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Well, I can lie too. “If you don’t tell me the truth, I am going to blow your brains out.”
“I’m sorry,” he squeaks. “I’m sorry. Mina, you didn’t say that he would have a gun.” The kid looks like he’s about to puke on his own shoes.
“Alex,” she says sharply, like a warning.
Sam takes a step closer to her. “Hey, it’s going to be—”
Alex takes a trembling breath. “She said that all I had to do was come here and tell you this story, but I don’t want to die. Please don’t shoot. I won’t tell anyone—”
“Mina?” I say incredulously. Dropping the pretense of the gun, I take my hand out of my pocket and snatch the envelope out of Alex’s hand. “Let me see that.”
“Hey!” says Alex. And then, as I start ripping open the package, he says, “Wait. That wasn’t real? You don’t have a gun?”
“Oh, he has a gun all right,” Sam says.
“Don’t!” Mina says. She reaches out to snatch the package from me. “Please.”
I give her a dark look. There are printed-out pictures inside the envelope, not negatives or a SIM card or a missing camera.
But it’s too late. I’m already looking.
There are three pictures, Mina standing in profile in all of the shots, her long black wig spilling over her shoulders. She’s not naked. In fact, she’s wearing her Wallingford uniform. The only thing naked about her is her right hand.
Her bare fingers touch the collarbone of the man beside her, Dean Wharton. His white dress shirt is open at the neck. His eyes are closed, perhaps with dread or with pleasure.
I let the photos fall. They scatter on the ground like dead leaves.
“You’re ruining everything,” Mina says, her voice almost feral. “I did this to make you believe me. I had to convince you.”
Sam reaches down and picks up one of the photos. He stares at it, probably, like me, puzzling through what it could mean.
I roll my eyes. “Let me get this straight. You lied to us so that we’d believe you?”
“If you knew what was happening from the start, if you knew a dean was involved, you wouldn’t have agreed to help me.” Mina looks from me to Sam to Alex, like she’s trying to figure out which one of us might still be vulnerable to her pleading. Her eyes are welling with tears.
“I guess we’ll never know,” I tell her.
“Please,” she says. “You can see why I didn’t want to—you can see why I was afraid.”
“I have no idea,” I say. “You’ve lied so much that I have no goddamn idea why you would be afraid.”
“Please,” she says tragically. Despite myself there is a part of me that really feels bad for her. I’ve been where she is, trying to manipulate people because I was too afraid to do anything else. Too convinced that they would never help me if I didn’t con that help out of them.
“Liars don’t get the benefit of being trusted twice,” I tell her, trying to keep my voice firm.
She covers her face with one slender gloved hand. “You hate me now, I bet. You hate me.”
“No,” I say, relenting with a sigh. “Of course not. Just, this time, let’s have the whole story okay?”
She nods quickly, wiping her eyes. “I promise. I’ll tell you everything.”
“You can start with your hair,” I say.
She touches it self-consciously, gloved fingers threading through the black mass. “What?”
I lean forward and give a lock of it a hard tug. Her whole hairline slips to one side, and she gasps, her hands flying to try to correct it.
Alex gasps too.
