The Better Liar(31)

I could just leave. But I had no car, and what if the door locked behind me? I’d be stuck outside all day.

    For a second, sitting there among the extra coats and dry cleaners’ bags, trying not to light anything on fire, I imagined myself getting on a bus, going to LA or Utah with my five hundred fifty in cash. Leslie and Dave had a ton of nice things lying around. I could find something good to pawn. That might buy me the first few nights there, and then…The fantasy fell apart. I put out my cigarette on the baseboard and fumbled for the door.

There had to be a spare key. Everybody had a spare key lying around somewhere. And if Leslie was going to lock me up in her enormous fancy house, I was going to snoop. It was basically my right.

Downstairs first, into the kitchen. I went through all the drawers, looking for the junk drawer, but there was no junk drawer. Each one had its own custom-shaped plastic organizer. Silverware, nicer silverware, spatulas, pizza cutters—it was like looking through Patrick Bateman’s kitchen. So then I went through the cabinets, but those were just as neat, pots and pans grouped by set (she had three separate matching sets of cookware, including one of those shiny copper kinds that I’d only ever seen in magazines). The only messy part of the kitchen was the baby cabinet, which was a shambles of cartoon-printed plastic cups and spoons. I poked through those, mostly just out of surprise that Leslie had allowed a single area of her kitchen to be less than spotless.

In the corner of the kitchen, beside the entrance to the hallway, there was a nook for a desk, with a wine rack and a tiny hanging lamp built into the wall above it. Below, on the desk, the family Mac sat, draped attractively with real ivy from a real ivy plant, which took up one of the wine-bottle nooks above. I jiggled the mouse and the screen woke up, prompting me for a password. flores, I typed. The password box shook itself no. floreshouse. Flores. password. password123. The computer informed me that I had two more tries before it would lock itself. I found the power button on the back of the screen and held it down until the computer shut itself off.

Off to the side of the kitchen was a narrow wood-paneled laundry room, which contained a washer and dryer, a rack for clothes, and a hanging organizer with detergent, dryer sheets, a fabric tape measure, shoe inserts, and a couple of Dave’s baseball caps. The only evidence of mess was a piece of twine shoved into the corner of one of the pockets and a loose silica gel DO NOT EAT packet.

    The living room had no place to hide things except in the giant walnut entertainment cabinet. It had two wrought-iron doors beneath the TV that matched the style of the chandelier in the entryway—like, who even knew they sold matching chandeliers and entertainment cabinets? I searched through the shelves on my hands and knees, but it was only wires and a lot of DVDs and video games, along with one of those big yellow phone books and a couple of the baby’s things, a blue plush kitten and a play piano. I sat back, red-faced, then thought, You dummy, and went to the front door.

I kept it carefully propped open as I searched the mat and the little pots containing succulents on either side of the door. The neighbor, a curly-haired mother with her kindergartner, saw me standing on my toes to run my fingers over the doorframe. She waved and I waved back, keeping a smile on my face as my fingers discovered nothing.

I went inside again and hustled over to the rear door. No key there either. It finally hit me what was so strange about my search: there were no hiding places in this house. Everything was so perfectly organized, each surface cleared of stray items, that there was nowhere to stuff any of the little indiscretions that occurred in any normal house—the stash of Ding Dongs, the Christmas-gift receipts. And Leslie and Dave had more than the ordinary number of indiscretions. She was lying to him about their finances, about her sister. He disappeared every few nights around the corner of the house. Where were the corners, the space behind the bookshelves, the lockbox on top of the refrigerator?

Then I thought: I’m the secret. Her house is my lockbox.

I closed the back door and sat against it, breathing in the air-conditioning.

When the house phone rang, I startled so badly I hit my head against the glass. It rang again, deafening in the empty house. I unfolded myself slowly and went to the phone, which sat on the desk in the kitchen nook, next to the computer.

    I picked it up in the middle of the third ring. “Hello?” I said, then remembered to add, “Flores residence.”

I could hear breathing on the other end. No one spoke.

“Hello?” I said again.

The other person hung up before I could say, Sam?

I set the phone back in its cradle. It couldn’t be Sam. How would he know where I was? He’d left with my money—he hadn’t seen me go with Leslie. And even if he had followed me to the hotel, would he have followed me all the way to Albuquerque?

There was no way. I was safe here. I did my pranayama breaths, one nostril, then the other.

I hadn’t checked upstairs yet.

Leslie and Dave’s bedroom was bright, even with the gauzy white curtains drawn. A huge soft bed dominated the room, with the bathroom to the right; light filtered in from the bathroom too, via midcentury-style glass blocks. The bedding matched the curtains except for the red Chimayo blanket covering the foot of the bed. On the walls hung framed paintings, one a modern-art bloody splash of orange, and the other a reproduction of Van Gogh’s sunflowers. Their wedding portrait rested on one side table, a black-and-white shot of their first dance in a roomful of blurry faces and fairy lights. They had a huge flat-screen television angled on top of their dresser across from the bed.