—Detective Rob Ryan, In the Woods (2007)
I lifted a brow at Daniel. “I think you mean dare? Truth or Dare.”
Back when I was living over the diner with Mom and Mona, when I was going to public school, I used to play Truth or Dare with kids on the playground at recess. It almost always involved someone trying to climb branches of an overgrown tree that bent over the schoolyard fence.
“Nope. Truth or Lie,” he insisted. “This is how we play. We each get three turns. On your turn, you ask me a question. Something that you want to know about me. And I can either answer truthfully . . . or I can lie. You decide if you believe me, or you can challenge my answer. Like, I might ask you what your favorite song is.”
“Okay.”
“What’s your favorite song?”
“Right now?”
“Right now, Birdie.”
“Everyone has a favorite song. Mine is ‘Under Pressure’ by Bowie and Freddie Mercury. Or is it? Do you think I’m telling the truth?”
“Yes?”
“You’re right. I am. Point to you. That’s how you play.”
“I don’t get it. How do you win?”
“Knowledge is winning, Birdie,” he said with a grin. “Just ask me a question. It must be something you genuinely want to know. And my answer has to be completely fabricated or all truth. No middle ground, no avoiding answering. After I give you my answer, you decide if I’m lying.”
“Like cross-examination?”
“Just like that. I should have called this game Interrogate Me. That’s more appealing for lady detectives such as yourself.”
“Hold on. Did you make this game up just now?”
“Is that your official question? You only get three. Don’t waste them.”
I laughed. He laughed.
Fine. I guess we were doing this.
I tried to think up a good question, occasionally surveilling the park, until something popped into my mind. “Okay, I thought of one. Ready?”
“Hit me.”
“How did you lose your hearing? That’s my official question.”
“Ah,” he said, leaning back casually. “It’s a funny story, actually. See, my mother, Cherry—that’s her name. She was a magician’s assistant. You know, the pretty thing onstage who gets chopped up in boxes.”
I squinted at him. Was he already lying?
He continued. “She performed every weekend with a semi-famous Seattle magician in the 1990s. They started out in small clubs until they got some notoriety. Then she met my father and got pregnant, and no one wanted to see a pregnant assistant get stabbed by swords in a locked box, so she was forced to stop. And, of course, you already know that my father was a soulless waste of flesh who felt she got in the way of his career, and how could he tell his über-white conservative family that he’d knocked up a young Asian girl? So he dumped her, and she pressed the pause button on magic to have me, and then her stage partner—the magician—died in a freak airplane accident, so she quit it altogether.”
“Interesting,” I said carefully, unsure if he was telling the truth. “But I don’t see how this answers my question.”
He raised his index finger. “Getting to that. My mother may have quit magic, but she kept all their stage props. And when I started showing an interest in performing, my grandfather encouraged me—Jiji. My mom’s father. That’s what I call him. And before you know it, I was trying to impress everyone, and . . . Do you know about Houdini’s water torture cell?”
“Uh, the escape trick?”
“Exactly. Magician is restrained and lowered into a tank of water, and while a curtain falls over the tank, he escapes. Well, the summer before my senior year in high school, I fixed up an old water cell and filled it up in my backyard. Some other guys helped me. It was going fine—I knew how to execute the escape—but the trick lock at the top of the cell was stuck. I panicked and accidentally hit my head on the glass. One of my friends used an ax to break open the tank before I drowned . . . but I perforated my eardrum. Got a bad infection. And that’s how I lost the hearing in my right ear. It’s also why I’m not allowed to do any magic or escape tricks. Like, ever again. I mean, there are other reasons for that, but . . .” For a moment, it sounded as if he were going to say more but quickly decided against it. “Anyway, there you go.”
I stared at his face, trying to decide if I believed him. It was an outlandish story, but then again, he had told me he wasn’t supposed to be performing magic tricks at Pike Place. “What other reasons?”
He shook his head. “It’s nothing. All in the past. I mean, unless you want to use up another question. . . .”
Did he want me to ask? I couldn’t decide. The detective in me longed to pry, but a strained uneasiness settled between us, as if I’d stumbled onto private land with a big KEEP OUT sign.
“What do you think?” he said after several seconds of silence.
“About . . . ?”
“About what I just told you. You asked. I answered,” he said, gesturing to himself and then to me. “Now you have to decide if I was telling the truth.”
Right. Okay. Maybe all of that tenseness was in my imagination. Best to take off my detective hat and focus on what he’d told me—not what he hadn’t. After replaying his entire story in my head, I decided to go with my gut. “I think I believe you.”
