Little White Lies

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “I hope you’re enjoying it up there,” he said abruptly. “With your grandmother.”

  I hadn’t told him where I’d been. My mom never mentioned her family, so I doubted that she’d told him, either. And that meant that the most likely source from which he’d come by my current location was my grandmother.

  “Did she pay you?” I asked. Rose garden heart-to-hearts aside, I still knew relatively little about Lillian Taft, but I did know that money wasn’t something she talked about. It was something she had—and something she used.

  “Not a word about any of this to Ellie, Sawyer.” That was all the reply I got from Trick, and all the confirmation I needed.

  “Is this the first time my grandmother’s paid you to hold my mother’s job?”

  No answer.

  “The second?”

  Still no answer. My mom had been underage when this man had let her rent the apartment overhead. He’d advanced her the first two months’ rent. He’d hired her to clean the place before she was legally old enough to tend bar.

  He’d saved her—saved us. I’d always believed he’d done so of his own volition. That he’d been fond of my mom and fonder of me.

  I looked away before I’d realized how badly I needed to. Unfortunately, this was a family business in a family town, and instead of having a moment to catch my breath, I caught sight of a whole slew of Trick’s grandsons behind the bar. Even the youngest was working tonight. Thad Anderson was only three years my senior.

  “You okay?” Lily appeared beside me.

  I nodded and turned away from the counter—and Thad.

  “You ever hustle someone at pool?” I asked Lily, but when I attempted to walk by her, she caught me by the elbow.

  “That boy behind the bar,” she said. “Who is he?”

  “His grandfather owns this place,” I said. I would have left it at that, but Lily had uttered a full five sentences about her relationship with Walker Ames earlier. I figured I owed her something in return. “His mom used to watch me after school, when my mom was working.”

  “You were… friends?” Lily asked cautiously.

  I shrugged. “I was more like an annoying little sister, until I got old enough to stay home alone.”

  And then I’d gotten older.

  “Also,” I added under my breath, “my freshman year, he had sex with some girl under the bleachers, and he let the entire school think it was me.”

  Lily’s eyes widened comically, then her face went blank. Dangerously, lethally blank. She turned back to the bar, probably to give him what I could only assume was a very sternly worded piece of her mind.

  This time, I caught her elbow. On the other side of the room, Boone appeared to be challenging a duo of drunk good old boys to a game of darts. Sadie-Grace stood to his side, blissfully unaware of the way that pretty much every male in the room was ogling her.

  “We should go,” I said.

  Lily stared at a point over my shoulder. She opened her mouth to reply, then closed it again. Finally, she managed to clear her throat. “Sawyer?”

  “Yes?”

  She nodded past me. “You really do have your mama’s cheekbones.”

  ily hung back and let me approach on my own. My mom’s hair was shorter than it had been when she’d left, her eyes brighter. The moment she saw me, she lit up the room.

  “Baby, you will not believe the couple months I’ve had.”

  No greeting, no surprise that I was here—just a smile wide enough to nearly break her face.

  “Right back at you,” I said, thinking about the couple months that I’d had.

  “Of that, we will not speak.” My mom paused, then rendered that statement null and void. “Tell me everything. Did you manage to have any fun? I hope you at least staged a protest in the middle of one of Lillian’s formal dinners. Burned a few bras?”

  “The 1960s called, Mom. They want their signature feminist protest back.”

  “Smart-ass.” My mom threw her arms around me. “I didn’t think you’d come back,” she whispered, breathing in the smell of my hair.

  For once in my life, I had no words. I wasn’t back. Not for good. “I’m…”

  “Too good for them,” my mom finished, finally letting loose of me. “You—”

  I knew the exact moment she spotted Lily, because she stopped midsentence.

  “I didn’t come alone.” I recovered my voice and glanced back at Lily. My cousin took that as her cue to come closer.

  “Olivia.” The name escaped my mom’s lips.

