Never Tell a Lie

by Hallie Ephron

  The middle drawer of her bureau was ajar. She pulled it open. Her nightgowns had been put back upside down and on the wrong side of the drawer. She lifted one out, shook it, and sniffed. All she smelled was laundry detergent.

  She picked up the silver Victorian mirror she’d rescued from the wicker trunk. A disk of Tinker Bell light skittered across the ceiling. She looked at her own reflection. Her eyes revealed the exhaustion that she felt, and her hair was in tangles.

  She reached for the matching hairbrush. The burnished silver had a warm glow. A few strands of dark hair were caught in the bristles.

  Deep inhale, exhale. Ivy looked down at her belly. She was still feeling enormously pregnant, but something had changed. Shifted south.

  She placed her hands on her abdomen and could actually feel her top ribs. The baby must have dropped. That was supposed to happen now, near the end. No wonder she hadn’t been burping and feeling uncomfortably full. That explained why it felt as if the baby were sitting directly on her bladder.

  She went into the bathroom and peed. Out of habit she went into her office to check her e-mail. A wave of panic stopped her when she saw the empty surface of her desk. Had the police confiscated her computer?

  Then she remembered—her laptop was still in the car. Thank God for small miracles.

  Ivy went downstairs. David and Theo fell silent as she passed through the kitchen. She went out the side door and retrieved her briefcase from the trunk.

  Back in her office, she hauled out the laptop, plugged it in, and started it up. As usual there was a message from kamala@nextgen.com. Kamala was “the perfect mate” from one of Jody’s favorite episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

  Ivy opened the message.

  So? I know you don’t want me to call and ask, but anxious friend is dying to know.

  xx

  J

  It took a moment for Ivy to realize that Jody was asking about her doctor’s appointment. It felt like days ago, not just hours ago, that she’d been on Dr. Shapiro’s examining table and listened to the baby’s steady heartbeat.

  Ivy started a reply:

  Went fine. Confirmed, giving birth to a water buffalo. ETA April 1.

  She paused. Guess what? Melinda White disappeared, and her bloody clothes showed up on our front lawn.

  She couldn’t type those words. She’d see Jody tomorrow at the baby shower. With any luck by then the mystery of Melinda White’s disappearance would be resolved.

  Ivy lay in bed a short while later, listening to Theo’s and David’s voices floating up from downstairs. Drinking buddies, poker buddies, high-school quarterback and wide receiver—the two had shared adventures that went back to childhood. It sounded as if they were arguing.

  She forced her eyes shut. Other sounds seemed to swarm around her. A steady thrumming and then the thud of water running and being turned on and off. A squeak and a ratchet, like the sound of a wicker trunk lid being raised. Probably the maple tree outside her window, swaying in the wind. A wheezy inhale and exhale, and a barely audible thumpa-thump-thump. Then sounds like stealthy footsteps kicked her heart into high gear.

  A moment later she realized what it was. Water dripping.

  She got out of bed, padded to the bathroom, twisted the faucet shut, and left a washcloth over the drain to muffle the occasional drip. She returned to bed, rolled onto her side, and sandwiched her head between pillows. Behind closed eyelids she replayed the reassuring steady pistoning of the baby’s heart. A good, strong heartbeat, Dr. Shapiro had said.

  Her mind veered to when they’d come back to the house and found a police officer standing at the curb, how he’d disarmed and entrapped them. Her mind veered again, and she saw the figure standing by the open trunk, only now she wasn’t as sure that it hadn’t been her own reflection. Again her mind veered, and she saw the bicyclist with the camera phone pointed at their house.

  Ivy tried reciting Madeline, but picturing the story’s Miss Clavell in her long nun’s habit with a cross hanging over the front reminded her of her lost amulet.

  She shifted to her other side, the pillow cool against her cheek. Where could Melinda have gone? If Melinda had been crying and distraught when she left their house, she might not have noticed someone following her. Had her car been parked on their street since Sunday, or had it been driven away and returned later? Were the police talking to Melinda’s friends and co-workers? Were they trying to identify the father of her unborn child?

  More questions flooded Ivy’s mind. How the hell had Melinda’s maternity blouse found its way into the wicker trunk? How long would it take for the police to determine whether the stains on it were Melinda’s blood?

