The Last Lie Read online

  Weeks before, on the afternoon before the sale of the house became final, I asked Jonas if he would like to spend one last night in the room where he’d slept while growing up.

  “Maybe,” he said after a moment’s contemplation. Way too much trauma and loss had left Jonas a tentative kid.

  “Dogs or no dogs?” I asked.

  He said, “Didn’t have a dog then. So, no dogs. If . . . I decide to do it.”

  Jonas was growing more cryptic as he aged. I associated his parsimony with his father, Peter. But I was concerned that it might simply be a response to all he’d suffered.

  “Not by yourself. I’ll be there too, you know,” I said. “If you decide to do it.” One of my guidelines for myself as a parent was that I always wanted my children to know what options they had and what options they didn’t have. My “I’ll be there” was my way of making certain that Jonas understood his degrees of freedom in that particular situation. If he chose to spend another night in the house, he would have my company.

  Jonas, I thought, was relieved. I assumed he wouldn’t want to let me know that he’d feel safer with me close by.

  “You can sleep in Ma’s room,” he said. “If I do it.”

  Maybe not, I thought. I didn’t believe in ghosts, but if I knew anyone who would be eager to haunt me playfully from the afterlife, it would be Jonas’s mom, Adrienne.

  “I’ll stay out of your way, if that’s what you want,” I said.

  Jonas’s aunt and uncle had recently flown out from New York and offered a big assist in helping to sort everything that had been in the house. Some special items had been crated and stored away for Jonas, a few coveted things were distributed to other family members on both sides of Jonas’s family, and the rest was tossed or put up for bid at an auction that I didn’t attend. What didn’t sell went to charity.

  Jonas was an eleven-year-old kid. Although he was precocious in some ways, he was immature in others. His sense of value, monetary or sentimental, was undeveloped. He had asked for very little from the house. But he had requested his father’s tools. Because the barn that had been Peter’s shop and studio had been vacated for the new owners, too, the precious stash of professional woodworking paraphernalia now filled a big rented storage locker down on 55th near Arapahoe.

  Jonas had also asked for his mother’s music collection, which included a couple of boxes of vintage vinyl that Adrienne had stashed in the cellar—she’d apparently once had a serious disco jones she’d kept completely secret from all of us—and a gazillion CDs. Jonas locked on to what he said was his mom’s favorite band, an indie folk group named Girlyman. Their multi-tonal harmonies proved so easy on Lauren’s difficult-to-please, MS-irascible ears that we began listening to a lot of Girlyman in our house. Jonas knew all the lyrics and could sing any harmonic line. Gracie started to join him in duets.

  During the first weekend after the autumnal equinox, while we were enjoying a Sunday supper of panko-crusted salmon to the sounds of “Tell Me There’s a Reason,” Grace asked, “What is a girlyman, anyway?”

  Lauren and I locked eyes—each of us was begging the other to jump in. Jonas saved us. He said, “My mom was a girlyman.” I was shocked by Grace’s response: she asked him to pass the creamed corn.

  The departed stuff left the big house empty in the way that only well-lived-in houses are ever empty.

  Some furniture—almost all of it, save the upholstered pieces, had been handmade by Jonas’s father, Peter—had left literal footprints behind. Indentations in the carpet. Scratches on the hardwood. The fingertips of ten thousand hands had darkened the lacquered or polished wood in those places that humans are drawn to touch by instinct or habit. In the master bath upstairs, I spotted a fossilized mosquito frozen in three dimensions, four if you count time, on the vanity mirror. In the scenario in my head, I guessed that it had been squished by Adrienne’s hand only hours before she boarded the airplane flight that would take her to Israel and to her death.

  I found the empty house eerie yet comforting. I could still feel the human energy in the space that had long been occupied by Peter and Adrienne and Jonas, and a seemingly endless parade of nannies. When I walked the house, I could still hear the echoes of Jonas’s laughter ringing through all of his earlier developmental phases.

  Jonas’s bedroom had been in the middle of the eastern side of the second floor, down the hall from the master. I suspected—if he chose to spend an additional night in his room—he would sleep in his bedroom’s peculiar loft.

