“Daddy would never want me to go public with this nonsense,” Campbell admitted, then turned wide, innocent eyes on me, the edges of her lips flicking upward like a serpent’s tongue. “But if the security footage leaked to the media, through no fault of my own…” She gave a helpless little shrug. “The senator would want to get out in front of the scandal, control the narrative. I’m sure the police would understand why I was reluctant to report my friends. Fragile young flowers such as myself are just so vulnerable to bullying from their peers.”
Campbell was about as fragile as a cement truck. She was also, I suspected, fully capable of leaking the footage herself and pretending to be horrified that it had come out.
“You’d get the lion’s share of the blame, you know,” Campbell said casually. “Not perfect Lily. No matter what she says, everyone—your family included—will think that the cousin with the unfortunate background was the ringleader of the whole kidnapping fiasco.”
If the police did get involved, if the blame fell on me—per the terms of Lillian’s contract, I could kiss my college fund good-bye.
“Let them think what they want,” I retorted. “I can handle it.” I hoped that Campbell could hear the promise in my tone: I can handle you.
Undeterred, she turned her attention to the party below. Lily was standing near the edge of a mahogany table, a drink held in a death grip in her right hand.
“She’s going to do it,” Campbell told me. “If I say dance, she’ll dance. She might need a little more liquid courage first, but she won’t risk that security footage coming out, and she definitely won’t risk me getting bored enough to upload a few uncropped photos to Secrets.”
I gritted my teeth. “Why are you doing this?”
“Petty revenge?” Campbell suggested pertly. “You do remember the whole kidnapping thing, right?”
“The blackmail predated the kidnapping.” I gave her a hard look. “Seriously—what did Lily ever do to you?”
“Who says she did anything?” Campbell pushed her ponytail back over her shoulder. “Maybe I’m just evil incarnate.”
I stared at her for a moment. “Maybe you feel helpless more often than you’d like to admit.”
I might not have known her, but I knew that people didn’t play games like this one because they already felt powerful.
Campbell stared down at Lily below, her expression impossible to decipher. “I love my brother,” she said. “Everyone does. They always have.”
Given the way Campbell had reacted earlier when I’d mentioned her parents, I was betting everyone started with the senator and his wife.
“But once upon a time…” Campbell’s gaze flicked back toward mine. “Lily was my friend.”
I took that to mean that Campbell hadn’t been a fan of the romance between my cousin and her brother. She was supposed to choose you.
Down below, Lily sipped at the drink in her hand. Again. And again. And again.
“I wonder how Walker would react if I released those pictures,” Campbell mused, signaling that this little heart-to-heart was over.
“If you even think about posting a picture with her face in it…” I said lowly.
“You’ll what?” Campbell returned. “Precious, proper little Lily made her own bed the moment she launched that site. I’ll let you in on a little secret, Sawyer: What girls like us do behind closed doors? As long as the person we do it with keeps his mouth shut, that’s our business. But you don’t flaunt it. You don’t do a striptease in the middle of a country club, you don’t lose it under the high school bleachers, and you do not give the gossiping mamas anything to talk about.”
The mention of bleachers hit me harder than it should have.
“People talk about you all the time,” I countered. Walker had told me that much.
“They talk because I want them to.” Campbell gave a graceful little shrug of her shoulders. “And I don’t give them anything quite so… intimate… to talk about.”
“It’s not like Secrets is pornographic,” I shot back. “The important bits are covered.”
“Barely,” Campbell said cheerfully.
“It’s PG-13,” I insisted. “Not R. Even if you do release the photos, people will find something else to gossip about soon enough.”
“You think so?”
Down on the first floor, Lily had finally finished her drink. She glanced up and caught the two of us looking down at her. Campbell lifted a hand to wave, one finger at a time.
“Dance,” she mouthed.
Lily bowed her head for a moment, and then she carefully hauled herself up onto the table. Slowly, the people around her caught on to the fact that something was happening and turned to look.
Lily moved her hips from one side to the other. Her hands raised themselves robotically over her head.
Campbell watched with no small amount of self-satisfaction. “There are two kinds of scandals, Sawyer.” Down below, Lily had fallen into the rhythm of the music, and the crowd around her had grown substantially. “Those that ruin you, and those that don’t. And if you think the difference between the two is in what someone does and not who does it, you’re even more naive than I thought.”
Even from a distance, I could see the flush on Lily’s cheeks when a boy hopped up on the table to dance beside her. She stepped back, and Campbell started clapping.
Loudly.
“What do you want, Campbell?” I bit out as other partygoers joined in on the applause and someone yelled for Lily to take it off.
“Right now?” Campbell turned her back on the scene below and walked toward me. “I want to enjoy the party, knowing that you and Sadie-Grace and your darling cousin will be handling the cleanup. I also want you to bring me the key you stole from my locker at the club.”
She brushed past me, but turned back to speak over her shoulder.
“After that?” she said. “I’ll let you know.”
ackie had spent the past ten minutes searching for a record of the girls’ arrest. Anything was better than trying to talk to the gown-clad foursome. He wasn’t at all sure what the quartet had done, but he was starting to think that the only thing they weren’t capable of was giving him a straight answer.
