All the Beautiful Lies

by Peter Swanson

  After a while, he was beginning to fall asleep again when he heard the creak of the stairs, maybe Alice coming up to bed. Then he heard faint sounds just outside his door. He listened intently, sometimes hearing them and sometimes not. Moving slowly and quietly, he got out of the bed and took three steps along the worn rug to stand in front of the door. He turned his ear toward the door and listened. It was unmistakable. He could hear Alice breathing just on the other side of the door. He shifted his weight, and a floor plank made a squeaking sound. He listened to Alice’s footsteps as she retreated quickly down the hall.

  Chapter 11

  Then

  After Edith’s death, Jake and Alice settled, quickly and naturally, into a new life together. Alice, as planned, enrolled in classes at the community college, commuting back and forth. She kept her own bedroom at the beachside condominium but spent every night in the master bedroom with Jake, even though there were so many reminders of her mother around.

  “Should we pack some of these things away?” Jake asked one morning. He was holding up a half-empty perfume bottle while Alice toweled herself dry in the en suite bathroom.

  “I don’t mind,” she said. “I mean, do what you want. You can throw that perfume away. I’ll never use it.”

  Jake shrugged and put the perfume back on the shelf where he’d found it. He watched Alice dry herself.

  “What are you looking at?” she said, smiling. She was bent over, drying her calves.

  “You don’t know what you have there, do you?”

  “What I have?”

  “What you are. What you look like. Right now, you are absolute perfection in every way. You know that? Youth and beauty.”

  “And I’m wasting it on you.” She straightened up and smiled so that he knew she was kidding. Even so, she caught a brief look of concern cross his face, like a wisp of a cloud crossing the sun.

  “I would never keep you here,” he said.

  “I will never leave.”

  He pulled her from the bathroom to the bed. As always, what they did together started out slow and reverent, Jake treating her with something akin to worship, and it always ended in an animalistic frenzy, Jake taking complete control. Later, Alice would find bruises on her skin that she didn’t remember getting.

  She was as happy as she had ever been. It was a month after the funeral.

  When Alice was alone in the house, which was fairly often, she occasionally looked through her mother’s things, sorting through her clothes and shoes, her books, and her few mementos. Some of it Alice wanted to keep, a decent cocktail dress for example, and the Gucci bag that Edith had bought from the fancy secondhand store in Portland. But most of it was junk, and Alice would fill grocery bags with clothes, bringing them down to the condo Dumpster out back and throwing them away, a little at a time. For some reason, she didn’t want to do this in front of Jake, even though she thought it would please him. Still, he must have noticed that there were less and less of Edith’s things around, and that more and more of Alice’s things were making their way into the master bedroom.

  At the bottom of the bedroom closet was an old liquor store box filled with some of the more personal effects that Edith had kept, including her Biddeford High School yearbook. Alice had seen pictures of Edith when she’d been young, but never pictures of her as a teenager. There she was in black and white, her hair in a bouffant, looking prettier than any other girl in her graduating class. Alice also found a picture of her in the cheerleaders’ squad, and one candid of her at a car wash fund-raiser. She wore tight white shorts, and a cute sleeveless top, and she was smiling, not at the camera but at another girl. Both had soap bubbles in their hair, and Edith was holding a hose. Alice couldn’t stop looking at the picture, partly because her mother looked so beautiful and so happy, but mostly because of how much she looked like Alice did now. How had she gone from that to what she became, that sloppy, drunken wreck drooling on a couch?

  Alice looked through the rest of the box. There was a cheap stuffed monkey that looked like it had been won in a fair, a second-place ribbon beginning to fray, a Bible with a white cover and Edith’s name inside of it, and two letters, typewritten on thin, oniony paper, that Alice was shocked to discover were from Gary Shurtleff, Alice’s biological father. Both were postmarked from San Diego, California. Both were short and apologetic, although in the second one he called Edith an uppity bitch for not writing him back. Neither of the letters mentioned a baby, even though Alice assumed he’d written them after he’d gotten her mother pregnant. Edith had once told Alice that her father had scampered out west as soon as he found out he was going to be a father. Now Alice wondered if her father had ever known about her. She also wondered where he was now. In California still? Then she put the letters back in the box with the yearbook and the Bible and the few other sentimental items that Edith had kept, and brought the whole box down to the Dumpster and got rid of it.

  The first winter after high school—the first winter that Alice was alone with Jake—was long and particularly cold. From January through most of March, the coast was pounded with an almost weekly storm, the temperatures rarely above freezing. Alice didn’t mind. When she wasn’t at college, where she’d enrolled in the business administration program with an accounting concentration, she was happy to be at home, warm in the condominium, with its views of the grey ocean, mirrored by its grey sky. The weather made her lazy and hungry. Every day she’d eat macaroni and cheese for lunch, then drowse on the couch, a textbook open across her lap, soap operas playing on the television in the background. She didn’t really pay much attention to them, except for General Hospital, but she liked the background noise. Jake always called before he left the bank, and it would give her time to take a shower, put something nice on, apply a little makeup. On the first real warm day of spring—sometime in mid-May—she met Jake at the door wearing her favorite pair of shorts and a bikini top.

