We Lie Here: A Thriller, page 30
“No!” Daddy stands at my window with his large hand too close to my face. “Your mother told me you were coming here.”
I shove him away. “You’re a liar.”
He holds my arm. “Yara, calm down.”
I bare my teeth, forgetting that the man on the other side of the window is my father.
“You lied to me,” I shout, not too different from the mother and daughter moments ago. “You’ve lied to me about everything, and I’m tired of living with it.”
Dad holds out his hands. “It’s complicated.”
“What did Kayla ask you and Mom yesterday?”
His mouth moves, but no words make it past his lips.
I roll my eyes and reach for that smacked-away cigarette.
Dad jogs to the other side of the Jeep and climbs into the passenger seat. In his practice sweats and cap, he smells like football.
“Get out!”
“I was married before,” Dad shouts back. “I’ve wanted to tell you that for a long time.”
I cross my arms and turn my head. I can’t even look at him. His voice is raw liver and maggots squirming inside my ears, and I’m sickened by the sound.
He takes a deep breath and pushes it out. “I wanted to tell you, but it was complicated. Yes, that word again. And then there’s the fact that she’s missing. I don’t know if you know that. She left, and I don’t know where she is, and it broke me, and I looked for her for a very long time even though she’d changed. Even though she lost her mind and just . . . well . . .
“Your mother doesn’t know this, but I’d been looking for Liz for about ten years, and I didn’t have any luck. I still think about her a lot, and I still wonder about her, and that’s what I’m doing beneath the tree.” He squeezes his temples. “I’m out there trying to figure out where she could’ve gone.”
He rubs his jaw. “Felicia was the only one who was more committed to finding her than me. She ping-ponged from thinking Liz was dead to Liz being alive, and we worked together to find the truth once and for all. But I slowed down in my searching because I had to start living.”
Callous. Sociopathic. I’ve never thought of him like that until today.
“Sheldon Marsh,” Dad continues. “He was one of the first Black composers for the movie studios. Maryam Marsh was absolutely stunning. She was a Dorothy Dandridge double for Carmen Jones and Porgy and Bess. And Liz was just as talented, just as beautiful.
“They were out for a drive around Lake Paz, and the brakes on their car went out. They careened off the mountainside. The accident killed Sheldon and Maryam instantly. Liz survived, but her injuries ended her dancing career.”
I know this already, and I see the beautiful Clara in the Inglewood High School yearbook hobbled and broken.
Dad wraps his hand around my wrist. “Liz loved this Russian ballerina Irina Baranova. She was one of Balanchine’s ‘Baby Ballerinas,’ and performed Swan Lake when she was just fourteen and all this stuff that—” He shrugs, shakes his head. “Anyway, Liz loved her and told me that we had to name our first daughter Irina. But when she looked at that beautiful little girl in her arms, she knew that Irina was too heavy and went with the nickname for Irina instead.”
He squeezes my wrist and looks at me. “So we called her . . . Yara.”
62.
“She even bought you a gold nameplate that spelled ‘Irina,’” Dad says. “You weren’t even born yet, but that never stopped her from buying you things.”
I can’t speak. I can only gape at the man in the passenger seat.
“Barbara isn’t your biological mother, Yaya,” he says. “Dominique is Barbara’s biological daughter, but you’re Liz’s baby. From your uncontrollable hair to the shape and color of your eyes. You look just—”
“Get out of my car.” I whisper this.
The smile that had spread across his face slowly dies on the vine. Confusion blooms in his eyes, all wild and silver-glisten. “We’d take you on long drives in the Camaro. That had been Sheldon’s car before the—”
“Get out,” I spit. “You’re a liar.”
“Why would I lie about—”
“You killed her.”
His eyes bug. “What?”
“I saw you. I was there.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know who told you that. No one knows where she is.”
A light pops in my head. “You killed Felicia because she was gonna tell me everything!”
“Yara—”
I hit the steering wheel with the palm of my hand. “Get out of my car!”
