Whispers and Lies

by Diane Pershing

  Or maybe he really was attracted to her, and she was allowing painful ghosts to infect her mind and run her life for her. Wow, what a concept.

  When the waiter, one of Lady Jamaica’s several tall, ebony-skinned sons, appeared at their table, Lou ordered a vodka martini. After Will had ordered a beer, he said, “A martini, huh? Pretty fancy for a ribs-and-corn dinner.”

  “It’s a tradition,” she told him. “One a night, and never more than one. It started with Mom about ten years ago. Our own little cocktail hour, a kind of letting-down time after a stressful day. And I’ve kept it up.”

  “Traditions are good things,” he said, nodding.

  “Unless they’re stupid things.”

  “Agreed. Like fraternity hazings.”

  “And shooting guns in the air on the Fourth of July.”

  “Although fireworks on the same day are good things.”

  “Agreed.”

  As they grinned at each other, Lou felt herself relaxing, just a bit, and was grateful for the respite. When the drinks arrived, Will raised his glass. “Let’s make a toast.”

  “To what?”

  “Good traditions and old friends.”

  She clinked his glass with hers, but her brief feeling of lightheartedness lessened. He was still playing that “old friends” tune. She could curse her suspicious mind all she wanted, but something in his attitude felt off somehow.

  She took a sip of her drink and let it warm her blood. Okay, enough. She was a grown-up now, she told herself, not a foolish schoolgirl, and could handle all kinds of situations, including dinner with Will Jamison. And so they fell into chatting about Nancy’s upcoming marriage to her childhood sweetheart, Bob Weiss. How the town had changed, what had happened to people they both knew. Will was easy to be with, Lou thought. He listened, seemed to be deeply interested in whatever she said.

  And, of course, there was that mesmerizing face of his. Eyes that were jade green under heavyish brows and lids, and eyelashes thicker than was fair; a long, thin nose, generous mouth, and just the slightest indentation in the middle of a square, rugged chin. She watched his expression change with each new topic—surprise, amusement, a hint of sadness when he learned of the high school principal’s death, all of it registered on his striking features…and made her stupid heart thump just a little harder.

  When their meals came—two huge plates of ribs, corn, coleslaw, beans and garlic bread, hot and spicy and mouthwateringly delicious—Lou was grateful to have something else to concentrate on other than Will Jamison. While he dug in eagerly, she took a bite of one of the ribs and chewed slowly, hoping she’d be able to eat a decent amount tonight.

  After Will had inhaled about half his dinner, he put down his fork. A time-out was called for, he decided. He wiped his mouth, finished off his beer and was wondering how to introduce the topic of Lincoln DeWitt when Lou took care of it.

  “Tell me about your life as a reporter.” Resting her elbow on the table, she cupped her chin in her hand and gazed at him. “Working on anything special lately?”

  “Well, yeah. I’m planning a series for the New York Times about the black sheep of prominent families.”

  “Ooh, lots of scandals. Sounds like fun.”

  “It is. I’m doing the first one on Lincoln DeWitt.” He tossed the name off casually and watched her face for a reaction.

  She shrugged. “Never heard of him, sorry.”

  “Really?” When she shook her head no, Will said, “He’s Jackson DeWitt’s brother. The senator from Florida?”

  “Now that name rings a bell.” She wrinkled her nose. “Sorry, I don’t much follow politics. I find it too depressing.”

  “It is that, but the backroom maneuvering is pretty fascinating.”

  She picked up a French fry, dipped it in ketchup and bit into it. That was when Will noticed that Lou’s plate was nearly full. Before he could comment on it, she said, “So, tell me, what’s this Lincoln DeWitt like?”

  “He’s got the morals of an alley cat,” he said with a smile. “The man has a huge ego, drinks way too much and, to tell you the truth, I kind of like him. You can’t help it. He’s so up front about what a bad boy he is.”

  “Does he know you’re writing the article?”

  “Are you kidding? He’s cooperating, one hundred percent. The man loves the limelight.”

