All the Beautiful Lies

by Peter Swanson

  Caitlin shook her head. “I don’t . . . I don’t think . . .”

  The detective placed a second photograph next to the first one. It was of a tattoo, cursive script across a rib cage: Do you realize we’re floating in space? As quickly as the wave of relief had swept through Caitlin, a wave of icy recognition replaced it. Caitlin looked back at the face, photographed on a neutral background. Yes, it was her twin, her features reduced to their basic nature, a nose, two eyes, a mouth. She hadn’t recognized the face because there was nothing left of Grace in it. But the tattoo, that silly, impulsive tattoo, some line from a song Grace had loved in high school, meant that it was really her sister.

  She nodded at the detective, and he produced a piece of paper, proof of identification, for her to sign. She quickly glanced over the sheet, not trusting herself to speak, then signed on the line. The detective put the sheet of paper in a manila folder, and thanked her, then asked if she wanted to be alone for a moment before they talked further. She nodded, and he left, shutting the door behind him. She cried, a hand across her eyes, for several minutes. She’d cried earlier, when she first got the call from her mother that Grace was dead, but this was different. She’d seen the pictures. Grace, unimaginably, was truly gone.

  “She was your twin?” the detective asked, after he’d come back, after she’d shown him the e-mail, after she’d asked him repeatedly what had happened, and why.

  “Yes.”

  “Identical twins?”

  “No. Fraternal. But some people thought we were identical because we looked alike. But really, we just looked alike because we were sisters.”

  “Were you alike in other ways?”

  “Personality, you mean? God, no. Not at all. I was the careful one, and she wasn’t careful at all. As you can tell . . . from the situation, and from the e-mail. She was kind of impulsive and didn’t really know what she wanted. No, that’s not entirely true. She was impulsive, but she always knew what she wanted. It just changed all the time.”

  “Like the way she wanted Bill Ackerson.”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you surprised that she came up here for the funeral?”

  “Yes and no. I just found out, when I got the e-mail.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “No. I’d just heard about him. Not even that much, because Grace knew I disapproved. Then she called at the end of last week to tell me that he’d died.”

  “You said your sister was impulsive. Any history of violence, any outbursts, any mental health diagnoses?”

  Caitlin shook her head no.

  “How intense do you think Grace’s relationship with Bill was?”

  “She was in love with him,” Caitlin said.

  The detective pushed the box of Kleenex closer to Caitlin. She took a tissue, realizing there were tears on her cheeks. “Can I keep you here just a little bit longer?” the detective continued.

  “I guess.”

  “I want to ask you some general questions about your family and Grace’s friends. Maybe this had nothing at all to do with Bill Ackerson.”

  Caitlin didn’t get back to her room at the Sea Mist Motel until late that afternoon. She sat on top of the shiny bedcover and reread Grace’s last e-mail, then she listened to the three messages she’d gotten from her mother since she’d last checked her phone. She knew she needed to get back to her, to confirm what they’d already known, that the body was indeed Grace’s.

  She braced herself and made the call.

  “Caitlin?”

  “It was her, Mom. It was Gracie.”

  They both cried together on the phone, then once Caitlin had confirmed that her mother wasn’t alone—Patrick was there, like he always was, and her mother’s sister, Aunt Nan, was coming over later—Caitlin felt better about beginning the process of ending the phone call.

  “Mom,” she asked. “Can you have Patrick call Dad? I don’t think I’m up to it.”

  “Yes, of course. Patrick can do it. You’ve done enough, Caitlin. I should have been out there with you.”

  “No, there’s no reason for you to be here. I’m fine. Well, I’m not fine, but you know . . .”

  “Did the police say anything else? Do they know who did this?”

  Caitlin told her what she’d found out, but left out for now that Grace had been up in Maine for close to a week without letting anyone know. She’d already told her mother earlier about Grace’s involvement with Bill Ackerson, a much older married man. Her mother’s response had been expected: “I blame your father.”

  They talked some more, Caitlin ensuring her mother that she would find out when the body was going to be released—she’d forgotten to ask—and how to make arrangements to bring Grace back to Ann Arbor.

  “I’ll call you later tonight, Mom, okay? I’m exhausted and going to try and get some sleep.”

  “Okay. Don’t go out alone. I still wish Dan was up there with you.”

  “I’ll be fine. Have Patrick call Dad.”

  They said good-bye, then Caitlin lay back on the bed. The air-conditioning unit in the window kicked up a notch, and the sound jolted her. She sat up again. As she always did when she was overwhelmed, she made a quick mental list of what needed to be done and in what order. Find out when they would be done with Grace’s body. Arrange for the body to be transported to McLellan’s Funeral Home in Ann Arbor (she had their number on her phone). Call Maria at work and tell her she’d be away for at least a week. Fly back to Ann Arbor herself.

