Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [114]
Annika went and sat down in a teak chair, sinking back into the patterned cushions. “I explained to Jack as best I know how.” She gave Alli a rueful smile. “But I know that some actions can’t be explained away, some actions stay with you, like a stigma. I was prepared for that with him, but not with you.”
“Oh, please, don’t bullshit me.” Alli crossed the room, leaned against the glass windows, staring out at the now deserted apple orchard with its sharp, twisted branches seeming to scrape the mottled gray and blue sky.
Annika watched her as she moved, as she crossed her arms over her breasts, as she looked longingly out onto the empty grounds. “The truth is fixed, immutable,” she said, “because if it contains even a grain of a lie, it’s no longer the truth.” By examining the girl’s face she could work out just how much Alli missed Jack when he wasn’t with her, but also a terrible sadness. There was a strong cord between them, no doubt, she thought, but there was also something dark there, a lie of some measure, or perhaps something unspoken, an omission, a truth deliberately unsaid. “But a lie comes in infinite gradations, it can be judged on a scale, whereas truth cannot, you see, because a lie can contain a grain of the truth, or even a great deal of truth and still remain a lie. But of what sort, on what level?
“You can tell a, what, a white lie, I think it’s called in English, isn’t it?” When Alli didn’t answer, didn’t even move from her blank contemplation, she continued undeterred. “You’re not punished for telling a white lie, are you? You needn’t feel remorse or guilt, or wish you could take back your words.”
“Why do you say it as if it’s about me,” Alli said. “It isn’t about me.”
“I was just using a figure of speech,” Annika replied, a deliberate lie. “How would I know if you had lied, or to whom?” She paused, as if expecting an answer, then went on. “Anyway, a lie can be useful when the truth won’t do, when it’s too sad, for example, or too shocking.” Alli twitched, one shoulder rising involuntarily as she sought to protect herself from the assault of Annika’s words.
“The point is you make a choice when you tell a lie, or even when you withhold the truth—”
“Stop it!” Alli said sharply. Her face, when she turned it toward Annika, was very pale.
“—even in instances when you must tell a lie in order to protect a person you’re close to or love, or in order to serve a higher end. This is what happened to me.”
The two women eyed each other, almost, it seemed to Annika, as if they were gladiators in the Forum, overlooked by the Tarpeian Rock, the ancient burial place of betrayal. She felt energized by this electric charge, by the hope that the ongoing conflict between them would jolt the girl out of her traumatized shell.
“Every lie has its moment when it’s believed,” she said, with her teeth slightly bared, “even by those whose nature it is to doubt, or to be cynical. Lies are seductive in nature because they’re what you want to believe, or contain an element, a seed of the distrust you yourself harbor, though you may not even be aware of it.”
Alli gave a strangled little cry as she peeled herself from the glass. “Is this the way you think you can gain my trust?”
“I never even considered gaining your trust. The man who kidnapped you, who held you hostage, stole your trust, and you’re incapable of getting it back.”
Tears sprang to Alli’s eyes as she tore out the door, stumbling across the flagstone terrace, around the side of the house, blindly following some strange, self-destructive instinct that took her toward the cliff face and the falloff to the churning water below.
TWENTY-THREE
DENNIS PAULL awoke in a room full of windows. Early morning light flooded the polished wood floor, by which he knew he wasn’t in a hospital or institutional room. He wasn’t bound, either. He was, however, disoriented. Where was he? What happened? The last thing he remembered . . . Christ, his head hurt.
“I have something for that headache.”
He turned his head at the sound of a