Deadly Little Scandals

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  It was a warning of all the ways this thing between us could go south.

  I made myself turn back to the shore, take one step away from him and then another.

  “You told me once,” Nick said quietly, “that after your grandfather died, your mother started wearing all black, and your aunt ran away.”

  That was just random enough that I found myself able to stop and reply. “For almost a year.”

  Nick strode toward me. I could hear him walking, but I didn’t turn back around until he stopped, right behind me.

  “You think you’re like your mother,” he told me. “And that Lily’s like hers, but you’ve got that backward. She’s the one who turns things in on herself. You’re the one who runs.”

  The tone in his voice was mild, but the intent in those words was not. You’re the one who runs.

  “No, I’m not,” I said sharply. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  I was still living with my mother’s family, even though things had pretty much gone to hell. I was here—with him—now.

  I’m not running. I’m not scared.

  As if in response to the words I’d just thought, he brought his hands to my face, then ran them through my hair. He kissed me, rough this time, in a way that banished every other thought from my mind. Count to seven. His touch turned gentle. His lips pulled away from mine and, moments later, brushed lightly against them again.

  And then he spoke. “You’re so afraid of being left, you live life with one foot out the door. That’s why you won’t call Lily on the way she’s been acting, even though you’re worried about her. Hell, that’s why you wanted to find Ana’s baby in the first place. Pregnancy Pact Baby Number Two is your backup plan. Backup family.”

  “That’s not true,” I said.

  “Really?” Nick brushed his lips lightly over mine again. “Then why won’t you tell Lily how worried you are?” He looked at me in a way that left me no choice about looking back. “Why were you so quick to believe that Jessi was something other than my sister just now?”

  “I’m not having this conversation with you.” I pressed my lips to his. He kissed me back but only for a moment.

  “What if I told you that I don’t want you to run?” he asked.

  You know better than to let him matter, something inside me whispered. You damn well know better.

  “What if,” Nick continued, “I told you that I don’t need your help to get Jessi into the Symphony Ball anymore? What if I told you your debt was paid?”

  I went very still, and the muscles in my stomach tightened. “What are you talking about?”

  “I haven’t needed to play nice with high society for weeks,” Nick told me, his voice as soft as his touch and both like fire to my nerve endings. “Your grandmother told me to consider it taken care of. Turns out she has a soft spot for girls from the wrong side of the tracks with lofty aspirations.”

  There was nothing chilling in those words. No reason I should have felt dread pooling in my stomach. “When?” I said.

  He knew what I was asking. “The fund-raiser at the Arcadia hotel. While you were outside.”

  That was the first time we went out. Weeks ago. I couldn’t make my mind slow down. Before Fourth of July. Before we were ever…

  I stepped back, away from his touch. Away from him.

  “See?” Nick told me, his voice low enough that it was almost lost to a sudden, punishing wind. “When things get real, you run.”

  “You lied to me,” I said.

  He just looked at me. “That’s not why you’re pulling away.”

  I shook my head, feeling cornered and caught and like something horrible might happen—or already had. “I have to go. I told Aunt Olivia I’d be home for dinner. And Lily…”

  “Lily is dealing with a crap hand life dealt her,” Nick told me. “But we both know people who’ve dealt with worse. She’ll come out of this okay. Don’t make her your reason for walking out of here and away from me.”

  I wanted to say something else. I wanted him to be wrong. But he wasn’t.

  “I have to go,” I said again.

  “I’m not going to chase you,” he told me. “If you’re too damned scared to let this be real, if I don’t get to matter to you, if I have to let this be nothing for you to stay—then go.”

  Go.

  He called after me as I fled. “I’m done playing, Sawyer. If you’re too much of a coward to stay? Don’t come back.”

  have to go. I played the words I’d said to Nick over and over again in my mind. I made it halfway through dinner before thinking about what he’d said in return.

  Don’t come back.

