Three Truths and a Lie

by Brent Hartinger

  “Yeah,” Liam muttered, “it’s all about the destination, not the journey.”

  The rest of us followed behind Galen, hiking single file. Liam and I were bringing up the rear, and after a while we fell back a bit, so we could finally talk without the others overhearing.

  “You having fun?” I asked him.

  “Sure,” he said, but I could tell he was unsettled too. For him, it had to do with the skinny-dipping, with how Galen had treated him the night before—and probably how Galen was acting even today. Liam didn’t like Galen, and not just because he was a total tease.

  “What about you?” Liam asked me.

  “Huh?”

  “Are you having fun?”

  “Sure.”

  “Rob, what is it?” He could tell there were things I wasn’t saying either.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Come on.”

  I hiked in silence for a moment.

  “That game last night was something,” I said at last.

  “Three Truths and a Lie? What about it?”

  “I just wondered what you thought about that thing Mia said.”

  Liam laughed.

  “What?” I said.

  “I knew you were going to bring that up.”

  “You did? Why?”

  “I don’t know. I just did.”

  “You don’t think it was weird?” I asked.

  “It was Mia,” he said. “For Mia, weird is normal.”

  We hiked on in silence again. Rocks skittered under Liam’s feet.

  “I think she was telling the truth,” I said.

  He laughed again. “That she killed someone when she was thirteen years old?”

  “Fine, forget it.”

  “No! No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have laughed. Why do you think she was telling the truth?”

  “Well, for one thing, she sounded like she was.”

  “But that’s the whole point of the game. To sound like you’re telling the truth even though you’re not.”

  I thought about saying how it hadn’t worked, that if Mia had meant to trick us, we’d all voted that as the lie anyway, but I was eighty-five percent sure Liam wouldn’t listen. I decided to go right to the big guns.

  “She wasn’t wearing underwear,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Don’t you remember? She said she was wearing underwear—it was one of her truths. But it wasn’t a truth. At one point, she bent over, and I didn’t see the waistband of any underwear. She must not have put them back on after skinny-dipping. And she definitely wasn’t wearing a bra, that was obvious.” This was all true. I’d wanted to tell Liam ever since I’d noticed it the night before. But it hadn’t felt right telling him with Mia in the cabin, and we’d had other things on our minds after going to bed.

  “So what if she wasn’t wearing any underwear?” Liam said.

  I stopped on the trail and turned to face him.

  “What?” he said.

  “Do you really not see?” I asked. “That thing about her underwear was supposed to be her lie. The thing about killing someone—I don’t think she meant to tell us that. I think it slipped out, maybe because she was drunk, or maybe because she finally wanted to tell someone. I think when she said it, she meant it to be true.” I was a little annoyed that I had to explain all this. Whatever happened to our always knowing what the other was thinking?

  “Unless she was wearing underwear and you just didn’t see it. Think it through.”

  “Okay,” I admitted. “That’s a possibility.” I started forward on the trail again.

  “Or maybe the thing about the underwear was supposed to be her lie, but then she said that thing about killing someone because she wanted to screw with us. To shock us, you know? So she told two lies. I mean, come on, this is Mia.” Liam could have been right about this too. “Or maybe she wanted to shock you,” Liam went on, “because she senses you don’t like her.”

  “What?” I said. “What are you talking about? I like Mia!”

  Liam laughed. “Mia was definitely right about one thing last night. You’re a terrible liar.”

  • • •

  The closer we got to the top of the hill, the more amazing the view became. You could already see out our little valley or basin or whatever, into the area beyond. The clear-cuts weren’t like squares on a patchwork quilt or anything like that. They seemed more random, and sometimes really oddly shaped. But they had to have a pattern of some sort. I figured it would all make more sense from the top of the hill when I could finally see the big picture.