Blackmail. Theft. At one point, something had been strongly implied about indecent exposure.…
“Excuse me.”
Mackie was grateful to even hear a male voice. It took him a moment to realize it belonged to a boy not much older than his white-gloved perps. “Can I help you?” Mackie straightened his spine as he asked the question. I am in charge here, he thought. I am an officer of the law!
“That depends,” the boy replied, leaning his elbows on the counter. “Do you know where I can find Sawyer Taft?”
f you’d been abducted by aliens, you’d tell me, right?”
My mom’s greeting almost made me smile—almost, because I had deep and abiding suspicions that unlike the smattering of communication I’d had with her since she’d taken off, this conversation was going to involve the kind of questions I couldn’t dodge.
“It would probably depend on the circumstances surrounding my abduction,” I replied, pulling my car—a beater I’d refuse to let Lillian replace—into a parking spot in front of a large white building. “How likely I thought I was to be believed,” I elaborated. “Whether or not the aliens in question had a taste for human flesh…”
I’d clearly spent way too much time around John David in the past month.
“Sawyer.” My mom’s voice was uncharacteristically serious. “Where are you?”
I turned the question back around on her. “Where are you?”
“I’m at home,” my mom replied. “Our home—and all of your stuff is gone.”
“If I’d been abducted by aliens, it’s highly unlikely that they would have allowed me to pack first.”
I could practically see my mom rolling her eyes. “I would like to remind you that I have a Mom Voice, missy. I don’t use it often, but I can and I w
ill.”
I’d missed her. Why was it that I never let myself register that fact until she came back?
“I went by the garage,” my mom continued. “Big Jim said you don’t work there anymore.”
“I haven’t worked there for two months.” If she hadn’t just spent two months who-knows-where with a guy she’d met at a bar, she would have known that. “I got a better offer.”
The term better was a stretch. It had been a little over six weeks since I’d come to live with my grandmother. Six weeks of playing debutante. A full month since Campbell had stopped lying low and started lording her power over us at every turn.
“What kind of offer?” my mom asked suspiciously.
I’d known from the moment I’d signed Lillian’s contract that I’d have to come clean eventually. As absentminded as my mom could be—as absent as she’d sometimes been since I turned eighteen—there was no way I could hide my location for nine months.
I eased into the truth as best I could. “I found a way to pay for college.” That, at least, would make my mom happy. “A nine-month contract. After this, I’m set.”
“Please tell me what you’re doing is legal.”
I let out a long breath. “Lillian’s lawyers assure me it is.”
One second of silence. Two seconds. Three…
“Sawyer, please tell me that your pimp’s name is Lillian.”
“Mom!”
“You’re working for my mother?” Ellie Taft was known for going with the flow. She’d never sounded as much like Lillian as she did right now.
“Not working, exactly,” I said. “More like… debutante-ing.”
“You’re a Deb.” My mom paused. “Your grandmother is paying you to…”
She trailed off in horror.
“Pretty much,” I said.
The rest of the conversation went about like I’d imagined. My mother could not fathom why I would have taken Lillian up on her deal, and also, did I not realize that my mother’s mother was manipulation personified and wrapped in a St. John suit?
“It really hasn’t been that bad,” I said. Aside from the blackmail, obligatory brunches, and lack of progress on identifying my father.
“You’re not doing this for the money, Sawyer. Don’t try to tell me that you are.”
The door to the large white building opened, and a familiar figure stepped out.
“I have to go,” I told my mother. “And you have to make your way back to The Holler and beg for your job back. The apartment’s paid through next month. Nonperishable groceries are in the cabinet.”
“As your mom, it’s my sworn duty to tell you that this is a bad idea.”
On the bright side, I replied silently, it’s not the worst idea I’ve had lately.
After I hung up, I slipped out of the car and approached the man who was waiting for me.
“Senator.” I offered my hand.
He took it. “Miss Taft,” he said. “Welcome to the campaign.”
Given that Senator Ames was only halfway through his term, it wasn’t much of a campaign yet, but six weeks without answers—and four weeks under Campbell’s thumb—was my limit. I wasn’t wired to sit around and do nothing. When I’d floated the idea of getting a job by Lillian, she’d offered me two options: Uncle J.D.’s investment firm and volunteering.
It wasn’t my fault that when my grandmother uttered the word volunteering, she thought Junior League, and when I heard it, I thought… access.
The day after the party at Katharine Riley’s house, I’d surrendered the key we’d stolen from Campbell’s locker to her possession. I’d also made a copy. The fact that she’d wanted it back was proof enough that there was leverage to be had, and the sooner we found it, the better.
Meanwhile, Boone had proven to be a pretty sorry detective. All he’d been able to tell me about his uncle, the senator, was that nineteen years ago, Sterling Ames had been a law student and already married to Walker and Campbell’s mother. In fact, based on the intel I’d gathered in the past few weeks, all four of the men on my list had been married at the time of my conception.
In other words: No matter how this shook out, my sire was a cheating cheater who cheated.
