Every Single Lie Read online

  “Yeah.” I back slowly toward the door. “You can’t tell anyone, though.”

  “I won’t. I swear.” Jake clears his throat and slides his free arm through the second strap of his backpack. “Beckett, are you okay? This is all insane.”

  “Yeah. But I’m fine.” I give him a small smile to reinforce my lie. Then, when he stands and reaches for me, I open the door and head to my first period class. Not because I don’t want him to touch me, but because I do.

  I really, really want that.

  After school, my mother is waiting for me on the couch with her laptop open on the coffee table. She’s logged into the @CliffordTNpd Twitter account. My phone is in my pocket, but it’s been off all day, in case any more reporters call, so I haven’t seen the tweet centered on her screen.

  All the blood drains from my face as I read it.

  “Beckett,” my mother demands. “Did you have anything to do with this?”

  CRIMSON CRYER

  @crimsoncryer · 15m

  Rumor has it the #CliffordBaby was a ! Sleep well, little ! Rumor also has it that @CliffordTNpd calls her Baby Jane Doe, but she deserves a name of her own. Let’s call her Lullaby.

  #LullabyDoe

  #RIP

  83 296 1024

  FIVE

  The #CliffordBaby has a name now, and #LullabyDoe is already trending as strangers all over the country send condolences to our town, and to Clifford High, and to the Crimson Cryer account. Some of those strangers are also sending hate messages to me, which I can see in real time, because my mother has set up a search column for @BeckettBergen. Doug must have helped her with that.

  @BeckettBergen I hope you burn in hell

  #BabyKiller #LullabyDoe

  @BeckettBergen should be ashamed. There’s ALWAYS another option.

  #BabyKiller #LullabyDoe

  Why hasn’t @BeckettBergen been arrested???

  #BabyKiller #LullabyDoe

  @BeckettBergen i hope you cant have anymore kids you dont deserve them

  #BabyKiller #LullabyDoe

  “Jesus. They’re calling me a murderer.”

  My backpack hits the floor. My bones melt, and I fall onto the couch.

  “Don’t look at that.” My mother closes her laptop. “We’ve put in a request for Twitter to suspend the Crimson Cryer account, but the chief doesn’t think they’re going to comply without a court order. Which we can’t get, because the account hasn’t broken any laws or violated Twitter’s user agreement or content guidelines.”

  I didn’t actually read the user agreement or content guidelines when I signed up for my account, so I’ll have to take her word on that.

  “Can’t you ask Twitter who opened the account?”

  “They’re not likely to comply with that request without a warrant, which we don’t really have the grounds to get. So, if you know anything about this, you need to tell me. If it’s a student, we stand a better chance of getting his or her parents to delete the account than we do of getting it taken down through legal action. I know you’re not the Cryer—”

  “Of course not! Why the hell would I do this to myself?”

  “—but no one else outside of the Clifford PD knew the gender of the baby, so if you told anyone . . . ?”

  “How do you know that? One of the other officers could have told their kids the baby was a girl, just like you told me.”

  I shimmy between my mother and the coffee table on my way into the kitchen, where I open the fridge and grab one of the sodas Penn picked up after his run yesterday.

  “I’m the only one in the department with teenagers.”

  “Okay, but you don’t know the Crimson Cryer is a teenager. You don’t even know that the baby belonged to a student, for that matter. Maybe a teacher had her.”

  My mother shrugs with her arms crossed over her chest, leaning against the framed archway between the kitchen and the living room. “We’re certainly keeping that possibility in mind. But the fact is that most teachers—most adults, in general—don’t have any reason to keep a pregnancy secret for thirty weeks. Or to give birth in a shower in the girls’ locker room, instead of calling an ambulance.”

  “Is that what you think happened? The baby was really born right there, in the middle of a school day?”