  As for the lake below, it really was like the moon, almost perfectly round. It was also interesting how it was surrounded by rain forest on one side and a clear-cut on the other. Two halves more or less evenly divided. It was like two warring armies about to meet in battle. I stared down at it all, trying to make out which army had the advantage, which one was winning the war.

  That’s when I noticed that, far below us, someone had set our cabin on fire.

  8

  The four of us went down that hill a lot faster than we’d gone up. We’d been hiking for almost two hours, but we made it back to the lake in fifteen minutes flat.

  The cabin wasn’t on fire. Everything looked perfectly fine, both inside and out.

  So what did we see?

  “I don’t get it,” Mia said, still out of breath from the run. “There was fire. And smoke. We all saw it.”

  “I can still smell it,” Galen said.

  I smelled it too. Woodsmoke. But that could have been the lingering smell of the fire we’d made to cook breakfast that morning, or even campers somewhere nearby in the woods.

  We walked all the way around the cabin, but nothing was burning or even charred. Honestly, it was so wet and covered with moss that I had a hard time believing it would have burned even if it was set on fire.

  “Look,” Mia said. She was staring at the rusted metal barrel in the yard. Wisps of smoke rose from inside. We’d missed it before, because we’d all been so focused on the cabin. She and Galen walked closer and peered inside.

  “Someone lit a fire in here,” Galen said.

  Liam and I looked inside too. Sure enough, there were smoldering embers at the bottom of the bin. Someone had lit a fire, but it had burned out. It must have mostly been newspapers and kindling, something that would burn big and bright, but not for long. From the top of the hill, it might even have looked like the cabin was on fire.

  “Okay,” Mia said. “This is too weird.”

  “What’s this for anyway?” Galen asked, gesturing to the bin.

  “We used to use it to burn garbage.”

  “Why would it be on fire now?”

  Mia shook her head. “I have absolutely no idea.”

  “What about the Brummits?” I said. “Would they use it?”

  She shrugged. “I guess it’s possible. But I don’t remember them ever doing that before. And it seems strange that they wouldn’t even ask.”

  We all stood there, not moving. The moss squished under someone’s feet, but I wasn’t sure who it was.

  “You know,” Mia said, “I think maybe we should go pay a friendly visit to the Brummits.”

  • • •

  Mia said the other cabin wasn’t far—a quarter of a mile or so down the dirt road. We decided to walk.

  Before long, we were deep inside the rain forest again. But as we kept walking, the forest changed around us. It wasn’t like all the rain forest we’d seen before.

  It was a bog. And suddenly we’d gone back even further in time: if the rain forest had felt like something from a million years ago, this place was like something from millions of years before that. I half expected to see a dinosaur.

  Fir trees had been replaced by fast-growing alders with bushy branches and emerald leaves. They rose up out of pools of muck, clawing for sunlight against the trees crowded around them. In the pools, jade-colored algae grew in swirls under the water’s surface, reminding me
of distant galaxies. The moss still hung heavy off the trees, but the ferns had given way to swamp cabbages, the pointed yellow spikes of their flowers just beginning to unfurl. Deeper in the swamp, I saw devil’s walkingstick, a tall plant with twisty stalks and branches, and ridiculously sharp thorns.

  Water still dribbled down from above, but now it landed in stagnant pools, not on vegetation, so each droplet made a muffled plink, like the sound of a hundred leaky faucets. I smelled moss and methane, blooming flowers and rotting leaves. The whole area somehow managed to smell both clean and dirty at the same time. It was funny that my first impression was that it seemed older than the rest of the rain forest, like we’d gone back to the time of dinosaurs, because the trunks of the trees weren’t nearly as thick here. It was clearly a much newer forest. But maybe that’s what made it seem more alien. The fact it was so new, so changeable. In this time, the whole world was fresher. In this place, evolution had only just started. Everything was still in flux and anything was possible.

  I stared over at the lake itself, barely visible through the new spring foliage on the trees. It wasn’t clear to me where that lake ended and this bog began—if the lake just flowed through the trees into the swamp, or if there was some kind of beachlike buffer. But at least the dirt road was high enough above the water level that it wasn’t any muddier than usual.

