Page 34
Story: Everyone Is Lying to You
Lizzie
I’m not okay.
It’s the first question Olivia asks me when she meets me in the gas station parking lot.
She was apparently close to the ranch, circling around and trying to find me.
By the time I was able to power my phone on and see all of her messages she’d driven back out this way and now we’re sitting in the front seat of my rental car.
“Are you okay?” she asks again, reaching over to pat my hand.
I shake my head. “Who the hell was in that house with me?”
“Well, they probably think the same about you. If they know you were in there at all. Let’s not forget you were trespassing.”
“I had a key.”
“Semantics.”
“I think they saw me.”
“Describe the truck again.”
“Pickup truck. Huge. Massive tires. Sparkling white.”
“Sounds like the kind of asshole truck every asshole guy around here drives. I’ve always said I think the size of a man’s truck must inversely correlate to his dick size.”
Olivia manages to be wry and funny even in the worst of times and I can see why Bex must like her. Today she’s in a yellow suit and somehow her hair now matches it perfectly again. I reach over to touch a strand. I can’t help myself. She bats my hand away.
“Never touch a Black woman’s hair. Where were you raised?”
“Sorry. Wasn’t this purple before?”
“They’re clip-ins. Just a little bit of flair to make my day more exciting. Don’t underestimate flair. So what did you find in that big gorgeous monstrosity of a house?”
I hesitate, unsure how much to trust her. Does she know about the shadow house? She must. Maybe she even helped Bex plan and construct it. But I can’t be sure. Instead, I turn the tables slightly and ask her a question.
“What do you know about Gray and Rebecca’s relationship?”
She doesn’t miss a beat with her answer. “I know that Gray Sommers was a bona fide asshole who wanted to control his wife and her business. I know that the ways he did that were toxic and often abusive. What do you know?”
Touché.
I gnaw on my lower lip as I pull the Polaroids from my bag.
“Asshole, indeed,” I say.
I wait for surprise to flicker across Olivia’s face as she glances at the photos, but it doesn’t. She knew, or she assumed. But from the curiosity in her gaze, I don’t think she’s seen these before. I don’t think anyone but Bex has seen these until now. Until me.
“One of these is much older,” she says.
“Fourteen years.”
“Where were they in the house? Just sitting around? Wouldn’t the police have found them?”
“She left them for me.” I explain about the book and how I gave it to Bex when we were in college, what it meant to the two of us. It was left out for me to find, I insist again. I tell her about the note.
“It seems like a stretch that you would stumble upon it.”
“But I did.” I know it seems like a stretch, but it also feels right.
Bex knew I would come, and she knew I would gravitate toward that book and it was next to the bed.
It’s absurd, but I feel close to Bex again.
Like we can once again crawl into each other’s brains the way we did so easily when we were younger.
“Why did she leave that one, do you think? The older one? The recent picture, that I understand. She wanted us to know what he did to her less than two weeks ago, but the first one?”
Even remembering this now is so painful. “It was the last time we were supposed to see each other. I flew out to San Francisco for my birthday. We were going to spend the week together. But she ghosted me. I think she wanted me to know this was why.”
Olivia only nods and then gazes out the windshield as if lost in thought.
“You should write about it. She would want you to write about it. About all of this.”
“Would she?”
“Why else would she have left those for you to find?”
I shake my head. “It feels too personal.”
“She’s a victim, Lizzie. She needs a voice. She needs your voice. I won’t tell you what to write or how to do your job. But she clearly trusts you.” Olivia places a warm firm hand over mine and grips it tightly.
“She chose you. She wanted you here to help her escape Grayson. That was her plan. And she needs you now.”
Olivia is charismatic and convincing, that’s for sure. It’s the charisma of a politician or one of those megachurch preachers.
“Where do you think she is?” I ask. Something tells me that this woman knows, but she definitely won’t tell me. Still, I can try.
There’s that stare into the distance again. “I honestly have no idea. She isn’t answering my emails. Her phone is long gone, or she’s been very careful to turn it off. I keep leaving voicemails and no response.”
“Same. I keep leaving messages in the hopes that somehow she is listening to them. What about the kids?”
“They’re safe.” Olivia says this with a certainty I didn’t expect.
“What do you know?”
She flinches and my reporter’s instinct tells me that she’s definitely about to lie to me. “I don’t know any more than you know, but Rebecca would never let anything happen to those children. They’re the reason she does all of the things that she does. They’re her everything.”
