Lies Like Poison

by Chelsea Pitcher

  Something foreboding.

  Jack was in and out of the bathroom in a couple of minutes. When he heard a voice coming from the first floor, he stopped to listen. Dr. Holloway was downstairs, talking to someone on the phone. That was what Jack believed at first. But when a voice responded, cutting through the silence like a knife slicing through steel, Jack went stock-still, his heart tumbling over itself.

  He knew that voice. He’d heard it ringing across the orchard on evenings when Raven had pulled himself into the trees, trying to block out the sound of his parents fighting. This time, the voice coming from downstairs was anything but angry. It was pleading.

  “Please,” Raven’s mother called out, causing the hairs to rise on Jack’s neck. “I can’t do this without you. I need my baby boy.”

  Jack found himself at the top of the stairs. One step after another led down, down, down to the pitch-black first floor. He made his way through the hall, where new portraits had been hung since he’d last visited the house. New, but old. Over the past three years, all evidence of Arianna Holloway had been shoved into the guest rooms, until no trace of her remained in the common areas. Now her smiling face was back on the walls. If given enough time, red roses might be planted in the garden, replacing the white.

  Then Evelyn would be erased.

  Jack rounded the corner on silent steps, veering toward the living room. He could see a flicker of light coming from inside. Could see the silhouette of a man sitting on the couch, his shoulders hunched over with grief. But this time, Raven’s father was not watching scenes of his family’s breakfast table. This time, Arianna Holloway stood in the center of the Rose Hollow Community Pool, clad in a crimson bathing suit and calling out to her son.

  “Come on, baby,” she cooed, striding toward the lip of the pool. Over on the deck, a toddler with big dark eyes stood, waffling. He dipped in a toe, then scurried backward.

  “Jump into my arms and I’ll carry you,” Arianna promised, holding her arms out to her son. Raven hesitated. He was wearing black swimming trunks and his curls were shorn close to his head. The sight of him, so small and unsure, made Jack’s heart squeeze. Raven sucked in a breath, tightening his hands into little fists.

  Then he leapt into his mother’s arms.

  There was a splash. Arianna shrieked with joy, and Raven shrieked with her, kicking out his legs. She spun him around. Bounced him on her knee. Leaned in and said, “See? It’s always better when you’re with me.”

  Jack froze at the back of the sofa. He kept sucking in short, shallow breaths, telling himself everything was okay. He hadn’t known Raven the year this video had been taken. There was no reason to recognize this scene, but deep down, in the recesses of Jack’s memory, he did.

  “Dr. Holloway,” he choked out, and when Raven’s dad twisted around, he looked like Jack felt. Gutted. Bereft. “I need to ask you about this video.”

  Raven’s father narrowed his eyes. He was wearing the same suit he’d had on when he picked Jack up from the detention center, but he appeared to be shrinking into it. The dark gray fabric was a mess of wrinkles. Deep circles lined his eyes. “Did I wake you? I’m sorry.”

  “No, you didn’t wake me.” Jack sat on the edge of the sofa. Perched on the arm, just so, he could steady his trembling legs without sinking into the fat, white cushions like Raven’s father had. He needed to be able to leap up at any moment. Needed to get back to Raven.

  But first he needed to solve a three-year-old mystery.

  “I know you were seeing Lily’s mom while you were still married. I know she was your therapist,” Jack went on before Raven’s dad could interject. Whether Dr. Holloway had been seeing Evelyn in other ways didn’t feel relevant anymore. Both of his wives were dead. “Lily’s mom was a marriage counselor, and sometimes she asked couples to bring in mementos of a time when they were happy.”

  “I… We shouldn’t be talking about this.” Dr. Holloway paused the video, as if to shield the memory from Jack. To keep it for himself. But it was too late for that, because Evelyn had already discovered this memory, and she’d used it to torture her stepson. To poison his mind.

  “I know this is prying,” Jack said, “but Raven started hearing his mom’s voice in the months before he left for boarding school. You know that, right? The detective talked to you about it?”

