The First to Lie

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

  “She won’t suspect you of working with us, Ms. Berensen, She’ll answer your call because you’ve had a prior relationship. Do you agree to help us get to her?”

  Ellie thought of a lifeline, grabbed onto it. Nora had disappeared once. She could do it again. Ellie thought of treasured moments as a kid, reading under her pale blue comforter before anyone else was awake, before the summer days and responsibilities lured her outside and the real world took over. I know who I was when I got up this morning, Alice had told the Caterpillar in her most favorite book, but I think I must have been changed several times since then. I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, because I’m not myself, you see.

  She’d been Nora this morning and this afternoon she was Ellie. She was in the midst of her own Alice story and she could almost see the smoke from the Caterpillar’s hookah encircle Monteiro as he stood silently awaiting her reply.

  “So let me get this straight,” Ellie began. “You said you’d give me details on your investigation into these crashes if I helped you. And apparently ‘help’ means finding Nora Quinn. But what if there’s someone besides Ms. Quinn who might have connected with both Kaitlyn Armistead and Pharminex? Someone else who’s worth investigating?”

  “Who?” Monteiro pulled out his notebook. Flipped it open.

  She wasn’t quite sure she should take this step. Too late now.

  Gabe had told her that the police suspected Nora in Kaitlyn’s accident. Why? To make her feel hunted or vulnerable? Or to encourage her to trust and confide in him? He’d laughed it off when she asked, but the more Ellie thought about it, the sorrier she was she’d trusted Gabe. Or whoever he really was. He’d shown her a driver’s license to prove Gabriel Hoyt was his real name, and she’d accepted that as proof. Like a fake license wasn’t hard to get.

  “He’s used several names. I know that. Although it might be perfectly benign.”

  “How did this ‘he’ know Lydia Frost?”

  “Hmm.” Ellie herself had told Gabe about Lydia, but she couldn’t say that. “I’m not sure, but he knows about Pharminex. And he knows people there, executives.” She’d introduced them too. She thought she had, at least.

  Monteiro nodded. “And?”

  “He’s interested in Pharminex, knew Nora Quinn, and knew about Kaitlyn—in fact.” Ellie sat up straighter, deciding. “He told me he’d talked to you about her accident. But that was before Lydia Frost’s death.”

  “Talked to me?” Monteiro frowned. “Specifically me?”

  “Though I know he didn’t personally cause these accidents,” she went on. “During one of them he was with me.”

  “What’s his name? What’s his stake in all this?”

  “Well, that’s exactly what I’m wondering too.” Too late to turn back now, Ellie decided. “So here’s my offer. You get those answers for me. On the down-low. Find out who he is and what he’s up to. And never let him find out. You do that—and I’ll contact Nora Quinn.”

  BEFORE

  CHAPTER 40

  BROOKE

  “I love seagulls, don’t you?” Brooke, the sun toasting her bare arms, leaned back against the once-familiar mahogany fittings of her brother’s beloved old Caduceus. He’d taught her to sail the Caddy, as he called it, when she was maybe eight, and barely strong enough to handle the jib sheets to come about. Put some muscle into it, Smidge, Trevor would tease, and she’d hated “Smidge” but adored Trevor, and this time on the bay was their connection. Even now, as she was about to finish grad school, the seagulls and the early summer, the fragrance of Coppertone and Trevor’s strong arm and his red life vest—like hers—transported her to times long past. His vest was unbuckled, as always, webbed straps flapping, his prowess at the helm more a life preserver than any vest could be.

  “Sure, Smidge,” Trev told her. He sat, one hand on the tiller and tan legs outstretched, with sunglasses glinting and a backward black-and-orange Orioles ball cap, steering them out of the yacht club and across the whitecaps of Chesapeake Bay; the shore and the beach and the pin-dot-sized sunbathers on the shore a faraway impressionist blur. “Seagulls. My fave.”

  They sat for a moment in silence, the fragrance of the briny water and Trevor’s wheaty Natty Boh taking Brooke back seven years, to the last time she’d seen her parents and the Chesapeake and her brother, and forward, to her potential new life and career, and reminding her of what she’d given up. And gained.

  “Mom and Dad are really hot to go to your graduation,” Trevor said. “I wish you’d tell them you’re here.”