Two red-faced cops stand in the employee parking lot, and they look over to us. They want us to keep going.
Dad realizes this, too, and runs a frantic hand beneath his cap and over his bald head. “I’m gonna find Dom—she’s not answering. We’ll talk about this at home.”
“Get out!”
He launches from the car and hurries to his Suburban. My shoulders hunch, just like his, and the top of my ears point out like a bat’s—just like his.
Dad has lied to me about Elizabeth Marsh’s existence as a person, as his high school girlfriend, as his first wife. And now, this woman who didn’t exist until last week has, suddenly, become my mother? And according to my real mother, Elizabeth Marsh is now dead because Robert Gibson, my father, shot her twenty years ago?
Of course he killed Felicia. She was the secret keeper all this time.
Mom’s gold Cherokee is not in the driveway.
Neither is Dad’s blue Suburban.
He said that he was gonna find Dominique. Did he decide to run away instead?
Did Mom decide to go with him?
I rush through the kitchen and out to the backyard. Small dust devils swirl behind the back fence. No one is perched on the lounge chairs beneath the pergola. No one sits in the chairs atop the small hill. Over in the garage, the tarp no longer covers the Camaro.
Liz’s Camaro.
The car door is unlocked.
Felicia gave me a set of keys. One for the cabin . . . and maybe the other for a car?
Both keys are now missing.
I press the yellow trunk-release button inside the Camaro’s cabin.
Pop.
The trunk creaks open, and that smell of car leather and Juicy Fruit gum swirls past me. I sweep away the large CANCUN towel spread across the trunk space.
Beloved sits there, and my lightning bolt chain, now repaired, dangles like a bookmark between the red cover and the first page.
So Dominique wasn’t lying. She did fix it, but it wasn’t on the dresser like she’d said . . .
The plastic tub of reports I took from the cabin and hid in my bedroom closet, that I just rummaged through last night, is in this trunk. So are my eyeglasses, the keys to the cabin and to the Camaro, and . . . my IDEAS-QUEEN OF PALMDALE journal. There’s a gun here, too, with a spot of red on its . . .
“Barrel,” I whisper. Just like the gun in my dreams of drowning in a lake. This gun does exist. I wasn’t imagining that. There’s a baby book, and the bottom of the trunk is lined with cash wrapped with rubber bands and bundled together with binder clips and paper clips.
Whose money is this?
Who took all these things, my things, and hid them here?
I grab the revolver and, a moment later, set the gun back in its spot. I grab my journal, Beloved, and the lightning bolt pendant. These are mine. There’s a copy of The Monster at the End of This Book. I flip through Grover’s story—a dark-red splotch covers half of page four.
Blood?
I grab this, too.
I grab the baby book and open it to see Yara Marie Gibson on the title page.
The birth date—April 25, 1995—is correct. The family-tree page . . . Robert Louis Gibson Jr., father. Elizabeth Marie Marsh Gibson, mother.
There I am, page after page. I learned to walk in January 1996 at nine months old. I started swim school at two. Here’s my yellow swim cap folded neatly in the page’s crease. There are pictures of me wearing floaties on my arms while this woman—Elizabeth Marsh wearing a tankini—holds me close. Big smiles. There she is, lounging in a lakeside chaise, a picture similar to the photo I found in the attic. There I am, wearing a Cookie Monster beanie with a cookie puff ball atop it, standing in front of the green cabin at Lake Paz. And there we are, Elizabeth and Daddy, cheek to cheek, with me in between them, stealing all the focus.
We were happy once.
There’s a folded transcription of an interview with Dad and Detective Stall.
MS: You were okay with leaving your wife and daughter alone?
RG: This is her family’s cabin—she grew up here during the summers and holidays. She knows the people.
MS: The same people who’d been suspected of tampering with her parents’ car?
RG: I was just going to be gone overnight. Liz isn’t weak.
MS: Where did you stay back in Los Angeles?
RG: At our house in View Park.