  A slow, careful nod. Raven’s dad was being cautious with Jack. Too cautious. “I think you need to let this go. It’s not healthy to fixate on Raven’s delusions.”

  “They weren’t delusions, and Raven’s your son. You should’ve believed him.” A sound from upstairs, like feet hitting the floor. Raven was awake, and Jack couldn’t let him walk in on this conversation. Even now, he was desperate to protect Raven from the ugliness in the world. The ugliness in his family. “Does the detective know about this video? Does he know how Evelyn used it—”

  “The video came from Detective Medina. He cleared out Evelyn’s office this morning, and he thought I’d want the video back.” Dr. Holloway swallowed, his gaze flicking to the woman on the TV screen. Raven’s mother was grinning widely, holding her son in midair. Eyes bright. Hair fanning out around her. “One night, in the dead of summer, it was so hot that Raven couldn’t sleep. I think he was nine or ten. Arianna convinced us both to sneak into the community pool that night, and we swam for hours. She was spontaneous. Nothing like Evelyn,” he added, his jaw tightening. “That woman was like clockwork. She got up at the same time every morning. Took a shower at the same time every night, while she let her tea steep.”

  “She let it steep?” A chill rippled up Jack’s spine. “Did you tell that to the police? The time of death was—”

  “Between eleven and one,” Raven’s dad recited, swaying a little. But he was talking about the time that Evelyn consumed the poison. The belladonna could’ve been stuffed into her teakettle half an hour earlier.

  Before Lily got to Belle’s. The words rang out in Jack’s mind, as loud and garish as the silence had been upstairs. It was still silent upstairs, but he could’ve sworn he’d heard the sound of feet landing on Lily’s bedroom floor.

  “I have to check on Raven,” he stammered, backing away so quickly, he banged his leg against a mahogany end table. Another piece of furniture that had been shoved into a guest room during Evelyn Holloway’s reign. Suddenly, Arianna was everywhere. Smiling from the walls. Whispering on the television. Jack wondered how long it had taken Raven to bring out his mother’s old things, and when, exactly, he’d had time to redecorate the house. The place had been crawling with cops his first day back. After that, Jack had appeared on the scene, and he’d hardly left Raven alone, except for when he’d been down in this room, watching Raven’s father come undone.

  The last time it had happened, Raven had been sleeping sweetly in his own bedroom. This time, Jack had left him wrapped in Lily’s covers, and Jack hadn’t even considered that someone might slip in through the window and creep up to the bed. Someone who had access to Evelyn Holloway’s keys. Someone who knew the security code to her office.

  Jack barreled down the hallway, rounded the staircase, and took the stairs two at a time. He told himself Raven had woken up of his own accord. Planted his feet on the floor and then realized he was far too scantily dressed to come downstairs. Jack had taken off his shirt hours earlier, along with his jeans, leaving Raven in a pair of silky black boxers. Maybe he’d had trouble finding his clothes in the dark. Maybe no one would be standing over him on the bed, a pair of gardening shears aimed at his bare chest.

  Maybe, Jack told himself.

  Definitely, he promised.

  But Jack had always been a storyteller. He’d written himself into fairy tales in order to survive the darkness in his life. As he entered Lily’s bedroom to find her leaning over the bed, Jack realized that darkness could be deceptively bright. Lily’s hair was luminous in the moonlight. Her skin looked eerily white as she brushed the curls from Raven’s face.

  “Please.” Jack took a
single step toward the bed. “I’ll give you anything you want. I’ll disappear. I’ll take Raven with me. Just don’t—”

  “You know I can’t let you go,” Lily replied. Her purse was slung over her shoulder, and Jack had no doubt that the rusty gardening shears were tucked inside. “Not after you stole my father’s file. Not after you tried to pin the murder on him,” she added, as Raven opened his eyes, blinking up at her. He had the brightest eyes of anyone Jack had ever known. The softest hands. The sweetest heart.

  “Jack? What’s happening?” he murmured, his voice heavy with sleep. With confusion.

  “Everything’s fine,” Jack said softly. “Lily and I are just having a chat, right, Lil? Isn’t that what your dad calls you? But he isn’t the person who poisoned your mom.”

