Deadly Little Scandals

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “Good for you?” my mom ventured.

  It was on the tip of my tongue to ask if she wanted a prize, but then a horrible thought occurred to me. “He’s not back with Aunt Olivia, is he?”

  “Not as far as I know,” Ana said. “I’m moving to the East Coast. I need a fresh start, and Victoria has talked me into investing in a start-up she’s been working on. I’m going to be following up with other potential investors while she finishes her degree.”

  I had no idea what Victoria was majoring in, but somehow, I wasn’t surprised that she seemed to be landing on her feet. I wondered briefly what the chances were that the other potential investors were former White Gloves.

  “What did you say to Lily?” my mom asked Ana.

  Lily’s biological mother glanced back to the bar, which Lily was wiping down maniacally with a damp rag, going back over the same spots again and again.

  “That’s between my daughter and me.”

  “She almost lost me.”

  Lily and I were lying in the field behind our house. It was unseasonably warm for December, but still cold enough that we should have been wearing jackets.

  We weren’t.

  “That’s what Ana said,” Lily continued. “Late in her second trimester, she almost lost the pregnancy. She couldn’t afford the hospital bills, and she said she just kept thinking—what if something happened to me after I was born? What if I got sick? What if I needed medicine she couldn’t afford?”

  “She could have gone to her family,” I said, thinking back to my conversation with Victor Gutierrez.

  “She would have,” Lily said softly. “And they would have controlled her entire life—and mine.” She paused. “She thought about going back to Davis Ames, too, but Ellen found her first.”

  The rest of the story came pouring out of Lily’s mouth—how Ellen had sold Ana on the idea of a loving couple who couldn’t have children of their own, a couple who would pay Ana’s expenses, who would give the baby everything, who wanted to make sure their baby’s biological mother had a real shot at life, once she’d given birth.

  Ana hadn’t found out who that couple was—or that said couple’s infertility was a lie—until later. Once she’d discovered that, once she’d realized all the ways she’d been lied to, she’d decided that the price she’d been paid wasn’t nearly enough.

  “She said that she went to Daddy when I was twelve,” Lily continued. “She told him the truth, and he told her that he’d give her whatever she wanted, do anything she wanted, if she’d just leave me where I was.”

  Beside me, Lily closed her eyes. I kept mine open and skyward.

  “He used to bring her pictures,” Lily murmured. “That was part of their deal. He gave her money, and he told her all about me.”

  Neither one of us had heard a word from Uncle J.D. in the past four months.

  “I feel like I stole him from you,” Lily said suddenly, opening her eyes and turning to face me. “If he’d known I wasn’t his from the beginning, he wouldn’t have—”

  “He raised you,” I interrupted her. “You’re his, Lily. He clearly feels that way, and I don’t need a father.” She was on the verge of objecting, so I continued. “With a sister/cousin/pregnancy-pact buddy like you, I’m good.”

  Lily snorted—quite possibly the most unladylike sound I’d ever heard her make.

  Catching sight of movement near the house, I sat up. “What’s my mom doing here?” I asked as she started striding across the field toward us. “And why is she carrying formal dresses?”

  he previous December, my mom had shown up unannounced on Lillian’s front porch, moments before the whole family had left for the annual Christmas party at the club. Why Ana’s visit had convinced her to pull a repeat performance, I couldn’t say, but there was no talking her out of it, and she was dead set on dragging Lily and me along.

  “Hold still,” Lily gritted out as she twisted my French braid—which she’d just finished—into some kind of updo and jabbed a half-dozen bobby pins directly into my skull.

  “That hurts,” I told her.

  “Pain is beauty,” Lily retorted. She stepped up behind me in the mirror, and her expression shifted. The dresses my mom had bought us matched. Hers was navy, mine a brighter, cerulean blue.

  “You know,” I said, thinking back on the past year, “I never really understood that phrase—pain is beauty—until now.”

