Page 20 of Never Lie
TRICIA
Present Day
I get about forty minutes into the tape when I realize that I’ve been down here for too long. Like me, Ethan is notoriously slow in the bathroom, but even he has got to be done showering and dressing by now. Any minute, he’s going to come down here looking for me.
I lost track of time. There was something about Dr. Adrienne Hale’s voice that was simultaneously hypnotic and powerful, as she advised the young patient featured inThe Anatomy of Fear,whose friends and fiancé were murdered by a maniac in a cabin in the woods. When she says,You will get better, it’s like the voice of God himself saying it. No wonder she was such a respected psychiatrist. No wonder so many people struggling with major trauma came to her for help.
Sure enough, footsteps grow louder on the stairs. I quickly eject the tape and pop it back in the case. I shove the cassette into one of her desk drawers seconds before Ethan pops his head into the office.
“There you are!”
I force a smile. “Here I am.”
He cocks his head to the side. “You weren’t nosing through her desk drawers, were you, Tricia?”
“No, I wasn’t,” I answer truthfully.
I hurry out of the office before he can try to figure out what I was doing. He is standing right outside, his hair still damp from the shower. I notice immediately that he isn’t wearing the dress shirt and slacks that he had on when we left the apartment. He’s wearing a pair of blue jeans bunched up at the ankles and a Yankees T-shirt.
“Where did those clothes come from?” I ask.
“Oh.” Ethan tugs at the collar of the Yankee shirt. “I found them in one of the drawers in the bedroom. I hung up my shirt and pants, and I’ll put them back on in the morning.”
The T-shirt and jeans didn’t belong to Adrienne Hale. They’re too big for Ethan even, and therefore, far too big for the psychiatrist’s petite frame. But they were in her drawer, so I’m guessing they belonged to her boyfriend. Luke.
“You might want to change before you go to bed too,” he suggests. “There are tons of sleep clothes in the other drawers.”
What’s worse—wearing the clothing of a dead woman or wearing the clothing of the man who killed her?
“That’s fine. I’ll just sleep in my bra and underwear.”
“Suit yourself. Do you want to come upstairs now?”
I look down at my watch. It’s getting late, and with the snow still coming down hard, we have little choice but to spend the night here. The idea of it creeps me out more than I thought it would. But we have to do this.
I can do this.
“Fine,” I say. “Let’s go upstairs.”
I cling to the banister as I follow Ethan up to the second floor like he’s leading me to my execution. It’s so dark outside the window that even with the lights on, the stairwell and hallways are still dark. Probably if someone changed all the bulbs, that would be a comfortable level of brightness. But we’re not going to do that now. We’re lucky there’s any light here at all.
I continue following Ethan down the hall, but I stop short when he leads me to the master bedroom. “What are you doing?”
He turns and frowns at me. “What? What’s wrong?”
“I’m not sleeping in that bedroom.”
“Why not?
“Because that dead psychiatrist slept there!”
His shoulders sag. “Tricia, stop being silly. The master bedroom is by far the biggest room. This is where we’re going to sleep when we’re living here.”
Yeah, over my dead body.
“Also,” he adds, “it’s the only bed that’s made up. I don’t even know where she keeps all the sheets and stuff, but I don’t feel like searching for it. I’m tired, and I just want to go to sleep. Aren’t you tired?”
A wave of exhaustion comes over me out of nowhere. That’s been happening to me more and more lately. In the evening, I’ll suddenly feel almost overwhelmed by fatigue. I suppose it’s because my body is making an entire other person.