  Lou offered a mirthless laugh. “Everyone wants to be famous. Not me, thanks. Give me a small, settled life, and I’m a happy camper.”

  “Good for you. Better that way.”

  So, she really didn’t know, Will realized. Had not an inkling, he was sure of it.

  When she took a small bite of her corn and then set it down, again his attention was brought back to the fact that she’d hardly eaten a thing, and he felt concern for her, more concern than was his business.

  Not for the first time, he wished he didn’t have two agendas for being here with Lou tonight, the personal and the professional. As a reporter, the two were often linked, and tonight was no exception.

  And although he didn’t believe in coincidence, that was exactly what had happened back in D.C. this past Tuesday night that had led to this meeting….

  The DuPont Circle neighborhood bar hadn’t been very crowded as, somewhat early for his appointment with Lincoln DeWitt, Will had been catching up on a back issue of the Susanville Courier. His little sister, the paper’s managing editor, always faithfully sent them to him.

  He was glancing at the obituaries when a slap on the back told him the man himself had arrived. Lincoln slid onto the stool next to him, saying, “Hey, Will, heard this one? Old geezer is having bed trouble with his old lady. You know, no staying power? Goes to his doc for some hot new meds. Doc tells him there are possible side effects: dizziness, high blood pressure, nausea, even death. Guy shrugs and says, ‘Hey, she dies, she dies.’” Lincoln followed the punch line with one of his big, hearty laughs.

  As always, his mirth was contagious, and Will chuckled. “And good evening to you, too, Lincoln.”

  DeWitt was a handsome man in his early sixties, with a straight nose, high forehead and a full head of silver hair. But his gut protruded over his belt and there were lines of dissipation around the eyes, a reddened nose, sunken cheeks. Hard living had taken its toll.

  After Lincoln ordered his usual double scotch on the rocks, his gaze drifted to the newspaper Will had spread out in front of him. A deep frown creased his patrician forehead as he stared at the Courier’s back page.

  Will noticed his reaction. “What is it, Linc?”

  The older man grabbed the paper and brought the page that had captured his attention closer. From his vest pocket, he removed reading glasses, put them on and studied the picture. “Where did you get this?”

  “It’s my hometown newspaper. Susanville, New York.”

  “Janice McAndrews,” he muttered.

  “Excuse me?”

  “This woman, this Janice McAndrews,” he said, pointing to the page, still frowning. “This is her obituary. Did you know her?”

  “Janice McAndrews,” Will said, thinking. “Let me see.”

  He peered over Linc’s shoulder and read. There were two pictures, one of a much younger woman—say, twenty years earlier or so—and another more recent one, taken at the age, reported to be fifty-three, when the woman had died of cancer. One survivor, Louise McAndrews, DVM.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, remembering now why the name was familiar. “I knew her daughter. Well, kind of knew her. She was one of my sister’s friends.”

  “Hmm.” And with that, Linc handed the paper back to him, grinning once again. “So, what’s up? Did you interview Gretchen? And does she still disapprove of me?”

  Will wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easily. “How do you know Janice McAndrews? What is she to you?”

  Linc gave an offhand shrug, that good-time twinkle was back in his eye. “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

  “Then why the reaction?”
r />   “She reminded me of someone, that’s all,” he answered easily. “But I was wrong.”

  “Linc. You’re BSing me.”

  After a momentary pause, during which the older man probably realized he wasn’t going to win this one, he said, “Yeah, I am.” He offered another smirk. “Okay, I think, well—” he winked “—I may have been, shall we say, intimate with the lady? Only that wasn’t her name…I think. I really don’t remember for sure. There were a few years back there in the seventies when I was experimenting with all kinds of potions and mixtures. The whole thing’s kind of fuzzy.”

  “And that’s it? You sure?”

  He splayed his hands. “Hey, I’ve come clean about all the ladies I’ve been with, at least all the ones I remember, haven’t I, Will?” That he had, and the list was long and possibly libelous—the Times’s lawyers would be sharpening their pencils, Will had no doubt.

