A Perfect Lie Read online

  The door shuts again, and I feel Rudolf’s presence. I walk to the right toward what appears to be the master suite, and I don’t look back at him. I cross the living room and I’m about to escape when I hear, “Do no use the phone.”

  I rotate to face Rudolf. “Dial my father.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “He ordered me to clean up for my meeting. I have no clothes, no make-up, no products whatsoever. I’ll need to have my father halt his campaign duties to make a Victoria’s Secret and Nordstrom’s stop for me, since I’m not allowed to use the hotel shopping service.”

  “We both know that you’ve been instructed to use the hotel shopping service.”

  “Was I?” I ask.

  He stares at me for several hard beats and then walks to the desk on the wall right beside me, picking up the phone. In other words, I’m to make the call with him present. I could reject this idea. I could fight him, but to what end? It would get me nowhere but frustrated and exhausted when I need to get my head on straight for this meeting. I walk toward him, accept the receiver and offer him my back. Once I’m done arranging what I need, I transfer to room service, order and then hand Rudolf the menu. “You should order. You’re going to need your energy to live this life with me.”

  He gives me a tilt of the head and accepts the phone. I head to the bedroom, and shut myself inside, aware that he’ll leave the phone off the hook when he’s done to prevent further usage. I’m trapped. I’m without means to communicate with the outside world and I can’t even search the internet for clues as to what is happening now, or what was happening last night in Austin, as well as here.

  I stare at the fancy, but generic room with its cream-colored leather headboard, and white bedding, but it’s the balcony behind lace balloon drapes that draw my attention. I cross the room and open the double doors, stepping outside onto the half-moon shaped balcony, ignoring the lounge chairs and table to my right to step to the steel railing. I close my fingers around it, looking over the city. We’re eleven stories up, high enough to put the swim lessons my father forced on me to use. I could easily dive to my death, a dramatic end to my life, sure to haunt my father with rumors of my guilt, and his poor parenting.

  I’m not sure how long I stand there, contemplating that jump, seeing myself fly through the air, but where I land is not the ground. It’s in the darkness of my mind, in the past. Suddenly I am sitting in my mother’s car, reliving the moments after the crash. The moment the car jerked to a stop and I breathed out, “Mom,” only to look at her and find a piece of steel inside her chest.

  I sink to my knees, hard stone biting into my skin and bones, my hands on the concrete wall in front of me, and the image of my mother morphs into me in the hallway of the aquarium bar, with Danielle grabbing my arm. Anger erupts in me, but I don’t know why. I want to shake her. I think I do. I know I do. Tobey is there. I think I hit him. Did I hit him? I think I—

  There is a pounding sound and I gasp as I hear, “Ms. Monroe. Ms. Monroe,” in a deep, urgent voice. I look over my shoulder as Rudolf charges in this direction and kneels beside me. “Are you okay?” he demands.

  “Yes. I’m fine.” I try to push to my feet and he helps me up, but I quickly back away, biting back a thank you that my mother would expect me to say. I cannot send a message to Rudolf that he can step into my private space. He’s too sly, too sharp, and on my father’s side, which is never good for me.

  Instead, I snap, “Why are you in my room?”

  “Why are you on the ground?”

  “Bad memory,” I say, recognizing his job to protect me is in play here. “Just a bad memory.”

  “About last night?” he asks quickly, too quickly for my comfort, which is why I snap again.

  “About seeing my mother with steel in her chest,” I say, admitting what I’d prefer to keep to myself, but I have no choice. I don’t want him to tell someone I acted guilty of something. “Why are you in my room?” I repeat.

  “I knocked and you wouldn’t answer. The food is here.”

  My brow furrows because we just ordered.

  “Forty-five minutes ago,” he supplies, clearly reading my thoughts.

  “They’re usually slower here,” I lie, the realization that I’ve lost time a terrifying one he doesn’t need to know.

  He doesn’t buy my cover-up. “You lost time,” he accuses.

  I open my mouth to tell him I was drugged, but zip my lips on that forbidden topic. “Bad memories take up good time that should have been shared.”

  He studies me several beats. “A profound statement.”

  Profoundly brutal, I think. “Do we have a time on the interview?”

  “Four o’clock. It’s two now. Your clothes should be here by the time you finish eating.”

  “I’ll come grab my tray,” I say.

  “I’ll put in on the desk here in the room.”

  I nod and he disappears. I don’t follow him. I turn back to the city view, picturing that dive again, and this time, it’s not as palpable as it was before. I turn and lean on the railing, facing the room. The drugs in my system are clearly messing with me. I need that food to absorb them before my interview, and feeling encouraged that a meal might return my memory, I wait eagerly for Rudolf to return and depart again. It didn’t work the first time this happened to me, but maybe it will this time.

  The instant my door shuts with him on the outside, I hurry to the desk, sit down, and scarf down my omelet and fruit, downing two cups of coffee in the process. Once I’m done, I sit there and try to conjure memories, but there is nothing. I’m still haunted with small pieces of last night, but I can’t even get back to the moments of anger I’d felt at Danielle, before Rudolf had interrupted. I can’t figure out where Tobey fits and why I would hit him. Did I really hit him?

