Aunt Olivia raised the gun. She held it on us but didn’t fire. Instead, she walked over toward the door and picked something up.
It took me a moment to realize that it was a can of lighter fluid.
One secret to bury, I thought, hysterical laughter bubbling up inside of me. One to burn. The White Gloves couldn’t have equipped Aunt Olivia better for this insanity if they’d tried.
Campbell lunged forward, but Aunt Olivia whipped the gun toward her and shot. “Consider that your only warning, young lady,” she said as the bullet buried itself behind Campbell in the wood. “I won’t deign to miss again.”
“You were always nice to me,” Sadie-Grace said quietly. “When my mama died, you were the one who held me, not my daddy. I stayed at your house for weeks.”
“I know, sugar,” Aunt Olivia replied gently. “This isn’t what I wanted. Believe me.”
“What did you think was going to happen when you drugged Sawyer and Sadie-Grace and tossed them in a hole?” Campbell asked.
Aunt Olivia didn’t answer the question. “This wasn’t what I wanted,” she repeated.
“You wanted things to be perfect,” I said. I still wasn’t sure what had led Aunt Olivia to thinking this was the solution to her problems, but I did know there was power in telling people what they wanted to hear. “Maybe they still can be.”
“Don’t be silly.” Aunt Olivia dismissed that notion out of hand. “If we’d been the only ones on this island, this could have been contained. But now? Campbell is trouble. She always has been, and don’t even get me started on—”
“Sawyer’s right,” Victoria interjected. “This can still be contained. As the only outsider to this whole situation, allow me to assure you that literally no one would believe any of this if we tried to tell them a word of it.”
“Besides,” Campbell added, “do you really think my mama is going to let anything about what happened to the real Liv come out? Aunt Julia? My grandfather?” Campbell seemed to have recovered from her near miss with the bullet. She tossed her auburn hair over one shoulder. “My father is already in prison. There is no way on this planet that my grandfather would allow a scandal like this one to touch my only remaining parent and both of Boone’s.”
There was a moment’s silence, which Sadie-Grace obligingly filled. “I don’t mind about the hole,” she promised sweetly. “Accidents happen. Lily and I once accidentally kidnapped Campbell and tied her to a chair for three days, and that turned out fine.”
“You what?” Aunt Olivia said.
“You can still walk away from this,” I reiterated, putting everything I had into those words. “Things don’t have to be perfect. They can just be.”
For a moment, I thought she was considering that. And then she finished dousing the wood in lighter fluid and pulled out a lighter.
his isn’t just about Liv.” Aunt Olivia toyed with the lighter for a moment, morose. “I could have dealt with the body washing up. That forensic sculptor nonsense—well, like Campbell said, I imagine someone in her family will be motivated to take care of it.”
“If this isn’t about the body,” Sadie-Grace said quietly, “what is it about?”
What in the world had possessed Aunt Olivia to give up the game, ask Ellen to drug us, and haul us out to this island? Why dig the hole? Why throw us in?
“I thought I could talk to you,” Aunt Olivia told me. “Make you understand.”
“Because drugging people really puts them in an understanding frame of mind,” I said.
“Also,” Sadie-Grace added seriously, “holes.”
“I wanted you sedated and contained,” Aunt Olivia explained. “I wanted time to make this right, to do damage control. I never said anything about a hole.”
“Ellen,” I said out loud. “You asked Ellen to sedate us, and she had us tossed in a hole.”
“I’m afraid she’s never once attacked a situation with a scalpel that she could go at with a hatchet. I thought I could handle this situation, have a little chat with you girls. She was a bit less optimistic. Hence, the hole.”
“So, what?” I said. “Ellen or her henchwomen helped you haul us out here, and the plan was just to keep us captive for a bit of chitchat?” Unbidden, my eyes went to the gun in Aunt Olivia’s hand. Was that the backup plan?
“It pains me to say this,” Aunt Olivia sighed, “but Ellen was right. Talking was never an option. There’s too much of your mama in you, Sawyer. You can’t ever just let things be. You push and you push, and the consequences be damned.”