  “Lily, sweetheart, you’ve barely eaten.” Aunt Olivia’s attention was blessedly focused on her daughter. Lillian’s, too. Neither one of them had clued in to the fact that there was a damned thing wrong with me. “Can I get you something else?”

  Beside me at the table, Lily picked up a steak knife and began meticulously slicing her meat. Slice. Slice. Slice. She used her fork to spear a delicate piece. “I hear the local authorities are bringing in a forensic sculptor,” she said primly, sounding almost like her former self. She dabbed a napkin against her lips. “To identify the body we found.”

  Focus on that, I told myself. Think about that.

  Aunt Olivia’s reaction to the term forensic sculptor was completely predictable. “Lily,” she said, aghast, “we do not discuss forensics at the dinner table.”

  “That’s right,” John David chimed in. “If I can’t politely entertain the idea of zombies who eat their own flesh, you can’t talk about dead people.”

  And that was that. Aunt Olivia didn’t seem alarmed. She didn’t seem to find the idea of the Lady of the Lake being given a face particularly worrisome. She exhibited no behavior out of the ordinary whatsoever.

  Until she invited Uncle J.D. over that night.

  He wasn’t allowed inside the house—Lillian’s orders. So he sat on the back deck, talking to John David and waiting for Lily.

  I wondered, when I couldn’t keep myself from it, if my response to Nick would have been different if J.D. had responded differently to me. How much of who I was came from years of watching my mom—and how much of it was something, the only thing, he’d given me?

  Three hours later, Lily was still in her room, and her father was still out on the back deck. I’d stopped wondering, stopped replaying the conversation with Nick.

  Mostly.

  But I couldn’t keep from thinking about the way Nick had said that the reason I hadn’t pushed Lily to say something, do something, feel something, was that I was terrified of losing her.

  Hell, that’s why you wanted to find Ana’s baby in the first place.

  Eventually, John David went to bed. Eventually, Aunt Olivia stopped coming by to nudge Lily to go out and talk with her daddy.

  I found myself standing outside Lily’s door. Somehow, she knew that I was there.

  “I don’t want to talk to him,” she said.

  “I know,” I replied. “But I do.”

  The last time I’d talked to J.D. Easterling had been in the hospital, the night Lily and I had discovered his affair. He’d told me that it was neither the time nor the place to discuss our relationship. He hadn’t made any attempt to contact me since.

  “Hello, Daddy.” Lily had woven her hand through mine, and she squeezed it a little tighter as she said the words.

  I’d pushed. She’d let me. She’d stayed.

  “Lily.” J.D. smiled. “Sweetheart, I’ve missed you so much. Thank you for . . .”

  “Talking to you?” Lily’s voice was a little wobbly. She let go of my hand and rested both of hers on the deck railing. “I’m not here to talk to you. Maybe I’ll be ready for that someday. Maybe I won’t. But right now, Sawyer is.”

  “Sawyer is what, honey?”

  “Ready to talk to you,” I elucidated.

  He was an affable person. He’d treated me fondly—as his niece. But now?


  “I really don’t think . . .” he started to say.

  “If you want me,” Lily said, her eyes fixed on the water down below, without any feeling in her tone, “then Sawyer is part of the package. You can talk to both of your daughters—or neither.”

  Lily’s father straightened slightly in his chair, the only tell I could see that until that moment, he’d been holding out hope that I hadn’t told Lily the truth about my parentage.

  “This situation is . . . complicated,” J.D. said, casting a meaningful look at the house. Through the window, I could see Aunt Olivia in the kitchen, watching us.

  “I’m not looking for a father,” I told him. “Evidence suggests you’re not a particularly good one anyway.”

  “He was,” Lily said quietly. “Once.”

  That, more than anything else, seemed to pierce his armor. “Sweetheart, you don’t understand. . . .”

  She understood enough. Lily had agreed to come out here with me so that I could get something resembling closure, but standing this close to the man who’d fathered me, I found that I didn’t have any real desire to ask him how he’d ever been able to pretend I was just his niece.

