All the Beautiful Lies

by Peter Swanson

  “Alice! No way,” he said. He was filling plastic cups for the swarm of students.

  “You got a keg?” Gina asked.

  “My brother’s home and got it for me. My parents are pretending they don’t know.”

  Justin got them both a cup of beer that seemed to Alice to be mainly foam. She drank it while Gina went to find her boyfriend. When she was finished with the beer she told Justin that she was heading home, that she really just came by to say hello.

  “Aw, man. Don’t go,” Justin said. “Besides, how’re you getting home?”

  “I’ll call my stepdad from inside. He’ll come pick me up.”

  “I can drive you. At least let me drive you.”

  Alice agreed, and Justin took off to try and borrow a car: “My car’s buried, but Brad’s around here somewhere.” Alice thought about trying to find Gina and saying good-bye, but knew that Gina would give her a hard time for leaving so soon. Justin returned, breathless, holding up keys. “Brad’s Mustang. I had to fight him for these.”

  Justin drove slowly, cutting over to Kennewick Harbor, then driving along the shore. At first Alice thought Justin was driving slow because he’d been drinking and was worried about being pulled over, but then she figured out that he just wanted to spend more time with her. He was asking constant questions, wanting to know how she felt about graduating, what classes she was going to take at MCC, why he never saw her at high school parties. She answered as best she could, and laughed when he drove right past her condo. “I thought you might want to go out to the lighthouse, take a little walk,” he said, shrugging.

  “Sure. Why not?” she said. Part of her just wanted to see what it felt like, spending more time with a boy who seemed to like her. And he was harmless, that much she knew.

  There were no other cars parked out at Buxton Point. They walked down the short jetty and sat on a flat slab of granite close enough to the water so that the spray from the crashing waves occasionally reached them. She let Justin kiss her, and unhook her bra, but stopped him when his hand plucked at the top button of her jeans.

  “I like you so much, Alice. You have no idea.”

  “I have a boyfriend,” Alice said. It was a lie, but as she said it, she pictured Jake.

  “You do?”

  “He’s older. You don’t know him.”

  “How much older?”

  “Just a little bit. I’m sorry, Justin.”

  “So why are you here with me?” He had leaned back, and in the bright moonlight looked genuinely upset. He’s a nice guy, Alice thought, but just a boy. He was halfway cute but his eyes were too close together, making him seem a little inbred, and his dark hair was already beginning to thin at the front. He’d probably be completely bald by the time he was twenty-five.

  “I shouldn’t be, Justin. I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s a bad time for me, and my mom isn’t doing well, and I should be home now. I should never have let this happen.” It was a trick she sometimes pulled on Gina, suddenly getting emotional to get out of something. She knew that because she was so stoic all the time, when she made herself sound upset, people paid attention. It worked with Gina, and it worked now with Justin. He drove her back to the condo, and dropped her off. She kissed him hard once on the mouth, their tongues touching, then quickly exited the car. The least she could do was let him think it was hard for her to say good-bye.

  As soon as she unlocked the front door of the condo and stepped inside, she knew something was wrong. It was quiet—just the sloshing sound of the dishwasher running in the kitchen—but the house had a bad smell. She could see her mother supine on the couch, but the television wasn’t on. She hung the house keys on the hook and walked toward her. The smell got sharper, and as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw that her mother had thrown up. Vomit had pooled on the couch and was streaked down her mother’s cheeks. It had happened before, but always when her mother’s head had been turned to the side. This time her mother’s head was tipped back, crusted lips parted, her eyes partly open.

  Alice watched her, frozen for a moment, and then her mother’s chest bucked, and she made a sound like a wet cough. Alice stepped backward, alarmed. Her mother was choking in front of her eyes, probably dying. Alice wondered if all she needed to do was step forward and turn her mother’s head to the side so that she’d be able to breathe again. But Alice just watched instead. She was revolted, not just by the vomit and her mother’s gargling, halted breaths, but disgusted by everything about her mother. She was so incapacitated that all she had to do was turn her head to live, and she couldn’t even do that. It was pathetic. Edith bucked again, but didn’t make the coughing wet sound.

  Alice realized she’d been balanced on the pads of her feet, as though she was about to move forward. Instead, she settled slowly back onto her heels. She didn’t want to watch anymore, but she couldn’t take her eyes away. A strange relief spread over her; her mother was being ushered away from her and to a better place. Alice’s body lightened, and her scalp tingled. Her mother had stopped moving and Alice knew she was dead. Still, she watched some more, aware of the blood rushing through her body. She felt dizzy and her chest was cold. A thought went through her: I got my wish. And then another thought: There was nothing I could do.

  Something caught at the corner of Alice’s eye and she turned toward the stairwell.

  Jake was on the bottom step, his face half shadowed, watching what had just transpired.

