Liars, Inc. (20 page)

“Oh yeah?” Pres took a bite of his burger. “She get in trouble yet?”

I laughed. “No. She doesn't say much. Is she really that bad?”

“She's pretty bad.” Preston smiled to himself. “In a good way.”

I finished my burger and crumpled the foil sleeve into a ball. “You guys aren't, like, hooking up, right? You're just friends?”

Preston grabbed the remote and flicked off the TV. His lips twitched. “You want to hit that shit, don't you?”

“I mean, she's really hot. But she seems cool too. I just . . .” I trailed off.

Preston laughed. “Oh, it's like that, huh? Maximus has a crush.”

“Screw you,” I said, tossing my foil ball at him. “I should have just asked her out without saying anything.”

Preston snorted. “She would have told me. She tells me everything. Blah blah blah, girls.” He grinned. “But you don't have to ask my permission. Parv and I aren't like that. Friend zone, you know?”

I believed him at the time. Maybe because he was convincing, or maybe just because it was what I wanted to hear.

I reach down, my fingers closing around a handful of loose dirt. I let it trickle out of my fist like sand from an hourglass. “Where is she, Pres?” I ask. “I know you felt the same way about her as I do.”

My phone buzzes sharply and I almost drop my flashlight. For a second I'm afraid to answer it, positive that if I do it'll be a dead guy on the other end of the line.

THE PHONE RINGS AGAIN. I
force myself to look at the screen. The caller's number shows up as
UNKNOWN
. My eyes flick nervously around the darkened graveyard. Suddenly, I am not alone anymore. The gravestones are eyes; the night bulges inward, like ears struggling to hear.

Exhaling deeply, I answer the call. “Hello?”

“Max?” It's only a tiny whisper.

Parvati.

“Where are you?” I try not to yell.

“I'm at the cabin.”

“Why?” I ask, my voice still louder than it should be.

“He says you have to come here. Alone.”

“Who?”

I hear the crunch of static that means someone is covering the phone speaker. Then, a muffled voice in the background. Male, I think. I can't make it out.

“Parvati. Are you okay?”

“You have until midnight to get here,” someone whispers, low and growly. It's a man, but he's purposely distorting his voice. “If you call the cops, she dies.”

“What do you want from us?” I ask. “Why are you doing this?”

The phone disconnects, leaving a silence as still as death.

If you call the cops, she dies.
“And if I don't call the cops, we probably both die,” I mutter. “This is too much for me.” I slip McGhee's business card out of my wallet and dial the number on it with shaking fingers. When the call connects, I dial his extension.

And get his voicemail.

In his gravelly voice, McGhee invites me to leave a message or to call 911 if I'm “experiencing an emergency situation.” 911 won't help. They'll think I'm some crackpot lunatic if I try to explain what's happening. Even if the dispatcher believed me, the local cops would probably show up in uniform and knock calmly on the front door of the cabin. I can't risk Parvati getting hurt. I don't want anyone else's death on my conscience.

I leave McGhee a semi-coherent message informing him
Parvati is being held at her dad's cabin and that I'm on the way up there. Hopefully he's the kind of guy who stays up late and checks his voicemail after hours. If not, it looks like I'm on my own.

I check the time. Midnight is less than two hours away, and it'll take me close to thirty minutes to walk home. Man, I miss my car. Abandoning the cemetery, I break into a jog and make it home in record time. I creep inside and snag Ben's keys, which are thankfully in plain view on the coffee table. I grab my black hoodie from the back of the sofa and slip it over my head, pulling the hood up around my face. Quietly, I slink back out into the night.

It takes multiple tries to get Ben's pickup to start. “Come on come on come on!” The clock on the dash reads 10:47. I turn the key again, and pray. The truck lurches forward as I shift into drive, and my knees ram into the console. I turn out of the driveway and onto the street. I figure there's about a 50 percent chance I'll make it up to the Colonel's cabin without the engine falling out.

My breath whistles in my throat and I realize I'm gripping the steering wheel so tightly that my fingers are going numb. I need music. Music keeps me calm. I flip on the radio. There's a commercial on my favorite station. I make my way through Ben's presets. Classic rock. Talk radio. Static. My finger is hovering over preset number four when
I hear the word “DeWitt.” The signal is weak, so the speaker's voice is broken up by bursts of static, but he's definitely talking about Senator DeWitt.