What consequences? She’d already said that this wasn’t just about the body. Back at Ellen’s, she’d told me that I’d brought this on myself. But I hadn’t gone to Ellen’s asking about the Lady of the Lake.
“The baby,” I said. I hadn’t quite pieced this together yet, but that was the only explanation that made any kind of sense. “We went to Ellen to ask about the baby.”
Campbell’s eyes widened. “Am I missing something here?” she asked.
I glanced at her. “I texted you about going to Two Arrows. You didn’t answer.”
“You went.” Aunt Olivia spoke over me. “And so did Lily. You told her about Ellen, Sawyer. My little girl shouldn’t have been there. She shouldn’t have ever gone there.”
“Why?” Sadie-Grace asked.
Why was it okay for me to go to Two Arrows, but not Lily? Why did my aunt care that I’d pushed and pushed about the baby?
I remembered something then, a tiny, seemingly meaningless detail that Lillian had told me when I’d confronted her with the truth about my father.
Lily was just two months younger than me.
Years ago, when my mom had gone to tell her mother that she was pregnant, Aunt Olivia had beaten her there. She’d already told Lillian that she was pregnant.
With Lily.
“Lily is two months younger than me,” I said out loud. And so is Ana’s baby. Lily has blond hair and dark brown eyes. Ana came to the hospital when Lily was injured.
There was a reason that Aunt Olivia hadn’t wanted Lily to go to Two Arrows, why she hadn’t taken kindly to me asking Ellen questions about Ana.
“Ellen said she didn’t take a dime from the people who adopted Ana’s baby,” I told Aunt Olivia. “Ana got paid, but Ellen didn’t.” I paused. “Ellen wouldn’t take your money.”
“Wait a second,” Campbell interjected. “Are you implying…”
That Lily is Ana’s baby.
“I went to Ellen.” Olivia spoke before I could. “To my mama. Do you know how hard that was, Sawyer? How humbling? When I left Two Arrows, she said Good riddance. And if she’d known where I was going—what I was planning to do…” Aunt Olivia shook her head. “I never wanted to go back there, but I’d told Lillian and my husband that I was pregnant. I’d beaten Ellie to the punch. Back then, J.D. would have left me if I’d given him half an excuse. But if he thought I was pregnant with his child? If Lillian thought her beloved oldest daughter was pregnant, when she heard about the mess Ellie had gotten herself into?”
“You lied,” I translated.
“I protected myself,” Olivia countered. “You should understand that better than anyone, Sawyer. People like us—we have to protect ourselves. No one else is going to do it for us.”
I thought of Lillian, telling me that I was a fighter, telling me that neither of her daughters ever had been.
I thought about Nick and the way I’d always seen both of us as people who could take care of themselves.
“You lied about being pregnant,” I repeated. “And then you needed a baby.”
“Mama never liked me much,” Aunt Olivia said. “I was too much like Lillian, not enough like her. I wanted more. God knows what possessed me to go to her for help. But when I did, when I came clean about where I’d been and the life I’d been living, do you know what she said? She said that the things I wanted might have been Lillian things, but the way I’d gone about getting them? The focus and determination and grit? Th
at was all her.” Olivia smiled. “She said that blood was blood, and I was hers, and she’d help me pull one over on her holier-than-thou sister.”
Help you. As in get you a baby. How had Ellen found Ana? How had she talked Ana into giving up the baby?
“Did Ana even know who she was giving her baby to?” I asked out loud.
Aunt Olivia’s response was immediate. “Lily is mine,” she said, in a tone I recognized—one that brooked no argument. She’d used the exact same tone when she’d dismissed my assertion that Greer was faking her pregnancy, telling me not to be ridiculous, that no woman would do a thing like that.
Because she’d done it, too.
“I love my daughter more than life,” Aunt Olivia said fiercely. “John David, too, and before you ask, yes, I carried him my own self, though quite frankly, I don’t see how that matters.” She closed her hand over the lighter, just for a moment. “My children are the best thing I’ve ever done, and I won’t let anyone ruin that.”