  I expected my mom to drive straight to Lillian’s house—or to Northern Ridge Country Club itself. Instead, she took a detour by the cemetery first. Lily and I followed her down a gravel path to a small wrought-iron fence. Inside the fence, there were two tombstones—small cement crosses.

  And in front of each tombstone stood a woman wearing heels and diamond earrings and, in Lillian’s case, pearls.

  “You came.” Aunt Olivia sounded surprised. “We’ve been leaving messages for weeks, Ellie. We didn’t think you’d—”

  “I had a change of heart,” my mom said, but Aunt Olivia wasn’t looking at her anymore.

  She was looking at Lily and me.

  “The last time I was here,” I said, making a mental note to kill my mom for bringing us into this unprepared, “there was only one tombstone.”

  Lillian stepped to the side. “Your hair looks good like that,” she told me. “One barely notices the bangs.”

  I looked past her to the writing on the tombstone she’d just stepped away from. There was no name on the cross, no year, but an inscription had been added.

  May her memory be eternal.

  “People will think that tombstone is yours,” my mom told Lillian. “They’ll say you have a big head, writing your own epitaph like that.”

  My grandmother gave an elegant little shrug. “People will think what they want. I daresay they always do.”

  My mom swallowed, her gaze locked on to that inscription. “How did you get her body?”

  Lily finally caught on to what was happening here. She stared, wide-eyed, at the second tombstone. “That’s…”

  “Liv,” I finished quietly.

  “The Lady of the Lake was identified,” Aunt Olivia told us, sounding just as she ever had, even though her chin quivered slightly as she spoke. “Her name was Kaci. She disappeared years ago, and the body came back as a DNA match for her mama.”

  Of course it did.

  “So that’s that,” I said after a moment. As promised, Lillian had handled the situation, and Aunt Olivia—and J.D. and Charlotte and the rest—had gotten away scot-free.

  “Not quite,” Aunt Olivia replied. “Mama and I were talking…”

  “Which mama?” Lily muttered.

  “We were talking,” Aunt Olivia reiterated, “and we decided that this family really should have a charitable foundation.”

  “A sizable one,” Lillian continued. “When I die and go to the good Lord, God willing, everything I have—except for what’s held in trust for John David and you girls—will go to that foundation.”

  “Assuming,” Aunt Olivia added, “that Ellie is okay with that plan.”

  “I don’t need your money,” my mom told Lillian. “I never did.”

  “I thought perhaps,” Lillian replied, “that you might enjoy helping the girls run the foundation.”

  “Is this some kind of bribe?” Lily asked, finally finding her voice again. “You’re letting us give away a fortune, and all we have to do is come back to the fold?”

  “I’m entrusting you with your grandfather’s legacy,” Lillian said. “And mine. No strings attached.”

  I was fairly certain Lillian Taft had never made a deal with no strings attached in her life. Given everything I knew about what she’d done from her time as a girl in Two Arrows until now, I was also pretty sure that her real “legacy” was a lot more complicated than the assets she’d inherited from her husband.

  “We’ll give you a moment,” Aunt Olivia told my mom. “To say goodbye.”

  She and Lillian passed through the gate. Lily and
I stayed behind, until my mom asked to be alone.

  “John David misses you,” Lillian told us casually, proving once and for all that she was as expert at guilt-tripping as she was at issuing bribes. “Both of you.”

  “I was always coming back.” Lily beat me to responding. She said it like that was less of a decision than a fate. “I just had some things to figure out first.”

  “And did you?” my grandmother asked.

  Lily stole a glance at Aunt Olivia and then turned back to me. “What do you think, Sawyer? Have we got it all figured out yet?”

  I thought of all the changes I’d seen in Lily in the past few months—and all the ways I’d changed in the past year. “Let’s just call that a work in progress.”

  orthern Ridge Country Club had really taken their Christmas tree game up a notch. Last year’s tree had been two stories tall; this year’s was two stories tall and decorated entirely in crystal. There were hundreds of ornaments—maybe thousands—and they all caught the sparkling lights like ice.

  “I believe,” Lillian said beside me, “that we’ll skip the family portrait this year.”