  Her brain would not shut down.

  Finally Ivy turned onto her back, stuffed the pillows under her head, reached for the remote, and turned on the TV. She flipped past cooking shows that made her sick to her stomach, past crime shows that on any other night she’d have been content to settle down to watch. Murder had lost its entertainment value.

  She whipped by a news broadcast, and then flipped back to it. There was a woman commentator, solemn-faced in a form-fitting pale blue suit, standing in front of their house. Ivy propped herself up on her elbows, now wide awake.

  “A Brush Hills woman remains missing at this hour. Melinda White was last seen Saturday morning at a yard sale at this home.” The camera panned sideways, showing their front door being guarded by a police officer.

  Ivy sat up and threw off the covers.

  “She is pregnant with her first child.” A photograph of a pudgy woman, all cheeks and chin and dark eyebrows, filled the screen. It was the same picture the police had shown them—Melinda in high school. “Anyone with information is urged to call this number.” A phone number appeared at the bottom of the screen.

  A moment later a cheery weatherman came on. “Well, we’re in for a period of unsettled weather….”

  No kidding.

  Ivy snapped the TV off. She hung her legs over the edge of the bed and pressed her fingertips against her eyes. Then she got up, crossed the upstairs hall, and went into her office. On the top shelf of the floor-to-ceiling bookcase, she found the Brush Hills High School 1993 yearbook. She opened to the back.

  There it was, among the last entries in the index: WHITE, MELINDA. Beside the name were five page numbers.

  Ivy turned to the first page listed. It had Melinda’s graduation picture, the same photo the police had shown her and the one Ivy had just seen on TV. She turned to the next entry. Melinda was part of a two-page who’s who—she’d been voted Friendliest. Ivy winced at the memory of the cruel joke that only Melinda hadn’t gotten.

  David was there, too, on the opposite page. Best Physique. He was giving the camera a hunky muscle-man pose while he ogled the abundantly endowed Marla Ward.

  Ivy wasn’t there at all. Smart, but not the smartest. On the track and the soccer teams, but no star athlete. Ivy had also written for the yearbook, started the school’s first chapter of Amnesty International, and painted scenery for Drama Club.

  David had been a jock, Ivy a geek, and Melinda an untouchable. In the petri dish of Brush Hills High, where cliques bred like colonies of toxic fungi, it was a near miracle that Ivy and David had ended up paired. In fact, it had been a total fluke.

  It was in the late fall of their senior year, and the boys scrimmaged on the field while the girls’ relay team practiced on the surrounding track. Ivy hadn’t seen David throw the pass, hadn’t seen the receiver running backward, backward, didn’t hear the shouted “Heads up!” The football hit her hard and square between the shoulder blades, literally knocking the wind out of her.

  Next thing she knew, she had a mouth full of dirt and there was David, the sun bright behind his head, bending over her. “Are you all right? Are you all right?”

  That night he’d called her on the phone. Three hours later they were still talking. Ivy sighed, remembering those sweet early days and the surprised looks they’d got
ten later when they’d first walked, hand in hand, through the school hallways.

  The next page with Melinda White’s picture was French Club, its main claim to fame an annual cheese party. There was Melinda in the front row, her hand over her mouth, hiding those teeth that she’d since gotten straightened.

  Ivy flipped to the next entry. Marching band. Melinda was at the end of the back row, wearing one of those feathered hats and a jacket with brass buttons and epaulets the size of flapjacks. Why, with everything Melinda didn’t have going for her, would she choose to play the tuba? She did seem to be, as Jody had suggested, a willing human sacrifice.

  Ivy turned back to Melinda’s graduation picture. Below it was her “senior will.” It began, “I, Melinda White, am so glad to be out of here.” Maybe not so clueless after all.

  Ivy read on:

  I leave a huge thank-you to Mr. Ball for being the best teacher ever and to Mrs. Markovich for all the times that I needed you and you were there. To the team, thanks for the memories.

  What team? Ivy wondered as she touched Melinda’s picture. Anger welled up inside her, and she had to tamp down the impulse to gouge her fingernail into that simpering, closed-mouth smile.

