Little White Lies

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “You can’t just kick us out,” one objected. “Campbell—”

  I sat. Sadie-Grace sat. Campbell stood, let her towel drop to the ground, and turned to the other girls. “Go.” Campbell waved a hand at them when they didn’t move. She repeated the gesture with an aristocratic arch of her eyebrow.

  After a brief deer-in-headlights moment, the other Debutantes scattered. Campbell waited until the door had closed behind them before she turned back to us.

  “Feeling modest, are we?” she asked, eyeing our towels and seemingly unbothered that she was bare as the day she was born.

  “I make it a general rule not to get naked around people who have a history of blackmail,” I replied.

  “I got a call from Nick.” Campbell apparently wasn’t in the mood to play. “He said that the two of you talked.”

  “Did he mention I gave him the dog tag from your locker?”

  Campbell’s gaze darted toward Lily and Sadie-Grace.

  “Don’t mind us,” Lily said sweetly. “We’ll just be over here minding our own business and listening to every blessed word you say.”

  “Whatever you think you know…” Campbell said flatly, her eyes going from Lily’s back to mine. “Leave it. Nick doesn’t need your help.”

  “Because he has you?” I asked with a heavy dollop of sarcasm.

  Campbell didn’t reply. The faint hiss of steam entering the room punctuated the silence.

  “You know,” Lily said coyly, “I’ve been looking back at all of the submissions I got for Secrets.” She paused. “There was one in particular…”

  My cousin was better at this than I’d anticipated.

  “You’re looking a little flushed, Lillian.” Campbell stared her down. “I think your skin is a tad too delicate for the heat. And were I in your position, I wouldn’t go around talking about Secrets.”

  This could go on—and on and on and on. “Sadie-Grace,” I said, deciding to speed the process up, “would you like to hear a story?”

  “Telling stories is actually my second-greatest talent,” Sadie-Grace said seriously. “After bows.”

  I amended my suggestion. “How about I tell you a story, and then you can tell me how to improve it?”

  Sadie-Grace seemed delighted with the prospect. As I spun my tale, I kept my eyes on hers, waiting to feel Campbell’s shift to me. “Once upon a time, there was a hit and run.”

  Sadie-Grace gave me a look. “That is not a good way to start a story.”

  “So noted.” I continued, keeping the embellishments to a minimum. “The police were not overly invested in finding the perpetrator, so they never found him.” I paused. “Or her.”

  Lily kept her eyes locked on Campbell’s so that I didn’t have to.

  “At some point after the accident, a guilt-stricken individual submitted a secret to an anonymous blog.”

  Sadie-Grace raised a hand tentatively. “If this is a story, who’s the protagonist?”

  Good question.

  “We’re dealing with more of an antihero.” Now I was just shooting in the dark. “Someone who didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

  “Sadie-Grace is right.” Campbell had probably never said those words before in her life. “This is not a very compelling story.”

  “I heard you talking to Nick at Casino Night,” I shot back. When that didn’t get a reaction, I said the one thing I could say that would guarantee me a response.

  “Would now be a good time for a plot twist?” I asked Sadie-

  Grace.

  “It’s always a good time for a plot twist!”

  “Spoiler alert.” I stood and pivoted to face Campbell head-on. “This one involves my mom and your dad.”

  Actual, undisguised emotion flitted over Campbell’s even features. First confusion, then curiosity, and then…

  “I would never just come right out and say this, Sawyer, but your mama… well, you can tell she’s lived a hard life, can’t you? At this point, she’s a mechanical bull, and the senator? He’s partial to thoroughbreds.”

  It took me a second to get past the insult and realize that she thought that I was suggesting that her father was cheating with my mother now.

  “Twist within a twist,” I said. “My mother was seventeen at the time.”

  Campbell opened her mouth, but whatever retort she’d been constructing died on her tongue.

  “Is this the part where you ask me if your father was the only one she was sleeping with?” I asked innocently. “Because the answer to that question is yes.”

