Chapter 5: A Name Said Once

The Ram turned away from the clock and laid his hand flat on the table, fingers spread. He left it there until nobody in the room was looking anywhere else.

“Again,” he said. “Among the nine of you there is one Liar. One. The Liar’s story is false — he’ll tell it, he can’t help telling it, and nothing he does makes it come out any truer. The other eight tell what happened to them last, before they woke up in this room. The telling doesn’t help you and it doesn’t hurt you. When the nine stories are done, you write a name. I count the names. That’s all I do.”

The mask turned toward the girl on Wes’s left. She was close enough that Wes could see the seam where the jaw of it met the rest, and the black webbing of the strap running back behind the Ram’s ear, pulled tight.

“You,” the Ram said. “Then around, clockwise. One each.”

Wes counted. He counted the way he counted money, without moving his lips. The girl on his left, then the ink on the forearm, then the woman with her hair pinned up, the gray suit, the old man against the wall, the black tee, the white coat, the big man. Then the table’s edge, and his own two hands on it.

Ninth. Last.

He turned the card under his palm a quarter turn and set it down. Last meant the room would be tired by the time he opened his mouth, and tired was good. It also meant he’d be the voice still in their ears when the pens came out. Under pressure, people tended to keep the first voice and the last one and let the middle go soft. Wes had watched it happen more than once.

He could hear the objection sitting behind his teeth. Ask to go somewhere in the middle. Say the order isn’t fair, that last gives a liar ten minutes with everybody’s story. Ask, and watch eight strangers look at one man and wonder why he wanted a particular seat.

“All right,” the girl said. “Fine. I’ll go.”

She pulled a strand of hair back behind her ear with two fingers and left her hand there, at her ear, like she was holding something in place.

“My name’s Bonnie.” She said it to the table, not to anybody. “And I do technical work. That’s what goes on the form. Technical. I’ve got a skill. People pay for the skill, and I’m not going to sit here and be sorry about it.”

Nobody said anything. The black tee had stopped bending the corner of his card.

“I’ve got stories that don’t belong at a table like this,” Bonnie said. “Ask me to act one out, that’s fine, that’s the job. Ask me to describe it and I don’t have the words. Nobody with a diploma does what I do. If I had the words I’d have a different job.”

She took a breath, and it came back ragged.

“So I’m at work. This client, I don’t know what was wrong with him. The house has rooms. Clean rooms, a couch, everything you’d want, and he wants the car. Says it’s better in the car. Says it’s a thrill.”

“Get to it,” the tattooed man said.

“I’m getting to it.” Her voice went up, and then she brought it back down herself, both hands up, then flat on the table. “So I go, because he’s paying and I’m working. Nice car, don’t get me wrong. But there’s no room in it. My back’s against the door handle, I’m sweating through my makeup, he’s got the seat back, and I’m thinking, this. This is the thrill. This is what men pay extra for.”

Somebody breathed out through the nose. Not a laugh. Wes couldn’t tell who.

“And his phone’s going the whole time. On the dash. Buzzing, buzzing, over and over, and he won’t pick it up, and I’m not going to be the one who answers it. I wanted to throw it out the window.” She stopped, glanced at the end of the table where the dead man lay, and her eyes lifted off him fast, like a hand off a hot pan. “Anyway. I picked my line of work. I’ll live with it. What I didn’t pick was the earthquake. First couple seconds I thought that was us. The car rocking. I thought, great, this is my life now. Then the mirror came off the windshield and I knew what it was.”

When she said the word, a thing went around the table. The gray suit’s hand lifted off her card. The big man’s head turned a quarter inch and stopped. The white coat looked up at the ceiling, at the seams where the concrete met the concrete, and then back down at his own pen.

Wes kept his eyes on Bonnie and his mouth shut. Asking why that word did what it did to a room of strangers would cost more than the answer was worth, and it would give them one more reason to keep an eye on him.

“Car’s parked in the alley behind the building, so there’s nothing over it but the wall and the billboard on the corner. Big one. Forty feet up, whatever the law says, and I had my head out the window because of the heat, so I’m looking straight up at it.” She held her hand flat above her head, fingers spread. “And it goes. Bang, then a shriek of metal, then the whole panel coming down. I don’t remember the car. I remember the sound, and then I don’t remember anything. I woke up here.”