  “Okay, yeah.”

  So, he’d let it lie. For the moment.

  But Linc’s reaction had been too big for his explanation. Will had a sixth sense for what his interview subjects wanted to hide, and Lincoln DeWitt was hiding something. So later that night, back at his home office, Will had turned on his computer and used Google to search the Internet for Janice McAndrews. He got some references to a classics scholar living in Madrid, several more to a financial adviser based in Chicago. A few single hits referred to school reunions, recipe queries and even more mundane things, but nothing about a Janice McAndrews of Susanville, New York. He might have picked up the phone right then and called Lou, but he knew he would be going home for his sister’s wedding.

  Now, here he was, three days later, sitting at Lady Jamaica’s, across the table from the woman he’d hoped might shed some light on what Lincoln DeWitt was hiding.

  Light had been shed, but Lou herself was completely in the dark.

  “All of us here in Susanville are pretty impressed at how well you’ve done, career-wise,” she said.

  He shrugged, tossed it off. “I’ve been lucky.”

  “Lucky and talented.” She smiled. “Fifteen years climbing the reporter’s career ladder, and now the New York Times. Everyone always thought you’d be the one to take over the Courier. But I guess the wider world outside of Susanville called to you.”

  “That it did.”

  “And how was it?”

  “The world?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a flippant answer Will could have given, but instead he found himself taking the time to actually think about it. A series of images flashed in his mind like slides on a screen: bodies being blown up in Iraq; more blood-soaked corpses strewn over the wreckage of a train crash in Spain; large-eyed, hollow-cheeked, diseased children in Sudan. “It’s pretty rough out there,” he said somberly. “I got burned-out. There’s a lot of pain in the world, and way too much violence.”

  “So I hear.” Compassion shone from her eyes, followed by a soft smile. “And burnout happens to us all.”

  He shifted his attention to her full plate. “Hey,” he said. “Come on, you have to eat something.”

  Lou was surprised by the change of subject, then she too looked down. Will was nearly done with his dinner and she’d hardly touched hers. She took a bite of her garlic bread, but could barely chew it. For weeks, her appetite simply hadn’t been there. It was as though her taste buds had calluses on them. Yes, sir, that new weight-loss gimmick—grief.

  “I’m not very hungry.”

  When their waiter asked if they wanted coffee or dessert, Will looked at Lou and she shook her head. He pointed to her plate. “Wrap that to go and I’ll take the check.”

  When they left the restaurant, night had descended fully, lit faintly by a quarter moon that hung to one side of the church steeple like a dangling earring. Lou took in a deep breath of cool evening air and felt her nausea abating.

  As though echoing her thoughts, Will murmured, “I always forget how much I love the nights here in Susanville. Clean air. No glaring lights to interfere with the stars. Not much traffic or noise. Quiet.”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s stroll a bit before I take you home.” He carried her packed-up dinner in one hand, so he bent his other arm and, as before, offered it to Lou. “Okay?”

  “Sure.”

  Lou inserted her hand in the crook of his elbow and they walked along, not speaking, their footsteps echoing on the nearly deserted sidewalks. This close to Will, she felt so small. Which made sense—he was a foot taller than she was.

  But it was more than that, always had been. It had to do with the power of that personality of his and the effect it used to have—still had?—on her. Will reduced her somehow, robbed her of a firm sense of who she was. She felt so…not helpless, exactly, but sapped of strength, as though all her energy—whatever wasn’t being utilized by unrequited love—was needed just to keep up. She didn’t care for the feeling, not in the least.

  She shot a sideways glance at him. Lit as he was by the moon and the occasional old-fashioned streetlamp, his face was all planes and shadows. Maturity agreed with him; he was more filled out, less bony. His face, with lines across his forehead and around the mouth and eyes, had not just beauty but character. If she was thirty-three, that made him thirty-six or thirty-seven. He was in his prime, the years when a man finally grows into his face and a woman’s begins to droop.

  She was contemplating the unfairness of Mother Nature toward her own sex when Will broke the silence. “Have you always lived here?”