  “Mom,” I stated, well aware that there was more or less an entire herd of elephants in the room now. “This is Lily.”

  It only took my mom a second or two to recover. “Named after Lillian, I assume?”

  “Yes, ma’am. It’s nice to meet you.” Lily was nothing if not polite.

  My mom didn’t do polite. “Your mama know you’re slumming?”

  Lily Taft Easterling had probably never even heard the word slumming, but to her credit, she didn’t bat an eye. “What my mama doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

  My mom stared a second longer, then broke into a wide, unbridled smile. “It’s nice to meet you, Lily.”

  “Sawyer’s been showing us the town.” Lily couldn’t have refrained from making chitchat if she’d tried. “It’s lovely.”

  “It’s something,” my mom countered. “But it’s ours. Between you and me, it’s a good place to live a little.” She eyed Lily for a moment and then leaned forward and expertly mussed her hair. “Or a lot.”

  Lily clearly didn’t know how to respond to that, and all I could think was that this shouldn’t have been her first visit. I’d grown up less than an hour away from my mother’s family. It would have been so easy for them to come see us.

  A crash on the other side of the room snapped me out of that line of thinking. Boone. He was standing with his mouth open, two darts in his left hand, and his right hand frozen in a position that suggested he’d just thrown a third.

  A few feet away, a man in a ball cap was staring at a broken beer bottle on the table in front of him, sopping wet.

  “It is possible,” Boone said gamely, “that my aim leaves something to be desired.”

  The man in the ball cap put his hands flat on the table.

  “I should take care of this,” I told my mom. I managed to extract Boone from the situation at approximately the same time that Thad Anderson brought the man’s table another round of beers on the house.

  Crisis averted. Then, from behind me, I heard: “I don’t think that’s legal.” Sadie-Grace sounded disturbingly contemplative. “But I am very flexible.”

  “Time to go,” I told Lily.

  She pulled Sadie-Grace away from the men she’d been talking to. I grabbed Boone by the back of the neck, and once I’d deposited all three of them safely outside, I ducked back into The Holler.

  “Friends of yours?” my mom asked dryly.

  “More or less.” My reply surprised both of us. I wasn’t exactly known for my habit of making bosom buddies everywhere I went.

  “These friends of yours have names?” my mom asked.

  “Boone,” I said. “And Sadie-Grace.”

  “They have last names?”

  My gut said that question was significantly less casual than it sounded. “Boone Mason. Sadie-Grace Waters.”

  My mom recognized the names. I’d known she would. If she hadn’t already noticed that the picture she kept taped to the back of her dresser drawer was gone, she’d almost certainly be checking when she got home.

  “Sawyer, what are you doing?”

  I didn’t answer, because I didn’t have to.

  “You’re not back, are you?” my mom said quietly. “You’re not planning on staying. Here. With me.” She paused, then searched my hazel eyes for the answer she desperately wanted to hear. “If I told you to let this go, would you?”

  No. Even now, she wasn’t answering the questions I’d had my whole life. She wa
sn’t going to—ever.

  “I’ve never been very good at letting things go,” I said.

  “Sawyer?” Lily stuck her head back into the bar. My mom and I both turned to look at her, and Lily cleared her throat. “The limo’s here.”

  My mom took the words like a slap. “It’s just as well,” she said, her mouth tightening. “My break’s over.”

  I could see how this was going to pan out. I wasn’t here to stay. I couldn’t let this go, and she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—understand that.

  “Mom,” I said as she started to make her way to the bar.

  She pressed a fleeting kiss to the top of my head. “When you come to your senses, I’ll be here. Until then…” Her voice hardened. “Your limo and Lillian await.”

  he driver dropped Boone off first. He said good night to me and Lily, and then stammered unintelligibly in the general direction of Sadie-Grace. After the car door closed behind him, I raised an eyebrow at Sadie-Grace, trying to focus on the here and now—and not my mom’s parting shot.

