Generation of Liars (41 page)

I erected from the tub, dripping
soapy water as I padded over the bedroom carpet to Ben’s dresser, where I slid
into one of Ben’s shirts and a pair of his boxers. I hadn’t left the apartment
even once to buy myself a single stitch of clothes. I went into the closet and
pulled out the high heel shoes I put in there the night I had shown up at Ben’s
apartment after Rabbit got shot and Motley got run over. I fished out my
confession from inside the shoe.

My loose end.

I unfolded it and scanned the phone
number of Heather Gilmore’s parent’s that was neatly inked over the page. I
shoved the paper into the pocket of Ben’s shirt and grabbed the spare set of
keys he had made for me. I took the maintenance exit that opened to the back of
the apartment building by the dumpsters in order to avoid Pressley on the
street.

*   
*    *

When I got outside there was a
dusting of snow on the sidewalk and the cold air entered into my lungs like
jagged particles of glass. The streets and sidewalks were sprayed with
shoppers. They all looked so happy, so peaceful, and so carefree. I felt like I
was carrying a thousand-pound sack around my neck. I walked until I found a
glass phone booth. I stepped inside and unfolded the paper from my pocket and
dialed the number.

It rang twice on the other end and
I almost hung the phone back on the receiver because my stomach was twisting
over in suspense. A young woman picked up. “Hello?” Her voice sounded like
someone my age, the voice was definitely too young to be Heather’s mom, and I
hadn’t known about any Gilmore siblings. The voice repeated, “Hello?” I told
myself that the young-sounding person who picked up was probably just a
relative visiting for the holidays. Or maybe there had been siblings, after
all. What did I know about Heather Gilmore or her life?

I was about to hang up the receiver
when someone in the background, an older voice, someone old enough to be my
mother, asked, “Heather, who is that on the phone?”

“
Heather
?” I mouthed the
name, letting is trap silently inside the hollows of my throat. It couldn’t be,
I told myself, because Heather Gilmore was dead. I held on to the sides of the
phone booth so that I didn’t collapse.

Chapter Forty-two: Heather Gilmore

W
HO
IS THIS?” the younger voice was demanding to know. The voice of a woman who might
be Heather Gilmore. I couldn’t bring myself to hang up the phone. My lips were
quivering over the receiver, broadcasting dead air. “Who is this?” the voice
asked again, and when I didn’t respond, she hung up. I uncurled the note in my
hand and spread it out over the small ledge inside the phone booth and read the
words in my head:
If found dead, please contact the parents of Heather
Gilmore at the following phone number and share the enclosed information
.

If you are reading this letter I
am dead. My name is Margaux Grace Fix and on the evening of the cyber attack
against the United States, I killed a girl. That girl’s name was Heather
Gilmore. I have been running ever since. Her parents deserve to know who killed
their daughter. Please contact them at the phone number at the top of this
letter and let them know it was me.

But Heather Gilmore was alive. I
talked to her on the phone, and the dead don’t answer telephones.

My eyes were pacing the corners of
the phone booth. The glass was covered in sloppy graffiti that said
Never Trust Anyone Over the Age of
Zero
. I rubbed my fingers over the obnoxious typography. Something else
caught my eye, tucked into the massing of flyers for apartment rentals and lost
dogs, was one of Skip Hask’s business cards. I ripped it down and dialed the
number on the card. Skip picked up on the first ring.

“It’s Skip, talk to me.”

“Skip. It’s Alice. Remember me?”

“Alice, I couldn’t forget you with
a .45 to the brain if I tried.”

“Well, I hope your memory is as
sharp as you claim, because I need you to remember what you saw about that girl
I asked you to research for me.”

“Heather-something, right?”

“Heather Gilmore. I know I told you
before that you found the wrong girl, but I’m wondering if you can still
remember any of the information you dug up on her.”

“Let me think,” he said. “Actually,
I think I still have the printouts I collected lying around somewhere, hold on
a minute.” I heard Skip put the phone down and the sound of paper shuffling. I
thought I heard the honk of train in the background too, and I assumed that
meant his office was situated near where the metro line veered. “Found it!”

