e’d had a plan. A detailed, meticulously thought-out plan that Campbell was apparently content to unilaterally amend at the last minute.
I was going to kill her.
Completely unbothered by my ire, she’d suggested that we should meet in person—at Lily’s parents’ place, where we wouldn’t be overheard.
“What in the name of God’s green earth are you doing?” I demanded when Lily and I arrived to find Campbell lying on her stomach on a pristine white lawn chair beside the pool.
Campbell replied without so much as bothering to roll over. “It feels like the first day of summer, doesn’t it?”
“It’s mid-April,” Lily said flatly.
“Regardless,” Campbell continued, “this place is practically abandoned, and I could hardly lay out by my pool. If my mama knew I was risking a sunburn today of all days, she would skin me alive.”
I could practically see my cousin counting backward from ten and reining in her temper. “You were supposed to send the pearls with Walker so that we could plant them in your father’s car for the police to find.”
“No.” Campbell finally turned over and sat up to face us. “Sadie-Grace was supposed to plant the pearls in my father’s precious sports car—along with a few other choice items—after Sawyer does her due diligence and makes some teeny tiny alterations to its engine.” She shrugged. “But things change.”
“I spent the morning being tortured with cuticle shears,” I told her humorlessly. “And now I’m seriously considering the merits of tying you up in the pool house.”
Campbell had the audacity to smile. We’d planned every aspect of this day, every minute detail, and she was sitting in a bathing suit smiling at my threats.
“Good times.” Campbell yawned and stood, stretching her legs with the grace of a predator cat. “Relax, girls. I nixed the original plan because I have a better one. The pearls are exactly where they’re supposed to be.”
Now I was the one counting to ten. “And where is that?”
Campbell removed her ponytail holder and shook her tresses down her back. “Why,” she said, “on the way to my father’s mistress.”
ntil we’ve sorted this out.” Lillian Taft was aggressively unimpressed as she repeated Mackie’s words back to him. “And what, pray tell, might this be?”
our father’s mistress?” I echoed what Campbell had just said. “Because this wasn’t enough of a soap opera already.”
Campbell shrugged. “I know my father, and that means that I am aware that no matter how well we plan this, there is a chance that he will lawyer or bribe or weasel his way out of any real consequences. If we want him to pay, we need a backup plan. We have to hit him where it hurts.”
“His reputation.” Lily was the one who filled in the gap.
“It’s not so much having a mistress,” Campbell said, “as it is being caught.”
I thought back to what Campbell had said when she’d explained to me just how damaging Secrets could be to Lily. Some things weren’t so much a matter of purity as discretion.
“And how are the police supposed to discover that your father’s mistress has the pearls?” I asked.
Campbell reached down and picked something up off the ground beside the lawn chair. She rose again and offered it to Lily.
“A camera,” my cousin stated. “With a telephoto lens.”
“You have a God-given talent for taking dirty pictures.” Campbell smiled sweetly at Lily. “How would you feel about putting that to good use?”
As much as I hated to admit it, I could see the logic behind Campbell’s alteration to our plan. If the story we wanted to push was that the senator had framed Nick for the purpose of preventing him from looking further into the hit and run, people were going to question why Sterling Ames hadn’t actually planted the pearls in Nick’s possession. That the senator had been holding on to the pearls because he could might have been the truth. But the idea that he’d stolen the pearls and given them to his mistress?
That was salacious.
Stupid and borderline implausible? Maybe. But at the end of the day, salacious sells.
“Would it have killed you to tell us about this part of your plan earlier?” I asked Campbell.
She shrugged. “I just found out about Leah last week.”
Leah. I registered the name, and my brain connected the dots. “His assistant?”
Leah-in-the-red-heels. Leah, who wasn’t more than a few years older than us.
A tiger doesn’t change its stripes.
“I have a massage in fifteen minutes.” Lily still hadn’t agreed to take compromising pictures of the senator’s mistress. She looked down at the camera. “Then makeup at two and hair at two thirty.”
“Then it’s fortunate, isn’t it,” Campbell replied pleasantly, “that I texted Leah from my father’s phone and asked her to meet him in their normal hotel room at noon. You didn’t hear it from me, but I deeply suspect she’ll be dishabille.” She smirked. “Except for the pearls.”
y hair and makeup appointments were right before Lily’s. After the fiasco on spa day, Aunt Olivia had decided that I should forgo the massage.
Campbell’s last-minute alteration to our plan had me on edge, but I just kept telling myself that it made sense. We wanted the senator arrested. We wanted the truth about the hit and run to come out. We wanted a conviction—for the accident or the theft. But if that proved a bridge too far, the biggest scandal we could possibly generate would have to do.
“Sit still, sweetie.” The man tying my hair back into God knows what kind of knot had issued the exact same order eight times. Each time, he dragged the endearment out a little bit longer.
I tried to turn to look at him, but he had a strong enough grip on my hair that the effort was futile. I sat still.
Right about now, Sterling Ames is arriving at the club.… In laying out the plan for today, a particular Symphony Ball tradition had proved most useful. Apparently, the one piece of wisdom that had been passed from one generation of Squires to the next was that when you were the parent, and it was your daughter’s turn to play Debutante—you did not want to stick around for the last few hours of preparations.
