Gathering Lies

Dragging the trunk down the steps, he noted that the sky was an odd yellow, the air still. Hot, for April. But that was the Northwest for you. One week snow, the next a heat wave. He wondered if there would be a thunderstorm, and knew he’d have to bury the trunk deep, so the upper layer of dirt wouldn’t wash away.

He got a shovel from the utility shed and went back to where he’d left the trunk, and began to dig. It was hot, tiring work, and he was still shaking from the unexpected way this had turned out. Still, he’d worked out for years, and was grateful for the hard, efficient muscles that made it possible for him to accomplish this.

When he was several feet down, he scrambled out and used his last ounce of strength to pull the trunk over to the hole, then dumped it in. Looking down into the makeshift grave, he began to sway. Wiping his forehead, he thought, God, I feel dizzy. Must be hunger. Or this crazy weather.

But then his feet began to move, and without volition they stumbled forward. Throwing his arms out, the man tried to keep his balance, like a chicken flapping its wings. But nothing stopped the forward fall, and the man screamed out. His boots slid on the crumbling edge of the grave, and horror overtook him as the ground shook and the trunk rocked back and forth. The flimsy lock snapped open, and the lid flew back revealing the woman’s bloody, broken body. The man fell on top of her, his face smacking the ooze from her skull. Dirt rained down upon them both, and like the wrath of God the ground continued to rumble and shake. Dirt choked his throat and stung his eyes. He tried to burrow an airhole, a space to keep him breathing till help arrived. But he knew, too, that help would not arrive. He was too far out, too isolated.

The next instant there appeared before him a tunnel of light. At first he thought he was dying, and he half expected to see his mother and all his dead relatives there, the way they said it happened on all those talk shows. Panic overwhelmed him. He’d read enough about near-death experiences to know they weren’t always sweetness and light. One could land in hell. Then, suddenly, the sides of the tunnel burst open with a whoosh. Light rushed in. It took the man a moment to realize it was real light, sky light, a hole in the grave. The ground in its shaking had opened a path—a path he could follow, if only he could get an arm out and dig.

“Dig, man!” he half screamed, his fingers scrabbling in the dirt like a crazed, panicky crab. “Dig!” He had to survive. He’d been given a second chance, and he had to grab it.

There was only one person left, now, who knew where that evidence was. Sarah Lansing. He would get to her, make her tell him where it was. Then he would kill her. It would be easier now, after this.

PART I

1

SARAH LANSING

Seattle, WA

May 5

Words.

Words have consumed me, of late. They’re just about all I have left, now, the only solace that remains. I sit here at my father’s desk, in the house I grew up in, telling my story to a computer screen. I write, now, for no eyes but my own. Every night I obliterate what I’ve written, in fear of having my work confiscated by the police. Days, my fingers hover over the keyboard, ever ready to hit the delete key in the event that what passes for the law should show up at my door.

Meanwhile I gather my thoughts, putting them into words.

Gather…Gathering…Gathered.

I have always loved that word. It has a multitude of meanings, as in storm clouds gathering, or supplicants gathered for prayer. It can mean a woman gathering material at the waist, as my mother did, to make a skirt. One can gather one’s thoughts, gather a man into oneself, gather children at one’s knee.

Or—as was the case at Thornberry—it can mean a gathering of lies.

We were all lying about something that spring. And thus, having come together, having gathered for reasons none of us fully understood, we harmed ourselves, and each other, in ways we had no notion of before we began.

I will tell you this: Each of us did what we had to do. Of that, I am clear, to this day. A path opened up and we took it, not even thinking where it might lead.

It led us straight into hell.

2

It was the spring of the Great Seattle Earthquake, and life had been bad enough without the ground opening up beneath our feet. But there it is. Life has a way of taking over, of running amok, and there’s not much point in fighting it—any more than there’s any point in fighting it when a man leaves, betrays, lets one down.

At first you ask yourself, was it my fault? Did I wear the wrong outfit, have the wrong shade of hair? Should I go shopping for something younger, perkier?

Buy a bottle of Clairol Midnight Brown?

I remember Ian saying once that he’d been in love, at twenty, with an Italian girl whose dark brown hair fell in waves to her waist. His pet name for her had been Sophia, he told me, as in Loren. His first love, he said, the one and only true love of his life.

He said this the day he broke it off with me, and I’ve always wondered if it wasn’t just what he told himself, to excuse the fact that he hadn’t had a lasting relationship in all the years since.

Or, again, maybe it was me. Am I too blond? Too amenable? Or conversely, too argumentative?

Life also has a way of burdening one with questions that have no answers, at least none one wants to hear. Therefore, regardless of the fact that I’d been to college and was thought to be a relatively bright woman, with a career I’d been excellent at, those are the kinds of crazy-making thoughts that went tripping through my brain on the day the Big One hit.

