Familiar Lies (3 page)

Max felt hot anger flash inside him. “He was just a kid. And you’re married!”

“I told you it was a mistake. My marriage is doing okay now, but for a while, it wasn’t. Josh was in the wrong place at the wrong time and it just happened.”

“You’re a grown woman, old enough to be his mother,” Max said, the fire still burning in his belly. “You should have known better.”

“I did know better. I’ve already admitted that. I said it was a mistake, what more do you want from me? I can’t go back in time and change it. If I could, I swear to God I would.”

Max paused, eyeing her and watching her reaction. A tear streamed down from her cheek and she wiped it away quickly. This woman, this middle-aged housewife slept with his underage son. The realization of that had only begun to sink in, but Max pushed on with his questioning. He could process the revelations later.

Max removed the letter from his pocket and handed it to Vanessa. She read it carefully before handing it back to him. “Where did you find this?”

“In Max’s room, underneath his desk.”

“Hidden there?”

“Maybe. Do you know who these other people are? Who is Julie? Who’s Gabe? Caldwell? None of these names mean anything to me.”

“And they shouldn’t. You don’t want to know.”

“I’ll decide what I want to know.”

“Look, Mr. Williamson, you loved your son. That much is obvious. Please, for your sake and the sake of his memory, just leave it alone.”

“I can’t just leave it alone. This letter says that somebody was watching my son, maybe even following him. That person might have killed him.”

“Josh was prone to making up stories,” Vanessa said. “That letter is embellished. He probably just needed some attention.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He told stories, to me and others, that’s all.”

“If it’s all made up then why are you so afraid?”

Vanessa sighed. “Just leave it alone, okay?” She implored him now with her eyes. “For everyone’s sake, just leave it alone.”

“Josh was everything to me,” Max said. “Surely you can understand that, having one of your own.”

“I can, which is why I’m asking that you let this go. Move on with your life as best as you can. Remember your boy as you knew him and try to rebuild. It’s all you can do.”

Max took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Anger raged inside him, but he pushed it down. “That’s not possible now. Not after this letter, not after all the possibilities it opens up.”

Vanessa looked Max in the eye. He saw a mixture of emotions in her face; fear, anger and shame. He also saw sincerity.

“Please, Mr. Williamson. Your boy is gone and that breaks my heart. What I did was inexcusable; not a day goes by that I don’t think about that. I have a full bottle of valium in my nightstand drawer that could use to make all this go away, but I have my family to consider. I know you can understand that.”

Max didn’t reply.

Vanessa reached out and touched Max’s hand. He wanted to recoil, but he didn’t. The touch of this woman, so despicable and yet so sincere, seemed to help just a little bit. “Your son is gone. Honor the memories you have. Please don’t pursue this. Don’t go to the club, don’t try to find Julie. She’s had it hard enough already. None of this will bring your son back.”

“I need to know.”

Vanessa nodded. “I know you think you do, but you don’t.” She stood, putting on her sunglasses and leaving the coffee behind, untouched. “For what it’s worth, Mr. Williamson, try to remember that we all have different sides that we show people. Josh showed you the side of himself you were supposed to see. That’s all we can expect of anyone.”

Vanessa left the table, exiting through the front door. The attached bell rang softly as the door opened and closed. Max watched her get into a silver BMW and back out of the parking space. As she pulled away, Max committed the license plate to memory just as the waitress reappeared.

“Anything else I can get you?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied. “A pen.”

Max returned home from the diner and by ten o’clock found himself parked in front of his laptop. He started with county public records, searching for the only clue that Vanessa had given him: the club.

Max didn’t know what kind of club it was, who owned it, or how it played into what happened to Josh. But he had a few names to go on and it was worth a shot to see if any of them shook out.

