Truth, Lies, and Second Dates

by MaryJanice Davidson, Camille Anthony, Melissa Schroeder

  “So you’ve unsuccessfully portrayed podiatrists before now? Congrats. Make sure to update your résumé accordingly. Meanwhile, all the living Monahans think I murdered the dead one. This is why I don’t go to memorials, Tom!”

  “Understandable.”

  That was vague enough to give her pause. Did he mean it was understandable that the Monahans put her in their burn book by implying she was a murderess vandal

  (Wait, that would be murderous vandal, right?)

  or was it understandable that she was annoyed about the (theoretical) burn-book placement?

  Never mind. Back to the rant. “How, how can they think that about me?” Ava, too worked up to get behind the wheel, began pacing back and forth while Tom tracked her like he was watching a slow tennis match. Back … and forth. Back … and forth. “Have they been stewing over this for a decade? What the hell just happened in there?”

  “If I were to guess, the Monahans may be wondering at the coincidence of you running into Dennis all these years later.”

  “Oh, please. The planet only looks big. People run into old friends and neighbors all the time—I see it almost every week in every airport.”

  “Yes, but … on a significant anniversary? And just in time to attend a significant event?”

  “Yeah, well, as you said: a coincidence.” But a horrid thought struck her: if she hadn’t gone to Danielle’s memorial, would someone still have trashed the place?

  That way lies nuttiness.

  “A terrible, shitty coincidence,” she continued. “And they must know that, or they’d have told the cops they suspect me.” She stopped in midpace. “Have the cops said anything to you about me being a psycho of interest? And before you play more devil’s advocate, that’s something an innocent person would want to know.”

  “The police are pursuing all leads.”

  “Great, you sound like a press release.”

  “The lead detective believes your version of events—”

  “My version?”

  “—partly because Mrs. Monahan did not indicate, then or back then, that she thought you killed Danielle. But I believe some of them wondered if you might have guilty knowledge.”

  Guilty knowledge. A phrase that never failed to make her shiver.

  “Partly, huh?” She threw up her hands. “Well, I’ll take what I can get. So why would they spring this on me? Why even let me come back here tonight? Why not disinvite me, or stop me from going inside? There’s enough of them; they could have posted a guard at every entrance. And at my hotel. And in every parking lot between here and my hotel.”

  “Perhaps for the same reason you and I attended: to see if we could spot a killer.”

  “Yeah, except we know it’s not me.”

  Silence.

  She turned to face him full-on. “Uh. Tom? We know it’s not me. Right? We know that? That’s not the royal we, by the way. That’s the plural we, as in the you-and-me we.”

  “Anyone looking at you for this would have to admit any evidence is entirely circumstantial.”

  Good thing she’d stopped pacing, because she would have walked right into a car: bam! Instant bruises. Instead, she stared at him in his immaculate dark suit, his immaculate face, his immaculate skull, his immaculate brain, which she didn’t understand but liked enormously.

  “You … think I’m the killer, too?”

  “Well—”

  “Not cool, Doc Baker!” God damn her arms itched. She groaned and scratched as the pieces started to fall into place with near-audible clicks. “You knew it was me following you, but you still let me walk right into the morgue.” A new thought struck her, one almost as staggering as the realization that everyone in the Crisp and Gross Funeral Home thought she killed her friend, then went to town on a bunch of folding chairs a decade later. “Jesus, no wonder you lost your shit when we ran into your family at the dog park! You weren’t worried about how it upset your routine; you were worried that you’d introduced your niece to a psychopath!”

  “In this case, I think sociopath would be more—”

  “Not now, Tom!” She stared at him, panting a little because the rant had left her out of breath. She now had to reexamine every moment they’d spent together and … it didn’t look good. “Is that why you haven’t tried to kiss me again?”

  “No,” he replied quietly. “I haven’t tried to kiss you again because, one way or the other, you’re just passing through. Because that’s all you do: pass through.”