  “What?” Sadie-Grace frowned. “Do I have something on my face?”

  I decided that subtle really wasn’t the way to go here. “Boone likes you.”

  Sadie-Grace wrapped the fingers on her right hand around her left. “Boys always like me. Or at least, they think they like me, until I’m… me.” She cleared her throat. “I have an unfortunate habit of breaking them.”

  “Breaking them?” I repeated.

  “As in…” Sadie-Grace ducked her head. “Physically. We try to do things, and then I break them.”

  I turned to Lily for a translation.

  “She is kind of… accident-prone,” my cousin said delicately.

  I made the executive decision that I did not want to ask any further questions. It was just as well, because an instant before the limo pulled away from the curb, the door opened again.

  Campbell slid in. Her face was pale, and she stared straight ahead, like the rest of us weren’t even there.

  “Commit any major crimes lately?” I asked.

  That jarred Campbell out of her uneasy reverie. She picked her team shirt up off of the limo floor, and a moment later, she was wearing it.

  Like she’d been here the whole time.

  Like whatever she’d been doing for the past five hours was nothing.

  “I take it we had fun tonight?” she chirped.

  Lily caught my eyes for the briefest moment. “You could say that.” She paused. “You seemed to particularly enjoy taking the evening into our own hands, frolicking through an abandoned lot in the sticks, and belly dancing at a dilapidated rural gas station.”

  Campbell turned her head forty degrees to the left, poised and ready to strike. “Did I?”

  I shrugged. “We may have gone off script.”

  Her green eyes caught the interior lights. “That wasn’t the deal.”

  “If you don’t want the footage that establishes you were a good forty-five minutes outside of town most of the evening…”

  “No.” Campbell forced a smile. “I’m sure what you have will be fine.”

  Lily hesitated for a second or two, then placed the camera in Campbell’s open palm. The flicker of relief I saw cross the senator’s daughter’s face was more concerning than any threat she’d issued in the past six weeks.

  “What are you going to do with it?” I asked. All of that precious footage, Campbell’s alibi for who knows what.

  “Exactly what our instructions say to do with it.” Campbell shimmied across the seat and lowered the privacy glass. “Excuse me, sir,” she said, molasses-sweet. “But I think we’re supposed to leave this with you.”

  Watching the glass go back up felt like watching a curtain fall—or a sword.

  “He’ll turn it in,” Campbell said. “The committee will review our video, and at our event next month, the winners of the scavenger hunt will be announced.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” I prompted. Lily’s tablet. The security footage.

  “After the next event,” Campbell promised. “As soon as the winners are announced, I’ll give you everything I have. You won’t hear a word from me about Secrets or anything else in the meantime.”

  That wasn’t the deal.

  Campbell’s gaze was intense. “I mean it, Sawyer. I won’t be a problem—for any of you—and at the masquerade next month, every trace of evidence I have is yours. You have my word.”

  “I, for one, find that extremely comforting,” Lily murmured, soft and sarcastic at once.

  Sadie-Grace’s reply was somewhat less elegant. “Uhhhh… guys?”

  I was still giving Campbell a hard look when Sadie-Grace repeated herself.

  “Guys,” Sadie-Grace repeated, her voice going up an octave. “Look.”

  I looked. The limo had just turned onto Camellia Court. ­Sadie-Grace’s house was on one side of the cul-de-sac; my ­grandmother’s was on the other, and down at the end, on the largest of the oversized lots, was the only house on the block set back from the street by a wrought-iron gate.

  Tonight, that gate was open. There were police cars in the ­driveway—three of them. Flashing blue and red lights drilled themselves into my brain with the strength of an ice pick—again and again and again.

  Lily whipped around to look at Campbell. “That’s your ­grandfather’s house.”

  I searched for any hint of weakness on Campbell’s face, any of the unsteadiness I’d seen when she’d climbed back into the car.

  All I saw was steel.