  Until it was muddy. The road must’ve dipped down, because the water suddenly seeped out in front of us, and then we were trying to navigate through muddy pools. We were mostly okay if we stayed on the bulge in the middle of the road. Here it was covered with grass.

  “It’s only like this in the spring,” Mia said. “The level of the lake is higher. In the summer, the road is dry.”

  Mia had been right: the cabin itself wasn’t far. And it was built on higher ground, so the bog soon fell away behind us and we were once again surrounded by fir trees. It was newer and bigger than Mia’s parents’ cabin, made of red cedar, not whatever dark, ancient wood Mia’s grandparents had used. The neatly shingled roof was mostly free of moss too, which meant the cabin had nice clean lines, not lumpy, saggy ones. A pale green fiberglass rowboat sat overturned near the shore of the lake, and a flat inflatable, a kid’s toy, drooped down in the crook of a tree. I couldn’t tell if it was an inner tube or an animal or what.

  But there were no cars parked outside.

  “Maybe they left,” Galen said. “Maybe they stopped at our cabin on the way out to burn their garbage.”

  “On a Saturday morning?” Liam said. “If they came all the way out here, wouldn’t they stay for the weekend?” Liam pointed at the road. “And if there was someone staying here last night, wouldn’t there be tire tracks?”

  He was right. There were no fresh tire tracks, and any vehicle would have left some in the mud.

  “Let’s look inside,” Mia said. When we stared at her, she added, “It’s fine. We used to be really friendly.”

  Mrs. Brummit didn’t seem very friendly the day before, I thought.

  “Friendly enough that they’d use your fire bin without asking?” Liam asked.

  Mia fluffed her hair. “That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?”

  Unlike Mia’s parents’ cabin, this one had a small deck. The lawn furniture was frayed and weathered. When she tried the door, it was locked.

  “I thought you said no one locks their doors up here,” I said.

  “No, I said we don’t lock our door up here.” She hesitated a second, then she knocked. That’s probably what she should have done first.

  No one answered.

  We peered in through the curtainless windows, which were bigger than the ones in Mia’s parents’ cabin, but it was dark inside so we couldn’t see anything.

  “Come look at this,” Galen said. He hadn’t joined us on the porch. He was over by the outhouse. They didn’t have plumbing either.

  When the rest of us reached the outhouse, Galen pointed. There was a spiderweb on the crack between the door and the outhouse. It was ragged, like it was old, and spattered with morning dew.

  He opened the door and peered down into the toilet itself, even inhaling to smell it.

  “No one’s been here in a long time,” he said at last.

  “Then who lit that fire?” Mia asked. “And knocked over our outhouse?”

  “And who did I hear last night?” I said. I was back to being eighty percent sure it had been a person I’d heard out in the dark.

  But of course no one had any answers.

  I shivered. All around me, water trickled down from the moss in the trees. We were away from the bog again, so it didn’t sound like the dripping of a hundred faucets. Even so, it was starting to annoy me.

  “I think we should get back,” Liam said.

  No one disagreed.

  We walked back along the road through the bog in silence. I was happy to finally leave it behind.

  When we reached the cabin, Galen said, “A guy walks into a bar, and his gymnastics coach says, ‘No, no, you’re supposed to swing yourself between the parallel bars, not walk right into them!’”

  Liam didn’t laugh, but Mia did. It was like she and Galen were going to pretend that nothing had happened. Someone was up in these woods with us, someone who didn’t want to be seen, but Mia and Galen didn’t even care.

  This was the big downside of being with people who lived in the here and now. They gave hardly any thought to the past and they were too stupid to worry about the future, even when the future seemed like something you should definitely be worried about.

  9

  Once we were all inside the cabin, I said, “I think we should go.”

  Everyone looked at me.

  “Go where?” Mia said.

