Liars, Inc.

by Paula Stokes

  But I never lied about them.

  I wish there were some way I could go back in time and never see those pictures. But I can’t, so I do my best to forget about them and focus on the Rosewood Center.

  Just after four o’clock, a woman exits the front door and cuts across the grass. She’s got wide shoulders and frizzy hair that’s pulled back in a low ponytail. She doesn’t look much like the pretty social worker I remember, until she glances in my direction. Same blue eyes and round face. My heart starts slam dancing around in my chest. Questions flood my brain. Will she remember me? Will she run away like I’m a crazy person? Has she heard about my arrest? What, exactly, am I supposed to say to her?

  She makes it to her car before I even get out of the truck, so I end up following her to a fish taco restaurant a couple of blocks away. Great. Now she’ll think I’m a stalker for sure. Oh well. Everyone else thinks I’m a murderer, so “stalker” feels like a promotion. I wait for her to order and then tap her on the shoulder while she’s gathering her napkins and salsa packets.

  “Anna?” I say.

  She turns around. “Yes?” Her brow furrows and I can almost see her mentally flipping through her group-home-kid Rolodex, trying to identify me.

  “My name is—”

  “Max Keller!” she blurts out. “Oh my God, look at you. Different body. Different face. Same messy hair.”

  I freeze up for a second. No one has called me Max Keller in years. But then I smile. It feels good to be remembered.

  She shakes her head in wonder. “I didn’t know if you’d ever talk,” she says. “You never spoke to anyone.”

  “Yeah,” I say, once again at a loss for words. I want to tell her how she’s the one good memory I have of Rosewood. How if it weren’t for her I would have run away from the center, and who knows where I’d be. I don’t say anything, though. It’s like there’s a statute of limitations on thank-yous. Like I should have said all that stuff the day I left, but I didn’t, and to say it now would be weird.

  “But I don’t remember the name of the people who adopted you,” she says.

  “The Cantrells,” I say. “They’ve been great.”

  “I’m glad.” The corners of her eyes crinkle up as she smiles. “I remember how Mrs. Cantrell instantly fell in love with you.”

  “Can I ask you something?” I cut her off before she can tell the much-repeated story.

  I pull the picture of Preston sitting on the Rosewood steps out of my pocket. “Do you know him?”

  Anna’s jaw goes tight, like she’s grinding her molars together. “Yeah.” She squints. “Adam. Lyons. He was at Rosewood . . . after you, maybe? I can’t remember exactly.” She shakes her head. “Nice kid.”

  “Are you sure about the name?” I don’t tell her I think it’s a picture of a young Preston DeWitt, and that he’s dead now.

  “Yeah. He disappeared from Rosewood and the center got audited because of it.” She glances around. “We almost lost our state funding. Child Protective Services had to come and recertify us.”

  “Do you know what happened to him? Or where he is now?”

  Anna takes a step back. “Why are you asking me all this?”

  “I can’t explain it,” I say. “But it’s really important.”

  “He just went to school one morning and never came back.” She fiddles with her handful of napkins, rolling them into a cylinder between her palms. “The teachers said he never made it to class.”

  I stare hard at the picture. The hair is much darker than Preston’s. Could I be wrong? Could it really be a picture of some other kid? But then why the hell did Preston have it? “Do you remember when it was that Adam disappeared?”

  “Maybe eight or nine years ago?” she says. “The LA Times did a piece on how we might lose our funding. I’m sure you can find the information there.”

  “Number four-forty-one,” the counter guy calls.

  Anna looks down at her receipt and accidentally drops one of her napkins. For a second she freezes, like she’s debating whether she should rescue the napkin from the sticky floor or just leave it.

  “I got it.” I bend down to get the napkin, which has tumbled its way across the floor and is sticking to the bottom of the trash can. I ball it up and toss it in the trash.

  “Thanks, Max.” She bites her lip again. “It was nice to see you, but I have to go. My daughter has a soccer game tonight and I’m running a little behind.”