  “Screw them,” Brooke said. She zipped up her yellow windbreaker. Summer had come early to the Eastern Shore, but the coastal weather could be fickle. “I wanted to see you, just you, and you know, since I had the job interview, it made sense. But you promised. Just us. Not them.”

  “Okay, but,” Trevor said, “you didn’t even come for Christmas, not since you went to college, and Mom still hangs up your stocking. So, you know, she misses you. We all do. It’s not the same without you, Smidge. Is there anything I can—”

  “Yeah. You can forget about it, okay? It’s fine. You can’t choose your family, but you don’t have to deal with them. It’s just how it is. ’Cept for you, though, Trev. I’m sorry they put you in the middle of it.”

  Trevor’s face darkened, its own shadow in the bright sun. “Okay, but listen, is there anything I should know? About what happened? I mean … if anything … if Dad—”

  “You watch too much TV,” Brooke said. “But hey, no, nothing like that. Really.”

  “Maybe someday you’ll tell me.”

  “It doesn’t matter, okay? Seriously. Let it go. You mean to head out this way?” Brooke pointed toward the receding shore.

  “Shit. You distracted me, Smidge. Grab that line, will you? Let’s come about.”

  “Oh, right, my fault.” She stood, balancing on the deck, tailing the jib and ducking under the boom as the boat tacked in the other direction. “Like the time you brought home that insane hamster from school. And blamed me when it got out.”

  “They ever find that friggin’ thing?” Trevor asked.

  “Shut up,” she said, ten years old again. “You’re a jerk.”

  She’d yanked her hair back in a ponytail, now flapping in the brisk wind. The sails filled, and for a moment she was one with the Caduceus, feeling the chop of the water and the slash of the wind and the shift of the hull as it cut through the brackish water. If they kept going, simply kept on and on in this direction, somehow, they’d hit England. She wished they could leave their lives behind, just like they’d left the shore.

  But the shore—and the lives she and Trev had waiting for them—would always be there.

  “It’s so great, isn’t it?” Trevor’s chest rose and fell as the boat adjusted, turned, skimmed the water. The rush of the wake and the hiss of motion—Brooke could tell, simply by the sound of it, that Trevor had found the sweet spot in the wind, the space that would carry them as fast as the laws of aerodynamics would allow. They had no destination this afternoon, no place to go but away, only the joy of motion and the feel of freedom, unattached and unmoored, making the wind and the water their personal place in the universe. “The Caddy’s such a rock star.”

  “You sound happy.” The sky, Brooke saw, was whitecapped with clouds, mirroring the dark water of the bay. “Married man and all, livin’ the life. Here at your summer place, all bougie and settled. Getting ready to take over the company. And kids? Ever? Mom’s got to be going nuts. She’ll probably move in with you when the baby finally comes. Lucky you.”

  “Huh.” Trev’s eyes kept focus on the horizon. “Rather talk about you, Smidge. Seriously. Mom would be so happy if—”

  “Trev? Seriously. Like I said. It’s history, it’s—never mind, okay?” She stood, looking out toward the mouth of the bay, widening her legs to keep her balance. “Stuff happens. I know your life is all textbook and perfect, but—whoa.” She grabbed a brass railing, almost tripped over her
own feet, clunky in white sneakers. “Tell a girl if you’re gonna turn like that.”

  “Just seeing if you still have your sea legs.” Trevor grinned at her as he angled the boat harder, his beer clamped between his battered boat shoes. “Let’s keep going, okay? Head out? You up for it? And hey, we have food. Lacey had sandwiches made for us. In the hold, in white plastic things.”

  “Very cozy.” Brooke edged her way toward the center of the boat, then turned, sat on the hatch cover, the white wood warm under her bare thighs. “Wait. Lacey knows I’m out with you?”

  “Well, hey, yeah, I mean—what’s the big? Yesterday she asked if I wanted her to get food, I said yeah, for two.” He shrugged. “Imagine if I said yeah, someone’s coming out with me but I can’t tell you who. Right. All I need.”

  “She still as Home and Garden as she was?” Brooke lifted the hatch, flapped it open, latched it down. Turned backward to take the three steps into the hold. “Can’t believe you guys don’t have two point five children already.”