  “Where the hell are you?” Ivy whispered. Why couldn’t she have disappeared at someone else’s yard sale?

  Ivy slammed the book shut and turned off the light.

  She crossed the landing and entered the corner room they’d fixed up for the baby. She ran her hand across the wall’s cool surface, which she’d painted a cheery yellow, barely able to feel the ridge where she’d filled in and smoothed over an enormous crack in the plaster. She gazed up at the border of blue sailboats she’d stenciled along the ceiling. She walked to the front window, her palms on her belly, trying to calm herself and channel some semblance of serenity the baby’s way.

  The crowd outside was gone. So was Theo’s campaign sign. Maybe someone had taken it as a souvenir, or maybe Theo had removed it himself, not eager to have his name emblazoned front and center on the evening news with a story about a missing pregnant woman.

  Ivy shifted to the side window. Below, light glowed from the living room of the house next door. Mrs. Bindel sat, as she often did, in a wing chair pulled up to the window. She had a newspaper folded in her lap, and she sat very still, with her eyes closed and her head tipped forward, her mouth hanging open.

  “I’m the neighborhood burglar alarm,” Mrs. Bindel had once boasted to Ivy.

  Mrs. Bindel shifted in her chair, yawning. Then she leaned forward and seemed to stare straight up at Ivy.

  10

  By daybreak Ivy was exhausted. Cocooned in warm quilts as she was, the last thing she wanted to do was get out of bed. But there was no way around it. She had to pee. Again.

  She dragged a quilt to the bathroom with her. When she got back in bed, she fell into the kind of deep sleep that had eluded her all night. It was after nine by the time she woke up again.

  She went downstairs and peered out through the glass panel alongside the front door. The sidewalk and street looked deserted.

  On the kitchen counter, David had left their address book open to the page with Mr. Vlaskovic’s new address and phone number. He’d scrawled “3:00. Shower!” on the top sheet of a pad of paper that was balanced on her favorite coffee mug.

  Ivy dumped out the inch of coffee David had left in the brewer and dropped a slice of wheat bread into the toaster. The newspaper was on the kitchen table. There on the front page of the Metro section, above the fold, was Melinda’s picture and the headline PREGNANT WOMAN

  MISSING FROM BRUSH HILLS.

  Ivy scanned the column. Police had apparently made little progress in their search. At least there was no mention of Ivy or David.

  The toast popped, and Ivy poured herself a glass of milk. She sat at the table and continued reading on the jump page. According to the article, Melinda lived in an apartment in Brush Hills. More than a year ago, she’d switched careers, quitting her job as a lab tech at Neponset Hospital and going to work for a real estate agency in South Boston.

  Ivy took a bite of toast and forced herself to chew. Then she took a swallow of milk.

  Neponset Hospital. That was where she and David attended childbirth classes and where she’d be headed when Sprout signaled her readiness to enter the world. It was also where Ivy had suffered her last miscarriage.

  Summer, a year and a half ago. Week twenty, when all the books said the baby was officially viable and just when she’d let down her guard, she’d started cramping and spotting, then hemorrhaging. There had been so much pain, so much blood. David had stayed beside her, holding her hand, helpless and ashen-faced.

  Ivy pushed away the newspaper.

  That tiny baby had been in perfect health. Dr. Shapiro couldn’t explain it. Just one of those “bad things that happen to good people,” she’d said. Ivy knew that the platitude was meant to be comforting.

  Afterward Ivy had clung to David, unable to stop crying. For months she’d felt hollowed out, as if her shadow were going to work and coming home, going through life’s motions for her.

  Then she’d gotten pregnant again. For the past nine months, she’d felt as if she were walking along a precipice, sure that any moment she’d slip and fall into a gorge. She’d sworn David and Jody to secrecy and told no one else that she was pregnant until she could no longer button her coat, not really believing in it herself until her belly button popped out, like the timer on a roasting chicken.

  This one would be different. It had to be. She looked down and touched her belly, firm and hard.

  This baby girl was going to be born, full term and healthy.

  It was nearly noon when Mr. Vlaskovic returned Ivy’s call. He said he’d be happy to see her—was now convenient?

