Perfect Lies

by Liza Bennett

  “Becca?” Meg intercepted the model on her way to the back of the studio where, Meg suspected, the bathroom was situated. Up close, beneath the heavy makeup, Becca’s skin looked unhealthy. Her beautiful eyes were bloodshot, her pupils dilated.

  “What?” Becca eyed Meg warily, taking a second or two to place her. “What are you doing here?”

  “Oh, just stopping by to see Danny,” Meg temporized. “We go way back.”

  “Good for you,” Becca said, attempting to push past Meg. “I got thirty shitty minutes for lunch. I gotta go.”

  “It’s great to run into you like this,” Meg said, following her. “Let me take you out for lunch. I know a terrific sushi place right down the street.”

  “I’m busy,” Becca said.

  “That’s too bad. When I saw you just now, I thought it would be good if we could talk…” But Becca kept walking

  “About you and Ethan.” Meg said.

  This got her attention. She stopped and turned to Meg.

  “What about Ethan?”

  “You were lovers.”

  “So? The whole damned world knows that by now.”

  “It must be hard on you, Becca.” Meg tried to sound sympathetic. “To lose Ethan in such a terrible way.”

  “Listen, Meg,” Becca said, her tone turning nasty. “Don’t bullshit me. I know from Lark about Ethan and you. And you know perfectly well that he dumped me for you.”

  “We weren’t lovers.”

  “You can lie to Lark but don’t think for a minute I buy that. I know Ethan. I knew … Ethan.”

  “I’m sorry, Becca,” Meg said, surprised that she felt pity for the unhappy woman in front of her. “This is hard for you, I know.”

  Becca bowed her head. Her hands were shaking as she tried to wipe away the tears that suddenly filled her eyes.

  “You have no idea,” she said. “It’s like I had everything, you know? My husband, our houses, our cars—all the great things—and I also had Ethan. My Ethan, my love. And then, Jesus, within a year, I’ve got nothing. It’s all gone. My marriage is fucked. Ethan is dead. I’m left with hardly enough money to live on—”

  “But Lark told me you did well in the settlement,” Meg said gently.

  “I bought all this stupid property in Red River. You know, so I could be near Ethan?” Becca’s tone was bitter. “Then he’s killed. And I’m stuck with this mountain of trees and rock. You wouldn’t believe the estimates my architect gave me to build there. Now… I don’t even want to. And I can’t even sell it back for what it cost because of some goddammed capital gains thing. So here I am, back at work.” They had reached the bathroom, and Becca turned to sneer at the empty set.

  “Why were you at the studio the morning Ethan was killed?” Meg blurted out.

  Becca looked at Meg, her arms folded defensively. “Why are you asking me all these questions? I already told the police all about that. I have nothing to hide.”

  “Why were you there, Becca? What happened?”

  “It’s none of your fucking business,” Becca retorted. She started to pull the bathroom door open. Meg stopped her, wedging her foot against the doorjamb.

  “I don’t believe Lucinda murdered Ethan,” Meg said. She watched closely as Becca’s face registered surprise and then fear.

  “But that’s ridiculous. Everybody thinks she did it.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s true.”

  “You don’t honestly think that I—?” Becca shook her head slowly as she tried to read Meg’s expression.

  “I’m trying to find out what really happened that morning, Becca,”

  “You didn’t run into me here by accident, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Meg confessed. “But I wasn’t sure you’d talk to me if you knew that I was looking for you.”

  “Well, you were right,” Becca said, brushing past her. “I’m not talking to you. Leave me the hell alone. You’ve already fucked up my life enough.”

  30

  When Meg first met Hannah Judson, she’d been intimidated by her super-glossy veneer and the boldfaced names that she dropped so casually into conversations. On closer acquaintance, Meg saw that the gallery owner was far from perfect. Though her beauty was dramatic—the high cheekbones, shock of silver hair, dark arching brows—her features were beginning to seem masklike and drawn. Although no expert in these matters, Meg suspected that Hannah might have had a face-lift. And Meg detected cracks in her personality as well. She was snobbish, intellectually arrogant, and—much to Meg’s surprise—as needy as a child for attention and approval.

  Ever since Ethan’s murder Hannah had been plying Meg with invitations to gallery openings, to a little dinner party she was throwing, to a Whitney Museum fund-raiser Hannah thought Meg might enjoy. Though Meg was flattered by the older woman’s attentions, she usually found a gracious way of saying no to the many tempting offers. When she called Hannah back on Wednesday night she was ready to decline yet another invitation.

  “It’s just a little vernissage for a marvelous new talent I’ve discovered,” Hannah told her. “He works in latex rubber. Molded soft sculptures. Totally brilliant stuff.”

  “I’m sorry, I—“

  “I haven’t even told you when it is,” Hannah cut her off. “I suppose I should just conclude that you don’t really wish to be a friend.”