  The loft. Peter created the nook as a gift for his infant son. He called the private space “the knothole.” Adrienne had always called the quirky space “the cubby.”

  Peter’s creation was maybe six feet long, four feet deep, and four feet high. The recess started a good five and a half feet off the floor of the back wall of Jonas’s bedroom. A low rail extended across the front opening. It was not there to keep Jonas from tumbling out. Peter, a master rock climber, had always presumed that any kid who carried his genes would be able to intuitively sense gravity’s inclinations and would be able to tumble short distances with the agility of a cat, if necessary.

  The rail was there to assuage Adrienne’s tendency to fret.

  And then to kvetch. Adrienne had never been one to suffer her nervousness in silence. When Adrienne fretted, she then kvetched. Sunrise/sunset. Inhale/exhale.

  Everyone who loved her knew the best cure, perhaps the only cure, was prevention. Fret prophylaxis equaled kvetch abeyance. Peter knew it better than anyone. And that is why a low rail extended across the opening of the knothole.

  The base of the odd nook was lined with a thick slab of corduroy-covered foam. The walls and ceiling were an intricate chevron pattern concocted of zebrawood veneer. The lines—the natural grain of the fabulous wood and the father-made lines of the angled chevrons—went every which way.

  The little space was a marvel. On one end of the knothole Peter had recessed shelving and drawers for Jonas’s books and his little-boy treasures. The nook had two built-in reading lights, dual outlets for future electronic desires—Peter was a visionary—and a disappearing curtain system that could, at Jonas’s whim, transform the space from his private retreat into his public stage.

  What the knothole didn’t have was any visible means of entry. Peter, who overlooked nothing when he designed and built furniture, had intentionally omitted a ladder, or steps, or handholds, or ledges, or any other way for a small child to enter the high sanctuary of the knothole.

  I had always thought that Peter had omitted an entrance because he wanted to be his son’s personal elevator. The space was constructed high enough off the floor that Adrienne—she had an excess of many things, but height and upper body strength were not among them—wouldn’t be able to lift her growing child, or herself, up into the space. Peter knew all that. By building the knothole so high off the floor, Peter had ensured that it would forever be a special father/son place. That was my theory.

  It would turn out that I was wrong about that. If I had been at all prescient about the damn housewarming and what was to follow, it would have been a good place to begin keeping a list.

  Of the things I was wrong about.

  “TURN YOUR BACK, ALAN,” JONAS SAID.

  We had carried sleeping bags over to spend the night.

  I did what he asked. After I rotated, I found myself looking out his bedroom door, through the open door of the room across the hall, out the far window, and across the lane. I was seeing the shingled roof of the modest house that had originally been constructed as a domicile for the caretaker for the big ranch house. I’d bought that caretaker’s shack from the woman who had owned the ranch before Adrienne and Peter.

  The now-renovated shack was Jonas’s new home, the house that, since his mother’s death, he shared with Lauren and me and his sister, Grace.

  Behind my turned back, I heard the squeak of a hinge. Once, then again. The brief, hushed hum of a motor. A few seconds passed. I hear
d the hum of the motor one more time. Then a click, and another.

  “Okay,” Jonas said.

  I turned around. Jonas was in the knothole.

  Had he jumped up? I didn’t think he could do it without making some kind of racket as he jumped up and scrambled in. I wondered, of course, about the squeaks and the motor. I assumed the squeaky hinge was on the door to the closet that shared a wall with the knothole. The motor? No idea.

  “I heard a motor,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “Can I look?” I asked, nodding at the closet.

  “You can try,” he said. It was a bit of a dare.

  I opened the closet. Heard the telltale squeak from the hinge on the door. The tight space was wainscoted with rough cedar planks, cut and installed on a bias. I tried to spot something that would indicate the entrance to a passageway that might lead from the closet to the knothole.

  Nothing was apparent.

  Jonas seemed pleased at my failure. “Closets should have closets,” he said.

  “Closets should have closets?” I said back.

  “That’s what Ma said Dad always said.”

  Your mom lied a lot, is what I was thinking. “Does this closet have a closet?”