  There’s a knock on the door, no doubt my retail items, and I stand up, open the door, and find Rudolf holding my bags. Sixty seconds later, they’re in my room, he’s not, and I’m headed to the shower. Once I’m under the water, I have that same awkward sensation I’d had after my mother had died. A moment when I think how wrong it feels to be doing normal things when someone has died, or in Danielle’s case, perhaps captive to some monster, who could be doing lord-knows-what to her. And yet, life goes on, even when we wish it would not.

  I drown myself in hot water for an excessive amount of time, in which I remember nothing more about last night, thus forcing me to move on to a choice I’ve made once before in my life thanks to my Europe trip with Danielle: what to wear for a police interview. Considering my “best friend” is missing, I decide on a belted black dress, pulling my dirty blonde hair that somehow seems more dirty blonde today, back at my nape.

  I’ve just finished readying myself, at least on the outside, for whatever comes next, when I somehow, without any obvious trigger, end up flashing through a collage of memories of my dead mother; her laughing, smiling. Yelling at me after that party, right before she died. There it is. The connection between now and then. Death. Anger. Danielle. I flatten my hands on the bathroom counter, staring at myself, preparing for what always comes right after the memory of my mother yelling at me. It’s not us in the car. It’s not the impact of the crash. It’s not her bloodied body. It’s my father arriving at the accident site, grabbing my arms and shaking me. “You did this,” he’d shouted gutturally. “She wouldn’t have been here if not for you.”

  Emotions jab at me and I shove off the counter, walk to the bedroom, where I stop and stare at the open balcony doors. If I jumped, my father would win the sympathy vote and the presidency. He’d probably celebrate right with Mommy Dearest and her perfect son. I’d be forgotten for political gain, just as Danielle is forgotten in political crisis. Rejecting both premises, my lips purse, and I walk to the door and open it.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I misstated a fact in my story, which we all know is a nice way of saying that I lied to you. Maybe I’m mor
e like my father than I like to admit. Whatever the brutal truth of that matter, here’s another truth, if any human being is capable of offering such a thing: I haven’t been interviewed by law enforcement two times, but rather four.

  You’d assume, I’m sure, that the first time was when I was sixteen, after my mother’s death, and about the crash that killed her, but it wasn’t. That was law enforcement encounter number two. The first time was a year before, while on European holiday with Danielle and her father. It was then that I recounted an event that I’d witnessed, and in doing so, I told the truth and yet I told lies. That sounds like a contradiction, but it’s not. Sitting across from a detective that I’d never met until that day, and would never see again, I actually believed what I told him. I, like Danielle, saw a woman take a selfie, lose her footing, and fall off a mountainside to her death.

  It wasn’t until later that I admitted to myself that my truth had been fiction. It wasn’t until later that I admitted that I’d lied. She hadn’t lost her footing at all. Nevertheless, whatever led that woman to that moment, it seemed then like a random, tragic event that shouldn’t be a part of the rest of my story. Later though, much later, in fact, I’d find out that just as there is no such thing as real choices in life, nothing is ever random. But I’m getting ahead of the story. We’ll come back to the woman on that mountainside.

  Right now, we’re focused on my third sit-down with law enforcement, which occurred the morning after Danielle disappeared, and not long after my twenty-second birthday. What I didn’t know in advance of that meeting, but you do now, is that actions had been taken before it occurred, outcomes already set in stone, and nothing that I would say, or could have said, would have changed those outcomes. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that despite it being last week, and eight years after the interview I had following Danielle’s disappearance, my fourth interview with law enforcement, was the spawn of those actions and outcomes.

  ***

  THE PAST—THE INTERVIEW…

  My father’s attorney, Bob Nickels, arrives an hour before my interview, and we gather around the massive dining room table in my suite; him across from me, with Rudolf at the end cap between us. I study Bob, and he studies a file in front of him, ignoring me, as if that file is more interesting than my words. He’s mid-forties, with a GQ face and body, a Hells Angel’s attitude, and in my opinion, no cares about anything but money and his own version of fame. In other words, he suits my father, and now I have to decide if he suits me.

  Tired of watching him watch that file, I end the silence. “You’re not a criminal attorney,” I say, stating the obvious, which I doubt my father or Bob himself, gave me credit for recognizing. “Why are you the one that’s here?”

  “I spent two years with the DA before I decided I’d rather compromise my morals for money than a greedy DA.”

  “In other words,” I say, “we the people should be pleased to know my father has an attorney willing to compromise his values for money?”

  His lips tighten. “We the people,” he bites out, “should be comforted to know the future President’s daughter doesn’t go to a bar and get into trouble, which,” he opens a file that he doesn’t look at, before adding, “I’m here to spin you as the innocent protector of your wild-child friend.”

  Danielle is not my wild-child friend, I think, but I barely manage those words without a cut of my eyes.

  Rudolf laces his fingers together on the walnut finished table and looks at me. “You better lie better than that if you plan to lie your way through this interview.”

  “Why are you here?” I demand, looking from him to Bob. “Don’t I have a right to client-attorney privilege?”

