Synopsis:
The town of Whistling Ridge guards its secrets.
When seventeen-year-old Abigail Blake goes missing, her best friend, Emma Alvarez, is compelled by guilt to discover the truth about what happened that night after Emma left Abi alone at a party in the woods. The police initially believe Abi ran away. But Emma doesn’t believe her friend would leave without her.
When officers find disturbing evidence in the nearby woods, the festering secrets and longstanding resentment of Abigail’s family and the people of Whistling Ridge, Colorado begin to surface . . . with devastating consequences.
Among those secrets is the passionate, dangerous love Abi’s older brother, Noah, feels for the handsome Rat, a recently arrived Romanian immigrant who makes his home in the local trailer park. Abi’s younger brother, twelve-year-old Jude, feels he knows information he should tell the police . . . if only he could put it into words. Abi’s father, Samuel, explodes in mercurial, unpredictable rages as Dolly, her mother, remains silent. And the other citizens of Whistling Ridge are wary of outsiders or anyone different from them, led by a charismatic preacher who advocates for God’s love using language that mirrors violence. Most of the residents exist under the sway of a powerful businessman who rules the town.
Abi had secrets, too, and the closer Emma gets to unraveling the past, the farther she feels from her friend.
In a tinder box of small-town rage, all it will take is just one spark — the truth about what really happened that night — to change the community forever.
Review:
The story begins at a party in the Tall Bones outside of the small community of Whistling Ridge, Colorado. It’s a place where the local kids gather to blow off steam, drink beer, and escape from their parents and day-to-day lives for a bit. Bailey says she loved the space in Colorado, but it made her feel cut off from the rest of the world, which was what many of her characters experience, as well. Emma sees her best friend Abi walk into the woods, but does not accompany or follow her. Abi never emerges. Or shows up back at home. After Abi vanishes, questions ensue and Emma feels guilty because she believes she was the last person to see her that night. And she didn’t look out for her, thinking that Abi just wanted to go make out with a boy. “Emma doesn’t look back. If she had, she might have seen Abigail hesitate, hand outstretched as if perhaps, in the end, she hadn’t really expected Emma to leave.” Because Emma loves Abi deeply, she resolves never to stop digging for the truth until she finds it.
Abi comes from an unhappy, dysfunctional home. Her father, Samuel Blake, is significantly older than her mother, a Vietnam War veteran who was raised by a mother who wielded Bible teachings like a sword. Samuel does the same thing with his three children. He is controlling, with a vile, violent temper, and regularly abuses his two sons, Noah, the eldest, and Jude, who is a twelve-year-old sweet-tempered child who has been permanently disabled by his father’s abuse. Their mother, Dolly, also suffers Samuel’s physical wrath and fails to protect her sons. Abigail, though, is her father’s precious girl and he does not subject her to the same treatment.
Noah is thoughtful and planned to attend UCLA as an English major, but he was forced to notify the institution he would be unable to attend due to financial issues. One particularly heinous episode in the Blake household required the expenditure of the only substantial money his parents had on medical bills. Now Noah is stuck in Whistling Ridge. Noah has strong feelings for Rat and the two of them spend time exploring their connection, even though Noah’s father is an unrepentant homophobe, as are many of the town’s residents, including the fire and brimstone-preaching Pastor Ed Lewis, who offers conversion therapy to members of his congregation. As Noah listens to Lewis, he is understandably appalled and dismayed, and wonders to himself, “Can it really be love if God has to threaten you for it first?” And as he thinks about his interactions with Rat, he recognizes that there “had been no bargaining, no intimidation, none of God’s usual Tricks. That was love, and Rat had never demanded he grew some backbone to receive it either.” And he knows what he is risking when he tells Lewis, “If I want fear, I’ll go to my father. I’m done with the fear of God.”
Emma Alvarez has also felt the impact of racism and prejudice. Although her mother is a local physician, her father, Miguel, mysteriously left town when Emma was just a little girl. But she doesn’t know what happened or why he left, because her mother will not share the details with her. Others intimate that some horrible event drove him to run away. Indeed, Jerry Mattox, the most powerful man in town and her father’s former employer, threatens her that she will end up like her father if she doesn’t stop poking around in search of answers, even though Emma doesn’t know exactly that that means. And now Emma has lost her best friend, Abi, and is the subject of gossip by kids at school. In the bathroom, she overhears other girls saying, “Can you believe Emma Alvarez just left her there? Do you think that’s why she was taken?” But, in fact, no one knows if Abi is dead or alive, although foul play becomes a distinct possibility once her bloodied sweater is discovered in the woods. Emma will not stop searching for the truth until she knows exactly what happened to Abi, and it is her determination that compels Bailey’s story forward.