  “Why?” John David asked. He’d grown what seemed like about a foot since summer, and in the five minutes since we’d left the valets to park the cars, he hadn’t mentioned zombies even once. “We’re still a family, aren’t we?”

  It was Lily who answered. “Of course we are.”

  The Northern Ridge gingerbread was a thing of legend. Personally, I intended to drown myself in it and sneak at least three pieces out in my purse.

  “Careful,” a voice said beside me. “I have it on good authority that people here really don’t like thieves.”

  I turned to the last person I’d expected to see at this shindig. “Nick.”

  He was wearing a tuxedo—the same one he’d worn to the lakeside fund-raiser. This time, however, he wasn’t overdressed, and he didn’t look like he was on the verge of ripping off the jacket.

  “Don’t say a thing about the monkey suit,” he told me.

  I called you. You didn’t answer. I left, and you told me not to come back.

  Once upon a time, that would have had my guard up—almost as much as the way my heart was beating in my chest. I remembered what it was like to kiss him, what his body felt like next to mine. The feel of my hands in his hair.

  The moment he’d told me that he wasn’t “dating” me for any reason other than the fact that he wanted to.

  It had been four months since I’d walked away from him, and he looked exactly the same.

  “I won’t say a word about the monkey suit,” I offered, “if you don’t ask me how many armed men I could disable with the excessive number of bobby pins in my hair.”

  Nick managed a smile. “Seems like a fair trade.”

  It took me longer than I wanted to decide what I should say next. “You never mentioned joining Northern Ridge,” I said.

  “I prefer not to think about the fact that I’ve sold my soul and joined the dark side.”

  “Part of Lillian’s plan to get Jessi into Symphony Ball?” I asked.

  Nick nodded.

  “I called you,” I said. “You didn’t answer.”

  “I know.”

  A few months ago, that would have thrown me into self-protection mode, if I wasn’t there already. Before that night on King’s Island, I wouldn’t have let myself want this—want him—want anything at all.

  “You didn’t call me back.” I smiled. “Want to call that an oversight?”

  Another guy might not have recognized that for what it was.

  A normal person might have wanted an apology. A heart-to-heart. A promise that I’d changed.

  Something.

  But Nick just stared at me for a full three seconds, then held out his hand. “I think it’s about time you gave me a second dance.”

  I gave him two before Lily pulled me away, outside to the patio overlooking the winterized pool below. At first, I thought she’d brought me out here to discuss what had happened at the cemetery, but then I saw Campbell.

  A split second later, Sadie-Grace literally bowled me over with a hug.

  “I love college,” she told me, scrambling to her feet and helping me up before resuming her aggressive hug campaign. “I’m majoring in dance and also Russian literature, and combined, Boone and I have only broken two bones!”

  “Both Boone’s,” Campbell clarified.

  “His bones are my bones,” Sadie-Grace insisted. “And vice versa. Unless that’s creepy? I’ve discovered I have a really hard time telling what’s creepy, but on the bright side, I haven’t been kidnapped or kidnapped anyone else this semester, so that’s good.”

  “And you?” I asked Campbell, wondering how she’d spent the months Lily and I had been away.

  “Same old, same old,” Campbell said. “Freshman year at an institution where I’m already a legend, planning world domination and plotting my revenge for the disappearing act the two of you pulled.” She turned her gaze pointedly to Lily. “Not very half-sisterly of you, was it? Not very polite, either.”

  “Oh, shut up, Campbell.”

  I wondered if either one of them realized that they’d acted like squabbling siblings for about as long as I’d known them.

  “Just for that,” Campbell told Lily, “I’m not going to tell you what Walker’s doing or give you the present I had specially made a few months back. In fact, I won’t give any of you your presents.”

  “Presents?” Sadie-Grace smiled, then turned to Lily. “Walker is going to college—in Scotland.” Sadie-Grace said Scotland like Walker might as well have been attending university on Mars. “Boone keeps asking him to mail home haggis and a kilt, but either that’s illegal or Walker just really doesn’t want to.” Waiting a beat, Sadie-Grace turned back to Campbell.