  “Since I was thirteen.”

  “And before that?”

  “We moved around a lot.”

  “Your dad’s job?”

  “No, my mom’s. Dad was a ship’s captain in the Merchant Marines. He died when I wasn’t even a year old.”

  So, Will thought, if his suspicions were correct, Janice McAndrews had invented a father for her little girl and had never given her a reason to doubt his existence. “What a shame,” he said, “to lose your father so early in your life.”

  “You can’t really miss what you’ve never had.”

  After passing a series of storefronts, they both stopped and stared at the sign in one window. Susanville Courier, Est. 1957, it read. Lou smiled. “And just think, instead of writing for the Times, all this could have all been yours.”

  “Never wanted the job.”

  Her eyebrows shot up. “Really? I’m surprised.”

  “I know, everyone took it for granted. But, trust me, it was the furthest thing from my mind. I hated the paper.”

  “Why?”

  A sense of bitterness tinged with sadness pierced him then, a feeling he hadn’t allowed himself to experience in years. “It robbed me of a father. He was always here, at the paper, hardly ever at home.”

  “A workaholic.”

  He nodded and they continued walking toward the clinic. “The man invented the concept. He couldn’t come to my soccer games because of a story, unless he was covering the game. Couldn’t visit me in the hospital when I had my tonsils out—deadline on an issue. He was editor, publisher, chief reporter, and I was pretty low on the list of his priorities. Yeah, I hated the Courier.”

  He was shocked at how much passion he still felt about the subject and had no idea why he was telling Lou about it. A man who never talked about his disappointment with his father—not to anyone—Will was letting Lou in, as though they’d been intimate friends for years.

  She cocked her head and gazed up at him, her deep brown eyes once again filled with understanding. “And yet you went into the newspaper business.”

  “I am my father’s son, I guess.” He’d gotten that little insight a while ago—that he was way, way too much like his old man for comfort. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, etc.” He shook his head. “Wow. I sure hadn’t planned on telling you all that,” he confessed. “Let’s pretend I didn’t.”

  “Why? Afraid I’ll pierce your manly armor and find out you have emotions?”
r />   Will chuckled. “Busted.”

  “Men.” It was her turn to shake her head.

  “Uh-oh. Is that disdain for my sex I hear? What’s the story there?”

  “None of your business,” she said lightly.

  “I showed you mine, you have to show me yours.”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  He grinned. “In a manner of speaking. Hey!”

  This last was directed at the backs of two men who, out of nowhere, it seemed, ran past them, obviously in a hurry, nearly knocking Lou and him over.

  “Hey!” Will called out again, putting his arm around Lou’s shoulder and pulling her close. But the men didn’t stop; instead, they sped up and disappeared around the corner. “Idiots,” he muttered.

  In another half block, they were at the clinic. “This where your car is?” he asked.

  “Where my house is.” She pointed upstairs. “Mom and I—I mean, I,” she amended, “live upstairs.”

  Together, his arm still around her, they walked up the alleyway at the side of the building where a flight of wooden steps led to the upper floor. At the foot of the stairs, Lou turned, slipped out from under his arm and said, “Well, thanks for dinner. See you at the wedding on Sunday.”

  He grabbed her hand before she could bolt up the stairs. “Not so fast. You were about to let me in on the reasons for the ‘I hate men’ attitude.”

  “I was about to do no such thing.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t hate men.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s boring.”

  “Try me.”

  She shook her hand loose. “God! You don’t give up, do you? Okay. It’s just that…” She shrugged. “The opposite sex and I don’t mix well. Let’s leave it at that.”

  “Nope. I always get my story. You can’t win. Are you going to invite me up for a cup of coffee?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay, then. I guess we’ll do it here.”

  He plopped himself down on the second-to-bottom step. Sighing loudly, she joined him, but on the step above. She was eye level with him now, illuminated solely by the bug light from the porch above them. Stray strands of wiry hair were backlit in yellow. “Let’s hear it,” he said.