  Chapter 8

  Now

  Harry woke, groggy and disoriented, just past eleven, having stayed in his room for the entire evening, dozing on and off, and finally falling into a deep sleep filled with terrible dreams that, now he was awake, were just out of his mind’s reach. He was incredibly hungry for the first time since he’d heard about his father. There was a text on his phone from Kim that had been sent at four in the morning. WHY AREN’T YOU HERE? Five minutes later she’d sent him a photograph of Paul, and Paul’s current boyfriend, Rich, both asleep, fully dressed, on her bed. Then she sent a photo of herself, her lips puckered in a kiss, the makeup around her eyes smudged. He turned his phone off and got out of bed.

  Downstairs had been thoroughly cleaned, with no sign left that there had been thirty people here the day before. There was a note from Alice on the island in the kitchen:

  Harry,

  I’m at Chrissie’s house this morning. Please CALL if you need anything.

  Love, A

  He felt relief that he had the house to himself for the first time since he’d arrived back. He swung the refrigerator door open; it was packed with leftover food, and Harry made himself a ham and cheese sandwich. There was some of yesterday’s coffee in the pot, not a lot, but he poured it over ice, added milk, and brought his breakfast out onto the front steps of Grey Lady. A cool, gentle rain was just beginning. There was no sound, except for the chatter of birds, and Harry could smell the ocean. That was not always the case in Kennewick Village, far enough inland that, depending on the wind, it didn’t feel any more like a seaside town than New Chester, Connecticut. But when the wind was right, the air had that unmistakable tang of salt water and tidal mud. He’d grown up in Manhattan, but Harry had spent enough summers in Maine to consider it a kind of childhood home.

  He finished his coffee and his sandwich, then went back inside. He thought of going into his father’s office but decided against it. He wasn’t prepared for a room so filled with memories of his father. Instead, he wandered into the living room, a room that with its beige color scheme and watercolor seascapes seemed more Alice than Bill. The one indisputable item of Bill’s, besides the dark grey wing-backed chair, was one of his cherished barrister bookcases, each shelf with its own pull-down glass front. Harry looked at its contents, all hardcovers, including a shelf of Agatha Christies. Harry lifted the glass front and pushed it back into its slot so he could look at the books. There was a hardcover copy of After the Funeral next to a hardcover of the same book with its American title, Funerals A
re Fatal. Harry, who’d inherited some of his father’s immense love of mystery novels, tended to like American crime writers more than cozy English golden-age mysteries, but he’d gone through a brief Christie phase in middle school after his father had given him Ten Little Indians. He could still hear his father’s voice from then: “Now, if you decide to read all of Agatha Christie, just keep in mind that some of her books have more than one title, so don’t read them twice.” He’d then gone on to catalogue the many different title changes in her publishing history, like another father might tell his son about the year-to-year batting champions in the 1930s and 1940s. Harry, at twelve, had been impressed, but now he wondered if his father had wasted his life in the trivial pursuit of something only he (and a smattering of other misfits) cared about. How many useless facts and complicated plots got wiped out the moment he died?

  Harry was looking at a hardcover of Five Little Pigs when the doorbell rang. He slid the book back into its place on the shelf and walked to the front hall. There was a tall figure visible in the frosted glass that ran along the side of the front door, and Harry felt a brief flutter of concern.

  He swung the door inward. On the other side of the screen door stood a man in a tan suit. He was holding up a badge.

  “I’m Travis Dixon with the Kennewick Police Department,” he said. “I’m looking for Alice Ackerson.”

  “She’s not in. Can I help you?”

  “Are you Bill Ackerson’s son?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do you mind if I come in and ask you some questions? It pertains to your father’s death.”

  “Okay,” Harry said, pushing open the screen door so that the detective could enter.

  “Thank you—is it Harry?” he said as he stepped into the foyer, ducking his head slightly, and offering a large, knuckly hand. Harry shook it.

  “It is,” said Harry. The shoulders of the detective’s light suit were speckled with rain. The sky was darker than it had been earlier that morning.

  “Is there some place we can talk?” the detective asked.

  Harry led him into the living room, where they sat on opposite-facing sofas. “What’s going on?” Harry asked.

  “We got a preliminary report from the crime scene investigators this morning, Harry,” he said, hands on his knees. “And although we are not ruling out an accident, we are presently treating what happened to your father as a suspicious death.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s inconclusive right now, but there is a possibility that your father was hit on the head before he fell off the side of the path.”

  “You think someone hit him?” Harry said, trying to absorb what he was hearing.

  “That’s what we think.”

  “What does that . . . ?”

  “What does that mean? It could mean many things. He could have argued with someone along the path. It could have been an attempted mugging, although your father was found with his wallet on him. It’s possible that some kid threw the rock that hit your father and it was a complete accident. We just don’t know. That’s why I’m here, just to ask you some questions.”

  “Okay,” Harry said, then added, “Should I text my stepmother? Should she be here?”

  “I’d like to hear from you right now.”