  And once she was there, she could finally tell her mom that Dan and she were no longer together, hadn’t been for about three weeks. Her mom, who loved Dan and referred to him as her daughter’s “fiancé” even though he never was, was going to be crushed. Or maybe it wouldn’t bother her, because of what had happened with Grace. But she didn’t believe that. She knew how her mom’s mind worked, and it was a moment of tragedy, and that meant all hands on deck, and Dan’s not being around was going to be a problem. The other problem, of course, was going to be her father. He would have to go to the funeral, of course, and her mother would just have to ignore him. She just hoped that her father would be decent enough to come to the funeral alone, and not bring his new wife and her three children.

  He’d left fourteen years ago, the day after Christmas. Until that moment, Mike and Carol (yep, the parents’ names on The Brady Bunch) had been together since high school, staying faithful all through college, even though Mike had gone to the University of Michigan while Carol went to Barnard in New York City. They got married a week after they had both graduated. They had three children in two years: the twin girls, then Patrick. There were no more children after that, and Grace and Caitlin had often speculated on how their parents had managed to find a Church-approved method of birth control that actually worked.

  Then there was that day after Christmas when Mike called the family together, told them that he was leaving to be with Angela Hernandez, a widow who had three children of her own. He left with one bag of clothes, plus his golf clubs. Caitlin and Grace had just turned eleven, and they had opposite reactions to the sudden decampment. Caitlin had made a silent list of what needed to be done, dedicating herself to helping her mother and her siblings get through the ordeal. Grace had gotten mad, at one point sneaking out of their house late at night and bicycling to their dad’s new home to throw rocks through their windows. That was why Carol blamed her ex-husband for all of Grace’s outbursts and bad relationships, in particular any relationship she had with a man older than she was. Truth was, there’d been a few, but Caitlin, as much as she blamed her father for many things, tended to think that Grace’s personality had been formed long before the Christmas when their father had left home.

  Caitlin went to the motel’s window and stared out into the half-empty parking lot. A gull skimmed by, just a few feet above a parked Suburban. It reminded her she was in a seaside town. Just two days earlier, Grace had been alive here, maybe falling for another man. Bill’s son, Harry,
of all people. And it had been Harry who found her body. How was he not a suspect? He must have been at least somewhat upset at Grace and her role as his father’s mistress. Mistress. The word almost made Caitlin laugh out loud. But that was what her sister had been, right? Nothing more than a mistress to a man old enough to be her father. And she’d gotten killed because of it, despite the detective’s asking questions as though there might have been some other motive for Grace’s death. The whole thing was lurid, and she hadn’t been surprised to see the news vans gathering outside of the police station earlier.

  She began to have a conversation in her head with Grace, something she’d done her entire life. Can you believe it? You were murdered.

  I know, right? Grace’s voice, so real in Caitlin’s head that a feeling of utter desolation swept through her that she’d never hear that voice out loud again.

  Caitlin, throat aching, focused on the mental list again. She repeated the items from her earlier list, adding Get something to eat at the terrible-looking diner across the street.

  Then she added one more item: Find and talk to Harry Ackerson.

  Chapter 23

  Then

  Jake Richter, born and raised in Menasset, Massachusetts, was the son of a German immigrant named Peter Richter, a truck driver who made deliveries for a fishing company in nearby New Bedford; his mother, Jocelyn, half Portuguese and half Quebecois, had cleaned fish at the same New Bedford company. They went on three dates before getting engaged on their fourth. A year later they were married and expecting their first child. After Jacob’s birth, a labor so traumatic that she made sure to never get pregnant again, Jocelyn quit her job, occasionally picking up housecleaning work for the summer residents who owned five-bedroom cottages down at the beach.

  During his interminable childhood, Jake and his parents spent every evening together in the cramped middle apartment of a brown triple-decker in Menasset’s town center. They didn’t own a television but listened to the radio every night, Peter steadily drinking brandy from a water glass while Jocelyn would eat Nabisco waffle creams and work on her needlepoint, sometimes talking back to the radio but seldom, if ever, speaking to her husband or her son. Peter Richter rarely spoke, either, and when Jacob started kindergarten he was so stunned by the sheer amount of chatter, not just from the other kids but from nervous Ms. Soares, a first-year teacher, that he refused to speak. Suspected of retardation, he was held back a year.

  But by the time he reached middle school, Jacob—now known as Jake—was regularly getting high marks and had learned to insinuate himself into conversations with the other kids in his class. Boys talked about baseball and comic books and liked to make up stories about getting into fights, while girls just liked it when you paid attention to them, mainly through teasing. Both boys and girls talked about television—for a while it was Howdy Doody—but by the time Jake was getting ready to leave Menasset Middle School for the regional high school, it was all Candid Camera or a new show being aired in the afternoons called American Bandstand. Jake asked his parents only once if they would consider buying a television. His mother said that she didn’t think she’d be able to keep doing her needlepoint and watch television at the same time, and his father said that television was a waste of money. So Jake learned to secretly listen in when kids talked about the shows they watched. He memorized what they said, and that way he could pretend he watched TV as well.