  “Summer’s here,” she said.

  He squeezed her skin just above the waistline of the shorts, and said, “I’m surprised you can still fit into those things.”

  That night, after Jake had fallen asleep, Alice slid from the bed naked and went to the bathroom and weighed herself. She had gained weight, ten pounds at least. Of course, since high school had ended, she no longer ran. She never really exercised at all, so it was no wonder she was getting fat.

  The following day, after Jake had left for the bank, she put on a one-piece bathing suit, and walked down to the water’s edge. There were a few shell collectors out, but they were dressed in jeans and sweatshirts. It was going to be a warm day but it wasn’t warm yet, and the water numbed her anklebones. Still, she remembered what Jake had said, and she slid into the icy water, swimming hard for twenty minutes till her lungs burned and her arms were heavy and useless. Walking back across the firm sand to the condominium, Alice told herself that she would swim as long and as hard as she could every day. Her body would return to normal. She wondered how long it would be before Jake noticed that she was starting to lose weight. She imagined him looking at her one evening as she changed out of her clothes and into the lingerie she slept in, imagined him reaching out a hand to touch her flat stomach and telling her how amazing she looked.

  It didn’t happen exactly like that, but after swimming every day for a month, there was a night in June when Jake asked Alice to slowly strip for him in the living room while he sat on the couch and watched. It wasn’t the first time he’d asked Alice to do this, but it was rare, and usually after they’d come back from a nice dinner out. That night in June they’d driven all the way into Portland to go to a new French restaurant that had recently opened. The food was good, but when Jake had ordered a bottle of wine for the table, the waitress had asked for Alice’s ID. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Jake had said. “I don’t think you brought it, did you, Alice?” The waitress, slightly flushed, had suggested to Jake that “your daughter can order something else.”

  “We’ll both have water,”
Jake said, his jaw tensing.

  That night, after Alice was naked, Jake asked her to sit on his lap, and said, “You are perfect.”

  “Thank you,” Alice said, thinking of the daily, lung-burning swims in the cold ocean.

  “I have something to ask you,” Jake said, his voice a little hoarse. “You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to, but I’d like to take some pictures of you, just as you are now.”

  “What do you mean, naked?”

  “Just for me, I promise. No one else will ever see them.”

  “Why do you want pictures when you can see me whenever you want, just like this?” She leaned back a little on his lap, nearly slipping off, and opened her arms.

  “Here’s the thing, Alice, and I understand that you’ll never grasp this at your age, but the way you look now, you are not going to look like this forever. And you’ll want to preserve it somehow. In pictures. Trust me.”

  “Do you want to take the pictures right now?”

  “No, not right now. I just wanted to make the suggestion. If we do it, I’d want to make everything perfect. The lighting. Everything.”

  “I don’t mind, but I don’t want anyone to see them except for you. Ever.”

  “I promise,” he said. “They will just be for me. And for you. One day, you’ll cherish them.”

  That weekend they took the pictures. Jake bought a fancy-looking camera for the occasion, plus a light meter, and Alice posed on the bed in the master bedroom. At first she was nervous, and self-conscious, but then it started to get fun and sexy. Jake was surprisingly quiet the whole time; Alice thought he might have specific ideas for how she should pose, but he didn’t—he let her do what she wanted. When she thought they were done, however, Jake said, “Let’s take some in your old bedroom.”

  “Why?” Alice asked.

  “It’s more you,” Jake said. “In here it looks like you’re playacting. In your room it will look more natural.”

  She did what he asked, feeling a little strange posing on her single bed underneath the Duran Duran poster, and the small shelf that held her cross-country trophies. But it made Jake happy, and after he put the camera away, they had sex in Alice’s old room for the first time. Afterward, Alice asked, “Where will you get the pictures developed?”

  “I have a friend at work with a darkroom, and he said I could use it.”

  “You won’t show him?”

  “No, of course not. Those pictures are just for us.”

  “I don’t want anyone else to see me like this. Ever. Just you.”

  “One day you will. One day I’ll be too old for you—I’m probably too old for you now—and then you’ll find someone else, someone younger. I won’t mind. It’s natural.”

  Alice didn’t say anything right away. It was not that she didn’t know that Jake, almost fifty, was considered too old for her—although she thought about Richard Gere in Pretty Woman, and how hot he was—but she had somehow never imagined him getting older. She imagined herself getting older, but him staying the same. “I don’t know about that,” she said.

  “You will,” Jake answered.

  They lay on the bed a little longer. “Did you always want this?” she asked.

  “Want what?”

  “Want me. Want me more than you wanted my mom.”

  Alice heard the faintest clicking sound. It was Jake, tapping his teeth together, something he did when he was thinking. “Yes,” he finally said.

  That whole first winter after her mother died, Alice had successfully avoided any contact with the kids she’d known from Kennewick High. All except Gina, who wrote frequent letters from New York City that Alice would occasionally answer. At the end of her freshman year at NYU, Gina had, predictably, gotten a modeling contract that was going to keep her in the city throughout the summer. But in August, she came home for two weeks, and showed up unannounced at Alice’s house on a Thursday afternoon.