  Lily made a show of looking between the two of us. “I can see a resemblance.”

  “Lily!” Sadie-Grace was aghast. “Their auras don’t look alike at all.”

  Campbell recovered her voice, but the emotion in it was impossible for me to read. “Could you excuse us?”

  Us as in me and Campbell. Lily looked on the verge of refusing, but at the last second, she shot a long, knowing look at me—and then she tugged Sadie-Grace out the door.

  “So,” Campbell said. “You’ve somehow come to believe that my daddy is your father.”

  “Somehow has a name,” I clarified. “Its name is Charlotte You-Absolutely-Cannot-Become-Involved-With-My-Son-Because-It-Would-Be-Wrong Ames.”

  Campbell tilted her head to the side. “You’re saying that my mother told you that you’re my father’s bastard child?”

  When you put it like that, it did sound somewhat unlikely.

  “My mom confirmed it,” I said. “So, sis…” I took a step toward her. “Just between the two of us, I have to know: Which one of you was driving the car that night—you or Walker?”

  nce upon a time, there was a girl.” Campbell had the cadence of a storyteller, her tone lilting and the rhythm halfway to musical. “She had a heart of glass, and inside the glass, a heart of stone, and she knew better than to care about anyone.”

  I was fairly certain Sadie-Grace would have approved of this story—just as certain as I was that Campbell could have saved both of us a lot of trouble by cutting straight to the truth.

  “There was a ball one night—a wedding ball, and the girl with the heart of glass and stone-within-glass had a little too much to drink. Her brother had a little too much to drink.” She shrugged. “Everyone had a little too much to drink.”

  She dropped the affected style of speaking so abruptly that I wondered whether it had been for my benefit—or hers.

  “Let me guess,” I said, “the next part involves a horse-drawn ­carriage and some fairy-tale drunk driving.”

  “I don’t have to tell you any of this.” Campbell grabbed for her towel. That, more than the staccato bursts of pent-up emotion in her tone, told me that she was feeling vulnerable.

  “Were you driving the car?” I asked again. “Or was Walker?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “What about your father?” I asked. Our father, I corrected silently. “Did you call him after the two of you hit Colt? Did he take care of the problem?”

  Sterling Ames was the one pushing for an arrest in the theft of the pearls. He was the reason that Campbell had felt the need to warn a boy she had actively and intentionally framed.

  What were the chances that my biological father had pressured the authorities not to look into the hit and run too hard?

  “Daddy called someone, and that someone took care of everything.” Campbell flipped her hair over her shoulder, but it was hot enough in the sauna that some strands remained plastered to her cheeks, her shoulders, her neck. “That’s what he does, Sawyer. He makes calls. He doesn’t talk to me—or listen. He doesn’t see me, the way he sees Walker. But if I’m in trouble, that gets his attention. He likes taking charge and making things happen. Quite frankly, if what you say about his relationship with your mama is true, I’m surprised he hasn’t taken care of you.”

  Well, didn’t that sound ominous?

  I focused on what mattered. “You said that he doesn’t see you, the way he sees Walker, that he only pays at
tention when you’re in trouble. When you’re a problem.” I let those words hang in the air for an instant. “Were you the one driving that night?”

  “Does it matter?” Campbell asked. If she’d wanted to, she could have denied it. She could have cast the blame on her brother. If she’d had a heart of stone-within-glass, then she would have.

  She would have cared only about herself. But Campbell had told me once that she loved her brother.

  Everyone does.

  “It was Walker, wasn’t it?” I asked quietly. There was something in her expression, something vulnerable and raw beneath the sweat and the flush. “You’re protecting him.”

  Even though he was their father’s favorite. Even though he was the one their father looked at and saw.

  “It was me.” Campbell flashed her teeth at me. “Happy? Not Walker. Me.”

  “You’re lying.” I was possibly channeling television detectives a little too much. “You’re protecting him—just like you had to find out who was behind Secrets once you realized he’d confessed.”

