Perfect Lies

by Liza Bennett

  “Sit here,” Janine said, pulling out one of four mismatched kitchen chairs for Meg. “It’s so nice, so unexpected to have you visit. I was just making some coffee, or would you rather have tea? The water’s boiling in any case so either one is just as simple as can be!”

  “Is Clint around?” Meg asked.

  “Why, yes, he’s upstairs washing up for lunch. We don’t get to have our noonday meal together here, you know, because usually I’m needed up at the big house. But Frannie took the girls so that Lark could help Hannah. Wasn’t that sweet of her? Do you want Clint? I could call him if you like, though he should be down any minute now. But I’ll call him anyway. Cli-int! Cli-int!”

  Her high-pitched voice had an immediate effect. A door slammed above them. Heavy feet sounded on the stairs. Clint, his flannel shirt half unbuttoned, burst into the room. He was clutching a towel in one hand.

  “What—?”

  “Honey, look who’s here,” Janine said, beaming at her husband and then at Meg.

  “I thought something was wrong,” Clint apologized, nodding to Meg as he buttoned up his shirt. “The way you were screaming, hon.”

  “Clint’s such an alarmist,” Janine said, going to the cupboard and taking down three green glass cups and saucers; Meg recognized them as Red River Studio originals. “He worries about every little thing. Is coffee all right with you, Meggie? Or would you rather have tea?”

  “Oh, no, thanks so much, I’m fine,” Meg assured her. Clint and Janine sat down across from her. There was an awkward moment when the only sound was that of spoons hitting glass as Clint and Janine stirred sugar into their coffee.

  “What can we do for you, Meg?” Clint asked at last. His expression was one of concerned goodwill.

  “I spent the last hour down at the police station. Going over everything again with Tom Huddleson. I guess he’s talked to both of you as well?”

  “Oh yes,” Clint replied, stroking his beard. “Together. Separately. Tom. The state detectives. They’ve had an awful lot of questions. We’ve being doing everything we can to help. Though them taking over the studio has put a real serious dent in our plans. But, we understand they’ve got a job to do.”

  “How do you …” Meg hesitated a moment, glancing from Janine to Clint “How do you see that job?”

  “What do you mean?” Janine asked.

  “I guess, what I’m asking is—are you convinced Lucinda killed him?” Meg asked Janine directly.

  “I saw her with my own eyes with the pontil in her hands,” Janine replied, her voice falling to a whisper. “I was the one who first saw her.”

  “So you were there?” Meg asked. “You were both there all the time? Would you mind telling me what happened?”

  Clint and Janine exchanged a look.

  “What’s your interest?” Clint asked. “We’ve been over this ground plenty already.”

  “Yes, I know,” Meg said, stalling for a moment as she tried to think of a way to allay their concerns. “It’s just that … well, I haven’t really heard the whole story from anyone. And I can’t bring myself to ask Lark about the details. You know, with everything else she’s going through. All these questions Tom was asking me—well, I began to think I’d really like to know more myself about what actually happened. So I thought, maybe you two wouldn’t mind helping me a bit.”

  “About what exactly?” Clint asked.

  “Did anyone else come by the studio that morning? Besides Lucinda.”

  “Well,” Clint tipped back in his chair, resting the back of his head in his cupped hands. “Okay, one more time: It was Saturday. Janine had breakfast with the girls and Ethan up at the big house and I went over to Yoder’s for my eggs and bacon. I like to hang out with the boys there sometimes, you know.”

  “I got back to the studio before you, hon,” Janine said. “And I started in on the mailing list merge and purge. I remember because I’d been putting it off for so long and was proud that I’d finally just buckled down to it.”

  “That’s right,” Clint said, sitting forward again. “You were at the computer when I got back from town. And a little while after that someone did come by. I thought it might be a delivery so I started to go into the studio but Ethan called out that he’d taken care of it.”

  “Did he usually do that?” Meg asked. “Handle the deliveries on his own?”

