She Lied She Died

She Lied She Died

Carissa Ann Lynch

One More Chapter

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © Carissa Ann Lynch 2020

Cover design by Lucy Bennett © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Cover photograph © Mark Owen/Trevillion Images

Carissa Ann Lynch asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008421038

Ebook Edition © December 2020 ISBN: 9780008421021

Version: 2020-10-23

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Thank you for reading…

The One Night Stand: Chapter 1

The One Night Stand: Chapter 2

The One Night Stand: Chapter 3

The One Night Stand: Chapter 4

The One Night Stand: Chapter 5

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About the Author

Also by Carissa Ann Lynch

One more chapter...

About the Publisher

Dedicated to Shannon

Thank you for your wisdom and late-night advice when my characters got in sticky situations I couldn’t get them out of. And for teaching me how to play chess—one of these days I might win.

“A truth that’s told with bad intent

Beats all the lies you can invent.”

— William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”

Chapter One

I was nine years old when the murder happened.

Old enough to taste fresh-found fear in the air; young enough to feel unscathed by it.

Alone in the farmhouse, I squatted on my haunches in front of my brother Jack’s bedroom window, eyes peeping over the ledge as far as they dared, faded binoculars shielding my face.

Jack would have killed me if he knew what I was doing because: 1. I was never allowed to enter his room, uninvited. 2. I’d gone through his trunk, which contained his “private things” (if you consider pics of naked girls with hairy bushes, and a pair of binoculars, “private”) and worst of all: 3. I’d borrowed those precious binoculars.

Jack was away, visiting with our dad’s aunt, my quirky Great Aunt Lane. Six years my senior, Jack and I were as close as two siblings that spread apart in age could be, I guess.

But Jack’s anger and disapproval about me being in his room were the farthest thing from my mind … he wasn’t here to stop me, and even if he was … something important was happening, something that went above and beyond everyday sibling squabbles.

I’d been quarantined to my bedroom, courtesy of Mom and Dad.

“Don’t come out until we tell you.”

“We have an important meeting to tend to.”

But I knew. I didn’t know what exactly … but I knew something bad had happened.

Sirens raged across the field, so loud my chest rumbled, thrumming in rhythm with the abhorrent beat.

My room—my temporary prison—was equipped with two windows, but unfortunately, both faced the trees. Wrong side.

I’d fought hard for this room—it was slightly smaller than my brother’s, but the rich green view was superior, and it had a built-in bookshelf to boot. Now, for the first time, I regretted my choice.

The urgency and excitement … that knocking fear … that call of importance—all of it was coming from the other side of the house.

So, I’d crawled across the knotty pine floors, army-woman style, until I’d reached my brother’s bedroom. It was unlocked, as was his precious trunk, and the binoculars were the prize I’d been hoping for.

I adjusted the binoculars on my face. They were old, too big for me. But they were my best bet because the chaos was happening across the field.

Through the foggy lens, I searched for my mother and father. But they were nowhere to be found.

There were others—several others, in fact. A cluster of people formed a strange, mystic circle in the centre of the field, a cloud of low-slung fog forming a blanket around them. Like ancient druids, they were engaged in some sort of ritual…

I let my wild imagination run its course, then I readjusted my viewpoint.

The source of the sirens was obvious—an ambulance had pulled right through the center of Daddy’s field, mowing down crops and kicking up mud. There were thick wet tire tracks in the soil.

The doors of the ambulance were left flung open on the driver’s side and cab; the flash of the sirens glittered like rubies.

The circle-jerks weren’t moving, but I could tell they were looking. Looking at what, exactly? I wondered. Heads ducked low, hands on hips … there was one man with his hands folded behind his head. Another was a woman covering her mouth and nose…

My next thought—a stupid one—was that maybe there was one of those crop circles in Daddy’s field. I’d read something about them in Jack’s sci-fi magazine, the one with the grainy image of Nessie, with her long neck and protruding humps, on the cover. I hadn’t believed a word of it.

As I trained the binoculars on the circle, willing the lens to focus, I realized that most of them were in uniform. Cops. Boring!

Suddenly, the man with his hands behind his head pivoted. He turned away from the others. Moving, marching, he was headed straight toward my house.

No, not the house … toward Mom and Dad. For the first time, I spotted them, huddled at the edge of the property. My dad, William, and my mother, Sophie. They looked too soft and young to be farmers. And, in reality, they weren’t. Just two young people trying to have a place to call their own, to carry on a family tradition…

For the first time, they looked their age, faces grim and tight with worry.

