Her Dark Lies

by J. T. Ellison

  I put a hand on her arm. “She’s interviewing Jack’s parents.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Reed—”

  “Jack, I’ve told you a hundred times, it’s Trisha. You can call me Mom if you want.”

  The coy smile, the slow blink, damn it, she is completely toasted. Drunk Trisha equals chatty, flirty, overflowing with Southern charm Trisha, at least until she tips over the edge into misery and anguish. Even when she drank regularly, she was only a good drunk if she stopped at three or four. Anything more and she devolved rapidly. This feels like much more.

  It’s my fault. We shouldn’t have served champagne at the brunch. I should have known better than to put temptation at her right hand.

  “Trisha,” Jack amends. “Let me call Fatima and have her show you the way back to your room.”

  “Oh, I think Claire can do that, can’t you, dear? Surely you’ve discovered this old place’s secrets.”

  I am already pulling on my shoes, relived to have a chance to scoot my mother away before she says something truly mortifying. “Sure, Mom. Let me grab a flashlight and I’ll get you back there. Brian’s probably missing you.”

  Jack puts a hand on my arm. “Claire—”

  “No, really Jack, it’s fine. I think I know where their rooms are.”

  I hope he can tell by my tone that I need to be alone with my mother. Sure enough, he takes the hint.

  “Yes, darling. Down the hall, turn left, and you’ll find the entrance to the guest wing. I’ll wait here for you, all right?”

  I blow out a grateful breath. “I’ll be right back. Come on, Mom. Where’s Brian? I thought you two were taking a tour?” I maneuver my mother down the hall, a hand on her elbow, tugging her along like she used to do to me when I was a child and she had to pull me away from the candy display at the grocery. Trisha seems not to notice my urgency, prattling on in her drunken sing-song voice.

  “Oh, Brian’s in bed, the lazy bones. He made his excuses and went to the room, left me to do the tour by myself.” Lord knows how much of this is true.

  She prattles on. “I can’t believe the lights went out. Such a bad storm, so glad we got here. When’s this rehearsal dinner now? Tonight? I can’t believe that woman changed the schedule on us, I mean, it’s just not done—this is a wedding. Have you decided what to wear? If you want me to, I could do your hair in a French braid. Though Jack probably has servants who are hairdressers. Oops!”

  We turn the corner by the staircase and Mom goes down, a flurry of curses streaming from her mouth. I shut my eyes and count to ten. I remember this version of my mother all too well, and it is in turns heartbreaking and frustrating. Trisha is suffering from a disease. I know this. I know my mom doesn’t like being an alcoholic. But why, in the name of God, has she chosen now, of all times, to start drinking again? What will Ana and Brice think?

  Something’s happened, I remind myself. Something’s wrong. You know she hates this.

  “She didn’t drink like this until after dad died. You caused her to be like this.”

  I don’t blame Harper for those harsh words. They’re true, after all.

  “Come on, Mom, up you go.” I put a hand under her arm, feel something ominously sticky. I flash the light on my hand and gasp. Blood.

  “Mom? Are you okay? Did you cut yourself when you fell?”

  “No. I just...can’t...what is this?”

  Trisha is still tangled up on the floor. I shine the flashlight and see a lump of spotted fabric on the floor beneath her. My heart kicks up a notch.

  “Mom, stop moving. Give me your hand.”

  She complies and I yank her upright.

  “You don’t need to be so rough,” she starts, but I cut her off.

  “Mom, stop. Now. Jack? Jack! We need you!”

  My voice is shrill in the dark. Moments later, Jack comes running.

  “What’s wrong? I heard you calling—”

  I point to the floor, hit the spot with the light.

  The body is crumpled and so bloody, and I don’t know what’s happening, not really. I’ve been operating on instinct, the sense that something is terribly awry, since I realized my hand is covered in blood. It isn’t until I hear Jack’s gasp of horror that my mind allows me to put it together. To identify the sleek spill of hair and the gray silk blouse, stained dark and wet.

  “Henna!” Jack cries, dropping to his knees. “Oh no, Henna!”

