Lies Like Poison
Page 12
“So he went to see Evelyn, hoping to get help.”
Raven nodded, but there was a knot between his brows. He could feel it, and the headache forming behind it. “My mom threatened to leave my dad if he didn’t get help. And it sounds like Evelyn did help him, at first. But toward the end of his sessions, Evelyn started crossing out my mom’s name in his file.”
Jack snorted, head tilting to the side. “She blacked it out? Like a government document?”
“She attacked it,” he said, holding up one of the copied pages. In three separate places, his mother’s name had been slashed to oblivion. “She must’ve used scissors, or maybe a letter opener. I wish I could’ve seen the original file. Did you notice anything when you were making copies?”
Jack shook her head. “The pages went through the copier so fast.” She frowned, peering at the places where Arianna had been sliced through with thin, sharp lines. “Why would Evelyn do this?”
“Maybe she’d fallen for my dad at that point. Maybe she wanted him to divorce—” He broke off at the sound of clattering on the other side of the door. “Sounds like the boys are dueling with fire pokers again.”
“I’m on it.” Jack rose from the bed. She was only gone a couple of minutes, and when she returned, the smell of roast marshmallows told Raven that the boys were making s’mores. He’d taught them that, one late October evening when their mother had promised to attend Connor and Dylan’s school play and had failed to make an appearance. Again. By the end of the night, their faces were stained with chocolate instead of tears and their sobs had given way to shrieks of laughter.
Raven’s heart hurt when he thought about it. His hands shook at the thought of his father seeing someone behind his mother’s back. But none of that compared to how he felt when the text message popped up on his phone, containing a video of Jack burning clothes in her fireplace.
The file was accompanied by a threat. As Jack strode back into the room, Raven beckoned to her, all the blood in his body rushing to his heart. Making it hammer. Stealing his breath. They read the message together, hunched over on the bed: Burn the file or the police will find out that Jack burned your clothes last night.
14
I Will Not Lose You Again
Jack stared at the message for several seconds. She closed her eyes. She opened them again. The words started to blur, but they didn’t rearrange themselves, and the accompanying video kept playing over and over on repeat. She could see herself feeding Raven’s T-shirts to the fire. His jackets. His jeans. Even worse, she could feel his body tensing beside her with each passing second.
She wanted to bolt from the room and never return.
Carefully, with fingers that wouldn’t stop shaking, she guided the phone out of his hand and hit delete. The message vanished but the damage had been done. “Raven, I can explain.”
“You stole my clothes?”
A beat, during which she swallowed, but the pain in her throat didn’t go away. “I only meant to borrow them. Actually, I didn’t even mean—”
“Jack.”
“I just missed you, so I snuck through your window one night, like I had a million times when you lived at home, and I walked around your room. Your drawers were open. I saw one of your T-shirts, so I picked it up and…” She was practically crying. She wasn’t crying, because she didn’t want him to pity her on top of hating her. She took slow, steady breaths, swiping at her eyelashes as the tears started to form. “I just wanted to feel close to you, at first.”
His head swiveled toward her, his brown eyes narrowed. The room had grown heavy with shadows, making it difficult to read the expression on his face. It was almost as if he wore no expression at all. “You did it to feel close to me,” he repeated, his voice emotionless.
Jack nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
“At first,” he went on, and all his missing emotions seemed to rush into her. She felt the beating of two hearts. The rush of too much blood in her ears. She shouldn’t have been so honest with him, but she couldn’t take back the words now. He’d already heard them.
And so, like she had with the changing of her name, she tried to brush it off like a casual thing. “You know how it is for me at home. My mom hands me down these ridiculous outfits. Sequined tops and miniskirts. I mean…” Jack huffed, shaking her head. All of this was a lighthearted conversation. She didn’t want to usher him out of the house, lock the front door, and never open it again.
Stay protected. Stay safe.
