Lies Like Poison

by Chelsea Pitcher

  Until they were alone.

  That quality alone time came swiftly, as the cell was closed and locked once more. Belle watched Jack through the limp strands of her hair. She could live without the curling iron and the hair dryer, the kohl liner, and the dresses of satin and lace. But every time that cell closed, a panic was incited in her chest. She wasn’t like a caged animal in those seconds. She was a living, breathing creature in a literal cage, and she thought she’d do anything to get out of it.

  At the present moment, she had something to focus on, and it loosened the tightness in her stomach. As Jack shuffled into the small gray cell, Belle set her book of fairy tales aside, rising to her feet.

  “You look like shit,” she said, and Jack’s head snapped up.

  “Belle.”

  “You don’t get to call me that. You can call me Belladonna, after the flowers you stole from my garden.” She narrowed her eyes. “You must’ve snuck over after I went to bed that night and carried your little bouquet to Evelyn’s house—”

  “I didn’t poison Raven’s stepmother! I offered to get you out of here, remember?” Jack shook her head in exasperation. “I went to the cops and provided your alibi, but the detective wouldn’t listen to me. He said I had a ‘history of telling stories.’ ”

  “Man, he has you pegged. Jack the storyteller. Jack the liar.”

  Jack’s face flushed burgundy, and Belle stepped closer. There were no weapons in this cell. The table and chair in the corner were bolted to the floor, and the bedding would’ve made a pathetic noose. That threadbare fabric could disintegrate in an instant. The charcoal-gray blankets already looked like dust. No, Belle would have to use her words to slice Jack open and leave her gutted.

  “When you offered to be my alibi, I had this intense rush of relief and… shame for how I treated you over the past few years. But then—” Belle huffed, wagging her finger in the air. “Then I realized you weren’t providing an alibi for me. You were providing one for yourself.”

  “I was home that night,” Jack insisted, striding past Belle. She sat down on the bottom bunk, curling into herself. “My brothers can account for me.”

  “Your brothers would lie for you in an instant.” Belle stepped up close. “And before you bring up your mom, I need you to remember that I know you very well. I know you better than Raven. I know you better than that detective who thinks you’re some sweet little girl who got caught up in someone else’s darkness. You’re the one with the darkness in you, Jack. You lie and you steal, and you never care who you hurt.”

  “I don’t—”

  “I saw you,” Belle snapped, plucking the book of fairy tales from the bed. She flipped through the old, yellowed pages, landing on an image of crows descending on Cinderella’s stepsister. “I went to see Raven the night before he left for boarding school. I saw you wrap your fingers around his shirt and pull him closer. I saw you kiss him, and it hurt so badly, I wanted to summon the crows and laugh as they clawed at your skin.” Belle flipped to another chapter, where a young, beautiful girl pushed a crone off a cliff. “I wanted to kill Raven’s stepmother for putting him in danger. But you know what I realized, sitting alone in my library after Raven left town?”

  “What?” Jack swallowed, visibly steeling herself against the daggers in Belle’s voice.

  “I thought I had to punish you for snatching Raven out from under me. I thought I had to poison Evelyn to keep him alive.” Belle trailed her finger along the spine of the book, touching the names printed there. “It’s what they wanted me to think.”

  “Who?”

  Belle strode over to the desk in the corner. After opening a drawer, she pulled out a crumpled piece of paper where she’d been keeping a tally of every storyteller who’d given her ideas as a child. She could be a princess, waiting patiently for a prince to save her. Or she could be a witch, wicked and powerful and wild.

  She returned to Jack, smoothing out the piece of paper before handing it over. “Notice anything?” she asked, pointing to the list of storytellers she’d loved so much. “What do they all have in common?”

  “They’re old dead guys?” Jack said, brow wrinkling at the list.

  “Take out dead.”

  “They’re old guys?”

  “Take out old.”

  “Belle.” Jack looked up, shaking her head. “What are you—”

  “They taught us to hate each other over beauty. To kill each other over boys. They taught us to cut off pieces of our bodies in order to make ourselves smaller—”

  “You’re blaming fairy tales for what we almost did? We almost killed a person, and we knew exactly what we were doing. I did.”

  “And you called it off at the last minute because you’re the knight. I’m the witch. And Raven’s the bright, shining prince that all of us were willing to kill for, if it meant saving him from someone truly evil. But you know what’s funny, Jack?” Belle sat on the bunk, her heart racing so fast, it was hard to push out the words. “I grew up with a man who hammered nails into my windows and locked my door from the outside. You grew up with a woman who told you, over and over again, that you were nothing. Garbage. Shit. We could’ve done any number of things to get away from them—”

  “We learned how to creep down ladders and climb up vines. And you found that skeleton key at a thrift shop when we were fourteen, which made it easier to get out of your room.”

  Belle snorted. “We learned how to hide. To sneak. To lie. But we never fought for ourselves. We only fought for Raven.”

  “Raven was our family,” Jack managed, crumpling the paper. “And sometimes it’s easier to fight for other people than to fight for ourselves.”

  “Like with your brothers,” Belle said calmly. Casually.