  “State police asked me the same thing,” Clint replied. “And what I told them was this: no, not as a general rule. Ethan expected us to do all the routine work. But I don’t remember it seeming like a big deal that he did it himself that day.”

  “Did you see the car?” Meg continued. “Do you remember what it looked like?”

  This time Janine answered. “I saw it. I got up and went to the side door and took a look. It was a sort of plum-colored car. A beemer, I think.”

  “A BMW?” Meg asked, and Janine nodded. “Why’d you bother to check?”

  She looked flustered for a moment, the color rising easily to her cheeks. “I guess because I wanted a distraction. Anything. I really didn’t want to do the mailing list. And I also wondered if it was Becca, if she’d come early for some reason. But Becca doesn’t own a beemer.”

  “Becca Sabin?” Meg asked. “Was she a customer?”

  “Depends on what you mean by that,” Janine replied. “Ethan sure had something that Becca wanted.”

  “Now, hon,” Clint warned.

  “I’m not saying anything that everybody in this town doesn’t already know. Has known for years. Becca was sick in love with Ethan McGowan. I mean, she was crazy with it. Even after he’d dumped her. Even after he told her it was over. She couldn’t give him up. She refused to believe that he didn’t want her. Someone as beautiful as her. But—”

  “Janine, just stop it” Clint’s voice was sharp and sobering. “Meg doesn’t want to hear a lot of tired old gossip. And neither do I. There was the one delivery that morning. And then, a half-hour or so later, another car drove up—and as I recall, it went on to the big house. That’s it. That’s what I told the police.” Clint pushed back his chair and stood up. “Now, unless there’s something else, I’ve a lumber delivery to pick up in Montville.”

  “No, really, thanks,” Meg said, her mind taken up with the news about Ethan and Becca. “You’ve been so helpful, Clint.”

  “Now, hon,” Clint said as he fished a fist of keys out of the back pocket of his jeans, “I’ve a feeling Lark’s wondering what’s happening to you. Time to get a move on.” With a nod to Meg, he left.

  “I’ll help you clear up,” Meg said, standing and starting to gather up the cups and saucers. It occurred to her that she’d get more out of Janine with Clint gone. She followed Janine to the sink.

  “Oh, I can handle all this,” Janine said as she turned on the faucet. Meg heard the grumble of Clint’s pickup truck receding down the drive.

  “I know what Clint was saying about gossip,” Meg observed, leaning against the counter as Janine washed the dishes. “But you knew, of course, that there was a lot of truth about Ethan and his—”

  “Other women?” Janine asked with a nervous giggle. “Of course, I knew.”

  “How did you feel about it?”

  “That it wasn’t any of my business.” Her prim response didn’t jibe with her earlier venting about Becca. “Ethan was our employer. And he was a good one. He gave us this house to live in. He taught Clint the craft. We have nothing but gratitude for everything he did.”

  “You know that others in this town feel differently?” Meg asked.

  “I don’t understand all this talk against Ethan,” Janine said, staring at the stream of running water. “He was a good man. Thoughtful, generous. He took good care of us—and Lark and the girls, too. You know that, Meg.”

  “Yes, I know,” Meg replied. “I also know that he had his passions. And that he sometimes couldn’t control them. Did he ever … approach you, Janine?”

  “Me?” Janine turned to Meg, her face flushing
a deep pink. “No. Absolutely not. He was always a gentleman with me. And doesn’t that tell you something? I mean, despite what people say, don’t you think that perhaps it was really these women who approached him? You know, he was so attractive. And some of them, like Becca, just couldn’t get over him. Lost all sense of decency.”

  “Maybe,” Meg said, deciding it wasn’t her place to set Janine straight about her former employer.

  “Meg, there is something that Clint didn’t see.” Janine turned off the faucet and reached over to dry her hands on the dish towel. “Something that I told Tom Huddleson, but nobody else.”

