Whispers and Lies

by Joy Fielding

  What I’d done was use bitter chocolate instead of sweet. A careless mistake no doubt, but I was only nine or ten, and surely the look on my mother’s face, the knowledge that she’d been right about me all along, was punishment enough.

  Except that it wasn’t. And I knew it. It was never enough.

  Even now I can feel my body tense as I waited for the blow to strike the side of my face, the blow that would send my head spinning and my ears ringing. But the blow never came. Instead came an eerie calm, a misplaced smile. My mother simply pointed to the chair beside her and instructed me to sit down. Then she took the knife and cut into my cake, producing a perfect piece similar to the one I’d cut for her, pushed it toward me, and waited for me to take a bite.

  I can still feel my hands shaking as I pushed the cake into my mouth. Instantly, the bitter taste settled on my tongue, combining with the bitter salt of my tears as they fell down my cheeks and ran between my lips.

  She made me eat the entire cake.

  Only when I was sick and vomiting on the floor did she stop, and only then to make me clean it up.

  Terry, for God’s sake, what are you doing down there?

  Coming, Mother.

  I glanced back at the cottage, then preset the oven to 350 degrees and lightly greased a large Bundt pan. I poured the batter inside it, then added my secret ingredient.

  What on earth took you so long? I need the bedpan.

  It’s right beside you. No need to get so upset.

  I’ve been calling you for forty-five minutes.

  I’m sorry. I was baking you a cake.

  What kind of cake?

  It’s chocolate. Your favorite.

  When the oven reached 350 degrees, I put the cake inside, then licked the bowl free of whatever batter remained. “You never let me lick the bowl, did you, Mother?” The best part, I’ve always thought. “I always missed out on the best part.”

  I know you blame me.

  I don’t blame you.

  Yes, you do. You blame me for the way your life has turned out, for the fact you never married or had children. That whole episode with Roger Stillman.…

  That was a long time ago, Mother. I’ve let it go.

  Have you? Have you really?

  I nodded, cut her a large slice of cake, pressed a forkful to her lips.

  You know that everything I did, I did for your benefit.

  I know that. Of course I know that.

  I didn’t mean to be cruel.

  I know.

  It’s the way I was raised. My mother was the same with me.

  You were a good mother.

  I made a lot of mistakes.

  We all make mistakes.

  Can you forgive me?

  Of course I forgive you. I kissed the flaky, dry skin of her forehead. You’re my mother. I love you.

  She whispered something unintelligible, maybe “I love you,” maybe not. Whatever it was, I knew it was a lie. Everything she said was a goddamn lie. She didn’t love me. She wasn’t sorry about anything except that she was the one in that bed, and not me. I pushed another forkful of cake into her stupid, eager mouth.

  My reveries were interrupted by a loud knocking and I raced to the kitchen door. A man was standing outside the cottage, his back to me. Suddenly Alison opened her door, the light from inside the cottage throwing a spotlight on the now familiar figure.

  “K.C.!” Alison exclaimed as his profile came clearly into view. “Come in.” She cast a furtive glance around the cottage before ushering him inside and closing the door.

  Look at the lowlife you’ve allowed into my home, I heard my mother hiss.

  “My home,” I corrected her now. “You died, remember?”

  With the help of Terry’s magic chocolate cake and a favorite pillow.

  “Taste buds failed you that time, didn’t they, Mother?” Whoever said that Percodan and chocolate pudding didn’t mix?

  I smelled the aroma of freshly baking cake, glanced at the oven, then back to the cottage in time to see the door reopen, and Alison step outside behind K.C. “Terry should be home soon,” she was saying. “I can’t be gone long.”

  I ran through the kitchen to the front of the house, watched through the living room window as Alison and K.C. marched purposefully down the front path to the street, then turned the corner, their arms brushing up against one another as they walked. Were they going to meet Lance and Denise? How long before they’d be back? And would Erica’s biker friend be with them?

  I wasted no more time. Clutching the spare key to the cottage between my fingers, and carefully sliding the foot-long butcher knife with its tapered two-inch blade from its wooden slot, I opened the back door and stepped into a night redolent with whispers and lies.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I’m not sure what I was looking for, or what exactly I thought I’d find.

  Maybe I was checking to make sure Lance was really gone. Or maybe I was looking for Alison’s journal, something I could take to the police, point to as proof positive that my life was at risk. I don’t know. As I stood in the middle of the brightly lit living room, my hands trembling, my knees all but knocking together, I had absolutely no thought in my head as to what to do next.

  I had no idea how long Alison and K.C. would be gone. And how did I know Lance wasn’t hiding in the bedroom, watching and waiting for my next stupid move? Hadn’t I parked my car around the block to avoid discovery? Couldn’t he have done exactly the same thing?

  Except there was no sign of him anywhere: no rumpled clothing strewn carelessly on the floor; no wayward creases in the furniture where he might have sat; no stray masculine smells permeating the air, disturbing the scent of baby powder and strawberries. I tiptoed toward the bedroom, the handle of the large butcher knife clutched tightly in the palm of my hand, the blade protruding from my body like the thorn of a giant rose.