  She decided to brush that aside for now and ponder it later, when she couldn’t sleep. “So all of it—meeting me for breakfast and then dinner and coming with me here … telling me those stories to keep my interest and pretending you liked me a little—”

  “Not just a little,” he replied quietly. “And not pretending.”

  “Shut. Up. All that … so did it work? Did you find out I killed her?”

  “Inconclusive.”

  She just looked at him until his gaze dropped. “Inconclusive. Okay. Well. For the record—since that’s all this is—I’ve never killed anyone. Not once. Not ever.” She groped in her purse, found the car key which wasn’t a key

  (Ugh, I miss keys.)

  and randomly pressed the thing until her door unlocked itself. She started to climb in and paused for a last look back. “It was nice to meet you, and I wish I never had. You have a lovely family, and I felt privileged to meet them. Now go fuck yourself.”

  “Ava…”

  “Captain Capp.”

  That gave him pause, she saw at once, and his expression was that of an unhappy man being yanked in two directions.

  “It’s my own fault,” she told him. “I read too much into it.” Way, way too much.

  “Cap—”

  “Good night, Dr. Baker.”

  She was in such a hurry to slam the car door (mostly to get away from the Crisp and Gross Funeral Home but also to get the last word) she almost closed it on her leg. She withdrew her limb like a startled tortoise (but faster), started the car, resisted the urge to run over Tom, and got the holy fuck out of there.

  Twenty-Four

  THE LIST

  Fuck it

  Fuck everything

  Once she’d gotten a good cry out of the way, Ava wasted no (more) time returning her union rep’s call. To her relief, Jan answered on the first ring. “Oh, hey, Jan. Didn’t think you’d be in this late.”

  “How is it that you never remember I’m in California?”

  “Because I don’t care about you, or your work, or anything you do.”

  A gusty sigh over the connection. “Finally one of you ungrateful jerks admits it. How are you, Ava?”

  Jan’s warm sarcasm was already making her feel better. “PCP-free and ready to get back. What’s the scoop?”

  “Passed with flying colors. That last test was seriously whiffed. Even the vitamin C deficiency was a false positive.”

  Relief made her knees buckle. Not that she’d worried a lab test would show anything harder than Advil. But once upon a time, that was all she worried about—whether she could pass a piss test—so it had stirred up some dark memories.

  “You know, it’s strange,” Jan was saying. “I’ve never seen a test come back with hits like that before. The lab’s trying to figure out if it’s the actual test or if it’s a computer glitch.”

  “Like someone entering the wrong results under my name?”

  “Exactly. But that’s not your problem, it’s theirs. And as of 0700, you’re clean and cleared.”

  The magic words. Not for nothing had she made the trip from teenage traumatized murder witness to valuable employee and pilot, even before the belly landing. She knew her time and skill sets were assets, and she enjoyed working for a company that valued them. She could be in New York tomorrow, or Seattle or L.A. or Dallas or Portland. She could be gone from here in no time at all. And if any of those flights took her through MSP, she’d just stay on the fucking plane next time.

  Tha
t’s not very practical, what if you have to—

  Shut it, inner voice. And pay attention. “Sorry, Jan, didn’t catch that.”

  “That’s okay. Inattention is a quality we prize in our pilots.”

  “Hilarious.” It was, though—Ava giggled in spite of herself.

  “Yuk it up, honey. See how you like it on the ground for a month.”

  “I’ll call that bluff, Jan. I know you guys are short-handed.”

  “You saw through me.” The banter dispensed with, Jan got back to it. “Can you take the four-twenty to Boston tomorrow? Eleven thirty A.M.?”

  Fly away, Ava. Again.

  Are you mocking me, inner voice? Because it’s not working.

  Because: why shouldn’t she? She’d done what she could here, and the sky was waiting for her. She had a wonderful job and a wonderful union and wonderful coworkers and a wonderful life and she needed to get back to all the wonderfulness. Dead was dead, she wasn’t a TV detective, and she was done with Tom Baker, who showed her only yesterday where a fast-food employee had been drowned in room temperature cooking oil.

