Beautiful Lies rj-1

by Lisa Unger

  What would have happened if Max and my father had decided to take certain cases into their own hands? What if providing safe haven for abandoned babies was just one arm of Project Rescue? What if there was another Project Rescue? One with which the social elite of New York City wouldn’t be so eager to have their stellar names associated. These thoughts ran like liquid nitrogen in my veins.

  “So you don’t have any idea how these kids were taken and why? You don’t have any theories?” I whispered to him.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  He moved away from the curtain and sat beside me on the small bench so that we were squished in next to each other. He stuck the gun in his waistband and wiped a sheen of sweat from his brow, then dropped his arm around me.

  “We’ll stay here for a while, okay?”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far ahead.”

  I noticed for the first time just how dog tired he looked.

  “What are you going to do, Jake?” I said softly, my lips so close to his ear that I could taste him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you figure it out? When you know all the answers about what Project Rescue is and what happened to us, what are you going to do?”

  He looked at me blankly with a slight shake of his head, as if the thought had never occurred to him, as if he’d been questing for an object he couldn’t identify. We’re all so lost, aren’t we? Always looking for something elusive, something we think is crucial, never knowing exactly what it is.

  “I just need to know who I am,” he said.

  “You know, don’t you?”

  “I need to know what happened to me. These other kids wound up in homes, I think, like you did. What happened to me? How did I wind up in the system? Don’t you want to know for sure, Ridley, what happened to you? Don’t you want to know the truth?”

  We were still whispering. It was a good question. The truth is always held up as this Holy Grail, the thing for which all must be sacrificed. Everyone’s always talking about how it will set you free and how nothing bad can come of facing it. I strongly suspected, in this case at least, that the truth was going to suck completely, that all my beautiful lies had been so much better. But I knew enough by then to know that the universe doesn’t like secrets, that it lays snares you can’t avoid. I was a fox with my leg in a trap. The only way to escape now would be to chew off a limb. And I’d lost too much already. I didn’t realize that I was crying (yes, again) until Jake reached over and gently wiped a big fat tear from my cheek.

  “I’m sorry, Ridley. I’m so sorry for all of this,” he said, kissing me. His breath was hot in my ear as he whispered and goose bumps raised on my arms. “I could have squashed this for you but I didn’t. I fanned the flame. I led you to Christian Luna. It was so selfish. I just—”

  “Didn’t want to be alone in this anymore?”

  He nodded. I understood that. I remembered how alone I’d felt lying in that dark hotel room wondering who I was and where I came from, who was trying to hurt me. Jake had felt like that all his life. And in the last year, this searching for his family and for answers to what happened to him, his only friend gone. How lonely he must have been. The thought of having someone sharing his questions, sharing his quest, must have been irresistible. After all, beneath the surface of it, isn’t that what we’re all looking for? We may say we’re looking for love, following dreams, chasing the dollar, but aren’t we just looking for a place where we belong? A place where our thoughts, feelings, and fears are understood?

  “I’m sorry,” he said again, pulling me into his arms and holding me. I wrapped my arms around him as best I could in the small space and held on tight. I couldn’t get close enough to him.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I understand it now.”

  “What?”

  “Quidam.”

  He looked at me then, some combination of disbelief and gratitude in his eyes. I could taste the salt of my tears on his lips.

  While we were hiding in the church, Detective Gus Salvo arrived at the scene of the shooting. I would find out later that, standing amid the glass confetti on the floor of the diner, he took from the shaken waitress the description of the two people who had fled the scene. He shook his head as she told him what she’d seen. It was another misshapen piece in a puzzle that made less and less sense the more he learned. What had started as a random shooting in a dangerous park was taking on dimensions he hadn’t intuited when the case first landed on his desk.

