Lies Like Poison

by Chelsea Pitcher

  The file was missing.

  Who could’ve taken it? she wondered, taking short, sharp breaths. Jack had gone home after sneaking into Evelyn’s office, and Raven had no reason to go snooping through Lily’s bedside table. Maybe Stefan had found it by accident. Maybe he’d stopped by to bring her some towels or washcloths or something, and he’d opened that drawer without thinking.

  Maybe she could get the file back.

  Lily hurried out of her bedroom. She could hear her stepdad shuffling around in the living room below, but if she was very quiet, she could sneak up to the third floor without him knowing. Her feet were silent on the hardwood. She took soft, careful steps on the stairs. Soon, she’d reached the third-floor landing, and then she was passing Raven’s door.

  The master bedroom loomed straight ahead. Lily made a beeline for it, her heart thumping. If Stefan had discovered her father’s file, he could use it to make her dad look guilty. Even if her dad wasn’t guilty. Lily knew for a fact that her father had not delivered the poisonous bouquet to Evelyn two nights earlier. And now that she only had one remaining parent, she had to protect him.

  She slipped through Stefan’s door.

  The room was in disarray, which never would’ve happened while her mother was alive. Lily checked under the mattress, beneath the four-poster bed, and in Stefan’s closet. She found no hint of the file. She started to worry that Stefan had hidden it in his study, and that was far too close to the living room for comfort.

  He’d catch her if she tried to sneak in there.

  Cursing under her breath, she opened the drawer to Stefan’s bedside table, keeping her gaze far from the table on the other side of the bed. Her mother’s table. Lily felt a twinge in her gut as she realized she’d been avoiding Evelyn’s half of the room. She didn’t want to see her mother’s dresses hanging in the closet. Didn’t want to feel the familiar satin or silk. When Lily had been young, she’d loved the cool feeling of the fabric against her cheek when she’d hugged her mother close.

  They’d loved each other once.

  But everything had changed once Evelyn had started bringing men into their apartment, and Lily didn’t want to think about what had happened next. The manipulation. The lies. She shuffled through Stefan’s drawer haphazardly, brushing aside a bottle of sleeping pills and a miniature tape recorder, which was empty. Everyone in the house knew that Stefan had trouble sleeping. He probably popped a couple of those pills and then listened to a tape of whale songs before drifting off to dreamland.

  Lily closed the drawer, her panic rising. Her grief. Standing in her mother’s room was getting to be too much for her, even with their complicated history. Her chest tightened with each breath. Tears stung behind her eyes. And she didn’t know that Stefan had stolen the file.

  He’d simply been the most logical suspect.

  Sucking in little gulps of air, Lily barreled out of the room. Raven’s bedroom was only a few feet away, and it was possible that he’d gone searching through her room. Belle was Raven’s ex-girlfriend. If he was desperate to free her from juvenile detention, he’d be looking for another suspect.

  Lily snuck into his bedroom. His satin sheets were tangled up, as if he’d slept fitfully. His soft black carpet caressed the soles of her feet as she crossed his room. Dejectedly, Lily crouched beside his bed, not really expecting to find anything beneath it. She found a pair of boxers and a wrinkled shirt. She shifted through a duffel bag beside the window. No file hidden there. She was almost crying by the time she noticed the little green thread waving at her from the window frame, the exact color of Jack’s olive-green coat.

  Heat flashed in Lily’s chest. Her face warmed as she realized that Jack had only pretended to go home after searching Evelyn’s office. Jack had followed her back here. Jack had snuck in through Raven’s window, and she’d probably climbed down the side of the house after her visit, passing Lily’s bedroom on the way.

  Lily’s hands shook with rage. She almost dropped her phone as she pulled it out of her purse, and it took several tries to pull up the video she’d recorded the previous night. The one she’d taken outside Jack’s window. The yard had been dark, but the flames were bright inside the house. It was obvious that Jack was burning clothes. Maybe they wouldn’t be identified as Raven’s, but either way, a woman had been murdered, and one night later, Jack fed potential evidence to the flames.