  “I knew you wouldn’t answer my calls, so I just thought I’d come over.” She held out a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill wine.

  Alice suggested they go to the beach, but Gina said it was too hot. They ended up drinking the wine in the living room, and eating Triscuits with port wine cheese. Gina was skinnier, and prettier, than ever. She’d lightened her hair, and it had been styled so that it lifted off her forehead, then cascaded down her back. Her dark, thick eyebrows had been shaped, and her nails were painted a neon orange.

  “Tell me about modeling,” Alice said.

  “You want to hear the good parts, or the sordid details?”

  “What do you think?”

  Gina told a few stories. The first time she tried cocaine (“It made me act like my little sister, or like Stephanie Richmond from cross-country, remember her?”), a slew of parties, endless proposals from older men, one of whom offered her ten thousand dollars to sleep with his wife while he watched. “They’re so gross,” she said. “The older they are, the grosser they are.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” Alice asked, hoping to change the subject from older men. Gina hadn’t mentioned Jake yet, but she knew she would. She’d alluded several times in her letters over the winter that she thought it was strange Alice was still living with him, that she thought Alice should move to New York City and stay with her for a while. It was only a matter of time till she brought it up. And it was only a matter of time till Jake came home. He was always home by five, and sometimes earlier, since the bank closed its doors at four.

  “Let’s go swimming,” Alice said, after Gina told her she didn’t have a boyfriend in New York.

  “I don’t have a suit,” Gina said.

  “Borrow one of mine.”

  “Okay. I guess.”

  Alice went to go upstairs, and Gina got up to follow. Alice suddenly realized that it might be obvious to Gina she was sharing a bedroom with Jake. Half her clothes were now in his bedroom, and the bed in her old room hadn’t been slept in in months.

  “I’ll bring you down some suits to try,” Alice said, bolting up the stairs.

  “Sure,” Gina said, shrugging.

  Alice changed into her favorite bikini upstairs, and brought down a few extras for Gina to try. She was shocked when Gina stripped down right in the living room. Gina must have read Alice’s face because she said, “Sorry. Model life. I have zero modesty.”

  “That’s okay.”

  Gina picked a black bikini that had white lace trim. The bottom fit fine, but the top was too big for her flat chest. Alice got her a T-shirt to wear over the suit, and together they walked across the softened asphalt of the parking lot and the scalding sand to where the waves were breaking against the shore.

  “It’s cold,” Gina squealed as they waded in.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Alice said, jumping as a wave rolled up against her. She dove under the water, and came up just as Gina tentatively lowered herself into the froth. They swam out together past the breaking waves, then both lay back, spreading out their arms, riding the swells. Gina’s white T-shirt billowed around her.

  “Okay, this is nice now,” Gina said. “Maine’s not so bad.”

  “Better than New York?”

  “God, no. I’ll come back and visit here, in the summer, but other than that . . . no thanks.”

  Alice didn’t immediately say anything, and Gina said, “Sorry, that was a little harsh. I’m just talking about for me, of course.”

  They rode together up a high swell, then slid down its backside. Alice’s mouth tasted salty. “So you’re done trying to get me to move to the city?”

  “How will you know you don’t like it if you don’t try? We’d have so much fun, Al. I mean it. I’d introduce you to my manager, and I bet you could get some modeling work yourself, probably not runway stuff because of your size, but I bet there’d be something. I mean, look at how gorgeous you are.”

  Alice laughed. “I’ll think about it,” she said, just to shut Gina up. What she really wanted to say was, Why would I go so
mewhere where everyone is looking for a better life, when I’ve already found it? I have the fairy tale ending already.

  “Is that your stepdad?” Gina suddenly said. She was shielding her eyes with her hand and looking toward shore. Alice did the same thing. Jake was there, just beyond the waterline, looking out toward the swimmers. He still wore his suit—the light blue linen one.

  Alice almost denied it, but it was obviously him. Instead, she waved to catch his attention, and said, “Yeah. There’s Jake.”

  “God, you are sleeping with him, aren’t you?” Gina said, as they both bobbed in the water, watching him wave back at them.

  Chapter 12

  Now

  “You think he had any enemies? Disgruntled customers?” Harry asked John. They were taking a coffee break after a morning spent packaging orders that had come in through the Internet.

  John finished his sip of coffee, holding the chipped mug in both hands. He thought for a moment. “Enemies, no. Disgruntled customers, not really, either. If someone was upset with the books we sent them, we’d always give a refund. Besides, even if we didn’t . . .” He made a face that suggested a disgruntled rare-book collector was not a likely murder suspect.

  “And there was nothing strange about that day?”

  “Not that I can remember. It was business as usual, and he left a little early, but just because he wanted to get a walk in before it got dark. He did that a lot of days. Do they think this was a premeditated thing?” His cataract-clouded eyes showed concern, as they had ever since Harry had told him what he’d learned the previous day.

  “No, I don’t think they have any guesses, except that he was hit on the head.”