Lies I Told

Lies I Told by Michelle Zink



Dedication


For Jennifer Klonsky,

who gave me a second chance





Epigraph


Wild honey smells of freedom

The dust—of sunlight

The mouth of a young girl, like a violet

But gold—smells of nothing.

—ANNA AKHMATOVA





Prologue


Looking back, I should have known Playa Hermosa was the beginning of the end. We’d had a good run, and if things were sometimes tense between Mom, Dad, and Parker, it was nothing a new job couldn’t fix. Just when they’d be at each other’s throats, we’d move on to another town.

And there was nothing like a new town to remind us which team we were on.

But Playa Hermosa was different. It was like another world. One where the old rules didn’t apply. Like the exotic birds on the peninsula, we were suddenly all on our own.

Except it didn’t feel like that right away. In the beginning, it was business as usual. Plot the con, get into character, work our way in, stick together.

I don’t know if it was my relationship with Logan that tipped everything over the edge or if the signs had been there long before. Either way, I tell myself it was for the best. The universe seems to have its own mysterious plan. I guess we’re just along for the ride. I can live with that. The harder part, the impossible part, is living with what I did to Logan and his family.

We knew what we were doing. Knew the risks. But Logan and his family were good. Maybe the first really good people I’d ever met. They loved one another, sacrificed for one another. Not because they didn’t have anyone else, but because that’s what love is.

What happened to them is my fault. And I’m still trying to figure out how to live with that.

Then there’s Parker. Deep down, I know the choice was his. But I can’t help wondering if he stuck around because of me. If he hadn’t, everything would be different, and he’d probably be drinking beer in Barcelona or coffee in Paris or something.

I can’t think about the other stuff. Thinking about it forces me back to the question: Why didn’t I see it? Had the end of our family been one sudden, impulsive decision setting into motion a string of events that changed everything? Or had it all been a long time coming? I think that would be worse, because if it was true, it meant that I was hopelessly, unforgivably naive.

And there’s no crime as unforgivable as naivety when you’re on the grift.





One


I swam my way up from sleep, trying to remember where I was against a mechanical roar outside the window. The room didn’t help. Filled with the standard furniture and a few unpacked boxes, it could have been any bedroom in any house in any city in America.

I ran down the list of possibilities: Chicago, New York, Maryland, and then Phoenix, because that was where we’d worked last. But it only took a few seconds to realize that none of them were right. We’d arrived the day before in Playa Hermosa, a peninsula that jutted out over the Pacific Ocean somewhere between Los Angeles and San Diego.

It was like a different world, the slickness of Los Angeles falling away as we entered an almost tropical paradise, shady with low-hanging trees and dominated by Spanish architecture. I caught glimpses of the Pacific, a sheet of shimmering blue silk in the distance, as my dad navigated the Audi up the winding roads and my mom pointed things out along the way. Parker sat silently beside me in the backseat, brooding and sullen like he always was when we started a new job. We’d passed fields, overgrown with dry brush, that led to turnouts where people could stop and take pictures. We didn’t take any, because that was one of the most important rules: leave no proof.

And there were more rules where that one came from, rules that allowed us to run cons in affluent communities all over the country, worming our way into the lives of wealthy neighbors and trust-fund babies with more money than sense. Rules that allowed us to make off with tens of thousands of dollars, staying in place just long enough after every theft to insure that we weren’t under the cloud of suspicion. That was one of the worst parts: staying put, pretending to be as shocked and innocent as everyone else.

Only after the dust settled would we move on, citing a job transfer or start-up opportunity for my dad and changing our identification through one of his underground sources. If anyone ever suspected us of committing a crime, we were too long gone to know about it.

A portion of each take was split between us, the rest of it used to set up the next con. From the looks of things, it hadn’t been cheap this time around.

The roar of the leaf blower outside grew louder as it moved under the window, and I put my pillow over my head, trying to block out the noise. We’d spent the last few weeks in a hotel in Palm Springs, preparing for the Playa Hermosa job, but I still wasn’t ready to face my first day in a new school. There had been too many of them. Right now, in this unfamiliar room, I was in a pleasant kind of limbo, the last town far enough away to be a memory, the new one still a figment of my imagination.

But it was no use. The down in my pillow was no match for the rumble outside, and I finally tossed it aside and got out of bed, digging around in a still-packed box until I found a hair tie. My gaze was drawn to the reflection in the mirror over the dresser. The brown hair was a surprise. I hadn’t been a brunette since Seattle, and I still approached every mirror half expecting to see my face framed by a sheet of straight, shiny blond hair. My eyes—a dark blue—were the only thing I could count on to be the same when we moved from city to city. But they were a little different now, too. Older, shadowed with something weary that echoed the way I’d felt ever since our near miss in Maryland the year before.