Beautiful Lies Read online

  I don’t move yet. “Who’s going to call the police?”

  “I will.” My uncle holds up the phone in his hand. “I’ll do it right now.”

  My inclination is to wait, to see for myself that he’s called, but I believe him. Besides, I have other things to do right now. So I head toward the stairs, walking slowly, bracing myself with every step in case I suddenly become dizzy again.

  Once I’m on the landing of the second floor, I stop. I wait for a moment, listening to the sound of my uncle’s voice as he speaks with the 911 dispatcher.

  “I think that I, uh, need to report a missing person.” He pauses. “My niece. Her name is Alice Foster. I’m her guardian … that’s right.”

  Carefully, quietly, I open the door to my aunt and uncle’s bedroom and step inside.

  My uncle’s wallet rests in plain sight on the nightstand. I don’t have to look to know that, if I open his top nightstand drawer, I’ll find the keys to his sports car. It’s a Porsche. He only drives it four months a year, from May to August. The rest of the time, he stores it under a canvas cloth in the garage behind our house.

  If I’m hoping to get very far, I’m going to need transportation. I walk to the nightstand on my tiptoes, even though the room is carpeted. I open the top drawer. I stare at the keys for a second. Then I take them.

  When I step into the hallway again, Charlie is standing on the landing, staring wide-eyed at me.

  “Hey, Charlie.” My hands dangle at my sides. He can definitely see the keys.

  “Rachel? Why were you in my parents’ room?”

  Oh, Charlie. He is kind at all times, curious and genuine and gentle. I love him dearly.

  But I love my sister more.

  “Can you do me a favor?” I ask him.

  He notices what I’m holding, and I can see the struggle on his face as he attempts to piece together what’s going on.

  “What?” he asks, doubtful.

  “I need you to stay in your room. Just for ten minutes. Go inside, close the door, and stay there. After ten minutes, you can do whatever you want. Okay?”

  “Why do you have those keys?” he blurts.

  “Shh. Quiet.” I take a step closer to him. “I can’t explain everything right now, but it’s really important that you listen to me and do what I say. You believe me, right? I wouldn’t lie to you.”

  My cousin’s eyes are glassy with worry. His hair is uncombed. Glancing past him through the open door to his bedroom, I see the framed drawing that he keeps above his desk. It’s a pencil sketch of his face, his lips turned upward into a patient smile, eyes staring brightly ahead. In the right-hand corner—so small and far away that I can only make out a hint of them—are the initials A.E.F.

  I don’t know exactly why I start to cry—I just do. I can’t stop myself. Maybe it’s because the dread is still all around me, seeping through my clothes and into my body, so thick that it seems to drip from my pores. Maybe because I am deeply certain that my twin sister is suffering somewhere, and I don’t know how to help her.

  My lungs crackle as I breathe, still unable to fully fill my lungs. Charlie’s face becomes a blur through my teary vision.

  “Rachel? I’m scared.” He puts a clammy hand on my arm. “Don’t leave. Okay?”

  “I’m just going upstairs. Don’t worry about me.” I smile at him. “Promise you’ll wait ten minutes before you come out.”

  He doesn’t answer for a long time. Finally, he says, “Okay. I promise.”

  I give him a hug. “Thank you.”

  I have no time for a shower. I hurry up to my room, quickly change my clothes, and slip on a pair of flip-flops. I pull my hair into a ponytail, my whole head aching now, and try to ignore the discomfort, along with the fact that my hair is covered in blood. I don’t care. I grab my purse and phone. I find my backpack beneath a pile of dirty clothes, and then I kneel down and reach under my bed until I find the last, most important thing that I’m looking for.

  I sit cross-legged on the floor beside a large rectangular cardboard box and lift off the lid. As I gaze down at the contents, I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding.