MS: That would be 4255 Enoro Drive. Her house.
RG: She inherited the house. We live there.
MS: Were you alone that night?
RG:I had friends over.
MS: You had a party.
RG: No. Just a few friends.
MS: Any women?
RG: No.
MS: You sure?
RG: I know who was in my house.
MS: So if a woman has told us that she visited 4255 Enora Drive on the night of June 25, would she be lying?
RG: Okay, she dropped by—but she didn’t stay.
MS: And who is “she”?
RG: Barbara McGuire.
MS: And what is your relationship with Barbara McGuire?
RG: What does that have to do with my missing family?
MS: It has everything to do with your missing family.
Missing family?
And there’s another missing person bulletin.
MISSING PERSON AT RISK
Yara Marie Gibson
Female, Black, three years old
36″, 29 lbs., brown eyes, brown hair
Last seen with her mother, Elizabeth Marie Marsh, in a blue Cookie Monster nightgown at 10:00 a.m. on Thursday, June 25, 1998, near their residence at 1224 Stardust Way in Lake Paz, California. Elizabeth Marsh suffers from depression and anxiety. Any information, please contact the Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau, Missing Persons.
What the hell?
I run back to the house with my arms filled with my things: Beloved, the pendant, the journal, the plastic tub, the children’s book, the baby book with the transcript and bulletin, and the set of keys. Back in my bedroom, I drop everything on the comforter. I’m barely breathing as I search the tub’s contents and everything relates to . . . me.
A witness named Earl saw me stumble out of the woods, crying. I ran from him.
According to Nana Audrey, I doggy-paddled over to the islet on Lake Paz and hid there.
And a statement from me: The bad lady come. I scared.
There’s a transcript of Dad speaking to the county’s child psychiatrist: She’s scared of water, and she has nightmares and night terrors. She sleepwalks and never remembers . . . She’s in counseling every now and then, but we think that, over time, she’ll, you know, snap out of it.
I never remember.
A chill tears up my spine, and I wonder . . . Did I put my things—the pendant, the book, the tub, everything—in the Camaro? Was I sleepwalking while I did this, and I simply don’t remember? What else have I done this past week that I don’t remember?
Did I kill . . . ?
No. No. No.
The creak of the Camaro’s trunk yanks me from my spiral, and I run across the hallway to stand in my parents’ bedroom window. Mom is staring into the Camaro’s trunk.
Where has she been all this time?
My phone rings.
It’s Kayla.
I answer but keep my eyes on the woman at the Camaro. “Hey, I need to call you back.”
“I have some news,” she says. “Are you sitting down?”
63.
No, I’m standing and staring out the window as my mother rummages through the trunk of her—no, Elizabeth Marsh’s—muscle car. What’s she looking for?
Kayla is saying something else now. I’m more irritated than interested.
“Are you listening to me?”
“I’m sorry.” I stumble back to my bedroom, a sad place with a crowded nightstand and bureau top, dingy walls, and the smell of sickness and smoke. “What’s wrong?”
“The green Mazda—I found the guy.”
“He exists?”
“You questioned that? You told me—”
“I know. It’s”—I’m—“complicated. What about the guy?”
“You were right. Will Harraway hired him to follow Felicia, but he only had the address to your parents’ house. When you saw him, he didn’t know that his target was already dead.”
I gasp. “Was he a hit man?”
“He says no, but of course, he won’t admit it yet.”
I close my eyes. “Can I call you back—”
“And,” Kayla says, “the light-colored car that was at Lake Palmdale when Felicia was killed? The one found near the creek back on Thursday?”
“The woman inside . . .” I cover my mouth with my hand. “You know who she was.”
“LaRain Andrepont,” Kayla says. “She was one of the people inside the white car.”
My stomach drops. “But LaRain doesn’t drive a white car.”
“It was reported stolen a year ago. One of Ransom’s when he ran that chop shop. LaRain was also the anonymous tipper. The phone she’d used to call me earlier this week belonged to her. We were supposed to meet that night at the Red Roof Inn, but she never showed up.”