Although it wasn’t official, a large number of the fathers were, even as I sat here, gathering in the men’s grill at Northern Ridge for drinks.
“There.” The smile was audible in my hairdresser’s voice, but it wasn’t until he spun my chair sideways, angling my body toward the mirror, that I could see why. A makeup artist had already had her way with my face. My eyes looked larger, my lashes impossibly long. My hair had been swept back from my face, smoothed, curled, and piled on top of my head. A single tendril—closer to mahogany than the color of mud—hung down on each side, framing my cheekbones.
I looked like my mom. For the first time in months, I considered ending our silent standoff and giving her a call.
Afterward, I told myself.
What I said to the stylist was: “I’m going to get some air.”
Get some air, sabotage a car that cost as much as an Ivy League education—same difference. Campbell had made an alteration to our plan, but my role was largely unchanged.
Wearing jeans and a button-down shirt—a must, Lily had assured me, so that I could get dressed later without damaging my makeup or hair—might have been less conspicuous had the rest of me not been ball-ready. Whatever the makeup artist had put on my lips, I was fairly certain at this point that the color could withstand a nuclear bomb.
Sadie-Grace—who hadn’t had her makeup done yet and nonetheless looked ten times better than us mere humans ever would—met me behind the portico. The two of us might not have been the ideal people to blend into the background today, but it just so happened that I had an inside source.
One who used to be a valet.
Campbell had assured me that the senator would be driving his 602-horsepower Lamborghini Huracán. Nick had assured me that whenever one of the members broke out a car like that,
the valets knew better than to park it out front.
They parked it where they could all ogle it themselves.
Unfortunately for them, the sheer number of Debutante fathers descending on the men’s grill in hopes of escaping ball preparation meant that there wasn’t much time for ogling.
And that meant that Sadie-Grace and I—temporarily—had the car to ourselves.
It felt wrong to monkey with an engine that could have doubled as a work of art, but desperate times called for desperate measures. I was mostly through with what I needed to do when things went south. I heard the footsteps, but not in time to divest myself from the inner workings of the Lamborghini.
Someone’s here. Think of a cover story. I scrambled, but before I could say a word, the person who’d approached spoke.
“Uhhhh… hey, guys.”
I breathed an internal sigh of relief. This was bad—but it could have been much worse. “Hey, Boone,” I said, trying to act like I hadn’t just been caught red-handed.
“You look nice,” Boone told me. “And possibly felonious. Felony-filled?”
“Felonious,” Sadie-Grace said quickly. “I think. And she’s not. I’m not.” She paused for a breath—her first. “Hi.” Sadie-Grace turned the full force of her smile on Boone.
In the past nine months, the closest Boone Mason had gotten to asking Sadie-Grace out had been on Casino Night. She’d thrown up on his shoes.
“Hi back,” Boone said. There was a long pause, and then he leaned up against the car. “Need another lookout?”
Thank goodness, I thought, for inept romance.
Four more minutes, and I was done. Sadie-Grace and Boone were… otherwise occupied.
Really? I thought. Now? After all of the times he’d managed to flirt—badly—with every other girl in the near vicinity but couldn’t manage to do so with her and all the times she’d been completely oblivious to—or possibly anxious about—his interest, they were making out now?
I cleared my throat. Sadie-Grace’s left foot, which was tracing ecstatic little circles on the ground, caught Boone’s right one just as he attempted to shift his balance. One second the two of them were standing there, and the next, he was on the ground and bleeding from the eye.
“Eep!” Sadie-Grace turned to me. “I told you! I break boys!”
More footsteps. I ducked behind the car—and pulled the eep-ing Sadie-Grace to do the same. Boone, who I could only assume was still bleeding, climbed to his feet as one of the valets approached.
“I’m glad to see you are all taking care of my uncle’s car,” I heard him say. “But I have a lady friend coming to see it.”
I could practically hear him winking.
“Man-to-man, can you look the other way? I fully intend to work my magic, and I’m going to need a moment.”
Boone’s “moment” bought us time for me to hand him three notes—one for him, one for Walker, one for Nick.
“Don’t deliver them yet,” I said. “And don’t open yours.”
Boone eyed me carefully. “Dare I ask what kind of shenanigans are afoot?”
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” I said.
Sadie-Grace placed a chaste kiss on his cheek and a hand on his chest. “Neither would I.”
’m afraid, ma’am, that I have been unable to ascertain why the girls were arrested.” Mackie congratulated himself
on striking the perfect tone between respectful and deserving of respect. “I believe you will have to ask them yourself.”
To Mackie’s surprise, Lillian Taft responded to that statement by turning back to the four girls. “Care to enlighten me, children?”
he trunk of a Lamborghini Huracán was not what one would call spacious. “You’re sure you’ll be all right?” I asked Sadie-Grace.
She folded herself into a freakishly small ball, arching her neck at an angle that did not look, in any way, possible. “You know how I told you I was really good at tying bows and telling stories?”