  “I’ll take it,” she said. “Up, up, and etcetera.”

  Twenty-Five

  An hour later, Ava was so busy throwing up she didn’t care about the welts blooming all over her arms.

  The illness—flu, food poisoning, non-food poisoning, a visceral reaction to all the evil in the world, whatever it was—had snuck up on her. In less than an hour, she’d gone from giddily thrilled about being cleared to calm to vaguely nauseated to nauseated to oh shit go-go-go and, as G.B. once put it, “shoutin’ at the floor.”

  Adding to her woes:

  “I feel strongly we parted on bad terms and would like further discussion on the matter, please!”

  Tom Baker was knocking on her hotel room door and hollering from the hallway.

  “Get bent!” she managed, before vomiting again.

  “There is a better than average chance you are in danger!”

  “Get. Bent!”

  Ava didn’t often envy the dead, but at the moment Danielle’s fate sounded, if not appealing, then at least not completely horrible. Wherever she was in the afterlife, Ava doubted anyone was pounding on Danielle’s door as she ejected half a pound of bread pudding and devoutly wished for all the toothpaste in the world.

  “I am sorry to trouble you! But I respectfully demand entrance!”

  Good God, is this going to go on all night?

  “Buzz off or I’ll call the main desk.” She fought her gorge and lost. “Bbblluurrgghh! And they’ll ream you a new one before or after they call the cops!”

  “Yes! The police! Summon them immediately! Your life may be at stake!”

  It is. It is going to go on all night. Shivering, she flushed, got to her feet, got to the sink

  “Have you called the authorities? Shall I?”

  “Will you give me five seconds?”

  washed her face, brushed her teeth, went to the door, took a breath, opened it.

  Tom greeted her with a gasp that could only be described as horrified.

  “What’s the matter?” she snapped. “Have I lost my youthful glow? A barf session will do that.”

  “Why are you still here?” he demanded.

  “Annnnnnd I’m shutting the door now.” She scratched her arms and glared. “Can you slam the door in your own face? I’ve got a lot going on right now … no, no, from the other side of the door … goddammit!”

  “Please.” Tom had his hands up like he was being arrested. Which was still in the cards for the evening as far as she was concerned. “Please answer my question. Why are you still here? Why were you grounded?”

  She stomped to the minifridge and grabbed a ginger ale. “Why are you assuming I was grounded? Maybe I just love all this tropical Midwest weather.”

  “Because the only reason you would have remained is if you could not leave.”

  Fair. “If I answer, you’ll go away forever?”

  “No.”

  She almost smiled, but it turned into a grimace as her stomach roiled. “Points for—uurrggh—candor. I flunked a drug test. Actually, I didn’t flunk the test; the test flunked me.” That made sense, right? Right. “Took them a day or so to get it straightened out. But I’m flying the mostly friendly skies as of tomorrow morning.”

  He reached out sloooowly and she watched, bemused, as he did a pretty good imitation of molasses. He gently grasped her arm, turned it over, and studied the welts rising on the pale underside. “And this?”

  “No idea. I’ve been itching like crazy.”

  “Yes, I saw you were scratching earlier; this looks like textbook irritant contact dermatitis.”

  “Of course,” she deadpanned. “Exactly what I was thinking.”

  “And you’re ill.” He inclined his head toward the bathroom, where the toilet was still running and all the lights were on. He reached up, put the back of his hand on her forehead, touched her cheeks. “But no fever.”

  “Thanks for the update.”

  “You’re being sabotaged,” he said flatly, and the moment he said it, she realized he might be on to something.

  “By the killer?”

  “Very possible.”

  “But some people think I’m the killer.”

  “Which works out nicely for the real killer, don’t you think?”

  She sighed. “You’d better come in.”

  “I am in.”

  “Oh. Right. Stay put. Don’t snoop through my stuff.”

  Five minutes later, she was reasonably certain the barf party was over—for a while, at least. Tom, meanwhile, had taken a seat at the small desk in the corner and was on his phone, but set it aside the moment he saw her.