Where the Truth Lies is a richly atmospheric, dark, and haunting story about a small town in which the most powerful residents are bigoted, homophobic, and determined to stop those they deem “others” to infiltrate their tight-knit circle. Men like Jerry Mattox and Ed Lewis demonstrate they will stop at nothing to ensure that their positions of power and influence are secure, even if it means getting involved in and covering up the behavior of their children or committing unspeakable acts. Bailey compassionately illustrates Emma’s devotion to the friend she thought she knew so well, and dismay when she learns that Abi engaged in behaviors and had relationships about which Emma was unaware. “Abigail had wanted to know everything about Emma had pulled it out of her, like loose threads, and there was a time when she gave pieces of herself back in exchange. Emma let Abigail know her. Isn’t that what love is? But had she really understood Abi so little in return?” Emma escapes from her unhappy life in unhealthy ways, skipping school and hanging out with Rat in the trailer park, but recognizes that she needs to find better ways to cope. As for Dolly, she is a battered woman who has failed as a mother by not shielding her sons from her husband or seeking to escape. Eventually, she realizes just how derelict she has been in her duty to protect her children. But is it too late for her to recognize her own power and save all of them, along with herself? Her husband, Samuel, is as unlikable a character as any readers are likely to encounter, but Bailey explains how his upbringing made him into a monster and the demons that reside in his psyche. Can he be redeemed?
In her debut, Bailey shows she is an eloquent wordsmith. She convincingly transports readers to the brooding, ominously claustrophobic and oppressive little town of Whistling Ridge where all of the inhabitants know each other and their histories, and movingly conveys the depth of her characters’ feelings about their complicated lives and dreams for the future. At the center of the story is Abi, the girl whose disappearance sets in motion a series of events that will change the characters’ lives, and the little town in which they live, forever. Bailey tells the tale through alternating narratives set “then” and “now,” and effectively provides critical exposition from the points of view of her characters.
Where the Truth Lies is ultimately both heart-breaking and affirming, delivering hope for healing and resolution once all is revealed. Bailey believes that good literature is powerful and can make lonely people realize that they’re not alone — someone else is going through the same things they are. She says she hopes her readers will take away from Where the Truth Lies a “sense of solidarity. I hope it can make lonely people feel less alone.”
Excerpt from Where the Truth Lies
Chapter 1
The roar of the bonfire is hard to distinguish from the sound of the trailer-park boys and the schoolgirls who holler and dance in the shadow of the Tall Bones. It is a small-town sort of night—the last that Whistling Ridge will see for many years to come, although nobody knows this yet — in the kind of town where coyotes chew on stray cigarette butts and packs of boys go howling at the moon.
Abigail Blake turns at the edge of the trees and smiles at Emma. This will be the memory of Abigail that stays with Emma long after the rest has been drunk away: long and pale as a moonbeam, flyaway red hairs curling gently in the damp air, hands buried deep in her sleeves, standing on the balls of her feet, like she might take off running at any moment.
“I’ll be fine,” she says. Her eyes give her away, darting ahead into the forest. They are not long into September, but fall comes quicker in the mountains, and already the early night has stolen over the pines, their opaque shadows broken only by the beam of a single flashlight.
“But how are you going to get home?” There’s a little dent in her brow, Emma thinks, just the right shape and size for the pad of her thumb.
“Em.” It’s as if she has to remember to smile again. “I’ll just call a cab or something. I’ll figure it out. Really, it’s fine.” She looks at the light hovering among the trees and, behind it, the vague shape of a boy. Emma follows her gaze, but it’s too dark to make him out properly.
“I don’t think you should go.”
Abigail’s grin looks so tight it must hurt. “It’s just fun, Em. Don’t worry about it.”
Emma does worry about it. She isn’t tall like Abigail, doesn’t have the same gap between her thighs like all teenage girls want; the only thing her father ever gave her was his Latino complexion, and it has dogged her all the way through school; she isn’t the kind of girl boys ask to go into the woods with them, so what would she know? But still she shakes her head as she peers into the darkness. “I’ll wait here for you.”
“No.” Abigail takes a deep breath and smiles firmly again. She smells of her strawberry ChapStick. “Come on, Em, let me live a little, huh? I’ll be fine. Promise.”
Abigail Blake is seventeen and, like all girls her age, she believes she’s going to live forever. Deep down, Emma believes it, too, and that is why she leaves her friend there, where the stomped-down grass of the field meets the trees, and slouches back out past the Tall Bones to her car. The fire is still crackling away, its light snaking off the surface of those towering pale rocks. The partygoers cheer as they smash beer cans together and hurl them onto the fire, cooing with delight as the flames whoosh higher into the dark.
