The Good Lie by A.R. Torre
CHAPTER 12
Los Angeles welcomed Scott back with open arms, and everyone wanted a piece. With Nita beside him, Scott appeared on the local news, then sat down with People magazine. His mother followed him through hair and makeup, sound checks, and on-camera interviews. With each performance, Scott’s story grew smoother, and his confidence bloomed. Then the camera would turn off, and he’d retreat back to his bedroom, to his phone, uninterested in life.
Now, Nita sat in a green room, watching him on a bank of monitors, a cold diet soda in hand. Beside her, a production assistant with a diamond nose ring and a goofy headset loudly gushed over Scott.
“Your son is a hero,” she mused. “To escape like that? And to be brave enough to tell his story?”
“Yes, he is.” Nita watched her son on-screen, his dimple appearing as he turned his head to face the cohost. What Scott had done was so brave. Then again, Scott had always been brave. When he was six and there had been a giant snake in their yard, he had grabbed its tail and yanked without even thinking twice.
The camera cut to the interviewer’s face. “I know it’s painful to recount, but can you tell our viewers how you escaped?”
Scott looked down, as he always did when faced with a difficult question. The camera scanned across a crowd filled with concerned audience members paying rapt attention. Nita thought of the first time she’d heard his answer, in their large dining room, the silver still out on the buffet, where the housekeeper had been polishing it. The room had been dim, the curtains pulled tight, covering the impressive views of the gardens. Once it had been her dream home. Now it would always be the place where she had lost and then refound her son.
“He used to chain me up.” Scott rubbed at the underside of his wrist as if remembering the restraints. “By my wrists and ankles.”
Nita had heard the story a dozen times but forced herself to stay in place. If he could live through it, she could listen to it.
Naked. That was how the monster tied up her son. It was a fact Scott left out of the media interviews, and she felt guilty for appreciating the omission. The sexual torture the BH victims had experienced was something the police had kept out of the news. In awareness of that, and of the other victims’ families, they had made a decision—among their family and with the police—to keep the information private.
“I had hidden a fork he had given me to eat dinner with. Normally, he watched me eat, but this time he didn’t. He had a phone call or a meeting. Something.”
Scott always faltered a little bit on this part of the story. Nita’s sister, who was a school counselor, said some memory loss, especially in moments of high stress and trauma, was normal. Nita had asked Scott if he had any gaps in his memory, but he’d shaken his head. She’d asked him if he wanted to speak to her sister, and again, he’d shaken his head.
The only things he hadn’t refused were the television interviews. There were too many of them. It wasn’t healthy for him to do so much. He needed to rest, to heal, to spend time with his family and friends. But he seemed to enjoy this. The crowds of people outside each filming. The emails and letters that poured in. The social media followers. In the two weeks since his escape, Scott had grown obsessed with his follower count, checking it hourly, and seemed to find joy in each new peak his numbers hit. With the swell of followers had come offers. Scott was an influencer now, whatever that meant. He was getting packages of products, dozens of different boxes arriving each day, everything from coconut oil to protein shakes to teeth-whitening kits. And earning money, too. He’d gotten ten thousand dollars just to do a video interview at a shoe factory.
All the people and all the attention seemed to make him happy. Maybe if she’d been tied up in a basement for seven weeks, she’d crave big crowds and screaming fans, too. Maybe she’d shy away from her mother’s hugs, too.
“I bent the tines of the fork and worked it into the clasp of the handcuffs. I can show you if you’d like.”
This was his exhibition time. The host, like all of them, jumped on the idea, and a crew member produced a cheap set of cuffs that could probably be pulled apart by hand. Still, Scott went through the motions, his grin widening as he successfully popped open the clasp to the delights and cheers of the live audience.
“So, a fork. A fork is what took down the BH Killer,” the interviewer gushed. “What happened next?”
Then, according to Scott’s story, he waited behind the door until BH came in to give him his breakfast. It was then that Scott shoved him to the floor and rushed through the house and out the front door, then ran the five miles home. By the time he’d staggered through their gates, he’d been dehydrated and exhausted.
He was different now than he had been before. She wouldn’t say that to anyone outside their family, but that was the truth of the matter. And who wouldn’t be, after that ordeal? Underneath his new clothes, he would always carry the scars of what had been done to him. Physical abuse. Mental. Sexual.
“It’s just amazing,” the woman beside her said. “Unbelievable.”
Nita studied Scott’s wide grin, the wave he gave the crowd as he stood and exited the stage.
The stranger was right. It was amazing, but also . . . unbelievable. Scott was lying about something, and she still couldn’t put her finger on what it was. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe Scott was saying whatever he needed to in order to mentally block out the truth. The pit in her stomach grew sharper, and she pressed a hand to the pain, willing it to fade.
“Mrs. Harden?” Their handler appeared in the doorway of the room. “I can take you to Scott now.”
Nita rose dutifully and waved a goodbye to the woman, moving through the rows of chairs and swallowing the mounting dread that this nightmare wasn’t over yet.