“I took the clothes to feel close to you, but once I realized how comfortable they were, I just kept wearing them. You have very nice clothes, Raven.” She poked his arm teasingly, as if to remind him that not everyone had cleanly pressed suits and crisp, tailored shirts. Suspenders and belts. Silk ties and pocket squares. “I mostly wore your jeans and T-shirts, because I knew Belle would figure it out if I wore some of your nicer things, but I felt really at home in your clothes.”
“Why did you burn them?” Raven asked after a minute. His voice was softer now, not so much neutral as gentle, and she told herself it was a sign that she should keep the rest to herself. He understood things, so far. There was no reason to push it.
“Your stepmother was murdered,” Jack explained. “And Belle called me from the police station, freaked out and crying, so I told her I’d provide an alibi—”
“Wait, what?” His head dipped down as if to understand her better. “I don’t know what I’m having a harder time believing: that Belle was crying or that you’d falsify an alibi. You could’ve ended up in a cell.”
“I know! That’s exactly what the detective said when I claimed I’d spent the night at Belle’s. He told me I’d get charged with providing false testimony, or conspiracy to commit murder, and I knew I couldn’t figure out the truth if I was locked up, so I bolted out of the station and went to talk to Lily. She told me the police were going through people’s things, so I figured it was only a matter of time—”
“Before they found my clothes and thought you had something to do with the murder.”
“Exactly.” Jack nodded, throat tightening again.
“But you didn’t,” Raven said. He sounded so sure. “And now that the clothes are gone, there’s nothing linking you to the murder except that video.” He reached across the bed, gathering up Andrew’s file. “All we have to do is burn this, and the video won’t get sent to the police. Then I’ll sneak into Lily’s bedroom while she’s sleeping and delete it from her phone.”
“I can’t believe she followed me home. She said she was waiting for your dad to check her out of the facility, which was obviously a lie.” Jack strode to her window, peering through the curtains. The glare of the sunset was bright, staining the sky scarlet and gold, and Jack’s eyes fluttered against the brightness. She searched for movement in the yard. For eyes glistening back at her. When she found nothing, she closed the curtains tightly, turning back to Raven. “The facility must’ve released her into Andrew Kane’s care after her mom died.”
“So Andrew is her father?”
“Definitely,” Jack said without missing a beat. “The file proves it.”
Raven’s gaze dropped to the file in his hand. “He talked about Lily during his sessions?”
“He did more than talk about Lily. He talked about Evelyn. He was clearly in love with her, and he wanted the three of them to be a family. He said he’d do anything to get Lily back in his life. Anything to prove he could take care of his daughter.”
“Then our theory makes sense. He could’ve poisoned Evelyn to get full custody of Lily.”
Jack returned to the bed, sitting beside Raven. “Lily’s dad has an alibi. She swears he spent the whole night at the facility.” Then again, Lily had claimed she’d hidden the Recipe for the Perfect Murder in a tree hollow, and the recipe had turned up in the kitchen. “What if Lily’s lying to protect—”
Raven’s phone chimed, cutting Jack off. They read the second message together: You have ten m
inutes to burn the file. Send me a video to prove it’s been destroyed, or my video goes straight to the police.
Jack lifted her gaze, peering at her oldest friend. He was resting his head in one hand, his fingers tangled in his curls, and his face didn’t look expressionless anymore. His eyes were bright. His lips were set in a firm line. She knew what he was going to say before he said it.
“We’re burning this.” He pushed off the bed, tucking Andrew Kane’s file under his arm. “If Lily was lying about her father’s alibi, somebody at the facility will be able to tell us the truth. But if the police see you burning my clothes, I could lose you.”
“The video alone doesn’t prove I’m a killer,” Jack insisted, following him across the room. “If we explain what happened the night before you left for boarding school—”
“The kiss?”
She nodded, finally admitting it to herself. Part of her had truly believed the kiss had been a fantasy. Something she’d conjured out of loneliness and desperation. “We can tell them I was some lovesick kid, missing you and wanting to feel close to you again.”