  “That’s what it looks like.” My mother sighs and lays one hand over her heart. “Beckett, childbirth is exhausting, and excruciating, and terrifying. And that’s coming from an army vet who had three epidurals. Anyone who gives birth alone, in a locker room shower, must really, really not want anyone to know she was pregnant. And that just doesn’t make sense for an adult in a professional career. Like a teacher.”

  I duck into the fridge again and pretend to look for a snack. “Okay. But that Twitter account could still belong to an adult. A friend or relative of someone you work with. It could be anyone.”

  Her footsteps cross the kitchen, and she tugs me out of the fridge and closes the door. “It certainly could. But I think there’s a reason you’ve spent the past five minutes arguing for that possibility instead of answering my question. Did you tell anyone about the baby’s gender?”

  My mother basically interrogates people for a living. I don’t really stand a chance of keeping this secret. Yet . . .

  “Is the rest of it true?” I ask. “Do you guys call her Baby Jane Doe? Because I didn’t know that, so even if I mentioned the gender to someone, I couldn’t have said anything about that part.”

  “Yes, but it’s common knowledge that unidentified female victims are called Jane Doe. Anyone could have drawn that conclusion.” My mother exhales slowly, holding my gaze. “Who did you tell, Beckett?”

  “Jake.” I sink onto a wobbly bar stool at the narrow, cluttered island. “But it’s not his account. He’s getting as much shit from this as I am, because people think that if I’m the mother, he must be the father.”

  People at school, anyway. His name hasn’t come up online. Probably because he’s not on Twitter, so there’s no one to tag.

  “Is that why you were talking to him about the baby? You feel like he’s in this with you, because people are giving him a hard time too?”

  She looks so sympathetic that I almost hate to admit the rest. But I can’t be the reason the police fail to identify that poor baby.

  “No . . . there’s more.”

  Silence stretches between us, and I can see my mother trying to compose herself. It’s okay to get mad at your daughter, but it’s unprofessional to get mad at a witness. Visibly mad, anyway. The fact that I’m both daughter and witness is obviously uncomfortable for her. But that feels fair, because the fact that she’s both mother and cop is uncomfortable for me.

  “Do I need to record this?” she asks at last.

  I shrug. “I mean, maybe? I need to amend my official statement, so I guess so.”

  She takes another deep breath. Then she pulls her phone from her pocket and opens the audio recording app and says my name, the date, and the time.

  “Beckett, is there something you’d like to add to your original statement?”

  She tucks her hair behind her right ear, even though it hasn’t fallen forward, and I realize she’s nervous about this. She has no idea what I’m about to say, or whether or not it will somehow incriminate me.

  But nervous or not, she’s going to do this by the book. Which means that Detective Julie Bergen has won out over Mama Bear. At least for today.

  “Yes. Sorry. I . . . ​um . . . ​I know who the bag belongs to. The duffel I found in the girls’ locker room. It’s Jake’s.”

  Another heartbeat of silence. “Jake Mercer?”

  “Yes.”

  She sets her phone on the counter between us, still recording. “How can you be sure of that?”

  “I recognized the bleach stain near the bottom of the left side.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this on Friday, in your original statement?”

  “Because I wanted to ask him about it myself first.
I mean, if the bag is his, I thought . . . ​the baby might be. And if that’s true . . .” I shrug.

  My mother ends the recording, because whatever she wants to ask now will be off the record. “Beckett, did your breakup with Jake have anything to do with the baby?”

  Translation: Did you dump your boyfriend because you found out he got someone else pregnant?

  “No! I didn’t know anything about the baby until I found it Friday afternoon. And Jake swears it isn’t his. That it can’t be.”

  “So then, why did you break up with him?”

  “Mom, that doesn’t matter—”

  “To the investigation? Probably not. To your mother? It definitely does.”

  “Fine.” I sigh, as if saying this is no big deal. “I thought he was cheating.”

  She blinks, and I can’t tell what she’s thinking. She’s gotten really good at that, and I don’t think it’s a skill she learned on the job. I think it’s something she picked up from dealing with my dad. From trying to keep the worst of it to herself.