  It would be enough to make her a suspect. Especially since the name Poppy showed up on the Recipe for the Perfect Murder. It took less than a minute to attach the video to a text. Thirty seconds later, Lily had typed out a message. All that remained was to enter a number into the contact field, but she didn’t send the video to Jack, or to the Rose Hollow Police Department.

  She sent it to Raven.

  13

  The Least Sinister Explanation

  Raven couldn’t stop thinking about the man’s voice. He’d choked out I’m so sorry and Raven’s entire body had gone still. Then the shaking had started, and he might’ve fallen down right then and there if Lily hadn’t appeared around the side of the house, her eyes blazing and her fingers curled around gardening shears.

  The absurdity had saved him.

  Things were different now. He was sitting in the quiet of Jack’s bedroom, and everything was painfully familiar. The jade walls. The Halloween costumes hanging in the closet, one from fifth grade, when Jack had dressed as Robin Hood, and another from eighth, when she’d gone as Link from The Legend of Zelda. Raven lay down on the green patchwork comforter. He felt the bed shift as Jack sat beside him, placing a hand on his arm. Suddenly his heart was racing and it had nothing to do with the man Lily had been visiting.

  Raven looked up. “What is it?” he asked, acutely aware of the silence around them. When they’d arrived at the house, Jack’s brothers had been heading to a nearby park, and her mother was nowhere to be found. No one could interrupt them. But the second their eyes met, Jack pulled her hand away from his arm, sending sparks shooting across his skin. He’d never felt about anyone the way he felt about Jack. He’d never wanted someone so completely. Why couldn’t he tell her that?

  “There’s something you should know,” Jack began, speaking to the wall instead of to him. “I did something last night, and you aren’t going to like it.”

  He pushed onto his elbows, his eyes narrowing. “Why don’t you let me decide that?” She always did this. Always assumed there were parts of herself that he would reject, or actions he wouldn’t agree with. But Jack was the most noble person he’d ever met, and he didn’t think anything about her would surprise him.

  Still, his pulse picked up as she unzipped her forest-green backpack and pulled out a file. The name Andrew Kane was written across the tab. “Before I came over to your house last night, I broke into your stepmother’s office with Lily.”

  “You what?”

  “Lily had this theory, and I thought it was smart. If Belle didn’t kill your stepmother, and none of us did either, who does that leave? Evelyn spent her evenings with your dad and her mornings and afternoons at work. So while Lily went through her mother’s emails, looking for anything suspicious, I went through her files.”

  “That’s incredibly illegal, Jack.”

  “I know.” She nodded, color darkening her cheeks. “And unethical. And dangerous. And—”

  “Did you find anything?”

  Her head snapped up, a smile tugging at her lips. Jack’s smile was unabashed, wide and wild, and the first time Raven had seen it, he’d thought he could spend his whole life making her face light up like that. He’d thought he’d never tire of it. Now, almost ten years later, even a hint of that smile made his chest flutter and his stomach dip.

  “We copied a bunch of files,” Jack went on, running her fingers over the muted yellow folder in her lap. “Evelyn spent all day talking to people in unhappy marriages. If one of them fell for her and couldn’t have her, maybe—”

  “They killed her?”

  Jack
nodded.

  “With belladonna from our friend’s garden?”

  “I know!” Jack threw up her hands, almost knocking the file from her lap. “I can’t figure out how everything ties together, but if you’re certain Belle’s innocent—”

  “I am,” he said, without missing a beat. “Belle spent half of middle school threatening people with the flowers in her garden. There’s no way she’d be stupid enough to kill someone that way. This is a setup. Someone must’ve heard her talking about those flowers and decided to frame her.”

