The King of Lies Read Online Free PDF

half-filled pot of coffee, poured a cup, and added milk. I took my coffee outside, under a diffuse and lowering sky.
    It was early for the office and court didn’t open until nine, so I went for a drive. I told myself it would be aimless, but I knew better. Roads lead somewhere; it’s just a question of choice. This road carried me out of town and across Grant’s Creek. I passed the Johnson place and saw a hand-lettered sign offering free puppies to a good home. My foot came off the gas and I slowed. For an instant, I considered it, but then I pictured Barbara’s reaction and knew that I would never stop. Yet my speed trailed away, and I kept one eye on the rearview mirror until the sign dwindled to a whitish speck and then was gone. Around the bend, the speed limit climbed to fifty-five and I goosed it, rolling down the windows and missing my own dog, now two years in the ground. I tried to put him out of my mind, but it was hard; he’d been a damn good dog. So I concentrated on driving. I followed the yellow line past small brick houses and developments with trendy names like Plantation Ridge and Saint John’s Wood.
    “Country come to town,” my wife would say, forgetting that my father was raised white trash.
    Ten miles out, I came to the faded, shot-up road sign for Stolen Farm Road. I slowed and turned, liking the feel of tires on gravel, the steering wheel that hummed under my hand. The road passed through a wall of trees and entered a place untouched.
    Stolen Farm was old, like the county was old, generations in the same family, with cedars grown tall along fence lines established before the Civil War. The farm had once been huge, but things change. Time had whittled it down to ninety acres, and I knew it teetered at the brink of bankruptcy and had for years. Only Vanessa Stolen remained of the family, and she’d been considered white trash since childhood.
    What right did I have to bring my troubles to this place? I knew the answer, as I always did. None whatsoever. But I was tempted. Dew was on the grass, and she’d be up with coffee on the back porch. There’d be worry on her face as she stared out over fields that could make anyone else feel young again, but she’d be naked under that old cotton shirt she wore. I wanted to go to her, because I knew that she would take me as she always had; knew that she would put my hands on her warm belly, kiss my eyes, and tell me everything would be all right. And I’d want to believe her as I so often had, but this time she’d be wrong, so very fucking wrong.
    I stopped at a bend in the drive and nosed forward until I could see the house. It sagged in on itself, and I ached to see more boards on the windows of the top floor, where in the past I’d stood at night to watch the distant river. A year and half had passed since I’d last been to Stolen Farm, but I remembered her arms and how they wrapped around my naked chest.
    “What are you thinking?” she’d asked, her face above my shoulder, a ghost in the window.
    “About how we met,” I’d told her.
    “Don’t think about such nasty things,” she’d replied. “Come to bed.”
    That was the last time I’d seen her; but a light still burned on the front porch, and I knew that it did so for me.
    I put the car in reverse, yet remained for a moment longer. I’d always felt Vanessa’s connection to the place. She’d never leave, I knew, and would one day be buried in the small cemetery tucked away in her woods. I thought then that it must be nice to know where you will spend eternity, and wondered if such knowledge brought peace. I thought that it might.
    I turned and left, leaving, as I always did, some small piece of me behind.
    Back on black pavement, the world lost its soft edge, and the drive to the office seemed harsh and full of noise. For nine years, I’d worked from a narrow shotgun office on what the locals called “lawyers’ row.” It was around the corner from the courthouse and across the