  “Do you want to tell me?” Meg said

  “It’s about the car Clint mentioned that drove by after the beemer,” Janine said. “The second one. It didn’t drive past to the big house like Clint thought. But it didn’t pull into the driveway, either. It went up and turned off into the woods where nobody would see it. But I saw it. I was watching. I recognized it, of course. I was expecting it.”

  “And it was?”

  “Can’t you guess? Becca.”

  25

  Lark‘s studio was on the third floor of the house, facing north, a small, beamed room that had once been part of the attic. Its ceiling followed the steep slant of the roof. Lark had painted it a bright yellow and, with the first draft of the illustrations for her book tacked in progression to the wood supports that girdled the room, it gave off the bright slightly disordered cheeriness of a nursery. The final flight of stairs was uncarpeted and rickety, and Lark must have heard Meg’s ascent from her first step. But she didn’t turn when Meg, breathing a bit heavily from the climb, hesitated at the open doorway.

  “Francine’s brought the girls home,” Meg told her. “And Janine came back with me. We put Fern down for her nap.”

  “Thanks,” Lark said, dropping a paintbrush into a glass of discolored water. She arched back in her chair, stretching. “We finally got Hannah squared away. I saw Fran drive up. I can see all sorts of things from here. You have a nice talk with the Lindberghs?”

  Though the dormer window that Lark’s drafting board faced was small, the view it offered was generous and broad; without the obstruction of leaf cover, one could clearly see the turnaround in front of the house, the studio, the scaffolding around the icehouse, and the Lindbergh’s front yard.

  “You do have quite a view,” Meg said, walking across the room to stand behind Lark. “You sit here and watch Becca Sabin come visit with Ethan every afternoon?”

  “Janine’s mouth has been flapping away again, I take it.”

  “Lark,” Meg squeezed her sister’s right shoulder, but it was tense and unyielding, solid as stone. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Meg asked. The two sisters were alone together, just as they had been for most of their lives.

  “Because I didn’t want you to know,” Lark said. “All the others were bad enough. But Becca … Becca and Ethan… that was just the worst.”

  “Listen, baby,” Meg sat down on the little footstool next to Lark’s drawing board and took her sister’s hands in hers. “Talk to me now, okay? Tell me what happened.”

  Lark looked down at their joined hands for a moment, then away into the middle distance out the window. With a deep sigh, she began: “Becca Sabin looked like trouble to me from the moment I first met her. She seemed so full of disdain for this town, despite the fact that Abe just loved it here. It helped a little that the house Abe had built ended up being featured in the pages of the New York Times magazine. That kind of thing—appearances, awards—mean so much to her. I remember that at the housewarming party Abe and Becca threw when the construction was finally completed, Becca had propped the magazine article open on the large glass cube they had for a their coffee table.”

  Meg saw Lark frown as she paused, remembering the scene.

  “It was late Indian summer weather that night—sultry, unsettled,” Lark went on. “The other women at the party had on the kind of thing I usually wear—you know, floral print dresses or black pants with silk shirts. But Becca! She was in full Manhattan regalia: a fuchsia-colored slip dress, a real curve-hugger. Bronze-dyed high-heeled sandals, a heavy gold chain-link necklace. The one thing she wasn’t wearing was a brassiere.

  “I saw Ethan watching her. I saw him kind of slowly circling around her. About halfway through the evening, he found a way to approach her. I could see them starting to talk to each other. Then I watched her really begin to take him in. The way her hips started to sway. And you know how Ethan used to run his hands through his hair? I always recognized that as one of his signals. I could just tell he was getting turned on by her.”

  “Oh, baby,” Meg squeezed her sister’s hands as Lark shook her head sadly.

