Page 74 of Everyone Is Lying to You

I explain about the voicemail. I explain about Alice being here with Katie. Olivia is surprised by some of it, but not all, and I wonder how much she knows about where Bex and her children have been for the past few days, how much she’s been keeping from me. How much she’s lied to me. But there isn’t time to ask it now.

“I’m closer to the hotel than the ranch. I’ll pick you up on the way.”

“Me?”

“I’m not going out there alone, Lizzie.”

I know she’s right. I can’t send her out there alone. But can I go? Can I put myself in danger like that? I’m a mother. I can’t do that to my own children.

“We’ll be safe together,” Olivia assures me. “I’m not going in without some ammunition.”

She doesn’t say any more before she hangs up and I know she’s on her way. I do have a choice here. I don’t have to go. I can leave right now. I think about Nora and Ollie. Both asleep in their beds at the beach house, safe with my mom, Robbie, and Peter. I think about Rebecca’s children. Also safe for now, but probably terrified.

I think about Bex. I still love her. After all of this I still love her like a sister. She’s responsible for so much of who I am today. She was my only real witness to the time when I became an adult.

“Go back to Alice,” I tell Katie. “I’ll get ready for Olivia. I’m going out there.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Rebecca

Marsden doesn’t like my jeans and dirty blouse streaked in blood. He wants me to look a certain way. We’re in my bedroom now. My feet are free, but my hands are still bound, my mouth gagged so I can’t speak and I can hardly breathe. He nudges me where he wants me to go with the sharp tip of the bowie knife that Gray always kept in the barn. He’s drawn blood with every single poke.

He opens the door to my closet and begins rummaging through my long flowery dresses. I watch as he slides his hand down the front of his jeans and gently strokes himself. Whatever he’s going to do to me will bring him an intense amount of pleasure and I wonder how he’ll violate me before he finishes this. Unfortunately, I want to draw it out as long as possible in the hopes that my call to Kiki went through. I’ll need to take whatever he doles out in case it keeps me alive even a moment longer.

He finally selects what he wants me to wear. It’s one of my least favorite dresses because it’s one of the least practical. It’s so longthat I trip on it every time I wear it. The lace at the neck and the wrists is scratchy and gives me a rash. But my audience loves it. Every time I wear it while I’m milking the cows or gathering the eggs they tell me I’m elegant and beautiful, a model of femininity.

There’s no way to get the dress on me without unbinding my hands. He does it, but pins my arms behind my back as he drops it over my head.

“Be a good girl now.”

He lowers his head and kisses each of my breasts before the material flutters down over them. He bites down softly on one nipple, like a child searching for milk. I stare daggers down at the growing bald spot on the back of his head and picture myself clawing the skin of his skull with my fingernails.

When he’s done taunting me, he marches me into the bathroom.

“Put on your face,” Mars sneers. His beady eyes flick up and down me hungrily. “I want you perfect.”

I’m shaking as I use a washcloth to remove the splatters of blood and then swipe on foundation, lipstick, mascara. Through it all I’m plotting how I can possibly use anything in here as a weapon. Organic hairspray in his pupils? Mascara wand up the nose?

It takes about ten minutes for me to get enough makeup on that he gives me a satisfied grunt. He reaches down and places his meaty fingers beneath my dress, runs his hands up the sides of my thighs. I prepare myself for the worst, but instead he just holds my legs in his viselike grip and stares at our two faces side by side in the mirror.

“I see both of us every time I look at them,” he says, and I know he means our children. If I survive this, will I ever be able to stop seeing him in their eyes and their smiles? I hope so. I’ll do everything in my power to forget. But first I have to escape. Westand like that for another thirty seconds, my breath hitching with his every movement, certain he is about to have his way with me against the marble countertop, but he eventually grabs another washcloth off the hook next to the sink, wets it, and then runs it up the sides of my legs and then down my arms, erasing all his fingerprints. He dons a pair of leather work gloves and pushes me out of the bathroom, then out of the bedroom and down the stairs, wiping his prints away as he goes.

Outside the full moon is so bright it might as well be morning. Marsden wants us to walk side by side and he loops his arm through mine as if we’re on an after-dinner stroll on our first date. The intimacy is almost worse than the violence.

He isn’t going to rape me. I realize that now. He wants to. He wants to so badly. I can feel his desire pulsing through him. But that would leave too much evidence and that’s not part of his plan.

“What are you going to do?” I finally ask. He’ll want to tell me. It will make him feel powerful and smart to outline his plan.

“You’re not well, Rebecca. You haven’t been for a long time. You’ve been able to hide it from your audience, but not from your husband. Gray has been confiding in me. Told me you’ve been so depressed you’ve taken to your bed for weeks at a time, while he had to care for the children. He told me you even threatened to hurt them. He told me over and over again that he might need them to come live with Veronica and me while you went away for help. I felt so bad for him. But I was also worried for him and for you. He says you’ve lashed out at him, that you’ve been violent and psychotic, that he was afraid of you. I told Veronica I didn’t believe it until that night. That terrible night when you murdered your husband right in his own barn.”

He says these lies calmly and evenly, as if they are facts. And maybe in his brain they are. The same way he convinced himself of an all-powerful god who will grant his every wish, he has convinced himself that I killed Gray.

“You can’t take it anymore,” he continues explaining as he pushes open the massive barn door. “You have to repent. You’ll take your own life here in the same barn where you attacked Gray. You called me to confess everything earlier today.”

Now I finally pivot and stare directly into his eyes. He’s smirking as he pulls out his phone and opens a recording. Only then do I actually want to die. It’s my voice, there’s no mistaking it. I’d thought it would be harder to doctor a spoken confession than written words. I’d been so wrong.

“I killed Grayson. The voices told me I had to do it. I couldn’t get them to stop screaming at me. But I can’t handle the shame and the guilt. My children will be better off without me. If I end my life here then maybe Gray and I can be together forever in the afterlife. Please forgive me, Lord.”

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