The Better Liar(2)

Her real name wasn’t anywhere in the wallet, or anywhere in the rest of the room. She had a lot of stuff, but most of it was clothes, strewn across the floor and piled in the closet. I picked through the items with pockets, careful of cockroaches, but turned up only old movie tickets and gas-station receipts. The walls were covered in movie posters and a corkboard with photographs of friends with red Solo cups, a scruffy orange cat, a long-lost boyfriend from whenever the last time was she was weighty enough to crush to his side while he held the camera out in front of them. The dresser drawers held dozens of bottles of disintegrating nail polish and depleted pans of eye shadow. At least fifty pairs of underwear, which I pushed aside with a clothes hanger, scraping the bottom of the drawer: nothing underneath.

    I shook out each of her shoes next—cowboy boots, Toms, slip-on sneakers—turning the left and then the right upside down.

Something fell out of the right one. I’d been expecting Robin’s real ID, or maybe a baggie, so the anticlimax startled me: a pair of pearl earrings, so light that they made barely any noise against the carpeted floor. For a moment I thought they must be insects, moths, alive inside Robin’s shoes, and their brief bouncing trajectory across the floor was translated by my gaze as mad, frenzied flapping; then I blinked, and they resolved into dead objects.

It took me several seconds to realize why I was staring at them. When it came to me I snatched them up so quickly that my fingernails scraped the carpet. My mother’s earrings. Five-pointed, like stars, each seed grasped by a minuscule gold claw. I hadn’t seen them since I was a little girl. I suppose I thought they’d been buried with her, or my father had sold them. But here they were in Robin’s cramped rented room in Las Vegas.

Had Daddy given them to her and never told me?

He wouldn’t have done that. She didn’t deserve them. I was the one who’d made his doctors’ appointments, helped him swallow, taken him to the movies every Sunday. Robin had done nothing but call occasionally, after she turned sixteen and disappeared.

He hadn’t given them to her. Probably she’d stolen them the night she left. She’d taken forty dollars out of my purse that night too.

I rubbed my thumb along the surface of the pearls, feeling several faint scratches on the curvature of one of the seeds, invisible to the eye but evident to the touch. Pearls were easily scratched. My grandmother had taught us to polish her pearl jewelry with olive oil and a chamois cloth, pushing our cloth-covered fingernails into the crevices where each pearl was secured. But Robin was careless.

    I closed my fingers around the earrings. The backings dug into my palm like children’s teeth. If I didn’t call the police, Robin Voigt could stay Rachel Vreeland. Rachel Vreeland could have a crappy City of Las Vegas burial, a heroin addict with no family, the person she had chosen to be when she was sixteen. It gave me a thick, sick pleasure to think about. I wanted her to be alone in the ground.

But it wouldn’t matter. Either way, I couldn’t get what I needed from her.

She would have loved that.

I had been in the room with her body for almost five minutes now. The pacing on the porch had stopped; Iker was considering whether to come back upstairs for me.

There was a series of faint rusty creaks as someone else came up the second set of stairs, which clung to the siding on the rear of the house, allowing access to the upper floor from the backyard. Whoever had come in went into the second bedroom and slammed the door.

Her roommate. Yes. Iker had said there was another tenant.

I heard the muffled noises of quick movement from the second bedroom. The roommate could come into the hall at any moment and see me—see Robin’s body—wonder where the police were, who I was, why Iker hadn’t called—

The front door opened into the house, and Iker’s voice came floating up the inner stairs. “Miss, um…Leslie? Did you…Leslie…?”

I didn’t reach for my phone. I slipped the earrings into my purse and walked quickly toward the back door. I was out before anyone saw me, making as little sound as I could manage on the metal stairs.

At the noise of the ignition, Iker ran back out onto the front porch, waving his arm at me to stop. He shouted something after me, something I couldn’t hear as I drove away.





2


    Leslie


I glanced in the rearview mirror again. The same blue sedan kept pace with me until I got on the freeway, then disappeared into the crush of cars heading into the city for Saturday night. That wasn’t Iker, I told myself. He drove a different car. A black one.

Gradually my ears picked up a dull buzzing noise. Coins rattling in the cup holder. No—my phone ringing. I fished it out of my purse. Two missed calls. Iker was trying again. The screen lit up as he left a message.

Why had I left? I’d run out of there as if I’d killed her myself. Stupid—stupid—

It was the earrings. I drew in a breath and felt blindly around the car for them, trying to keep my eyes on the road. They weren’t in my purse. Had I dropped them? At last I thought to pat myself down and found that I was wearing them. I didn’t remember putting them in my ears.

She’d just stuffed them in her shoe. I couldn’t understand why it upset me so much. I hadn’t even thought about these earrings in at least fifteen years. But the idea that Robin had helped herself to my mother’s jewelry box on her way out—and hadn’t even taken care of them—