“. . . apparently not only decided against . . . Secretary of Labor . . . also resigning from the Senate . . . entire D.C. community shocked . . . wake of family tragedy . . .”

Holy shit! Preston's dad is leaving politics because of Preston's death. Why would he do that if he just killed off the only witnesses to his crimes?

“. . . rumblings of a possible divorce . . .”

I turn the volume up, hoping to hear more, but the radio station fades out.

The sprawling suburbs dwindle, gas stations and strip malls giving way to patches of vegetation and then the hills of the Angeles National Forest. I alternate between watching my rearview mirror for cops and watching the minutes on the dash clock tick forward. 11:18. Forty-two minutes to find Parvati.

As I lose the lights of the suburbs, the winding roads seem to fill with shadowy ghosts, swirls of darkness that condense and dissolve in the ravine at the side of the highway. I blink hard. It's just the residual effects of my head injury, combined with fatigue. But the twisting shapes at the corners of my vision don't go away. Suddenly, one of them darts out into the road, and I slam on my brakes. The shadow grows in size
as it approaches the truck, but when it gets close I realize it's not just a shadow.

It's a boy, about my age.

Preston.

HE TAPS ON THE GLASS
as I slow to a stop. I roll down the window, almost like I'm in a trance. Crickets sing in the high grass. Darkness wraps around the truck.

“Boy, Maximum Overdrive, am I glad to see you.” His hat obscures part of his face, but the voice is unmistakable.

I reach forward and flick on my emergency flashers. Obviously, that tree trunk did some permanent damage. Only Preston doesn't seem like a hallucination. He looks real, sounds real, he even smells real—a little sweaty, like he's been running.

“What the fuck, dude?” For a moment I'm at a loss for words. I touch one hand to the back of my head. The spot where I hit the tree is tender, but it's not leaking brain matter
or anything. I blink hard again, rub my eyes. But Preston doesn't disappear. My throat constricts a little as I choke out, “We just . . . buried you. Everyone thinks you're dead.”

“Not everyone,” he says. “They grabbed us in the woods by the cemetery and took us to the cabin. I managed to escape because Parvati created a diversion, but we've got to go back for her.”

Parvati! Preston's materializing out of the swirling dark like some horror movie phantom almost made me forget that I was on the clock. 11:33. Twenty-seven minutes. “Who? Who grabbed you?”

“DeWitt's goons.”

“Your dad seriously hired guys to kidnap you?” Even though I've been thinking the same thing, it still seems so unreal. “Are you sure? I found cocaine in your room. Can't that shit make you paranoid?”

“That's not my coke and DeWitt's not my dad,” Preston says. “My name isn't even Preston.”

A pair of headlights appears over the crest of the hill. Both of us turn in unison to watch as the car cruises past. Neither of us speaks. The scarlet taillights dissolve into the night, and we're alone again.

“What do you mean your name isn't Preston?”

“Preston's dead.” At my look he adds, “Don't be sad. He's been dead for years. You never met him.”

“Huh? I don't understand.”

“It's a long story.” He opens the driver's side door to the pickup. “You look exhausted. Move over. I'll drive.”

I want to hear every piece of this long story. I need to figure out what's happening. But then my eyes catch the clock on the dash. “We have to get to Parvati by midnight.” I quickly fill him in about the phone call.

“Did you call the cops?” he asks.

I shake my head as I scoot over the console and into the passenger seat. “I couldn't reach the FBI, and it's not like anyone else would have believed me.”

“Yeah. Half the cops are probably on DeWitt's payroll anyway. Let's go get her.” He flips off the emergency flashers and guides the truck back onto the road.

“So if Preston has been dead for years, who the hell have I been hanging out with?” I ask.

The boy formerly known as Preston laughs. “My name's Adam. The truth is pretty fucked up. We might not get all the way through it before we get back to the cabin, but rest assured I'm still the same guy that you know.” He bumps his fist lightly against his chest. The gesture is so Preston-like that I can't help but smile. I should be furious. He lied to me about hooking up with Parvati and videotaped us having sex. I should seriously kick his ass right here and now. But somehow all I can do is stare, like he's magically risen
from the grave. Who cares what he did or what his name is? We can hash out all of that bullshit later. My friend is alive. That's all that matters.

“Adam Lyons,” I say.

