Beautiful Lies (7 page)

It’s money. Lots of it. Ten thousand dollars, to be exact.

Here in my room. Hidden in a box beneath my bed. I guess it’s my money, in the sense that it’s in my possession at the moment. But from a legal standpoint? A moral one? That’s where things start to get a tad sketchy.

I hesitate, staring at it, overwhelmed by how much is there even though I’ve looked at it many times over the past few weeks. The money isn’t mine; I found it. Actually, I stole it. And I can’t ignore the possibility that its owner probably wants it back. Maybe whoever it belongs to wants it badly enough to go after the person who took it. And maybe they made a mistake; what if they confronted the wrong sister last night? What if something terrible happened, and it’s all my fault?

I remember the dream I had last night. My sister’s voice:
Don’t. Tell. Anyone.

But I have to tell someone. Without giving it another thought, I grab the money and stuff it into the front of my bookbag. Then I leave.

Back on the landing, I peek downstairs. My aunt and uncle are in the living room at the front of the house. They’re talking
in hushed voices. The television is on, tuned to a muted episode of
Meet the Press.
I can hear Billy Idol’s “White Wedding” blaring from TJ’s car stereo on the street.

It could almost be any normal Sunday.

Except that on any normal Sunday, my sister and I would be downstairs with our family. We’d all be eating breakfast—except for my sister, who can’t stand to put anything in her stomach before lunch. Right now we might be watching the kittens, marveling at how tiny they are, how we’ve never seen anything so
new
in our whole lives.

Instead of joining my family in the living room, I slip down the secret stairway and into the empty kitchen. I tiptoe unseen out the back door and hurry toward the garage. By the time the police arrive, I’ll be gone.

I drive slowly through town, constantly glancing at the sidewalks, trying to get a good look at each person I pass, hoping I might suddenly recognize my sister among them. I imagine pulling up beside her, demanding that she get in the car.

“What’s the matter?” she might ask, grinning, like her disappearance is nothing more than a hilarious practical joke. “Did I scare you?”

I’m so desperate to find her that the fantasy is pleasant in an achy sort of way. I let it continue, the scene unfolding in my mind with almost no effort on my part; it seems like my sister is describing it herself, from somewhere very far away.

“Here,” she says, pulling something from her pocket. “I have a present for you.” She opens her hand to reveal another peach-pit monkey. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”

I laugh. I reach into my pocket and produce my own identical carving.

My sister’s eyes twinkle. She rests her monkey in my palm. “Look,” she says, “they’re twins.”

But none of it is real. The longer I drive, the more sure I am that my sister isn’t walking around on these streets, waiting for me to stumble upon her. I make my way down a steep one-way hill that winds around the back of the hospital and brings me out next to the local Catholic school, whose parking lot offers a shortcut to Pennsylvania Avenue.

The Porsche is out of place among the other cars parked along the street, all of which appear old and beat up. Pieces of trash—mostly empty soda cans and cigarette butts—litter the cracked, uneven sidewalks. Pennsylvania Avenue used to be considered one of the worst streets in town. It spans four blocks cluttered with huge old homes, many of which are broken up into low-rent apartments. You can tell just by looking that it’s not a bright and happy place. Almost all the small front lawns are overgrown with weeds and strewn with random junk. For years this street was a notorious source of local drug activity. I think there have even been a few shootings.

Lately, though, people have been making efforts to clean up the area. About six months ago, a group of investors purchased most of the houses, a few of which are already undergoing renovations. The idea is to restore them to single-family dwellings and sell them for a huge profit once the whole street has been transformed. Marcus Hahn—my boss and Nicholas’s dad—is the leader of the investment group.

He personally owns six houses on this street, all of which are on the same block, directly behind the Catholic school. Three of them are still occupied by tenants whose leases don’t expire until the end of the year. Two of them are in the early stages of repair. And one of them is empty, the tenants gone since June, even though its cleanup isn’t scheduled to begin for another few weeks.

I know all of this because, for a couple of months now, Mr. Hahn has been letting Nicholas use the empty house to entertain friends after school and on weekends. He’s what you might call a permissive parent. Nicholas hasn’t had a curfew since eighth grade, and he told us that on Christmas last year, his dad gave him a box of condoms in his stocking.

Nicholas has a key to 340 Pennsylvania Avenue, and as far as I know, his dad has never bothered to check up on what happens here. He doesn’t care if we trash the place, Nicholas explained, because they’re just going to gut it in a few weeks anyway.

As soon as he got a key to the house, Nicholas promptly made copies to distribute among his friends—my sister and I got one to share, and I have it with me today. After I’ve knocked a few times, once I’m confident the place is empty for the moment, I dig my key from the front pocket of my bookbag and let myself inside.

“Hello?” I call, stepping into the foyer. “Is anybody here?”

The place is enormous; it’s one of the few homes on the street that never got split up into apartments. Still, it’s a
wreck inside. The hardwood floors are scratched and stained, probably beyond repair. The wallpaper in the dining and living rooms is peeling away in sheets. Little piles of rodent droppings line the baseboards. The electricity is still on, but almost none of the lights are functioning because the wiring is so bad. Even though the water works, there’s only one usable toilet in the house, down in the basement. The spaces behind the walls and ceilings are infested with squirrels; if you listen carefully, you can hear them running around inside, their little claws scratching against the wood.