  When he was fifteen years old, one of the women whose houses his mother cleaned asked her if she knew anyone who could take care of the grounds in the fall. Jocelyn volunteered her son, and in October of that year, Jake began to work one day a week at Mrs. Codd’s shingled cottage, two streets from the shore and with a two-acre backyard to take care of. His job was primarily raking, getting rid of the leaves from the massive beech trees and maples that lined her property, but Mrs. Codd always had one or two small jobs for him to do around the house—taking down the storm windows, or moving the patio furniture back into the garage. She’d hover near him while he did these chores, always with a lit cigarette. Her hair, cut into a bob, was dyed a platinum shade of blond; her face was heart shaped, dominated by wide-set brown eyes made larger by heavy streaks of light blue eyeshadow. She couldn’t have been more than fifty years old—at most—but her two children were already away at college, and her husband, an insurance executive in Hartford, came out to the house only on the weekends. Like some of the kids at school, and not at all like his own parents, Emma Codd talked nonstop to Jake, even sometimes accompanying him as he raked up leaves, telling him about her two boys at college, or asking him what kids these days were like, what music did he listen to, what did he watch on television.

  “We don’t have a TV,” he said to her, the first time he’d admitted that to someone.

  “Well, that’s probably a very healthy thing, Jake, although I don’t know what I’d do without it in the evenings. It’s not that I watch it all the time, but it’s nice to have on just for the company, you know?”

  “My parents don’t really care about my health, it’s just that my dad is too cheap.” Jake had figured out that Emma Codd, who could talk about anything, liked to talk about other people’s shortcomings most of all.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” she said. “I bet he’s just worried about your eyes, is all. But, really, if it has to do with money, I’d be happy to just let you have my old television set, one of those things they made just after the war, looks more like a radio with a screen in it, but I’m sure it still works. Or, you’re more than welcome to come over anytime you want in the evening and watch some television with me. I wouldn’t mind the company.”

  Jake knew that his father would never accept the television, especially from Emma Codd, a woman he often referred to as “that rich bitch,” and whose husband he called “cuckold Codd,” using a word that Jake didn’t understand. But he did mention to his parents that he’d been invited to watch television at the Codd household. He knew there would be no objection. His was a cold and loveless house, but that also meant there was freedom. He could come and go as he pleased; his parents never expressed any desire to have him around, and his father even grumbled sometimes about how much the weekly food cost had increased now that Jake, who’d grown four inches in under a year, was eating so much.

  Jake started going to Emma Codd’s house weeknights after suppertime, only after the dishes were cleaned, dried, and put away (his nightly chore), and only if he’d finished all his homework. In her large living room, Mrs. Codd and Jake would watch television together while she drank a Tom Collins, and talked over most of the programs. She would move around the room, freshening up her drink, or stretch out on the sofa next to Jake, sometimes brushing his legs with her bare feet.

  Back at home, under his covers, he’d allow himself vague and dirty thoughts about Mrs. Codd, which would always end with him feeling repulsed by himself. Jake had limited knowledge about sex, not having learned anything from either of his parents, and having absorbed a fair amount of misinformation from kids at school. But in all that misinformation he’d never heard about a kid having any kind of relationship with an adult. It never occurred to him that Mrs. Codd would want to have sex with him. Jake knew that married couples did it, and he’d heard stories about spin-the-bottle games, and the two or three girls from Menasset who would let you get away with more than kissing, but he was still utterly surprised when Emma Codd, one night, asked Jake if he’d ever kissed a girl.

  “Not really,” he said.

  “Not really?” she laughed, so loud that it led to a coughing fit. She stubbed out her cigarette in the plate-sized glass ashtray on the coffee table.

  “One or two, I guess,” Jake said, which was true. Margie Robinson and he had kissed on the lips in the woods behind the middle school playground. She’d claimed she wanted to see if the lipstick she was wearing would get onto his lips.

  “No tongue?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did your tongue
s touch when you kissed? Was it French kissing?”

  “No,” he said, shifting uncomfortably on the sofa. Just hearing Mrs. Codd say the word tongue had caused an instant reaction in his jeans, and he moved so she wouldn’t see what was happening to him.

  “It’s not real kissing, you know, if you don’t use the tongue. I can show you if you like? That way you won’t be embarrassed when you next kiss a girl.”

  “Okay,” Jake said, his mouth instantly drying up.

  As though she could tell, Mrs. Codd passed him her tall Tom Collins. “Have a sip of this. It will help.”

  He drank the sweet, icy drink, and it did help, at least with the dryness of his mouth. Mrs. Codd slid down the sofa next to him. He was worried, more than anything, that if they got close enough to kiss, she might notice the hardness in his pants. Would she be disgusted, kick him out of the house, tell him to never come back? Would she tell his parents?

  “Now just relax,” she said, taking the drink from his hand, sipping some herself, then placing the glass on the coffee table. They began to kiss, and just like she’d said, there was a lot of tongue. She tasted of gin and tobacco, and they kissed so long that Jake began to worry he would suffocate. When she pulled away, she said, “Not bad for your first time.” Her lipstick was smudged around her lips, and Jake thought of Margie Robinson in the cold, damp woods.

  “Now let’s try it again, but a little bit closer this time.” She turned toward him, sliding a leg across his lap, and Jake shied away.

  “Sorry, sorry,” he said.

  “What for? This?” She put a hand on his crotch, and Jake nodded, feeling so ashamed that he was worried he might start to cry.