Beautiful Lies (24 page)

twenty-six

I got out of there as fast as I could. Looking back, I realize there were a thousand questions I should have asked Dr. Hauser—a real private investigator wouldn’t have freaked the way I did and bolted—but I didn’t know how long I could hold that fake smile and nod my thanks for his help. I felt like there was a siren going off in my head and I was walking on one of those fun-house floors that jolt and tilt. So as soon as he handed me the number, I left. I didn’t ask him about Jake, about Project Rescue.

I yanked the crumpled door open on the Jeep (it still opened and closed but not without effort) and climbed inside. I sat there a minute in the cold. It was growing dark outside now and the snow that had started to fall was growing heavier. I turned the engine on and realized as I reached to put the car into reverse that I didn’t have any idea where to go next. I fished my cellular phone out of my coat and dialed.

“Salvo.” He answered before the second ring, his voice gruff, tired but officious.

“It’s Ridley Jones.”

A sigh, then silence. “You tipped him off. And now he’s gone.”

I didn’t respond to his statement. I wasn’t going to incriminate myself, but I didn’t feel like lying anymore, either. “Is his car still impounded?” I asked instead. That was the reason I’d called, or one of them. I had to know whether Jake had tried to kill me.

“What?”

“The Firebird,” I said, sounding a little snappish, tense. “Is it still impounded?”

He was quiet for a minute. “We never impounded his car, Ridley.”

My heart sank a little further in my chest and I fought back tears of disappointment and fear.

“I’m in trouble, Detective Salvo. Someone tried to kill me.” My voice sounded odd, even to my own ears, tinny and strained. Even then, I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to say,
I think Jake tried to run me off the road in his Firebird.

“Come in to the station. I can’t protect you if I don’t know where you are.” He sounded calm and concerned, gentle. But I didn’t trust him, either. Maybe he was just trying to coax me.

“I need to find out what’s happening to me,” I said, trying to sound firm and together. “Did you look into those missing kids I told you about? Or were you just humoring me?”

I heard some papers rustling in the background. “I did some nosing around, just because I said I would. All the parents are dead…except for Marjorie Mathers, mother of Brian. She’s serving a life sentence for murder at Rahway State Penitentiary for Women.”

“Doesn’t it seem odd to you?”

“What? That all these kids went missing and were never found? Sad to say, it happens more often than people want to admit.”

“Okay. But then most of the parents die?”

“Well, I mean, these are what we call high-risk people. You know, their lives and habits put them in dangerous situations. Drug addicts, right? Drinkers who don’t think twice about getting into a car. People who get in bar fights. I mean, think about it. People like you, Ridley, are low risk. You obey the law—up until now, anyway. You’re responsible to yourself and the people around you. You’re less likely to meet with a violent and early death because of your choices. If you’d had too much to drink, you’d probably choose to get a cab or call a friend than get behind the wheel. A choice, which, poorly made, might result in your death and the death of three teenage girls…or not.”

Choices. We were back to that, the things that determine the course of your life. Was it that simple? Some of us are high risk and some of us low? Some of us made bad choices and some of us made wise ones? And these choices determined whether we were happy or miserable, healthy or unhealthy, loved or unloved? I had to wonder, What informed these choices? The obvious answer is our parents, the people who loved or didn’t love us, raised us well or poorly. There were other factors, of course. But did it just come down to whether someone loved us enough to teach us how to make the right choices for ourselves?

No. It’s not that simple. Life never is. I mean, look at Ace and me. We were raised by the same people in the same house. Totally different outcomes; we’ve made totally different choices in our lives. Like I said, how you were raised
is
part of the big picture. It’s one important factor in a million. But in the end, it’s not just the big and small events that make you who you are, make your life what it is, it’s how you choose to react to them. That’s where you have control over your life. I believe that.

“So what about these kids? Their parents were poor—high risk, as you say. Everyone who might have loved them is dead. No one ever figures out what happened to them. And, oh well?”

I heard Detective Salvo sigh again on the other end of the phone. “It was thirty years ago. I’d say the trail has gone cold.”

“If someone was alive to love those kids, they’d still love them even thirty years later.”

“Now you sound like Marjorie Mathers.”

“You talked to her?”

“I told you I’d look into it.”