  But nothing in the bedroom indicated Lance might still be in residence. No shirts in the drawers, no suitcase in the closet, no shaving kit in the medicine cabinet. I even checked under the bed. “Nothing,” I said to the reflection that flickered at me from the long, sharp blade of the knife. Was it possible he was really gone, that he’d taken off with Denise, just as Alison had claimed?

  If so, then why was K.C. still around? What was his connection to Alison?

  I laid the knife across the top of the white wicker dresser, watched it wobble against the uneven surface as I rifled through each drawer. But the drawers were mostly empty—a few push-up bras from Victoria’s Secret, half a dozen pairs of panties, several uncomfortable-looking thongs, and a pair of yellow cotton pajamas decorated with images from I Love Lucy.

  Where was her journal? Surely that would tell me something.

  Only after searching through every drawer several times did I spot the damn thing sitting on the night table beside the bed. “Stupid,” I said in my mother’s voice. “It was right there the whole time. Open your eyes.” I marched to the nightstand, grabbed the journal, turned swiftly to its final entry.

  Everything’s falling apart, I read.

  As if on cue, a series of loud bangs, like small explosions, erupted from the street, followed by an even louder voice, then more banging. “Terry!” the voice shouted. “Terry, I know you’re in there. Terry, please! Open the door!”

  I dropped the journal onto the bed, raced to the side window, watched as Alison came running around the side of my house from the front to the back door, K.C. at her heels.

  “Terry!” she persisted, banging repeatedly on my back door with her open palm. “Terry, please. Open up. We have to talk.”

  “She’s not there,” K.C. said.

  “She is there. Terry, please. Open the door.”

  Suddenly Alison was vaulting toward the cottage. Had she seen me watching from the window? I spun around in helpless circles, knowing there was nowhere for me to go.

  I was trapped.

  I ran toward the closet, noting only at the last second the journa
l I’d carelessly dropped on Alison’s bed. I hurried back, scooped it up, and returned it to its rightful place on the nightstand, then scrambled across the bed toward the closet, bringing the door closed after me just as Alison’s key turned in the front lock.

  It was then, my fingers tightly curled around the doorknob, that I realized I’d left the knife—the foot-long behemoth with its tapered two-inch blade—lying on top of the dresser. Stupid, stupid girl! my mother whispered in my ear. She’s not likely to miss that, is she?

  “Maybe it wasn’t her car,” K.C. was saying from the next room. “There are lots of black Nissans.”

  “It was her car,” Alison insisted, confusion bracketing her words. “Why would she park it around the block and not in the driveway?”

  “Maybe she’s visiting a friend.”

  “She doesn’t have any friends. I’m the only friend she’s got.”

  “Doesn’t that strike you as strange?”

  There followed a long pause in which we all seemed to be holding our breath.

  “What are you talking about?” Alison asked.

  I heard the shuffling sounds of two wary people walking around in circles. How long before one of them stepped into the bedroom, saw the knife? How long before Alison checked the closet for bogeymen?

  “Look, Alison, there are some things I have to tell you.”

  “What kind of things?”

  Another pause, this one even longer than the first. “I haven’t been very honest with you.”

  “Welcome to the club,” Alison muttered. “Listen, on second thought, I don’t think I’m up for this discussion right now.”

  “No—you need to hear me out.”

  “I need to pee.”

  Dear God, I thought, as I shot from the closet like a yoyo on a string. I grabbed the knife, the blade slicing across my palm as my fingers closed around it. Then I leaped back inside the closet, the door closing after me just as Alison entered the room.

  I stuffed my wounded hand inside my mouth, sucked at the steady stream of blood issuing from my palm, and tried not to cry out. From the bathroom, I heard Alison grumbling as she relieved herself. “What in the world is going on here?” she kept repeating over and over. “What in the world is going on?”

  Alison flushed the toilet, washed her hands, and reentered the bedroom, then stopped, as if not sure of her next move. Or had something suspicious caught her eye? A drop of blood on the dresser? A suspicious footprint in the carpet? Was her journal lying wrong-side up? I raised my knife, steeled my body for her approach.

  “Alison?” K.C. called from the living room. “Are you all right?”

  “That depends.” A pronounced sigh of resignation. “What is it you want to tell me?”

  K.C.’s voice drew closer. I felt him standing in the doorway. “Maybe you should sit down.”

  Alison obediently plopped down on her bed. “I’m liking this less and less.”

  “For starters, my name isn’t K.C.”

  “It isn’t,” Alision said, more statement than question.

  “It’s Charlie. Charlie Kentish.”

  Charlie Kentish? Where had I heard that name before?

  “Charlie Kentish,” Alison repeated, as if thinking the same thing. “Not K.C., short for Kenneth Charles.”

  “No.”

  “No wonder nobody ever calls you that,” she observed wryly, and I almost laughed. “I don’t understand,” she continued in almost the same breath. “Why would you lie about your name?”

  “Because I didn’t know if I could trust you.”