Dad’s hairy arm was draped over Mom’s tiny, narrow shoulders. She was … shaking.

As the mysterious policeman crossed the field, trotting toward them, I was mesmerized by him … with his thick black hair and chiseled body, he looked scruffy and world-weary, but in a good way—like that actor in Hollywood Detective.

He stopped in front of Mom and Dad, hands resting on his waistband, fingers itching his gun like an outlaw from the Wild West.

Suddenly, he pointed across the field, gesturing wildly. Even behind a sheet of glass, I thought I heard Mom’s sorrowful wail, “Oh noooo.”

There was a gap in the circle now, I realized, pulling my eyes away from the cop and my parents. I zoomed in as far as the binoculars allowed, and for the first time, I could see inside the secret circle.

I could see what the fuss was about.

Knuckles white, I willed my hands not to shake. Willed myself not to look away…

There was a girl in the center of the circle. Fragile and small, she lay curled up on the ground, like one of those pill bugs we called “rollie pollies”.

It wasn’t natural, the way she was bent … arms and legs sharply curved and folded in, like a clay sculpture you could shape and mold, bend at will…

Could it be an alien … or better yet … a mannequin posed for a prank?

Sitting back on my haunches, I took a few deep breaths, then poked my head up again.

This time, the crowd had thinned out more, and as I zoomed in again … I saw her completely. For the first time, the lenses were crystal clear.

She was real—human. White skin, pale hair to match. Thin, white strands of hair blew around her face like corn silk. Her fingers were curled up by her mouth, nails painted matte black like the night sky.

Eyelids open, one gray eye bulged out at me like a grape being squeezed between my thumb and forefinger …

The rolling in my stomach was less of a roll and more of a lurch. I was barely on my feet when the vomit came. It sprang from my mouth and nose, and although I tried, pathetically, to catch it in my hands, there was just too much of it.

I puked on my brother’s favorite Star Wars blanket and CD tower, then I curled up on the floor like that thing in the field, trying to erase the image burned on the back of my eyelids.

It's not real. It’s not real. Please tell me it’s not real.

Chapter Two

Three truths.

One lie.

I’ve lived in the same shitty town for most of my life.

A girl named Jenny Juliott was murdered in my own “backyard”.

I’m an aspiring writer who moonlights as a Kmart cashier.

Jenny Juliott’s killer was never caught.

That original image of Jenny’s face—moon-white and ominous in the early morning light—those bulgy eyeballs and dead gray irises … that image had evolved over the years. Replaced by one replica after another … there is her face, the way I think I saw it that day … and then there are the memories, and later, the flashes of crime scene photos I pored over in my free time.

I didn’t know her—of course I didn’t; she was fourteen and I was nine. We may have lived in the same shitty town of Austin, Indiana, but we didn’t know each other at all. Despite what they say about small towns, we do not all know each other.

But, over the years, I came to know everything about the girl with the white-blonde hair and the haunting gray eyes who smoked skinny cigarettes called Virginia Slims and who would never age a day over fourteen in the hearts and minds of Austin’s residents.

Jenny Juliott had a mother, a father, and an older brother around Jack’s age.

It was weeks before the crime scene was cleared from our property, reflective yellow caution tape stirring in the wind like a warning flag. Little bits of it floating around the property like confetti…

Years later, after the crime was solved and her killer was locked away in prison, I was digging around, looking for dandelions—not the yellow ones, but the ones you wish on—and I found what looked like a strip of gold in the dirt.

But it wasn’t gold; far from it. It was that stupid old crime scene tape, bits of it still rotting around the edges of our property, still strung up in the branches of trees where it had gotten blown around that summer. A reminder that it wasn’t all a bad dream, as much as we wanted it to be…

After Jenny was murdered, my parents pretended nothing happened … this was their way. That had always been their way. Perhaps they saw it as protecting me, but I saw it as treating me like an imbecile.

The lies we sometimes tell ourselves—or, in their case, lies were simply omissions.

“Nothing for you to worry about, dear.”

“She was a wild girl, must have got caught up in some trouble.”

“This is the safest town in three counties.”

Lies.

Lies.

Lies.

