Lies That Bind Us Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Andrew James Hartley

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503949379 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1503949370 (paperback)

  ISBN-13: 9781503953994 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1503953998 (hardcover)

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  First edition

  To my wife and son, in memory of a beach in Crete . . .

  Contents

  PART 1 INTO THE LABYRINTH

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  PART 2 THE CAVE

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  PART 3 TARTARUS

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PART 1

  INTO THE LABYRINTH

  . . . wandering in the labyrinth, and finding no possible means of getting out, they miserably ended their lives there: or were destroyed by the Minotaur which was (as Euripides hath it)

  A mingled form where two strange shapes combined,

  And different natures, bull and man, were joined.

  —Plutarch

  Chapter One

  It’s dark when I open my eyes. Utterly dark. I blink but it makes no difference, and for a moment I wonder if I have gone blind. I move my right hand up to my face and think the darkness thickens slightly, graying again as I take my hand away.

  The back of my head throbs, and I feel for it, finding a lump at the base of my skull that sings out with tenderness when I touch it.

  Where am I?

  How did I get here?

  What happened to me?

  The questions crowd around me in the darkness like things I might reach out and touch. I cannot answer them. My memory is blank, the past a hole or a tunnel, deep and lightless, showing no more than the overturned car I am now in.

  Except that it’s not a car, and as soon as the idea comes, it goes again, and I have no idea where it came from. I’m not in a car. I’m somewhere else entirely.

  A room.

  The word flutters and alights in my head, then takes hold and becomes something firmer. I am not outside. The air feels still and close. I am lying on my back on something soft—but not very—and when I shift it gives a little beneath me. My right hand strays beneath it, finds the plasticky fabric edge and then the hard, gritty surface of stone or concrete. I turn my head, and the darkness softens fractionally: a pale, thin mattress smelling of mildew and age. I sniff cautiously and catch something else, a scent I almost recognize but don’t want to. Part of me noted it as I woke but pushed it away from my brain. It was stronger then. On impulse, I move my right hand back to my face and inhale.

  There it is. Sharp and edged with metal.

  Rust, perhaps.

  Or blood. Lots of it.

  I snatch my hand away and make to sit up, only to be yanked back by something hard around my left wrist. I reach over with my right and feel the cold metal just below the heel of my left hand. I move it cautiously, testingly, bewilderment and curiosity drowning out all other feelings as I struggle to learn where I am and what is going on. I can move my left arm only a few inches before the resistance tightens. I roll onto my side and probe with the fingers of my right hand. The metal around my wrist is rough, its surface pocked and irregular but its core substantial, a good half inch thick. When it moves, it drags another weight, which I can hear: a heavy, purposeful chain. Sightless and fighting back the dull swell of alarm, I follow it with my fingers, a dozen or so coarse links that reach up, then loop through a heavy ring set into the wall beside the bed.

  I don’t know how I got here, but I know now where I am. I hear the flat echo of my breathing in the hard, confined space. I’m in a cell. Not the cell of a police station; the darkness and the manacle tell me that. I’m somewhere far worse. And now the panic spikes, my skin tightens all over my body, and I hear myself start to scream.

  Chapter Two

  One week ago

  “Congratulations, Jan,” said Camille, offering me her slim, dark hand and beaming. “Welcome to the land of the salaried.”

  I shook her hand, feeling the color rise in my face as a smile of joy, triumph, and relief broke out like a hot sun burning through clouds.

  “Thank you,” I said. “You won’t regret it.”

  “I know,” said Camille with an arch grin. “Else you wouldn’t be getting it.”

  I laughed to show I knew she was joking, but it sounded too loud in my ears, so I bit the sound off quickly and reminded myself to let go of her hand. My own had started to sweat.

  “Do you know how you are going to celebrate?” she asked.

  “Actually,” I said, “I do. I’m going on a trip.”

  “Good for you! Anywhere nice?”

  “Greece,” I said. “Well, Crete, actually.”

  “Wow,” said Camille, looking more impressed by this than she had by my interview. “That’s fantastic. Just don’t forget us. Your first executive team–leader meeting is on the twenty-fifth.”

  “Got it,” I said, grinning, and hoping she couldn’t see the tears in my eyes.

  The trip was an extravagance. Even on the roughly $70,000 a year I’d be making before bonuses—a significant step up from the hourly rate at which I’d been working for the last seven years—I would have thought twice about it if it hadn’t been for Melissa and Simon, who had insisted on footing the bill for everything except airfare. They might have covered that too if the promotion hadn’t gone through, but I was looking forward to telling them I wouldn’t need their help on that front.