  Jack cocked her head. “I guess that’s possible. But Belle stopped talking about her garden once we got to high school. She said she needed time away from me, after what we’d almost done, but I still had classes with her. We saw each other at lunch. She never mentioned those flowers. I didn’t either, except…” Jack’s eyes went wide, her hands slapping over her mouth. “Oh my God, Raven. It was me.”

  “What was you?”

  “I mentioned Belle’s flowers in a letter to you. I started walking by her house after school, hoping she’d see me, and… I don’t know. Call out to me. Tell me she wanted me in her life. That never happened, but one afternoon I saw her sitting in her garden, and I wrote to you about it that night. I told you she loved those flowers more than she loved me.”

  “That isn’t true,” Raven said, but his heart was thundering. His mouth was dry. “And if someone stole our letters, they did it years ago. It makes no sense that they’d wait until now to pick those flowers. None of this adds up.”

  “Not yet.” Jack looked stricken, opening the file on her lap. “But while I was copying files from Evelyn’s office, Lily stole this file from the cabinet. I never would’ve known if I hadn’t seen her reading it in her bedroom while I was climbing down the side of your house this morning.” She huffed, shaking her head. “Say what you will about my penchant for breaking and entering. It does have its advantages.”

  Raven tilted his chin up, smiling softly at her. The sun was pouring through the window, warming up the room. Warming up the bed. Cautiously, he slid his hand across the comforter, nearing Jack’s. But at the last minute, he lost his nerve and plucked the file from her lap. “Why do you think Lily stole this?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? Andrew Kane has to be her dad. She’s planning on living with him, and if there’s anything incriminating in this file, he might be deemed unfit to be her guardian.” She paused, gaze flicking to the folder. “Well, that’s the least sinister explanation.”

  Raven just looked at her, waiting. He already knew what she was going to say, and after the way he’d felt twenty minutes earlier, standing outside that man’s house, he was ready to believe her. Too ready.

  “Lily said she connected with her dad more than two years ago,” Jack reminded him. “Maybe he tried to get full custody during that time, but Evelyn wouldn’t let him.”

  “So he poisoned her with Belle’s flowers.” Raven nodded slowly, swallowing the bitterness in his throat. “But that doesn’t explain the missing letters. Lily already knew about Belle’s habit of threatening people with her flowers. She could’ve just told her dad about it, and he could’ve framed Belle, since she and Lily hated each other.”

  “Yeah, about that.” Jack bit her lip, not looking at him. “When I went to see Belle at the detention center, Lily was already meeting with her. They didn’t know I was watching them, and they, um. Well, they didn’t seem like enemies.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m still trying to make sense of what I saw. But I don’t think Lily’s dad was the only one connecting with her while she was in that facility. I think she and Belle became friends. And if her dad knew that, I’m not sure he’d frame—”

  “You really think he’d kill Evelyn and then pause to worry about Belle’s feelings? Come on. He’d cover his tracks and never think twice about it. Just like the guy who killed my mom.” Raven’s chest ached at the mention. Even now, four years later, he could hardly think of her without wanting to curl into a ball. Either that or smash his fist into a mirror, fracturing the glass until it matched the wreckage in his heart.

  And Jack knew it. Before he’d even sucked in a breath, she’d taken his face in her hands. “We’re going to figure this out, okay? We have this file, and we’re going to find out exactly what Lily is hiding from the police.” She pulled back, brushing her thumbs beneath his eyelashes. There were no tears lingering there, but it was so like her to check.

  She was always trying to protect him.

  He could sense her hesitation as she pulled a stack of files out of her backpack. When he asked, “Our suspects?” she nodded, flipping through the stack. Slowly, as if it weighed more than all the other files combined, she procured one from the bottom.

  “Did you know your dad was going to see Evelyn before your mom died? It looks like he was one of her clients from—”

  “Give me that.” Raven yanked the file from her hand, flipping through it in a panic. He had that discordant feeling of being in a nightmare, where the walls are closing in on you and the monsters are advancing, but a part of you senses that it isn’t real. If you squeeze your eyes shut tightly enough, and shake your head violently, you can wake yourself up.

