our father asked you to dance with Walker Ames.”
“I never said that he didn’t.” Victoria barely spared me a glance as she led me up the staircase and away from her father and the party preparations below. “I did tell you that Campbell’s invitation to the first White Glove event had nothing to do with the business between our families’ companies, and that was the truth. Now,” she continued, leading me into what I presumed to be her bedroom, “do you want to spend the next hour cross-examining me about Walker and my father’s grudge toward his family…” She nodded to her bed. “…or do you want to look at those?”
There were dozens of file folders, possibly hundreds, in neat little stacks.
“Dossiers,” Victoria informed me. “Our man is very…thorough.” She spoke like it was completely normal to have “a man” and refer to him as such, then gestured to the different piles of folders. “Those are the girls the White Gloves considered as Candidates but decided against. Next, we have the ones who made our initial pool, and finally, those”—she gestured to the last pile—“are the ones who’ve made it to the final round of selection.”
I reached for the folder on top of the last pile and flipped it open. Lily’s smiling picture stared back at me. Behind the picture, there was a report—a biographical sketch, notes on her parents, a summary of her dating history, which only included Walker. Behind the written summary, there were pictures—of Secrets on My Skin.
Once upon a time, that had been the biggest secret—and vulnerability—in Lily’s life.
“Your PI didn’t say anything about her father’s affair,” I commented, skimming the file.
Victoria shrugged. “Perhaps he’s not as thorough as we believed.”
I looked from Lily’s folder to the others. “You have this information on all of us?” I asked. “And everyone you considered?”
“Date of birth, family history, known social ties, past and current relationships, and potential…points of interest?” Victoria inclined her head. “Yes.”
Without another word to her, I sorted the folders in all three piles by date of birth. My mom had said that it took Ana a little longer than her to get pregnant, but by December, when my mom had told Lillian she was pregnant with me, Ana was expecting, too. Casting a wide net, that put the date of birth for her child at some point in time between late July and the first week in September.
Once I had pulled the dossiers for all the Candidates and Potentials who had been born in that window, I started reading. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Three of the dossiers noted that the subject had been adopted, but all three also included copies of the adoption paperwork.
“Has it occurred to you,” Victoria said as I scrutinized the three folders in question, “that Ana’s child might not know they were adopted? That there might not be paperwork?”
Given the situation with Sadie-Grace’s baby brother, that thought had crossed my mind.
“Has it occurred to you,” Victoria continued quietly, “that the baby might be Campbell?”
“What?” I said. But as I turned the question over in my head, it made sense. Davis Ames had given Ana money. According to his own recounting of events, he’d promised her more when she had the baby but had never heard from her again.
What if he was lying? What if he had a family all picked out? I turned back to the folders I’d set aside as being within the window and shuffled through the Candidates’ to find Campbell’s. What if that family was his own?
I tried to wrap my mind around the way that might have played out. Would Campbell’s father have told his wife the baby was his? Would Charlotte really have agreed to pass the baby off as her own?
It might explain some things about Campbell’s relationship with her mama.
I flipped open Campbell’s file. My birthday was in July. Lily’s was the last week in August. Campbell’s was September 1.
“When was Walker born?” I asked. He’d been a year ahead of Lily and Campbell in school.
“October,” Victoria answered. “Walker and Campbell are only eleven months apart.”
“So either their mother got pregnant when Walker was just a couple of months old or…”
“Or,” Victoria echoed. She let that sit with me for a minute and then executed an elegant shrug. “It’s a theory, but not the only one I’m working on. There’s one more folder you should read through before we join the rest of the White Gloves and Candidates in the guesthouse.” She nodded to her dresser. A single folder lay there.
“Why wasn’t this in with the others?” I asked.
“Because,” Victoria replied, “it’s not from a White Glove in your year. Ana’s baby would be getting ready to turn nineteen—they’re just as likely to be a sophomore as a freshman.” I opened the folder and saw a girl with dark blond hair and light brown eyes staring back at me. Then I saw the last name.
“Hope’s little sister,” Victoria told me. “Also Nessa’s girlfriend. Her name was Summer.”
“Was?” I asked.
Victoria got quiet for a moment, and I thought of the secret Hope had buried during her initiation process years before. The cancer came back.
“Summer joined the White Gloves last August,” Victoria told me. “She and Nessa started dating in December.” Victoria looked down at Summer’s picture—blond hair, brown eyes, just like Ana. “She died in March.”
ere are the rules.” Liv smiled, leaning into J.D. “First one to jump makes them. Last one down pays the price.”
Before anyone could process that statement, Liv was running, full blast, for the cliff’s edge. Charlotte watched her in the air. There was something beautiful about this version of Liv. Something wild.
Something that made Charlotte think Liv might have considered jumping, even if there hadn’t been water down below.
In the time it took that thought to register, J.D. and Julia had followed Liv’s lead. Thomas Mason went after Julia, and that left just three of them on the ledge.
Sterling and Charlotte—and between them, Trina.
“This is a stupid game,” Trina said.
“Do I need to throw you over?” Sterling asked her.