  Simon and Melissa were loaded. I wasn’t absolutely sure what he did—finance of some sort, the kind that got him apartments in London and New York—and she was an interior designer. I imagined she was good at it but figured she also moved in the right circles, where being glamorous and put together was worth as much as whatever actual talent she had.

  Maybe that wasn’t fair.


  And I should say I didn’t really know them that well, which made their generosity so remarkable, as if they were driven to share their good fortune. I had met them five years before, when I was still with Marcus and we were vacationing in Crete, and had seen them only twice since, both times when Simon was in Charlotte for work and Melissa was visiting her folks in Raleigh. Their connection to North Carolina had been part of our very first conversation, a welcome coincidence that bonded us over some terrible retsina and initiated the friendship that followed. I confess—and I know how dumb this sounds—that I had rarely been happier to be a Carolinian. The present trip was to be a sort of reunion, three couples getting together again to relive a glorious, boozy week from the finale of our twenties.

  The other couple, Brad and Kristen, lived in Atlanta, though she was a Brit by birth and currently had a recurring role on a sci-fi show that was shot there. Brad was originally from some no-name town in Missouri. He was in real estate of some sort, but I didn’t recall the details. Like Simon and Melissa, they had a shine about them, a glamour that made you want to be in their orbit, like a minor satellite, and I felt giddy at the prospect of being included in their presence again. It felt—to extend that orbit metaphor—like the Greek sun itself, warm and benevolent and invigorating. I just couldn’t wait.

  The timing was precise, if silly. The last night of this trip would mark the 1,999th day since we met. The idea had come to us near the end of that first week. We’d been mellowed by sun and drinking and by that special camaraderie that comes from feeling unbelievably lucky to have blundered into each other. Prince had been playing on the radio, and Kristen was talking about a friend of hers who had just had a baby and was obsessed with what she called “the first two thousand days,” which was supposed to be crucially formative in a child’s life. Somehow Melissa, who had never been much interested in children, latched onto the number and suddenly lit up.

  “That’s what we should do!” she said, the light of joyous revelation in her eyes. “To celebrate our friendship. New friendships are born, right? They have to be tended, nurtured.”

  “How much have you had?” asked Brad, checking her glass playfully.

  “I’m serious!” she exclaimed. “We make a pact right now that wherever we are, whatever we are doing, we get together again, here, in two thousand days, just to do this all again.”

  “You’re crazy,” said Brad. “I like it.”

  “Wait!” said Simon. “Hear that?” He cocked his head toward the sound of the radio. “We’re not babies. But I think we might party like it’s 1999!”

  Melissa’s eyes and mouth widened with delight. “I knew there was a reason I loved you,” she said, leaning over and kissing him loudly.

  “Won’t that be, like, October or November?” said Marcus, counting the months on his fingers.

  “Fall break,” said Simon, as if we were all still in college. “Perfect.”

  “Fall break!” sang Melissa. “We in?”

  “I’m in,” said Simon.

  “Hell yeah,” said Brad.

  “1999,” Kristen agreed.

  Then Marcus. Then me. It was infectious—ridiculous, perhaps, but infectious just the same, because in that moment we were just so happy that anything, however random or goofy, that seemed like it would make it all happen again had to be grabbed with both hands.

  “To us,” said Melissa, raising her glass, “and to one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine days till one hell of a party!”

  I could see it all, feel the last warmth of the afternoon sun on my skin, the still greater warmth of being with them, of being one of them. The memory still made me smile.

  It was going to be so very good to see them all again. That week when we had stumbled onto each other, clueless foreigners all, pointing our way through whatever the hotel bar had to offer because none of us spoke the language, had been, now that I thought about it, one of the highlights of my life. Perhaps the highlight. Till then, at least. Now I had other great things to look forward to, the vacation included.

  Over dinner that night—takeout from Barrington’s, which was fabulously expensive and deserved better than the mismatched china I served it on—Chad had taken a break from his pan-seared grouper to ask if I minded going alone and if I felt awkward about seeing Marcus again. I actually laughed.

  “I honestly hadn’t thought about it,” I said, taking a sip of wine. “I mean, you know I still see him from time to time. We’re still friends. But I don’t miss him. Not in that way.”

  “Sounds very healthy,” he said, returning to his fish. “Good.”

  “Chad Hoskins,” I said teasingly, “are you jealous?” Then I kissed him so invitingly that he spilled his wine. “Goose,” I said, laughing. “Now you’re all wet. Whatever shall we do?”

