Page 4 of The Lie Maker

He threw his arms around his father. The man knelt and went to wipe tears from the boy’s cheeks, but they were indistinguishable from the raindrops.

“Son, I have to—”

“You have to tell me,” the boy said. “You have to tell me why you can’t tell them you’re sorry.”

“Sorry isn’t good enough sometimes,” his father said.

“What did you do?”

The father hesitated. The agent had settled into the front passenger seat to avoid the rain, but powered down her window to listen.

“You’ll find out eventually,” he said. “Your dad’s not a good person. Your dad killed people, son. That’s what I did. I killed people. Sorry just doesn’t cut it.”

He gave the boy a final hug, got in the car, and closed the door. The boy watched him through the glass and stood there in the rain until the car had reached the end of the street and turned the corner.

Two

Jack

I should have been more excited, first day at a new job.

It wasn’t as if I didn’t care. I was glad to have found something. I told myself it was temporary. Didn’t mention that in the interview, of course. No prospective employer wants to think you’re viewing a position with them as a stopgap, although I think the guy who interviewed me, Terry, probably suspected it.

Like when he asked me, point blank, “So, Mr.Givins, why on earth would you want to work for us?”

It was a good question.

Terry Crawford was the managing editor for a stable of trade magazines: Contractor Life (aimed at the construction industry), RV Life (for recreational vehicle manufacturers and enthusiasts), Plumbing Life (no explanation necessary), and so on. When I had observed, in the interview, the recurring theme in his magazines’ titles, he had grinned and said, “We’re high on life here.”

He’d added, “Doesn’t strike me that this would be the kind of place where you’d want to put your skills to work. Not that you aren’t qualified. Getting two books written up in the New York Times? That’s pretty impressive.”

So he had done a bit of internet sleuthing. The books had been written under a pseudonym, but I’d been revealed as the author in one of those reviews. Someone at the publishing house must have leaked it at some point, although it created little buzz in the literary world. Good reviews in the Times had not led to a spot on the paper’s bestseller lists. My first book, Avoidably Inevitable, had sunk like a stone. My second, A Life Discontinued, also garnered some praise, but the sales were only marginally better than the first book. My third, Lost and Unfounded, had yet to find a home despite the efforts of my literary agent, Harry Breedlove. I’d told him just before I interviewed with Terry that if he couldn’t sell that book I was putting the full-time novelist thing aside indefinitely.

I could live with that if I had to. I’d only been out of the conventional workforce a couple of years. I’d spent a few at a medium-sized daily Massachusetts newspaper, writing as well as working on the desk, editing stories, writing headlines, assigning reporters. I liked that world, and was lucky to have worked in it, given that I had no journalistic background. I’d arrived at the right time, when the paper was short staffed and the editor wasn’t fussy.

But the timing wasn’t entirely fortuitous. The industry, fighting a losing battle with the internet for readers and advertisers, was already in decline, and in the short time since I’d left, had contracted even further. Even before I left the Worcester Tribune, it had gone through two rounds of layoffs. The pandemic had made things even worse. Reporters had been working from home for so long, several papers dispensed with their newsrooms altogether and sold the buildings. The publishers were so encouraged by how much money that saved them that they started to look for more ways to make a profit, so they slashed their reporting staffs. It was like trying to save money at a restaurant by firing the cooks.

Anyway, getting a job at a paper again was out of the question, so here I was looking to work for a publisher of trade magazines. But I didn’t feel I could tell Terry he was my last hope, even if he was. I was running out of money.

“The books are kind of a side thing,” I said. “I’m looking for something steady.”

“Gotta keep the paycheck coming in, right?” Terry said. “Married? Got kids?”

“No,” I said after a second’s hesitation. “Not married. No kids.”

“You’d oversee production of five magazines,” he said. “Each comes out six times a year.”

“Sounds manageable,” I said. “I can turn things around in a hurry. I’m pretty meticulous about getting things right.”

Terry smiled. “Well, that’s great, although to be honest, it’s not that big a deal since I don’t even know how many of our subscribers read these things, unless it’s an actual story about them. The way we work it is, with a lot of our publications, we assign stories based on who buys ads.”

The dreaded “advertorial.” Content based on what someone was willing to pay. So much for objective journalism. I wasn’t going to let that worry me today.

Terry’s operation was based in Everett, one of Boston’s suburban so-called cities, just across the line from Charlestown. I already had an apartment there, so there wouldn’t be much of a commute. I’d moved closer to the city not long after I’d left the Worcester paper to have more of a cultural life—movies, theater, music—as well as to be nearer to Lana Wilshire.

Well, almost nearer. Lana was no suburban girl. She lived in the heart of the city, in a fancy condo that overlooked the harbor and, on the other side of the bay, Logan Airport. She was one of the Boston Star newspaper’s senior reporters, and we’d met a few years earlier when she was covering a winter plane crash near Rutland, northwest of Worcester. I was on that story, too, and while we were waiting for a press briefing I offered to share a warm car with her while her photographer was elsewhere with the vehicle they’d driven up in. An hour and a half later we had each other’s phone numbers and email addresses and had arranged to meet for dinner the next weekend in Boston.

We’d seen each other off and on for a few months. The relationship went quiet for a while, and then we picked things up again. Things had been semi-serious for the better part of a year. Neither of us had proposed any kind of major step, but it was in the back of my mind.

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