The house is always packed with kids on weekend nights, but otherwise it’s usually empty. Over the summer, my sister would slip away sometimes, for a few hours here and there. She told me she liked being alone in this house. She said she’d lock all the doors and go up to the attic, where a huge window offers a panoramic view of the city.

“But what do you
do
?” I’d asked her more than once. I’ve been in the attic myself a few times; it’s filthy. Aside from the unfinished wooden floor, there’s nowhere to sit. The big window is painted shut, preventing any fresh air from getting in, so the room always smells musty and suffocating. Anytime sunlight shines through the dirty glass, you can see all the dust particles floating in the air.

My sister didn’t want to tell me how she spent her time alone here. All she would ever do is give me a little smile and say, “Everybody deserves to have a secret, don’t they?”

But she isn’t here today. I check almost the entire house
twice, calling out to her, looking in closets and behind doors, hoping that maybe she snuck over here last night and fell asleep, or got locked in somehow, or was just having too much fun by herself to bother coming home.

Even as I’m searching, I know I’m not going to find her here. The more I look, yelling her name—waiting for an answer and only hearing the
scratch, scratch, scratch
of the squirrels behind the walls—the more frantic and disappointed I become.

After maybe fifteen wasted minutes, I find myself standing at the foot of the basement stairs. It’s the only place I haven’t checked yet. The basement is unfinished; it has a dirt floor and low ceilings, from which plaster is falling off in chunks. Behind them are rusty pipes and old clusters of wires, their insulation chewed away by squirrels and whatever other creatures might be lurking behind the scenes.

A few Saturdays ago, after the first football game of the year, Nicholas had a party here that lasted until four a.m. Sunday morning. My sister and I both came, along with practically everyone else from school. Jill Allen, the secretary of our senior class, brought three jugs of homemade liquor that she’d stolen from her parents’ root cellar. Apparently it was some kind of family recipe going all the way back to Prohibition. We tried mixing it with everything we could think of—soda, juice, even Gatorade—but no matter what we used, our drinks tasted like poison and made our insides burn. The only upside was that we all got drunk very quickly. By
midnight we were a bunch of fools, stumbling all over one another, making so much noise that you could feel the walls vibrating. Eventually the chaos started to make me feel sick. Looking for a quiet spot to rest for a few minutes, I came down to the basement, which was the only unoccupied part of the house.

Pennsylvania Avenue runs along a steep hillside; all the homes are built so that their basements have doors and windows looking out the back, while their front rooms are basically underground. I’d only been down there a few seconds when I heard footsteps on the stairs, presumably someone looking to use the only functioning toilet in the house.

I’m not sure why I wanted to remain unseen so badly, but for some reason I hurried deeper into the basement, into a cool, windowless room toward the front of the house. It was dark, but once my eyes adjusted I could make out a crooked wooden door on the opposite wall.

When I lifted the latch, the door creaked open to reveal another set of steps, much steeper and more narrow than the main basement staircase. I felt the walls around me until my fingers touched a light switch. When I flipped it on, the space filled with dim light. Beyond the second set of stairs was what appeared to be
another
basement. A sub-basement.

Ordinarily, I would have been curious enough to go exploring. But I was drunk, and the space below me looked creepy enough that I didn’t want to check it out alone. I stepped a few feet into the stairwell so I could pull the door
shut behind me, intending to wait until whoever was using the bathroom had gone back upstairs.

I slipped and fell immediately. There was no banister to grab on to. I tumbled all the way down on my butt, the unfinished wooden stairs scraping the backs of my bare legs. I was tipsy enough that it didn’t hurt much, but I knew I was probably bleeding.

Once I’d recovered from my spill, I found myself in an area so tiny that it didn’t even qualify as a room. It was just a hollowed-out square of dirt, more of a crawl space than anything. But there was something nestled into one of the corners. Even in the dark, I recognized its shape. It was a duffel bag.

In hindsight, I don’t know why I took it back upstairs with me. I didn’t think there would be anything of value inside. I wasn’t even that curious. But I didn’t think it through at all—I was in a hurry—so I grabbed the bag and tucked it under my arm and limped out of the crawl space, the scrapes on the backs of my legs beginning to burn.

Whoever had come down to use the bathroom was gone. Alone again, I unzipped the bag and peered inside.

It was money.

I’d like to think that, if I hadn’t been drinking, I would have put it back where I found it. But that’s not what I did. Instead, I rolled the duffel bag into a ball and stuffed it up the front of my shirt. I kept my arms crossed against my chest as I went back to the party. I didn’t speak to anyone as
I walked out the door, straight to my aunt’s car parked on the street, and stowed the duffel bag under the front seat. Then I returned to the house and got myself a fresh drink. It didn’t occur to me until a few days later that whoever had hidden the money might come looking for it eventually. But did it really matter? Nobody had seen me take it. Nobody had even known I was in the basement.

Later on that week, as I sat on my bedroom floor and counted the bills for the fourth or fifth time, astounded each time by how much was there, I reassured myself that everything would be fine. I smiled. “Finders, keepers,” I whispered.