House of a Thousand Lies
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Synopsis
Diana Wolf likes to think she has it all: a rock-god husband, an empty nest, a wine cellar, and a dream home in the woods. Life is good. It has to be. But when she hires a cartographer, Kerry Perkins, to survey and map her estate in rural Tennessee, she pulls back a frayed corner of the lie that is her fairytale life. On his first night at Wolf Hollow, Kerry stumbles across a young girl's skeleton buried in the woods. But what really scares Diana is a familiar symbol carved into the girl’s skull: two wolves. A week later, the cops are digging in her backyard. Diana begins to question how good her life really is. How good of a man is her husband and how good a father? She’s not the only one with questions. Kerry Perkins can’t shake what he saw in the woods that night. He suspects that Diana recognized that symbol, that she lied to the police, that someone is watching him, and that whoever it is, they desperately want him to keep his mouth shut. His search for answers leads him to Pink, a deeply disturbed man obsessed with the Wolfs’ celebrity. Pink knows the family better than they know themselves—and he knows that the more he and Kerry dig, the more bones they will find. Told through the eyes of multiple narrators, none reliable, this is a story about parents, the lies they tell their children, and the lies they tell themselves.
Release date: August 9, 2022
Publisher: Crooked Lane Books
Print pages: 320
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House of a Thousand Lies
Cody Luke Davis
1
Diana
October 8, 2019. 3:12 AM
DIANA WOLF CLICKS “Confirm” on the thirteen-grand purchase saved in her cart.
As her browser goes white loading the next page, it hits her that she has no clue what it is she just bought and no memory of having gone online to shop. Nor of demolishing a fancy cheese platter and two sleeves of water crackers, nor of buying Princess Bride on Apple TV, but the forensics are damning.
Westley’s getting tortured in the Pit of Despair, so she’d guess her last hour is gone. At least.
Shit. Blackout Santa strikes again. It’s been a while.
“How do you feel?” asks the six-fingered man.
Westley whimpers in pain.
“Interesting.”
Diana snorts. Droplets of red wine fleck her iPad. She wipes it on her pants.
She opened only two bottles tonight too … one more reminder she’s turning fifty-four in a month. It may be time to accept her tolerance isn’t what it was and adjust her nightly intake.
Or not.
It’s only a little money. Diana wouldn’t have put it in a shopping cart if Diana didn’t want it. It’s not like she bought a car again … is it? What would thirteen get her, a Kia? No. There’s not enough alcohol in the state of Tennessee to get her that drunk.
She stares at her browser, waiting for it to change, but the next page stays white and blank. Still loading. Stuck.
She swipes over to her inbox, hoping to find a confirmation email.
To her delight, there are two.
The first one is the drapes Thad asked her to buy for his man cave so he won’t see cars pulling into the driveway. Good. Thad would’ve thrown a fit if she forgot his drapes, and it looks like she sprung for two-day shipping. So that’s good.
The second email is … less good.
It’s okay. It’s not a car. It just isn’t something she needed, wanted, or ever thought she might want in the future, which is a bit of a letdown. Blackout Santa usually gives better gifts.
“It’s like you don’t even know me anymore,” she says to her wineglass.
She hired a cartographer?
A quick Google search reveals that cartographers survey parcels of land in order to draw maps of said land. So, it’s a map. She spent a Kia’s worth of dollars on a map of Wolf Hollow, including the thousand acres of poplar woods they own behind the main house. But why? Talk about an impulse purchase. Minus an impulse. Do maps usually cost five figures?
Diana googles it. No. They do not.
The cartographer’s website clears up the price after a little digging: her map is period accurate. He makes it how the Pilgrims did it or some shit—there’s a whole spiel.
She keeps clicking.
Mr. Cartographer’s name is Kerry Perkins. She peruses his blog and is pleased to find photos. He’s a handsome Asian guy, looks like in his late twenties … athletic, tall … often shirtless … and he’s got a jawline that reminds her of Christopher Reeve. Oh. Oh yeah. She suspects these photos played a role in her map purchase. That, plus she loves to throw money at these hipster artisans.
