The Better Liar(87)

“They’ll put me in a room,” she said. “Like her. They’ll put me under observation.”

“I mean, those places are better than they used to be. But what’s important is”—I grabbed her hand and squeezed—“I know the truth now. That’s all I wanted. I just wanted to understand what was wrong. You were acting so strange that day in the parking lot when you thought I was dead. I wanted to know why. And now that I do, I can help you.” I caught her eyes. “Say it.”

“Say what,” she whispered.

I licked my lips. “?‘Robin, will you please help me?’?”

She looked at our hands. “How?” she said again.

I smiled and released her. “Not like you were planning, that half-assed attempt. I know a guy. We’ll stage a break-in. That’s so much more believable. No one wants to jack your three-year-old Honda mom-mobile.”

“At the house?” she said. “No, no—Dave—”

“Not there,” I said. “Here, silly. Someone’ll break in, take the television and the more valuable records, and knock you out against a wall. Not for real, obviously. But it’ll be a good whack. The neighbors will see you being dragged into a car and driven away. He’ll ditch you on the side of the road, I’ll pick you up, and off we’ll go. Easy as pie. And it won’t cost you forty grand. This is a fifteen-grand job, max. Clery must have known he could rip you off.”

    Leslie scrambled off her seat. “You’re not serious.”

“Of course I am.” I sat back. “How do you think I keep from getting booked for shit? I know people. Good people.”

“Where would we go?” She was pacing. The blanket slipped off her shoulders and fell to the floor.

“To LA,” I said patiently. “After that you can skip for Canada or whatever if you want.”

“You can get me a fake ID?”

“Leslie, please listen to yourself. I’ve had fake IDs since I was twelve. It’s not hard.”

She reached for my arm, just as she had that first night in the hotel room. The same wild look was in her eyes. “How soon?”

I matched her expression. “Tomorrow. Be here at ten A.M. Tell Dave I went back home to Vegas and say you’re going to finish packing up my room.”

She sucked in a breath. Tears sprang to her eyes. “I don’t want Eli to grow up like we did.”

“It’ll be different,” I told her. “Dave is a great dad, and he has about eleven million relatives. He’ll be sad, but he’ll be fine. And we’ll be together.”

Her voice was high and thready. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again. Robin, I…”

I stood up, almost knocking over my chair, and reached for her. This time she put her head on my shoulder. I felt her face dampen my T-shirt. “You and me,” I said. “All you had to do was ask for my help. And everything is going to be okay.”

“I don’t know how to thank you,” she murmured.

I held her close.





54


    Leslie


I asked Robin if she needed a ride, but she said she had one—the rental, maybe, although when I went outside my car was still alone in the driveway. A dozen or so cars lined the street on either side. It was impossible to tell which might be hers.

It was a Friday, and I should have gone to work, but instead I called in sick again. I drove home on autopilot, the fifty thousand in the envelope beside me in my purse, next to the burner.

I tried to remember the face of the girl on the bed in Henderson. She’d been thin—so thin. Her open mouth, chin sharp as a knife. People who grew that thin no longer resembled themselves; their skulls peered through their faces. That was what I expected of Robin. The last time I’d seen her in person, she’d been a child. After that, she had deteriorated into missed calls, creditors, drunken messages, like a long, ugly, boring haunting. I’d wished she was dead. I’d wished it.

When I walked into the house in Henderson, I had expected someone like the girl on the bed, someone who was mostly gone already, bones and memory.

I hadn’t imagined her the way Mary was—friendly, earthy. The kind of person who would hold your hand in the dark.

    I’d been sitting in my own driveway for several minutes. Belatedly, I shut the car off and went inside, upstairs, my feet carrying me to the guest bedroom where Mary had been staying.

It was still a mess, just as it had been last night—just as Robin’s room was, I remembered, in the house on Riviera. The yellow dress she’d worn was in a puddle on the floor, the elastic top puckered. Her sheets were wadded at the end of the mattress, streaks of mascara on her pillow. The stub of a thin cigarette lay on the bedside table.

I’d never touched Robin’s room, but suddenly I was furious with her for leaving it that way—for always expecting somebody else to clean up after her, just as Daddy had expected me to—

I yanked the sheets from the bed and piled them into the hamper outside Eli’s bedroom. Then the stained pillowcase, the cigarette butt for the trash. I went around gathering up each discarded item of clothing, folding them carefully, even the ruined yellow dress. Every time I picked something up, more cigarette butts were revealed, even in odd places like the floor of the coat closet and under the bed. I swept all of them out with my hands and dropped them into the wastebasket. I hung each damp towel in the bathroom neatly from the rack. Her makeup was strewn across the countertop. I organized her brushes and pencils into one of the travel cases underneath the sink, and wrapped the cord neatly around the curling iron, tucking it back into its drawer. All my bath bombs were gone, and when I looked, I found them piled into her duffel. I left those where they were and picked through the rest of the bag, looking for—something. Evidence.