  “Well, Meggie, you know by that time I was pretty accustomed to turning a blind eye on Ethan’s little ‘things.’ That’s how I used to think about them. I was used to these infatuations—they’d only last a few weeks, maybe a month, always accompanied by a lot of intense activity in the studio. I came to the conclusion that this was simply Ethan’s way of working. Flirtation, sex, his artwork—it was all the same to him. Ethan always came back to us in the end, refreshed, relaxed. I felt that these episodes somehow freed him from his inner demons. So when I saw Becca and Ethan moving toward each other that night, I thought I knew what was going to happen. Ethan had been restless for several months at that point. He’d been increasingly difficult and demanding. Bad moods flaring up at unexpected times. I’d tried everything I could think of to help him out of the black hole he’d fall into at times like that—but I was beginning to feel pretty damned helpless. It seemed to me that these affairs—as meaningless as he always claimed they were—tended to release him. I knew the women meant nothing to him. That helped me get through it each time I sensed he was starting up with someone new.”

  “I hate to think of you going through this alone,” Meg said. Lark’s tone was so resigned and matter-of-fact, Meg couldn’t help but wonder how her sister had dealt with her anger.

  “Well, at least I’d become somewhat inured,” Lark replied, giving Meg a brief smile. “Poor Abe had no such understanding or help for his humiliation. He told me later how he’d blown up after the last of their guests had gone. He’d accused Becca of doing everything but unzipping Ethan’s fly. He’d begged her not to take it any further. Apparently, Becca had been known to stray a bit before this—that’s one of the reasons Abe wanted them to spend more time in the country. Becca would go off on shoots or runway work, get high on coke and screw around on him. He thought Red River could solve their problems. I guess, for a time anyway, it helped. Then Becca met Ethan.

  “Becca told me later that she tried,” Lark continued, her gaze moving back to the window. “Not to see Ethan, I mean. Not to think of him. But, you know how it is up here, Meg. We all get invited to same the parties, run into each other at Yoder’s every other day. You can’t help it. And at some point, Becca didn’t want to help it anymore. She moved up to Red River for the winter, then spring and summer, while Abe commuted from town on weekends. Poor Abe. He thought she was trying to please him, do her bit to keep the marriage together.

  “Instead, she began to put herself in Ethan’s line of vision as often as she could. She figured out when he usually picked up the mail, and she’d be at the post office at the same time—juvenile things like that. But she was hooked on him. Janine was right, it was a kind of insanity, because she was so used to getting what she wanted. Becca the Beautiful. But there was one thing about Ethan that she didn’t know. He hated to be pursued. He liked romance to be a mystery, a dance, a series of slightly obscure signals, like lightning bugs on a summer’s evening: ‘I’m here, where are you?’

  “The illusion of the chase.” Lark shook her head. “That’s really what he thrived on. Like the high-wire act he did with his sculptures—not knowing, until the penultimate moment, how, or if, the whole crazy thing would turn out. And there was Becca—giving the surprise ending away. Ethan ignored her
, stepped around her. He even complained to me that Abe’s wife was becoming something of a nuisance. So when we were invited to a Labor Day party at the Aldridges and he heard the Sabins were going to be there as well, Ethan actually thought about refusing to go. You know the Aldridge place up on Edencroft Road? That gorgeous colonial on the hill with perennial gardens that go on forever? Owen Aldridge is a big mucketymuck on Wall Street, and he and his wife Myra poured millions into fixing up the house and grounds. It was going to be the first time any of us saw all the renovations. Catered. A swing band from Boston. I was the one who talked Ethan into going.

  “Everybody who was anybody in the county was there: all the wealthy weekenders, the local elite, a couple of TV stars who had been doing summer stock in the Berkshires. It was a beautiful, crystal-clear night. Tons of stars. I remember seeing them all reflected in the Olympic-sized swimming pool the Aldridges had put in. Dinner and cocktails were served around the pool. Dancing on a raised platform under a striped tent. It was truly elegant. Ethan and I steered clear of the Sabins, which wasn’t all that hard to do as there were so many people.

  “After dinner, we danced. He’s—he was—a very good dancer. He had that grace. We were happy, having such a good time, and then Abe asked if he could cut in. I learned afterward that Becca had put him up to it. Abe had actually forgotten or—who knows?—repressed what had happened the night of their party. That had been nearly a year before. We were all getting to be friends now, or so he thought.