I closed my eyes, trying to erase the image of the blood on my hands. But it was there, splattered across the backs of my eyelids like paintballs.
When I opened my eyes, the face of the mystery man stared back at me from my sketch. This man had been at Mom’s house the night she died.
And I knew, finally, with absolute certainty, that I had been there too.
* * *
Exhaustion and jet lag made me dazed and disoriented. Day and night had merged into a weird gray color, making it impossible to tell if it was twilight or morning when the plane landed at London’s Heathrow Airport. My phone said noon, but my body said midnight.
Heathrow was a dizzying labyrinth of corridors and yellow signs pointing in all directions. The hallways were a crush of travelers jostling for space, people bustling up the escalators and pushing past stragglers while snapping clipped pardon me’s. I’d only ever flown to Cancun for spring break when I was in college, but that trip wasn’t anything like this one.
I followed a series of signs for taxis, finally finding a line of them, black and shiny as a beetle’s shell, in front of the terminal. I opened the back door of one and climbed in, but the driver scowled at me.
“You gotta go to the front of the queue,” he barked.
“Oh, sorry!” My skin crisped with embarrassment.
I did a bizarre tourist’s walk of shame to the front of the line and opened the back door of the front taxi.
“ ’Ow ya doin’, love?” The driver turned to grin at me. He was older, powerful-looking, with wide shoulders, a white beard, and a receding hairline. “Bag in the boot for ya?”
“Uh …” I looked at my backpack. “No, thanks.”
“Where ya off to, then?”
“Shoreditch.” I showed him the address Jacob had texted me, and he nodded and pulled into traffic. A sports game played on the radio and he listened intently as he turned onto a highway. Cheers erupted from the speakers and the driver groaned.
“He’s a right geezer, innit? Want to gi’ him a dry slap.” He shook his head, tutting.
I leaned my head against the backseat, my brain too jet-lagged to figure out what he was talking about.
The taxi driver glanced at me in the rearview window. “Name’s Graham.” He pronounced it gray-um. “Right tippin’ it down, innit?”
“Excuse me?”
He laughed, revealing long, crooked teeth. “It’s raining hard out right now.”
“Oh.” I looked out the window. “Yes, it is.”
“First time here?” he asked.
“Is it that obvious?”
He laughed again. “Little bit.”
I scrolled through my e-mail and Instagram messages, all variations of the same thing: OMG, just heard about your mom. What happened? Are you ok? I was relieved that nobody knew the police were suspicious of me but wasn’t stupid enough to think it would last. I swiped past texts from my dad and Lily, but hesitated when I read Andrew’s.
The detective is asking where you are. Please tell me you haven’t seriously gone to London.
I thought of my brother at eleven, fists on hips, saying, “Uh muh muh muh mum!” when he caught me smoking pot in the backyard with a boy I was trying to impress. Even as an adult he was that type: relentlessly perfect, aggressively good. He organized his socks according to color, studied French in his spare time. When I went through my wild phase—sex, drinking, drugs—he’d been wholly repulsed. Just like my mom. Peas in a pod, those two.
The taxi accelerated onto a highway, droplets of rain slicing diagonally across my window. I rubbed my tired eyes, wishing instantly, intensely for my bed.
Graham caught my eye in the rearview mirror and smiled sympathetically.
“Rough night last night?” he asked.
I stared at him, my throat suddenly dry. He meant on the plane, of course, but his words caused the barbed ends of a memory to snag at the edges of my brain. I squeezed my eyes shut and nodded, trying desperately to block it out. But it was too late. My mind was already tunneling backward to the morning after I was attacked.
* * *
I woke next to a pool of vomit on the floor of my bedroom. My head felt like it had been flayed open and doused in chemicals.
“Eva! Eva?” My roommate, Holly, was hovering anxiously over me, her short, pink-streaked hair standing on end.
I tried to sit up, but a wave of nausea washed over me. I bent at the waist and vomited again.
