Beautiful Lies

“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.”