Because the first thing my parents did was replace the locks on the front, back, and sides of the house. Days of riding my bike to my best friend Adrianna’s were over. So were the days of slumber parties, playing outside alone, and walking to school or down to the park with friends.

Most of my friends, and their parents too, were too afraid to come to the farm. As though my family might be involved in her death, or that death itself might be contagious if you got too close.

There are two types of people in this world: those who drive by fast, avoiding the scene of a tragedy, and those who slow to a crawl, chicken heads bobbing up and down through the windows just to catch a glimpse of where a young girl died.

After the tragedy on the farm, we got a little of both types. Those who wanted to avoid us, and the creeps who wouldn’t leave us alone.

At school, there were stirrings … I heard a few things, but since I was only in third grade at the time, a lot of the true grisly details were shielded from us.

But it didn’t stop us from creating our own.

“Someone killed her. Hacked her up with a chainsaw. She must have pissed someone off right good.”

“I heard aliens abducted her then dropped her down from the sky.”

“They fed her to the pigs on the Breyas farm.”

“Oink oink, Natalie. Oink oink.”

Lies. All lies.

We didn’t even own pigs, dammit.

It wasn’t until I turned the ripe age of fourteen, the same age Jenny was when she died, that I learned some things that were true.

Jenny Juliott wasn’t killed on my family’s farm—she was dumped there. She had been strangled and stabbed, and the police knew who did it, because the killer confessed: the confessor’s name was Chrissy Cornwall.

Chrissy Cornwall: resident Austin tough girl who grew up on the “other side of the tracks”. It just so happened that that “other side” was across the creek and through the woods from my family’s farm.

Chrissy was fifteen when she committed the murder. She had jet-black hair, oddly streaked with flakes of gray at an early age—or was it white, like lightning? I couldn’t be certain. I knew her even less than I knew Jenny.

Chrissy and Jenny were not friends; they didn’t even attend the same school.

Chrissy was “homeschooled” by her mother—and by “homeschooled”, I mean that they requested to teach her at home but never did. Unlike Jenny, who grew up in a nice middle-class home with a stay-at-home mother and a pastor father and attended Austin Middle School with most of the other kids in town, Chrissy was an outcast. An unknown.

Jenny bought ripped jeans from outlet malls and painted her nails black with twelve-dollar polish. Chrissy’s pants were ripped with time, and from scrapping with her hoodlum brothers on the front lawn of her daddy’s trailer lot.

Jenny was smart, pretty. Chrissy was … I don’t know what you’d call her. Poor white trash, I guess.

On paper, Jenny and Chrissy had nothing in common. But there was one thread that tied them together, and that thread had a name: John Bishop.

John went to school with Jenny and the others, and he and Jenny were dating. But, unbeknownst to Jenny and the rest of the kids, John had a girl on the side—the dirty girl whose parents didn’t send her to school, the girl with the strange black-gray hair who lived in a trailer.

And that trailer was a hop and a skip from my family’s farm.

There were many people to blame for Chrissy’s actions—her parents for their lack of supervision and education, the state for not following up on reports of abuse, the school for letting a girl who didn’t attend there kidnap another in the school parking lot …

But most of all, we blamed the guilty party: Chrissy herself.

She was jealous and angry, and determined to make Jenny pay for messing around with John, whom she felt she had a claim to.

Those are the scarecrow details.

Over the years, much more has come out. But some parts are still a mystery. I guess when it comes down to it … you can never fully understand the heart of a person—why would anyone kill someone over a stupid boy? And to do it so brutally…

I hadn’t thought about the case in over a decade. Chrissy had been tried and convicted, sentenced to life in prison despite her age at the time of the crime. I used to be obsessed, but not any more.

The media had forgotten, as had I; we’d moved on to similar cases, ones with gorier details and more exciting bylines splashed across the nightly news.

But, of course, Austin hadn’t forgotten. And as much as I tried to push it away, I hadn’t let it go either. Jenny was always there; a memory, a warning … a piece of my childhood I couldn’t get back. Perhaps there was a small part of me that blamed her death for the fallout of my own childhood…

A lot can change in thirty years—but a lot can stay the same.

The third step on the corkscrew staircase still creaks when I step on it; the bathroom and cellar still stink of Clorox and mold like they did when Mom and Dad lived here.

Inheriting my family’s farm ten years ago should have been a blessing, and when I was thirty, it had sort of felt like one. But thirty turned into thirty-five, and just last week, I celebrated my fortieth birthday the way I did my thirty-ninth—alone.