She repositioned her grip and flicked the lighter. The second I saw the flame, my mind dissolved into a mess of overlapping thoughts—lighter fluid, a house made out of old wood. Ana’s baby. Uncle J.D. The way he claimed he’d started paying Ana before they were ever involved.
What if she’d run out of money? What if she’d known—or figured out—who had been raising her baby?
What if she’d told J.D. exactly who she was?
For all their faults, Lily’s parents loved her. I’d never doubted that, and as I took a step toward her mother, I didn’t doubt that now.
“Lily loves me,” I said out loud. I took another step toward Lily’s mama. “She would be heartbroken if anything happened to me. You know that.”
“I know,” Aunt Olivia said. “But accidents do happen—especially at the lake.”
I wondered if that was why she—and Ellen and whoever else had helped them—had brought us to King’s Island. Did Olivia know we’d spent time here earlier this summer? Or was she just looking for a place where she could stage an accident?
What kind of accident involves a fire and a gun? I took another step.
Aunt Olivia swung the gun toward me, her other hand still holding the flame. She spoke again as she began backing toward the door. “You stay right where you are, Sawyer Ann.”
“I think,” Sadie-Grace whispered beside me, “that this is bad.”
The gun. The lighter. Old wood, soaked in an accelerant.
Before I could say another word, someone else beat me to it. “Olivia, please.”
It took me a second to place the voice, whose words hadn’t sounded like a plea so much as the kind of chiding John David typically received when he farted loudly—and intentionally—at the dinner table.
Olivia sucked in a breath and turned toward the voice’s owner. “Mama.”
Not Ellen, I realized as the speaker walked toward us.
“Lillian,” I said. I’d never been so glad to see anyone in my life.
There was a split second of indecision on Aunt Olivia’s part, and then she turned the gun on my grandmother.
Lillian was not impressed. “For heaven’s sakes, put that thing away, Olivia. You’re being ridiculous.”
“She’s pathologically unhinged,” Victoria corrected.
Lillian spared her but a single look. “My condolences about your father, dear.” Because, of course, Lillian Taft would express condolences in the middle of a hostage situation. Without missing a beat, my grandmother turned back to my aunt. “Are we quite done here?”
She still has a gun pointed at you, Lillian. I don’t think that qualifies as “done.”
“Get over there,” Olivia ordered my grandmother. “With them.”
“Am I to believe you’re going to kill all of us?” Lillian asked. “You’ll do no such thing.”
Even with a gun pointed at her, she answered her own questions.
“You have no idea what I’m capable of,” Aunt Olivia said. “Now move.”
“Kaci,” Lillian stated, exasperated, “I will do no such thing.”
The name—Kaci—froze Aunt Olivia in her spot.
“Kaci?” I repeated.
“You know.” Aunt Olivia’s voice shook, like Lillian knowing her real name was somehow more unfortunate than the fact that she’d been caught holding us hostage at gunpoint. “Did…did Ellen tell you?”
“My sister hasn’t spoken to me in forty years,” Lillian replied. “Thankfully, I am plenty capable of putting two and two together myself, though I will admit it took me some time.”
“What?” I said. “You knew?”
“Not right away,” Lillian told me. “Not nearly soon enough. I was grieving. I’d lost my husband. I couldn’t stand the idea of losing my daughter, too. When she came back, I thanked God and put it all behind me.”
“You couldn’t have known,” Aunt Olivia insisted. “I practiced. I got everything right.”
“You were perfect, sweetheart.” Lillian gave a faint shake of her head. “And Lord knows my Liv was never that. Her daddy spoiled her. I did, too, truth be told.” My grandmother managed a very small smile. “For years, I told myself that Liv had changed—that whatever she’d done to get over her daddy’s death had changed her. I told myself that she’d grown up. But last year, when I brought Sawyer back here, and I watched you treat her like she was your own…This summer, when I heard you and J.D. arguing and realized you were aware of her parentage…” Lillian closed her eyes. “That was when I finally let myself ask the questions I should have been asking all along. That was when I knew.”