  Inside is all that’s left of the life my sister and I once shared with our parents. There are our report cards from kindergarten through third grade; art projects that our small hands constructed so carefully, eager to impress our mom and dad; old Christmas tree ornaments; two Baby’s First Year scrap-books. There is a thick row of loose photographs arranged in no particular order. A small manila envelope contains some of my mother’s old jewelry, including her engagement ring. I’ve looked through this stuff a hundred times—my sister and I both have. But I’m not interested in any of it right now. What I want is all the way at the bottom, wrapped in a thin cotton blanket—the same one the nurses used to swaddle me in at the hospital, right after I was born.

  It’s money. Lots of it. Ten thousand dollars, to be exact.

  Here in my room. Hidden in a box beneath my bed. I guess it’s my money, in the sense that it’s in my possession at the moment. But from a legal standpoint? A moral one? That’s where things start to get a tad sketchy.

  I hesitate, staring at it, overwhelmed by how much is there even though I’ve looked at it many times over the past few weeks. The money isn’t mine; I found it. Actually, I stole it. And I can’t ignore the possibility that its owner probably wants it back. Maybe whoever it belongs to wants it badly enough to go after the person who took it. And maybe they made a mistake; what if they confronted the wrong sister last night? What if something terrible happened, and it’s all my fault?

  I remember the dream I had last night. My sister’s voice: Don’t. Tell. Anyone.

  But I have to tell someone. Without giving it another thought, I grab the money and stuff it into the front of my bookbag. Then I leave.

  Back on the landing, I peek downstairs. My aunt and uncle are in the living room at the front of the house. They’re talking in hushed voices. The television is on, tuned to a muted episode of Meet the Press. I can hear Billy Idol’s “White Wedding” blaring from TJ’s car stereo on the street.

  It could almost be any normal Sunday.

  Except that on any normal Sunday, my sister and I would be downstairs with our family. We’d all be eating breakfast—except for my sister, who can’t stand to put anything in her stomach before lunch. Right now we might be watching the kittens, marveling at how tiny they are, how we’ve never seen anything so new in our whole lives.

  Instead of joining my family in the living room, I slip down the secret stairway and into the empty kitchen. I tiptoe unseen out the back door and hurry toward the garage. By the time the police arrive, I’ll be gone.

  Chapter Five

  I drive slowly through town, constantly glancing at the sidewalks, trying to get a good look at each person I pass, hoping I might suddenly recognize my sister among them. I imagine pulling up beside her, demanding that she get in the car.

  “What’s the matter?” she might ask, grinning, like her disappearance is nothing more than a hilarious practical joke. “Did I scare you?”

  I’m so desperate to find her that the fantasy is pleasant in an achy sort of way. I let it continue, the scene unfolding in my mind with almost no effort on my part; it seems like my sister is describing it herself, from somewhere very far away.

  “Here,” she says, pulling something from her pocket. “I have a present for you.” She opens her hand to reveal another peach-pit monkey. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”

  I laugh. I reach into my pocket and produce my own identical carving.

  My sister’s eyes twinkle. She rests her monkey in my palm. “Look,” she says, “they’re twins.”

  But none of it is real. The longer I drive, the more sure I am that my sister isn’t walking around on these streets, waiting for me to stumble upon her. I make my way down a steep one-way hill that winds around the back of the hospital and brings me out next to the local Catholic school, whose
parking lot offers a shortcut to Pennsylvania Avenue.

  The Porsche is out of place among the other cars parked along the street, all of which appear old and beat up. Pieces of trash—mostly empty soda cans and cigarette butts—litter the cracked, uneven sidewalks. Pennsylvania Avenue used to be considered one of the worst streets in town. It spans four blocks cluttered with huge old homes, many of which are broken up into low-rent apartments. You can tell just by looking that it’s not a bright and happy place. Almost all the small front lawns are overgrown with weeds and strewn with random junk. For years this street was a notorious source of local drug activity. I think there have even been a few shootings.

  Lately, though, people have been making efforts to clean up the area. About six months ago, a group of investors purchased most of the houses, a few of which are already undergoing renovations. The idea is to restore them to single-family dwellings and sell them for a huge profit once the whole street has been transformed. Marcus Hahn—my boss and Nicholas’s dad—is the leader of the investment group.