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
“Come on, let’s get you washed off.”
Holly helped me into the shower and sprayed the vomit off me. “Where’d you go last night?” she asked.
I stared at her, horrified as brief flashes came back to me.
“Holly,” I whispered, “I think I was raped.”
She drove me straight to the police station after that. We were whisked into an interview room, given a hot cup of tea. After about ten minutes a detective came in. He was old, with sagging jowls and a permanent frown between his eyebrows. His badge read DETECTIVE ANDERSON.
“Rough night last night?” he asked, leaning against the edge of the table.
Holly jumped up, her face blotchy with fury. “Are you fucking kidding? A rough night is finding out your car’s been towed or that your friend threw up on your couch. Not realizing you’ve been raped!”
Anderson put his hands up. “Of course. Sorry.” He turned to me. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”
I swallowed hard, feeling like a fish bone was stuck in my throat. “We were out last night. At a club.”
He jotted something in a notepad.
“I got really dizzy really fast and everything started spinning, so I went outside. I threw up in the alley. I don’t remember much after that. Someone was talking to me. A man. He said he’d help me get home. And then we were in his apartment.…”
I closed my eyes, trying to remember.
“Did you know him?”
“I don’t think so. I can’t remember.”
“Do you remember anything about him? Hair color, facial hair, did he speak with an accent?”
“I can’t remember.”
“But you remember having sex?”
“Sort of. I couldn’t move. It was like I was paralyzed.”
“What about his address? Where he lived?”
I shook my head, tears burning. “No.”
“Maybe the neighborhood?”
“She was obviously drugged!” Holly jumped in. “That’s why she can’t remember.”
“Look. We can run a rape kit, do blood tests. But you said you’ve showered, right? And any drugs will be long gone from your system. So evidence will be …” He shrugged. I could tell by his face he didn’t believe me.
I stood and moved toward the door, stumbling over Holly’s purse. “Never mind.”
I decided never to speak of it again. Not talking about it became a protective measure. Maybe he was right. I didn’t know what had really happened. I couldn’t remember. Besides, I wanted to block it off, box it up, bury it.
Until the day I saw that little pink line on the pregnancy test.
* * *
Graham pulled off the highway and veered around a massive roundabout, picking his way through thickening traffic. A sign fixed to a flight of stairs labeled the station below: Old Street Station.
The street throbbed with traffic, people walking urgently on the sidewalks as they spoke into their phones. Ethnic restaurants, vintage clothing stores, and hipster cafés lined the streets. A kaleidoscope of bright murals and street art adorned nearly every wall. The vibe was both dingy and hip, a buzzy urban feel like Seattle’s Pioneer Square, only grittier.
Graham pulled up outside a pale, sandblasted brick building. Downstairs was a trendy-looking coffee shop with a neon sign flashing BEAN GRINDER above the door. He pointed to a series of sash windows above it. “You’re in them flats up there.”
I paid and signed the receipt. Graham pointed at my hand. �
�Hey, I’m a lefty too.”
“Yeah?”
“You know, most kangaroos are lefties.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yep. I read it in my son’s National Geographic magazine.”
“Huh.” I handed him his pen. “Maybe it’s because they’re on the other side of the world.”
Graham laughed and held out a business card. “You need a taxi, give me a call, love.”
I waved good-bye, then circled the building until I found the entrance at the side. I used Jacob’s keys to let myself in and climbed the stairs to the top floor.
Jacob’s flat was large and open-planned with high ceilings and exposed blond-brick walls soaring over pale hardwood floors. To my left a bank of windows overlooked the busy street below, and a cream leather sofa sat in front of a flat-screen TV. To my right was a small white-and-steel kitchen. The walls were filled with pale, rather abstract art. It was all very modern and beautiful, but not at all what I would’ve pictured Jacob buying.