  Gun laws in New York State were pretty strict. If you wanted to legally obtain a weapon, there’s a gauntlet of checks and balances, a long waiting period, etc. Harley Jacobsen had observed these laws in obtaining his Glock nine-millimeter and another smaller five-shot .38 Special Smith & Wesson, a gun cops often used as their off-duty piece. He was legally licensed to carry both. The rifle used to kill Christian Luna, however, had been purchased in Florida, where laws were much more lenient, employing only a three-day waiting period. In fact, in Florida, you could buy a weapon legally without registering it. Now, Detective Salvo could understand driving to Florida, buying an assault rifle, and driving back to New York City to use that weapon in the commission of a murder. What he couldn’t understand was why Jacobsen would have registered it. Salvo obtained the documents that Jake had signed, compared them to the signature he had on file for Jake’s PI license, and discovered that they were not even close.

  He had been true to his word to me and was looking into the cases of the four missing children, following pretty much the same trail Jake, and then I, had taken. But Gus Salvo was a very single-minded man. He didn’t have all the distractions and personal agendas that Jake and I did. And he never lost sight of his goal, to discover who had killed Christian Luna and why.

  Luna was believed by police to be Teresa Stone’s murderer. The fact that he hadn’t been caught meant that the case was still open. But according to the files Detective Salvo had been poring over, no one had looked into any other possibilities. Teresa Stone didn’t have any family to press the investigation, so after a year or so it had fallen into Cold Cases, more or less finished, gathering dust in a file deep in a basement somewhere in Jersey. Good news for whoever killed her. So the fact that Christian Luna had resurfaced and asserted his innocence to a woman he believed to be his kidnapped daughter, and who happened to have an entirely new identity now, must have seemed like pretty bad news and a very big problem to someone.

  So Detective Salvo had come to the conclusion that Christian Luna had been someone’s loose end. The fact that Jake had been digging around in the same graveyard made him a loose end, too. And I, for that matter, looked to be doing a bit of dangling myself.

  He looked around the diner, littered now with shattered glass. The sidewalk outside was riven with rounds from an automatic weapon. What the fuck, he wondered to himself, was going on? And I might have known this sooner if I hadn’t stubbornly turned my cell phone off when it started to vibrate in my pocket and I saw his number blinking on my caller ID.

  twenty-nine

  You’re driving on the highway and an eighteen-wheeler in front of you kicks up a little rock, which hits your windshield with a surprising, loud snap. That stone, probably no bigger than the nail on your little finger, leaves a tiny, almost invisible chip. And even though at first you can barely see it, eventually it’s going to spider. That minuscule rupture has created fissures that compromise the stability of the whole. Eventually everything you see through it will become fractured and broken, and another blow, however small, might cause the entire thing to collapse in a deadly, slicing rain.

  Through the compromised windshield of my memory, I saw things that I hadn’t thought about since childhood, if I’d thought about them at all. They were rushing back to me, these moments that had been recorded but buried. How many things have we seen once and then never thought about again? I think, as a kid, when you see things you don’t understand, ma
ybe you file them away in your subconscious, and only when you have the language and the knowledge to finally process them do they surface in your memory again. I’m not talking about repressed memories. I’m talking about nuances, subtleties, those delicate moments that can change meaning.

  I remembered an afternoon in winter when my school closed early. I was eight maybe, in the third grade, and we all gathered at the jalousie windows to watch the snow fall, coating the playground impossibly fast. The sky was that blizzard color, a kind of blackish gray. Our school was dismissed in shifts generally, the kindergartners and pre-K’s all released at noon and the rest of us at three, so there weren’t enough buses for all of us to go home early on that day it snowed. Mothers were called and the drive leading past the entrance to the school was a parade of station wagons and minivans. I remembered this feeling of guilty excitement, happy to be going where it was warm and cozy to watch the cold, wet world grow ever whiter from a window near our fireplace, eating grilled cheese sandwiches and drinking hot chocolate.