“Yeah, watch this.” Adam punches a couple of buttons on a phone and scrolls through a long list of files. After selecting one, he tosses the phone into my lap. A video of Claudia DeWitt starts playing on the screen.

She's flipping through TV channels in her living room. A phone rings. Claudia mutes the television before answering it.

“What? How is that possible?” she says.

A pause. She turns away from the television. Walks toward the big picture window that looks out onto the lawn.

“You swore all that was in the past. You promised me.” A pause. She lifts one hand to her forehead. “Don't tell me not to be dramatic. We covered up a death, Rem.”

Rem. As in Remington. She's talking to her husband.

Her voice cracks. She dabs at her eyes with the back of her left hand.

“You know as well as I do that you're guilty of child endangerment . . . perhaps more.” A pause. “I'll never forgive myself for the things we did . . . to both of them.”

The clip ends. The hamster wheel in my brain starts spinning.

“Play the next one,” Adam says.

It's Preston, or who I always thought was Preston, and his dad.

“I'm tired of pretending to be someone else,” Preston says. He paces back and forth in front of the plasma TV.

“You agreed,” DeWitt says. “You agreed to be the son we want you to be until you're twenty-one.”

“And what happens then? I just disappear?”

“We'll figure something out,” DeWitt says.

Preston turns to face his father. His face is red, his hands clenched into fists. “Do you regret it?”

“Forgetting to secure the gun? Every day of my life.”

“I'm not talking about what you did to him,” Preston says. “I'm talking about what you did to me.”

“I like to think Claudia and I gave you a good life. We bought you whatever you wanted, computers, fancy phones, private surfing lessons. We even allowed you to enroll at public school.”

Preston goes back to his pacing. “But you told the doctors I was crazy. The shock treatments, the medicine—you screwed up my brain. Sometimes I think about the past and realize I'm remembering something that never even happened.” His voice cracks. “You tried to erase me.”

The screen goes dark. Adam reaches over and lifts the phone out of my hand before I can even begin to process what I've seen. Shock treatments? Medicine? What the hell?

“So you know how DeWitt is CEO of DeWitt Firearms, right?” he asks.

I nod. “Yeah.”

The truck swerves hard to the left as Adam dodges a pothole I don't even see until we're right on top of it. “So of course he's always been politically aligned with gun nuts, the NRA, etc.”

“Yeah?” I don't really get where Pres—er—Adam is going with this.

“When he was nine, the real Preston DeWitt accidentally shot himself with his father's gun.”

“Holy shit!” If I were driving I probably would have rammed the truck into a tree.
We covered up a death, Rem.
“Now
that
is some news that never made the
LA Times
.”

“Exactly,” Adam says. “Daddy's close advisors told him if the news got out his political career would be finished. Not to mention DeWitt Firearms. Not only would he be arrested, the press would destroy him and his company. Pro-gun politician's kid shoots himself with Dad's gun. Can you imagine the headlines?”

“So . . .” Maybe I'm thick, but I still don't get it. “Where do you come in?”

“Apparently the senator covered up Preston's death and then sent his goons looking for a suitable replacement. They found me in a boys' home. I was about the right size and
shape, with hair and eyes that could be fixed.”

I glance over. Preston had blue eyes, but Adam's are a weird greenish gray. So that's why I never knew “Preston” wore contacts—because they were part of a disguise. And the frequent haircuts I used to mock him for were probably to mask his curly hair. And now the picture in front of the Rosewood Center for Boys makes sense. Because Preston really was there, only he wasn't Preston.

“I didn't know any of that at the time, of course,” Adam continues. “The truth leaked out over the past few years. Claudia tends to get chatty when she's drunk.” He glances over at me. “At the time, DeWitt's men just told me if I wanted to get out of the boys' home and go live in a big pretty house in the city I would have to change my name and pretend to be someone else. They made it sound fun, like acting. They said they'd buy me whatever I wanted. I'd get my own room, my own
maid
.”

“So DeWitt . . .
hired
you? To become Preston?”

“Basically.” Adam's mouth twists into something harsh and ugly. “His men helped me run away from the center and brought me to the DeWitts to start my ‘great new life.' Only it wasn't great.” He bears down on the accelerator, and the pickup's engine grinds in protest. He looks confused for a second.