He nodded, looking satisfied. “Good. It was the truth. Point for you. My turn. How did your mom die?”
I wasn’t expecting a serious question. It took me a long time to decide if I wanted to tell him the truth. “She died of a weak heart.”
“Wait, what?” Daniel said. “That’s not a thing. You mean she had a heart attack?”
“You tell me,” I said, crossing my arms. Maybe I liked this game now.
“Hmm. You said your mom died when you were ten, and you also said she got pregnant with you when she was about your age. That would have made her, what? Twenty-eight when she died?”
I nodded, expecting the usual tightness in my chest that always seemed to come when I talked too much about her death, but . . . it didn’t happen. Oddly, I sort of wanted to talk to him about it. “Yes,” I said. “She was twenty-eight.”
He made a noise and then exhaled heavily. “Okay, I’m going to say your story is . . . true.”
“Do I have to confirm?”
“You do.”
“Okay, it’s true. Technically.”
“What do you mean? You lied?”
I hesitated. It was easier to talk about things in the dark, out here where it felt as if we were on top of the city, far away from everything.
“Do you know what an ectopic pregnancy is?” I asked.
“I’ve heard of it, maybe?”
“It’s when a fertilized egg implants in the wrong place, like on the inside of a fallopian tube. So the baby starts growing there, and the tube eventually bursts and bleeds, and it’s super painful, and if it’s not removed in time, you can die. But my mom didn’t know she was pregnant. She thought it was food poisoning. But it got worse, and Aunt Mona—she lived with us—was working. And I didn’t know what to do, so I went and got Ms. Patty from the diner, and we called an ambulance. It took them forever to see her in the ER, and once they figured out that she was bleeding and were prepping her for surgery, Mona finally got there. But before they could operate, Mom had a heart attack.”
“Jesus,” Daniel murmured. “That’s awful, Birdie.”
I forced myself to shrug, to keep my emotions in check. “It was just dumb luck. Just one of those things that happens. But it’s why I hate hospitals.”
“I don’t blame you. I’m really sorry.”
“The weird thing is that my grandmother died of a heart attack too. They both had congenital heart defects. So, as I said, weak heart. Which make you technically right when you guessed.”
He reached out, and I felt the gentle weight of his fingers on mine, a whisper of a touch.
I squeezed his hand in answer and then let go. “I’m okay. Let’s keep playing.”
“All right,” he said. “One point to me. We’re tied. Your turn to ask a question.”
I was relieved that he wasn’t making a big deal out of my revelation. It made me relax a little. I pushed hair out of my eyes while a brisk wind blew through the park. A purple tinge was bleeding into the night sky. Dawn was coming. Still no sign of our stakeout target, so I continued. “Back in the diner, you said your mom was trying to talk you into going to fake school. What does that mean?”
“Pfft,” he said. “That’s barely a question.”
“You have to answer, right?”
He sighed heavily. “Okay, fine. Here goes. My mom wants me to go to clown school.”
I blinked several times. “Clown school?”
“Red noses. Painted faces. Big shoes.”
“There’s a school for that?”
“She says I act like a clown, so maybe I should turn that into a professional career.”
“Um . . . no. Not true. Lie.”
He laughed. “Fine. But she did tell me that once, so it wasn’t completely a lie.”
“A point for me, and now you’ve got to tell me the truth.”
“Fine,” he said, pretending to be upset. “Here goes. After the Houdini fuckup, I sort of had a hard time. I went through some stuff, and yadda, yadda, yadda, I missed a bunch of school, my grades bit the dirt, and I graduated by the skin of my teeth. I didn’t apply for college because . . .”
“Because?”
“It was a bad time in my life.”
I waited for him to explain.
He considered his words carefully, starting and stopping a couple of times before settling on, “I did a stupid thing.”
“Okay . . . ?”
“I was mad at the world for losing my hearing,” he explained. “Which was ridiculous, because first of all, it was my fault. And second of all, once I started . . .” He paused to think, head turned toward the city lights. “Once I started getting my shit together, started working full-time at the hotel last summer after graduation, made some . . . adjustments. I guess you could say things slowly got better. But over the last year, I’ve been thinking, hey—do I really want to end up working at the Cascadia for the rest of my life? No. I do not. So, I’m trying to figure out what to do. I mean, yes, I’d like to do magic for a living, but I don’t want to end up being the sad magician that does kids’ birthday parties or gets paid in free appetizers to entertain people in chain restaurants, and I hate Las Vegas, so where does that leave me? Pickpocketing?”