  “Sure,” Harry said. He watched as the detective pulled a spiral-bound notebook and a pen from the inside of his jacket. Harry thought that he couldn’t have been more than forty years old, although he had a receding hairline, noticeable even though his hair was cut very close to his scalp. He had a long nose and thin lips, and his dark eyes were set deep in their sockets.

  “Can I ask you some questions about your father?” he said.

  Harry nodded.

  “Had anything changed in his life recently? How was his marriage?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know that much about my father’s marriage.”

  “How long had they—”

  “Since I went to college, so about four years.”

  “Can you think of anyone who might have had a reason to harm your father?”

  “No.”

  “Disgruntled customers from the store? Old girlfriends?”

  Harry shook his head.

  “Do you know anything about your father’s financial situation?”

  “You mean, did he have money?”

  “That. Or did he have money problems? How was the store doing?”

  “Fine, I think. My father did okay in his business, well enough to send me to college. He had some family money, as well, I think. And my mom had some money from her parents. My biological mother.”

  “Your mother is . . . ?”

  “She died. About seven years ago.”

  The detective jotted that fact down in his notebook, as though it was the first thing he learned that he hadn’t known already. “How did she die?” he asked.

  “Of lung cancer.”

  “Did your father have close friends here in Kennewick that you knew of?”

  “He was friends with John Richards, who works for him.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “Not much. He’s a retiree who started out by volunteering to help out at the store, but now he pretty much co-manages it with my father.” Harry stumbled over the words, aware he was using the present tense.

  “And they were friends?”

  “Oh, yeah. I don’t know if they were social with each other, if they did things outside of the store, but my father relied on him.”

  “What about other employees?”

  “I know that he sometimes got someone to help out during the summer, when there was the most foot traffic in the store, but they were usually teenagers or college students.”

  “You never came up and helped out during a summer?”

  “No,” Harry said.

  “Okay. What about other friends? Did your father and his wife socialize with other couples at all?”

  “I don’t really know, but I don’t think so. Alice has a friend named Chrissie Herrick—that’s where she is right now—and she’s married but I don’t know if they did ‘couple’ things together.”

  The detective pulled a vibrating phone from his pants pocket. He checked the screen, then put the phone into his suit jacket pocket. “Sorry,” he said, then slid forward fractionally on the sofa. “Anyone else you can think of that your father had regular contact with? Anyone he kept in touch with in New York?”

  “His old business partner, Ron Krakowski, was there, and they were still close, but he never even leaves the city.”

  He jotted the name down on his pad, then put it back in his suit jacket. It was clear that he was getting ready to go. “You’ve been very helpful, Harry,” he said as he stood.

  Harry stood, as well, and accepted the card that the detective was holding out to him. “If you think of anything else, even if it seems insignificant, give me a call. That’s my cell number on the card,” the detective added.

  At the door, Detective Dixon asked Harry if he was planning on staying in Kennewick awhile.

  “I have no other plans,” Harry said. “I’ll probably help out at the store.”

  As soon as the detective turned to go, Harry watched as he pulled his cell phone out, thumbed the screen, then lifted it to his ear. He was talking as he got into the maroon Impala and shut the door behind him. The car’s glass was tinted.

  Harry turned back into the house and thought of calling Alice but quickly decided against it. Instead he wandered back into the living room and looked out at the rainy day, trying to wrap his head around the new information. He felt as though his body was reacting to the news faster than his mind was; his chest hurt, and his limbs felt electrified, like he needed to do something physical. He realized the feeling was anger. His father might have been killed. Harry’s mind flashed on the young brunette woman that he’d seen outside of the house and at the funeral. He remembered that he was going to ask Alice about her today. He stared at the window. It was still
raining, but a streak of blue sky had appeared over the tree line to the west. Harry suddenly needed to get out of the house. He grabbed one of his father’s raincoats from the row of pegs in the front hall, and stepped through the door onto the front steps. He felt instantly better, breathing in the damp air. He walked to the end of the driveway, then arbitrarily turned right and began to walk, head down, the diminishing rain pattering on the hood of his father’s coat.

  Chapter 9

  Then

  Edith Moss’s funeral was held at a church in Biddeford, and she was buried in a family plot. Alice wondered if that was what she would have wanted, considering the way she talked about her family, but Alice also knew it didn’t matter. Her mother was dead and would never know the difference.

  Edith’s two brothers were there, and some of their kids from assorted girlfriends and ex-wives. Alice hadn’t seen any of them since they’d moved out of Biddeford to Kennewick. “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Edith had said. Alice actually liked her uncle Claude, even though he was supposedly the worse of the two Moss brothers; he rarely worked, and drank all day. But he was always in a good mood, and when Alice was a little kid, he’d give her packs of fruit-flavored chewing gum. Her uncle Theo, who never gave her anything, was a construction foreman with a bad back who was now on disability. In the receiving line, he said to Alice, “Guess you get all that Saltonstall money, now, eh?”