Last one down pays the price. Charlotte was wary enough of Liv’s ever-changing moods to fear she’d make good on that threat, but the alternative was leaving Sterling up here alone with the girl he’d picked up.
He knew I’d be here. He knew I’d be here, and he brought her anyway.
That thought buzzing through her brain—and her bones and her blood—Charlotte grabbed the whiskey bottle off the ground and took a swig. Then she walked to the edge.
Instead of jumping, she dove.
orty-five minutes before the party was scheduled to start, Victoria pried me away from the dossiers and escorted me down to the guesthouse. Because, of course, the Gutierrez lake estate had a guesthouse. When we opened the front, we were greeted by utter silence.
Then I heard an eep that was almost certainly Sadie-Grace.
Victoria was undaunted. “They must have brought out the scissors.”
That was not the most comforting thing I’d ever heard.
“Scissors,” I repeated. “Why would we need scissors?”
In answer, Victoria led me to a small—or at least, smaller, relative to the main house—living room. White Gloves and Candidates sat scattered around the room wearing nothing but their bras and panties.
As promised, one of the White Gloves held a pair of gleaming metal scissors.
“I may be off base here,” I said, “but I was under the impression that getting ready involved clothing.”
Victoria shrugged and shed her own dress. “This way, none of us will get hair on our clothes.”
Popular culture had led me to believe that “trust exercises” generally involved falling backward and allowing another person to catch you. But for the White Gloves, trust seemed to involve two key things: underwear and scissors.
“I’ll go first.” Campbell was awfully blas
é for someone whose auburn tresses were practically trademarked. She shook out her hair. “It’s getting a little unruly anyway.”
Campbell’s hair was many things, but unruly wasn’t one of them. She was wearing it wavy, not straight—this was the lake, after all—but the waves were salon-perfect, unlike my own hair, which had a habit of waving itself right into knots.
“Who wants to do the honors?” Campbell asked. Hope raised her hand and gave a wiggle of her fingertips. The scissors were passed to her.
“Any requests?” she asked Campbell, giving a snip or two of the blades.
Campbell smiled, undaunted. “Surprise me.”
The room held its collective breath as Hope began finger-combing Campbell’s hair, and then—snip.
A lock of auburn hair, an inch or so long, fell to the floor. More followed. The result brought the hair next to Campbell’s face up in a subtle frame.
“Not bad,” Hope commented before passing the scissors on to Nessa.
Nessa stared at them for a moment, running a finger along the edge.
“Do me next!” Sadie-Grace said, with the cheer of someone who had clearly never had a bad haircut in her life.
I wondered if it was possible to give Sadie-Grace a bad haircut. That question remained unanswered, because Nessa seemed unable to talk herself into doing more than cutting off a fraction.
My turn rolled around, and the topic turned to what should be done with my bangs, which had grown out just enough that they no longer quite merited the term.
“It’s not that your bangs are horrible per se,” Victoria told me. “It’s that whoever cut them did it too bluntly.”
Five minutes later, I was the proud (read: somewhat apathetic) possessor of a new side bang.
One by one, the Candidates let the White Gloves take their scissors to our hair, though two refused and a third burst into tears the second the scissors bit into her hair. None of the changes were major. Most weren’t even readily visible.
This wasn’t about hair or having the right look. This was about trust.
Lily went last. Victoria ended up with the scissors. I shot her a warning look. I had no idea what Victoria’s deal was with Walker—if she liked him, or if her father had ordered her to get close to him, or what—but regardless, she wasn’t exactly a person I trusted with Lily, especially in Lily’s current fragile state.
Victoria circled Lily, examining her. “Your hair is long,” she commented.
“It always has been,” Lily replied.
There was a pause, and then Victoria tilted her head to the side. “Is that what you want?”
I don’t know what I want anymore, I could hear Lily confessing. Or who.
Victoria stopped her pacing, standing directly in front of Lily. The two of them stared at each other, caught up in some kind of silent standoff.
Lily held out her hand, palm up, and after a second’s delay, Victoria handed over the scissors.
“It’s just hair,” Lily said, bringing the scissors up.
Before I could say a word, she’d grabbed a chunk of her blond hair and sheared it off at the chin.
’m out! Are you okay? I didn’t step on you too hard, did I? I tried not to step on you too hard.”
“I’m fine, Sadie-Grace. Now go.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“You have to. I have no idea where we are, but you need to be somewhere else when she gets back.”
“I could try to find help?”
“Yes. Just go.”
looked slowly from the long chunk of hair on the floor to Lily, who was still staring Victoria down.
“Hope,” Victoria said. “A little help here?”
Hope stepped forward and took the scissors from Lily’s hands.
“She’s good with hair,” I heard a White Glove whisper beside me. “Really good.”
As I watched Hope, with her appreciation for chaos, assessing the damage Lily had wreaked, I thought back to the picture in the dossier Campbell had shown me. To Summer.
I tried to imagine what it would feel like to be Hope, to have lost a sister.
Ten minutes later, Lily was sporting a chin-length bob.