Navigating the government website took considerable time and before he knew it an hour had passed. There was no way he’d make any headway before midnight and working the following day would be impossible. He’d never be able to keep his mind on the job. He could take vacation time, maybe even through the following week. He had enough saved up and if they called him on it then he’d tell them the anniversary of his son’s death had taken a toll on him. It certainly wouldn’t be lying, but using Josh’s death that way made Max feel like a heel.

But he’d promised that he’d find out who did this to his son and that promise needed to be kept, regardless of how it made him feel.

By one o’clock a.m. Max found himself no closer to matching a name with a club than he had been when he started. He searched all the business licenses granted to nightclubs in the county for the past ten years, but none of the names on the applications matched with the names in Josh’s letter.

Did you really think it would be that easy?
a little voice in his head asked. The same voice that had been speaking to him as of late, something inside that he never knew existed before.

No, he hadn’t thought it would be that easy, but he’d hoped. He wondered if the voice in his head was simply inner dialogue or a sign that he was under too much mental stress. He didn’t actually
hear
the voice—not with his ears, at least—and he knew it was his own. That was enough to convince himself that he wasn’t cracking up…at least not just yet.

If the county records wouldn’t give up the tie then Max knew that he’d have to do it the old fashioned way. He wouldn’t get to the bottom of what happened to Josh by surfing the Internet. No, he’d have to get out there and beat the streets, ask questions, stir up the hornet’s nest.

It occurred to Max that maybe Vanessa was right. Maybe this situation was a hornet’s nest. Maybe this entire business should be dropped altogether, but to not do anything, to let someone get away with killing his baby boy simply wasn’t an option.

Max would know what happened that day a year ago. He would know what happened, even if it killed him.

As Max sat at the dining room table staring at the laptop screen, the sound of a closet door opening came from inside Josh’s room. Max looked up and stared at the closed door, his heart suddenly racing. He sat there, wondering what could have made that sound. Probably just the house making its usual groaning at night; nothing unusual.

But it did sound unusual. Despite knowing better, Max found his skin turning to gooseflesh as he listened hard to the sound of the house in the wee hours of the morning.

Then he heard the sound of footsteps from behind Josh’s door. They were faint but perceptible. Like the sound of his son walking across his room, from the closet to his bed.

“That’s impossible,” Max said out loud into the lonely house. His voice sounded like a bomb going off in the silence. He stood, noticing the stiffness in his legs. How long had he been sitting at that table? Three, maybe four hours? He suddenly had to pee in a bad way.

He stepped away from the table and took a step toward the hallway leading to the bathroom before stopping. The hallway led past Josh’s room and Max suddenly found himself hesitant to make the trip.

You’re being silly
, the voice in his head told him.
Just go.

But he didn’t want to. Something kept him rooted to the spot.

Get moving
, the voice prompted.

Max got moving. He walked into the hallway and stood outside Josh’s door, staring at the handle for a few moments before reaching down and grasping it. It was cold to the touch. His heart galloped in his chest as all the spit dried up in his mouth. The urge to pee had gone away, replaced with the cold anticipation of what he’d find when he opened that door.

Max’s mind wandered and he could almost see himself opening the door to find Josh sitting there on the end of his perfectly made bed, headphones on, listening to some kind of hard rock. Max would smile and wave and Josh would return it while the muted music escaped from the headphones.

Max twisted the knob and pushed the door open.

He stood at the threshold and glanced inside the room to find the bed empty, just as he knew it would be. The foot of the bed was a little creased from where Max had been sitting earlier when he read the letter. He couldn’t help but feel that he’d violated something sacred by sitting there.

Or maybe he felt he’d violated Josh’s privacy by reading the letter in the first place. It hadn’t been meant for Max, it had been meant for whoever Julie was. Max considered what Vanessa had said about people choosing what side of themselves they showed to others. He wondered what side she showed to her husband and son. Surely not the cougar milf who took advantage of a seventeen year old boy.

But Max couldn’t help but shake the notion that maybe Vanessa was the one who’d been taken advantage of.

He glanced at the closet door and the breath caught in his throat. He blinked hard, trying to rid his eyes of the fatigue and force them to work properly.