“Walker will show you the ropes.” The senator, who’d been giving me a tour of his office space, got my attention the moment he said his son’s name. My master plan in coming here wasn’t what one would call defined. I wanted to get a bead on Sterling Ames. I wanted to figure out what kind of man he was, and if I found something that let me counteract Campbell’s increasingly ridiculous demands—that we hand-wash her car twice a week, that Lily decline a nomination for student council president, that Sadie-Grace stop using conditioner of any kind in her hair—all the better.
Campbell’s brother was an unexpected complication.
“Welcome to the trenches, Sawyer Taft.” There was an edge of humor—or something like it—in Walker’s tone. “I had no idea you were politically inclined.”
Allow me to translate, I thought. You weren’t expecting to see me here, and you don’t particularly want to be here yourself. I was willing to bet big money that when Walker had dropped out of college, the senator hadn’t given him much choice about “volunteering.”
“How are you at fetching coffee?” Walker asked me. “Personally, I consider it my calling in life.”
“Walker,” his father scolded fondly. I thought back to what Campbell had said about everyone loving her brother, but didn’t get the chance to ruminate on the relationship between father and son, because Walker was standing directly in front of his dad’s office, and inside that office, nearly obscured from my line of sight, was a safe.
The kind you opened with a key.
awyer, I could hug you.” Standing on Lillian’s back porch, where I’d pulled my cousin to talk the moment she and Sadie-Grace had arrived after school, Lily seemed on the verge of losing her characteristic composure.
“Let’s not get carried away here,” I replied. “We don’t know that the key from Campbell’s locker fits her father’s safe. Ooof.” I had to fight to keep my balance. Unlike Lily, Sadie-Grace didn’t threaten hugs. She hugged with a vengeance.
“You have no idea what school’s been like,” Sadie-Grace whispered fiercely. “Campbell makes me wear plaid.”
“She makes me wear ponytails,” Lily added gravely.
“I feel for you both,” I replied dryly. Right now, I really didn’t think that Campbell playing fashion dictator was anyone’s biggest problem. The fact that she could still out Lily as the person behind the now-defunct Secrets on My Skin and leak the footage of the kidnapping?
That was a much bigger issue—for all three of us.
“With a little luck,” I commented, “Campbell will be off all of our backs soon.”
“Will I?” a voice asked behind me. Campbell loved to make an entrance, and for someone who preferred heels—the taller, the better—she walked with surprisingly light steps as she sauntered out the back door.
In all likelihood, Aunt Olivia had let her in and sent her back.
I turned to face the enemy head-on and found, to my surprise, that Campbell wasn’t wearing heels. She was wearing tennis shoes, patterned leggings, and a long-sleeved, slightly oversized T-shirt. In her hands, she held a large cardboard box.
“Help yourselves, ladies.” Campbell dropped the box on the porch. Sadie-Grace peered inside. Based on the expression on her face, I deduced that she was likely expecting a box of snakes.
“Shirts,” Sadie-Grace said, frowning and perplexed. “Like yours.”
“Presents,” Campbell declared. “For my favorite fellow Debs.” Campbell gave a little spin so we could take in the 360 view. Her name was written on the back of the shirt in block letters, with the number 07 underneath. On the front, written in script, were the words Symphony Ball.
“There are ball caps beneath the shirts,” Campbell continued blithely. “I hope y’all don’t mind that I took lucky number seven.”
She was acting like we were actually friends, like she hadn’t spent the past month blackmailing the whole lot of us.
“You made us shirts,” I said slowly. In the grand scheme of Campbell’s modus operandi, making us personalized clothing seemed remarkably undastardly.
“It is possible,” Campbell allowed, “that I am a wee bit competitive. I like to win, and I like to be color-coordinated when I do it. Try on the leggings. I swear, they’re like butter on your legs.”
There was waiting for the guillotine to fall, and then there was hearing the eek, eek, eek of the blade creaking downward. Campbell being nice was downright terrifying.
We tried the leggings on. They were made of the softest fabric I’d ever touched.
“I told you,” Campbell practically purred. “Heavenly.”
I felt like I’d fallen into the Twilight Zone. “Far be it from me to ask questions,” I said, “but what, exactly, are we meant to be winning?”
“Far be it from me to provide answers,” a male voice intoned, “but I know this one!”
We seriously needed to put a bell on the door—and Aunt Olivia seriously needed to stop letting people into Lillian’s house and sending them back.
“Boone,” I greeted.
“Skeptical one,” he returned, bowing his head slightly. He shot Lily a brief smile and then tripped over his own two feet when he attempted to do the same with Sadie-Grace.
It had not been difficult, over the past few weeks, to ascertain that Boone had a crush. Sadie-Grace was the only one he didn’t try to flirt with, and she was the only one who didn’t realize how head over heels for her he was.
“Tonight is the Symphony Ball scavenger hunt.” Boone tried to recover his cool, a task which would have been monumentally easier if he’d ever had it. “Teams of five, must be coed.” He gestured to the four of us. “Co.” Then to himself. “Ed.”
Campbell reached down into the box and pulled out a T-shirt with her cousin’s name on it. “I decided you didn’t need leggings,” she told him.
“Always the bridesmaid,” Boone sighed. “Never the bride.”
Little White Lies Page 11