She put her hands down in her lap.

“That’s it. That’s the whole thing. I’m scared out of my mind, I don’t know where my shoes are, and that’s everything I’ve got.”

The Ram didn’t move. If her story had done anything to him, the mask held it.

“Do we have to keep going?” the tattooed man said.

The white coat looked up. “What does that mean?”

“It means we can vote now. That’s what it means.”

Bonnie turned toward him. “What? What did I say?”

“You gave us a fake name,” the tattooed man said. “Bonnie. Nobody in that work uses her real name. Not one of them. They all pick something. Candy, Brandi, whatever they think a man wants to yell. You gave us the name off the sign and told it to us like it was your name. That’s a lie. First thing out of your mouth.”

The color went up Bonnie’s neck and into her face while he was still talking. “You don’t know anything about me,” she said. “You don’t know one thing.”

“I know a fake name when I hear one.”

“Fine.” She said it too loud, and then said it again, quieter, getting hold of it. “Fine. It’s Darlene. Darlene Pruitt, and I’m from Arizona, and if you want to know whether I’m lying, call me Darlene.” She went around the table with her eyes, one after another, and Wes made himself sit still for it. “Go ahead. Say it. I won’t answer you. I haven’t been Darlene since I was nineteen years old. Nobody at the house even knows a Darlene. You ask for Darlene, they’ll tell you there’s nobody here by that name. I’m not hiding anything, I’m telling you exactly where to check—“

She ran out of air. Her eyes were wet, and she wiped at them with the back of her wrist, angry about it.

Wes watched the way she’d told it and the way she was defending it, and kept his face doing nothing.

The story had come out even. No going back to fix a detail, no smoothing over a rough spot, and the complaints in it were the small exact complaints a person actually has — a door handle in the back, a phone buzzing where you can’t reach it. Which meant either she’d told it before, plenty of times, to herself in the dark, or it was true.

And then there was the way she was behaving now. She’d handed eight strangers the one test that would work on her. She’d given them her legal name and the state she came from and exactly how to prove she’d handed them the other one. Whatever Bonnie was, she hadn’t come in here with a lie built ahead of time, and she hadn’t thought up name-as-lie on her feet. She’d walked into the problem and stood there with her hands out.

Which meant the Liar in this room was not the girl the Ram had pointed at.

Wes pushed the thought out flat and looked at it.

If the rule was the rule — one Liar, exactly one — and Bonnie’s wasn’t it, then the lie would have to come out of one of the other seven, the ones still waiting their turn. And he knew every one of them would tell the truth, because he knew which voice in this room the lie belonged to.

His own.

He sat with that. His palm was damp on the card.

He didn’t know a single person at this table. The dying this time would be somebody else’s.

The other thing he had was this: the rule had never said what part of a story the lie had to be in.

He’d been sitting here building one. A beginning, an end, a hole in the middle where the lie went, a thing that would hold if somebody pushed on it.

He didn’t need a wall. He needed one word with nothing under it.

Corrigan was not that word. Corrigan made people stop. Two r’s in it and a question attached to them — how do you spell that — and behind that question another one, about his father, or where the name came from, or what part of the country it belonged to. Every one of those was a place a man could get caught, and if he got caught on the one thing he’d chosen to lie about, they’d have him.

He wanted a name that got said once and dropped.

Dan Miller, he thought. He tried it and put it down. Everybody had a Miller. A man hears Miller and he thinks of a cousin, a guy he worked with, and then he says it back to you to hear himself say it. Too much there to hold on to.

Mark Ellery.

He tried it with his mouth shut. Mark could be anybody. Ellery had a soft sound in the middle that people swallowed, and a man who swallows the middle of your name thinks he already knows it.

And if somebody got it wrong — Ellory, Ellers, whatever came out of their mouth — he’d let it stand all night. Correct a man on your own name and you’ve told him the name is worth something.

Ohio, he thought, and left it there. He’d used Ohio before, and both times the conversation had gone on to something else.

He said the name once in his head, at the pace he’d use out loud. Easy on the first word. Nothing lifted on the second, no pause where a pause would be a question. Then he put his hand flat on the card, squared it to the table’s edge the way he’d square a stack of cash he wanted counted right, and waited for the room to come around to him.