  42

  Tumble Tumble Fall

  I’m frozen in place, whether from terror or a morbid curiosity, I’m not sure, watching this awful scene unfold. With the lights out, the chaos in the hall is amplified. My mother sobbing, Jack shouting into his phone for help. The empty husk of the woman who’s assisted me with everything from finding a dress to the seating charts to the vows and all in between, the travel arrangements, the hassles, the concerns, the tiny meltdowns—everything I worried about: being good enough for Jack, marrying into the Compton family, finding time to paint while stressed about the wedding—Henna has assured, assuaged, comforted. From day one, Henna welcomed me with open arms, and now she is dead, twisted and broken on the thick wool runner.

  The light from the windows on the landing is a cloudy green, like looking through emeralds, and the beam of the flashlight tells the tale: Henna’s neck is broken; the blood on her beautiful silk shirt from a massive gash on her forehead. It’s looks like she fell down the stairs, she must have hit her head somewhere along the banister.

  Jack has put away his phone and is attempting to interrogate my mother, who in turn is answering incoherently between hiccups and sobs.

  “Did you hear anything? Any cries or calls? God, Trisha, stop trying to touch her. Quit...moving...”

  Mom is squirming and reeling, her hands covered in blood, disturbing the scene. She manages to get her feet crossed and immediately trips. One bloody hand hits the wall, leaving behind a perfect, gory handprint, black in the dim flashlight-lit corridor.

  So much blood.

  It is that handprint that makes me swing the flashlight in arcs around the scene. There, on the floor, opposite the melee, is a thick pewter candlestick. It has rolled against the baseboard. I can’t tell if there is blood on it or not. It could have fallen when Henna went down, it could have been knocked off by my mother’s gyrations. Or...

  No, she couldn’t have killed Henna. Could she have? Could she have been drunk and surprised in the darkness and reacted? No. No way. Henna fell down the stairs. One perfectly polished Jimmy Choo is canted sideways on the steps, next to the spilled-open notebook she used to keep all the details of our wedding intact.

  Finally shocked into action, I grab my mother by the shoulders.

  “Mom. Stop, right now. Come with me.” And to Jack: “Honey, she’s drunk. She’s useless like this. Let me get her out of here. We can talk to her when she sobers up.”

  “How dare you!” Mom cries. “I am not drunk. I haven’t had a drink of alcohol in five years.” She yanks her arm out of my hand and promptly falls face-first into the wall with a mighty thump.

  I sigh deeply, forcing back my own sobs. I have to get her out of here. She will be mortified when she sobers up, if she even remembers. I pray for a blackout to save her the embarrassment of this. I get a hand on her belt and tug. “It’s okay, Mom. Let’s go to your room. Right now.”

  Jack is on his cell phone again, this time talking to Tyler. “Ty? I need you. Henna’s fallen down the stairs. It’s bad.”

  His voice breaks, and I take a step toward him by instinct, but he waves me away. The pale wash of his face is disturbing. It doesn’t take any sort of intimacy to see he is rocked to the core.

  It’s bad. Henna won’t be vertical ever again, but maybe Jack isn’t used to death, doesn’t recognize it when he sees it. Maybe it took someone who’s caused it before to know Henna’s soul has long since left her body.
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  The hallway is long, the flashes of lightning and the bobbing yellow beam of my flashlight the only breaks in the oppressive darkness. Why does this place not have more windows? It is strangely musty; the heavy rain brought out the wet in the stone. A centuries-old fortress, the stone cliff of the island itself, areas of the Villa not always occupied, the staff not getting the rugs clean, who knows? I have the strange sense that if Ana was aware of the smell, she would be furious. Maybe Fatima isn’t as good at her job as we are led to believe.

  My mother has sagged against my shoulder and is crying quietly. Wrestling her down the long hall is like walking the gauntlet with a large sack of potatoes strapped to my side.

  “What did you drink, Mom?” I ask. “I didn’t see you have anything at brunch.”