  “Would you like me to get an antinauseant?”

  “Why? Are you sick?”

  “Ava. This is serious.”

  She sighed and perched on the end of the bed. “I know. I’m just a little numb right now. To this and … everything.”

  “Will you tell me about your drug test?”

  “It flagged me for PCP, ecstasy, weed, coke, benzos, oxy, and PCP.”

  “You said PCP twice.”

  “Apparently there was a lot of it. A lot of fake PCP.”

  “But the test was wrong.”

  “Of course. Wait, why do you know that? We’ve known each other less than a week. Who are you to say I’m not a raging cokehead?” Wait. Am I actually offended that he assumed I’m clean?

  “Point. However, it’s difficult to picture you breaking the law and jeopardizing your health and your license for something as oddly specific and ultimately mercurial as a benzodiazepine-PCP-cocaine-MDMA-marijuana-oxycontin high.”

  “Well. Yeah, that’s mostly true. But.” She cleared her throat. Took a sip of ginger ale. Coughed again. Good God, she’d told this story to any number of counselors, employers, and coworkers. Why was it difficult now? “Uh. Back in the day, after Danielle and my folks were killed, I started having trouble sleeping.”

  “Having trouble sleeping” was code for lying in bed night after night after night after night, staring at the ceiling with gritty eyes and seeing Danielle’s corpse and the demolished wreck that had swallowed her parents (she’d talked the insurance agent into letting her look at the pictures, an action they both immediately regretted), and wondering if anyone would care—or at least notice—if she OD’d. Over-the-counter Unisom turned into booze, but she had to drink too much of it to get numb and disliked the taste of just about all of it. Or, as she told her T-group, “I failed as a drunk. Just couldn’t get it done.”

  So she turned to Ambien, which turned into scamming prescriptions from just about every doctor within a 120-mile radius, which turned into buying loads of it online, which turned into popping six to eight Ambien a night to sleep, then being a zombie during daylight hours, only to gulp down another half-dozen Ambien to force herself under again, and somewhere in there she lost track of a year.

  “I ended up in
a Minnesota slough—Hazelden—for just under a month, and they helped me get my shit together,” she explained. “I’ve been clean for close to a decade. But hearing I’d flunked a routine screening brought back bad memories.”

  “Of course it did.” He didn’t sound judgmental, just upset on her behalf. “It would be unpleasant for anyone, never mind someone with your history. Which makes for an extra sadistic touch, don’t you agree?”

  Yikes. When he put it that way, it seemed a lot more ominous—and personal. It suggested the killer didn’t just know her but had kept up with her post-Danielle history. Could it be?

  Dumb question. Of course he or she kept up—they managed to reach out from wherever and fuck up my drug test. Among other things.

  “Tell me about the irritant.”

  “He’s sitting about eight feet away.”

  Tom chuckled. “I suppose I earned that. When did the symptoms start?”

  “Late yesterday. I didn’t think much of the itching at first, because I’d misplaced my damned moisturizer, so I figured it was just my skin crying out for more Eucerin.”

  “And then you found it again.”

  “Yes.” On the driver’s-side floor of her rental car, as a matter of fact … she’d looked down and seen the top of the bottle sticking out. At the time, she’d wondered how she had missed it when she ransacked the car earlier.

  “Which you then immediately, and generously, applied.”

  “Oh my God. What the hell did that shithead put in my lotion?” Poison? Bodily fluids? Please, please let it be poison …

  “I mean to find out.” He reached into his pocket and shook out … a gallon-sized Ziploc bag? “May I have it, please? I’ll have the lab take a look.”

  “Absolutely. And good fucking riddance.” She got up, went to the dresser, opened the top drawer, and pulled out the bottle, using a pair of clean panties as a glove. She let it plop into Tom’s bag. And let the panties plop into the garbage can. “That applies to the bottle and you, in case you were wondering.”

  Tom sealed and tucked the bag away somewhere. “Someone has done their research. Which is why I’m here. I have to help you. Please let me help you.”