“And?”

Another heavy sigh. Or maybe it was that he was smoking, releasing these sharp exhales. “She says two men dressed in black with masks over their faces came in that night and took her boy. She thought her husband had hired them because they were duking it out over custody. She claimed he abused the kid and she was gunning for full custody and supervised visitation only for the father.”

He paused and cleared his throat. I heard him sifting again through papers.

“Thing was, you know, she didn’t call the police until the next morning. Claims she was knocked out by some drug and didn’t recover consciousness until the next day. But there was no evidence of that. The police didn’t believe her story. So both she and her husband were suspects. And she wasn’t very credible—had a history of depression and suicide attempts. Says in the report that she was hysterical.”

I laughed a little. “Wouldn’t you be?”

“So she killed her husband ‘by accident,’ trying to find out what happened to her son. But she got murder one, anyway. Jury didn’t buy it. And that was that.”

“Brian got lost again.”

“Yeah, I guess he did. They had the case open for another year. I can see from the file that they followed procedure.”

“For all the good it did,” I said. “What did she say when you talked to her?”

“She’s a little nuts,” said Detective Salvo unkindly. “I talked to her on the phone. She’s sticking to her story, anyway. Says a day doesn’t go by she doesn’t cry for her little boy, wonder where he is. She swears he’s still alive.”

“Let me ask you. Did she mention that a private investigator had been to see her awhile ago?”

The detective was quiet a minute. “Yeah, she did. How do you know that?”

“I’ve been following this trail and he’s been everywhere I’ve been so far.”

“Harley Jacobsen?” he asked.

I didn’t answer.

“What does that tell you?” he said.

I didn’t say anything. The last light had gone from the sky and I was sitting in the dark. The air blowing from the vents was tepid at best. I knew the car wouldn’t really warm up until it was moving. The dials on the dash glowed orange and green. The radio was turned down low, but I could hear a low murmur of voices coming from the speakers.

“Well, it tells
me
something,” he said when I didn’t answer. “It tells me you were the last stop on that trail, Ridley. That he followed it to you and he’s using you to get what he wants.”

The words hit me hard. I hadn’t really thought of that. It made sense now. Made sense like a lead boot in the stomach. I thought of him coming to my door that night, just after I’d received the letter from Christian Luna. I thought of the invitation I found at my doorstep, the bottle of wine and apology. Thought about the way I’d told him everything that first night. The man on the staircase. The second note and the newspaper clipping that he was so quick to identify.
They lied.
That’s what the note had said and I had wondered how anyone could know what my parents had said to me. He knew because
I’d told him.
My mind struggled with it all. I thought of Christian Luna. He was real; I knew that much. But who had killed him? Jake? Why would he do that? Why would he lead me to him and then kill him? It didn’t make sense.

“What does he want?” I said, more thinking aloud than really asking.

“I don’t know, Ridley,” said Detective Salvo, startling me. I’d forgotten I was on the phone with him. “But let me help you, okay? Just come on in and we’ll figure everything out.”

Gus Salvo was a nice man. He was a good cop, and though I didn’t doubt that he wanted to help me, my gut told me that he couldn’t, that I was on my own if I wanted to find out the truth. I was swimming in an ocean of lies and my instincts were the only thing keeping me from going under. So I hung up on poor Detective Salvo without another word and pulled out of the Little Angels parking lot. I drove the battered Jeep back to the city, watching out nervously for the Firebird and for cop cars all the way home.

I returned the Jeep to the after-hours drop-off lot, left the keys and the documents in the cup holder. I began walking out of there and the attendant, a young black woman with ironed hair, red and purple bejeweled nails, and the biggest gold hoop earrings I’ve ever seen, looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.

“You’re going to have to
pay
for that,” she said. “That car’s
damaged.
” She grabbed the paperwork from the car and started marking up the little diagram of a car with a red pen.

“That’s fine. You have all my information,” I said. I couldn’t care less. Before all of this I would have felt bad if I’d left a cigarette burn on the seat of a rental car, would have felt terribly irresponsible, but that seemed like a very long time ago and a very different Ridley. Now all I could think about was lying down. I went back to the hotel on Washington Square. I didn’t do any transportation acrobatics. I just walked; it wasn’t far from where I’d left the car.