“What other information on Heather
do you have, Skip? Please tell me.”

“The only other things I dug up
were as dull as the stuff I already shared. Let’s see, there’s an announcement
in her hometown paper about her getting a softball scholarship her senior year
of college. Wesleyan.”

“Senior year? That’s a good sign.
It means she might have actually had a full senior year. What else?”

“Then we have a couple of articles
here that mention a minor accident.”

“An accident? But you told me last
time that you didn’t uncover any blood or intrigue.”

“I didn’t uncover blood or
intrigue. This accident thing was minor, like I said. It barely seemed worth
mentioning.”

“Tell me everything the article
says about the accident.”

“Like I said, really minor.
According to a blip from the Middletown police archives, it looks like a few
years ago she got into a minor bang up when a car struck her on her college
campus at the start of her senior year. Wesleyan, again. It never even made it
past the college newspaper.”

“The incident was labeled a minor
bang up?”

“Yeah, it looks like she walked
away with a bruise or two, like I said, nothing major, oh and it looks like
they never caught the guy who did it.”

“Does it go on to say anything
about an investigation?”

“Hold on.” I could hear his breaths
beating as his tongue skimmed the information in front of him. “Ah, it looks
like the police ruled it a hit-and-run, but Heather couldn’t recall any
description of the car and there were no witnesses, so the police never brought
in any suspects.”

“Oh my gosh,” I gasped into the
phone. “I can’t believe I was so
stupid
.”

“Stupid? What’s this all about,
anyways? Was she one of your sorority sisters or something? You just wanted to
divert my attention away from the dynamite stick for the afternoon?”

“She is a girl I thought I killed.”

“Killed? Even when you pointed a
gun at me inside the club bathroom, I didn’t see a murderer in your eyes.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose. Kill
Heather, I mean. I was driving across campus back to my dorm, it was late.” My
eyes lifted to the roof of the phone booth as the imagery from that night
surged through me. “I was driving my big, ugly red Buick. It was foggy as heck
that night, that real thick, smudgy fog that makes everything surreal like a
charcoal painting. You know those kinds of nights?”

“Yeah, I’ve driven through some
myself,” Skip replied.

“Well, my mind was distracted by
the November Hit happening that morning, plus I was stressing about test grades
being posted like any normal college kid, and my mind wandered off - and then
THUNK, Heather Gilmore bounced off the hood of my car and flew into the bushes.
She had crossed in front of the library when I hit her, the books she had been
carrying were scattered all over the street. I ran away the next morning and
that’s when I met my boss, Motley, at the train station.”

“Alice, that’s horrible!”

“I’ve heard that screech in my
dreams for three years.”

“So, that’s why you had me look up
information on Heather? To learn the details of her death, and to see if anyone
back home was looking for you as a suspect? But what made you think she was
dead? Based on the newspaper clippings in front of me, it sounds like she
barely had a scratch on her.”

“I never got out to check if she
was alive or not. I mean I stopped the car, but it was so dark and all I could
see in the bushes was her blond hair and the checkered sweater she had on. She
wasn’t moving. I recognized her because she always sat at the senior table in
the dorm cafeteria. I thought for sure she was dead. The way she was so very
still. She didn’t even utter a sound. I tried to listen for the sounds of her
breaths against the bristles of the bushes she was jammed in. But there was no
sound. I didn’t think a person could ever be that still and that quiet without
being dead. I couldn’t think. I sped away and went back to my dorm.” My eyes
clenched in desperation as I went back to envisioning that night. “I heard
sirens streaking across campus a few minutes later. I was afraid a witness
might have seen my car, might have seen me speed away. I didn’t sleep at all
that night. All I saw when I closed my eyes, all I ever saw, was Heather lying
dead in the bushes.”

“Didn’t it occur to you to just
turn yourself in, explain to the police that you panicked?”

