Never Lie
Freida McFadden
Everybody lies.
Years ago, a psychological experiment was devised to estimate the prevalence of untruthful behavior. It involved a broken vending machine.
Subjects were informed that the vending machine was malfunctioning. If they put in a dollar, the faulty machine would dispense candy, but then return their dollar. Subjects who used the vending machine found this to be absolutely true. They dispensed one, two, three, or even four pieces of free candy, and then retrieved their money from the machine.
There was a sign on the vending machine. The sign read: “To report any malfunctions with this machine, please call this number.” Unbeknownst to the subjects, the number provided belonged to one researcher in the study.
Take a guess how many of the subjects called this number to report the broken machine.
Zero.
That’s right. Not even one of the dozens of subjects was honest enough to call the number and report the broken vending machine. Each one of them took their free candy and moved on.
As I said, everybody lies.
There are many easily identified signs that a person is lying, especially if they are an unskilled liar. As a trained psychiatrist, I am intimately familiar with these signs. It’s almost too easy to spot them:
Liars fidget.
The tone of their voice or speech patterns changes.
Liars offer too much information, babbling on with excessive detail to convince themselves or others of what they are saying.
Machines have been built to recognize these patterns and identify them. However, even the best lie detector has a twenty-five percent rate of error. I am far more accurate than that.
If you listen to the audiotapes of my patient encounters, you can’t always tell. On tape, you miss the important visual cues. Avoiding eye contact, for example, or covering their mouth or eyes. But if you are my patient, and you are sitting in my office talking to me, I can watch your face and your gestures and listen to the pitch of your voice.
I will know the truth. I always know.
Never lie to me.
Chapter 1
TRICIA
Present Day
We’re hopelessly lost and my husband won’t admit it.
I can’t say this is atypical behavior for Ethan. We’ve been married for six months—still newlyweds—and ninety percent of the time, he’s the perfect husband. He knows all the most romantic restaurants in town, he still surprises me with flowers, and when he asks me about my day, he actually listens to my answer and asks appropriate follow-up questions.
But the other ten percent of the time, he is so stubborn, I could scream.
“You missed the turn for Cedar Lane,” I tell him. “We passed it like half a mile down the road.”
“No.” A scary-looking vein bulges in Ethan’s neck. “It’s up ahead. We didn’t pass it.”
I let out a frustrated huff as I clutch the printed directions to the house in Westchester, courtesy of our real estate agent, Judy. Yes, we do have GPS. But that signal went out about ten minutes ago. Now all we’ve got to rely on are these written directions. It’s like living in the Stone Age.
Well, Ethan wanted something out of the way. He’s getting his wish.
The worst part is that it’s snowing. It started a few hours ago, back when we were leaving Manhattan. When we left, they were cute little white flakes that evaporated on contact with the ground. Over the last hour, the flakes have quadrupled in size. They’re not cute anymore.
And now that we have turned off the highway, this more deserted, narrow road is slick with snow. And it’s not like Ethan drives a truck. His BMW has gorgeous hand-stitched leather seats, but only front-wheel drive. And he’s not incredibly skilled at driving in the snow either. If we skidded, he probably wouldn’t even know whether to turn into the skid or out of the skid. (Into the skid, right?)
As if on cue, the BMW skids on a patch of slushy ice. Ethan’s fingers are bloodless on the steering wheel. He rights the vehicle, but my heart is pounding. The snow is getting really bad. He pulls over to the side of the road and holds out his hand to me.
“Let me see those directions.”
Dutifully, I hand over the slightly crumpled piece of paper. I wish he had let me drive. Ethan would never admit I’m better at navigating than he is. “I think we passed the turn, Ethan.”
He looks down at a sheet of typed directions. Then he squints out the windshield. Even with the wipers going full speed and our high beams on, the visibility is horrible. Now that the sun has dropped in the sky, we can only see about ten feet ahead of us. Everything past that is pure white. “No. I see how to get there.”
“Are you sure?”
Instead of answering my question, he grumbles, “You should have checked the weather before we got on the road.”
“Maybe we should turn back?” I press my hands between my knees. “We can view the house another time.” Like when there isn’t a freaking blizzard raging outside the car.
My husband whips his head around and glares at me like I have lost my mind. “Tricia, we’ve been driving for almost two hours to get here. We’re about ten minutes away, and now you want to turn around and go home?”
That’s another thing I have learned about Ethan in the six months since we’ve been married. Once he gets an idea in his head to do something, he does not back down until it’s done. I suppose I could see it as a good thing. I wouldn’t want to be married to a man who left a bunch of half-finished projects around the house.