  “Walker. Was. Not. Driving.” Campbell’s fist tightened around the towel in her hand. She turned her back to me and wrapped it taut around her body.

  “If Walker wasn’t driving,” I pressed, “then why exactly did he hop on the merry-go-round of self-destruction two days later?”

  “Because,” Campbell said, her voice low and fierce and strangely hollow, “he thinks that he was.”

  fter Mackie had acquired the boys’ driver’s licenses, it occurred to him to do the same for the girls. Holding all six in one hand, he retreated to the nearest computer station and ran all of them through the system.

  Sawyer Ann Taft, Lillian Taft Easterling, Campbell Caroline Ames, Sadie-Grace Waters. None of the girls’ names returned any hits. A little poking around online, however, revealed that what Nick Ryan had said earlier was entirely correct: The quartet in the holding cell was a perfect storm of social connections. Senator ­Sterling Ames. Oil magnate Charles Waters. Mackie stopped himself right there. He didn’t need a search engine to tell him that Lillian Taft was, among other things, the Magnolia County Police Department’s single largest donor.

  Glumly, Mackie turned his attention to the boys’ IDs. Nick Ryan returned multiple hits in the system—the juvie records were sealed, but the more recent one gave Mackie plenty to chew on.

  “Fifty-thousand-dollar pearls,” he murmured. His heart ticked up a beat. The girls mentioned pearls. He ran the last ID.

  Walker Ames.

  Mackie stared at the screen. A record had popped up, but every line in it—every single one, other than the name—was blank.

  alker wasn’t driving, but he thinks he was. I stared at Campbell.

  “You were driving.” My mind was spinning. “But Walker doesn’t know that. He thinks…” I was so horrified I could barely form the words. “You let him think that he’s the one who hit Colt?”

  No response from Campbell.

  “How does that even work?” I took one step and then another, until I was standing in front of Campbell instead of behind her. “You were both drunk, but he was too drunk to remember? Did you put his body in the driver’s seat? Or just lie to him later?”

  Campbell bolted. In a flash of white towel and tan skin, she was halfway out the door. I followed on her heels. All I could think was that Walker was my half-brother. He was the type of person who pulled a girl out onto the dance floor and invited her to insult him. He missed being a good guy. He chased people away, because deep down, he believed that he deserved to be alone.

  “How could you?” I started to say, but before I finished, Campbell stepped to the side. I was still going forward. Somehow, I ended up outside the door, and she ducked back in. Before I could react, she slammed the door to the sauna.

  I hadn’t been aware that it locked until I tried to get back in.

  “Campbell!” I pounded on the door with my fist. “Open this door!”

  Eventually resigning myself to the fact that she had no intention of doing so, I turned to make my way back toward the changing room. Whatever my next move is, it is not going to happen while I’m wearing literally nothing but a towel.

  Unfortunately, that thought proved to be prophetic. I made it half a step away from the sauna before I realized that when Campbell had slammed the door, she’d caught my towel. The edge was stuck between the door and the frame.

  I tugged, to no avail.

  I looked down the hallway—to the left, to the right—but there was no one there. No Lily, no Sadie-Grace, no spa employees.

  Whatever my next move is, I realized, setting my jaw, it’s not going to happen while I’m wearing nothing but a towel.

  Unless I wanted to stand here indefinitely, it was going to happen while I was wearing nothing at all.

  We shall not speak of the rest of Spa Day.

  Suffice to say, I eventually obtained my clothes, and I was also asked to leave the premises. That was how I ended up back at Lillian’s house several hours earlier than scheduled. I fit my key into the front door and tried to prepare myself for the Southern Inquisition.

  I eased the door open an inch or two, but realized an instant later that I needn’t have bothered. Aunt Olivia and Uncle J.D. were arguing too loudly to hear me.

  “Are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?” Aunt Olivia phrased the jab as a question.

  “You know everything, Olivia. You’d be the first one to remind me of that.” Uncle J.D. was easygoing. Uncle J.D. was a ­goofball—­

  90 percent John David and only 10 percent Lily. But right now, he sounded… not quite angry.

