The Better Liar(44)

    He parked on the street and went into a Thai restaurant. I stood on the street, watching the windows. A girl who looked like a teenager stood up when he walked in, and he kissed her, picking up her hand, stroking her palm. She glanced out the window, as if she could feel my stare against her cheek.

I was only twenty-five. Twenty-seven—but Paul hadn’t known that. Nobody knew that. To him, and to everyone else, I was twenty-five. And he’d traded me in.

She was twenty-two, I found out later.

That was the first time.

Anyway, unlike Paul, Leslie used her turn signal religiously.

She turned in to the parking lot of a three-story building that looked like a bank. HARGRAVE RESIDENTIAL, LLC was written on the shoppe-style wrought-iron sign outside. I turned in to the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru across the street and ordered an iced latte as Leslie went through the big glass doors. Then I found a space and shut off the engine, watching the building across the street.

I stuck the straw in my mouth. Ten minutes passed. Leslie didn’t emerge. After half an hour, I started the engine again and pulled into the Hargrave lot.

Inside, the lobby was designed to look like a home, full of squashy furniture and lined with floral wallpaper. In the center of the room a woman sat behind a huge mahogany desk outfitted with a Mac and a stained-glass lamp. “Hi, how can I help you?” she said as I made my way across the too-thick carpet, leaving little tufty footprints behind.

“Hi, I’m looking for Leslie Flores? Does she work here?”

“Yes, Ms. Flores is on the third floor. Do you have an appointment?”

“I have a job interview at ten. I’m supposed to meet with the person in charge of…” I groped. “HR? Is that her?”

The receptionist glanced at my jeans. “No, Ms. Flores is the director of accounting. HR would be second floor. May I take your name?”

    “Oh—I’m Alice.” I gave her a big smile. “I’m a little early, though. I’ll go get my purse and be right back.”

“?’K,” the receptionist said, her eyes already back on her screen.

In the car, I sucked down the last of the melted whipped cream and glanced up at the Hargrave building.

So it was true. Leslie hadn’t lost her job. She’d been lying to me.

Now I had to find out why.





30


    Mary


I got back on the freeway to Leslie’s house. I couldn’t stop thinking about the way Leslie had talked last night, the panic in her voice. Stop fucking around.

What did Leslie need fifty thousand dollars for? I was pretty sure at this point that it wasn’t for her house. I was equally sure that she was desperate for that money.

I pulled into the neighborhood and parked the car on the same adjacent street. A woman in running gear passed me and waved, as if she’d seen me parking in that spot every day of her life. I could barely summon the energy to wave back.

The Flores house was echoey with nobody in it. The noise of the back door shutting clattered around the kitchen. I could have gone to bed again, waited for Leslie to come pick me up. Trusted that we were in this together.

Anyway, you know what I did instead.

I tried the tablet in the master bedroom again first. Dave had left it on top of the bed this time, in sleep mode. I opened the lid and found that it was password-protected. password, I typed. eli. The Mac informed me that if I entered another incorrect password, the computer would be locked. Fuck. I went downstairs.

    The desktop computer in the kitchen had been shut off, its screen black. I started it back up. I was about to try password again when something occurred to me. This was the house computer, in a house that had no place to hide things.

I pressed ENTER.

The screen loaded, just like that.

I should have known. It was obvious to me at this point that Leslie loved to pretend she didn’t have any secrets.

I scanned the icons on the desktop. Outlook. Yes. Email. I clicked on that, but it prompted me for a password. I tried pressing ENTER again, but nothing happened. I searched the underside of the keyboard and the back of the monitor, but she wasn’t one of those people who wrote her passwords down, or at least not anywhere I could find them. The drawer to the desk that held the computer itself was full of carefully organized receipts from Target and Sprouts and White House Black Market. A little pouch held coupons, and the rest was loose rubber bands, twist-ties, ballpoint pens, and one of the baby’s dusty old binkies.

I went to Facebook. Success—she’d set it to autofill her password. Her feed was all onlooker, passive, no interaction, just friends from high school promoting their multilevel marketing schemes and friends from college “Five Years Ago Today”–ing their lush honeymoons. I clicked on Messenger. She didn’t use Messenger to chat, apparently—it was only invitations to public events and messages from Babs at Planet Fitness reminding her to renew her membership.

I started going through her bookmarked sites. No access to any of the bank-account websites that autoloaded in the search bar. Weather reports, a yoga exercise video, some clothing sites with shoes and blouses. I moved on to the desktop. Leslie had a ton of illegible, apparently work-related Excel spreadsheets and Word documents scattered across her background. I went back to the browser history. Children’s YouTube videos, a “lullaby baby” playlist on Spotify. Somebody had searched how to get vegetable-oil stains out of clothing.