“Might be lucrative. But then there’s the jail time.”
“Exactly. Anyway, my mom wants me to go to wood tech school.”
He gestured loosely. “There’s a vocational school that teaches you how to build things. Carpentry. Boats. Furniture. There’s a woman who lives in our community—”
“That Nest place you told me about.”
“Yep, that’s the one. And Katy is one of the residents there. She built all our picnic tables, cabinets . . . even remodeled two of the houses. She’s a genius. Anyway, she’s been teaching me stuff, and I’m pretty good at it. And that’s why my mom says I should learn a trade instead of going to college. I don’t know. It’s weird to think about not going to a regular university, or whatever.”
It sounded as if he was fishing for an opinion, so I said, “Just because you take a few classes doesn’t mean you have to commit to it forever, right?”
“I suppose, but I’m sort of a commitment type of guy.” He gestured loosely with his hands. “Anyway, I’m still not sure.”
“I get that. I’m not sure what I should be doing either.”
“Are you going to college?”
“I want to,” I said. “But I don’t have a diploma.”
“There aren’t homeschool diplomas? I don’t know how that works. Your grandma taught you? Did you have a regular schedule like people in school? Was she teaching you the same stuff we were taught? Did you study and have tests?”
“Tests. Lessons. Regular school schedule. Grandma was a high school teacher before my mom died, so she knew what she was doing. In some ways, I probably got a better education than a lot of kids, because it was one-on-one without distractions. But in other ways, not so much. I mean, I wanted to go to public school. She wouldn’t let me. My grandparents argued over it. She won. And then she died before she could issue me a diploma, so technically, even though I scored high on my SATs and made good grades—”
“She graded you?”
“It wasn’t hobo school. There were grades, like I said. And tests, which I passed. But I don’t have a diploma, so I never officially graduated. Which makes things complicated for college applications.”
“Whoa. That’s wild. I’ve never met anyone who was homeschooled. I have a million more questions.”
I smiled. “I thought we only got three. And that was your second question for me. By the way, I should get a point for catching you in the clown school lie. And let the record show that I believed you were telling the truth about wood school.”
“And I think you were telling the truth about hobo school—or homeschooling, as you claim.”
“I mean, I can hop a train and heat a can of beans over an open fire like no one’s business.”
“Is that right?” he said, teeth flashing at me in the dark as he grinned. “If I went to wood school, I could probably make you a stick for your hobo sack.”
“A bindle?”
“They have a name for that?”
“You’d know this if you’d gone to hobo school.”
He laughed loudly. The photographer on the other side of the park turned to look at us while I shushed Daniel. And for a moment I became paranoid. Someone was walking around the sculpture in the middle of the park—was it Raymond Darke?
It wasn’t. But it sobered us up.
We were quiet for a long stretch of time, each buried in our own thoughts. My mind went back to when he said he’d done a stupid thing. I desperately wanted to know what that was, but I didn’t want to press him if he wasn’t ready to share it. He was so open about everything; maybe that was off-limits for a good reason. So my mind drifted to other answers I wanted from him. One answer in particular.
I cleared my throat and said, “You agreed with me when I said that what happened the first time we met was a mistake. So why did you post that Missed Connections ad?”
Every casual line on his body straightened at once. “You saw the ad?”
“Only after you told me about it. Before you took it down.”
“Well, I’d found you, so there was no reason to keep it up.”
Oh. “I just assumed you’d changed your mind. About us. You said all that stuff about fate, and then you said maybe you didn’t believe in fate.” And maybe after he spent more time around me at the hotel, he realized I wasn’t his one true destiny. Not that I thought I was. I still barely knew him, and he barely knew me.
He started to answer, changed his mind, and started over again.
“I told myself if you answered the ad, it was a signpost.”
“A . . . ?”
“Signpost. Do you ever feel like the universe is trying to communicate with you? If you just listen hard enough and pay attention to things around you? I know that sounds a little wacky, but it happens to me. Streetlights blink when I walk under them, or I see things I’ve dreamed about . . . It’s hard to explain, but I think sometimes they’re signs. And if I follow them, they lead me to important things. Or important people. And I think I was supposed to meet you for a reason.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I tried to keep the conversation light. “This sounds a lot like fate.”
“Fate will find a way, Birdie.”
“Are you trying to quote Jeff Goldblum? It’s ‘life.’ Life finds a way. Jurassic dinosaur apocalypse, not destiny.”
