The Better Liar(18)

For a second we were motionless, staring at each other, linked invisibly by our ridiculous partnership. Then she stumbled across the room toward me. I could have brought my arms up to defend myself, but I didn’t. I let her fall against me. She clung to me, smelling of yesterday’s schnapps and Lanc?me powder and sweat. She hugged me, like I was saving her from something.



* * *



—

I slipped the cash back into Leslie’s wallet when she went to take a shower. When she came out, I was watching an infomercial about a food processor, with the bits and pieces of the hair-dye kit scattered around me on the mattress.

“I can’t open this,” I said, holding out the bottle of developer. “Hey, have you ever used one of these things? The chopper thing? Does it work?”

Leslie took the bottle from me and pulled at it. “They don’t chop things evenly,” she said. “So some stuff cooks all the way through, some gets burned…It’s a—let’s go into the bathroom, I feel like this is going to explode—it’s a scam.”

I gathered up the rest of the kit and followed her meekly into the stuffy motel bathroom. “Am I going to have to watch videos?” I blurted suddenly, watching her wrench at the cap.

“What?” Leslie glanced up, her ears peeking through her wet hair.

“Like of Robin,” I said, the name feeling foreign in my mouth. “Do I need to, like, watch videos of her so I can pretend to be her?”

She frowned and pulled again at the developer bottle. The cap came free at last and Leslie sighed in relief. “We never made home videos or anything. There’s a few photos of us in old albums and things, but…it’s really just signing her name. I guess you could practice her signature, but I doubt anyone’s going to be looking that closely at it.” She swallowed and handed the bottle back to me. “You just have to act normal. You don’t even have to act like you like me. She definitely didn’t.”

    “What if I get caught?” I asked. The bathroom lights were bright blue fluorescent, washing us both out in the mirror. “What if they find out I’m not her?”

“Albert—the lawyer—he’s met her maybe twice, more than ten years ago,” she said. “If I say you’re her, I’m the one who would know. I don’t have any other close relatives. Dave’s never met her. There’s almost zero chance that you’ll get caught. But there is a risk. It’s fifty thousand dollars and it’s not really your money.”

I poured the developer into the dye and shook the bottle. “And no one knows she’s dead? She’ll be in the city records as Rachel Vawhatever?”

“Rachel Vreeland,” she said. “Yes. No one knows except me, I’m pretty sure. She was living under the other name since she moved to Las Vegas, I think.”

I put on the plastic gloves and lifted the bottle to my hairline.

“How did you end up in Vegas?” Leslie asked, watching me spread the dye along my scalp.

I hesitated. “A boy,” I said at last, dragging out the second word. “He lived out here. A little older than me. He helped me move and everything, set me up in his apartment. It didn’t work out, but it sure was nice while it lasted.” I made it sound more romantic than it was so that Leslie wouldn’t think I was a sucker.

“Where were you from before?”

“My folks are in Texas. Outside Dallas. I don’t talk to them now. They didn’t much like me running off to Vegas for a guy.” I sucked in air through my teeth as I spread more dye across the back of my head. “Gosh, this stings! I didn’t know it was gonna hurt.” I looked in the mirror, at Leslie behind me, her broad shoulders and long pale face. There was a funny flat spot just at the bridge of her nose. “Come on, distract me,” I said. “Tell me something about you. Something Robin would know.”

    Her forehead twitched, and she leaned against the damp sand-colored tiles, folding her arms. “My middle name’s Elizabeth. After my grandmother.”

“Aww,” I said, scrunching my fingers in my hair. “Were y’all close?”

Leslie shook her head.

“How about you and Robin?” I said. “You made it seem like she didn’t like you much. You were the older one, right?”

“Four years,” Leslie said, seeming to shrink against the wall. “When we were really little, I guess we were close. We shared a room and everything. Then when I was in middle school she got her own room and suddenly she hated me.”

“Wow,” I said. “Like, for no reason?”

Leslie lifted a shoulder. “I never really thought about it. She was just a kid. You can’t blame kids for things.”

I finished scrunching dye into my hair and came over to crouch on the tile floor. After a minute, Leslie slid down the wall next to me. “I gotta wait on this stuff,” I said. “Twenty minutes. Tell me more. How did your parents meet?”

Leslie’s shoulder brushed against mine, and a little more color came into her voice. “He was older. He was forty-four when they met and she was twenty-six. He was a lawyer, so he didn’t really have time to date. He met my mom at a restaurant where the department store she worked at was having a Christmas party. He said when she used to tell the story, she said she almost didn’t go to the party because she was getting over the flu. She sat in the corner and coughed and coughed, and he brought her a glass of water, and then he asked her out. She said she would go out with him if she was well by New Year’s. He had a care package of cough medicine and Kleenex and soup delivered to her store. So then she had to go out with him.” She smiled, crooked tooth on display.