I walked into the dingy lobby and got into the small elevator, exited on the third floor, which smelled like mold and mothballs even though it looked as if it had been newly renovated. I let myself into my room and climbed onto the stiff mattress with its scratchy comforter. I lay there in the dark for a second, my mind totally blank, my body numb. And then I fell into a black, dreamless sleep.

twenty-seven

Carl Jung believed in a shadow self, a dark side to each of us that we learn to hide. Within this darkness dwells our forbidden appetites, our secret beliefs about ourselves and the world around us, the ugly traits and flaws that we hate and seek to bury. But Jung held that there was no denying this part of ourselves, that the more we tried to hide it, pretend it didn’t exist, the more audaciously the universe would conspire to reveal it. He maintained that this shadow craved more than anything to be recognized and embraced. Only when we have forgiven it can we truly be whole, truly be free.

I awoke with a start in my hotel room. It took a few seconds to orient myself and then another few for everything that had happened to me in the last few days to come back in an ugly rush. I flipped on the light by the bed and half of me expected to see Jake sitting in the chair by the window. But he wasn’t. I was alone.

For the first time since leaving Dr. Hauser’s office, I allowed myself to reflect on what he’d told me. My father was Jessie Amelia Stone’s pediatrician. He knew her. Could it be a coincidence? Carl Jung would say that there is no coincidence, only synchronicity, the forces of the universe colluding to introduce us to our shadows. In this moment, lying in a space that was completely sterile and that offered me no comfort whatsoever, I now had to fully face what I think, on some level, I had always known. That my life up until the moment when I received the note from Christian Luna had been a series of beautiful lies. Beautiful lies that had made me happy, provided me with a good life, lies that were told no doubt out of love, but lies nonetheless.

I still hadn’t quite fit the pieces together, the why and how and who of what had happened to me. But it was clear that Ridley Jones was born on the night that Teresa Stone had been murdered in her home. And that my parents (of course, I still thought of them that way) must have had knowledge of that fact but were invested enough in hiding it that they had feigned ignorance on three separate occasions.

I also deduced that someone else, someone separate from them, was equally invested in preventing my discovery of these things, invested enough that they would have me followed, kill Christian Luna, and try to run me off the road to deter me from pursuing the truth. Why did I think this? Because I
knew
my parents. For all their flaws and mistakes, for all their lies and half-truths, I knew they loved me, would rather die themselves than see me hurt. Whatever it was they had to hide, they would never sacrifice
me
to hide it. I was in real danger and the only way I could escape it was to wrap myself back up in those beautiful lies, pretend that all of this was a terrible dream, and go back to sleep. But, of course, I couldn’t do that now. Once you’ve started down that road to self-discovery, no matter how treacherous the path before you, you can’t turn back. The universe doesn’t allow it.

And where did Jake fit into this? Was he friend or enemy, lover or assassin? I didn’t know. He had lied to me, yes. I believed that he knew who I was before I ever met him. And in thinking on it, I was sure that he had sent that second envelope. The first had come from Christian Luna, but the second one had come from Jake. Still, I couldn’t forget the way he had looked at me, the way he held and made love to me. I couldn’t forget the way he had laid the ugliness of his past before me, made himself vulnerable to me in that way. For all the lies, there was something real there, too. But for all I knew I might never see him again. He might be gone for good.

It was two in the morning when I left the hotel room again. There’s a hush over the city at this time of night, like a breath drawn and held. The street was quiet, dozing, but the city seemed restless. Or maybe it was just me. I smelled bacon and coffee as I walked past an all-night diner. I could smell wood burning from someone’s fireplace. The air was cold, and a slight wind snaked down the collar of my shirt. I was tired to the core, my eyes heavy, and I had that nausea that you get from lack of sleep.

I walked up the stoop and pressed the buzzer. Once. Twice. Three times.

“Hello?” A tired voice, alarmed.

“It’s Ridley.”

“Holy shit, Ridley,” he said, and pressed the buzzer to let me in.

I waited for the elevator. I had come to the only person who knew me and my parents. The only person I thought might have some answers. Zachary.