  “Presents?” she said hopefully.

  “I’ll give them to you,” Campbell promised coyly, “just as soon as Sawyer thanks me for getting her out of that hole.”

  I had a feeling she’d be lording that over me for an eternity—and then some.

  “Campbell?” I said calmly.

  “Watch your language,” Lily murmured preemptively.

  But all I said was: “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” Campbell smiled sweetly. “You’re not forgiven for ditching me—you either, Lily—but you’re welcome. Now close your eyes and hold out your hands.”

  In normal circumstances, that would not have struck me as a particularly risky proposition, but between the events of our debutante year and the summer that had followed, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that, once I closed my eyes, Campbell might calmly place a stolen masterpiece or a still-beating human heart in my palm.

  Hell, if history was any indication, I couldn’t testify with any level of certainty that I was talking to Campbell and not her evil—or evil-er—twin.

  Sadie-Grace closed her eyes and held out her hand. Lily did the same.

  “Sawyer,” Campbell prompted.

  “Fine.” Eyes closed, hand held out, I waited, and then Campbell placed something in my hand. I opened my eyes and determined the present in question to be a necklace. The chain was simple and delicate, and the tiny charm on the end was…

  “A shovel?” Lily said. “Really, Campbell?”

  Campbell smirked. “They’re platinum. Custom-ordered. Honestly,” she continued as she affixed her own shovel necklace in place, “the White Gloves are proving a little mild for my taste. I deeply suspect the four of us can do better.”

  “A shovel!” Sadie-Grace did the math. “Like the kind people use to dig holes!”

  I could have done without the insignia Campbell had chosen, but I put the necklace on anyway.

  “We’re ladies,” Campbell said as Lily and Sadie-Grace slipped their necklaces on, too. “And my mama raised me to believe that ladies play to win.”

  When I’d taken Lillian’s deal more than a year earlier, it had been because I wanted to f
ind my father, but deep down, what I’d really been looking for was family. I’d been looking for my people, for a place where I belonged. I hadn’t imagined finding it among the Debutante set.

  With Lily, with Sadie-Grace, even with the devil herself, Campbell Ames.

  But here I was, wearing a platinum shovel around my neck and walking back into the party with the three of them, arm in arm.

  “Do you know anything about the new class of Debutantes?” Lily asked Campbell as the world around us blurred into a mix of champagne and black ties, fresh flowers and live music.

  “Nothing worth repeating,” Campbell replied. “You know the girls the year below us. They’re boring. Now, if you start to look a couple of years down the line? Two of my little cousins on the Bancroft side will be coming out. I trained them in my own image.”

  That was terrifying. I thought of Nick’s sister, as much an outsider to this world as I’d ever been.

  “Is this the part where we say Bless their hearts?” Sadie-Grace asked.

  I brought my hand to the delicate shovel charm nestled just above my collarbone. “How about”—I thought of every single thing that had happened since I became a Debutante myself—“Good luck?”

  he longer I’m in this business, the more keenly aware I become of how lucky I am to have a truly one-of-a-kind team in my corner. I wrote the first draft of this book as the sleep-deprived mom of two kids under the age of two. I literally could not have done it without the incredible support and creative work of my editor, Kieran Viola. When I needed more time, she gave me more time; when the book needed more, she knew exactly how to get us there. Most of all, her love for these characters and this series got me to where I needed to be to get the story where it needed to be. An editor is a creative collaborator, a sounding board, a champion, and so many more things, all rolled into one, and I could not ask for a better one. Thank you, Kieran.

  Another champion who deserves special recognition is my agent, Elizabeth Harding, who has seen me from being a teenager, writing YA from my college dorm room, to a professor/mom/writer attempting to juggle all three. I know very few writers who are still with their first agent; I am lucky to have found an incredible advocate and partner, right out of the gate. Thank you, Elizabeth, not just for this book (number twenty!), but for everything that’s come before. Here’s to the future!