  Brooke ducked into the musty gloom of the hold, that fragrance, too, taking her back to summers past. It smelled of wool and wind, with a scent half of salt and half of mildew, somehow comforting instead of smothering. Some of their most perfect days had been out on the water. Separate and peaceful. Feeling as if they had some control.

  “Got ’em!” Brooke yelled up into the daylight. She put one plastic-covered sandwich in each windbreaker pocket, unflapping one life jacket buckle to make room, then pulled two icy beers from the cooler and tucked the bottles under her arm. Trev had let her have beer way before she was legal, she remembered, another secret they had from their parents. Beer and sun and water made her sleepy, but it was too gorgeous a day not to indulge.

  She clambered back up, pausing a moment to watch Trevor as he turned the tiller yet again, the mainsail boom swinging across the deck as he tacked a textbook ninety degrees. She heard the mainsail luff before it decided to fill with the wind, and then felt the boat catch its mark and speed ahead. Trevor, concentrating and empowered in his own world, looked like he owned the place.

  Brooke wondered, looking at him, if Lacey loved this as much as he did. She couldn’t imagine that woman, all manicure and eyeliner, letting nature take its course as it inevitably did out here.

  “Does Lacey sail?” She set one sandwich next to Trevor, inserted his beer in a brass holder.

  “She did when we first met.” Trevor linked his arm over the tiller, holding it in place while he opened his sandwich. “Seemed to love it. Said so, at least. Mom even sprung for a bunch of lessons, engagement present. Since we were married, though, she’s not so hot on it.” He shrugged, taking a bite.

  Brooke took her place again, setting her beer in the middle of a roll of gaffer’s tape, their makeshift cupholders. “Tell me the scoop about Lacey and Mom. I bet they’re big besties. Hey, we’re getting out there, bud. You mean to?”

  Trevor took another bite. “You in a rush?”

  Brooke shook her head, letting go. She’d had classes, and finals and her thesis, then job interviews, and now, she realized, her life was like that ocean in front of them. Vast and full of possibilities. She only had to learn how to navigate it. She rolled her eyes at her own dumb metaphor.

  “So, Mom and Lacey, I was saying.” Brooke twisted the top from her Boh. Took a swallow. Beer and sailing, she thought. They ought to bottle it.

  “Yeah, well.” Trevor’s face darkened. “There’s a thing about—” He blew out a breath, didn’t look at her. “You asked about kids. Yeah. I’m all about that, and Lacey wanted kids too.”

  “So?” Brooke grinned. “You need me to explain it to you?”

  Trevor didn’t laugh.

  “Joke,” she said.

  “Yeah.” Trevor took another swig of beer, tried to put the empty in the metal holder, and missed. Brooke swiped up the bottle before it rolled away across the deck. Stuck it in a mesh trash container.

  “Trev?”

  “Ah, not sure how much I can tell you,” he said. “Kinda personal.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’d know if you were home, Brooke.”

  She widened her eyes, startled that he’d called her Brooke. “What? Know?”

  “Lacey’s, like—well, you know Mom, right? And her miracle-of-modern-medicine stuff?”

  Brooke’s stomach twisted, in memory or remembrance, and her tuna sandwich suddenly seemed impossible. She wrapped it back into the plastic, stashed it in her windbreaker pocket. “All too well,” she said.

  “So Lacey was having—I mean we were having, I mean … trouble.”

  Trevor seemed to be struggling for the proper words.

  “I’m so sorry,” Brooke said, even though she wasn’t sure about what. Were he and Lacey fighting?

  “Between us? I mean, you can never tell Lacey I told you. But I can’t—there’s no one for me to talk to. I mean, in our family?” Trevor’s smile was full of rue. “The vaunted Vanderwalds of the pharmaceutical behemoth? To complain about medications? That’s total blasphemy. Treason. Punishable by torture and death. Don’t bite the hand, right?”

  The water shushed by them, the shore now diminished to a slash of fading beige and far-off green, the people and dogs dotting the sand no longer recognizable. They’d passed other sailboats, bobbing on their buoys in the harbor. Brooke loved this, the vast alone. Her college had teemed with sound and motion, and her dorm quad full of chattering students, flirting or partying or earnestly solving the problems of the universe. It was never quiet in Brooke’s college world; that’s what she missed about the water.

  “Got that right,” she said. “Medications? But sure, I four-leaf-clover-swear not to tell. Remember?”