  I nod. “It was nice to see you too, Anna.” Once more, a bunch of sappy gratitude swells up on the tip of my tongue. “You were . . .” I crack my knuckles as I try to come up with the right words. “The one thing about Rosewood that didn’t suck.” By the time I spit it out the cashier has abandoned Anna’s order to ring up the next person in line.

  Anna smiles faintly. “Thanks. I hope everything is okay, Max.”

  “It will be,” I say. She leaves and I order a trio of tacos and a drink for myself. I stare at the photograph of who I thought was Preston while the food is being prepared. Now what?

  The cashier calls my order number in a monotone voice. I grab my tray, load up on napkins and soda, and take my food to a booth in the corner. I set the picture on the bench next to me and unwrap the first taco.

  Could Preston have a twin or brother I don’t know about? It seems far-fetched, the wealthy and powerful DeWitts giving a kid up for adoption, but who knew what politicians were capable of? I finish the first taco in about four bites and crumple the waxy wrapper into a ball. I suck in a long drink of soda. Parvati thought Violet was Preston’s mom. Maybe she was closer than I thought. Maybe DeWitt had an affair and this Adam kid is Preston’s half brother.

  I bite into my second taco. A couple of diced tomatoes and chunks of flaky cod fall from the shell and land on my paper-lined tray. Tomato juice runs down my chin and I swipe at my mouth with a napkin. Maybe Preston somehow figured all of this out and went looking for his half brother, not knowing that Violet had actually given her child up for adoption. Violet might have gotten upset about being found, about Preston tricking her into meeting him, but why did they both end up dead? I crumple another wrapper and take a gulp of soda.

  And then it hits me like a twenty-foot wave. Maybe Preston and Violet were the people blackmailing Senator DeWitt! I try to remember if one of the folders on Pres’s hard drive was called RD, or anything else that might stand for the senator, but the two-letter folder names are just a jumble in my head. It makes sense, though. If Pres had video cameras rigged in the spare bedroom, surely he had them in other places around the house too. Who knows what he had caught his father saying, or doing?

  And what if Adam was in on it, and he’s still alive somewhere? Maybe Langston is looking for him and he thinks Adam will try to contact some of Pres’s friends.

  Maybe DeWitt bailed me out as bait.

  My fingers shake a little as I finish the third taco and ball up the wrapper. Wiping my hands hard on a napkin, I stare down at the scuffed tabletop, at my three crumpled paper balls. Preston. Adam. Violet. What if the three of them had threatened to expose DeWitt’s affair and subsequent abandonment of his other son just as DeWitt was about to get appointed to the president’s cabinet? I know how much Preston liked money. I wonder how much he could have gotten for keeping a secret this big. But would he really sabotage his father’s entire political career just to make a quick buck? Maybe he was so angry about being lied to and denied his only family that he wanted everyone to pay for it. Either way, I still couldn’t believe that Senator DeWitt would really kill Preston to shut him up. Politics couldn’t possibly mean more than his own children.

  Did Preston ever tell you about his childhood? I glance around, suddenly nervous. If DeWitt did kill Preston, that means Langston and Marcus know about it. And that means they’re just keeping tabs on me to make sure I don’t figure it out.

  THIRTY-ONE

  IT’S TIME TO DO MORE research. If I head home now I’ll get caught in traffic, so instead I drive t
hrough the streets of Rosewood until I find a small brick building with a sign that says LIBRARY out front. It’s mostly empty inside, but a handful of college students and older people look up curiously as I stroll through the metal detector. A librarian with thin lips and a cone-shaped pile of graying blonde hair on top of her head stands as I approach the desk. It’s like she’s already judged me as a troublemaker and is preparing to throw me out by my ear.

  “Yes?” One word. Curt. Sharp.

  “I need to, uh, is it possible to use the internet?”

  Her mouth twists like I just admitted to a hard-core porn addiction. “Do you have a library card?”

  “No.” I’m about to tell her I don’t live in Los Angeles when I get a better idea. I lower my voice. “I’m from Rosewood Center, you know? The group home.”

