Miracle Creek

Janine is nervous; Abe wants her to provide a voice sample, to see if the insurance agent clerk who answered the phone will recognize her voice. However, she is more nervous over the possibility that there will be a polygraph. Janine researches ways to beat a polygraph test, realizing that she should have told Abe about her mysterious arrangement with Pak.

However, she couldn’t bring herself to tell Abe, and she wants to tell Matt but feels so stupid when she hears his explanation of Mary’s notes that she cannot bring herself to do it. Indeed, she does not know if “their marriage could survive” her confession about the “deal with Pak, their decision to keep the arrangement secret, how she’d intercepted their bank statements to hide the payments she’d so carefully spread throughout multiple accounts over multiple months […]” (228). Janine decides to try a technique she read about, putting thumbtacks in her shoes, and “pressing down on” them “while answering the initial ‘control’ questions, the theory being that pain causes the same physiological symptoms as lying, so they can’t differentiate between true and false answers” (229).