A Field Guide to Deception Read Online Free Page A

the deck, and woke in the dark, trembling with cold.
    Two days later, Liv’s hands were bleeding. She’d finished the run along the driveway, and now had only the front of the property left to fence. At the riverbank, she lay on the grass, held her hands in the water, and squinted as cigarette smoke burned her eyes. Suddenly he was on her back, heavy and painful, with his knee in her spine. She rolled over and clutched him to her, her cigarette flung away. “Simon. Simon.”
    Claire had grilled asparagus and fish with lemon and butter and roasted garlic. She hadn’t noticed Liv’s hands until they were washing up, Simon asleep under the table.
    In the following flurry, Liv found herself seated at the kitchen table, her hands deep in a basin of warm water and Epsom salt. Claire’s lecture was magnificent. It had a thesis and sub-points and a magnanimous conclusion: “We’re taking the weekend off. You and I have been working like slaves, and it’s over. We’ll hike and eat and play with Simon. No research or tools or mending of anything. Promise me.”
    â€œI promise.”
    â€œYou’re not allowed to injure yourself again. Promise.”
    Laughing now, this woman so beautifully earnest, Liv said, “Yes. I promise.” She couldn’t stop grinning—high—poisoned maybe, by lingering fumes from the stain, or some toxin in the fish, or the river water.

    Claire lugged the child from beneath the table, carried him away to
bed, and then returned to pour each of them another glass of wine.
    â€œTell me about your trip,” Liv said.
    Claire had thrown rocks into the river with Simon, and walked along the trails, watching butterflies. They’d collected sticks and roasted marshmallows, and she had avoided mushrooms by focusing her considerable attention on the child. At night, she’d told him stories about the stars. When he fell asleep, she wished for Liv. Pressing her jacket tightly around her, she’d wished she weren’t alone.
    I missed you, she wanted to say to this woman soaking her hands in Epsom salt. I missed you, and I don’t know what to do with that. “I haven’t taken a research trip without my aunt, ever.”
    A fly had gotten into the kitchen; she could hear it buzzing against the screen door. After she let it out, she said, “Fourteen years.” She might have been talking to the fly, or the door. She sat and added, “practically my entire adult life. I worked with her, and lived here in this house, and obsessed about mushrooms for fourteen years. She’s dead and the work is five chapters from over, but I’m still here.” Water sloshed in the basin as Liv shifted; they watched until the water stilled. “The normal, daily parts are hardest: meals, and grocery shopping, and reading to Simon. All the things that haven’t changed.”
    Twenty when she agreed to work as her aunt’s assistant, Claire hadn’t expected to keep the job long, had accepted her aunt’s proposal only because she thought no one would ever search for her in Spokane. Spokane: where the world ended.
    â€œLook at this place,” Claire said, and swept her arm back to take the entire L of the house in. “I missed it. I missed this sad refrigerator—that shade is called pimento, if you can believe it—and the wood paneling in the basement, and that shitty linoleum in the bathroom.” She shook her head. “I was only gone for three days.”
    â€œJust imagine how much you’ll miss it when we gut the place,” Liv said. “Maybe we should leave one room completely intact as a shrine to seventies décor.”
    Claire laughed, put her feet in Liv’s lap, and leaned her chair back. When Liv didn’t object, Claire laughed again. Enough of shrines, she thought.

Five
    An intrusion in the dark
    Claire woke, alert and listening, just as she had during Simon’s