The closet door stood slightly ajar.

Surely it had been closed when he left the room earlier. Max hadn’t touched it, had he? He racked his brain, trying to remember opening the closet and couldn’t remember doing so a single time since Josh had passed.

Maybe the door came open on its own
, he thought.
That had to be it. Houses come alive at night; they inhale, they exhale. They yawn and stretch.

Surely that had to be the explanation.

Max stepped into his son’s room and walked to the closet. He touched the handle and had the wild idea to open it. His mind seemed to come a little unhinged and he could imagine his son’s body in there, his neck snapped from the fall, his arms and legs broken, bones protruding from compound fractures, his face smashed and deformed. The type of injuries that require a closed casket.

Max saw his son’s face in his mind—terrible and clear—just as it had been on the day he’d been forced to identify his body. He hadn’t thought of that day in a long time, effectively blocking it out until this moment. Now it came back like a ghost from his past, there for a reckoning long overdue.

Max pushed the closet door closed. It clicked loudly in the quiet room as it shut. He turned back toward the bed, expecting to see his son there.

Of course the bed sat there painfully empty.

You’re tired
, Max told himself. You just need some sleep.
This will seem like a silly dream in the morning.

He told himself that, but nonetheless he slept with the light on that night.

The following day Max took the rest of the week off last minute, calling in from home to let his boss know. Ken Tomlin wasn’t a bad guy to work for and sounded more disappointed than mad at the news. “We’ll make do,” he told Max before hanging up. Ken didn’t deserve the kind of half-ass job Max had been doing for the past year, but things were what they were, for lack of a better, more justified reason.

Max slept in that morning until almost eleven o’clock, rising and getting dressed by noon. He had a light lunch and prepared for the day, figuring out where to go next. Last night he’d had no luck finding club owners with any of the names listed in Josh’s letter, but he didn’t plan on letting that stop him. He had two working feet, after all, and he planned to get them stepping.

By four o’clock Max hoped it would be close enough to opening time to get started. He didn’t have much of a game plan outside of showing up at every club he could find and simply asking questions. Not the best-laid plan, more like throwing everything against the wall to see what stuck, but at least he was doing
something
. And something was better than nothing at all.

He doubted there’d be much business on a Wednesday night and maybe he could find somebody ready to talk. Worth a shot.

Max left the house with a printed list of night clubs in a ten-mile radius. He hadn’t realized how many there would be and how much he’d have to rely on his phone’s GPS to find them. He stopped first at a dive bar called Mallon’s and encountered a short and squat man built like a fire hydrant who greeted him with squinty eyes and a pleasant demeanor. Ultimately he proved unhelpful, but it gave Max some hope that he wouldn’t run into a brick wall everywhere.

Max visited four more bars; one with live music, another Mexican themed. A couple more had little more than bare floors and pool tables, all serving watered down mainstream brand beers and some heart-stopping junk food.

It occurred to him as he drove away from the last bar visited that maybe he was headed in the wrong direction, chasing down the wrong kind of places.

Maybe he needed to check the strip clubs.

Josh wouldn’t do that
, the voice in his mind countered.
He was underage.

But his underage son had had a relationship with Vanessa Simmons, a very average and very married housewife. All things considered, the strip club surely wasn’t an impossibility.

He stopped the car and ran a search on his phone, bringing back all the strip clubs in the area. They were clustered together in the same part of town, likely zoned for that kind of activity. The politicians’ way of keeping the revenue coming while keeping the riffraff out of the high tax areas.

Choosing the first place at random, Max pulled out and headed toward a place affectionately called
The Hustle
.

* * *

Max pulled into the gravel-lined parking lot of
The Hustle
, his tires crunching as he avoided potholes and searched for a spot. He found one close to the door, his suspicion that a Wednesday night would be slow proving true. He got out of the car and took a deep breath, smelling car exhaust and beer hops.