  “I told you, I didn’t drink anything other than a cup of tea that pinched-face housekeeper brought me. Why are you being such a bitch, Claire? Oh my God, I smell disgusting.”

  She’s right, she does. The mustiness isn’t only the rain. I flash the light over her body and see why—she is covered in Henna’s blood. I gag convulsively, cover my mouth as if stifling a cough.

  My mother doesn’t notice. She puts on the fake little girl voice she uses to mock Harper and me when she is especially angry. “‘She’s drunk, Jack.’ I didn’t drink anything. How could you accuse me of something like that, after all I’ve been through? I swear, Claire, you always have to make a scene. Make it all about you.”

  “As it happens, it is about me, Mom. This is my wedding. You decided to get bombed and a woman is dead. So yeah, accuse me of making a scene.”

  “You never have understood how things work. How the world works. It’s not here to bend to your will. We aren’t your servants to order about as you like. Just because you’re marrying a man who has money, that doesn’t make you a princess.”

  Ah, here we go. We’ve tipped over into the nasty stage of the buzz. First sweet, then flirty, then just plain hateful and mean, that’s Mom’s trajectory when she drinks.

  I don’t bother arguing anymore. We’ve had variations on this fight for a decade. There is no winning. There is no rationalizing with Trisha when she is deep in the bottle.

  My nose is overwhelmed by the dank vegetal scent of blood. I have to get out of here, get a shower. “Do you have your key, Mom?”

  “Brian,” she says, mumbling now. “Money. So much money. This place...it’s...it’s...ostentatious. Gaudy. So tacky, all just to show off...”

  We’re close to her room now; the huge Palladian window is at the far end of the hall. Using my light, I see the hand-lettered names tacked to the doors atop the room’s usual definers—Bell Tolls, Blue Danube, Starry Night. The rooms in the guest wing are named for famous figures or the room’s creative inspiration. Supposedly, it started when an artist stayed in the room and declared it their own, but there’s no way to know if that’s verifiable. The truth of their pasts died with them; we’re only left with the legends.

  I feel a spike of sadness. Henna hand-lettered the personalized signs for the guest wing herself, the calligraphy elegant and precise. My flashlight turns the signs ivory as we walk down the hall. Katie Elderfield, Harper Hunter, ah, here it is—Trisha and Brian Reed.

  I prop my mother between the door jamb and my left shoulder and pound on the door. Oh please, Brian, don’t you be drunk, too. “Brian? It’s Claire. Are you in there?”

  “Brian, you in there?” my mother echoes with a tiny giggle, losing her balance as she reaches for the knob. “Briiiiiannnn... Mommy’s home.”

  Oh, ew. There are just some things you aren’t ever supposed to know about your parents.

  Brian opens the door, red hair standing on end as if he’s been buried face-down in a pillow. The light lilt of his Irish accent heavier than I’m used to. “What in the world?”

  I shove my mother into his arms. “She’s drunk.”

  “She’s covered in... Is that blood? Trisha? Honey? Where are you hurt? What happened?” To me: “I had no idea. I was beat after brunch, came up for a nap. She stayed downstairs, chatting. I am so sorry, Claire. I’ll get her straightened out. But where is she bleeding from?”

  “It’s not her blood. Get her cleaned up and keep her in here, okay?”

  Without waiting for an answer, I take off back toward my wing of the Villa.

  I stop briefly at Harper’s door, listening. I hear nothing, so I knock. She doesn’t answer. She must still be with Ana and Brice.

  Someone will need to tell Ana. Please let that not be me.

  As I hurry back, I realize something. Brian didn’t seem too shocked that Mom was wasted. Which means Harper’s insistence that it’s just been a couple of glasses here and there while they’ve been visiting Italy is probably not true.

  Mom’s drunk. Henna’s dead. What a mess. My God, what else can go wrong?

  I mentally smack myself as soon as the thought forms. Don’t curse yourself, you idiot. But now it’s too late; the thought is out there in the universe, ripe for the picking.