  “He’s former FBI,” Bob replies. “Which makes him the perfect person to walk you through a mock interview.” He holds up documents. “Danielle is working for your father. We know her party girl history, which she assured us in the interviews were long behind her. She was only hired as a favor to her father by your father, and with the understanding that if she slipped up even once, she’s out.”

  “My father doesn’t do favors he believes would jeopardize his candidacy,” I retort. “In other words, he wouldn’t hire her at all if he saw her as a risk.”

  “Your interviewer,” Rudolf interjects, “will have done his homework. He’ll know Danielle’s history.”

  “There is no history,” I reply irritably, “not beyond a normal college student attending frat parties and living life. And this isn’t about her party history.”

  “Her party history doesn’t fit your role in your father’s life,” he says. “The agent sent to interview you will look for a reason you had to kill her. Troublemaker fits.”

  My mind flashes back a moment in the bar when I’d read her text messages, to a swipe of unexplainable anger that I try to understand. What was in those messages?

  Even while I do so, Bob eyes his Rolex that I’m sure my father paid for, about a hundred times over, and then me. “Thanks to the short notice of this incident,” he says, “we have limited prep time.” He flattens his hands on the table. “Let’s get to work. Repeat the story your father gave you to tell.”

  “I didn’t want to go to the bar,” I say, already tired of this story. “Danielle didn’t want to leave. Tobey took me back to my room. You need to know that I don’t remember last night. I think I was drugged.”

  “Do not repeat what your father told you not to repeat.”

  “You’re my attorney,” I remind him. “And I’m stuck with Rudolf.”

  “You were with Tobey,” Bob states. “He’ll back you up. You back him up.”

  “What do you know that I don’t know?” I ask.

  “Enough to stop talking about being drugged,” he snaps. “Now. Rudolf will get you ready for the actual presentation of the story we’ve given you to use.” He motions to Rudolf. “Do it. Question her.”

  Rudolf complies and hits me with a question. “Why did you go to the bar last night?”

  “Because my father’s an asshole who ignored me after the debates,” I state honestly, when honesty isn’t what he’s looking for, “and,” I add, “I needed to let off steam.”

  “Holy fuck,” Bob bites out. “This is not a game, little girl. Your father’s running for the most powerful office in the world. Get it right and do it now. Understand?”

  I purse my lips. “Yes. I understand.”

  “Good.” He motions to Rudolf. “Begin again.”

  “Why did you go the bar last night?” Rudolf repeats.

  This time, I offer the answer as I’m expected to offer it: politically fluffed. “Danielle coordinated a first debate celebration at a private venue that felt secure and appropriate.”

  “Danielle coordinated the visit to the bar?” he confirms.

  “Yes,” I reply, offering nothing I don’t have to offer, which is also the politically fluffed version of any interview.

  “Elaborate,” he commands.

  I arch a brow. “What do you want to know?”

  His lips quirk every-so-slightly. “How did you get from the debate venue to the bar?”

  “She and Tobey were waiting on me outside the debate event center,” I say. “Tobey didn’t want me to go to the bar because he’s quite protective of my reputation. But Danielle pressed us and we caved. Or I did. Tobey only went along to look out for me.”

  “But you didn’t leave with her?” Rudolf counters.

  “No,” I say. “Tobey’s disapproval read like my father’s and I just couldn’t get past that. I regretted the decision to go to the bar almost immediately upon arriving. Danielle didn’t want to leave when I told her I was leaving, and she chose to stay there on her own, but that wasn’t unusual. Because of my father’s career, I’ve been the one to go while she stayed during most of our college years, actually even as far back as high school.”

  “Like the night your mother died?”

  My anger is instant, and I su
rge to my feet. “This is over.”

  “If you can’t handle me,” Rudolf assures me. “You can’t handle this interviewer who will be looking for a reason you hate her enough to kill her.”

  “She wasn’t even around when my mother died,” I snap.

  “And if she had been?” Rudolf presses. “How would things have changed?”

  I wouldn’t have ended up alone in a park and my mother might be alive, I think, but my self-preservation is strong enough to say, “Thank God, she wasn’t,” I say. “The steel went through my mother to the back seat. Danielle might have died in that crash, too.”

  Rudolf looks at Bob and back at me. “Good answer. Go with it.”

  I lean on the table and glower at him. “They won’t go down this path.”

  “You don’t know that,” he states flatly. “You opened the door the minute you said high school. Don’t open the door to a room you don’t want them to visit.”

  “They wouldn’t know to associate Danielle with my mother, but I know who would.” I straighten and look at Bob. “My father told you to ask that question.”

  He doesn’t even blink. His reply is instant. “Your father knew that if you could handle that, you could handle anything. He was right. You did well.”

  I laugh without humor. “This is priceless,” I say. “My father tests me by tormenting me with my mother, knowing that I’m fearing for the safety of my best friend.”

  “Your father is trying to protect you,” Bob states.

  “My father is trying to protect himself,” I counter.

  “This isn’t some local cop that doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Rudolf states. “You crossed states lines and your father is a presidential candidate. This is the FBI you’re dealing with, and that’s another playing field.”