When She Regretted Her Lies novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Census Man
Birdie tells a police officer every true thing that sounds terrible, and Rena opens every door, until the officer shows her the note that sent him.
Officer Cobb was halfway through our census form when my five-year-old asked if he was there to arrest me for kidnapping her.
He laughed, the friendly way a man laughs at a child in a ladybug raincoat.
"Why would I arrest your mom, kiddo?"
"Because she said she kidnapped me," Birdie said. "Yesterday, at the snack drawer."
His pen stopped on the word "occupants."
I had said it.
I had said it once, through my teeth, over a box of cheese crackers she wasn't allowed to finish.
On the lawn next door, Mrs. Tandy had stopped watering grass that was already dead.
She was holding her phone up and pointing it at our porch.
"She's joking," I said, and laughed too loudly. "I was angry yesterday. It was a snack thing."
"I'm not joking," Birdie said. "I'm honest. Ask anybody."
She reached into her raincoat pocket and took out a butter cookie in a plastic wrapper.
It was from the tin her Grandma Inez had sent home with her on Sunday.
She ate it slowly while Officer Cobb looked at me.
"Kiddo, kidnapping isn't something to joke about," he said.
"I know. That's why I'm telling you. Mom is also the ugliest mom at my whole preschool."
I smiled at him with every tooth I had.
"Honesty is a big thing for her right now," I said.
"She locks me in the car," Birdie went on. "I pull the handle and nothing happens."
"Those are child locks," I said. "They came with the car."
Officer Cobb wrote something down.
"And she puts the snacks on the top shelf where I can't reach, and she counts them."
"Because you ate eleven fruit snacks at once. Eleven. I have the box."
He wrote something else.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I ignored it.
"And she got me from a hospital," Birdie said, getting louder, the way she does when she knows she's winning. "She paid with a credit card. Daddy says we're still paying it off."
Officer Cobb stopped writing.
His smile did not fade. It simply left, all at once.
"Ma'am," he said. "Has your daughter ever been outside this house without you?"
"Only at preschool," I said. "And my husband took her once, for a haircut, and she told the barber I'd been rude to a cashier."
"Was she right?"
"Yes," I said. "It was a long line."
He didn't laugh.
I looked at my daughter, sitting on the step in her ladybug coat with cookie crumbs on her chin.
She wasn't being cruel.
She was five, and she had told a policeman everything she knew, and nobody had ever told her which parts to keep.
I could argue with her, and I could beg Officer Cobb to understand, and every word would sound worse than the one before.
So I opened every door in the house.
"Please," I said. "Look at everything."
He followed me through the kitchen, and Birdie came behind us narrating.
"That's the snack shelf. She counts them."
He looked at the shelf, which held fruit snacks, crackers and a jar of peanut butter with a knife standing in it.
"That's my room. Mom sits on the floor until I fall asleep. It's weird, honestly."
He looked at the floor, where a pillow lay next to the bed.
"That's the bathroom. That's the other bathroom. That's the closet where Daddy hides the good chocolate."
"Thank you, Birdie," I said.
"I'm just telling the truth."
At the back door my phone buzzed again, and this time I looked.
It was Gil. I had texted him two minutes earlier: Police are here. Birdie told them I kidnapped her. Call me.
His answer was one line.
Don't stress, Rena. Mom says she's handling it, she knows someone.
I read it twice.
I hadn't asked him to tell his mother.
Inez was the first person Gil called about everything, so I let it go.
I put the phone away.
When we came back to the porch, Officer Cobb stood on the top step and read his clipboard for a long moment.
Mrs. Tandy was still filming, openly now, and two other neighbors had come out onto their porches to watch.
"Mrs. Kimball, I don't see anything wrong with your house," he said.
My shoulders came down for the first time since the cheese crackers.
"But I'm going to tell you something," he went on, quietly, so the lawn couldn't hear. "This address wasn't on the census route this morning."
"Then why are you here?"
He turned his clipboard around.
Clipped under the form was a folded note, typed, with no name on it.
It said: Visit the Kimball house. Ask the little girl. She always tells the truth.
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