Page 43 of Everyone Is Lying to You
Grayson was found by one of the farmworkers around seven in the morning. I know this from my discussion with Detective Walsh when he tried to pin me down on the last time I saw Rebecca. It was early when she left me, just after sunset, only about eightp.m. or so. Plenty of time to go back to her hotel room, get what she needed, pack up, and drive out here. I think about the text message I glimpsed on her phone when I picked it up thinking it was mine.
You won’t get away with this you fucking bitch
It came from G. Possibly Gray. But what exactly was she getting away with? According to Olivia, Bex was about to go behind her husband’s back, her very controlling husband’s back, and announce a major business deal that didn’t involve him. A business deal she knew he didn’t want her to accept. Had he found out about it? Did he know about her betrayal? Was that what set this all in motion? Did it cause a fight that ended with him bleeding out on his barn floor?
Murdering him would destroy everything Bex has worked so hard for.
Only if she doesn’t get away with it,a little voice whispers in my head.Are you helping her get away with it?
A fine layer of dust settles on the rental car and the roads go from pavement to gravel to dirt. I know where I’m going. I spent a good deal of time last night figuring out how I would do this. The main entrance to the ranch is clearly going to be both sealed off and possibly crowded with cops and reporters if the police and media action at the hotel are any indication. But the property is huge, more than two hundred acres since it’s technically still a working cattle ranch. I cross-referenced Google Maps and Bureau of Land Management records and then downloaded an app called OnX Hunt, which promised to be the most comprehensive property record locator for hunters who are trying to avoid hunting on private land. It showed privately owned land interspersed with government owned and public land. None of the boundaries were a perfectly closed circle and there was a public use easement rightin the middle of the Sommers ranch, which meant there had to be a gate where the cattle were locked in on either side and could be moved across the public land when they needed to switch fields. I learned way more than I ever expected to learn about hunting, land ownership, Western ranches. It was weirdly fascinating.
Sure enough, Google Earth showed me a gate when I looked at it in the satellite view on my computer. Bingo.
That’s where I’m heading. From the maps and the apps it looks like there will be a dirt road from that gate to the Sommers ranch house and the barn. I’m hoping it isn’t occupied by the police at the moment. It’s a risk. But I also have a gate code and two keys, which allows me to convince myself that what I’m doing isn’t trespassing. I’m more than a little proud of this plan and the execution is giving me a bit of a thrill. I’m still good at this. I haven’t felt this excited since I was nominated for a national magazine award for a piece about an underground railroad I uncovered, Catholic nuns rescuing young women from being sex trafficked. That was years ago, before the kids, but the memory of the reporting, the research and the flow of the writing, is as sharp as if it happened yesterday.
There’s no cell service out here, but the GPS on my phone still works so I can follow the maps I’ve laid out for myself. And just as I expected, the fencing opens up, and there’s a large metal gate on the side of the road. The gamble I’m making is that the gate code is the same for all the gates, since there’s no way Bex could have known which one I’d be using. If it was Bex who left me the key. That’s something else I need to consider. That all of this is bigger than Bex and bigger than Grayson. That this world Bex found herself in is much more dangerous than either of us knew.
I pull the car to the side of the road and suck in a deep breath as I remove the pale pink piece of paper from my bag. I had stared at the numbers long and hard last night and finally realized the code must be her first child’s birthday. Alice, the beautiful redheaded piano prodigy. Further proof to me that Rebecca wouldn’t put her children in danger. She loves them. They’re a part of her. I lift the lid on the keypad and punch in the six digits. Three beeps. As the gate slides, I allow myself a smile at the small victory and return to the car, unsure how long it will stay open.
I shouldn’t have worried. This fancy metal barrier is on a sensor and slides shut right behind me. Its efficiency makes me nervous that some kind of alarm has been sounded, that someone is watching me. But I calm my nerves by reminding myself this gate must be opened for the cattle on a regular basis. Also, who would be monitoring things right now? Possibly the police. Gray’s dead. Rebecca’s missing. There’s probably a farm foreman but did they show up for work today?None of it really matters. Rebecca’s words from my dream echo in my head again.
So what if they find me here? I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m just trying to help. I convince myself of this, but the important thing is that I’ve committed to this and I’m here. The only path is the one forward. I timed this well. The police are holding a press conference about Gray in the city right now, which means most of the people on this case will be more than an hour away.
I roll the windows down and bask in the high of my successful plan as I rumble along the rocky path through the pastures, hoping I’m not stripping all the paint off this rental car.