I bend over. My head swims with words and sounds.
“There’s something else you should know,” she says.
“Just wait.” Feels like I’m breathing through a straw. “I just need . . .” I thrust my hand at the nightstand and knock over the vials of antibiotics and steroids, old drinking straws, and near-empty tissue boxes. I need the inhalers just prescribed by my doctor, but they’re not here.
I paw through the wastebasket in case I knocked them in, but they’re not there, either.
I search my purse . . . no inhalers.
My lungs tighten as I drop to my knees to search beneath the bed, then beneath the comforter. No luck.
This city has taken my breath away. Just like I knew it would.
My parents have taken the life that I once knew, and they’ve broken its back.
Barbara—my mother—is not my mother.
Elizabeth Marsh is my mother.
And my father killed her.
Yoga-breathing poses will help, and I close my eyes and inhale. There aren’t many free breaths left in me, and I release that precious breath already feeling stronger. I will conserve my words, and I will walk slow until I find my meds. If all else fails, I will drive back to the hospital and request another set. My doctor will certainly think that I’m either selling my drugs or that I’m getting high off Ventolin.
“I’m having a hard time,” I whisper to Kayla.
“You need an ambulance?”
“Just . . . What else do you need to say?”
“The DNA that we found on Felicia? It definitively does not belong to you.”
I didn’t kill Felicia.
“But—”
“But?”
Kayla sighs. “It’s a partial match to Dominique’s.”
I shiver. “Are you saying that my sister—”
“No,” she interrupts. “Dominique has a solid alibi. We have security camera footage showing her and Ransom at BJ’s and then at the Cinemark that night to see the new John Wick movie.”
“Is there a complete DNA match?”
“Yes.”
“My father?”
“When the medical examiner conducted LaRain’s autopsy, he found something in her hand. He found a honeybee pendant.”
“What?”
Kayla says nothing for a long time, then: “Where’s your mother? In this instance, I mean . . . Where is Barbara Gibson?”
64.
Kayla’s driving here right now, and I think she said the word “ambulance.”
The world around me is worse than a blur. The world around me is soup and clouds and dragon’s breath and breathing the world’s air has broken my lungs and I can’t even cry anymore because the world has broken my tear ducts, too.
With numb hands, I fumble for my bag and pull out the answering machine and the bag of tapes. I select the only tape that I haven’t listened to and press “Play.”
There’s a woman’s frantic voice and a child—me?—crying in the background.
“Where are you? I’m here alone and Rob’s not calling me back.” She hangs up.
Next call: “Felicia, it’s Liz again. It’s about three o’clock. Should I be worried? Bee wouldn’t do anything in the middle of the day, would she? Anyway, call me.” She hangs up.
Next call: “Felicia, ohmigod.” She starts to weep, and the call ends a minute later.
Next call: “Barbara’s gonna kill me, I know it. She’s out there—I saw her Jetta. I think . . . I think I’m just gonna drive back to LA. Yaya’s not feeling good, and Bee’s crazy and unpredictable, and Rob thinks I’m crazy, but I know she’s the one who keeps calling and hanging up. I know she’s the one who forged that letter to the parents at the dance school. I know she’s the one who opened that credit card at Nordstrom. I know she’s the one who spray-painted Rob’s Bronco, but I’m just a hysterical female, right? I’m the crazy one. I’m not, and I told you and I told Rob, and no one listened to me. No one! I’ll let you know when I’m leaving the lake.”
Next call: “Yaya’s sleeping, so I packed my bag and I’m just gonna load her up and get outta here. I can’t call you on my cell phone—no reception up here. So I’m on my way.”
Next call: “Ohmigod, Bee’s outside. Where are you? Felicia, you there? Pick up.”
The tape ends.
Packed my bag.
Is that the go bag now stowed in the foyer’s nook?
Parts of me remember that night. The yelling, the crying, my shoulder hurting. All that water. I’d lived through something, but what?