“My work here is done,” Hope declared. She snipped the scissors in the air to accentuate the point.
I let myself look at Lily. The bob didn’t look bad at all. Mostly, it looked different, which I deeply suspected, for Lily, was the point.
As the lot of us got dressed again and headed for the main house—and the party—I thought back to the night at Arcadia, when Campbell and I had found three keys waiting for us at the valet stand. The White Gloves had already cut Lily once.
But that was before we’d caught her father with Ana in the woods. Before her family had fallen apart. Before she’d broken up with Walker and fearlessly taken a chunk out of her own hair.
Pick her, I thought. She needs this more than I do, more than Sadie-Grace, maybe even more than Campbell. Pick her.
Stepping into the foyer, I found myself looking automatically for Nick. Per our plan, he was supposed to meet me here. I would play the role of his escort. His date. We’d mingle. We’d chitchat.
We’d make sarcastic comments about the evils of mingling and chitchat.
But Nick was nowhere to be seen. Where is he? I tried and failed to push down the urge to get out my phone. The screen informed me that I had a missed call and a text: three words, which was practically a novel, considering Nick’s views on texting.
Something came up.
He didn’t say what that something was. It doesn’t matter, I told myself. I didn’t need him here to hold my hand.
To hold me.
The whole point of this party was creating an opportunity for Ana to show up and taking advantage of the opportunity to talk to her if she did. That would be easier without Nick along.
I’m glad something came up. I’d halfway convinced myself of that when my grandmother saw me from across the room. She must not have spotted Lily yet, because she eyed my side bang and crossed the open floor plan to talk to me.
“Sawyer, might I have a word?”
“Do I have a choice?” I asked.
Lillian smiled. “I’m not going to ask you about those bangs,” she said, taking my arm and leading me to a nearby alcove in a way that would have suggested to any onlookers that she was interested in doing nothing more than showing me the art hanging on the wall there. “And I’m certainly not going to ask you what your cousin did to her hair.”
So Lillian had seen Lily. Then why corner me?
“She’s not just my cousin,” I muttered under my breath. “And I think her hair looks good.”
My grandmother studied me for a moment. “Have I done something to upset you, Sawyer?”
“No.”
“You’ve been avoiding me.” The fact that Lillian hadn’t communicated that information through the use of a pleasant rhetorical question told me how much she was bothered by the observation.
She wasn’t wrong. I had been avoiding her—for the past two weeks.
“If this is about your mama…” Lillian started to say, but the look on my face seemed to bring her up short. “Or your aunt…” she modified. Then, taking in my expression, she paused. “Well, for heaven’s sakes, Sawyer, what is this about?”
I made a show of studying the painting in front of me. It was a landscape, and though it didn’t strike me as anything special, I had few doubts that the signature in the bottom right corner would have meant something to someone who knew art.
“I went to Two Arrows.”
I heard Lillian suck in a breath beside me. In public, that was the most that any revelation could cause her to do.
“Two Arrows is not a safe place for you to go.”
I wasn’t sure what I’d expected from Lillian, but that sentiment wasn’t it—though given the vibe I’d gotten from her sister and her gun-toting associates, maybe it should have been.
“You grew up there,” I pointed out.
“And you turned out fine.”
“That, I believe, is a matter of some debate.”
I turned to look at Lillian. She hadn’t asked me if I’d met her sister. I knew her well enough to deeply suspect that she wasn’t going to.
“You named my mom after her,” I said. “Ellen, Eleanor—but both called Ellie.”
Lillian was quiet for a moment, and I flashed back to the two of us standing beside her husband’s grave, weeks before.
“She was the strong one, growing up,” Lillian said. To the outside observer, her expression wouldn’t have looked like it changed at all, but I felt a shift in her. I heard it in her voice. “There were days when she didn’t eat so I could.”
Lillian hadn’t said her sister’s name—not Ellen, not Ellie. She hadn’t commented on the fact that she’d named my mother after someone from whom she was estranged.
“Your sister went hungry for you,” I said, finding it hard to believe that there had ever been a time in my grandmother’s life when she hadn’t considered herself strong. “And you left town and never looked back.”
That got me another almost inaudible intake of air, subtler this time, more controlled.
“I would have brought her with me,” my grandmother said. “I tried. Did she tell you that?”
Ellen hadn’t, but she had said that she didn’t want anyone’s charity—least of all her twin’s. “She didn’t want to come with you,” I surmised.
“She didn’t want to want to, Sawyer. She always hated when I talked about leaving that town, and she hated it when I left. She hated your grandfather. Edward Alcott Taft. Even the sound of his name set her to gnashing her teeth. She hated who I was when I was with him. There are days I’m not sure what she resented more—that I left, or that I offered to pull her out.”
“She doesn’t hate Two Arrows,” I said.
Lillian hesitated. “She should.”
My grandmother had told me, more than once, that I didn’t know what it was really like to be poor. Having been to the town where she’d grown up, I wondered if poverty was the only reason that Lillian had wanted to leave.
Deadly Little Scandals Page 18