Wearing only socks and undies, I tiptoed from my room—my parents’ former bedroom—and made my way for the stairs. Every light in the house was off, which was how I liked it. If I can’t see the shadows, then they can’t see me…

As I wound my way up the stairs, I caught a glimpse of moonlight through the picture windows in the kitchen … it can’t be much later than two, maybe three, in the morning…

So, what woke me?

There were sounds, but nothing unusual. The creaky old floorboards, the low hum of the refrigerator downstairs, the soft ticking of the grandfather clock in my office, which I’d converted from Jack’s old bedroom.

Sometimes I caught glimpses of the place as it was before … Mom in the living room reading paperback mysteries, Dad at the table with the Times, and Jack mounted up in the living room watching Star Wars … their ghosts, just a flicker of movement, a light hollowed sound through the walls…

But there was something else this morning, something real … whiny and synchronous, coming from the side of the house. And just like that, my legs were shorter and thinner … I was nine years old again, creeping toward my brother’s bedroom window, following the warning moans that lay beyond the dingy clapboard walls of my daddy’s farmhouse.

It can’t be. There’s no reason for an ambulance … no way there’s anything out there. Maybe this is all a dream … a memory…

The door to Jack’s old bedroom was closed up tight. I’d like to think I kept it closed to ensure the privacy of my home office, but in truth, I think I did it out of habit.

Jack would want it that way.

I nudged the door open with my foot and, trancelike, I tiptoed toward the window facing the field.

When someone dies, it’s not unusual for their family or friends to keep their rooms exactly as they once were. But with Jack … I couldn’t. Erasing him felt better, easier … and so, the first thing I did when I moved back home ten years ago was tear out the carpet and take his old bedroom furniture out and replace it with a modern oak desk and shelves. A computer and a desk—the necessities for any writer. But I hadn’t written a word in years.

As I edged closer to the window, there was no doubt: someone was out in the field. But that sound … it wasn’t sirens; no gaudy red rubies bouncing through the trees, ricocheting from my heart to my head.

But what I saw took my breath away.

A circle of people, each one holding a candle in front of them.

Thirty years later, and still: the first thing that comes to mind is a pagan ritual.

They were singing, something low and melancholy, flames from their candles casting ghoulish shadows over their faces.

I felt a flicker of rage. How dare they waltz on my property like they own the place? This isn’t a tourist attraction!

But in a way it had been … people had come from all over to see the “spot” the first few years after the murder. Sometimes, Dad would chase them off with a shotgun … but after a while, he took to ignoring them. “Easier that way,” he told me.

But since I’d come home, there hadn’t been a single unwanted visitor. Until now.

I’d assumed that most had forgotten Jenny Juliott and the girl who’d killed her.

Snapping the bolts to unlock the window, I shoved on the glass and poked my head all the way out, forgetting about my lacy black bra.

“Hey! What are you doing?” I shouted. It was windy, and chilly for October, and my words blew back angrily in my face.

I tried again. “Hello! It’s, like, two in the morning…” I screamed so loud I could feel veins protruding from my forehead.

And just like that, the singing stopped. Nearly a dozen heads turned my way.

“Hey, Natalie,” came a woman’s voice in the dark. As I squinted, she stepped into the sliver of moonlight in the field and pushed back the hood of a dark gray sweatshirt.

She looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her. Was she someone I went to school with?

It’s funny how over time every face looks familiar, but at the same time, I could never remember names. My childhood just a splotch on my memory board…

“Hey,” I answered, dully.

Another woman stepped up beside the first. This one had black curls and, despite the chill in the air, she was wearing a white T-shirt and thin multi-colored yoga pants. A face I’d never forget: Adrianna Montgomery, forgotten friend turned local columnist. I tried to avoid her in town at all costs, but I saw her occasionally at the supermarket and Kmart when I was working. I usually pretended not to and luckily, she did the same.

“Natalie, it’s good to see you. Sorry we’re out here, but we tried to call you first … we wanted to honor Jenny, especially considering the latest news. We can’t forget what that monster did to her, you know?” Adrianna said.

The latest news?

My lousy paychecks from Kmart weren’t enough to justify getting cable. I had just enough to eat, fill up my car with gas, and gas the tractor for cutting the field in the warmer months … I didn’t keep up with local news, or national news either.