THE LIE

  The Lie

  Behind Closed Doors: Family Secrets

  Debra Webb

  The Lie

  Copyright © 2020 by Debra Webb

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, transmitted, or distributed in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without specific written permission from the publisher. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher are illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is coincidental.

  Published by Pink House Press, Huntsville, Alabama

  Print Edition ISBN: 9798693677586

  Digital Edition AISN: Bo8BS38XB7

  First Edition 2020, Printed in the USA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  FamilySecrets.Life

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  FamilySecrets.Life

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  FamilySecrets.Life

  Sneak Peek

  Behind Closed Doors: Family Secrets Series

  About the Author

  Also by Debra Webb

  Don’t Miss StormWatch

  Don’t Miss Breakdown

  FamilySecrets.Life

  The decision to dig into your past

  is not one to take lightly. You may

  discover that there are

  some secrets best left buried.

  FamilySecrets.Life

  Chapter One

  “All these years,” he said, mostly to himself, “Being caught was never a concern.”

  He laughed. Not really a laugh. More a dry, rusty sound. Men like him didn’t laugh. Not really. But this was almost laughable. He had gone to great lengths to protect the work. His every tedious effort had kept him safe for more than three decades.

  How many others, he mused, could claim such an astounding record?

  Few, he supposed.

  Now, however, his choices had been limited. A man could not outrun fate forever. Even a cat ran out of lives eventually.

  He smiled at his companion who glared back at him from the keeping place.

  “I can’t stop it now.” Not that he actually wanted to prevent what came next. In fact, he relished the potential interactions and reactions to come. He was protected. Though he would miss the challenge of the work he had come to love so, change was a part of life.

  For a true chameleon, transformation was a necessary element of existence.

  It was time for change.

  As if to applaud his conclusions, the birds sang for him. Oh, how they called out to each other…a siren’s song to lure in their prey. They watched him, reacted to his voice. They were so like him in their brutality. Their beauty belied their ruthlessness.

  The sheer hatred emanating from his companion reminded him that he had many preparations to make. Like the beautiful birds, his companion watched him from his cage.

  He knew better than to trust either—the birds or the companion. One was as ruthless as the other.

  “You shouldn’t waste your energy,” he warned. “You’ll need it for what’s coming.”

  The fool dared to spit in his face.

  Didn’t matter. He would, as the saying went, have the last laugh.

  Tomorrow would prove interesting.

  The day after, even more so.

  It was time to watch his carefully orchestrated drama play out like the finale in the latest hit on Broadway.

  A believable lie was far more complicated than the simple truth. He had become very, very good at creating the perfect lie. And why not?

  He’d had the very best teacher.

  Chapter Two

  Miller’s Bend Road

  Maple Ridge, Tennessee

  Friday, November 27, 10:00 p.m.

  That’s a wrap, folks. Until next week! May your killers be too slow to catch you!

  Lara typed the final comment, ending her blog for the day. More comments would appear over the weekend. She would check back in from time to time. It was never a hardship to respond to her followers. She smiled as she closed her laptop. As long as her audience kept growing, she would answer their comments twenty-four/seven if necessary. The bigger her audience the better the sponsors and endorsements.

  She stood, stretched her back and headed to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of wine. As a teenager she never expected her fascination with true crime to turn into something that would earn her a living.

  Her decision to give it a try had been greatly influenced by her mom’s constant urging that Lara should follow her passion. She reached for a stemmed glass—same one she’d used last night—rinsed it out and went to the fridge. She grabbed the bottle of white and opened it. Some connoisseurs hated screw off tops but Lara was grateful for the convenience. Especially after a long evening of answering comments on her crime blog, Killer Musings.

  The first taste of the fruity Moscato was sweet on her tongue. She sighed. When she’d lived in New York most of her friends adored their reds, cabernet, merlot, pinot noir. Not Lara, she loved her whites, once in a while the occasional blush but never the deeper reds.

  The notification that a new email had arrived echoed through her tiny cottage. Glass in hand she padded barefoot through the house, returning to her office. When she’d come to Maple Ridge in June to make the arrangements for her mother’s funeral, she’d had no idea how long she would stay. The heart attack had been so unexpected, Lara had needed time to pull herself together and to do what needed to be done. Maybe pack up the family home and put it on the market. No way was she leaving New York and staying in this small Tennessee town. Though it was fairly close to Nashville, Maple Ridge was basically the middle of nowhere compared to her Manhattan neighborhood.