This one takes his Pilgrim shtick seriously. His “About Me” page says he walks every inch of every property he maps.
Walks.
Wolf Hollow is over a thousand acres. How long will he be out there?
And then Diana remembers. “Oh, fuck me.”
She puts her wineglass down to type with both hands, but she misses the coffee table and it shatters on the floor.
Well. Thad will be unhappy if he finds out she broke another one, but she’s got bigger issues than cleanup. It’s late as hell and he played with Otto today, so it’s safe to assume he’s sleeping it off somewhere. Diana golfed with them once. By the thirteenth hole, the two men were so drunk they bet a thousand dollars on whether Thad could hit a squirrel. He could not. Since her husband won’t be back until morning—noon-ish—and America, their maid, will show up for work in just four hours, the broken glass really isn’t Diana’s problem.
Diana’s problem is Kerry Perkins.
She rereads the cartographer’s confirmation email.
There it is. Shit.
The survey portion alone is going to take a week.
Seven days of a stranger walking around in their backyard from sunrise to sunset. As if that won’t piss off Thad enough by itself, it gets worse. In just three days, the day she chose, Kerry plans on driving over from Nashville to Leiper’s Fork to get started on it. He expects to stay with them at Wolf Hollow, eat meals with them, and sleep in the main house.
For a week.
Nope. None of that’s happening.
At best, she might be able to put Kerry in the barn. Thad would sooner burn the house and start over than let an employee sleep in the guest bedroom. “It’s for guests,” she can hear him snarling.
Three days. She’s got seventy-two hours to whip up a good lie. Kerry Perkins doesn’t offer refunds.
She decides to sleep on it.
Three days later, Diana waits for the cartographer in the kitchen with a glass of Malbec.
The glass itself is identical to the one America cleaned up the other day. Not her first replacement. There were eight wine glasses in the custom set when she commissioned it (another artisanal purchase) two years back. Three left intact now. Thad thinks six but, as evidenced by the fact he hasn’t shut down the cartographer thing yet, alcoholics are easy to gaslight.
She told Thad it’s going to take a single day. Next week.
Not her best lie, but the idea of a map grew on her once she sobered up. She doesn’t know any women in town who have one of these. All she has to do is hide a stranger living on the property for six days.
What could go wrong?
She got the drapes installed in the man cave yesterday, so Thad won’t be able to see any lights on in the barn, and she told Kerry Perkins via email he’ll be eating meals alone, which he okayed. On the off-chance Thad discovers Kerry in the barn, her plan B is simple. She’ll throw the cartographer under the bus, act like he’s a stranger, and tell him to get the fuck out—then, once Thad’s back inside, tip the guy very well and move him into the Songwriter’s Cottage.
Deny, deny, deny. That’s her motto.
If Thad finds Kerry in the Songwriter’s Cottage … well, he’s shit out of luck. The chances of her husband entering both buildings in a week are minuscule, but even so, her mind wanders to the pistol Thad wears on his belt. Going from L.A. to Leiper’s Fork was a rough transition, so she can forgive the initial purchase, but ten years later he still wears it. Thad claims it’s for shooting rattlesnakes. It’s an ugly thought, but she wouldn’t be surprised if he bought the gun to shoot people.
Old people do that.
Thad turned seventy-one in January. Seventeen years older than she is. Ever since they moved, the age difference feels more and more like thirty years, or forty. She can’t decide if it’s a psychological thing or if he had a mild stroke on the plane or what, but her husband got old in Tennessee.
Thad Wolf is an old person now. And it shows. Hence, the drapes. Hence, a lot of things: he watches Fox News eight hours a day; he’s made a sport of yelling at the maid; America has become well-acquainted with the word eyesore.
Tires crunch to a stop in the gravel driveway outside.
Diana gets up and opens the front door. She leans on the frame, swirling her wine.
An old black sedan sits behind three other cars in the gravel parking circle: her dark green Jag, Thad’s neglected red Mercedes, and the ancient blue family minivan (eyesore) in front.