Emma doesn’t look back. If she had, she might have seen Abigail hesitate, hand outstretched as if perhaps, in the end, she hadn’t really expected Emma to leave.
There is another young man watching her from the other side of the bonfire. He has a wicked sort of gaze, which makes Emma feel as if she’s shivering even though she isn’t. She has seen him around, lingering on the edge of town since springtime, but she knows him only by sight. A profile sharp enough to cut cocaine, dark hair brushing the collar of his worn-out leather jacket: there is something in the motion of his hips, the way he juts out his chin, that feels like he might have been a highwayman in a previous life. Evening rain has stripped back the heat of the day, and now his cigarette breath hovers in the cool air the way storm clouds do around mountain peaks. When she looks again, he is gone.
“Where have you been?” Dolly Blake stubs out her cigarette as her eldest son tries to close the front door quietly behind him.
“Nowhere.”
Noah emerges from the gloom of the hallway, and for a moment Dolly tenses, seeing in his lean, lanky shape that of her husband. From a distance they are often confused for one another—the same down-and-out plaid shirts, that same flash of red hair, same high-set shoulders, as if they’re worried someone might peek over and see something they shouldn’t. But although at twenty-two he is a man now, Noah’s face retains the gentle edges of youth, which his father, Samuel Blake, exchanged a long time ago for a wiry beard and weathered skin from long hours spent hauling timber. Dolly breathes a sigh of relief.
“You’re lucky your dad went to bed early,” she says. “What did you do to your jeans? They’re filthy.”
“None of your business.”
Above him on the wall hangs the large gemstone cross that Dolly’s mother-in-law gave her as a wedding present nearly a quarter of a century ago. Behind it, Dolly knows, there is a hole where Samuel once punched through the plaster.
“Don’t give me that attitude, young man,” she says, but she isn’t looking at her son, she’s looking at the cross. “I don’t care how old you are, when you live under this roof, you get yourself home on time, and you talk to your mother with more respect.”
“You never give Abi the third degree like this.” He steps around her with his long muddy legs, and beats a hard, familiar tattoo up the stairs to his room.
Dolly sighs and digs her nails into her scalp. She wishes he weren’t the only one she can stand to lose her temper around, but she knows she has to lose it sometimes. Otherwise one day she might just burst.
Emma turns the car radio on, some late-night psychic—who says nothing of the events to come—so she drives away from Abigail without a second thought. Puddles on the county road flash yellow in her headlights, and the smell of wet tarmac coming through the air vents reminds her of wax crayons. She knows the route well, even at night. On either side steep banks are covered with conifers, leading up to dusty mountain peaks where the trees grow stumpy and fade out altogether as they approach the timberline.
After a mile, the tree line following the curve of the road breaks away. Pine bark beetles have infected the evergreens here, and huge patches of the woodland are gray and brittle. In the daylight, through their thin dead branches, she can glimpse the blackened remains of the old Winslow house, hollowed out by fire over a century ago. Usually she can look right through the empty windows all the way to the other side, and even though she knows she won’t be able to see a thing in the dark, Emma glances at it as she drives by, just out of habit.
There is a light.
Something glimmers behind an old window frame. Emma slows the car, but the light swings suddenly, sharply, and is snuffed out.
She will tell the police this when they question her, eventually, plundering all the last precious details she has of Abigail.
The bonfire has been tamped down and now the blackened circle of its remains looks like somewhere a UFO might have come to land. The Tall Bones are silent silhouettes against a night sky silvered with moonlight. The partygoers have scattered back down the road toward Jerry Maddox’s trailer park, or crammed into their friends’ cars and driven home through the woods, so there is no one around to hear the gun when it goes off.
Tomorrow is Sunday, and the Blakes cannot yet imagine that they will sit in their usual lonely row of fold-up plastic chairs at church without Abigail beside them. Tomorrow is Sunday, and Emma is supposed to bleach Abigail’s hair for her, because Abigail is tired of being ginger, even though she knows her parents will say she looks cheap. Tomorrow is Sunday, and Emma lies awake listening to the coyotes wail and wishes she were one of them. In the morning she will check her phone, void of any reassurance from Abigail that she made it safely home. Her eyes will return to that box of bleach, sitting unopened on the dresser, and somehow, she will know.
By the end of the week, Abigail’s face will grin emptily from a hundred flyers tacked to telephone poles and church billboards, flapping in the Rocky Mountain breeze. Samuel Blake will go out into the forest with the police department, crying his daughter’s name into the trees. Noah will scrub the stains on his jeans until his fingers are raw, and Emma will hide the box of bleach under her bed. Dolly, sucking on her cigarettes, will knead the flaky flesh of her scalp, and stare at the big cross hiding the hole in the wall, afraid that, now, all the wrong things will come out.
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