“Where did she go? Do you see her?”
“I don’t know, I don’t… wait, there? Is that her?” Finn asked. He pointed to a small open space about fifty yards away.
Lisey stood, her back to us, one hand raised to her hair, the other on her hip. She wore a tight yellow T-shirt, too small for her voluptuous frame, and men’s carpenter-style jeans that hung loose from her hips and sagged at the rear.
We pushed through the crowd. When we were a few feet behind her, I grabbed Finn’s arm and held him back.
Lisey was speaking but there was no one else there, and I realized she was on the phone.
“I told you, I’m through,” she said. There were tears and anger in her voice. “No, no more. You promised. I don’t care how much, it’s not worth it.”
Finn looked at me with raised eyebrows, as Lisey screamed, “No, screw you! I’m done. Don’t call me again!”
She threw the phone in an arc toward the woods that surrounded the fairgrounds. After a moment, she sighed and then stomped off and started searching the ground.
Finn and I walked to her.
“Lisey?” I said softly.
She jumped and turned and stared at me without any sign of recognition. Her face was tear-stained and I saw that when she wasn’t scowling, or stoned out of her mind, she was actually quite beautiful. Her skin was the color of fresh cream, her eyes an amber brown. Her cheekbones were wide and with her ample body, she could have been a model for Titian or Rembrandt.
“Yeah?”
“Do you remember me? I’m Detective Gemma Monroe, I visited with Tessa at your cabin a few days ago?” I asked.
Lisey shook her head. “It’s not my cabin anymore. I moved out yesterday.”
She started to turn away, then stopped, twin roses blooming in her cheeks. “Oh, I remember. I was, uh, incapacitated when you stopped by.”
I nodded. “That’s right. Are you feeling better? I understand you were upset about Reed’s death.”
Finn bent down and picked up a pink sparkly object. “This your phone?”
“Thanks,” Lisey said. “I… dropped it a few minutes ago.”
We stood there awkwardly for a moment. I took a deep breath and said, “I don’t mean to be nosy, but why did you move out of the cabin? I thought you and Tessa were friends?”
“Tessa doesn’t have friends. She uses people like toilet paper and then flushes them out of her life,” Lisey replied, dropping down to the ground. She sat cross-legged and jabbed at the keypad on her phone. “Shit, I think it’s broken.”
“Let me take a look,” Finn said. He bent and plucked it from her hands.
Lisey started to protest but he shushed her. I watched as she eyeballed him, top to bottom, and then she closed her mouth with a pretty little pout. Finn’s blue polo shirt matched his eyes and his slacks were clean and pressed, and I tried to see him as she did, but it was no good. I knew him too well.
I squatted down beside Lisey and within a few seconds, my knees and quads were screaming, so I lowered myself all the way down to my butt. The ground was grassy and comfortable and I sighed, the weight off my feet. It was going to be a hell of a struggle getting up but for the time being, I was content.
“Lisey, I don’t follow,” I began. “I was under the impression that you and Tessa were… close.”
She smirked. “Is that what she said? The first thing you should know about Tessa is that she is supremely talented. The second is that she’s a pathological liar. You do the math.”
I asked, “So if Tessa told me that you were in love with her, that was a lie?”
Lisey fell backward to the grass with a hysterical laugh. She lay there, chuckling, and when she sat back up, her eyes were again filled with tears. A lock of auburn hair fell across her face, and she pushed it away.
“That’s hilarious. I had my first boyfriend when I was eleven. I’m about as far from that as… as…” She faltered off as she tried to think of a suitable comparison. “As Jennifer Lopez!”
Finn handed the pink phone back to her. “I think I fixed it for you.”
“Yeah?” she said, and pushed a few buttons. “Hey, thanks! It’s working.”
Finn gave her a wink and sat down next to us. “So, Lisey, no girl-on-girl action? Why would Tessa tell us you had a thing for her?”
“Like I said, she’s a liar. And she’s really good at it; it’s second nature to her. Sometimes she lies even when there is nothing to lie about. Like, I’ll ask her if we need milk and she’ll say yes and I’ll check and there’s a full carton. Stupid shit like that.”
I asked, “Did Reed know about the lying?”
Lisey snorted. “Of course he did, the idiot. But he was such a nice guy, and he was in love with her, like straight up Romeo and Juliet love. He worshipped her. He thought she would change.”
“Tessa told us she found a torn-up photograph of herself and Reed under your bed. Did you do that?”
Lisey looked startled. “What? Why would I do that? I liked Reed; he was a good guy. He was kind of freaky, with the piercings and tats, but hey, he was a gentleman. Tessa didn’t deserve him, that’s for sure. And if I did tear up some photo, why would I keep it under my bed for Crazy Pants to find?”
She had a point. If Lisey was telling the truth, then I couldn’t believe a word Tessa had said. But if Tessa was telling the truth, then Lisey was a jealous woman with a good reason to hurt Reed. Maybe even kill him.
The one thing I believed was that they both couldn’t be telling the truth.
But that didn’t mean they both weren’t lying.
Finn leaned back on his arms and stretched his long legs out in front of him, so his left shoe was touching Lisey’s right foot. He gave her a little kick and she looked at him.
“What do you do, anyway, Lisey? I mean, here,” he said. “At the circus.”
She smiled, displaying a mouth full of crooked teeth that somehow made her look even more beautiful. “I’m a costume designer. I make all the costumes, for the performers, the clowns, even the animals, like the elephants’ headpieces and the vests for the monkeys.”
“All of them?”
She nodded. “I have a couple of assistants, day laborers we pick up in the cities, but I design the outfits and do most of the sewing and beadwork. The pay is shit but I love the work. And it’s sort of fun, you know? Getting to see the world, one crappy town at a time.”
“Where are you from originally?” Finn asked. He’d withdrawn his foot and crossed his legs but his eyes hadn’t left Lisey’s face.
“Salem, Massachusetts. I got my degree there, in fashion design, and then had what you might call a falling-out with my dad. I left Salem and stayed with some friends in Chicago for a few months, working for a shop out there. The owners knew Papa Joe-Mr. Fatone-and well, one thing sort of led to another,” she said. She plucked at a few pieces of grass and began threading them together in her hands. “Tessa was the first friend I made.”
“So you’re what, twenty-three? And this is what you want to do for the rest of your life?” Finn asked. “What about a family? Career?”
“I’m twenty-five. And yes, this is what I want. These guys, the performers, the workers, they are my family. My dad wants me to come home and work for him at his construction company, but I hate that stuff,” Lisey said. “Accounting, taxes. Death by office work.”
She looked down at the phone in her lap and then up at me.
“I was just talking to him. He said he would pay me fifty thousand a year to run the front office, plus health benefits. But a desk job would just kill me. I tried it last summer, when the circus was having some financial trouble and there was talk of layoffs. I cried every night. Talk about soul-numbing.”
High above us, a jet engine roared. We watched the plane pass over us, heading southeast, no doubt to the big Air Force base in Colorado Springs. The jet left a trail in the sky like someone had brushed a streak of white paint across a cornflower-blue canvas.