It happened while we were at Thornberry—I and the other women. I didn’t, at that point, know the real reason I’d been lured there—for that’s the way it turned out, I was lured there. Nor did I know, in my mind, why I’d accepted the invitation. I only knew I was on the run: from a broken heart, a lost job, and a life that was in shambles.

The invitation to Thornberry, a writer’s retreat on a tiny, private island in the San Juans, came by way of a friend at Seattle Mystery Bookshop, near the rather humble apartment I had lived in for years. When Bill Farley told me the invitation originated with Timothea Walsh, my response was immediate and positive.

“I know Timothea,” I said. “I spent summers on Esme Island as a teenager. My parents and I stayed at her bed-and-breakfast.”

“She’s turned it into a writer’s colony now,” Bill told me. “I hear she likes helping beginning writers, and most of the time they have to apply. This is something new she’s starting, where she invites women only, published or not, for one month out of the year. Everything’s paid for, room and board. All you have to do is show up.”

“But she can’t have asked for me, specifically,” I said, puzzled. “How did she know I was writing a book?”

“Maybe she read about it somewhere?” Bill said, a brow rising. “The papers, maybe?”

Good point, Bill. I’d been a high-profile public defender in Seattle until my arrest in January for drug possession. The local media made that hot news, splashing it all over the papers and television—which made sense, since my defense was that I’d been set up by a cabal of crooked Seattle cops. In the midst of all the media furor, someone had leaked the information that I was going for revenge by writing a book blasting the justice system, and the Seattle police in particular.

That “someone” was almost certainly my agent, Jeannie Wyatt, not that she’d admit it in a million years. Shortly after that, though, offers rolled in. From that point on, my fate as a writer—at least for a year or so if I turned out to be only a “one-book wonder”—was sealed. A bidding war began, ending forty-eight hours later in seven figures.

I’d become an overnight sensation—the Great White Hope of a New York publisher threatened with potential bankruptcy and unprepared for the advent of on-line publishing, e-books, print on demand. Rife with paranoia, they’d already dumped most of their mid-list writers, and were placing all their bets on a hot new blockbuster.

My book, someone high up had decided, would be blockbuster enough to hit the New York Times bestseller list.

And I hadn’t yet written a word.

As for Timothea, it did not surprise me that she’d turned her B&B into a writer’s colony. It was Timothea who first inspired me to write, sitting at her cherry-wood dining room table in the big white house, while everyone else was out on the beach or hiking around the island.

Tiny and remote, there was never much to do on Esme Island but swim and hike. I’d linger behind, my nose in a book, and one day Timmy—as she asked me to call her—sat me down with a pad and pencil and told me to write. She saw something in me back then, something I was too absorbed in being a teenager to see.

Later, when I took legal writing in law school, I began to recognize a few stirrings of potential in that direction. It wasn’t until after the arrest last January, however, that I seriously thought of becoming a scribbler for a living.

A ludicrous thought, an oxymoron for most struggling authors—writing for a living. But once convicted and sentenced for drug possession—if that was the way it turned out at trial—there was little chance I’d ever be a lawyer again.

Some days, at least when the sun shines, I sit here in the bay window of my parents’ house, at my father’s desk, and look out at ships going by on Puget Sound. Before me is the Space Needle, high-rise apartment buildings, sparkling blue water and islands with lush green forests. A halcyon scene. A scene I grew up loving, with great hopes to one day be part of it, to leave my mark on it, doing nothing but good.

How then, could things have gone so wrong?

Fresh out of law school fifteen years ago, at twenty-five, I still had some of those wildly heroic ideas law students get about saving the world. Growing up, I’d watched my father defend corporate raiders and tax cheaters at Sloan and Barber. It was always expected I’d follow in his footsteps. Then, as children will, I’d opted to do the opposite with my fine new degree and become a public defender.

This was not entirely to spite my father, who had hoped I’d one day be a partner at Sloan and Barber, a daughter he could show off at the country club, since he’d never had a son. I actually considered S&B for a while, but in law school I’d begun to hear about innocent people who’d been jailed for crimes they didn’t commit. Many lingered in prison ten, twenty years, while life outside the walls passed them by. Their children grew up, their wives or husbands moved on.

It was something that saddened and even frightened me. The idea that someone who had done nothing wrong could be yanked from his or her home, charged with a crime, and sent to prison for years—even life—sent chills down my spine. It smacked of Nazism, innocent people being dragged off into the night. I think this frightened me because I knew that if it could happen to one, it could happen to all.

My fear was theoretical in nature, back then. I couldn’t have known that one day it would happen to me. Unless, of course, it’s true that we come in “knowing” at some level what our life will be—thus explaining, for some, the kind of choices we make.