Kerry Perkins steps out of the black sedan, closes his door. “Hello there. Are you D?”
He is as advertised: six foot four, flannel shirt, biceps, jawline.
Diana bites her lip. She waves from her perch in the doorway. “You found me. Diana Wolf.” She signs off with just the first letter for correspondence. Minimalist.
“Nice to meet you in person, Mrs. Wolf,” he says as he climbs the three steps up to the porch and reaches out a hand. “I’m Kerry. The cartographer. We emailed. Kerry Perkins.”
Diana looks down at his hand. Shakes it. “I know. Come inside. Welcome to Wolf Hollow.”
“Gorgeous,” he says, following her into the entry hall.
“The house? Or is that just what you say to all the girls?” She glances back over one shoulder and arches her spine, the way that makes her ass look good.
Kerry gulps. “The house,” he clarifies.
Diana smirks. She leads him into the kitchen and pours him a glass of wine. “Sorry for missing your texts. Cell service is spotty down here.”
He eyes his wine with suspicion. “Oh. Thanks. I shouldn’t. Maybe tonight?”
“I insist. One glass. You’ll walk it off.” She thrusts it into his hand, smiles, and sits at the island. “So, how does this work exactly? Now that you’re here.”
“Well, Mrs. Wolf,” he says, taking a stool across from her, “for about a week, given the acreage we discussed, I’ll be surveying your property. Then I’m going to draw you up a map.”
Diana’s blue eyes sparkle. “Oh great!” The conversation is going to be one-sided, she imagines.
She flirts with him for a while.
Kerry can’t keep his eyes off her breasts once he has a glass of Malbec in him, which is flattering. Other women her age might get offended, but not Diana. She loves it. It reminds her she still has it.
That said, she’s a huge tease. She’d never cheat on Thad in a million years. She owes him too much.
How many teenage girls grow up to marry their celebrity crush? Not a lot. But she did. Diana used to sing “A Thousand Lies” walking to school back in Ohio. The trip was six blocks from her last foster home, just long enough to get through the whole song twice if she didn’t rush. Never in her wildest dreams did she imagine that just a couple years later, she’d ride a bus to L.A. to visit her sister, Kristen, and they’d go to a big party, and she’d run into the rich, famous, blue-eyed Texan hunk who wrote that song, and he would swoop into her life to rescue her.
But it happened. He did.
It’s been thirty-two years since then, though.
These days, it’s nice to be reminded now and again that what she sees in the mirror over the sink at night isn’t what men see. All she sees is decay. Wrinkles. Dark blue veins pulsing in her forehead like worms. But this young specimen, Kerry Perkins, God bless him, he just sees a code-red rack on a bombshell blonde whose husband isn’t home, and he’s going to think of her tits tonight while he jerks off in the barn, fifty yards from her bedroom.
Because Diana Wolf still has it.
The knowledge puts her in a good mood. She decides to jump her husband’s bones when he gets home tonight, and makes a mental note to text him so he can take his pill.
Nothing stupid happens with Kerry.
She gets a good laugh out of how nervous the poor kid is when she shows him to his bedroom on the second floor of the barn. But that’s it.
Once he’s all set up, she takes his arm in hers and walks him down a gravel path behind the house so he can get his workday started.
“Trust me, you want to survey the woods first,” she tells him as the path ends at a cobblestone bridge over a deep ravine. Nothing but tall, thin poplar trees on the other side, a thousand acres of it. Her hope is Kerry won’t meet Thad until the seventh day if he saves the main clearing for last.
Diana stops halfway across. “Well, this is it for me.”
She goes up on her tiptoes and pecks Kerry’s cheek goodbye, then shoos him off.
The big lunk gets fifty feet or so before he turns back and waves her down. “I forgot to ask, is there anything I should know about in there?” he shouts from just inside the tree line, where a shadow falls so dark she can’t make out his eyes. “You know, like a landmark or two you want me to mark on the map?”
Diana shrugs. “I don’t—”
Know.