  I don’t realize I’ve taken the wrong hallway until I come to a staircase that is not the main route up into the Villa. Damn it. I turn and head back, but within minutes it’s clear that in my distraction, I’ve managed to get myself lost.

  I go to the closest window to get my bearings. The rain is hammering the house, the grounds, coming down so intensely I can hardly make out what’s below me.

  The sea. That’s all I can see, the whitecaps frothing against the rocks.

  “Shit.”

  The stairwell down is my only course. It must lead to the kitchens, must be the servants’ access to these floors.

  Should I try to go back, or should I try to go down? Surely this will lead somewhere I’m more familiar with. If I can find the foyer, or the kitchen, I’m golden.

  Decision made, I shine the flashlight on the steps and start down.

  43

  Surmising, Surprising, Sizing Things Up

  Henna’s body is on the floor between the bridal suite and the guest wing, just at the turn toward the staircase, the staircase that leads to the lower floors between the two halls. Malcolm and Gideon stand guard to make sure no one accidentally comes up or down the stairs, allowing Tyler to do an assessment without being interrupted.

  “I think she tripped down the stairs and cracked her head against the marble table,” Tyler says. “Broke her neck. God. Henna. Mom’s going to be devastated.”

  Considering the series of events over the past few days, Jack tries to look at this with altitude. He doubts Trisha is anything but an inconvenient scapegoat. No, if Henna’s been killed, this attack is personal. What stronger message could their unseen tormenter send? Taking out Henna, beloved, innocent Henna, means all bets are off.

  But if she hadn’t fallen, had been pushed, who could be capable of such a thing? The very thought makes him squirm. The pool of possible suspects can only be drawn from two groups: the staff, or the wedding guests.

  Where is Claire now? Damn it, what was he thinking, letting her go off alone?

  “I have to ask, Ty. Could Henna have been killed?”

  “What, like someone pushed her? Who would do that?”

  “I don’t know. The damn candlestick is covered in blood. Claire’s mom was clearly intoxicated. She could have been surprised by Henna coming down the stairs and, not thinking clearly, feeling threatened, reached out for the closest thing to keep herself safe.”

  “It is entirely possible, though not probable. These stairs are steep, and without the lights, and Henna wearing those damn heels... It’s not your fault, Jack. I’m sure this is just a terrible accident.”

  “God, I hope you’re right. I’m being paranoid, but with everything that’s been happening, it feels too coincidental for my liking.”

  “One of us needs to go tell Mom.”

  “Y
ou do it. I can’t bear to.”

  Tyler nods sympathetically, puts a hand on Jack’s arm. “Hang in there, okay? We’ll figure this out.”

  When he’s alone again, Jack looks at the area with fresh eyes. This part of the house is built in compass-driven architectural wings—east, north, and south. The west wing, two floors up, meanders back into the cliffside, meeting up with the original fortress, and is blocked off from the main areas of the house. It is accessible from the north wing through a back staircase originally built for servants, but no one ever goes there except the Italian restorers his father has hired to make the fortress rooms livable. With three sons, Brice hoped his brood would eventually expand, and wanted room for all the families to visit at once, and their families in the future.

  The three main spokes—east, south, and north—are all accessible through the grand staircase. None of these hallways have access to one another. They are full of furniture and the accumulated bric-a-brac of the Comptons’ life well-lived: framed movie posters from the thirties and forties Italian cinema compete with trophies from early hunts, moth-eaten fur and threadbare animal heads with fuzz covered antlers, soulless brown eyes staring reproachfully; marble tables with family heirlooms; wing chairs; shallow armoires—the original design of the Villa didn’t include closets, so the linens for each room are stored in the hallway armoires.

  Perhaps someone could have been hiding in the shadows, or inside one of the heavy walnut pieces, lying in wait for Henna.

  The thought of someone lingering, watching, chills him, and he shines his light up and down the carpeted hall. Ready for mayhem, braced for someone to spring from the nearest dark wood cupboard, Jack checks them, one after another, only to discover nothing more threatening than fresh sheets and towels, redolent of the cedar blocks stashed in the corners.