“Can’t we have both?” he said with a smile. “Look, I’m not trying to get heavy here. I’m just saying, maybe I was supposed to meet you because of Raymond Darke. Or maybe it was for something bigger.” He tugged his ear several times. “As for the other thing, I agreed that us having sex was a mistake because it was. Clearly. It was . . . pretty awful.”
Ah, there it was. My old friend humiliation and its accompanying red face.
“No, no, no,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean . . . I meant, yes, it was awkward at the end, but it started out good. Right? It’s just . . . Why didn’t you tell me you were a virgin?”
Ugh. He knew? I didn’t want to think about how, but I definitely never told him. Why did I even ask about this? Rewind! Cancel!
After a strained moment, I reconsidered what he’d just asked me and got a little angry.
“Are you blaming me?”
He held up both hands. “Not at all. It just . . . can be different the first time.”
“I’m not an idiot. I’m aware of women’s bodies. I have one.” I was most definitely aware of the pain and the smear of blood that haunted me until I got home, until I cried in the shower and later threw away my underwear—making sure it was well hidden, as if it were a piece of murder evidence. I think I halfway expected Grandma Eleanor to rise from the grave and tell me I was just like my mother. As much as I loved my mom, sometimes I felt I’d never be free of her mistakes . . . or free of Grandma judging me for them, because my mother wasn’t alive to carry the guilt anymore.
Daniel sighed. “This is coming out all wrong.”
“What are you trying to say, then?”
“That . . .” He drew in a fast breath and said, “We were racing like the world was burning down. Like we might get caught. It should have been somewhere else—somewhere private. In a bed, with candles. Or after a date at the top of the Space Needle,” he said, gesturing loosely toward the lit-up white tower in the distance.
“Space Needle?”
“Something more romantic. I don’t know,” he said, throwing up his arms.
“I don’t need all of that romantic stuff.”
“Well, maybe I do,” he said, a little indignant. “All I’m saying is that I feel awful about how everything played out, and I’m an idiot for not picking up on the clues, but I guess I’m a shitty detective. And I liked you too much. I was greedy and stupid and not thinking. But also, you wouldn’t talk to me.”
“You didn’t say anything! I thought, okay, he’s finished. I guess that’s that.”
He made a face and held up a finger. “Um, I didn’t finish. For the record. I stopped. There’s a difference.”
A renewed surge of embarrassment raced through my body. “Well, I’m sorry I didn’t realize that,” I said angrily. “Do you want some sort of good-guy prize?”
“What? No!” He growled in frustration, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes. “I don’t want a prize. I’m trying to say that I’m sorry that it sucked, and I feel responsible. I wish you’d stayed and talked to me. I wish I’d had the sense to talk to you more before we started. I wish . . . I don’t know, Birdie. I feel like an asshole, and I wish I had a time machine so that I could go back and change everything. Because it could have been so much better. We could have gone to the movies that night. We could have gotten to know each other first.” He blew out a long breath through his nostrils. “All I’m saying is that I wish you had talked to me instead of leaving.”
“What do you want me to say about it now? That I wasn’t thinking when we got in your car and that I freaked out because I realized halfway through it all that you were a stranger, and it was just way too intense? That I’m not good at heart-to-heart talks because I’m terrified of getting too close to anyone—because everyone I care about always leaves me, so why bother?”
He stared at me, eyes wide, body rigid.
The underside of my eyelids prickled. Do not cry. Do not cry. I pushed myself off the bench and paced in front of the wall, just to clear my head and put some distance between us. He didn’t follow.
Everything he’d said replayed inside my head on a loop. And now that I was able to calm down a little, I wished I hadn’t said what I did. It wasn’t fair to him. See, this was why I didn’t do this kind of thing. I wanted to erase everything I’d just said and go back to the first part of Daniel’s game, when it was easy and breezy and my heart didn’t feel as if it were studded with broken glass.
Maybe it wasn’t too late to apologize.
But before I could rally the nerve to turn around and find out, I spotted someone walking two dogs. A husky man. With a baseball cap.
It was the man from the elevator. I’d bet my life on it. The clerk at the record store had been right. Bill Waddle, opera fan, walked his dogs at dawn.
Was it possible that right now I was looking at the actual Raymond Darke?
All the hairs on my arms lifted. My brain closed the door on our emotional talk and switched into investigation mode—something that was much more comfortable, frankly.
I spun around to signal Daniel, but he was right in front of me. Startled, I let out a little cry, which carried across the park. The photographer looked at us again. So did the man walking his dogs.