  “No, he isn’t.” Lily sat down on the bed. She was looking at Raven with the detached fascination of a house cat who doesn’t need to hunt for food, but still has the wiring of a hunter. That was why cats played with mice after all, and didn’t bother to eat them.

  They were natural killers.

  “Tell us about the night your mother died,” Jack said, eyeing the distance between them. “After you stole the flowers from Belle’s garden, you came here and found your mom’s teakettle on the stove. Right?”

  The moonlight sliced through the window, illuminating Lily’s face. There was no blood in her cheeks. No curve in her lips. When she opened her mouth to speak, Raven reached out, placing a hand on her cheek. “I don’t want to hear how you killed your mother,” he said, his voice startlingly gentle in the quiet room. The quiet night. “That part’s easy. That part, anyone can guess.”

  Lily shuddered as he found her gaze. “Don’t tell us how you killed your mother. Tell us why you wanted her dead.”

  PART 3 The Truth According to Lily

  I was ten years old when I found the old photo album in my mother’s closet. I’d been sneaking into her bedroom for weeks, trying on her vintage lace slips and elegant costume jewelry. My first impression of my mother, from when I was very young, was that she was strikingly lovely, and I wanted to be like her.

  The photo album was tucked behind her shoes. I’d been trying to pull a pair of ivory Ferragamo pumps down from a high shelf when it toppled into my arms, almost knocking me over. I was small back then. I’d always been a bit smaller than my peers, and for years I would believe this was a bad thing, until my mother explained to me that small was good.

  The smaller the better.

  But in that moment, my smallness caused me to stumble against the closet wall, and the photo album sprang open, revealing a picture of a family. Everyone smiling. Everyone blond. But in the places where the parents’ eyes should’ve been, someone had taken a pair of scissors and hacked until no irises remained, no eyelids, no pale lashes brushing against cheeks.

  I should’ve closed the album then, but I didn’t. Instead, I sat down beneath the satin and the lace, and I turned page after page. Those eyes were scratched out everywhere. My heart raced at the sight of them, and I couldn’t understand why my mother had done this to her own parents.

  I wanted to ask her the minute she got home. It would take her a few minutes to close up her office, and half an hour to drive across town to our little apartment, which meant she’d walk through the door around a quarter to six. By the time she got home, I was waiting for her in the living room. The album in my lap. She took one look at it and yanked it from my hand, stomping toward the kitchen. With a flick of the wrist, she opened the garbage can and dropped it inside. Turned around. Wiped her hands on her white pantsuit.

  “Shall we call in for dinner?”

  “Who were those people?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. They were my grandparents. Her mom and dad.

  “They’re nobody, baby. What do you feel like? Popcorn shrimp? How about tapas? We haven’t done tapas in—”

  “Why did you scratch out their eyes?”

  She came and sat next to me on the couch. We didn’t have money then, but she’d managed to scrounge up a decent living room set from a nearby thrift store. The sofa and love seat were the softest, cushiest white. The tables and chairs, as bleached as the bones of a whale. This was a home where shoes were taken off the second one walked through the door, and beds were made before breakfast. Cleanliness and godliness and all of that.

  “I was angry when I did that,” my mother said simply, running her hand through my hair. She loved to toy with the pale blond strands. For years, we’d slept in the same bed every night, and she’d stroked my hair until I’d fallen asleep. Read me stories. Sang me songs. She was my favorite person in the world, and I was hers.

  “Why were you angry at Grandma and Grandpa?” She tensed the second I said those words. Those names, which I’d rarely spoken. “Were they mean to you? To me?”

  “They never met you.” Her hand caught on a tangle in my hair. “They never touched you, and they never will.”

  “Not even for a hug?”

  Her fingers tightened, tugging uncomfortably at my scalp. I slithered out of her grip. And I watched her, cautiously, breathlessly, as she strode over to the garbage can and pulled the album out.

  She returned to my side.

  “What have I told you about my family?” she asked, flipping through the album. Page after page sped by, revealing widely grinning smiles and impeccable clothing. Hands clasped. Eyes slashed.

