The Liar's Daughter Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Megan Cooley Peterson

  All Rights Reserved

  HOLIDAY HOUSE is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  www.holidayhouse.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Peterson, Megan Cooley, author.

  Title: The liar’s daughter / Megan Cooley Peterson.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Holiday House, [2019] | Summary: Desperate to escape deprogramming after being rescued from a cult, seventeen-year-old Piper wants to rejoin her family, but the truth about that family, her past, and herself cannot be denied.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019014092 | ISBN 9780823444182 (hardback)

  ISBN 9780823446261 (e-book)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Cults—Fiction. | Family life—Fiction. | Kidnapping—Fiction. | Brainwashing—Fiction. | Memory—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.P456 Li 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019014092

  ISBN: 9780823444182 (hardcover)

  Ebook ISBN 9780823446261

  v5.4

  a

  For my daughter,

  the map of my heart,

  and for anyone who has ever felt lost

  and needed to be found

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. After

  2. Before

  3. Before

  4. After

  5. Before

  6. Before

  7. Before

  8. After

  9. Before

  10. Before

  11. After

  12. Before

  13. Before

  14. After

  15. After

  16. After

  17. Before

  18. After

  19. Before

  20. After

  21. Before

  22. After

  23. Before

  24. After

  25. Before

  26. After

  27. After

  28. Before

  29. Before

  30. After

  31. Before

  32. Before

  33. After

  34. Before

  35. After

  36. Before

  37. After

  38. Before

  39. After

  40. After

  41. After

  42. After

  43. Before

  44. After

  45. After

  46. After

  47. Before

  48. After

  49. Before

  50. After

  51. After

  52. After

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  A bed.

  A window seat.

  A chipped desk with daisy stickers on the drawers.

  These things belong to me, I’m told.

  The woman takes me from the room and down a hallway, the walls so close they almost crush me. She wears all beige and not a stitch of makeup. My bladder strains, and I can’t remember the last time I peed. Her shoes squeak against the floor; her skirt rustles. My ears ring from the roar of it all.

  The woman nudges open a door. The white walls and floor blind me, and I blink until my eyes adjust. It smells faintly of bleach. “There are clean towels in the cabinet and soap in the shower. Use whatever you like. This is your bathroom now. You’re safe here.”

  She looks at me expectantly. I say nothing.

  Finally, the door closes, and the click echoes around the room. The urine bleeds through my pants before I can get to the toilet.

  I jut out my chin in defiance, make sure whoever’s watching can see it.

  Father and Mother told me this might happen. “The world can be an evil place,” Mother warned. “I’m the only one you can trust. Me and your father. Never forget that.”

  Cold water surges from the faucet, pummeling the bottom of the tub. I twist the knob to the left, to the right, but there’s just cold, no warm. My reflection in the metal is distorted, inhuman.

  They fixed it so I have to bathe in ice-cold water. They think I’m weak. They think I’ll break.

  My pants cling to my legs as I pull them off. I unhook my mother’s necklace with the green stone and set it on the counter—but then the stone catches the light, and I put it back on, listening for sounds outside the door.

  When I face the mirror, I barely recognize the girl looking back. My collarbones stick out, shadowed underneath. My breasts are smaller, my stomach shrunken in. My hair falls out when I pull on it.

  They told me I’m safe here. They told me this is my family now.

  But I don’t know these people. And this is not my home.

  Voices come from behind me, warped, like a recording played backward. When I turn toward the door, they snap off.

  “The world can be an evil place.”

  I conjure Mother’s voice. It comforts me. We’ll find each other again, like she promised.

  The water scalds my foot, so cold it circled around to being hot.

  The tiles on the floor are tiny hexagons slithering underneath the bathtub, flat and cracked. Bottles line the sides of the tub with promises of better hair, softer skin. My mother’s fancy soaps smelled of lavender and lemon.

  I drag a rag across my body, over and over until my skin turns pink.

  I’m the only color in the room.

  The kitchen reeks of bleach.

  I hold my finger up to my lips and smile at Beverly Jean, who sits on a stool next to the kitchen sink. The Aunties have a towel wrapped around her small shoulders, secured in the front with a clothespin. Auntie Barb combs through her hair while Auntie Joan mixes up a bottle of hair bleach.

  Beverly Jean’s eyes swing like a pendulum as she watches Auntie Joan jolt the bottle back and forth.

  “Can I hold her hand?” I ask. As the oldest daughter, it falls on me to help take care of the younger children. Auntie Barb and Auntie Joan aren’t exactly maternal, and they expect me to make up for that.

  Auntie Joan plunks the bottle down on the table and sighs. Her long, graying hair is gathered in a tight bun that pulls her crepe-paper skin back sharply.

  “Do what you like,” she says. “But keep her quiet. You know how your father hates it when you children cry.”

  I rush to Beverly Jean and squeeze her hand with mine. “It’ll be over before you know it,” I whisper. “Just close your eyes and hold my hand, and it’ll be okay.”

