The bedroom I lived in for the first eighteen years of my life looks nothing like it did when I was younger. Before leaving for Los Angeles, I cleared out the entire room. Took everything off the walls and boxed it all up, emptied the closet and dresser, tossed all the old notebooks and school assignments in my desk.
Mom replaced the furniture at some point—the twin bed is now a queen, and the dresser and desk are new—and so the room is completely different than when it was mine. It’s a relief.
I pull my laptop out of my bag and plop down on the bed, which is hard as a rock. Mom thinks that soft beds are bad for your back, and she won’t be convinced otherwise.
I have a few emails, a couple book-related, one hate-mail-related (“Who did you sleep with to get the charges dropped, you evil bitch?”), and one from my agent, Aubrey. Aubrey Vargas is a perpetually upbeat woman, and she has sent me an email with a lot of exclamation points about how she’s not at all worried about the podcast. “Your real name will be kept under wraps here as usual! I hope you have a great time in Texas!”
Sure, Aubrey. The best time.
I also have a mountain of social media notifications, and I scroll through them quickly. I only have active social media accounts under the Eva Knightley name. I had Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter accounts once upon a time, but I shut them down a long time ago. It felt too risky. I’d just barely skirted beneath the radar of social media for years before this podcast. I never wanted to tempt fate.
Eva Knightley is just a bubbly romance author with lots of (strictly online) friends. No one thinks she’s murdered anyone, with the exception of
the occasional fictional character.
I scroll through the comments on my Facebook reader group page, where a few people are discussing Clayton, the evil ex-boyfriend in my last book.
“Am I the only one who thought that Clayton was going to mysteriously die at the end?” Amber Hutton wrote.
“Yes!” Erica Burton replied. “When Poppy says ‘literally no one would miss you if you disappeared tomorrow, Clayton,’ I was like, she is going to murder that dude! And I’m not going to be sad about it!”
“LOL,” Amber replied, “100%. For a minute I wondered if I’d picked up a really weird romance novel, because the heroine doesn’t usually kill people.”
“Eva, maybe you should be writing serial killer books too!”
I snort as I type out a reply. “Not a bad idea. Watch out, world—I’m entering my murder era!”
The comment immediately starts to get likes and laughs. I have to wonder if they’d think it was funny if they knew who I really was.
“Lucy, dinner!” my mom calls from downstairs, and suddenly I’m sixteen again. I wish I’d gotten the stupid hotel room.
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Dad made dinner. Both my parents cook, but Dad does it most of the time. He’s better at it, and he enjoys banging the pots on the stove really loudly when he’s annoyed.
There’s been a lot of banging tonight.
I offered to pick up Grandma so she could join us, but she claimed exhaustion and told me to come over in the morning. “Exhausted means drunk,” Mom helpfully explained when I got off the phone.
Now, I sit at the table across from my parents. They’re both on the other side, united against me. Or maybe they always sit there. It’s weird, but perhaps they don’t want to look at each other.
I take a bite of roast chicken. Dad’s disappointment doesn’t transfer to his cooking. People like to claim that food tastes better when it’s made with
love—like how their grandmother’s pie didn’t taste right when they made it, so it must have been the love that made it good.
This is bullshit, in my opinion. It was probably just extra butter or better-quality sugar that made it good.
Dad’s cooking is proof of this. It is not made with love; it’s made with resentment and disappointment. And it still tastes fucking great.
“How is work, Lucy?” Mom’s using her long, peach fingernails to slowly peel the skin off her chicken breast. She banishes it to the edge of her plate, which seems a shame to me.
I look at my food instead of at her. “Fine. Same as usual.” My parents don’t need to know I was fired. Their opinion of me is low enough already.
“That’s good. You’re still working for that educational publisher, aren’t you? Doing copyediting and such?”
“Yep.” I did have that job for a few months, two years ago. Close enough.
“You always noticed misspellings and grammar mistakes. Don, you remember, don’t you? She used to mark up the church program and give it to the pastor.”
“I remember,” Dad says. “I think that Jan has held a grudge about that forever.”
“Jan should have done a better job typing up the programs,” I say.
Mom laughs, because it’s true. Those programs were an embarrassment. For years I amused myself during sermons by counting all the mistakes, but by about age fifteen I couldn’t take it anymore and I’d hand over my corrections to the pastor after the service. I must have looked like a little asshole to Jan, the receptionist whose job it was to type them up every week.
They replaced Jan after I pointed out that she’d used pubic instead of public in the newsletter. My youth group lost it. Plumpton Baptist Church Pubic Events was the funniest shit we’d ever seen.
Jan was given another job in the church, but she definitely always hated me after that. It’s not my fault that Jan couldn’t be bothered to proofread her work.
I wonder whether anyone (besides my parents) remembers that now. Aggressively copyediting church documents seems rather tame, considering the events of the next few years.
Listen for the Lie Podcast with Ben Owens
EPISODE 2—“SHE WOULD NOT HESITATE TO CUT A BITCH”
There’s a wealth of information out there about Savannah. Most of her friends and family have been forthcoming with stories about her life. But Lucy? She’s more of a mystery. A lot of people I spoke with said they wanted the focus to remain on Savannah, not on Lucy. Savannah was the one who was murdered, after all.
However, you can’t talk about Savannah without also talking about Lucy. So, I pressed people for details about her, and what they remembered about her from before the murder. Here’s Ross Ayers, who grew up in Plumpton and went to school with Lucy.
Ross: I mean, Lucy was … she was okay when we were little. Like, she was sort of nice, I guess. But later she … I don’t know. She …
Ben: She what?
Ross: Do I have to be politically correct about murderers now too? Jesus Christ. She was a bitch, okay? She was a huge fucking bitch.