  We were all bundled and waiting by the aluminum-and-glass doors, and every time the doors opened, a flurry of snowflakes and cold wind blew in so that our noses and cheeks grew pink in the waiting. I was one of the last children to be picked up. I saw our familiar car approach, but at first the woman driving didn’t look like my mother. Her face was gray, her expression hard and drawn. Her hair looked tousled, and her eyes were narrowed in an angry squint. My mother was a beautiful woman, always impeccably maintained. I don’t recall ever seeing her “undone,” as she would say. The woman who had seen us off that morning, though still in her red silk pajamas, had been perfectly groomed, face washed, hair brushed, wearing a matching black velvet robe and slippers. She was in costume and playing her role as mother perfectly.

  The woman at the wheel of the black Mercedes looked anxious, annoyed, and deeply, deeply sad. She stared ahead into the snow as if the weather were the most crushing disappointment to her. I remembered a flutter in my heart that I’m not sure I would have been able to explain. In that moment, I think I saw my mother without her mask.

  My teacher, Miss Angelica, said, “There you go, Ridley. There’s your mom.”

  I looked away from the woman at the wheel and shook my head. “That’s not my mother, Miss Angelica.”

  My teacher looked again, peering through her glasses into the snow. “Why, sure it is, Ridley.” She gave me a confused, benevolent smile.

  When I looked back my mother was there, smiling and waving. I felt a little jolt of surprise and then moved out into the snow. My mother leaned over and pushed the door open for me. I climbed in beside her and smelled her perfume, L’Air du Temps, the one that came in that frosted glass bottle with the little bird on the stopper. She brushed the snowflakes from my hat.

  “Snow day!” she said cheerfully. “Let’s go pick up your brother from the middle school. Then we’ll go home and have some hot chocolate.”

  I was still looking for that ghost woman.

  “What is it?” she said with a smile when she saw me staring.

  “You didn’t look like yourself,” I said. “When I saw you from the door. You looked different.”

  She gave a little laugh, as if I was silly or playing a game. But her smile twitched a bit. “Did I?” she said. Then she turned and made a face, sticking out her tongue. “Do I look like myself now?” I dissolved into giggles.

  What am I trying to say? What am I trying to tell you? I guess that it’s not just the big things that were lies—some of the little things were, too.

  I remembered again that day, that birthday party when I overheard Uncle Max and my mother talking in the kitchen, how I couldn’t believe the tones they were using with each other. So angry. I realize now, so intimate. Because, think about it, you don’t talk that way to polite strangers, even to your husband’s best friend, even if over the years he’s become your friend, too. There was so much emotion in their words. As if there was a whole layer to their relationship I hadn’t suspected.

  To bring one of them here. To Ace’s party. How could you?

  I didn’t want to come alone.

  Bullshit, Max.

  What do you want from me, Grace, huh? Stop being such a fucking prude.

  My maternal grandmother always said with such pride about my mother and her siblings, “Oh, they never, ever fight.” And for the longest time I thought this was the hallmark of a good relationship, a lack of conflict. And then, one night, when my grandmother made the remark, I heard my father whisper under his breath, “Yeah, they never fight because they never talk.”

  “What was that, Benjamin?”

  “Nothing, Mother.” He called her that, as if it tasted sour in his mouth. He called his own mother Ma.

  I remembered how my parents never fought—except about Ace. That I knew when she was angry at him—he was never angry with her that I saw—because of the silence and the darkness. When my mother was in a good mood, all the lights would be on in the house, the fire lighted in winter and autumn, the sound of a television or a stereo somewhere. When she was angry, she sat quiet and alone in the dark until she was appeased. That’s how I knew when things were not good.

  “You doing all right?” asked Jake, putting a hand on the back of my head.

  “Yeah. Just remembering,” I answered. He nodded as if he understood.

  The cab we had hailed on Hicks Street had come to a stop in front of Ace’s building. I won’t say I was thrilled about seeing him again; I was still angry and hurt from our last encounter. But honestly, there was nowhere else to go for answers. He knew more than he’d told me. His passive-aggressive hinting around told me that. And he was going to be honest with me, for once. I wasn’t leaving without answers. Not this time.