  Raven didn’t wake. Not when he turned page after page with a trembling hand, uncovering the secret his father had been keeping from him. He’d been seeing Evelyn for a year. He’d been locked up in that office with her, where no one could see them. Maybe they’d used that time to talk. Maybe they’d used that desk to spread out pictures and jot down revelations about his broken marriage.

  Or maybe not.

  A terrible feeling was unfolding in the pit of Raven’s stomach, and it felt so much more dangerous than fear. It felt like knowing. Suddenly, so many things made sense. His father had become distant in the year leading up to his mother’s death. Fidgety. He could be caught staring off into space halfway through dinner, or sitting in his study in the middle of the night, watching the walls. Raven hadn’t been able to understand it, but then his mother had died in his arms, and his heart hadn’t had room for anything but memories of her. The way her hair tickled his neck when she embraced him. The way her warm brown eyes mirrored his own, and when the light went out of them, his world didn’t simply fade to darkness.

  He sank into it.

  All that year Belle had tried to pull him back into the light, and when she realized she couldn’t, she’d stayed in that dark place for him. They’d lived in his nightmare together. Raven hadn’t even realized it until the night Jack stood over him in a glass coffin, her cheeks flushed at the thought of waking him with a kiss. The moonlight had been filtering through the trees and he’d looked up at her through slits in his eyes, pretending to be asleep but desperately, desperately wanting to wake up.

  Wanting Jack to wake him.

  Now, shaking on the edge of her bed, his father’s file in his lap, he looked up to find her staring at him. There were flecks of gold in her green eyes. Strands of red in her hair. Looking at Jack was like peering through a portal into a world of glittering light and ancient redwoods, a world everyone told you to stop looking for, because you’d never find it. But Raven had.

  He let her take his hands and tell him, “It doesn’t have to mean anything. Your dad probably went to talk about his marriage, because he and your mom were having problems. I bet Evelyn started to care about him during that time, and after your mom died, she must’ve reached out—”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  Jack’s brow furrowed, her lips curving down. “I’m not doing anything. I’m just telling you what probably happened, because I know where your mind is going. It’s going to the worst possible place.”

  “I’m okay, Jack. I promise. I know I spent our last year together scaring the shit out of you and Belle, and I’m so sorry for that. But I’m stronger now. I can handle this.” He scooted away from her the tiniest bit, because she would always try to take care of him if they got too
close. She took care of everyone. Except herself. “Why don’t you go over half the files, and I’ll go over the other half. We’ll see if there’s anything suspicious in them. Anything that could explain what happened the other night. All right?”

  For the next few hours Raven curled up on one side of Jack’s bed, and she curled up on the other. They pored over their individual files. The shadows shifted, growing longer across the room. Jack’s brothers came home, along with Flynn’s new friend Diego, who was probably more than a friend, but Raven wouldn’t make assumptions until Flynn decided to tell him about it. Raven had known Flynn since he was five, and Connor and Dylan since they were born. He loved those boys with a fierceness that made his stomach ache. When smoke drifted into Jack’s bedroom, he suspected they were building a fire on their own.

  “Should we check on them?” he asked, looking up from his father’s file. He’d spent the bulk of his time investigating the other files Jack had copied, but upon finding nothing sinister or mysterious, his attention had returned to his own family’s secrets.

  “I’ll go.” Jack glanced at the file in his hands. “Did you find anything interesting?”

  “Their sessions seemed normal, for the most part. He talked about his job at the hospital. There was this kid who kept coming in with bruises, but no one could prove he was being abused. I guess he was about my age.” Raven took in a breath, blowing it out slowly. “One night the kid came in and he was banged up so badly, he had internal injuries. My dad tried to save him but he couldn’t. After that, he started taking pills to sleep, and when his prescription ended, he stole another bottle from Mom’s pharmacy. He kept stealing them, and that’s why my parents were fighting all the time. Because he wouldn’t stop taking them.”