  I couldn’t ask him to fix whatever it was that was wrong with me.

  So I asked a different question—for Lily. “What do you know about the Lady of the Lake?”

  Lily hadn’t been able to stop listening to that recording. She needed to know, and I needed to push her, to trust that I could.

  “Who?” J.D.’s confusion was genuine, if momentary.

  “The Lady of the Lake,” I repeated. At the railing, Lily’s hands tightened over the wood. “The body we found.” I took a stab in the dark. “The reason Aunt Olivia called you when Lily mentioned a forensic sculptor.” No visible response. “The one,” I continued, “that Aunt Olivia is holding over your head.”

  I could see the gears in his mind turning, could see the exact moment when he decided to smile and shake his head and treat me like I was speaking nonsense. “Sawyer, I—”

  “Lie to her,” Lily said softly. She turned back but looked down at the deck, at the water-marked wood beneath our feet. “You’re good at that.”

  That shot proved true. It hit its target and stopped him in his tracks.

  “I know you don’t love Mama.” Lily couldn’t stop now that she’d started. “Maybe you never did. But did you ever even love me?”

  I could see the shell she’d retreated into these past weeks starting to crack.

  “More than anything on the face of this earth,” her father said. “Everything I’ve done, I have done for you, Lily. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you and your brother. You and John David are my world.”

  “Ouch,” I muttered, under the mistaken impression that treating his words cavalierly might make them hurt less.

  “Then tell us about the body,” Lily whispered. “Or tell us about the blackmail. Tell me something that’s true.”

  “I love you.” He looked at her like she was the most precious thing on this planet, then turned to me. “And, Sawyer, I care for you, too. I do. That’s why I’m asking you to just leave well enough alone. This family has been through enough. I’ve put this family through enough.”

  “It’s never enough,” Lily said, and the emotion in that abbreviated sentence took me aback. This was the Lily who’d hit the wall. This was the kind of angry that didn’t know how to be anything else.

  This was what she’d been keeping under lock and key.

  “Ask me something else,” J.D. begged her. “Lily—if there’s something else you want to know, anything else—just ask me.”

  I expected her to turn around and walk back inside. She’d come out here for me, and it was clear by this point that I wasn’t going to get anything resembling closure—or answers.

  Instead, Lily asked, “How long have you and Ana been having an affair?”

  This was exactly the conversation she hadn’t wanted to have. I wished that I could protect her from this. I almost wished I hadn’t pushed.

  “We got to know each other when you were twelve.” J.D.’s answer was immediate and without frills. I knew instinctively that it was true. “It wasn’t physical for a few years.”

  “How long have you been paying her?”

  “You don’t need to know that.”

  She stared at him, impassive, until he answered.

  “Since you were twelve.”

  It took me a second to register the fact that J.D. Easterling had just claimed that he’d been giving Ana money before he’d had a physical relationship with her at all.

  As far as I knew, he’d never given my mother a dime.

  “Why were you paying her?” I asked. “If you weren’t sleeping with her, if you were just getting to know her—why give her money?”

  J.D. didn’t answer. Lily shook her head, disgusted, because he couldn’t even give us this.

  “I’m not paying Ana anymore.” J.D. tried to make it sound like he’d taken a stand, but taking into account what Campbell had said about the late Victor Gutierrez’s will, I saw straight through that.

  Lily did, too.

  “Is there anything else you want to know?” she asked me.

  I was on the verge of saying no, of telling J.D. Easterling that I didn’t need or want anything else from him, when I realized that was a lie.

  There was one thing. Even if he wouldn’t say a word about bodies or blackmail, even if he wouldn’t acknowledge me, there was one answer he could give me.

  “You said that you got to know Ana when Lily was twelve. Where was she before that? Did she tell you anything? Where did she disappear to when she left town, back in the day?”