  Bitter.

  “Allow me to rephrase, dear: are there any financial matters that I should be aware of?”

  “Stay out of it, Liv.”

  “Don’t call me that.” Aunt Olivia’s tone wasn’t quite angry, either. Cold. “I called to check on the renovation timeline. It’s ridiculous that it’s taken them this long. Imagine my surprise when they said the project was halted in December.”

  “I’m going to work this out.…”

  “Halted for lack of funds.”

  She just mentioned money, I thought dumbly. Aunt Olivia doesn’t talk about money.

  I thought back to the auction—to the moment when Davis Ames had outbidden Uncle J.D. on the family pearls. The old man had mentioned something about rumors.

  Before Uncle J.D. could reply to Aunt Olivia’s accusation, before she could press him for an answer, a door slammed.

  “If you get a call from the neighbors,” I heard John David call out, “I want you to know that duck had been infected with the zombie virus, and he had it coming.”

  The argument in the kitchen evaporated in an instant.

  “Come in here,” Uncle J.D. called back, “and tell us about this zombie duck.”

  I heard John David sigh. “I might have scared him. And he might have pooped all over the neighbor’s car.”

  Deciding this was as much of a distraction as I was going to get, I opened and closed the door—loudly. “I’m home,” I called. Before anyone could reply, I darted for the stairs. Thank you, John David, patron saint of girls weathering the fallout of accidental nudity.

  I made it up a third of the grand staircase before I heard the distinct sound of a throat clearing behind me. I turned to see my grandmother standing at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Sawyer,” she said. “A word?”

  illian waited until she’d poured each of us a cup of coffee before she spoke.

  “I don’t want you worrying about your aunt and uncle.”

  “Okay.” I took a long drink of coffee to avoid saying more, and she led me out to the front porch. A bench swing hung there. ­Lillian sat and, with an arch of her eyebrow, commanded me to do the same.

  “Olivia has a way of landing on her feet. I should have worried less about her growing up.” Lillian took a sip of her drink. “And more about your mama.”

  Since Christmas, Lill
ian had only tried to bring up my mom once or twice.

  “I don’t intend to make the same mistake with you.”

  I realized then that this was an ambush. Or possibly an intervention. I wondered if my grandmother had been informed about “the streaking incident.”

  “You and Lily have obviously mended fences,” Lillian commented, making me think the answer to that question was no. “I’m glad to see it—but I also see you. You aren’t sleeping, Sawyer. You pace around this place like a cat in a cage. Something is bothering you. This would be an appropriate time for you to share what that something is.”

  Oh, you know. My biological father may or may not be pressuring the DA to arrest a boy who was framed by my devil of a half-sister, who also somehow convinced her brother—who tried to kiss me—that he was the one who put that other boy’s brother in a coma.

  “Things are fine,” I said.

  “Sawyer.” Lillian fixed me with a look. “Splendid is good, good is okay, and okay and fine are horrendous.”

  Not for the first time, I got the distinct feeling that Lillian would be rather lethal at poker. And chess.

  “What can you tell me about the Ames family?” I asked. I meant the question to distract her, but that didn’t keep me from leaning forward to hear the answer.

  “Why do you ask?” Lillian covered her lips with her coffee mug, just long enough to obscure whatever fleeting emotions my question might have provoked.

  I’d always believed in absolute honesty: Say what you mean, mean what you say, and don’t ask a question if you don’t want to know the answer.

  And then I became a Symphony Debutante.

  “I’ve been having some trouble with Campbell Ames.” I could have told her what my mother had told me six weeks earlier. I didn’t—and wasn’t even sure why. “And over Christmas, Walker tried his hardest to kiss me.”

  Lillian didn’t bat an eye at either of those statements. “Never trust an Ames boy,” she said. “They’re too handsome for their own good and too ambitious for anyone else’s.”

  Ambitious wasn’t exactly a word I would have used to describe Walker. The senator, on the other hand?