  “Why did you think he was cheating?”

  “Because he started hiding texts from me. Like, turning his phone over, so I couldn’t see the screen. Putting his phone under his leg while we watch movies, so I can’t even see if it lights up. And that felt suspicious. And you said that sometimes you have to trust your hunches.”

  Her guarded expression crumples to expose . . . ​guilt. “Oh, Beck, that’s not . . . ​You’re not a police detective. I was talking about work. About an instinct I’ve developed over a fourteen-year-long career. You haven’t had—”

  “You weren’t talking about work when you said that. You were talking about—”

  Dad.

  I don’t say it out loud, but I can tell that she hears it, because she looks like I just slapped her.

  “Beckett . . .”

  “You said you could tell something was wrong, and that you had to trust your gut, and you were right.”

  But she was too late. We were all too late.

  I can’t be too late again.

  “Beckett, that’s an entirely different situation. Jake isn’t your father. Your father wasn’t cheating. And you don’t know that Jake was either, do you?”

  “I can’t prove it, but—”

  “Stop.” Her hand settles over mine on the counter, and she squeezes. “Again, for the record, this is a completely different situation than what happened with your father. But if you’re going to take my advice and apply it in ways I never intended, then take this next piece of advice with it, because it’s just as important. The worst thing you can do in an investigation is to start off with a presumption of guilt. A detective investigates to find the truth, not to prove what she thinks she already knows. If you’re looking for evidence that Jake cheated, eventually you’re going to find something that looks like proof, whether or not it is proof.”

  “So . . . what should I do?”

  “You should decide whether or not you trust him, because that’s what really matters. If you trust him, you have to believe him. If you don’t, then it doesn’t matter whether or not he lied—whether or not he cheated—because you can’t be with someone you can’t trust. And—”

  “But you stayed with Dad, and you couldn’t trust him.”

  We couldn’t trust him.

  At first, it was little things. Like text messages he didn’t want us to see. So he stopped leaving his phone sitting around. Then the fire station let him go, and we didn’t know about that for three days, and once we finally did find out—my mother figures everything out, eventually—he lied about how he lost his job. He said a couple of the other guys had it in for him. That they were telling lies about him to the chief. Dad said those guys were jealous because he was a better fireman, and that he didn’t want that job anyway if they were willing to believe those assholes over him.

  He said there were lots of other jobs out there for a man with a decade of active duty service and several more years in the reserves. He said offers would start rolling in. He said we would be fine. But those offers never came, and with our household income cut in half, it didn’t take long for us to go through our savings. For my mother to start paying for groceries on a credit card. For her to downgrade our internet speed and cancel the cable. To start buying us Walmart-brand sodas, jeans, and shoes.

  We weren’t supposed to notice any of that. And maybe Landry didn’t. She was only in the seventh grade. But Penn and I aren’t kids. We understood what was going on.

  At least, I thought I did.

  The really embarrassing part is that at first, I believed my dad. He railed against the injustice of a soldier being unable to find honest work, and I believed the world was out to get him. I thought those other firefighters were jealous, and that the fire chief was a coward who’d fired my dad two weeks before Thanksgiving because that was easier than believing him. Than confronting those other guys on their bullshit.

  I even called him once. At the end of Thanksgiving break, when my dad was so upset about losing his job that he hardly got off the couch. When my mother had to work over the holiday, to get overtime pay. I went out into the backyard, where no one would hear me, and I called the fire chief, demanding to know how he could be so heartless as to let one of his best firefighters go right before the holidays.

  He was super polite, but firm about the fact that he couldn’t discuss human resources issues with the child of a former employee. And I was so mad. In that moment, it felt like everything that was going wrong for us was the chief’s fault, for firing my dad, and I needed to know why. But he couldn’t tell me that my father had been showing up for work late, and high. That he had put other people’s lives at risk. That he was a liability to the entire department.

