Lies That Bind Us

“No,” he said. “Means nothing to me.”

You remember your firsts, especially where romance is concerned. First love. First kiss. First true sexual encounter. You remember them usually because you didn’t really know what they were till they happened. They open up a rush of new thoughts and sensations, like you’ve stumbled on a world you hadn’t believed in till you found yourself in it. The feelings that come with that new world may be the beginning of a long sequence that eventually becomes familiar and staid, but they begin as surprise.

It makes sense then that I could think of nothing else to say. Marcus had never lied to me before.

I returned to my room to breathe, though I knew the air would be stale and stuffy. I needed a moment alone to process what had just happened. I couldn’t explain how I knew that Marcus had lied, but I knew it in my heart because I knew him. I knew his face. I knew the involuntary tic of his cheek, eye, and lip muscles. He had never lied to me before, not really, but he had tried to conceal a straight flush across the poker table, had pretended not to take notice when I remarked on a particular perfume three weeks before Christmas, and had tactfully buried any sign of disappointment when I made a less than successful meal or—exhausted from getting up before dawn—started to drop off during a date. Those were all long ago, but I remembered them like my arm remembered how to catch a ball, though I hadn’t practiced it for years. Some things didn’t change. The hesitation, the blank look, the slightly evasive gaze, the repetition, the stupid questions (“Manos? Never heard it. Why? What is it?”), these were his tells, and I could read them like headlines.

He was lying.

But why?

I snatched up the phone I hadn’t touched in days and tried to find a signal, moving to the window and waving the thing around. No bars. No Wi-Fi. I opened a search engine and typed in Manos, but when I hit the “Go” button, it just cycled and cycled. I was staring irritably at it when I heard a shrill and distant tinkling.

A telephone.

The telephone. There was only one in the house that worked.

I left the bedroom and moved along the hall to the stairs and was halfway down when I heard someone pick up.

“Hello?”

Kristen. There was a momentary pause, and then all her quiet reserve was replaced with earnestness and concern.

“What? Slow down,” she said. “What happened?”

In the silence that followed I heard other people coming from the living room to listen.

“How?” said Kristen. “And you spoke to the airline?”

Gretchen. It had to be.

“Let me talk to her,” said Melissa in a low voice.

“Hold on,” said Kristen. I wasn’t sure which of them she was talking to. “She took the wrong bag. Those damn purse things you bought. She has your passport, not hers. They won’t let her on the plane.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Brad said. “Have her change the name on the ticket to match Mel’s passport. She can pretend to be you. There’s no finger printing in immigration. She’ll be fine.”

“And what about me?” Melissa whispered back. “How do I get home?”

“On her passport! Easy peasy.”

“That’s massively illegal, Brad,” said Kristen. “Hold on, honey,” she said, brightly to Gretchen, “we’re just kicking some ideas around.”

“No one’s gonna know,” he said. “They even look alike.”

“That’s absurd,” said Melissa.

“You have a better idea?” said Brad. I was still halfway down the stairs, paused now, for fear that if I suddenly appeared, it would look like I was eavesdropping, which, of course, I was.

“Better than illegal immigration?” snapped Melissa. “Er. Yeah. Reschedule the flight.”

“She’d have to wait till tomorrow,” said Kristen. “No more available planes out today.”

“So she waits a day,” said Melissa.

“She doesn’t want to,” said Kristen, quietly now. I suspected she had the mouthpiece of the phone pressed against her.

“Tell her we’ll come pick her up and get her there in plenty of time tomorrow,” said Melissa.

“I think she’s happy to stay in a hotel in Heraklion,” said Kristen.

“It’s no trouble . . . ,” said Melissa.

“I think she’d prefer to stay in a hotel,” Kristen clarified.

“Give me the phone,” said Melissa.

“Mel, she’s upset,” said Kristen.

“Give me the damn phone.”

I heard Kristen sigh. There was a flurry of movement, and I should have known to go back up the stairs. Or down. Anything but stand where I was, where Kristen could see me as she came, her face flushed and annoyed, round the corner and up the stairs. Her eyes met mine, processed my lurking, then she kept coming, up and past me. I heard her footsteps on the landing and then the slam of her bedroom door.

I breathed out, only dimly aware of Melissa’s cooing, sympathetic noises into the phone in the foyer below, then came down the rest of the way to find them all grouped around the telephone table like a collection of statues, straining to hear. Simon was leaning against the tapestry, Marcus against the door to the basement where the generator was. They saw me. Their eyes went back to Melissa and to the phone, as if I had intruded on something private.

“I’ll go with you,” I said.

It had taken Melissa twenty minutes to talk Gretchen into coming back. I hadn’t listened so I didn’t know what she’d said. In fact, she had urged everyone away so they could talk “properly,” whatever that meant, and when she returned to the living room, it was with the look of someone who had just finished a long-distance run in a competitive time.

“Not sure you’re the one she wants to see right now,” said Melissa, her smile brittle.

“Perhaps not,” I said. “But I want to see her. Give me a moment to talk to her and she’ll come back a lot happier. She may not even want to leave tomorrow.”

I’m not sure why I added that last part. It was instinct. My gut said that Melissa didn’t want Gretchen to go: that it was important she stayed the whole allotted week. Maybe it was an ego thing. Mel, the perfect host, didn’t want people fleeing her party . . .

“Why?” she said, hawklike again. “What are you going to tell her?”

I swallowed, conscious of everyone listening.

“Why I did what I did,” I said.

It was as if the house itself had sighed, a collective breath, a little release of the pressure that had been building up overnight. Melissa gave me another calculating look, processing what I had said, then threw her arms around me.

“Oh, Jannie,” she said. “It’s OK, sweetheart.”

I shuddered, suddenly overcome with real emotion, and squeezed my eyes shut as I buried my face in her neck. When I opened them again, I expected to see relief, contentment in every face, not just because the crisis was past but because their suspicions had proved correct, and that meant that all was right with the world. But that was not what I saw. Not from all of them, anyway.

Marcus looked as unsure as he had before. Kristen looked flat-out stunned and puzzled. And Brad was staring at me with fierce and terrifying malevolence.



Chapter Twenty-Seven

I explore the chamber where the railway line ends, but there’s no way out, just a roughly cut wall of stone behind the buffer. I have to go back, though how far I have to go before I find another route, I have no way of knowing.

For a moment I squat between the steel rails, my back to the buffer, my hands clasped under my chin and my eyes squeezed shut like a child in prayer, which is, I suppose, pretty close to what I am.

I am Daedalus, the great artificer, I think. This is my labyrinth. I will find the way out.

It’s stupid, and desperate, but it holds back the fear like the iron bracing of some great door as the ram batters against it, and from the stillness comes the beginning of a realization.

The curve. I remember the track suddenly curving this way. Perhaps if I got back to that point and go straight, I’ll find that the room I am in now is a kind of siding, a place to store trucks or a small locomotive. Maybe going straight will lead me to a door, to stairs, to safety.

So I get up again and take three cautious steps, arms outstretched, toes feeling for the steel rails set into the stone floor. I can feel the gentle arc of the turn as I walk, but then . . .

What was that?

The tunnel is so silent that every movement I make seems to fill it with sound loud as thunder, the fractional skittering of gravel underfoot, the shifting of my dress, the roar of my breathing, my heart. But I am sure there was something else, something sharper that came from . . . where? Farther along the hall but also somehow above me. It echoed, furring the edge of the sound, but I feel certain that it had been short and crisp, like the snap of a door latch.

I listen, and at first there is nothing, so I eventually raise my right foot to take another step; but then it comes again and is followed by the short, staccato sound of shoes on stone steps.