“I crave truth. And I lie.”
—Detective Rob Ryan,In the Woods(2007)
12
I lifted a brow at Daniel. “I think you meandare? Truth or Dare.”
Back when I was living over the diner with Mom and Mona, when I was going to public school, I used to play Truth or Dare with kids on the playground at recess. It almost always involved someone trying to climb branches of an overgrown tree that bent over the schoolyard fence.
“Nope. Truth or Lie,” he insisted. “This is how we play. We each get three turns. On your turn, you ask me a question. Something that you want to know about me. And I can either answer truthfully... or I can lie. You decide if you believe me, or you can challenge my answer. Like, I might ask you what your favorite song is.”
“Okay.”
“What’s your favorite song?”
“Right now?”
“Right now, Birdie.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Everyone has a favorite song. Mine is ‘Under Pressure’ by Bowie and Freddie Mercury. Or is it? Do you think I’m telling the truth?”
“Yes?”
“You’re right. I am. Point to you. That’s how you play.”
“I don’t get it. How do you win?”
“Knowledge is winning, Birdie,” he said with a grin. “Just ask me a question. It must be something you genuinely want to know. And my answer has to be completely fabricated or all truth. No middle ground, no avoiding answering. After I give you my answer, you decide if I’m lying.”
“Like cross-examination?”
“Just like that. I should have called this game Interrogate Me. That’s more appealing for lady detectives such as yourself.”
“Hold on. Did you make this game up just now?”
“Is that your official question? You only get three. Don’t waste them.”
I laughed. He laughed.
Fine. I guess we were doing this.
I tried to think up a good question, occasionally surveilling the park, until something popped into my mind. “Okay, I thought of one. Ready?”
“Hit me.”
“How did you lose your hearing? That’s my official question.”
“Ah,” he said, leaning back casually. “It’s a funny story, actually. See, my mother, Cherry—that’s her name. She was a magician’s assistant. You know, the pretty thing onstage who gets chopped up in boxes.”
I squinted at him. Was he already lying?
He continued. “She performed every weekend with a semi-famous Seattle magician in the 1990s. They started out in small clubs until they got some notoriety. Then she met my father and got pregnant, and no one wanted to see a pregnant assistant get stabbed by swords in a locked box, so she was forced to stop. And, of course, you already know that my father was a soulless waste of flesh who felt she got in the way of his career, and how could he tell his über-white conservative family that he’d knocked up a young Asian girl? So he dumped her, and she pressed the pause button on magic to have me, and then her stage partner—the magician—died in a freak airplane accident, so she quit it altogether.”
“Interesting,” I said carefully, unsure if he was telling the truth. “But I don’t see how this answers my question.”
He raised his index finger. “Getting to that. My mother may have quit magic, but she kept all their stage props. And when I started showing an interest in performing, my grandfather encouraged me—Jiji. My mom’s father. That’s what I call him. And before you know it, I was trying to impress everyone, and... Do you know about Houdini’s water torture cell?”