  The weeks had turned into months and by September Lara had decided that maybe she’d buy herself a small lake house for visiting when she needed to get away from the rapid-fire pace of the city. She could transition some of the keepsakes from her childhood home and then sell the place.

  Except that last part hadn’t happened. Instead, she had fallen in love with this little cottage and its cozy bohemian theme, and she’d left her mom’s house exactly as it was except for a few things she had brought here to her cottage. Eventually she’d have to sort through things with an eye toward downsizing and sell the place, but not now.

  Maybe next year.

  Right now, she sat down at her desk, stared out the window at the darkness beyond. The view from nearly every window was the same—the lake. It was so calming, it made her want to be still, to just be.

  The excitement and endless possibilities of the city had kept her jumping and moving, her mind humming. She’d prowled Manhattan and the other boroughs for ten years. She’d traveled all over the country interviewing survivors of the worst sorts of monsters—cold blooded murderers. One of these days she might even finish the book she had started ages ago. She had
been approached with the idea of publishing more than once. Recently, she’d started work on the project again. Maybe it was time she saw it all the way through.

  “Maybe one day I’ll actually have something completed to submit,” she muttered before sipping her wine once more. The truth was, she’d been mentally toying with the project for months before actually opening the file on her laptop. Not that she’d told anyone. Well, she might have mentioned it to her closest friend. She smiled as she read the sender of the new email she’d received. Nate Decker. Her friend and FBI agent.

  How was it possible that so much time had passed without a face-to-face meeting with the man she unconditionally considered her best friend? Five years. Unbelievable. Never enough time, she decided as she opened his email.

  Great analysis as always. Time will tell if you’ve solved the crime before the police can.

  Lara laughed but it had happened. Over the years she’d figured out the killer before the police once or twice. The local authorities—wherever the heinous crime occurred—were always grateful for the assist but rarely appreciated her telling the world by blogging about it.

  She hit reply and selected a wine glass emoji to send to her longtime friend.

  Despite the fact that they’d never met in person, she and this handsome FBI agent were as close as possible in a long distance, online way. Five years ago when she’d just started making a name for herself as a blogger in the world of true crime, she’d needed information available only through the Federal Bureau of Investigation. After submitting her request, she had received an email through her site from a Special Agent Nathaniel “Nate” Decker. They’d become fast friends. Obviously as a member of law enforcement, he loved solving crimes just as much as she did. He was intrigued by her depth of research and innate ability to assess a homicide. She had often teasingly suggested he probably thought her to be a closet serial killer and wanted to keep tabs on her. Either way, he was her go-to guy for all things FBI.

  Lara leaned back in her chair and sipped her wine. Their online conversations had evolved into text messaging and quite often phone calls. The idea that they’d never met in person was nothing more than proof of how busy they both were. It would have been so easy before she’d come to Tennessee to take care of her mother’s final arrangements. She’d lived in New York all those years and he was in D.C.—a mere train ride away.

  Just another downside to city living. Time slipped away so quickly. The next thing you knew five years had gone by.

  He’d wanted so badly to come to her mom’s funeral, but he’d had that terrible flu that was going around over the summer. By the time he was fit for travel, Lara just needed to be alone for a while. It was a difficult time for her, and she’d wanted their first in-person meeting to be happy.

  Pushing back her chair and standing once more, she considered that she and Nate would have to change that sad fact one of these days. Maybe over the Christmas holidays. She finished off her wine and returned to the kitchen for more. This time she would take it to the front porch. It was cold outside but there was a nice moon shining over the water. She could curl up in a quilt and enjoy the view for a bit. It soothed her. She sat on that porch almost every night.

  Glass topped off, she grabbed her favorite well-worn quilt from the sofa back and headed outside. Her mother had worried, particularly the past few years, whether Lara would ever find her happily-ever-after in the big city. At thirty-two she still felt too young to worry about forever. Her mom had worried enough for the both of them.

  Maybe it was because her mom never had a happily ever after of her own. Lara’s father had died when she was a baby and her mother never remarried. She hadn’t ever even attempted another romance as far as Lara knew. She didn’t raise the topic of grandkids, but she often mentioned how much she wanted Lara to find someone so she wouldn’t be alone in the world after she was gone. Mary Franklin had fretted a great deal about Lara having a partner in life. They had no other family, only each other.

  Even in the city Lara always enjoyed plenty of friends, but her mother only had one that Lara had met. She had been far too much of a homebody—almost a recluse—to support more than one relationship at a time. She’d often said how glad she was that Lara hadn’t inherited her hermit ways.