  Her voice loses a bit of edge. “Why do you need the internet?”

  “Research,” I say. “School project.”

  “So why not use the internet at Rosewood?”

  I look down at the floor. “I got in trouble there. For online gaming. I’m not allowed any internet or video games for a week, but I’ve still got to get this paper finished.”

  “Ah. Well, I suppose I can set you up with a one-day pass,” she says. “But they’ll have to get you a library card if you’re planning to come back.”

  She hands me a little plastic card printed with login information and then directs me to a glassed-in room with two tables of computers. I find Number 9 and log on.

  I type “Adam Lyons” into the search box. Hundreds of pages pop up. I add “disappearance” and “Rosewood” to my search criteria, which narrows the results to just two pages. The first one is an article from a few years ago about the problem of runaways in warm-climate states. It only mentions Adam’s name in passing, as one of several kids who disappeared from group homes in the Southwest. The second link is to the article from the LA Times that Anna mentioned. It doesn’t say much, only that Adam Lyons was the second ward of the state to disappear from the Rosewood Center for Boys in the past five years. The article goes on to question some of the Rosewood policies and call into question whether the staff members are qualified to care for “at-risk” youth. There’s a tiny black-and-white picture of Adam embedded in the article. It’s grainy, but it still looks a lot like Preston. There’s no mention of the exact date that Adam disappeared, but the article is dated February 11, almost eight years ago.

  I try Preston’s name with “Rosewood” and then Preston’s name with “Adam Lyons.” No hits. Other than the picture, there’s no evidence linking Preston to Rosewood or Adam Lyons. I try the name “Violet Cain” with all of the other search terms. Nothing. I drum my fingers on the tabletop, not sure what to look up next.

  I’m missing something important, but I don’t know what it is. I turn back to the computer, intending to log off, but instead I type something completely unrelated into the search box: “Alexander Keller Los Angeles.”

  A whole string of hits come back. I click on the first one and my father’s picture pops up next to a news story. I study his piercing eyes and square jaw. I wish I looked more like him.

  “UCLA Professor of Oceanography Alexander Keller died this morning of an apparent heart attack . . .”

  My phone buzzes. Stern Librarian glances up from her desk. She points at a sign that says NO CELL PHONES. Damn, how can she even hear it from way over there?

  It’s Parvati, of course. I let her go to voicemail. There’s nothing else for me to find here. I take one last look at my real dad’s picture and then log off the computer. I turn in my internet card as I pass the librarian’s desk on the way out.

  The railing for the library steps is a low cement wall, and I hop up onto it and let my feet hang down. I don’t know where to go next. The FBI could probably access more information about Violet Cain or Adam Lyons, but there’s no way McGhee and Gonzalez would believe a crazy story about Senator DeWitt putting out a hit on his own son to cover up some affair he had almost twenty years ago. I can’t even believe it myself.

  Drumming my fingers on the cement, I stare off into the distance. The sun is starting to set. A neon sign on the parking garage next to the library crackles to life. Reluctantly, I listen to the message Parvati left.

  “Max. I need to see you. There’s something else that you should know. Please call me when you get this.”

  Maybe she’s got new information. I breathe in and out a few times and then dial her number.

  “Max!” She sounds so happy to hear from me that it kind of makes me feel sick.

  “You said you had something else to tell me?”

  “Yeah, but not over the phone. I need to see you.”

  “I’m not home right now.” I’m also not ready to see her yet. I glance down at the manicured lawn at the bottom of the railing and try to quell the jittery feeling in my stomach. It’s not like what she has to tell me could possibly be any worse than eight-by-ten glossies of her and Pres having sex. “Just spit it out, P.”

  “Sooner or later you’re going to have to let me explain the Preston thing.”

  “Yeah? Well, I choose later,” I say. “There are more important things than us right now, like finding Preston’s killer. So unless what you want to tell me has to do with that . . .”

  There’s a long pause. “No,” she says finally. “At least I don’t see how it could.”