  J.D. didn’t shrug off the question. He didn’t shrug me off this time. “I don’t know exactly, Sawyer. She mentioned something about spending some time in a small town near the lake when she was pregnant, and after that, she traveled. Sweden—her mother was Swedish. New York. California. Paris. Everywhere that wasn’t here.”

  Inside the house, Aunt Olivia was washing dishes—by hand, even though we had a dishwasher. That had her positioned near the window, where she could see.

  Where, with the window cracked open, she could hear every word.

  Beside me, J.D. was talking to Lily again. I didn’t really hear what he was saying to her, because the sound of my own thoughts was suddenly deafening. Open window. Hear every word. I flashed back to the trip Sadie-Grace, Boone, and I had taken. I saw Ellen in my mind’s eye.

  I heard Beth, Ellen’s granddaughter, screaming through the open window with each contraction.

  Anything bought or sold in that town, Lillian had said of her sister, she has a hand in it.

  The simple, ugly truth of the matter was that Ellen had been perfectly willing to sell Beth’s baby to Greer. It hadn’t occurred to me at the time to wonder if Sadie-Grace’s new little brother was the first baby Ellen had sold.

  She mentioned something about spending some time in a small town near the lake when she was pregnant. J.D.’s answer to my question replaced everything else in my mind.

  “A small town near the lake,” I said. I didn’t realize how loudly I’d said it until I realized that both Lily and her father were staring at me. I gathered myself. “What was the name of the town?”

  J.D. claimed he didn’t know the answer.

  But I did. Or, at least, I thought that I might. Two Arrows.

  awyer, you do realize you sound both paranoid and delusional, right?”

  “Bite me, Campbell.”

  “That’s a pretty way to talk to the person who got you out of that hole.”

  “I’m not paranoid. Or delusional.”

  “Okay, well…I’m just saying. I’ve known your so-called kidnapper my entire life. She doesn’t have it in her to use the wrong fork at the dinner table, let alone drug a couple of Debutantes and throw them in a hole.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you about this, Cam. She threw us in that hole, and I got
the distinct feeling that after she got whatever she wanted from us, she was going to bury us alive. We have to get out of here.”

  “Do you even know where here is?”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “We’re on King’s Island, and we really don’t want to be here when it starts to storm.”

  ily didn’t say a word to anyone for two days after her father’s visit. I came close—more than once—to telling her what I suspected about Ana, Two Arrows, and our grandmother’s twin, but I didn’t.

  I’d seen a crack in the barrier she’d put up between the rest of the world and her emotions, but I wasn’t sure what would happen when it shattered. I didn’t want to be the one to break her.

  Damn Nick. Damn him for being right—and for being the one person I wanted to call. But he’d told me not to come back.

  I assumed that meant he wouldn’t pick up the phone.

  I’m done playing.

  “Have you seen your cousin?” Aunt Olivia asked me. Since J.D.’s visit, she’d been, in Lillian’s words, in a bit of a tizzy. Also known as: full-blown togetherness mode. She’d filled our itineraries with lakeside bonding activities: water sports, mini golf at the yacht club, cookouts, s’mores, ghost stories, midnight movie marathons—pretending the whole time that Lily wasn’t silent and in danger of heatstroke with the way she was dressed.

  “I’ll go look for her,” I said.

  “I thought we could all go tubing,” Aunt Olivia called after me. “In that cove you like. What’s it called?” In true Taft woman style, my aunt answered her own question: “King’s Cove.”

  I found Lily in our closet, hiding from her mother.

  “Where’s a pantry when you need one?” I asked her.

  I saw then that she was holding something in her hands. A phone. I stepped closer, and realized that it was mine. “Lily?”

  She turned toward me. Her dark brown eyes met mine. “You got a text.” She held out the phone. “Three of them.”

  Nick. My first thought was a nonsensical one, and I knew it. My second didn’t come in words. My stomach twisting, I took the phone from Lily.