That’s what she means to say. But she stops.
It’s true. She doesn’t know any landmarks. How could she? She never sets foot in the woods out back.
Now that she thinks about it, it seems strange. She never makes it past this exact spot on the cobblestone bridge. Halfway. Every time she walks the gravel path in the yard to its end, this is where she gets chills, stops, and hurries back to the main house.
The poplar woods scare her.
Why?
She stiffens at the appearance of a little voice in her head, not her own. It’s been silent for years. Therapy was supposed to help. It did. For a while. Now it’s back.
But her answer to its question is what gives her pause. She has no idea why.
The poplar woods were a big selling point when they bought Wolf Hollow. She was the one who begged Thad to let her build a path out back, and then a bridge to reach the tree line, because she thought she’d take walks to watch the leaves change. She picked out these cobblestones. They’re from Spain.
“I … my two sons built a treehouse when we first moved,” she says. “But it’s probably just sticks now. It was eight or nine years ago, the last time I saw them go out to it.”
Maybe a decade, since Jonah and Cy look like teens in her memory—as they crossed the bridge into the woods that last time, both of her sons were smiling. Joking like they did back then, when the two boys still looked alike, before Cy got so muscular and Jonah so thin and gaunt. Almost twins. Platinum-blond hair like their mother, tall like their father, as good-looking as you’d expect.
Best friends. Happy.
Or she used to think they were.
“Don’t go looking for it,” she trails off, eyes stuck on a quivering dead leaf wedged between two cobblestones.
“What was that?” he shouts.
“Nothing!” she shouts back, wondering the same thing. “I’m sorry. You go on.”
The little voice is gone, but a stung feeling lingers. It’s like waking up in bed after a spider bite. She knows a tiny pain woke her up, but not what it was or where the wound is. Not yet. You never do until it starts to itch, so you just close your eyes and go back to sleep.
She glances up, smiles.
Kerry nods, waves.
Diana watches the cartographer disappear in the trees.
She walks back up the hill to the main house and sees it. Oh.Oh no.
Not even a day in, and there’s already a gaping hole in her plan. It’s going to be hard for Thad to miss the black sedan parked in the driveway.
2
Kerry
October 11, 2019. 3:21 PM
HAVING FAILED TO “walk off” four generous pours of Malbec, Kerry Perkins stumbles out of the poplar trees into a huge, sun-drenched clearing. He felt sick, and the grass looked inviting.
Huh. The clearing isn’t empty.
He shades his eyes, hoping to get a better sense of what he’s looking at. He’s not tripping; it’s a house.
Kerry rifles through his fanny pack and pulls out what he’s looking for: a handheld GPS, his dirty little secret. All those old brass sextants and quill pens he brought? Stage props. Truth is, only a moron would use paper and ink to survey an estate like this: a thousand acres, ninety percent of it dense forest. Forget a week. It’d take a year.
Work smart, not hard. That’s his motto.
Less than two miles as the crow flies from the main house. Still in Wolf Hollow. This must be that “treehouse” her kids built, then.
In her emails, Diana specifically said there are only three structures on the estate: a main house, a barn, and a cottage. He saw those. This makes four. She must have never seen it. There’s no tree. It’s got an L-shaped foundation, painted white walls, a black tile roof, glass windows … and most of them aren’t even broken.
It is a house.
This right here is some serious rich kid shit. It’d cost a fortune just to haul materials out here. Then again, these are celebrity scions he’s talking about—who knows how much unearned capital they had access to?
Kerry googled Diana Wolf the second he got her full name, same as he googles all his new clients. When he started the artisanal maps racket in Nashville, he used to think he’d get hired by a lot of country singers. Nope. Not one in three years. His real clientele is mostly stay-at-home wives who found him on Pinterest, and their husbands all work in biotech or finance or semiconductors … nothing cool. He was starting to think the singers weren’t real. So, imagine his surprise when Google revealed who the mysterious “D” is.
Holy shit.
This estate belongs to the Thad Wolf. That was his house. She’s his wife.