“Lovesick?” Raven’s lips curved up on the ends, and it seared her from the inside out. She felt pleasure and pain. Fear and desire.
“You know what I mean,” she said, wanting to get the file away from him. “Puppy love. A teenage crush. Adolescent girls are always acting dramatic on TV, and if they think I’m—”
“This isn’t a negotiation. You could go to jail while Evelyn’s killer walks free.” Raven took her face in his hands. If she wanted to, she could yank the file from under his arm and bolt out of the room. Race down to the station. Hand over their evidence. But in that moment, with his fingers brushing against her skin, she was frozen. He lowered his forehead to hers, and she told herself not to get her hopes up. He might not want to kiss her again. He might not want to lose himself in the feel of her, the softness of her breath, the taste of her lips.
But maybe he did. Jack tilted her head up and Raven tilted his head down, her stomach tightening as his lips neared hers. She needed him. She wanted him, and she was struck with the all-consuming power of letting yourself want someone you hadn’t believed you could have. All the lies she’d told herself tumbled over her, lies about just wanting to be friends. Of living as brothers in the orchard. Kindred spirits, but nothing more. When he whispered, “Jack,” like an incantation that could make impossible things real, she slid one arm around him, pressing her hand into the small of his back.
Drawing him near.
“Yes, Raven?” she murmured, brushing her lips across his jaw. It was the lightest touch and it was electric. The crackle of energy before the downpour.
“I lost you for three years,” he whispered into her mouth. His breath was life giving. Life affirming. “I will not lose you again.”
He leaned in. Grazed his lips across hers, so softly. And then he left. One second he was cradling her face, and then his hand slid away, twisting open the door. Jack was too shaken to stop him. Too frozen in that moment and heavy with wanting. Lovesick. Love starved. When she finally realized where he was going, her legs stumbled after him, but it was too late. He’d gotten too far away. She arrived in the living room to find their evidence blackening in the flames. Off to the left, she could hear the boys laughing in the kitchen.
But she had no room for laughter in her shaking frame.
“Why?” she demanded, though he’d already told her, hadn’t he? She just refused to believe him. This house was shit. Their yard was shit. And she was just the same—that’s what her mother had told her, over and over until she’d believed it.
Until she’d felt it in her bones.
Now Raven was pulling out his phone to record the destruction of the file. “I won’t let the police lock you up when you haven’t done anything. You would never hurt anyone.”
Jack brushed past him, reaching for the shovel that swung beside the fire poker. She desperately tried to fish the burning pages out of the flames. “We’ll take pictures of the file,” she stammered, stomping on the charred, curling pages. “We’ll keep them as insurance.”
“Jack, stop. I need to send this video to Lily, and right now you’re in the frame.”
“I’m not letting you send that video!” Jack dug another pile of pages out of the fire. She had no idea what order the pages were in now, or if any of them were readable, but she refused to give up on the only evidence they’d uncovered. The only real lead they had. She took picture after picture, and twenty minutes later, she was sitting on the floor, scanning through the photos.
Everything looked charred and wrinkled. She could barely make out a word.
“The file is destroyed,” Raven said, crouching beside her. He scooped up the half-burned pages, dumping them back into the fireplace. “I’ll send Lily a video to prove it, and then we can plan our next—”
Raven broke off at the sound of pounding on the front door. Jack’s heart skittered into her throat. She told herself it was her mother, drunk and incapable of dredging her keys from the recesses of her purse. It had to be her mother. It couldn’t be the police.
Jack took slow, unsteady breaths as Raven strode to the window, parting the heavy green curtains. His phone chimed. He pulled it out of his pocket, reading the message aloud. “ ‘I warned you,’ ” he whispered as Jack caught a glimpse of flashing lights in the driveway.
“We took too long to send the video. We have to burn the other files before the police find them.”