I nodded.
“I am awesome at riding in trunks.”
As the minutes ticked down, I tried to get a rough count of the number of ways this could go wrong and the number of laws we’d already broken.
“Sadie-Grace in place?” Campbell came to stand beside me. Tonight’s ball was drawing close enough now that no one would question our presence at the venue—which, luckily for us, was Northern Ridge.
The only thing someone might question was why we weren’t sequestered inside, putting on our dresses.
“If she gets hurt…” I said.
“As long as you’ve done your job right, she won’t.” Not bothering to spare another word for me, Campbell withdrew her cell phone from her pocket.
Showtime.
“Daddy?” Campbell let her voice wobble. “I just talked to Walker. He’s so angry. I think he’s been drinking. He kept raving about going to the press.”
I could practically imagine the senator cursing on the other end of the line—but no. He was in the men’s grill. One wouldn’t want to cause a scene.
“I did what you told me to,” Campbell continued. “I said that he was mistaken about what happened that night. I told him that he was the one who…” She trailed off.
Just a silly little girl, easily cowed.
“I think Walker is going to do something stupid. Something big. He said he’s going back to where it all started.” Campbell managed an impressive sniffle, even as a wicked grin spread over her face. “The site of the crash.”
The senator came for his car, as planned. Campbell and I were in the ladies’ sitting room, as planned.
Lily arrived with my dress, and the three of us stripped. I was fairly certain no Debutantes had ever gotten gowned and gloved up so quickly.
We made certain we were seen on our way back through the club. Greer asked us if we’d seen Sadie-Grace. Once we’d told her we hadn’t, Campbell snagged a bottle of champagne. We ducked out of the building, giggling. If anyone came looking for us, the oh-so-discreet staff would mention, oh-so-discreetly, that we were simply off somewhere celebrating in advance of the ball.
Better to be seen breaking minor laws than suspected of something worse.
ackie turned expectantly toward the cell. Finally, he was going to get some answers.
The prim and proper one spoke up first. “Honestly, Mim,” she said. “We don’t know.”
Mackie stared at her. “You don’t know why you were arrested?” He tried not to sputter. “But what about the blackmail? The pearls? The indecent exposure…”
“Wait. Are they supposed to tell us what they’re arresting us for before they arrest us?” The beautiful, tear-prone heiress managed to sound both surprised and insulted.
“Now, see here…” Mackie started to say, but before he could get out any more than that, the door to the station opened.
Good grief, he thought. What now?
But to his utter and absolute relief, it wasn’t another teenager. It wasn’t another society titan.
It was O’Connell and Rodriguez.
looked down at my wrist, even though I was wearing white gloves and no watch. All three of us had left our phones back in the sitting room.
“She’s late,” Lily said. “Isn’t she?”
Sadie-Grace was supposed to be here by now. Her part in the plan was fairly straightforward. Once my “adjustments” to the engine kicked in and the senator did what Campbell had assured us he would do in response, Sadie-Grace just had to let herself out of the trunk, plant a certain something—that wasn’t the pearls—on the senator, do a little switcheroo, and…
“Here!” Sadie-Grace came bounding around the bend in the road. “I’m here!”
And there we were: four Debutantes on the side of the road, one mile from the action.
“You need to get dressed,” Campbell said. “Hurry.”
As she retrieved her dress from the spot in the woods where she’d left it, wrapped in plastic, Sadie-Grace caught us up.
Th
e senator had driven to meet Walker.
Walker wasn’t there.
The car wouldn’t start up again.
“And?” Campbell prompted as she forcibly turned Sadie-Grace around and zipped her.
“And,” Sadie-Grace said giddily, “he drank the scotch in the glove box!”
It was a strong, expensive scotch—strong enough to hide the taste of… other things. After a single drink, he would have been out of it. Per the plan, Sadie-Grace had popped out of the trunk, switched the laced scotch for a normal bottle, helped the senator to ingest a few more shots of that, and then left him with a parting gift. By the time anyone found him, his blood alcohol level alone would be more than enough to explain his… condition.
Campbell glanced over at me. “How long will he be out for?”
“Long enough.”
“How much time do you think we have until someone spots the car?”
Until we got closer to the ball, the road would see very little traffic, and—not surprisingly, given his desire to be discreet—the senator hadn’t exactly parked in plain view.
“If we’re lucky?” I said. “An hour. Maybe two.”
odriguez! O’Connell!” Mackie felt a wave of relief go through his body. “This is Lillian Taft.” He paused to let that sink in. Then, feeling vindictive, he crossed his arms over his chest. “She’d like to know why you arrested her granddaughters.”
Why, bless your heart, Mackie thought. Bless your precious little hearts.
Instead of the horror Mackie had expected to see on their faces, Rodriguez and O’Connell just shrugged.
“We didn’t arrest them,” Rodriguez said.
O’Connell cleared his throat. “They were in there when we got back from patrol.”
That announcement was met with the most terrifying silence Mackie had ever heard in his life. Lillian Taft looked from one police officer to the next to the next, her gaze finally landing on Mackie.
Little White Lies Page 27