“Oh no,” I whispered. “I think that’s him. He sees us.”
“Shit,” Daniel murmured. “Move here. Okay, that’s good.”
Now my back was to the man. “Is he still looking?” I whispered. “Is it Darke?”
“It’s definitely him,” he whispered back. “I’m going to put my hand on your shoulder. Don’t freak. Just act casual. I don’t want him to recognize me.”
Duh. Me, either! I wanted him to come back to the hotel on Tuesday night, so I could trail him and find out what he’s doing there every week. I didn’t need him seeing me here now and getting spooked if he recognized me later in the hotel. No detective worth their salt would be so sloppy.
Daniel rested his hand on my shoulder. Several tense seconds ticked by. I watched Daniel’s face while he watched Darke under lowered eyelids, and my thoughts began to wander. He smelled nice. Maybe that was his hair. It fell over one shoulder and down his chest, and it was right in front of my face. Close enough that if I leaned forward a few inches, I could stick my face in it. It would be soft, and—
What was the matter with me? Soft hair? These were probably a serial killer’s thoughts. And for the love of Pete, why was I even thinking about this? Hadn’t we just had a fight? My feelings were certainly raw enough.
His hand was shifting to the back of my neck. I became light-headed, thinking about all the movies that had scenes in which people faked a kiss to avoid being seen. Was he planning to do that?
Did I want him to?
It didn’t matter, because his hand suddenly dropped to his side. Right. Ha. Yeah. No kiss was coming, so I could forget that silly notion.
“He’s not looking anymore,” Daniel murmured. “Let’s move before he leaves the park.”
Grabbing my hand, Daniel jogged toward the metal sculpture. I tried to run without making noise. The damp grass muffled our footsteps, and we slowed when our shoes hit concrete. The sculpture cast a big shadow, but it was getting lighter outside, and everything had that funny haziness of dawn. Dark . . . but not. Almost morning, not really night. I could see Raymond Darke clearly—could see the lolling tongues of his two beefy dogs. If I could see him, could he see me?
“Should we trail him?” Daniel whispered. “He might be headed home. We could see where he lives. How far could it be? Those mutts don’t look like they were bred for long-distance walks.”
“I don’t know. . . . I think it’s a bad idea. What if—”
A man stepped out from a shadow at the edge of the park. A uniformed cop. Darke stopped and talked to him. One of the bulldogs was pulling on his leash, trying to get around the cop’s legs. Holy crap, those dogs looked mean. Like they could tear someone’s hand off.
Suddenly the bulldog lunged and began barking. His brother joined in, a chest-deep cacophony that sent my adrenaline soaring: the dogs were barking at us.
For one terror-filled moment, I pictured the bulldogs breaking their leashes and running to attack us. But it was so much worse: the author and the cop both turned around, and Darke pointed in our direction.
“Oh, shit!” Daniel whispered loudly. “We gotta leave. Now!”
The cop shouted something at us that I didn’t catch because we’d turned around in tandem and strode away. Not fast enough to be running—that would look suspicious. But fast enough that my calves burned, trying to keep up with Daniel’s longer stride. I didn’t know where we were going. Wasn’t his car in the opposite direction?
We crossed the street and walked half a block before we could head around a building and catch our breath. Was the cop following, or had we lost him? I didn’t hear anyone coming. Maybe we were being ridiculous.
“We weren’t doing anything illegal,” I said, more to myself than to Daniel.
“I think he might have seen my face. Fuck,” Daniel swore.
“The cop?”
“No, Darke.” Daniel seemed even more upset than I felt. “This was stupid. I’m not even sure what we accomplished by coming here.”
We’d learned nothing about Darke. Possibly blew our cover. Nearly got attacked by rabid bulldogs. And, oh, that’s right: our terrible attempt at sex that I’d been desperately trying to forget? It was now back out in the open and more painful than ever.
If we’d accomplished anything, it was that we’d dug up a giant pit of misery beneath our own feet and both fallen inside.
My worries didn’t diminish when he drove me back downtown in silence. No David Bowie. No arguing. No nothing. It wasn’t until couple of hours later, when I was back at home and getting ready for bed, that a light shone from the top of our proverbial misery pit. I got a text from Daniel. It said:
TRUTH OR LIE, BONUS QUESTION:
Do u think we’d be together now if we never went to my car that day?
I reread it several times and finally typed out my answer:
I’m not sure.
Then I turned off my phone and went to sleep. Let him figure out if I was lying.
Maybe I’d need to figure that out myself.