  “You can’t swear on a four leaf clover.” Trevor repeated his line.

  “Yes, you can!” She channeled her eight-year-old self, thinking about all that had transpired since then.

  “Yeah, so.” Trevor’s voice was back to a twenty-nine-year-old’s. “Lacey said her doctor said she couldn’t have kids. Something’s wrong with her, um. You want details?”

  “Whatever feels right.” Brooke watched her brother’s face darken, even in the sunshine. “It’s just us out here.”

  “Okay, well. Let’s just say we were having trouble staying pregnant. She told Mom.” He lifted his sunglasses, parking them on his forehead. Squinted at her. “Can you imagine that conversation? Christ. Anyway. Mom made her go to a doctor, one of Mom’s cast of characters, and told him Lacey was fine, she was perfect, all she needed was a boost of this stuff. And Lacey was up for it, she told me; what else was she supposed to do? Say no to Mom? And a doctor? To make it easier for her—for us—to … you know. And he gave her—well, shit. He gave her some drug, Monifan? And it went wrong, she’s allergic or something, now she can’t have kids. And it’s a P-X drug, naturally, and they’re saying this has never happened before. But—”

  “That’s horrible.” Brooke felt the blood drain from her face. “I’m so sorry, Trev. There’s nothing they can do? Surgery? Or anything else?”

  “Nada.” Trevor flipped his sunglasses back into place with one expert snap, as if closing off the conversation.

  “I’m so sorry, Trevs,” she said again. “And I guess she must be miserable, thinking about how she could have said no. Did they give her a choice?”

  Trevor turned his head, his dark glasses facing out over the water, staring toward England.

  “There’s never a choice with Mom,” Trevor said. “She thinks she can fix anything. ‘Fix’ meaning make it be the way she wants it to be. And then she’ll say she was only trying to help.”

  Brooke risked a gulp of her Boh, then another.

  “How do you stand it?” she had to ask. “Being with her?”

  “Her? Lacey?”

  “Mom. And Dad. And that whole thing. And allergic? Allergic? They’re saying Lacey’s the only one? Really? Honestly? The only one?”

  “Brooke? Can we not—”
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  “And hmm. You’re about to become Prince Hotshot at P-X.” She toasted him with her beer bottle. “You planning on mentioning that little glitch in their miracle drug? How will that hit Dad’s precious stock price?”

  “Shit, Brooke. Don’t ask me that, okay?” Trevor adjusted the tiller as the boat slowed, the wind falling off as the afternoon slipped by. “Your dedicated trust fund is still intact, no matter what happens to P-X.”

  The old Barge Point lighthouse loomed in the distance and a pair of swooping seagulls now shepherded their journey. The shoreline behind them, Brooke saw, became a distant curve of sand and sky.

  “True.” Brooke remembered a fireside chat one winter evening when her father had explained the family’s financial structure to an impatient teenage Brooke. She’d wondered: Why do I have to know this? She knew it was hypocritical, distancing herself from her parents but not from their money. But in her equation, it served them right. They couldn’t buy her love, or her loyalty, but they owed her. Big time. And she’d use their money for good. “And yours too, I suppose. Daddy made sure of that. But listen, that drug she got—”

  “Let’s anchor here, right? Finish Lacey’s sandwiches, talk about something else?”

  Trevor lowered the anchor over the side, feeding out the rope hand over hand. The Caddy bobbed in the light chop, tugging at the set anchor like an impatient puppy. Brooke tossed a few crusty edges of her tuna baguette to the fish below, imagining the winter-chilled depths and teeming marine creatures, the rocky bottom so far beneath them. The waves, gentle, sloshed against the hull of the boat, caressing and cradling, as if the arms of the sea were rocking them into silence.

  Trevor, tiller lashed with a bright orange bungee cord, leaned against the brass rail behind him, grabbed his sandwich, then propped his bare feet on the deck bench beside Brooke. She faced the opposite way, toward the shore, wishing they never had to go back.

  Nine years now, since Mom had taken that decision away from Brooke, tricked her, not even offering her the respect to make her own choice. And now, it seemed, probably again insisting it was “for the best,” Mom had done the same thing to Lacey. Whom Brooke never liked, sure, and who’d never given Brooke a second thought. But now, Brooke let out a sigh of conscience; maybe they were victims together.