“You need to slow down or shift up,” I say. “The gears are
sensitive on this thing.” I watch as he wrestles with the gearshift. How completely bizarre would it be if Adam and I were at Rosewood together? I was only there for about three weeks, but it's still entirely possible. I try to recall the faces of some of the other kids, but they're all blurs. Nameless blank figures who sometimes stared at me but never talked to me. All I remember is Henry.

“For the first two years, they kept me in the house,” Adam says. “They told everyone I'd been in an accident and needed plastic surgery. Then they said I went straight from recuperating to boarding school. Only instead of classes I got drilled and redrilled by Claudia about what it meant to be Preston DeWitt. When I screwed up, she locked me in my room for hours until I promised to try harder. Do you know how hard it is to
learn
to be someone else?” he asks. “I ran away once, but they caught me and I ended up in a psych ward. Some shrink decided I had paranoid schizophrenia. He jacked me full of meds and zapped my brain. After that, I didn't run away again, but my memory began to get choppy. I started filming everything I didn't want to forget, just in case.”

“That is seriously messed up.”

“Tell me about it. And then I started talking to my real mom again—I found her online—and she gave me the great idea to start recording the DeWitts,” Adam says.

“Violet?”

He nods. “She raised me by herself because my dad split early. But then the state took me away from her when I was seven because she sometimes left me home alone while she was working. After I found her again, I didn't want to be Preston anymore. Mom said we could get a lot of money from my fake parents. I rigged the house with cameras; getting them to incriminate themselves was child's play. I wanted to save up so me and my mom could disappear and start over somewhere else.” He whips the steering wheel to the right to avoid what looks like a dead raccoon. “But those bastards set her house on fire. They tried to kill us both.”

“But there was a second body. Who—”

“Some loser frat guy Mom brought home from her job.” Adam stares straight through the windshield. “You were right about her being a stripper, by the way.”

“But DeWitt—”

“Identified the remains as Preston?” Adam's mouth twists into a scowl.

“Why the hell would he do that?”

We almost fly right past the turnoff to the Colonel's cabin. My eyes flick to the dashboard. 11:51. Adam hits the brakes at the last second, turning off onto a dirt road. Even with the brights on, I can only see a few feet ahead of us.

“I'm surprised he even reported me missing in the first
place. Maybe Claudia did—she seemed to take everything a little harder than dear old Dad. But my guess is that once Langston and his guys got close, they probably wanted to hunt me without any interference from the FBI. DeWitt IDs me as dead, and suddenly everyone stops looking for me. No one would ever expect a distraught father to lie about something like that. And if they did, DeWitt would just pay them off, I'm sure.”

“It just all seems so . . . insane.”

“Yeah, it does. And now even if I turn up claiming to be Preston, they've probably got real Preston's fingerprints and DNA locked away somewhere. If need be, DeWitt can just pull them out and call me a fraud, perpetrated by political opponents or some shit.” Adam squints into the dark. “It's not like he'd let me go back to being Preston after finding out Mom and I were blackmailing him.” He glances at the dashboard clock. 11:54. “We need to grab Parvati and then find a safe place to hide out until I can mail my videos to the cops.”

“Why not just turn them in yourself?”

Adam shakes his head. “I've got enough money to start over. I don't want to hang out here to testify. I'd rather just let the world think both Preston and Adam are dead.”

The road narrows. Tree branches slap against the outside of the pickup like clawing fingers. We're getting close to the cabin. “We should park here and hike in on foot,” I say. “If
we get much closer they'll know we're coming.”

Adam nods. “DeWitt's got a whole group of ex-military thugs doing his dirty work. They'll be ready for you. Hopefully some of them are combing the woods trying to find me. They won't expect me to come back. I can be your secret weapon.”

He pulls the truck off the side of the road until it's halfway buried in the trees. We both jump out of the truck and head into the woods. My heart races in my chest. What chance do I have against guys like Langston and Marcus? Almost none. “Wait.” I touch Adam's arm as he plunges into the trees in front of us. “Why the hell would they take Parvati from the cemetery? Why would they bring you guys
here
?”

Adam looks back at me. His eyes glow gray in the moonlight. “She knows too much. Not sure why they brought us here. Probably to throw suspicion onto someone else.”

“Someone like me.” I tell him about the fake eyewitness, the bloody cell phone, my shark's tooth pendant showing up in the fire.

Adam snorts with disgust. “I'm not surprised. DeWitt doesn't care who suffers as long as it's not him.”