  Her mother’s homebody behavior hadn’t seemed strange to Lara. Growing up her life was plenty full. She’d never missed having a father or extended family.

  She pulled the quilt closer around her and exhaled a big breath, shifting her mind from the past. She looked forward to Monday’s blog. The controversial crime solving technique on the agenda was sure to be a hit with her followers. Who would have guessed there were so many couch crime solvers out there?

  Monday’s blog was particularly interesting to Lara. Genetic evidence and DNA profiling had always been at the top of her curiosity list. More recently the ancestry sites and their role in contributing to the discovery of criminals was mind-boggling. Everyone—even the worst of the worst killers—came from somewhere, had some person related by blood to him or her. The idea that the connection, even a fairly remote one, could haunt a killer with the fear of exposure was exhilarating. How could a killer protect him or herself from the genetic connection? He couldn’t. Because few people knew everyone with whom they were related in some way.

  You might be able to conceal or destroy your paper trail and even your online existence, but you couldn’t hide from genetics. You could only hope to never leave any behind at a crime scene.

  Lara herself, for example. She had no known family beyond her mother. If her father had extended family beyond his adopted parents, who died not long after his death, her mother hadn’t known. But there would almost certainly be someone out there. To prove her theory, Lara used one of the public ancestry sites to look for her own genetic relatives. The results would be available for review on Monday morning, and Monday evening she would share them with the world.

  She sipped her wine, shivered as the cold invaded the thick cotton swaddled around her. Her mom wouldn’t have approved of the idea. She insisted that family was the people around you who loved and took care of you, not some person whose DNA pattern was like yours.

  This was true, of course. A genetic connection didn’t make people family in the truest sense of the word.

  Still, it was interesting in terms of solving crime. Her followers would love the personal aspect. In truth, she was vaguely curious as to whether she had any close genetic links out there.

  Who wouldn’t be?

  She’d also done some browsing on FamilySecrets.Life, a fairly new site touted for doling out advice and offering private counseling. The counseling options were slanted toward family issues. Lara was somewhat impressed with what the site brought to the table. The advice was often times blunt but on target, in her opinion.

  She drank the last of her wine and leaned her head against the vintage wood of the ancient swing. Pushing off with a sock-clad foot she set the swing in motion then tucked her leg back into the warmth of the quilt. Closing her eyes, she allowed the quiet and the darkness to clear her mind. All the voices of tonight’s multitude of commenters faded into nothingness. She could sit here all night, just swaying gently back and forth. Except she might very well freeze to death. She’d caught a little of tonight’s weather news. Wasn’t the low supposed to be like thirty-five? Too cold for sleeping on the porch for sure.

  She would get up and go inside eventually. But not just yet…

  A crash shattered the silence.

  Lara’s head came up. Cold had invaded the quilt. Had she fallen asleep? She shivered as she glanced around.

  What the heck?

  She blinked, clearing the fog of sleep from her eyes. Porch. She’d fallen asleep in the swing. It was still dark but judging by the cold she’d slept for a bit. Where was her cell phone? Her hands moved around her lap. Not in the quilt. Not in her pocket.

  She shivered again and decided it was past time to go inside. Putting her
foot down, something poked her. She yelped.

  A shard of glass.

  The wine glass.

  She’d fallen asleep and dropped it. That was the crash that had awakened her.

  Braced for the worst, she wiggled her toes and turned her foot in a circle. She relaxed. Luckily it felt like only a poke to her big toe.

  Walking with her toe canted up until she could fully examine the damage, she went into the house, shrugged off the quilt and hurried to the bathroom. The small bathroom was circa the fifties with a single pink porcelain sink mounted to the wall and sporting two polished metal legs. The cross piece between the legs was a great place to hang a hand towel. The tub, too, was pink as was the toilet. Lara didn’t mind. She’d always liked pink. It had been her mother’s favorite color and splashes could be found all over the family home. The pink walls in this cottage, however, Lara’d had to paint. As much as she liked the color she could take only so much. The white tile the previous owner had added to the walls and floor was the perfect remedy for the overdose of pink in this bathroom.

  She pulled off her sock and checked her toe. Not so bad. Shallow but a little bloody. Thankfully the sock had soaked it up preventing her from leaving a trail through the house. She cleaned the wound, added some antibiotic cream for good measure and applied a bandage. No big deal.

  The slam of wood against wood startled her.

  The front door?