  Jack’s ears reddened, her gaze dropping to her hands. “What are you talking about? My brothers don’t have anything to do with this.”

  “I thought so too, at first. When Lily came to visit me here and said you were sneaking around, burning Raven’s clothes in a fireplace, I thought there had to be a logical explanation. You couldn’t have killed his stepmother and framed me for it, because you were the one who called off the murder. You didn’t have a violent bone in your body.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You do.” Belle’s smile cut across her face, sharp as a scimitar and equally deadly. “I just had to figure out the connection between everything. You called off the murder so suddenly, just days after your mom’s boyfriend fell down the stairs. He swore somebody tripped him. He refused to come back to your house after that,” Belle added, and it didn’t escape her attention that Jack’s breathing had gone shallow.

  “I didn’t trip him,” Jack whispered. “I couldn’t have tripped him, because he fell down the attic stairs, and I was in my bedroom sleeping when it happened. My mom came out of her room first, and I came out after her. It would’ve been impossible—”

  “Yeah, I remember what you told the police,” Belle broke in. “You recited it to me and Raven like you were quoting from a script. But I have a theory about what happened that night, just like I have a theory about what happened the night Evelyn was murdered. If you don’t start telling the truth, I’m going to take both theories to the police.”

  Jack’s eyes were on the ground. She was sinking into her ratty gray sweats, as if she might disappear entirely. But there was no escaping this facility, just like there was no escaping what she’d done. “What’s your theory about the other night?”

  Belle leaned in as a guard passed their cell, briefly glancing inside. A moment later, she said, “You’ve been in love with Raven for a very long time. You thought you loved him enough to kill for him, but then your mom’s boyfriend fell down the stairs. He claimed someone tripped him, and if the police found a petal of poppy in Evelyn’s tea a few days later, they might suspect you’d gone all vigilante on the adults in town. So you found a way to protect Raven without risking arrest, and you found a way to feel close to him, even when he was g
one.” Here, she flicked her gaze to Jack’s clothes, and even though they weren’t the familiar T-shirts and jeans Jack had been sporting for the past three years, Jack clearly caught Belle’s meaning. “Did you think I wouldn’t figure out that you were wearing his clothes to school? I went shopping with him for half those clothes. Peeled some of them off him, too.”

  Jack flinched at that. Her entire body seized up, and in that moment, Belle knew that she really did love Raven. Completely. Desperately. But desperation led to ugly things when little girls were raised on fairy tales, and Jack was not the hero in this scenario.

  She was the villain.

  “Then you heard Raven was coming home, and you realized you had a choice to make.” Belle paused for a beat, then two. “You could let Evelyn torture him again, and you could let me try to steal him back, or… you could get rid of both of us in one fell swoop.”

  Jack’s face was pale as marble, her breathing so quiet, it didn’t make a sound. She sat still as a statue, as if waiting to be shattered by a hammer.

  Belle smiled at the thought. “There’s just one thing I don’t understand,” she admitted. “Sneaking into my garden would’ve been easy, and getting Evelyn to drink poisonous tea was probably a piece of cake. Catching that man creeping up to your attic, though… how did you do it? How did you make it back to your bedroom by the time he’d fallen down those stairs?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “You’re lying. You’ve always been the liar, Jack. But I want to understand why you did what you did. Was he messing with your brothers? It’s the only explanation, isn’t it? You couldn’t have been defending yourself. We’ve already established that we don’t do that. We only rescue boys.”

  “Stop.” Jack’s head was bowed, her body trembling. Tears had gathered in her lashes. But she didn’t lift her hands from the blankets, where they were digging into the fabric so tightly, her knuckles had gone completely white. “Please don’t tell anyone about this. They wouldn’t understand. You don’t understand.”

  “Then help me understand! Help me see how all of this ties together. The death of Lily’s mother. The police dragging me away from my house in the middle of the night. It all starts with you and the night that man went crashing down your attic stairs. You broke his bones.”

  Jack’s head snapped up, and she wasn’t crying anymore. Her grip on the blankets had loosened. When she opened her mouth to speak, there was a curious light in her eyes. “I wanted to break his neck.”

  16

  Jack and the Giant

  The first time Jack encountered a giant, she was seven years old. The man towered over her at six foot four. Jack saw his big, meaty fists and thought of glass breaking and bones cracking. She knew what would happen, even before he threw a punch.

  He didn’t hit anything at first. Most monsters put on a beautiful mask in order to get into your house. They smiled politely and made you dinner, ruffling your little brother’s hair. Flynn was four at the time, and Conner and Dylan hadn’t been born yet, so Jack only had two people to take care of.

  Flynn and her mother.

  It was funny, though. The man seemed perfectly happy when it was just him and Jack’s mom. He only became agitated when reminded that his bright-eyed, giggling girlfriend had children. When the first plate was hurled against the wall, and shattered into pieces, Jack simply took her brother’s hand and removed him from the situation. She invented a game she would later play with Raven, scouring the neighborhood for swords and magical artifacts that might help them take down a giant. And while they never succeeded in defeating him, they kept themselves out of danger, and it was enough.

  For a while.