He stood waiting for me at his apartment door in his boxers and his Rutgers University sweatshirt, his blond hair tussled, his face creased with sleep. He embraced me and I let him take me into his arms, even though I didn’t lift my arms to him. It felt good to be held, even by him. He led me inside and took my coat. I sat on the couch while he made me a cup of tea. Then he sat beside me on his couch while I drank it, not saying a word. Finally:

“Ridley, are you going to tell me what’s going on?” He was gentle and looked at me with such worry. I remembered how harshly I’d treated him the last time I saw him and I felt bad (but not too bad—he had been
way
out of line). Well, you know by now how prone I am to spilling my guts. The story came out in a tumble. I told him everything but omitted a lot of the stuff with Jake. I didn’t want to hurt him any more than I already had.

When I’d finished, he leaned back and shook his head. “Whoa. You’ve been through the wringer, Ridley.” He put a comforting hand on my shoulder. I had pulled my shoes off and was sitting cross-legged beside him. It was nice to be somewhere familiar and comfortable that had never been mine. The leather couch, the big-screen television, the clutter of Knicks paraphernalia, the bar lined with his collection of beer cans.

“Yeah,” I admitted. “It’s been a little rough.”

“Listen,” he said. “Why don’t you take my bed and try to get some sleep. I’ll sleep out here on the couch. And in the morning, when you’re rested, you take a fresh look at some of this stuff. I think things are going to seem a lot different after you’ve had some sleep.”

“What?” I said. “No, Zachary. I can’t sleep right now. I need answers. That’s why I’m here.”

He looked at me with that same expression of worry, and instead of being comforted by it, I wanted to punch him. Suddenly it didn’t look like concern as much as condescension. He leaned forward and rested his forearms on his thighs, steepled his fingers. I felt a lecture coming on. “I want you to consider something for a moment, Rid.”

“Consider what?”

“I know you’ve had a hard couple of days. But I want you to stop for a second and ask yourself if any of this seems reasonable to you.”

“Reasonable?”

“Yeah. Has it occurred to you that this whole thing is just bullshit? That the psycho who started all of this and your ‘friend’ Jake were lying? That this whole thing is just some kind of scam?”

It struck me as a ridiculous thing to say and I was amazed that he could even suggest it. “A scam? What would any of them have to gain? Have you been listening to me?”

“Yes, I have been,” he said slowly. “Have you been listening to yourself?”

I shook my head in confusion. He didn’t believe me.

“I mean, what makes you so ready to listen to these total strangers over your own father?” he asked.

“Zack, I just
told
you that he was Jessie Stone’s pediatrician.”

He shrugged. “So what, Ridley? Your father has been doing clinic work for longer than you’ve been alive. He’s probably seen thousands of kids at these clinics. And yeah, some of them have probably gone missing or died from illness or neglect or abuse. But that doesn’t mean he had anything to do with it.”

I just looked at him. I felt this veil of confusion fall over my thoughts. If you questioned the basic truth of what had happened to me, then every single one of the events that had occurred in the last few days could be explained away as the elements of a very complicated lie, some kind of plot to make me question my identity. I entertained the idea for a second, the way you might daydream about winning the lottery or moving to the Caribbean. Sitting in the warmth and comfort of Zachary’s living room, I could almost be convinced. It would be so easy to let him convince me that I had been deceived and manipulated, suffered from a kind of temporary insanity. I could check into someplace plush in the country for a little “rest” and recover from my nervous breakdown. And when I got out, I could marry Zack and have children and we’d all be one big happy family. We’d forget all about poor Ridley’s little “episode.”

I lay back on the couch, closed my eyes, and tried it on. Was it possible? But the question “Why?” was the one that couldn’t be answered. Why would anyone do this? Even Ace, who maybe did have reason to hate me, to be consumed by some kind of irrational jealousy—what would he have to gain?

Zack rested a comforting hand on my forehead. I opened my eyes and looked at him. He wore a relieved smile.

“Just rest awhile,” he said. “This is all going to look different in the morning.”

He grabbed the oversize chenille Knicks blanket I’d given him for his birthday last year and pulled it over me. I could almost imagine doing it, lying there and letting him take care of me. He’d sit with me awhile, until he thought I was sleeping. Then he’d go in the other room and call my parents, tell them I was all right and that he was going to take care of me. It would have been the easiest, most familiar thing for me to do.