  “Oh, dear,” Campbell said, the very picture of concern. ­“Grandfather’s house. Whatever could have happened there?”

  spent the night lying in bed, wondering what in the hell we had been a party to. Three police cars wasn’t misdemeanor territory. Exactly what kind of felony—or felonies—had we aided and abetted Campbell in committing?

  When I finally heard Lillian stirring downstairs the next morning, I took that as my cue to throw in the towel on sleep. If my grandmother had heard anything about what had happened at the Ames place, I wanted to know.

  I joined her on the front porch for morning coffee. We were the only two people in this family who took ours black.

  “Something happened last night.” I took a long drink from my mug. “When we got home from the scavenger hunt, there were police cars at the Ames estate.”

  Lillian Taft was nothing if not unflappable. “I don’t suppose there was an ambulance,” she said.

  My heart stopped. It hadn’t occurred to me—not until just now—that Campbell might have hurt someone.

  She didn’t. She wouldn’t. Would she?

  “No ambulance,” I said out loud.

  “Pity,” my grandmother commented. “A heart attack or two might improve Davis’s disposition.”

  I choked on my coffee. “Lillian!”

  “Oh, pish, Sawyer. Don’t look at me like that. Before my morning coffee takes hold, I am allowed to make heart attack jokes about Davis Ames, so long as no one with manners is around to hear them.”

  Apparently, I didn’t qualify as a person with manners. I took that as a compliment.

  “What do you think happened?” I pressed my grandmother. “Three police cars. That seems like a lot.”

  I’d witnessed all-out bar brawls that had only merited one.

  “We don’t see much crime in this neighborhood.” Lillian lifted her mug to her face and inhaled. “Davis would expect an immediate and impressive response. The senile old coot probably misplaced his car keys and reported them stolen.”

  I should have found her dismissal of the situation comforting, but I was taken off guard, because for the first time in six weeks, I felt like I was talking to Lillian Taft, Actual Person, not the family matriarch—or even my mother’s mother.

  “My mom called yesterday.” This was not what I’d planned on saying. “She wanted to know where I was.” I paused. “I went to see her.”

  “I can’t imagine that she’s happy you’r
e here.” Lillian set her coffee down. “I’m sure that in her telling of things, I’m an absolute villain who never reached out, never asked to meet you even once.”

  You didn’t, I thought.

  “Quite frankly,” Lillian continued, perfectly content to carry on a one-sided conversation, “I’m appalled it’s taken this long for my daughter to inquire about your whereabouts and well-being.”

  “Of course you are,” I said. I’d chosen to come back here. That didn’t mean I had to take her side against my mom’s.

  Lillian cut me a look. “Have I done something to upset you, Sawyer? Something other than providing you food and shelter and opportunities most young women would die for?”

  I would never, in a thousand years, master that tone: the one that managed to sound mildly curious and gingerly self-deprecating and not at all critical, no matter how much criticism was being given.

  “I took Lily to The Holler last night.” When in doubt, go with blunt and unexpected.

  “Pardon me?”

  “The bar where my mom works. I took Lily there last night, and it appears as though someone is paying the owner to keep my mother employed.”

  Lillian resumed sipping her coffee. “Isn’t that odd?”

  “Lillian,” I said. No response. “Mim.”

  It was the first time I’d used Lily’s name for her. My perfectly poised, perfectly formidable grandmother blinked, her eyes watering. She raised a napkin to her lips and gave herself the amount of time it took to blot to gather her composure, as effectively and mercilessly as a commanding officer gathering her troops.

  “What would you like me to say, dear? That I committed the cardinal sin of watching out for my own flesh and blood? That I would have bought the entire establishment if I thought I could get away with it, just to make sure the two of you always had a home?”

  You’re the one who kicked her out, pregnant and scared and alone. You’re the reason we were there.

  “Now…” Lillian folded her hands in her lap. “Why don’t we talk about something a little more pleasant?” Not a question, not a request. “What do you think brought the police to our street?”