  “You lived in a beautiful mansion. You wore beautiful dresses, and your parents took you to lunches and dances and parties. But when you started sneaking out to meet Daddy, they got mad.”

  “Your daddy was wild. Reckless. He loved putting poison in his veins, and my parents threatened to disown me if I kept seeing him.” She turned a page too quickly. The page tore, and her lips twitched up, as if the destruction pleased her. “I didn’t listen. I didn’t think they’d actually throw me out, but when I got pregnant with you at sixteen, they told me I’d made my choice. A few days later, I came home from school to find my dresses on the lawn. My shoes. My photo albums. They’d changed the locks to the house! I pounded on the door, sobbing, but my parents passed by the window like they couldn’t see me. I thought…” She slid her fingernail along the photograph, scratching at her mother’s eyes. “They didn’t deserve eyes if they wouldn’t look at their own daughter. I picked up a rock and threw it at the glass, hoping it would shatter. Hoping shards would make a home in their eyes. But the glass barely cracked, and nothing happened to them.”

  “So you stabbed their pictures instead.”

  She nodded, closing the album. “I stabbed their pictures, and I moved in with your daddy, and for a few years, I had a family. Until he left me too.”

  I frowned, reaching up to touch her face. “You still have a family,” I promised. “You have me.”

  She smiled, and then she went to the bathroom to fix her mascara. We ate tapas while sitting on the living room floor. We laughed and told stories about finding your true family, and it was one of the best nights of my life.

  For the next few months, I was happy. My mother and I felt closer than ever. Sure, she was buried in loan debt, and she was struggling under the burden of raising me alone, but we had each other. It was us against the world, and nothing could touch us. Hurt us. Tear us apart.

  Then my mother started seeing a man she knew from college, and we didn’t eat dinner together anymore. She got dressed to the nines, wearing her heels and her pearls, and she went out every night. She swore it was only temporary. The “honeymoon period,” where they wanted to see each other every second of every day. Soon, those fluttery feelings would settle into comfort, and she’d bring him to meet me. Then we could be a family.

  But things didn’t go as planned. Two months into the relationship, my mother asked her new beau to come and see me, and he grew skittish. Distant. Based on snippets of phone conversations I overheard, he wasn’t ready for the responsibility of raising a ten-year-old child, and that wasn’t his fault.


  She hadn’t told him about me.

  Over the next couple of years, my mother dated six different men, each of whom disappeared at the mention of me. It didn’t matter if she told them on the first date or the twenty-first. Her adolescent daughter sent them running for the hills. She’d had me when she was sixteen, she insisted to them. She was still young, and they only had to be as involved in my life as they wanted to be. They didn’t have to be my father. They didn’t even have to be my friend. But no matter what spin she put on the story, the second they learned she had a daughter in middle school, they vanished.

  Then, halfway through the seventh grade, she started dating Troy. She’d met him on some dating app or another, and he was a bright-eyed dental student with an easy smile. I watched through my bedroom curtains when he picked her up, and hurried to look out the window again when he brought her back home. He opened doors for her. He held his jacket over her head when it rained. He seemed nice! Maybe he would be the one!

  Inevitably, it came time for me to meet him, and I could tell my mother was nervous about introducing us. He knew about me, but she’d talked about me so casually over the phone, I sounded more like an old sofa in the corner than a child. And maybe I wasn’t a child anymore. Men looked at me like I wasn’t. They held doors open for me, and though no one had covered me with a jacket when it rained, I thought it was only a matter of time, and so… I decided to introduce myself to Troy. I put on one of my mother’s smallest dresses, which almost fit me, if I belted it very tight. I curled my hair like she curled her own, and when he came to pick her up that night, I raced outside to meet him.

  My mother was aghast. She gaped at me with a horrified look on her face, as if I’d hurled her over the side of a mountain, but she didn’t understand what I was doing. I wasn’t a little girl. The men she dated didn’t have to be scared of taking care of me, because I was just a smaller version of my mom, and I could take care of myself.