  And even if he’d been allowed to tell me that, I don’t think he would have. Who wants to say something like that over the phone to a fifteen-year-old girl? So I got nothing from him but repeated, gentle, and humiliating encouragement for me to talk to my parents. Then, suddenly, my anger—my utter outrage—fell apart like a cookie crumbling in my fist. And I started crying. Right there on the phone with the fire chief.

  I hung up when he asked if I was okay, and the next day, it was all over school, because the chief’s son had overheard him tell his wife how worried he was about Kyle Bergen’s family. That’s when the rumors at school reached a fever pitch. When I started to feel like people were staring at me and whispering behind my back. When—depending on my mood—I started either hurrying through the hall with my head down or making aggressive, confrontational eye contact with everyone I saw. And it all started with my father hiding text messages.

  Just like Jake.

  My mother exhales slowly. Pain crackles behind her eyes, as if I’ve just pried the coffin open and demanded she take another look inside. As if I’ve disinterred his memory.

  “What happened with your dad was different. And much more complicated. Your father and I had an entire life together. Twenty years of history. Three children. And he loved us. Even when things started to go bad, that much never changed. I couldn’t give up on him. I couldn’t throw all that away. Maybe I made the wrong call, and if I did, I’m really sorry. But you and Jake . . .” She lets go of my hand and runs her fingers through her hair, and it’s like she’s just hit the reset button on this entire discussion. Like she’s stricken Dad from the official record. “If you insist on investigating Jake, what you should do instead of looking for evidence that he cheated is look for the reason he’s acting suspicious. Which may or may not be that he’s cheating. Investigate the cause. Don’t assume the cause.”

  Oh my god, that’s what I did. I just assumed he was guilty. That’s what Penn was trying to tell me.

  My mother watches me as if my eyes are an old-fashioned Polaroid and my thoughts are finally starting to develop. For a second, I think she’s going to ask me something. But then she just clears her throat.

  “You’re sure Jake’s not the Crimson Cryer?”
>
  “He says he isn’t, and I believe him. He also swears he knows nothing about the baby, and I believe that too.”

  Does that mean I do trust him? Did I just throw away everything we had, for no reason?

  My mother ducks to draw my gaze up from the countertop. “But you’re sure it’s his bag?”

  “Yes, and he is too. He says he lost it.”

  “Okay, we’ll have to ask him about that.”

  “I know. He was expecting you to show up with a cotton swab and a warrant over the weekend.” My mother gives me a look, and I shrug. “Like I said, I meant to tell you it was his bag.”

  “Beckett. I’m going to say this one more time, and I want you to take me very seriously. You cannot talk about—”

  The front door squeals open, and my mother bites off the rest of her warning as my little sister comes into the kitchen with two plastic grocery bags swinging from one arm and her backpack hanging from the other.

  “Hey, we’re home!” Landry calls out. “Penn took me to the Super Walmart in Daley, but they didn’t have miso paste, so I had to give up on the miso-roasted mushrooms. We’re having risotto and vegetable tian instead.”

  “What on earth is vegetable tian?” I ask.

  “Slices of sweet potato, tomato, squash, and zucchini, baked with cheese melted on top. Like potatoes au gratin, but with healthier veggies.”

  “You owe me twenty-three dollars,” Penn adds as he follows our sister into the kitchen.

  “I’ll try to stop for cash on the way home.” Mom gives him a tight smile, then she turns to Landry. “But next time, submit your budget for approval before you shop.”

  Landry dumps the grocery bags on the island. “You’re not staying for dinner?”

  “I was going to, honey, but something came up with a case.” Mom presses a kiss to Landry’s temple, then heads back into the living room. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Save me some leftovers,” she calls as she shoves her laptop into her bag.

  “I always do,” my sister says. But Mom is already halfway out the front door.

  For a second, we stand there in the kitchen, looking everywhere but at one another. Then Landry reaches for the nearest grocery bag, and Penn exhales, as if her sudden motion has cut through the tension and made it okay for him to breathe. “I gotta go for a run. Can you help her unload all that?”