"Dead Head" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harris Rosemary)

Prologue

So many lies. The day you start telling them, you expect a hand on your shoulder at any moment. Every time you open your mouth and the fake history comes out-the fake family, the fake anecdotes. If not the hand, then the stony gaze, as if to say “I know that’s not true” or “like hell you are.” The challenge is anticipated. It may be delivered casually with a slightly puzzled look and a muttered “really?” Or more forcefully by a relentless questioner pressing you for names and dates, distances between the cities where you say you’ve lived, and the names of the schools you say you’ve attended, because miraculously the speaker has a relative in each of them.

When the challenge doesn’t come-or the hand or the handcuffs that would eventually follow-there’s a whoosh, like a plane slipping through a layer of clouds or a diver breaking the surface, coming up for air. You’re free. And after years of that happening and feeling free, maybe you are. When every trace of who you were has disappeared or been buried and all that’s left is the new person.

Everyone remembers the crooked financier who turned himself in to the authorities-the one who stole billions with a decades-old Ponzi scheme. Springfield was abuzz with gossip. The names of those who’d been hit and were quietly deaccessioning boats and pied-à-terres were spoken in hushed tones as if the victims should somehow be ashamed for having been bilked out of their fortunes. People were astonished at the greed and the lavish lifestyle the man’s crimes had supported. At how otherwise smart people had handed over millions of their hard-earned dollars apparently without checking the man out.

I marveled at how the man had kept the lies straight for so many years-the nonexistent meetings and transactions, the phantom companies, the fictional world he’d created a thousand times more complex and intricate than the one I’d devised-and how it had all come crash ing down around his ears and whether the same thing might happen to me.

But then, I had no intention of confessing.