  “Closets . . . should have closets, Alan.” He smiled.

  Jonas called me “Alan.” Every once in a while he called Lauren “Mom.” He’d always called Adrienne “Ma.” Peter was “Dad.”

  After he’d shown off his cubby, Jonas told me he didn’t want to spend the night after all.

  6

  When I finally got to her after the van passed, I found Fiji’s nose buried in the foyer of a prairie dog den. Her leash was completely tangled in the dry grasses nearby.

  I picked her up, which wasn’t her favorite thing. She wasn’t a dog who liked to be restrained, no matter how affectionate the restrainer’s intent. She wriggled to try to get out of my arms. I didn’t care.

  When I finally put the puppy down, I picked up a stick a couple of feet long and stuck it in the dirt where I’d tumbled to avoid the truck. My plan was to use the marker as a guidepost the next morning to begin the search for my damn cell phone. Then I clenched my hands together and blew between the bent knuckles of my thumbs. The sound I made with my hands cupped that way was a bass-horn-like bellow. It was my signal to Emily that her evening rounds were complete.

  The first blow was an alert. With the second—it was a two-note, low-high melody—the big dog knew it was time to come running.

  In seconds she was by my side. “Let’s go home,” I said to her more than to the puppy, whose English-as-a-second-language skills were still in development.

  Emily knew the drill, but she was hesitating. She lifted her twitching nose into the wind from the north. She turned her ears due north, as well.

  “It’s some idiots in a van,” I explained to her, but she wasn’t mollified. I inhaled but by then I couldn’t smell anything other than the distinctive perfumes of Greeley.

  And maybe some smoke. I inhaled again. No, no smoke.

  Emily finally took off down the lane. The puppy tried to chase after her. But I tightened my grip on the lead. Emily stopped once more on the way home, again sticking her nose into the north wind. Again tuning her ears to capture sounds from down the lane.

  She mouthed one deep “woooo” bark. I translated that particular sound as one of general disfavor, not danger or alarm.

  She and I were, I thought, on the same page. “Good girl,” I said.

  When we arrived back between the two houses, it appeared to me that almost all the guests had departed our new neighbor’s party. A solitary car remained.

  I’d kissed the sleeping kids good night before I went out with the dogs—Jonas in his room in our west-facing walk-out basement, Grace down the hall from the main floor master. I brushed my teeth and climbed into bed.

  Lauren was restless, which was nothing new. I touched her shoulder with my dry Colorado lips. She said something about my lunch with Raoul, which reminded me about my other commitment.

  I checked the alarm. Set it.

  I sighed. I had to be up in time for dance class.

  LAUREN’S PROMPT SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN NECESSARY. Raoul had already reminded me about our rendezvous when he and Diane had arrived at the housewarming.

  “Well, this is awkward,” was what Diane had said to me after she’d climbed out of the passenger side of Raoul’s Range Rover. She was looking me over the way a skeptical father might appraise his young teenage daughter’s outfit minutes before she departed on her first-ever date.

  It was apparent that Diane didn’t like what she was seeing. I was feeling as though I was displaying too much décolletage and was about to be directed back inside to pick something a tad more modest, even though the actual problem was that Diane was dressed for a night out while I was dressed to walk dogs.

  Diane Estevez was my oldest friend in Boulder and my longtime partner in business. We were both clinical psychologists. I worked full-time at my craft, Diane a little less than that. Our business was, of course, mental health. We both had long considered it our good fortune that the success of our business endeavor was dependent on our abilities to boost the mental health of others, not ourselves or each other.

  Diane’s husband, Raoul, was a brilliant Catalonian with an electrical engineer’s training, a hound’s nose for business opportunity, and an unmatched two-decade-long résumé of venture capital success in Boulder’s fertile entrepreneurial soil. Raoul’s well-placed bets on incubating businesses and his knack for stewardship while the companies were young had earned Diane and him significant wealth. How wealthy were they? I didn’t really know, which was fine with me and was typical of the way accumulated wealth tended to work in Boulder.

