Behind Every Lie(30)

I shook my head. If I stayed, I would always be filled with doubt, a gnawing fear that I was a horrible, broken person capable of murdering someone I loved.

I closed my eyes, fending off the guilt and the longing for him.

“I’ll be back,” I said. “I promise.”

And I hung up.





fifteen

eva




“FINAL CALL FOR BA FLIGHT 520 to London.”

I quickly e-mailed a picture of Mom’s letter and the scrap of paper with the address to Detective Jackson, then sent a brief text to Andrew explaining where I was going before boarding the plane.

I stared outside as the airport’s squat buildings raced by and we rose into the night sky, rubbing my fingers over the lightning marks on my arm. The electric pulses had faded to a faint tingle, but the skin was still raised. The feel of it under my fingertips was strangely comforting.

I pulled my coat over my head and tucked the airline blanket around my legs, blocking out the cabin light and the man with a hyperactive leg next to me, hoping to catch a few hours’ sleep. The ripples of a dream reached for me. Images twisted and shifted like a snake slithering against bare skin.

Mom’s living room. Lightning flashes. The silhouette of a man on the other side of the room. Mom slumped in a chair. My hands splattered with blood. Lightning flashed again. The man turned, his face caught in the light. He was older, much older than me. A mocking smile twisted his mouth. He stepped toward me.

My eyes flipped open, and I battled briefly with the coat over my head. The man in the seat next to me woke with a snort and shot me an annoyed look.

“Sorry,” I whispered.

I felt around at my feet for my purse, pulling out a pen, a scrap of paper. My fingers flew over the paper, an image slowly emerging, revealing the shape of the man’s face. Wide forehead. Dark, bristly hair. A shadowed jaw. Long, bent nose, like it had a history of being broken.

I closed my eyes, trying to erase the image of the blood on my hands. But it was there, splattered across the backs of my eyelids like paintballs.

When I opened my eyes, the face of the mystery man stared back at me from my sketch. This man had been at Mom’s house the night she died.

And I knew, finally, with absolute certainty, that I had been there too.



* * *



Exhaustion and jet lag made me dazed and disoriented. Day and night had merged into a weird gray color, making it impossible to tell if it was twilight or morning when the plane landed at London’s Heathrow Airport. My phone said noon, but my body said midnight.

Heathrow was a dizzying labyrinth of corridors and yellow signs pointing in all directions. The hallways were a crush of travelers jostling for space, people bustling up the escalators and pushing past stragglers while snapping clipped pardon me’s. I’d only ever flown to Cancun for spring break when I was in college, but that trip wasn’t anything like this one.

I followed a series of signs for taxis, finally finding a line of them, black and shiny as a beetle’s shell, in front of the terminal. I opened the back door of one and climbed in, but the driver scowled at me.

“You gotta go to the front of the queue,” he barked.

“Oh, sorry!” My skin crisped with embarrassment.

I did a bizarre tourist’s walk of shame to the front of the line and opened the back door of the front taxi.

“?’Ow ya doin’, love?” The driver turned to grin at me. He was older, powerful-looking, with wide shoulders, a white beard, and a receding hairline. “Bag in the boot for ya?”

“Uh …” I looked at my backpack. “No, thanks.”

“Where ya off to, then?”

“Shoreditch.” I showed him the address Jacob had texted me, and he nodded and pulled into traffic. A sports game played on the radio and he listened intently as he turned onto a highway. Cheers erupted from the speakers and the driver groaned.

“He’s a right geezer, innit? Want to gi’ him a dry slap.” He shook his head, tutting.

I leaned my head against the backseat, my brain too jet-lagged to figure out what he was talking about.

The taxi driver glanced at me in the rearview window. “Name’s Graham.” He pronounced it gray-um. “Right tippin’ it down, innit?”

“Excuse me?”

He laughed, revealing long, crooked teeth. “It’s raining hard out right now.”

“Oh.” I looked out the window. “Yes, it is.”

“First time here?” he asked.

“Is it that obvious?”

He laughed again. “Little bit.”

I scrolled through my e-mail and Instagram messages, all variations of the same thing: OMG, just heard about your mom. What happened? Are you ok? I was relieved that nobody knew the police were suspicious of me but wasn’t stupid enough to think it would last. I swiped past texts from my dad and Lily, but hesitated when I read Andrew’s.

The detective is asking where you are. Please tell me you haven’t seriously gone to London.



I thought of my brother at eleven, fists on hips, saying, “Uh muh muh muh mum!” when he caught me smoking pot in the backyard with a boy I was trying to impress. Even as an adult he was that type: relentlessly perfect, aggressively good. He organized his socks according to color, studied French in his spare time. When I went through my wild phase—sex, drinking, drugs—he’d been wholly repulsed. Just like my mom. Peas in a pod, those two.