  She had just enough time to pay him a visit and then get to Rose Gardens for the baby shower at three.

  Ivy drove I-95 South, staying in the right-hand lane. About half the trees bordering the highway were bare; the remaining leaves had turned leathery brown with an occasional flash of red or yellow—reminders of what had been glorious fall foliage.

  She glanced down at the passenger seat, where she’d set directions she’d printed from MapQuest. The exit was a few miles farther along.

  She turned on the radio and switched to news, hoping to hear a bulletin, something like Missing pregnant Brush Hills woman turns up alive and well in Albuquerque. Instead she got an earful on another car bombing in Iraq and the struggling real estate market. When the commentator started a story on the latest DNA test for birth defects, she smacked the “off” button.

  Ivy slowed behind a flatbed truck carrying a large, bright yellow forklift. It was the kind David used to move boulders. Sitting on the forklift’s tines was a smaller forklift, large enough to haul around pallets of turf.

  The smaller forklift rattled precariously, jumping whenever the truck hit a bump in the road. It looked as if any moment that wobbly little forklift would tip over, maybe even fall from the truck.

  When Ivy pulled off the exit ramp, she was sobbing and laughing at the same time. Mama and baby forklifts? Pregnancy had addled her brain. What she was, she thought as she drove along the winding, tree-lined road, was a hormone-driven lunatic.

  She felt a jab, upward into her diaphragm. Even the baby agreed.

  She turned into a driveway marked by a large carved wooden plaque: OAK RIDGE ESTATES ASSISTED LIVING. Mr. Vlaskovic was waiting for her, sitting hunched in a massive wing chair in the lobby, the only man surrounded by a gaggle of women in pastel pantsuits who eyed Ivy with intense interest.

  He pushed himself to his feet. Blue veins ran beneath the mottled, nearly transparent flesh on the back of the hand he offered Ivy. His dress shirt and khaki trousers were so stiffly pressed that they could have stood up on their own.

  “My dear,” he said, giving her hand a strong squeeze. He looked as if he’d once been quite a tall man. Now, in order to look her in the eye, he had to t
urn his head to the side like an inquisitive stork.

  “Come,” he said with a courtly bow, and offered Ivy his elbow. She took it, and they strolled off. He glanced back at the seated women, who were nudging one another and whispering, and then he winked at Ivy.

  A woman shuffled toward them, pushing a walker, staring intently at her own knuckles. As she passed them, she looked up and her face opened in a smile. “Happy birthday, Paul. This is the big one.”

  Mr. Vlaskovic smiled and nodded. When they were out of earshot, he muttered, “Silly nonsense, birthdays. She thinks I’m turning eighty. It’s really eighty-six. Getting older, bah.” He held open a door, and Ivy moved past him into a sun-filled courtyard.

  He eased himself onto a bench, much the way Ivy’s grandmother used to set her prized porcelain teacup on a shelf in the china cabinet.

  “I see you are expecting,” he said, raising a thin gray eyebrow in the general direction of her stomach. “Any day, by the look of it.”

  She sat beside him. “I’m due on Thanksgiving,” Ivy said, surprising herself by admitting her real due date. Why not? Mr. Vlaskovic wouldn’t be pestering her as the time approached.

  “Just three weeks.” He pursed his lips and shook his head in wonder. “So? To what do I owe the pleasure of this unexpected visit? I distinctly remember selling the house to you as is, so I hope you have not come to ask me for a refund.”

  Ivy laughed. “Nothing like that. We love the house. It’s about some things that were left in a wicker trunk that our neighbor had in her garage. She said they belonged to your family?”

  “Wicker trunk,” Mr. Vlaskovic said, the furrows in his forehead deepening. “I do remember an old trunk that my father’s family brought over, but I have no idea what was inside. So now what? She wants to charge rent? You know, Mrs. Bindel drives a hard bargain.”

  “She certainly does,” Ivy said. “Actually, she was going to throw it out, but there were a few things inside”—Ivy opened the bag she’d brought with her—“that I thought might have some sentimental value to you or to other family members.” She took out the silver hairbrush, the mirror, the hair receiver, and the leather-bound diary and set them on the bench between them.