Thad Wolf’s wife hit on him!
Dad would be proud. A con man doesn’t get to think that often.
Back in the seventies, Perkins was a fresh-off-the-boat Chinese immigrant in Austin, Texas, with nothing but a made-up name, a dishwashing job, an apartment with thin walls, a racist neighbor, and an understandable eagerness to broadcast his deep patriotic love of all things American and capitalist. Anyone can do that math—of course he listened to The Pack. What’s more American than crossover country music?
Sixteen years later, his new wife died giving birth to a baby boy. Art, ever the patriot, named his son after a senator.
Kerry remembers riding in cars a lot as a kid, always traveling to new cities so Art could interview for a new job or meet some new woman he’d been pen-palling with (neither ever worked out). In the Perkins family, it was a rule: driver picks the tunes—meaning Art, and he picked The Pack. Kerry knew the lyrics to “A Thousand Lies” before he could speak. It was Dad’s favorite song. When Kerry was nine, they played it at his funeral.
Today, Art can brag in heaven about how his only son is working for the man who wrote and sang that song. Kinda cool.
And … yup. The fucking chorus is stuck in his head now. But he’s alone in the woods, and it just so happens that’s the best place you can be when you’ve got a song stuck in your head. Out here, he can belt it out if he wants to, and nobody’ll hear a damn thing.
Moments like this make him wish he’d studied to be a real cartographer. Three years into it, selling maps is the only scam he ever ran that makes him happy. Lots of exercise, sun, nature, and the cherry on top is his marks never even realize they got screwed. The end product they receive—he gets his maps made in China for three hundred bucks and change—is indistinguishable from what he promised, so his reviews are stellar. No one gets hurt, for once. No one comes after him. It’s nice.
Hands in his pockets and a smile on his face, he doesn’t feel so sick all of a sudden.
Kerry sings as he walks into the clearing, flat as hell.
I can cast aside a thousand lies
I can close my eyes to keep you close to me
I can let you in, forget your sins
All you need to promise is you’ll never leave …
When he gets to the treehouse-cum-starter-home, he tries the front door. Locked. Door is solid teak, so he meanders over to the east-facing side and peers in through a broken window.
The interior is dirty. Dark.
But the dirt and mess all looks recent, like a bad storm came through a few weeks, not years, ago. Leaves on the floor, dust on the moldings, spiderwebs—but that’s it. No real damage. It’s nicer than his house in Nashville, that’s for sure. Christ. They got an onyx countertop installed in the kitchenette: a single massive slab of polished black stone with big splashes of white.
Little fuckers. That alone must’ve cost twenty grand.
Kerry decides to explore a little.
He wraps up a fist in his flannel’s sleeve, clears a few glass shards from the frame, and vaults in.
Inside, the sounds of the forest die.
He meanders into the kitchenette, intending to check if the onyx slab is real, and if so, if it’s light enough to carry out.
But then something else catches his eye. Around the corner of the ell, where he couldn’t see before, a clear plastic tarp covers most of the floor. Four open cans of slick black paint hold it down, one in each corner, and there’s an easel in the center with a six-by-six-foot stretched canvas propped up on it. A painting.
Near-finished, all in black and white oils. Grayscale, he half remembers from an art class he flunked in high school. Whoever painted it was no amateur—it looks realistic. And wet.
Kerry shivers, suddenly aware of how much colder it is in here than outside. Like an air conditioner is on.
He rounds the corner and stares at the painting.
It’s of two devils. He’s not sure what else to call the two life-sized figures writhing on the canvas. Both have big, curved goat horns growing out of their shoulders. One is male, bigger, and the smaller one is female, which he can tell because the two devils’ anatomy is human where it counts, and boy are they fucking. It doesn’t look fun. Not for the female. He walks up to it for a closer look. Where the male’s claws dig into her breasts, little black trails leak out and run. Blood.
Kerry backs away.
The big male’s eyes follow his. It’s a cheap illusion created by the paint’s texture, but the eyes look alive: vertical white slits, hungry and smiling.
