. So let’s just go, and then—”

  “Go from there?” Jane said. Lawyers. Sometimes you had to be patient.

  “Exactly.” He pointed Jane to the passenger side of his silver Jeep, then hopped into the driver’s seat, tossing his briefcase in the back. Jane saw a sleek tennis racket, two of them, on the backseat, next to a battered canvas Adidas bag. Two yellow tennis balls rolled onto the floor, landing on a pile of grimy Boston Registers and a wadded-up towel. “Sorry for the car.” Peter waved at the chaos. “You’re not allergic to dogs, I hope?”

  Jane put her iced coffee in the cup holder, clicked on her seat belt, tucked her tote bag at her feet. “Dogs?”

  “Dog. At home, luckily for you.” Peter eased the Jeep out of the parking lot, the metal barrier arm creaking up. “Black lab. Named Harley. He’d be trying to sit on your lap if he were here.”

  “I have a—” Jane always hated to tell people she had a cat. She loved Coda, and had loved Murrow. But did it sound spinsterish? Single woman with cat. Still, possibly that was her own issue. “Not allergic,” she said.

  Peter headed up Dorchester Ave., turned onto the Southeast Expressway, instantly hitting the left lane, passing whenever he could, weaving through the snarl of traffic more aggressively than Jane might have. There was never a moment, even on a Tuesday afternoon, when 93 South wasn’t teeming with cars, headed to the South Shore, or the Cape. Boston had gone crazy over the hot weather, celebrating the ending of another gloomy winter, and anywhere there was water became a magnet to hooky players. Jane bet half the cars on the road were workers who’d banged in sick. Who’d return in a day or so suspiciously sunburned, telling stories of “food poisoning.”

  The speed limit was fifty-five, but as the highway passed the JFK Library, the traffic braked to a crawl. The Jeep’s digital speedometer flirted with twenty, and lost. That gave Jane time to find out what the heck was going on.

  “Peter? What secret?” She smiled, trying to encourage him to talk. “Did you lure me into the car under false pretenses? I have a cell phone, you know. Or the way this
traffic is going, I could easily hop out and walk back to the Register.”

  “Sorry, Jane.” Peter edged into the left lane again, swerved back into the middle, sneaked between a minivan and a Subaru with a ponytailed woman texting at the wheel. “I’m trying to decide how much I can tell you. It’s tricky.”

  He punched on the radio, AM 1030, the all-news station. Traffic on the threes, it was saying. “Heavy and slow on the Southeast…” He changed lanes again, swerving.

  “Hey!” Jane grabbed the strap, steadied her coffee. She never liked being the one along for the ride. “The deal is, you tell me everything. This is the way to Sandoval’s sister-in-law’s house. We weren’t going to talk to them again until there was an arrest. So was there an—”

  Jane stopped, mid-sentence. Another possibility. Peter had questioned Chrystal about the woman’s body found in the Arboretum. They could get there this way, too. “Hey. Are we going to the Arboretum? Why?”

  Jane turned down the radio. Why was he making her guess? “Peter? You think Elliot Sandoval had something to do with this murder? The new murder?”

  Two crazies on motorcycles zoomed past them, weaving flamboyantly though the sluggish traffic.

  Peter swore at them, then punched the radio back on. “Listen, I need to see if the cops are—well, let me hear the news, okay? Since you won’t get me the details from your editor, I have to hear it somehow.”

  Jane took the elastic out of her stubby ponytail, shook out her hair, opened the window, letting in a puff of crazy-hot May air. This wasn’t how she’d imagined this day. She’d imagined going to the drug store, buying sunscreen. Imagined pink sand and turquoise water and no deadlines. Now she was zero for three.

  She waited, twisting her hair back into semi-place, letting Peter hear the newscaster’s voice describing a house fire in Brighton, a state legislator forced to resign after some graphic tweets, and then, a body in Jamaica Plain. A woman, no identification as yet, police say no suspects. Jane saw Peter’s grip change on the steering wheel, saw him flinch, even though he probably didn’t realize it.