  Beverly Jean does as I instruct, and Auntie Joan squirts the dye onto her scalp. Almost immediately, it turns the skin red. I’ve asked for less-harsh dyes to be used, but the Aunties say this is all that’s available.

  Beverly Jean whimpers. I hold her hand even tighter and hum “Hush, Little Baby,” the same lullaby I sang to her when she was little.

  When Auntie Joan finishes, Auntie Barb snaps a plastic shower cap over Beverly Jean’s burning head and sets a timer. Auntie Barb wears a long denim dress and compression socks. Every day, the same. “Fifteen minutes,” she says. “Not a second less.”

  The Aunties disappear down the hallway, and Beverly Jean opens her eyes. “After your wash, I’ll rub ice cubes on your scalp, okay?” I promise. “That always helps.”

 
When the timer rings, I put my hand in the sink water and touch it to Beverly Jean’s arm. “Does this feel too hot?” I heated up a pot of water on the woodstove an hour ago, and I hope it hasn’t cooled too much in the sink. We don’t have running water, but the pipes still work for drainage.

  “No, it feels good. Thanks, Pip.” When Beverly Jean was little, she couldn’t say my whole name. So she said Pip instead, and it stuck. It’s all she calls me.

  She leans back, and I peel off the cap and wash the bleach from her hair. Her once-dark roots have turned as bright as the goldfinches that feed on Mother’s sunflowers. I massage toner into her hair, and soon she is a perfect blonde again. Just like Mother.

  After I towel dry her hair, I grab an ice cube from the icebox and rub it along the angry patches on her scalp. “You deserve an ice pop,” I say. “What flavor?”

  “Grape!”

  I pry one out of its mold. “Father and Mother will be here in a few hours,” I tell Beverly Jean. “They’ll be so happy to see you looking your best.”

  She scrunches up her nose. “How come you and Henry don’t have to get your hair dyed? It doesn’t seem fair.”

  I touch my long ponytail. “Because our hair is already blond. Mother just wants us to look like a family. She doesn’t want anyone to feel left out, or unloved, or different.”

  “But what about Caspian and Thomas?”

  “Father took them in, but they’re not our brothers. It’s all right if they’re not blond. Does that make sense?”

  “I guess so.” Beverly Jean bites into her ice pop.

  I kiss her cheek. “Good. Now finish up your ice pop. I’ve got to help with Samuel’s hair next.”

  * * *

  After we finish the bleachings, I go outside looking for Caspian.

  The lake laps against the shore, and pieces of seaweed bob along its surface. A few of the younger children are trying to catch a frog in a bucket. Their laughter washes away the stench of bleach trapped in my nostrils, and I smile.

  The old roller coaster rises above the trees. Our property includes a derelict amusement park that’s been abandoned for forty or fifty years. Father’s torn most of the rides down, but a few remain. He said this was the perfect location for his children, far from cities and towns.

  We live in the old caretaker’s house. It has two stories with lots of windows and hardwood floors. The roof over the boys’ bedroom needs to be repaired, so for now it’s covered with a big piece of blue tarp. Father prefers to keep us “off the grid,” so we don’t have electricity or running water. But we have a pump, generators, candlelight. We have all we need.

  The Aunties are nowhere to be found. They must be resting before lunch; they’re always telling us how vexing we are.

  I stop in front of the old oak tree. Nailed to its trunk is the sign Father carved from a piece of balsam wood.

  The Community is truth.

  The Community is loyalty.

  The Community will keep you safe.

  It’s our creed, everything the Community stands for and believes in. Every time I’m feeling sad or frustrated, I read the sign. It fills me with light and hope.

  When I reach out to touch it, a spark of magic pricks my finger.

  I find Cas working in a row of corn, hacking at weeds with a hoe. Our garden is large, at least twenty feet long, with corn bordering the far end. We grow many different crops: artichokes, lettuce, tomatoes, cauliflower. My favorites are the root vegetables, the carrots and beets and radishes that hide themselves away until they’re ready.

  Cas wears a white T-shirt, and his wide shoulders press at the seams as he works. I grab the handle right out of his hands.

  “Hey!” he says, trying to snatch it back. “I’m using that.”

  I jump away, keeping it just out of his reach. “You’ve worked long enough today. I need you to time me.”

  Father put a buoy a hundred feet from shore, and I’ve been practicing swimming out to it and back. When war comes, I have to be as strong as possible. All those extra push-ups I did this week must’ve made me at least a second faster.

  Cas’s eyes meet mine, blue like the sea he was named for. I’ve never seen an ocean in real life, only in a book, but the photograph stuck with me, and someday I’ll swim in one. Cas’s eyelashes are so dark and thick it looks like he’s wearing mascara. He’s the only one of us with dark hair; his brother Thomas has brown hair, but Cas has black hair like he says his father had. “I think you’ve just about perfected your swimming by now,” he says.