  He personally owns six houses on this street, all of which are on the same block, directly behind the Catholic school. Three of them are still occupied by tenants whose leases don’t expire until the end of the year. Two of them are in the early stages of repair. And one of them is empty, the tenants gone since June, even though its cleanup isn’t scheduled to begin for another few weeks.

  I know all of this because, for a couple of months now, Mr. Hahn has been letting Nicholas use the empty house to entertain friends after school and on weekends. He’s what you might call a permissive parent. Nicholas hasn’t had a curfew since eighth grade, and he told us that on Christmas last year, his dad gave him a box of condoms in his stocking.

  Nicholas has a key to 340 Pennsylvania Avenue, and as far as I know, his dad has never bothered to check up on what happens here. He doesn’t care if we trash the place, Nicholas explained, because they’re just going to gut it in a few weeks anyway.

  As soon as he got a key to the house, Nicholas promptly made copies to distribute among his friends—my sister and I got one to share, and I have it with me today. After I’ve knocked a few times, once I’m confident the place is empty for the moment, I dig my key from the front pocket of my bookbag and let myself inside.

  “Hello?” I call, stepping into the foyer. “Is anybody here?”

  The place is enormous; it’s one of the few homes on the street that never got split up into apartments. Still, it’s a wreck inside. The hardwood floors are scratched and stained, probably beyond repair. The wallpaper in the dining and living rooms is peeling away in sheets. Little piles of rodent droppings line the baseboards. The electricity is still on, but almost none of the lights are functioning because the wiring is so bad. Even though the water works, there’s only one usable toilet in the house, down in the basement. The spaces behind the walls and ceilings are infested with squirrels; if you listen carefully, you can hear them running around inside, their little claws scratching against the wood.

  The house is always packed with kids on weekend nights, but otherwise it’s usually empty. Over the summer, my sister would slip away sometimes, for a few hours here and there. She told me she liked being alone in this house. She said she’d lock all the doors and go up to the attic, where a huge window offers a panoramic view of the city.

  “But what do you do?” I’d asked her more than once. I’ve been in the attic myself a few times; it’s filthy. Aside from the unfinished wooden floor, there’s nowhere to sit. The big window is painted shut, preventing any fresh air from getting in, so the room always smells musty and suffocating. Anytime sunlight shines through the dirty glass, you can see all the dust particles floating in the air.

  My sister didn’t want to tell me how she spent her time alone here. All she would ever do is give me a little smile and say, “Everybody deserves to have a secret, don’t they?”

  But she isn’t here today. I check almost the entire house twice, calling out to her, looking in closets and behind doors, hoping that maybe she snuck over here last night and fell asleep, or got locked in somehow, or was just having too much fun by herself to bother coming home.

  Even as I’m searching, I know I’m not going to find her here. The more I look, yelling her name—waiting for an answer and only hearing the scratch, scratch, scratch of the squirrels behind the walls—the more frantic and disappointed I become.

  After maybe fifteen wasted minutes, I find myself standing at the foot of the basement stairs. It’s the only place I haven’t checked yet. The basement is unfinished; it has a dirt floor and low ceilings, from which plaster is falling off in chunks. Behind them are rusty pipes and old clusters of wires, their insulation chewed away by squirrels and whatever other creatures might be lurking behind the scenes.

  A few Saturdays ago, after the first football game of the year, Nicholas had a party here that lasted until four a.m. Sunday morning. My sister and I both came, along with practically everyone else from school. Jill Allen, the secretary of our senior class, brought three jugs of homemade liquor that she’d stolen from her parents’ root cellar. Apparently it was some kind of family recipe going all the way back to Prohibition. We tried mixing it with everything we could think of—soda, juice, even Gatorade—but no matter what we used, our drinks tasted like poison and made our insides burn. The only upside was that we all got drunk very quickly. By midnight we were a bunch of fools, stumbling all over one another, making so much noise that you could feel the walls vibrating. Eventually the chaos started to make me feel sick. Looking for a quiet spot to rest for a few minutes, I came down to the basement, which was the only unoccupied part of the house.