  I didn’t fly much. The new job might change that, I supposed, and I rather liked the idea of jetting around with the sober business-suited bound for Tulsa, Newark, or Chicago on a Monday morning, gabbling instructions to my assistant in a no-nonsense way over my cell phone, asking for receipts with my steak dinner since I was “expensing” everything. Maybe that got dull eventually, but for now flying was still a little exotic, however much the airlines packed us in and gouged us for every inch of legroom and every bag of stale pretzels. The Aegean plane was nicer than the American Airlines one I’d crossed the Atlantic in: clean and sleek and new, with room to stretch out and everyone looking fresh faced and excited for the hop across the sparkling water.

  I remembered the last time I had been to Greece, marveling at the blueness of the water that I had seen in books and brochures but assumed was a trick of filters or Photoshop, and my heart gave a little flutter of anticipation. I thought of Melissa and the others, and I realized I didn’t know when everyone else would be arriving. I half thought Marcus might have been on the Charlotte plane and was a little disappointed when he wasn’t. Just for company, of course. I had kept an eye open in the gate area at Douglas and made a couple of strolls down each aisle of the plane after they’d served dinner and dimmed the cabin lights, but there was no sign of him. One of the haughty, brittle flight attendants had pointedly asked me if everything was OK, like I might be planning some elaborate terrorist heist on my way to the bathroom, so I told her I’d lost an earring.

  She hadn’t believed me.

  “I’ll keep an eye out,” she’d said brightly, daring me to push the issue further. She said out like there was a W in it. Canada, perhaps, or Wisconsin. I went back to my seat and stared fixedly at the little electronic map on the seatback screen, the tiny plane inching its way across the ocean and down. I think I may have slept for an hour or two at the most.

  It was a long flight to Crete, with layovers in Rome and Athens. I saw the Colosseum from the air, which was exciting, and I had a plate of pasta at the airport in Rome, which wasn’t. The connecting flight to Greece was delayed, and I had to run through the airport in Athens, dragging my carry-on like a wild-eyed bag lady, to make the Aegean Airlines flight to Heraklion. But the Crete flight was over almost as soon as we were in the air, and I found that the exhilaration at the prospect of seeing the others and rekindling our friendship from five years ago was turning into something hot and oppressive.

  Calm down, I told myself. You’re as good as any of them. Executive team leader . . .

  I grinned privately to myself, but only for a second, and partly at the absurdity of my own pretense. Because no—my little promotion would hardly impress my ridiculously successful and beautiful friends, however much I told myself that I was somehow keeping pace with the jet set. But then that’s how you get by sometimes, isn’t it? By deploying those little half-truths that keep the world rosy enough to live in.

  I came through baggage claim and out into the body of Heraklion Airport with a low-grade anxiety that everyone would have gone, that I’d be forgotten and would have no way to reach the house except on my own dime, which would probably cost more than I could afford. Then what? I
ask Simon for reimbursement, show him my cab receipt, like I was filling out expense forms for work?

  God, I thought. That would be humiliating.

  And finding the place would be no picnic. Melissa had refused to tell me anything about where we were staying except to say that it wasn’t a hotel. I had an address but had not bothered to look at a map to gauge how long a journey it would be. Having already traveled for a dozen hours on practically no sleep, I hoped it wasn’t far, but Melissa’s dangled promise of an “exclusive luxury villa away from the resort set” didn’t bode well. My nervous exhaustion spiked again, and I felt my pulse quicken.

  Get it together, Jan, I told myself before taking three long, steadying breaths—one of Chad’s tricks designed to soothe my ragged nerves.

  Thinking of Chad calmed me as much as the breathing exercise. This would all have been easier if he were with me. I had told him so, and he had smiled that gentle, thoughtful smile of his and said, “You can tell me all about it when you get back. Take lots of pictures.”

  I would. I did the breathing thing again and felt better.

  The arrivals area—lounge, which I thought implied chairs, was the wrong word—was a wall of watchful faces: men in close-fitting dark suits and no ties held signs—some were dry-erase boards, some computer printed, most just blocked out in Sharpie—all blaring names of passengers. I scanned them hurriedly: Blunt, Kastides, Ferguson, Alexandros, Merrimack, and more.

  No Fletcher.

  I stopped in my tracks, craning to see some of the signs casually held up from the back row, and a woman with a pair of pink roll-on cases jostled me out of the way, shooting me an irritated look.

  “Sorry,” I said, but she was already walking away, welcomed by a lean, angular man in his fifties, who gave her a perfunctory nod and took one of the cases. As they moved away a space opened in the throng, and there, like Apollo himself, was Simon, handsome and tanned, flashing me that toothpaste-commercial smile of his, blue eyes glinting.