It’s surreal being here, staring at this landscape that I’ve onlyglimpsed on Rebecca’s social media on my small screen, like being an extra in a movie I’ve watched dozens of times while slightly high. Right over there is the massive gnarled tree where Gray and Rebecca stand with the kids during each of her pregnancy announcements, the existing children popping out from behind the trunk one by one until finally Bex emerges with a pregnant belly, again and again. The latest one of those videos has more than twenty-three million views.
Everyone always looked so exuberant and glowy in those videos. The last one filled me with the strangest emotions. Did I want another baby? I didn’t. I sure as hell didn’t. But was that somehow wrong? Should I want another one? Why did motherhood look so easy for her when it broke me on a daily basis?
Of course now I know it wasn’t easy, but the images and the feelings those images and videos conjured inside me are impossible to shake.
There’s the pasture where Gray and Rebecca renewed their vows a couple of years ago with aMidsummer Night’s Dream–themed wedding ceremony and a dinner for fifty people at a long wooden table in a field. The children were all dressed as woodland fairies. Bex wore a crown of pink and white roses and peonies. They released thousands of fireflies into the night. Tripod, the three-legged goat, was the ring bearer. He had wings.
The ranch comes into view and it’s bigger and more gorgeous than it appeared in pictures and videos. It’s truly massive, set back against the red rock walls of the canyon. I know from my research that this part of the property is located in a small oasis. A creek flows beneath here, allowing for more trees and plants and the vegetable garden where Rebecca famously grows herorganic heirloom tomatoes and the strawberries and blueberries she turns into perfect pies.
Everything around me feels so alive, so vividly real after years of scrolling through filtered images and staged moments. The ranch pulses with a raw, untamed energy.
I know from my research that the front gate to the ranch is on the other side of the property, at least a half mile away in the opposite direction. So far, I’ve encountered no one, a lucky accident for sure. It’s time to ditch the car and move around on foot. It will be easier to avoid detection that way.
I park next to one of the rustic cabins beyond the wooden barn where Gray met his disturbing end. I can’t even look at it right now. The entrance is cordoned off with police tape, though there’s no officer stationed there. The lack of a more active investigation tells me something I already knew: The police believe they have their prime suspect.
They just have to find her.
I hurry down the perfectly manicured stone path to the wraparound front porch adorned with flowering annuals and hummingbird feeders. Adirondack rocking chairs dot the surface and I picture Bex out here rocking while nursing her twins, two babies at once, as natural as can be with a child hanging off each breast, more motherly than the Madonna herself. In this fantasy, a third child stands nearby sipping from a fresh-squeezed glass of lemonade they made from lemon trees in their garden. These images waft through my brain as if they’re my own memories and not some parasocial creation or, more likely, something I saw on her account.
But the fantasy is punctured by more evidence of aninvestigation. Yellow police lines stretch across the porch, warning me away.
I hesitate for the first time. Am I really doing this? Am I writing myself into the story like this? Because once I open that door there’s no turning back. I can walk away right now, get in the car, drive to the hotel, and go to the airport. I don’t have to be here.
But then I think of Alice and Bex’s other kids. I think of Bex too, not Bex now, but the Bex I met on the first day of college, the bright-eyed exuberant teenager who wanted to, as she said, grab the world by the balls and hang on until they fell off.
I duck under the tape and pull the key out of my pocket.
The air inside the house carries a faint scent of cedar and sage, mingling with the warmth of sunlit wood. The interior unfolds like a page from a designer magazine brought to life. Polished hardwood floors gleam under the soft glow of wrought iron lanterns hanging from exposed wooden beams overhead. The only evidence of an investigation are large dusty footprints marring the floors. It’s as though even the police were scared of puncturing the perfection.
Bex’s straw hat hangs by the door. It’s such a staple of her uniform. Bex is rarely without it, even inside the house. It became so popular that some company created a Sommers Garden Hat and sold it on Amazon. Her lawyers, Olivia maybe, must have had it taken down because weeks later the same hat appeared on Bex’s own website at double the price and sold out in three days.
The centerpiece of the living room is a grand stone fireplace, its hearth adorned with neatly stacked logs and an ornate wrought iron screen. Above it, a massive elk antler chandelier dangles from the vaulted ceiling, casting intricate shadows acrossthe room. Plush leather armchairs and a weathered leather sofa beckon invitingly around a sturdy coffee table crafted from reclaimed barnwood.
