She Lied She Died Read online

  She Lied She Died

  Carissa Ann Lynch

  One More Chapter

  a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

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  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

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  Copyright © Carissa Ann Lynch 2020

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  Cover design by Lucy Bennett © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

  Cover photograph © Mark Owen/Trevillion Images

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

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

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  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.

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  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.

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  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

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  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 w
ent 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…