Page 62 of The Lie Maker

“They don’t know where he is,” she said plainly.

“What?”

“They’ve lost him. Whatever life they built for him, he’s walked away from it. He’s out there somewhere, doing God knows what, and we have no idea where he is.”

Thirty-Three

Things were starting to come together. Kyle Gartner had almost everything in place.

The fake passport. The phone. The money. A significant sum had been transferred to a new account. So many precautions had to be taken. One small slip and it would all come crashing down around him.

He knew he had to act as though nothing was out of the ordinary. He didn’t want his wife or daughter to suspect anything. It was important to maintain his usual routine. Off to work in the morning, back home in time for dinner.

He knew that Cecilia had noticed he’d been especially on edge the last few months. She’d been willing to make allowances. She knew how troubled he was about his sister’s death, how his anger over an injustice from years past had not faded. She tried to be understanding when he lost his temper. Rather than engage, she would walk away, let him cool off.

She didn’t know the half of it. The things he had planned.

It was critical that over the next couple of days he hold it together. Dial back the anger. He needed to be agreeable, he needed to be... nice. That was perhaps the biggest challenge. Acting as though he was interested in the lives of his wife and daughter when his mind was actually on something else, something much bigger than they could ever have imagined. The seeds had already been planted. The upcoming business trip. How he would be away for a few days.

“You seem... better,” his teenage daughter, Cherie, had said tentatively just that morning.

“Oh,” he’d said casually, like he hadn’t even been aware of it.

“I’m glad,” she said. “It’s good.”

Cecilia, who had been hounding him ever since Valerie’s death that maybe he should talk to somebody, a therapist or a grief counselor or even their family doctor—anybody—had abandoned that line of badgering.

Kyle thought he’d been careful, but evidently not quite careful enough.

He was back in his home office and had carelessly left the door open an inch. He was on the phone, talking in hushed tones.

Cecilia had been passing by when she heard his whispers. She stopped, turned her ear to the gap in the door, and held her breath.

“Yes, yes,” her husband said. “I’ll be coming out there.”

This business trip he’d been talking about, she assumed.

“You’re being careful?” he asked. A pause, and then, “Yes, we have to be careful. Don’t want anyone getting wind of this. It’s going to happen. I’ve waited this long. I can wait a little longer.”

Cecilia wondered whether she should go to another phone in the house, pick up the extension, and listen in. But Kyle might not be on the home’s landline. He could be on his cell.

At one point, she heard: “We’re going to find...”

And a moment later, “...get this done.”

Find what? Or who? Get what done?

“Okay, okay, I’ll be in touch,” Kyle Gartner said. “It’s really going to happen.”

He ended the call.

She wondered whether she should enter the room now, pretend to have heard nothing. Or maybe she should face this head on. Go in and ask what that was about. Because whatever it was, it was clearly something he didn’t want her to know—

The door suddenly opened. Kyle was as startled to find his wife there as she was to have been discovered.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Nothing. I was just coming in to see you.”