I threw my backpack on the sofa. Fatigue dragged at my body. My eyelids felt like they were made of glue. I took a quick shower to wake myself up, turning the water up to scalding. There was a bottle of Tesco lemongrass all-in-one soap and a razor in the metal shower tray. I almost laughed, thinking of the expensive handmade soap Liam had imported from Paris.
After I dressed, I heard the sound of my phone ringing from the living room.
“Hello, Eva.” Detective Jackson’s voice was smooth and unreadable when I answered. “Thanks for sending that copy of your mom’s letter.”
“Sure.”
“Do you know what she was referring to? The danger you were in?”
“No, I don’t. She never said anything, and I never felt in any danger when I was growing up.”
“It must be difficult,” he said, “finding out your mother wasn’t biologically yours. How did that make you feel?”
“What, are you a shrink now?” I snapped. I gritted my teeth, trying to fold my irritation away. I felt like little pieces of me were leaking out.
“Hmm,” he said, as if he were placating a testy toddler. “Listen, there are a few things I wanted to ask you about your mother.”
“Like what?”
“Our crime scene investigators found a gun in her house. Do you know why she bought a gun?”
“A gun?” I shook my head. “That’s not possible. Mom was very antigun. She never understood America’s obsession with firearms.”
Even as I said it, I was thinking that it was totally possible Mom had a gun. She was very private—or maybe secretive was a better word. She’d kept a million secrets, big ones and small ones. Or maybe you couldn’t even call them secrets. Maybe they were just straight-up lies.
“It’s a nine-millimeter purchased and registered to Katherine Hansen in May 2017. Did she have a reason to buy a gun?”
“I don’t think so.”
“We’ve done some digging into Katherine’s background. Do you know much about her life before she moved to America?”
“I guess as much as any kid does about their parents. My father died in London when I was a baby. Mom’s parents died when she was young, so we moved to America to start over. She met Mike in Chicago, and when they got married, he adopted me. Why? Is there something I don’t know?”
“We’re still trying to establish some details. Have you been able to remember anything else?”
I pulled the sketch of the man I remembered at Mom’s house out of my purse. “No,” I lied. “Nothing.”
A beat of silence.
“Have you heard of Interpol?” Jackson asked. His voice had chilled noticeably. “It’s an international policing agency, so no matter where you go, Seattle, Whidbey Island, or London, we can still arrest you.”
I licked my lips, trying to moisten my mouth. He knew. He knew I was here.
“I know you know something about your mother’s murder, Eva. And I’m going to find out what it is.”
His words at the gallery floated back to me. I never would’ve stopped until I found the guy who did that to you.
I realized now he’d been warning me.
“You have nothing on me,” I whispered.
“Not yet, but I will,” he growled. “Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, maybe the day after, my CSIs will give me their results—your fingerprints, DNA, your car on the ferry to Seattle the night she was killed—and I’ll have proof. And when that happens, I’ll issue an arrest warrant to Interpol. And no lawyer will be able to save you from a murder charge.”
“I have to go, Detective.” I was proud to hear that my voice didn’t quiver, even though my hands did. “Thank you for your call.”
I hung up. Liam was right. Jackson was tracking my credit card, maybe my bank account, my passport. Could he track my cell phone? I turned my phone off and slid the SIM card out. I stared at the tiny chip in my hand, then squeezed my fingers tight around it.
Maybe I didn’t remember the night Mom was murdered, like I didn’t remember the night I was attacked. But I wasn’t going to slink away and take the blame for something that wasn’t my fault. Not again.
sixteen
kat
25 years before
“KATHERINE?” SEB CRACKED the bedroom door and peered into the murkiness. Light from the hallway spilled inside, along with the faint, ashy smell of smoke still left from when I burnt the ironing board. I tried to focus, narrowing my eyes against the sudden onslaught. My body was thick and heavy with the weight of the drugs in my system.
I reached for the bottle of pills on the bedside table, dry-swallowing two. This was my routine when I woke. Pills. Swallow. Sleep. Wake. Pills. Swallow. Sleep. I found anything else quite beyond me.