Kerry’s heel catches on the edge of a pile rug against the wall. The corner flips back, just for a second. A black flash. “What the fuck?” he whispers, glancing down at the rug.
He kicks it again. It slides an inch.
He isn’t crazy. There’s a metal hatch in the floor. He can see a corner of it.
He gets on his knees and rolls up the rug, and there it is—a hatch. Black iron, just big enough for a man to fit. The kind you’d expect to open and find a ladder inside, like the ones they put on top of submarines. But where does it go? A basement? He tries the rusted handle. Pulls once. Twice. It won’t budge. Not locked, he realizes. Sealed. Fused shut at the edges, like someone took a blowtorch to it.
Kerry hears a sound like loose clothes behind him.
The hairs on his neck stand up, and he glances over his shoulder. But there’s no one. It was just a cross-breeze blowing dead leaves in from the far window.
For the first time, he notices a leather notebook lying on the tarp. Pocket-sized.
He crawls over to it.
He picks it up, flips the notebook open. Tiny black droplets dot the lined white pages here and there. Other than that, it looks empty. But a page is marked. He flips ahead to it. A single note is scratched into the margin in pencil: 39.3851 N, 119.7064 W.
Kerry knows coordinates when he sees them. On a whim, he takes out his iPhone and snaps a photo of the marked page. Then he closes the notebook and puts it back where he found it.
A twig snaps somewhere in the woods. Close by.
Kerry crab-crawls to a wall and flattens his back to it. Holds his breath.
But there’s nothing. No one.
When he realizes it was just the wind again, or a rat or a bird, his face gets hot. This is stupid. He is thirty-one years old, and there’s no good reason for him to be this scared. But still … he should leave. If only to get on with the survey.
From the ground, he looks up at the unfinished painting.
The big male looks back.
Kerry scrambles to his feet, finds the broken window he used to get inside, vaults out into the clearing, and makes his way back to the tree line. He jogs this time. He doesn’t sing.
Hours pass.
The sun goes down.
Right as it’s getting truly dark and he’s fighting through a patch of brambles and choke vines in the thickest woods yet, right when he’s nearly forgotten all about the two Wolf brothers, the air-conditioned house no one knows about in the clearing, the two devils, the iron hatch, and the coordinates jotted in the paint-smeared notebook—or, at least, right when he’s finally convinced himself he only got so freaked out because he watched the first Blair Witch movie alone last week, and it’s not worth worrying about, and obviously there’s no mad painter running around out here with a blowtorch, he just scared himself stupid in the woods like a jackass, Kerry Perkins kicks something lying half buried in the dirt. Hard.
He trips and staggers forward, cursing.
The something rolls a few yards, lopsided.
Kerry toggles his phone’s flashlight on and aims the beam down past his feet at it. “Whoa. Whoa.”
An earthworm wriggles and falls out of an eye socket. Lands in the black dirt.
No more jogging: he runs.
Kerry bursts out of the trees and sprints over the cobblestone bridge, then up the gravel path into the main clearing, past the firepit, the parking circle, and all the way to the barn. He takes the stairs three at a time up to his room, where he grabs his MacBook Pro and a day bag packed full of clothes—only what he can carry—then he’s down the stairs and in the parking circle again, power-walking past a big red pickup truck that wasn’t there earlier. He pops his trunk with the key remote and dumps his stuff. Slams it shut.
Then he takes a much-needed breath.
Kerry slips his iPhone out of his pocket to check if he has a signal yet. Twenty minutes, he’s been trying to get through to the cops. Anyone.
But no. Still nothing.
“Jesus fuck.” He rubs his temples as he trots to the driver’s side of his car.
Ch-Chck!
Right next to his ear. It’s a metal sound you only hear in movies: the slide cocking back on an automatic pistol. He stops in his tracks. Drops his car keys to the gravel. Raises both empty hands, slowly, to the back of his head.
“Where’d you get those keys, boy?” says a drawling voice, so close he can smell whiskey on it. “This car belongs to America.”
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