“You have to run,” Raven countered, bolting back to Jack’s bedroom. He returned seconds later, and before Jack could utter a word, he’d hurled all of their stolen files into the flames.
“Raven—”
“Go, now,” he said as her brothers hurried in from the kitchen. Everyone Jack loved was in this room. How could she leave them? But the second Flynn saw police lights in the driveway, he put himself in front of the other boys. Raven took Conner’s hand. Diego took Dylan’s.
Jack backed away from the door, wondering if she should sneak out the back of the house or go through her bedroom window. If she went out the window, she’d have to scale her neighbor’s fence. It would be difficult. Painful. But the police might be waiting for her in the backyard. Jack veered right, pushing into her bedroom, her heart beating as loudly as her steps. Each beat sent a jolt of panic through her. She couldn’t breathe. Her hands shook as she reached for the window. It took a couple of tries to wrench it open, and then she was slipping outside at the exact perfect moment. The last of the light had bled from the sky, leaving the world not black but absent of color. No one could find her in the moment the sun dipped below the horizon, because no one could see anything in that moment, and soon she’d be climbing over the neighbor’s fence. She’d be racing to freedom. She’d be—
A hand gripped the back of her jacket, jerking her to the ground. She fell fast. She fell hard. Her cheek slammed into a rock, and pain ricocheted through her, bringing tears to her eyes. She should’ve kissed Raven when she had the chance. She should’ve believed in his affection for her, for once, instead of doubting that anyone could really love her if they knew who she was.
Now she might never have the chance to tell him. Feel his arms wrap around her. She focused on this image as the officer jerked her to her feet. Handcuffs slid around her wrists easily, as if they’d been made for her, and she heard her mother’s voice again.
Hadn’t this been inevitable? The man was treating her like garbage, and it felt like a prophecy fulfilled. As if this were her destiny, and she was far from being the hero of her own story. The knight. The man dragged her toward the front of the house, where Raven was arguing with two uniformed men. Jack wanted to bolt over there, because the officers in this town weren’t known for serving and protecting boys who looked like him, but as soon as she arrived on the scene, all eyes were on her.
When a man strode over to her, she took a resigned breath. “Detective,” she managed through a swollen lip.
“You can’t arrest me for burning clothes in a fire. That isn’t illegal.”
“You’re right.” The detective nodded. “But my boys are going over that fire with a fine-tooth comb, and they’ve already found a scrap of paper with Evelyn’s letterhead on it. Care to explain?”
“I didn’t—it isn’t—”
“Please tell me you didn’t break into Evelyn’s office. We swept the place this morning, and there was a fresh set of fingerprints on the filing cabinet. Once I book you down at the station, we’ll be able to figure out if those prints are a match.”
Jack’s eyelids fluttered closed, the muscles in her arms starting to cramp up. She wanted to stretch so badly. To scream. To run. “I want to talk to an attorney,” she said, as Medina led her toward a car with blinking lights. “I can explain everything, but you aren’t listening to me.”
“Every time I listen to you, I catch you telling lies.” He opened the door to the police car, guiding her inside. “Three years ago, you came to me with a story about Raven’s wicked stepmother. Now she’s dead. If I find out you had anything to do with what happened to her, I won’t be arresting you for destroying evidence. I’ll be arresting you for murder.”
15
Kill Each Other Over Boys
When Jack arrived at the detention center, Belle was curled up in her cell, reading a book. There was no library within these gray, peeling walls, but donations arrived sporadically, and Belle had laid claim to an old book of fairy tales, not unlike the ones she had at home.
It gave her a small measure of peace.
But when she saw the familiar face peering through the bars, that peace crumbled like a castle long battered by the winds. The cell clanked open, and Jack was nudged inside, dressed in a nondescript gray sweatshirt and matching pants. The standard uniform in this glorified prison for minors. The guard provided a clipped introduction, which Belle did not find necessary, considering her history with Jack. But she thought it might be wise to play it cool and pretend the two were strangers.