  “Come on,” I wheedle. “It’s been two weeks since anyone timed me. I’m sure I’ve gotten faster since then. I want to show Father when he gets here. Prove that I’m ready to be initiated.”

  “You know Curtis is proud of you no matter what, Piper. You’re his favorite.”

  “That is totally untrue.”

  Cas nudges me with his shoulder. “Oh, please. You were so afraid he’d love me more than you when I first got here that you told me I could eat as many strawberries from the patch as I wanted. I got in a lot of trouble for that.”

  Father took Caspian and Thomas in a few years ago when they had no place else to go. He was forced to expel their parents from the Community when they brought drugs into the compound, but of course he allowed the boys to stay—it would have been too cruel to let the Outside have them. Thomas has been at the main compound with Father and Mother these past several months, ever since he was initiated into the Community, and I’m itching to hear all about his new life there.

  “I never told you to eat those strawberries, and you know it! If you’re going to lie, at least come up with something interesting.”

  He gives me a playful shove, and I shove him back. My stomach flutters, but I ignore it.

  Then he goes for my weak spot—the soft skin of my inner arm. He tries tickling it, and I squeal and run toward the lake, kicking off my sandals. The smaller children laugh and chase after us, and soon we’re all splashing water at one another. The sun warms my shoulders, and the cool water is a salve, taking away the sting of Beverly Jean’s burned scalp, the sting of missing Father and Mother.

  “Get out of that filthy lake water this instant!”

  Auntie Joan stands on the shore, hands on hips. We immediately fall into line, youngest to oldest, and march toward the house.

  We’re good at following orders.

  “You’re lucky I don’t take a switch to each and every one of you,” she says. “You need to get cleaned up and dressed.”

  When she’s not looking, I reach back and smack Cas on the arm. He catches my hand and holds it, just for a moment, before letting go.

  The last time Father and Mother came to stay, Millie hadn’t started walking yet.

  It was an easier time.

  She wiggles out of my grasp now, naked, and takes off down the hallway holding her favorite stuffed animal, a giraffe missing an ear. “Millie, get back here!” I chase after her, freshly washed diaper in my hand, and find her at the large hall window overlooking the lake. She always waits there for our parents, who’re due to arrive any minute.

  “Millie,” I coax. “Don’t you want to look pretty for Mommy and Daddy?”

  She pops a thumb into her mouth. “Where’s Mommy?”

  “She and Daddy are on their way. Let’s get you dressed, and then they’ll be here.”

  I lead Millie back to the girls’ bedroom. Beverly Jean is already dressed, immaculate in her burgundy dress with the white sash. She sits on her bed, dressing one of her paper dolls in a purple ball gown.

  Carla slumps over the desk, drawing in her sketchbook. She’s got her dress on, but not her sash. She’s a few years younger than me and recently decided dresses are evil.

  “Carla, where’d your sash go?” I try peering over her shoulder, and she blocks her drawing with her arms.

&nb
sp; “Beats me.”

  “Look through the closet. You don’t want the Aunties to see you without it.”

  Carla grunts, closes her sketchbook, and yanks open the closet doors. She kicks aside a basket of dirty clothes. “Not here.”

  Millie lies on her back, and I lift her bum and slide the diaper under it. Once it’s secured with safety pins, I slip one foot into her tights, and then the other. Her tights stretch against her meaty thighs, and I’m afraid they’ll tear. Whoever invented tights for babies should be locked up. “You barely looked. Please, Carla, just do as I say.”

  “You’re not Mother, you know,” she reminds me, but then she immediately locates her sash on the shelf and ties it around her waist.

  “Was that so hard?” I ask. Carla ignores me.

  “You look so pretty,” Beverly Jean tells her.

  “I look ugly.” Carla sags onto on her bed, which is across from mine. “I’m all broken out.”

  “You both look lovely,” I remind them. Once I’ve changed Millie into her dress, I hand her off to Carla. “Try to keep her from getting naked again,” I say, slipping out of my bell-bottoms and crocheted peasant top and into my dress. Auntie Barb made us matching burgundy dresses a few months ago, and mine is already a little looser. All that swimming has made my body leaner, more streamlined. But I don’t complain. Mother loves it when we’re all dressed up. Father doesn’t care for vanity, but he indulges her.

  Auntie Barb sticks her head in our room. “Hurry up, now. Let’s get lined up outside.”

  Once she’s gone, I take Millie back. “I hope you read your pages,” I tell Carla. She rolls her eyes as she lifts Father’s book from her desk and shakes it at me. All of Father’s teachings are hand-typed and bound in leather. He’ll know if we’ve fallen behind in our reading.

  For once, the boys beat us outside. They stand on the front lawn in a perfect row. Caspian adjusts his burgundy tie and straightens his hair. A lock falls over his forehead, and I want to brush it away, to touch him, but the Aunties are watching. They don’t seem to approve of our closeness anymore. Next to Cas is Samuel, eleven, and then Henry, eight. Their matching corduroy suits and ties are darling, and I waste no time telling them so.