Seb slid a plate of toast and a steaming mug of tea onto the bedside table and sat next to me, his weight dipping the bed as I lay back, clutching Barnaby to my chest. On some level I recognized his gesture of kindness. But he smelled of stale sweat and cooking oil, and it took everything in me not to retch.
“You have to get up.” Seb’s voice was wooden. “You haven’t come out of here in almost a week. We have to pick a casket.”
I rolled away from him and didn’t reply. My daughter was dead. What did it matter what casket she had? Cell and tissue, skin and bone, we were all just particles of matter, obeying the laws of physics as we grew and lived and breathed and died and turned to nothingness in our graves.
A good mother would have taken her responsibilities seriously.
A good mother would have been watching her child.
A good mother would have kept her child safe.
I was not a good mother.
“We have to do this together,” Seb insisted. “Eva deserves to have both of her parents pick out her casket.”
The sound of her name triggered a visceral reaction in me. A stab of white-hot pain sliced through my core, a sharp blow to my solar plexus. It was like being caught in the gravity of a black hole. Once you were within its grasp, there was no escape. All you could do was wait for it to suck you in, to crush you.
I pulled my knees to my chest and pressed Barnaby to my face. My tears seeped into his bloodstained ear, smearing red across my palms. Seb dropped his face into his hands, ragged, guttural sobs wrenching from his chest, a howl of pain so deep it reached into my soul and touched me. I knew his pain, I felt it ravaging me every conscious moment.
“They let Rose go,” he said after a while.
I vaguely remembered Seb saying Rose had been arrested.
“Why?” I whispered. The familiar, cottony numbness of the drugs had started to wind its way through my blood.
I meant why had they arrested her, but perhaps he misunderstood.
“Her husband got his fancy lawyer involved. It didn’t matter how much I paid my contact in the police department, it obviously wasn’t as much as he did. They said they had no evidence to charge Rose with anything.” Seb slammed a fist into the bed, making me flinch. “But it was her hous
e, her window, and she opened it! She’s the reason our daughter is dead! And I swear to you, I swear to you, if it’s the last thing I do, she will pay. I will make Rose pay.”
* * *
I woke abruptly later that afternoon, as if I had been shaken. I bolted upright, gasping for breath and drenched in sweat. The sound of Eva’s scream echoed in my ears. I unplucked my rigid fingers from the tangled duvet, pain shooting from my knuckles to my elbows.
The rays of the late-afternoon sun were bleeding through the pulled shades. The sound of voices came from inside the house. I crept down the stairs, my bare feet silent on the cold hardwood floor. Cool air swirled up my nightgown, licking at my legs.
The familiar voice of Seb’s dodgiest business partner, Paddy, wormed through the crack in his office door. “Oi, mate, I was down the local with this fit bird—”
“I don’t give two fucks about that, Paddy!” Seb’s fist hit something, the desk or perhaps the wall. “What did you find? Did you follow her?”
Paddy sighed, and I heard creaking as he sat in one of Seb’s leather chairs.
“Yeah, mate, I did like you asked. Rose goes for a walk every evening. It would be the perfect chance. The only problem is she’s always with the girl. Never goes out without her.”
My heart was slamming in my chest, my breath rattling, fast and loose like a container of Pop Rocks.
It was silent for a long moment; then Seb spoke, his voice low and dark. “An eye for an eye.” The sound of a drawer opening. A hard, metallic clunk. “Take this.…”
Another long pause. “All right.”
I didn’t listen for anything else. I turned and fled back upstairs to my room, diving under the covers and pressing Barnaby tight to my chest. After a while, Seb came in. He stood over me for a long time. I kept my eyes closed, my breathing steady and even.
And finally, he turned and left.
* * *
I dressed quickly and grabbed the car keys from the hook by the front door. Fortunately, the car was still outside, which meant Seb had left with Paddy. I was uncertain how long I had.
Behind Every Lie Page 10