  “Home,” I said. “Away. We can even spend the night in a motel somewhere along the road. I have money.”

  I knew Liam wouldn’t laugh at me, but I thought Mia and Galen might, or at least look at me like I was crazy. They didn’t. Everyone stared at me with eyes wide open.

  This surprised me. Maybe they were scared too and had just been pretending they weren’t. I couldn’t help but wonder what else they might be pretending about.

  “There’s someone up here,” I said. “I heard them last night. Whoever it was, they knocked over the outhouse and lit that fire. And they also stole our phone.”

  The missing phone. No one had mentioned that since the night before. It was one thing when it seemed like we’d misplaced it, but now that we knew we weren’t alone, it meant something completely different. It meant that whoever was up here with us had stolen it and was trying to cut off our only means of contact with the outside world.

  “It could be the Brummits,” I said.

  “You think the Brummits stole our satellite phone?” Mia said.

  Now she looked at me like I was crazy.

  “It’s only a theory,” I said. “But, I mean, it’s possible.”

  “But why would they do it?”

  “Maybe to jerk us around. Or maybe for something more.”

  “Something more like what?” Galen asked.

  “Like they have something else planned, and they don’t want us calling for help.”

  No one said anything for a second. Then Mia’s eyes narrowed.

  “They were angry at my parents and grandparents,” she said. “Not me. Not us.”

  “Maybe,” Liam said. “But maybe not.” I smiled at him, grateful for the support. At least the two of us were in sync again.

  “But there wasn’t anyone over at their cabin,” Mia said stubbornly. “There hasn’t been anyone over at their cabin.”

  “Maybe it’s not the Brummits,” I said. “But we know someone else is up here. And there are all kinds of things they could have taken from this cabin. Expensive things, like our wallets and our cell phones. But the only thing they took was that satellite phone. Doesn’t that mean they don’t want us calling for help? And if that’s true, doesn’t it worry you about what they might have
planned?”

  Once again, no one said anything. We sat there thinking about it for maybe twenty seconds, frozen like trolls at daybreak.

  Then we turned and started packing, all of us at exactly the same time. Maybe one of us had moved first—we probably had—but it didn’t seem like it. We didn’t talk any more about it either. It was like there wasn’t anything left to discuss.

  As we packed, I felt clearheaded and focused in a way I hadn’t felt all day, maybe not since we’d entered that little town of Marot the day before.

  Five minutes after we started packing, Mia said, “I don’t believe it. Look what I just found!”

  She turned around from the kitchen, holding up the satellite phone.

  “What the hell?” Galen said. “Where was it?”

  “Behind the food in one of the cupboards. I must have put it up there by mistake.”

  Everyone stopped packing. Or rather they started unpacking. Again, it all went completely without saying. But this time, I hadn’t joined them.

  “Wait,” I said. “Does that mean we’re not leaving?”

  Everyone looked at me.

  “Why would we leave now?” Mia said.

  “Well, the fire and the outhouse . . . ,” I said. “I mean, there’s still someone up here with us.”

  “Yeah, but if they didn’t take our phone, what difference does it make? They burned some trash in our bin, and they accidentally knocked over the outhouse. So what?”

  “But . . .” But what? She was right. The missing satellite phone was the big deal. The rest of it was just silly stuff. And now it turned out the phone hadn’t been missing after all.

  “But I did hear someone,” I said. “Last night, right outside our cabin.”

  “I’m sure it was an animal,” Mia said. “They can make some really strange noises. You’d be surprised how often they can sound like a person.”

  Maybe it was an animal, I thought. But maybe it wasn’t. If it wasn’t the Brummits, maybe it was those guys who’d chased us that night at the tattoo parlor. Maybe they’d somehow followed us all the way out to the Olympic Peninsula. But even as I thought this, I realized we would have seen them following behind us on the logging road, especially in the clear-cuts. Besides, Mia had locked the gate behind us.