  The stoop was empty, and though it was just after 4:30 P.M., the sky was nearly dark. We’d waited in the church for a while, considering ourselves safe because no one had followed us there. We dozed off in the confessional, leaning against each other, holding hands. Both of us were so tired, it felt as if we’d been drugged. We awoke during an afternoon Mass and remembered that the sign said confession began at four. When the Mass ended, we filed out with the faithful and got a cab right in front of the church, told the driver to head toward the Lower East Side. Jake watched out the back window, and when he was satisfied that we hadn’t been followed, asked me to give the driver the address. Now we stood in front of the building.

  “This is where he lives?” he asked.

  “If you can call it a life.”

  As we walked into the building, Jake put his hand to the gun at his waist. Like before, that awful odor—garbage, human rot, something chemical—drifted up into my sinuses. But tonight the building seemed quiet, deserted, and there was no sunlight fighting its way in through the dirty windows.

  “It’s okay,” I told him, taking his hand.

  “I don’t like dark like this,” he said. I thought about all the awful things that had happened to him in the dark and I understood. I squeezed his hand tighter. Our eyes adjusted as we climbed the stairs, the wood creaking beneath our weight. When we came to the apartment door, it stood open and my heart fell like a stone into my stomach.

  “Ace?” I said. But there was no answer.

  Jake drew his gun and stood to the side, guiding me gently over toward the wall. He pushed the door and with a creak it opened. There was a figure slumped on the bed; I could see the outline in the dark. The thin, frail shadow seemed to shake slightly. Then I heard the sound of low sobbing.

  “Ruby?” I said, moving closer to her. Jake reached for my wrist but I shook out of his grasp and walked toward her.

  “They took him,” she said quietly between sobs.

  “Who took him?” I asked, kneeling beside her. I couldn’t see her face but I could smell the cigarettes on her breath.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Two men in masks. They slammed through the door. One of them hit me so hard in the jaw.” She reached her hand up
and rubbed her face. “I blacked out. When I woke up, they were gone and so was Ace.”

  “Are you okay?” I said, trying to inspect her jaw in the relative darkness.

  She nodded and looked at me, her eyes wide and full of tears.

  “They didn’t say anything?” said Jake from the door.

  She nodded. “They said to tell you to let it go.”

  “To tell me?” I said, incredulous.

  “Both of you. They said, ‘Let it go and we’ll let him go.’”

  I didn’t say anything for a second because there was something lodged in my throat that kept all the words bottled in my chest. I had that nightmare feeling again, that moment where you look at things around you and hope that something is going to remind you that you’re dreaming.

  “It’s my fault,” she was saying. “I told him to help you. I told him he had to tell you the things he knew, that he had to protect you from them.”

  “Protect me from who?”

  “He knows,” she said, nodding toward Jake. “He knows who.”

  Jake just shook his head and raised his shoulders. “No idea,” he said when I looked at him.

  “The men who took you, Ridley,” she said, looking at me earnestly. “The people responsible for everything that’s happening to you.”

  “Who, Ruby? Who’s responsible?”

  She started crying again. I had dueling impulses: One was to embrace her, the other to slap her.

  “I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me,” she said as she cried harder. “For the same reason he wouldn’t tell you. He thought it was too dangerous for us to know.”

  Was this girl just a crazy junkie? Did she have any idea what she was talking about? I didn’t know what to say to her.

  “They left this telephone number,” said Ruby finally, sitting up and handing me a piece of paper. She kept suspicious eyes on Jake. It was dark in the room but there was enough light that we could see one another’s faces. The smell of cigarette smoke was like a presence. I pulled the cell phone from my pocket and turned it on. With a beep and a flash of green light, the screen announced that I had three messages. I had no idea how to retrieve them. I looked over at Jake.