  I hear a voice in the background. It sounds like the Colonel. “Isn’t this the day you stay late for newspaper class?” I ask.

  Parvati sighs again. “My parents pulled me out of school. I’m going to finish up at Blue Pointe Prep in the spring.”

  “What about this semester?”

  “I’ll have enough credits that I don’t need it,” she says. “Another thing I wanted to tell you in person.”

  “Sorry,” I say tersely. “Didn’t mean to get you in trouble.”

  “It’s not just because of you,” she starts. “My mom was snooping around in my room and found—”

  Condoms? Sex tapes? A lump starts to form in my throat. “I have to go,” I say quickly.

  “What? Go where?”

  I don’t answer her. I just click the disconnect button and slip the phone back into my pocket. I’m still sitting on the wall, my dangling feet growing heavy in my sneakers. People pass back and forth in front of me, colored blurs against the gray sky.

  I spent most of my life being no one, and not really minding. And then I met Pres and Parvati and started to feel different. Not because they were popular or had money—I never cared about any of that. With them, I was part of something. Only maybe I wasn’t. Maybe it was never the three of us. Maybe it was always the two of them, and me. Either way, Preston is gone and I kind of wish Parvati was too, even though that would clearly make me no one again. It kind of sucks having nothing to lose, but it sucks even worse having everything good taken away from you.

  Or to realize it was never yours in the first place.

  THIRTY-TWO

  LANGSTON CALLS ME ON THE way home. I flip on the cruise control and turn down the music.

  “Marcus and I took care of your car,” he says.

  “Do I want to know what that means?”

  “It means that it’s gone for good.”

  “Shit. I guess I’ll be walking everywhere from now on.” I drum my fingertips on the steering wheel.

  “Sorry.” He pauses. “Better than life in prison, though, right?”

  Corporate campuses rush by me on both sides of the highway. I pull the truck into the exit lane to switch highways, swearing under my breath as I nearly sideswipe a black BMW that was hovering in my blind spot.

  “There was nothing useful in the trunk. Anything new on your end?” he asks.

  “No. I’ve been staying out of it, like you said I should,” I say quickly.

  Langston chuckles. “You sound anxious. What’s wrong, Max? Still worried we’re going to revoke your bail?”

  “I just don’t kn
ow how all this stuff is going to play out.” I swerve around a dead possum, trying not to notice the guts spread all over the highway.

  “Everything will be fine. I’ll be in touch.” He hangs up.

  I crank the radio volume, zoning out a little as the truck eats mile after mile of open road. The sky has gone from gray to navy blue. The hard-rock station starts to broadcast an interview with a band I hate. I flip through the rest of the stations, but everything else sucks, so I turn the radio off.

  The silence quickly makes me crazy. What am I coming home to? Had news of Preston’s death been made public yet? Could Pres really have blackmailed, and then died at the hands of, his own father? The questions swirl together inside my head, and I can’t answer any of them.

  But I know who possibly can. Just the thought of Parvati’s throaty voice makes my insides ache. She’s always been able to make me feel better, and now I’m avoiding her because every time I talk to her it hurts me. And every time it hurts me I get one step closer to realizing the two of us are over. But maybe I should stop hiding and just deal with things. Darla’s right—I need to hear her out, even if talking to her means officially breaking up. Plus, she’s smart, and she’s the only one who understands this whole Preston mess. If she can help me find his killer, I should let her.

  She picks up right away. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I’m sorry I hung up on you.” She doesn’t respond right away, so I keep going. “I’ve been doing a really shitty job of dealing with things. Finding out about you and Pres from the FBI was not ideal, you know? But I can’t avoid hearing the whole truth forever . . . even though I kind of want to.”

  “I know it was wrong to lie to you, Max. I guess I just didn’t want to screw up our friendship. Would you have wanted to hang out as a group if you knew Preston and I . . .” She trails off.

  “The feds have pics of you guys from Bristol Academy, Parvati. How did you not know Pres was recording you two having sex for years?”