I play along and allow her the feigned ignorance. Often pieces of the truth will come out through the lies. “That doesn’t mean they’re not in danger though. That she isn’t currently in danger. I mean, the man who was in the house with me…They were looking for something.”
“You know it was a man?”
I think about the heavy thuds on the stairs, the groans and muttering I heard in the hallway and the bedroom, the intense energy in the space since they walked into the house.
“I think so. Or I thought so at the time. I can’t explain why.”
“Okay. I’ve got no idea who it could have been. So many people work that ranch. Too many people have access.”
“But to that part of the house?”
She shakes her head solemnly. “No. Not usually to there. But who knows who Gray gave access to over the years. Who knows what that man did and with who. He had his secrets. Lots of them. As you now know from seeing these pictures. That poor girl. I knew he was horrible. But I thought he was horrible with his words alone. He was always telling her she was worthless and stupid, that she was nothing but trash even though she was the one keeping the family afloat, making enough money that he could invest in a bunch of worthless start-ups and still pretend to be a cowboy. He needed that money, but he hated her for making it. She told me plenty of times that he threatened to leave her and take those kids, even though it was an empty threat. No one gets divorced out here. The church looks down on it and judges are wicked to women who ask for one. So many of these women get trapped in these marriages when they’re practically teenagers.
Rebecca’s exit plan was to have so much money that she could tell them all to screw off. ”
“But her plan didn’t work out.”
“That one didn’t work out. But focus on the present. We have to pivot. What do you say? About what I said. About writing the truth about Rebecca?”
“I need to think about it,” I respond carefully.
“You want to go somewhere to think? Right now?”
“Right now?”
“Get some food. Clear our heads. Go somewhere that we can talk and lay out what we know that isn’t your rental car. There’s a halfway decent watering hole down the road. And by down the road I mean about twenty miles away.”
“It’s early for a drink.”
“It’s never too early in the desert, and besides they have a rib eye that will knock your teeth out and their drinks are all watered down because they pretend they don’t believe in overindulgence here.”
What a strange woman Olivia is. And convincing. I agree. I’m hungry and spent and I want to get out of my dusty rental car to eat some red meat and sip on a watered-down lager.
It isn’t until we get settled in a booth at a place literally called the Rib Eye that I remember I took a picture of the license plate of the truck that was in the driveway. I pull it up on my phone to show Olivia.
“Is this familiar?”
She squints and then puts on a pair of massive yellow reading glasses.
I wonder if she has them in every color to match every suit and every piece of hair flair.
If so, the dedication to the vibe is impressive.
“I’m not in the habit of memorizing license plates,” she says.
“So I’ve got nothing for ya. You’re a reporter though.
Don’t you know someone who can search these kinds of things? ”
I do actually. Or I did. A friend from a long time ago who used to work for the NYPD who now works in private security.
“It’s harder than you think. I doubt it.” For some reason I still don’t want to show Olivia all of my cards because I’m pretty sure she isn’t showing me all of hers.
“In the meantime, I think you should get writing. Get Rebecca’s story out there. Create a safe space for her to return to.” Olivia helps herself to a Twizzler from the pack I brought inside with me.
Her phone rings. The ringtone is Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”
“Inside joke,” she murmurs about the tune, and looks at her screen before pushing a button to send it to voicemail and beckoning the waiter over to our table. She orders a steak that is “so rare it is bleeding out on my plate,” and a cup of chili.
“You have to get the chili.” I do. I match her order except I ask for less gore.
Once the waiter is out of earshot I ask if I can turn on my recorder.
“No recording. But you can write some notes. Let’s talk on background for a bit.”
“I did what you said. I spoke to some of the women at the conference. And one of them told me that there were dangerous men, powerful men, supporting Gray, men who could be after Rebecca now. What do you know about that?”
Olivia nibbles on the end of the Twizzler and then perches it between two fingers as if it’s a lit cigarette.
“There probably are. No…no. That’s not right. There definitely are. You don’t know much about this part of the country, do you, Lizzie?”
Table of Contents
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24
- Page 25
- Page 26
- Page 27
- Page 28
- Page 29
- Page 30
- Page 31
- Page 32
- Page 33
- Page 34 (Reading here)
- Page 35
- Page 36
- Page 37
- Page 38
- Page 39
- Page 40
- Page 41
- Page 42
- Page 43
- Page 44
- Page 45
- Page 46
- Page 47
- Page 48
- Page 49
- Page 50
- Page 51
- Page 52
- Page 53
- Page 54