“No,” Aunt Olivia said again. “You didn’t. You would have said something. You would have done something.”
“After twenty-five years?” Lillian asked. “To what end? You’re Lily’s mama and John David’s.”
I realized that Lillian still didn’t know that Aunt Olivia had faked her pregnancy with Lily, but right now, that hardly seemed to matter.
“You were my daughter for twenty-five years,” Lillian continued, staring at Olivia. “You tried so hard, and when I finally got past seeing what I wanted to see, I was able to catch a glimpse of something else. You were hungry, Olivia—not physically, but down in the depths of your soul hungry, wanting things in a way that people who grow up with everything never will. Weeks ago, I recognized that, and then I recognized you.”
“You didn’t know about me.”
“It had been years since I had seen you,” Lillian countered. “The resemblance was less uncanny then, between you and my Liv. You could have passed for sisters, but not twins. Genetics are funny that way. Ellen and I got less identical as we got older, and you and Liv…”
“You knew?” Aunt Olivia—I couldn’t bring myself to call her Kaci, the way Lillian had just once—seemed unable to get over that. “You knew about me, back when Liv was still alive? You could have come for me. You could have brought her. You could have…”
“Ellen wouldn’t let me visit. She certainly wouldn’t take my money, but I did what I could to make sure you kids didn’t go hungry. I kept eyes on you, for a time.”
I did what I could. That was the same thing Lillian had told me at the Gutierrezes’ party. At the time, I’d felt like she couldn’t have possibly done enough for her sister’s family. But now, listening to my grandmother tell Aunt Olivia that she’d known quite well she wasn’t her daughter and allowed the charade to continue…
“What about the real Liv?” I asked my grandmother. “Don’t you care?”
“Of course I care,” Lillian said quietly.
“It wasn’t me,” Aunt Olivia said urgently, before Lillian could finish. “I didn’t hurt her, Lillian. I wouldn’t have….”
“I know that,” my grandmother said. “You’ve been by my side your entire adult life. I know you didn’t hurt my Liv. I know you won’t shoot me or hurt these girls. You’re a fighter, Olivia. Always have been. But you’re not a killer. Put the gun down. Now please.”
Obediently, the
hand with which Olivia held the gun sank to her side. But the lighter—she held on to the lighter.
“I won’t snuff that flame out for you,” Lillian told her sternly. “You have to do that for yourself. Prove to yourself and these girls that no matter what ideas your mama put in your head, no matter what the stakes, you were never going to hurt them, any more than you would have hurt Liv.”
They stared at each other. And since they were staring at each other, neither one of them was looking at me.
I stepped forward, ready and willing to take that lighter by force. But the woman who’d been Olivia Taft for two and a half decades didn’t give me a chance.
She killed the flame.
’ll take care of…this.” Even in the most trying of circumstances, never let it be said that my grandmother was not discreet. An abandoned house soaked in lighter fluid? An impostor daughter who’d kidnapped us, drugged us, and held us at gunpoint?
All summarized in a single word: this.
“You girls head home.”
“And how do you suggest we do that?” Victoria was the first one to recover her voice. “Someone took care of our Jet Skis.”
Lillian was not ruffled in the least. “Lily and Walker are the ones who called me. They brought me here. They’re waiting on the east side of the island, and they have a boat.”
A hundred questions swirled and collided in my head. What were Lily and Walker—and for that matter Lillian—doing here in the first place? And what could my grandmother possibly be planning on doing to contain this situation?
The only question that came out of my mouth was: “If we take the boat, how will you get home?”
Lillian turned toward the woman who’d been her daughter longer than the original Liv Taft had lived. “I suspect Olivia has a way off this island,” she said quietly. “But first, I’d like to finally hear, after all these years, what happened to my girl.”
Campbell, Sadie-Grace, Victoria, and I spent the first half of the walk back to the east shore of the island trying to figure out what—if anything—we should do. I knew what Lillian’s preference was. I could practically hear her ordering me to let her handle it.
Deadly Little Scandals Page 24