“Tell me about Project Rescue,” I said.

The relief dropped from his face, the smile faded. Annoyance took its place.

“You need to move past this, Ridley,” he said. “You can’t believe someone like Christian Luna over your own father.”

At another point in my life, I might have missed it. It might have slipped past me. But that Ridley was gone. I smiled at Zachary. I imagine it was a sad, angry smile because that’s what I was feeling. I sat up and threw the blanket off of me.

“I never told you his name,” I said quietly.

“What?”

“Christian Luna. I never said his name.”

“Yes, you did, Ridley,” he said, looking at me sadly.

But I hadn’t and I was certain of that. In fact, I had purposely omitted the name for reasons I couldn’t have explained at the time. He could pretend that he thought I was insane but I knew that I wasn’t.

“Ridley. Please.”

I looked at Zachary then and realized that there had been more than just wanting my freedom, more than just not loving him enough, that had led me to leave him. It was something about him that I had intuited but had never had proof of, something that had disturbed me on a subliminal level. I had caught a glimpse of it when he’d let himself into my apartment that day. I was feeling it now but still couldn’t put into words exactly what it was. I stood up slowly and reached for my coat. He stood with me, and when I looked into his face again, he was someone I didn’t recognize.

“If you leave here, I won’t be responsible for what happens to you.” His voice cracked when he said it but his eyes were flat and cold.

“What’s Project Rescue, Zack?” I asked, and I heard my voice quaver. I was scared of him, I realized. Physically afraid. I started backing toward the door.

He heard the fear in my voice, too. He looked surprised by it, as if I’d slapped him. And for a second he was the man I had loved once. “Rid, please. Don’t look at me like that. I would never hurt you. You know that.”

But I didn’t want to see any more lying faces, any more masks.

“What is it, Zack?” I was screaming now.

“Calm down. Stop yelling,” he pleaded, looking past me down the hall. “Project Rescue is exactly what your father told you it was. It’s an organization that gives frightened mothers an alternative to abandoning their babies in the street. It’s nothing more than that.”

“You’re a liar.”

“No. It’s the truth.”

I didn’t say anything and he sighed and sat down on the couch. “The child welfare system wasn’t always what it is today. Now, whatever its flaws, at least it errs on the side of safety for the child. But in the seventies, it wasn’t like that. It was hard to get a kid away from an abuse situation. Physicians a lot of times had a front-row seat to the systematic neglect and abuse of a child that would eventually end in that child’s death. Their hands were tied.”

“What are you saying?” I asked. But I was starting to see. I was starting to understand. The missing piece I’d sensed during the conversation with my father.

“I’m saying that there were some people that couldn’t stand by and watch. They couldn’t live with themselves.”

“People like my father and Uncle Max.”

“Among others. Including my mother,” he said, looking up from the floor and meeting my eyes.

I remembered Esme saying,
I’d have done anything for that man.
The words took on a different meaning. I wondered what she had done for Max.

“That’s enough, Zack.” The voice made me spin around. There was Esme in a pink pajama-and-robe set. I remembered how she sometimes stayed on the futon in Zack’s study when her work kept her late in the city. I used to love the nights when she was there and we’d all cook dinner together and rent a video, make popcorn.

“Ridley,” she said softly. “You’re making a terrible mistake, honey.”

I looked at her. “What mistake am I making?”

“Dredging up the past like this. It won’t be good for any of us.”

“I haven’t dredged up anything. It’s coming up on its own.”

She shook her head, seemed about to say something but then clamped her mouth shut.

“Do you know who I am, Esme?”

“I do, Ridley. I do know who you are. The question is: Why don’t you?”

She wore a sympathetic smile that didn’t do much to hide frightened eyes. I looked to Zack, hoping to see something in his face that I recognized.

His face was pale, his eyes filled with anger and something else. It was a look I recognized from my years with him. It had never been directed at me before, but I had seen it when he talked about certain patients he saw at the free clinic where he worked once a week with my father. It was usually accompanied by a comment like “Some people don’t deserve to have children.” I used to mistake it as passion, a passion for his work, a love for children, a sadness that so many of them fell through the cracks of the system. But now I saw it for what it was: judgment, a lack of compassion, arrogance.