  Boulder had just turned one hundred and fifty years old. Originally born of humble mining and ranching roots, it had long since transformed itself into an academic and scientific powerhouse. Most would agree that it had managed to remain humble, despite its striking good looks, until the last few decades of the twentieth century.

  That’s when Boulder began an evolution, dubious or not, and became cool. Then seriously cool. Followed in short order by something suspiciously resembling trendy. Despite the evolution, Boulderites took some pride in the fact that their burg had never become the kind of commercial oasis that was Aspen or Vail, which were both nearby safe cradles for the ostentatiously rich, either native born or merely visiting.

  Although Boulder was, by almost all standards, a town of much-greater-than-average affluence, the town’s wealthiest citizens tended to keep the evidence of their fortunes on the down low. People drove themselves around Boulder. Although very nice cars were commonplace, exceptional cars were rare. The determined, at times even overdetermined, egalitarian ethos in Boulder limited exclusive clubbing—either the country kind or the night kind. Restaurants that catered only to the I-don’t-care-what-it-costs set weren’t part of the town’s fabric. The fabulously wealthy ate at the same few fine restaurants—Pain Perdu, Frasca, L’Atelier—as the merely well-to-do. If their tabs reached from oh my to the stratosphere it was only because of the wine they’d chosen to sup.

  To drop serious money on a designer-label gown or an outrageously bejeweled necklace, or to pick up something for the house that was exceedingly precious, required that Boulderites make the hop down 36 to Cherry Creek in Denver, endure a flight to one of the coasts, or at the very least carve out a shopping detour during a ski weekend in one of the mountain resorts.

  Boulder is a community where social mores dictate that the very rich limit their public displays of consumption to a stunning home on an exceptional piece of land; a nice set of wheels, or maybe two; and perhaps a solitary piece of oh-really bling. At least at a time. The second and third houses, the private aircraft, the daring Rothko or the da Vinci drawing, just weren’t mentioned in general conversation in town.

  It’s not that it was considered bad form. It just wasn’t considered
.

  In Boulder, if one boasted in public to raise someone’s eyebrows in a good way, one talked not about one’s money but about one’s hand-crafted bicycle, or hot new skis, or even better, one’s new personal best in the previous month’s 10k, or the completion of that summer’s Triple Bypass, or a successful training regimen for the upcoming Leadville Trail 100.

  Knowing all that, I still assumed that our new neighbors were counted among Boulder’s wealthy. Somewhere, I guessed, in the same neighborhood of rich as Diane and Raoul. On the day that the sale was finalized, Jonas’s uncle had informed me that the buyers of his sister’s home had brought cash to the closing table. To afford to buy Adrienne and Peter’s prized digs and its many surrounding half hectares, especially with cash, required some significant financial resources.

  By the time Diane and Raoul arrived at the housewarming, there were a couple of dozen vehicles lining the lane—a typical high-end Boulder mix, which meant primarily SUVs and hybrids. The big Mercedes and the little BMW coupe that were parked near the house beside Raoul’s shiny Range Rover announced to me that for Diane and Raoul, this was a night for socializing with at least a few of their wealthy friends.

  A vintage Camaro, pristine but for the thin layer of dust deposited from the jaunt down our unpaved road, was fifty feet farther away, near a caterers’ van at the southern end of the property. The Camaro told me that a classic car aficionado—an acceptable local affectation—was among the guests, too. Between the Camaro and the Euro collection was a small SUV—a Hyundai, or a Kia, or something. I can’t keep track of all the small SUVs that dot Boulder’s roads. In my head, I assigned the pedestrian ride to catering staff.

  Raoul had one bottle of wine cradled in the crook of his left arm. He gripped a duplicate by the neck in his left hand. The label confirmed for me that the housewarming gift was most generous. The wine selections were from a prized case that Raoul had purchased at a recent online auction. He had shown me a solitary bottle the last time I was at their house. I hadn’t recognized the label. I’m not a wine expert, but I can tell a Burgundy bottle from that of a Bordeaux. His prize was the former. I did remember that even though he was trying to convince me he had gotten a bargain on the case, the price revealed that each bottle had cost half as much as my bike.