  “Why wouldn’t you trust me?”

  I felt him shrug. “I’m not sure where to start.” Another shrug, perhaps a shake of his head.

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t bother.” Alison jumped to her feet. I felt her moving around, pacing back and forth in front of the bed. “Maybe it’s not important who you really are or what you have to tell me. Maybe you should just leave, so that you can get on with your life, whose ever it is, and I’ll get on with mine, and we can all live happily ever after. Don’t you think that’s a good idea?”

  “Only if you come with me.”

  “Come with you?”

  “You’re in danger if you stay here.”

  “I’m in danger?” Alison laughed. “Are you completely nuts?”

  “Please listen to me—”

  “No,” Alison said resolutely. “You’re starting to scare me, and I want you to leave.”

  “It’s not me you have to worry about.”

  “Listen, K.C., or Charlie, or whoever the hell you really are—”

  “I’m Charlie Kentish.”

  Charlie Kentish, I repeated. Why was that name so damn familiar?

  “I don’t want to have this conversation. If you don’t leave, I’m going to call the police.”

  “Erica Hollander is my fiancée.”

  “What?”

  “The woman who used to live here.”

  “I know who Erica Hollander is.”

  So that’s where I knew the name. Of course. Charlie Kentish. Erica’s fiancé, the one she was always going on about. Charlie this. Charlie that. Charlie’s so handsome. Charlie’s so smart. Charlie’s got this great job in Japan for a year. Charlie and I are getting married as soon as he comes home.

  “Your precious fiancée ran out on Terry in the middle of the night, owing several months’ rent,” Alison said.

  “She didn’t go anywhere.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, she didn’t go anywhere,” he repeated, as if that explained everything.

  “I don’t understand. What are you saying?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “Tell you what? I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

  “Maybe if you’d stop pacing for two minutes and sit down …”

  “I don’t want to sit down.”

  “Please. Just hear me out.”

  “And then you’ll leave?”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  I heard the bed squeak as Alison resumed her former position. “I’m listening,” she said in a tone that indicated she’d rather not be.

  “Erica and I had been living together for about six months when I got this great job offer to work in Japan for a year. We decided I should go, and she’d stay here, move into a cheaper apartment, and we’d save our money so we could get married as soon as I got home.”

  “I thought you were from Texas.”

  “Originally, yes. I moved here after college.”

  “Okay, so off you went to Japan,” Alison said, getting back on track.

  “And Erica e-mailed me about finding this great little place, a small cottage behind a house belonging to a nurse. She was thrilled.”

  “I’m sure she was.”

  “Everything seemed perfect. I’d get these glowing E-mails telling me how wonderful Terry was, how she was always inviting Erica over for dinner, doing little things for her. Erica’s mother died a couple of years ago, and her father had remarried and moved to Arizona, so I guess she was just really grateful to have someone like Terry in her life.”

  “So she could take advantage of her.”

  “Erica wasn’t like that. She was the sweetest—” His voice cracked, threatened to break. “Then things started to change.”

  “What do you mean? What things?”

  “The letters stopped being so positive. Erica wrote that Terry was starting to behave strangely, that she seemed fixated on some biker Erica once said hello to in a restaurant, that she was getting paranoid.”

  “Paranoid? In what way?”

  “She never went into detail. She just said that Terry was starting to make her feel uncomfortable, that she was afraid she might have to start looking for another place.”

  “So she skipped out in the middle of the night.”

  “No. I was due back in a few months. We decided she might as well stay put until I got back to Delray an
d we could look for a place together. But then, the E-mails suddenly stopped. I tried calling her cell phone, but no one ever answered. That’s when I started calling Terry. She told me Erica had moved out.”

  “You didn’t believe her?”

  “It seemed odd that Erica would move out without telling me, let alone go anywhere without leaving a forwarding address.”

  “Terry told me she was hanging out with a bad crowd.”

  “No.”

  “That she met someone else.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Things like that happen every day.”

  “I’m sure they do. But that’s not what happened here.”

  “Did you check with her employer?”

  “Erica didn’t have a regular employer. She worked for Kelly Services. They hadn’t heard from her in weeks.”

  “Did you go to the police?”

  “I called them from Japan. There wasn’t much they could do long-distance. They contacted Terry. She gave them the same story she gave me.”

  “Which you can’t accept.”

  “Because it isn’t true.”

  “Did you go to the police when you got back home?”

  “As soon as I got off the plane. They reacted pretty much the same way you are now. ‘She found somebody else, buddy. Move on.’ ”

  “But you can’t.”

  “Not till I find out what happened to her.”

  “And you think Terry is somehow involved? That I’m involved?”

  “I thought that in the beginning.”

  “The beginning?”

  “When you first moved in.”

  I could almost feel the quizzical look on Alison’s face.

  “I’d been watching the house for about a month at that point,” K.C. explained. “After you moved in, I started following you. You got a job at that gallery, and I started hanging around. I almost had a heart attack when I saw you wearing Erica’s necklace. I gave her that necklace.”