“It did occur to me. I thought all
about it all night. I was certain that there had to be witnesses, so I knew it
was only a matter of time before the police came knocking at my door. My car
was this old red Buick, everybody knew I drove it. It would be easy to identify
me. The next morning, I called my boyfriend Pressley to meet me on the lawn on
campus so I could tell him what happened and he could take me to the campus
police to turn myself in. But then once I saw him, saw the way he looked at me
with such love and innocence, I chickened out. I ran away instead.”

“Damn, Alice.”

I collapsed into sobs. “You have no
idea how much carrying this secret around has been killing me.”

“Why are you telling me all this,
Alice? You barely know me.”

“I needed to tell someone. You have
no idea what it’s like to walk around with a secret like this.”

“A secret can change a person,”
Skip said, with his voice trailing to a deep world populated with his own heavy
regrets.

“You think if only you can get far
away enough from it, that you can leave the secret behind, that it won’t have
any power over you. But it seems like the further away you run, the more
corners the secret seems to creep up in.”

“And what about now, Alice? Now
that your secret wasn’t as scary as you thought?”

My eyes caught my reflection,
casting in the glass of the phone booth; my blond hair was set around my face
like twisted roots, and my cheeks were slim beneath a pair of sad, yet bright,
eyes. “Now I have to live with the way I’ve acted. Heather may not be dead, but
I’m still guilty. They aren’t kidding when they
say Never Trust Anyone Over the Age of Zero
. I
can’t even trust myself.”

“That’s just a stupid saying. Don’t
be too hard on yourself. I mean, who can blame any of us for being wily
deceivers when we live in the Generation of Liars.”

I wiped the tears from my eyes and
cracked open the door to the phone booth so that the cold air knocked onto my
skin. “Thanks for digging this stuff up for me. Next time I see you, I hope it
isn’t in some filthy bar bathroom again. I hope we are toasting to your
Pulitzer or something.”

“Here’s to Heather Gilmore being
alive, and to the immortality of the Generation of Liars. See you around.”

I crumpled up the confession note
and shoved it back into my shoe. Once I climbed out of the phone booth, I took
the first real cleansing breath of air I had taken in three years. That’s when
I saw a set of eyes focused on me from behind a bus huddle across the street.
The eyes were dark, and even concealed beneath a dark hat, I recognized them,
and I recognized the betrayals of brown tendrils peeking out from beneath the hat’s
brim.

“Ben?” I called out. He rounded the
corner, as though trying to get away without me seeing him. I jogged to catch
up with him and called out his name. “Ben, what the hell are you doing?”

Chapter Forty-three: Followed

I
JOGGED
UNTIL I got close enough to tap him on the shoulder. When he turned around his
face was strange and the smile curled on his lips was forced. “Alice, what a
surprise.”

“Did you follow me here? Were you
spying on me just now?”

“Alice, no, I didn’t follow you.”

 “Don’t lie to me.”

“Lie to you, Alice?” He was
indignant. The expression on his face had suddenly turned hostile, as though a
switch had been flicked. “Lie to you? It is quite interesting for
you
of
all people to accuse someone of lying.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Oh please, Alice, like we both
don’t know that you haven’t been honest with me.”

“Ben, don’t you dare turn this back
on me. You’re the one who just got caught spying on me when you said you would
be at work.”

“Isn’t it sad that I have to spy on
you just to figure out what you’re up to?” He coughed out a petty laugh.
“Having to spy on my own girlfriend, how tragic.”

“So, then, you admit you were
spying?”

“I admit it. I followed you. Can
you blame me? I was worried and I wanted to make sure you were safe.”

“I can take care of myself, you
don’t have to worry.”

“I know you lied about being a
flight attendant.”

A shiver licked upwards the length
of my spine. “You do?”

“I know why you lied, and I
understand. But that doesn’t mean I won’t still worry about your safety.”

“You mean you’ve known this whole
time?”

“I’ve known ever since the night
you showed up at the hospital. The first time I laid eyes on you, just by the
way you were dressed in those flashy stockings, and how you wouldn’t say who
hurt you. Trust me, I’ve treated more than one of the dancer’s from Pigalle
before, coming in with black eyes and broken bones. I know how it is.”