  Pennsylvania Avenue runs along a steep hillside; all the homes are built so that their basements have doors and windows looking out the back, while their front rooms are basically underground. I’d only been down there a few seconds when I heard footsteps on the stairs, presumably someone looking to use the only functioning toilet in the house.

  I’m not sure why I wanted to remain unseen so badly, but for some reason I hurried deeper into the basement, into a cool, windowless room toward the front of the house. It was dark, but once my eyes adjusted I could make out a crooked wooden door on the opposite wall.

  When I lifted the latch, the door creaked open to reveal another set of steps, much steeper and more narrow than the main basement staircase. I felt the walls around me until my fingers touched a light switch. When I flipped it on, the space filled with dim light. Beyond the second set of stairs was what appeared to be another basement. A sub-basement.

  Ordinarily, I would have been curious enough to go exploring. But I was drunk, and the space below me looked creepy enough that I didn’t want to check it out alone. I stepped a few feet into the stairwell so I could pull the door shut behind me, intending to wait until whoever was using the bathroom had gone back upstairs.

  I slipped and fell immediately. There was no banister to grab on to. I tumbled all the way down on my butt, the unfinished wooden stairs scraping the backs of my bare legs. I was tipsy enough that it didn’t hurt much, but I knew I was probably bleeding.

  Once I’d recovered from my spill, I found myself in an area so tiny that it didn’t even qualify as a room. It was just a hollowed-out square of dirt, more of a crawl space than anything. But there was something nestled into one of the corners. Even in the dark, I recognized its shape. It was a duffel bag.

  In hindsight, I don’t know why I took it back upstairs with me. I didn’t think there would be anything of value inside. I wasn’t even that curious. But I didn’t think it through at all—I was in a hurry—so I grabbed the bag and tucked it under my arm and limped out of the crawl space, the scrapes on the backs of my legs beginning to burn.

  Whoever had come down to use the bathroom was gone. Alone again, I unzipped the bag and peered inside.

  It was money.

  I’d like to think that, if I hadn’t been drinking, I would have put it back
where I found it. But that’s not what I did. Instead, I rolled the duffel bag into a ball and stuffed it up the front of my shirt. I kept my arms crossed against my chest as I went back to the party. I didn’t speak to anyone as I walked out the door, straight to my aunt’s car parked on the street, and stowed the duffel bag under the front seat. Then I returned to the house and got myself a fresh drink. It didn’t occur to me until a few days later that whoever had hidden the money might come looking for it eventually. But did it really matter? Nobody had seen me take it. Nobody had even known I was in the basement.

  Later on that week, as I sat on my bedroom floor and counted the bills for the fourth or fifth time, astounded each time by how much was there, I reassured myself that everything would be fine. I smiled. “Finders, keepers,” I whispered.

  Right now, alone in the basement again, all I want to do is put the money back where I found it. The duffel bag is long gone, but I figure that won’t matter to whoever stashed it in the first place. If whoever took my sister comes looking for the cash again, they’ll find it all right where they left it, safe and sound, every bill accounted for. They’ll let her come home. Everything will be okay. It has to be.

  I can feel the adrenaline pumping through my veins as I make my way toward the little wooden door, unzipping my bookbag and reaching inside while I walk. All I have to do is run down the stairs, replace the money, and leave.

  But as I reach for the latch, I freeze. My stomach turns. The walls seem to rise up around me, swallowing me, all the light and air and hope slipping from the room like water falling through the holes in a sieve.

  Somebody has attached a shiny metal combination lock to the latch. The door is locked.

  I grab the handle anyway and lean my shoulder into the door, trying to force it open. It doesn’t budge. I try again, then again, but the lock isn’t going anywhere.