  Then came a man with lazy, drooping eyelids that could barely stay open. When he was around, Jack’s mother appeared to be in a permanent state of lethargy, draping her body across the couch or hunching over in a kitchen chair. Jack spent those months making sure her brother ate, and when the new baby came along, she learned how to change diapers and heat formula, and life went on.

  One man left and another arrived. Sometimes a wall would get punched, and sometimes Jack’s mother would disappear for several nights on end, leaving Jack to care for yet another screaming baby, but none of her little brothers were bruised or broken.

  She kept them safe.

  Then a man arrived in a forest-green baseball cap with the lying smile of a fox. He slunk through the house on gangly limbs, tall and sinewy but not bulky. There was something incongruous about him. He didn’t seem particularly insidious, and yet Conner and Dylan started flinching in his presence. Little patterns of bruises appeared on their wrists, as if they were being grabbed when no one was watching. But the bruises faded within a couple of days, and the boys never admitted that anything was happening.

  Jack couldn’t prove it.

  One night, when she was fourteen years old, she heard the creak of footsteps outside her bedroom. Her mother’s footsteps were very recognizable, either shuffling or thudding, depending on the amount of alcohol she’d ingested. These footsteps were slippery, as if someone were sliding across the floor in stockinged feet. They were soft as a whisper. Quiet as deception. They paused outside Jack’s door, and she tensed, pulling the blankets up to her neck as if that might protect her. All her childhood instincts kicked in at that moment. She made sure her feet were tucked under the covers. Investigated the movement of the shadows, seeking strangeness. She was almost certain she could hear the doorknob twisting, but within a couple of seconds, the footsteps had moved on, and she relaxed. Closed her eyes. And then…

  A soft creak on the stairs. The squat, ramshackle house boasted only one story, but there was a twisting staircase that led to the attic. The place where her brothers slept. Jack disentangled from her blankets. She stood a little shakily, heart racing and mind spinning and not entirely sure what to think. She had a terrible feeling blooming in the pit of her stomach, but her brain wouldn’t allow her to consider the possibilities of what might unfold in that attic.

  There was a wall inside her, protecting her from reality.

  But her brothers weren’t being protected. The three of them were huddled together in one bed, and if someone crept up to them while they were sleeping, they wouldn’t be able to defend themselves. They might not even know they needed to until they were already trapped. Some giants stomped around, their heavy footfalls warning of their arrival. But others were surprisingly fleet of foot, and by the time you realized they were towering over you, you had nowhere to go.

  Jack tiptoed to her door, as quietly as the giant himself. She twisted the knob, ever so gently. Poked her head outside. No one was in the hallway, and after checking that her mother’s door was completely shut, she made her way down the hall, through the living room, and toward the attic stairs.

  He’d made a decent amount of progress in that time. Jack had expected to catch him halfway up the staircase, but he’d already made it to the boys’ door. With a twist of the knob, it groaned open. He slipped inside. A minute later, he appeared in the doorway again, and Conner was with him. Jack’s youngest brother was squirming to get out of the man’s grip, but his wrist was clasped as if in a vise. The man loomed over him. Pulled Conner close and hissed about wasteful little boys who didn’t finish their dinner. Jack narrowed her eyes, thinking back to earlier that evening. Conner had refused to finish the meat loaf the man had brought him from the diner where he worked because it had mold on the corner.

  “I’m doing everything I can to provide for this family,” the man snarled, while Conner cowered beneath him. “Your mother would starve without me taking care of her. Is that what you want?”

  Conner shook his head, tears streaming down his cheeks. He was wearing his superhero pajamas. It broke Jack’s heart to look at him, so little and so terrified. He jerked away from the man for the briefest instant, backing against the window near the top of the stairs.

  That was when Jack noticed the vine. One year earlier, Raven had helped her plan
t that small packet of beans, and now that spring had come again, the vine was climbing up the side of the house. It peeked through the window where Conner was cowering. When the man’s temper calmed, and he ushered Conner back through the doorway to the attic, Jack didn’t pause to think. She simply crept up the attic stairs, opened the window farther, and pulled that long, twisting vine into the house. She guided it across the third stair from the top, tying the end to the banister, but not too tight. Then she rapped her knuckles against the boys’ bedroom door. The man barked at Conner to stay inside the room, and a moment later, Jack heard the whisper of soft, slippery footsteps approaching. She raced down the stairs, out the side door, and into the yard. The door had just closed behind her when she heard the scream.

  There came a single thud, followed by tumbling. Groans. An instant later, she heard the sharp cracking of a bone. It was remarkably loud, considering all sound was making its way to her through the window, and when the man started to cry, she crept up to the side of the house, tugging at the vine.

  Little by little she gathered it in her hands, and when she was certain she’d pulled the last of it from the attic stairway, she hurried around the house, entering her bedroom through the window. Then she waited. It didn’t take long for her mother to wake, and as soon as Ms. McClain had staggered down the hallway, Jack opened her bedroom door. She needed her mother to hear her coming out, so that no one would figure out what she’d done.

  And no one did. Not when the police arrived and took everyone’s statement. Not when they studied the stairs for signs of foul play. The man insisted that he’d been tripped, but without anything to back up his claim, the police had no reason to believe him.