  “Hannah—” Meg began, but the other woman’s directness surprised her. She decided to be equally frank. “I’ve just a lot on my mind right now. Lark’s not speaking to me. I have to go up to a hearing for Lucinda in Montville this Friday and I’m not exactly looking forward to it.”

  “You seem to be losing supporters right and left, Meg,” Hannah observed. “I’d think you’d be looking around desperately for new friends at the moment, rather than putting them off. What time are you due at the hearing?”

  “Two-thirty.”

  “I’m scheduled to drive up to Cold Spring this week—there’s an art gallery there I do some work with. If you like, I’ll drive you on up to Montville afterward, it’s not much further.

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  “You’ll actually be doing me a favor,” Hannah said. “I really don’t enjoy driving that far by myself. And we have a lot to talk about.”

  *

  Meg went into the office early Friday morning and worked for a few hours before heading back to her apartment, where Hannah had agreed to pick her up. She had her eye out for the white Judson Gallery minivan and was surprised when a car honked down the street and she saw Hannah waving to her from a double-parked maroon BMW sedan.

  It was a sort of plum-colored car. A beemer, I think.

  It was an unseasonably warm day for mid-December, the sky clear except for a haze of high cirrus clouds. Most of the snow had melted, exposing bright stretches of green along the highway, grass and underbrush that had not yet gotten the message that their season was over. There was something unsettling about the fine weather. Meg had become accustomed to the cold, bleak landscape; it had complemented her state of mind. Now, the strong winter sun made her lightheaded and anxious—everything made worse by the certainty that Hannah had been lying to her. In a subdued and abbreviated manner, Meg filled Hannah in on how her championing of Lucinda’s cause had alienated just about everybody else.

  “I’m persona non grata in Red River now.”

  “I’m sure you find that upsetting,” Hannah said, glancing from the rearview mirror to the road ahead. She was a fast and clearly experienced driver, weaving around slower moving vehicles with abandon. “And though I can hardly pretend that I like Lucinda, I must say I rather admire the way you’re sticking to your guns. Defending the weak, et cetera. I never would have pegged you for someone with such strong convictions.”

  “You make it sound like some kind of disease.”

  “Well, really.” Hannah laughed in the throaty way that no longer sounded strange to Meg. “I’m one to let sleeping dogs lie, you know. I just mind my own busin
ess and if that means the world is going to go to hell in a handbasket, so be it.”

  “Were you minding your own business when you visited Ethan the day he was killed?”

  “Excuse me?” Hannah didn’t take her eyes off the highway.

  “This car. Janine saw it at the studio that afternoon. I think you were there. But the day of Ethan’s funeral, you certainly made a point of pretending to me that you’d never been in Red River before.”

  “I object to your tone of voice,” Hannah replied, glancing at Meg. Her thin lips were drawn in a disconcerting smile.

  “But you were there?”

  Hannah thought for a moment.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Hannah told her that Ethan had left his jeep near Hannah’s gallery the final afternoon that he was in New York, though she didn’t realize that until later. They’d spent an hour or two together in the small apartment Hannah kept above the gallery, a one-bedroom that Hannah lent to visiting artists or dealers who needed a place to stay for a few nights.

  “It was convenient for other things as well,” Hannah said dryly. “And Ethan never lost an opportunity to take advantage of that fact.” When Ethan left at the end of the afternoon, Hannah assumed he’d gone back up to Red River. She went out for her usual busy evening, a dinner party, as it turned out, in a restaurant a block or two from the gallery.

  “A lucky coincidence, actually. Usually, at that time of night, I head back to my loft in SoHo, but I’d left my car in front of the gallery and walked back that way after dinner to pick it up. And there he was. He was a mess. I actually believe he might have been crying,”

  Alarmed, Hannah had invited him back up to the apartment above the gallery, and he talked to her in a way that he had never done before.

  “He let the emotional floodgates loose. Pouring out all this stuff about his years of cheating on Lark, all the women—his need for them, the high they gave him, the lift. It kept him sane, somehow, kept him above the dark abyss. Well, he knew that I of all people would understand. I just let the man talk, though I’m not very keen on confessionals anymore. But what could I do? He was clearly in pain. And finally he told me about you and what had happened with Lucinda. I have a feeling that you meant more to him than most. Why else would he react like that? I’m not a great judge of these things, but you seem to have put him, as they say these days, in touch with his feelings—and he suddenly couldn’t cope with the unreal life he’d created.”

  Ethan was afraid of being alone that night, though he longed to get back home and have it out with Lark. Finally, Hannah agreed to follow him back up to Red River, driving behind his jeep in her BMW. She saw him safely to the house, then slept over at the Days Inn in Montville. In the morning, still worried about him, she decided to drive by the studio on her way back to New York.

  “I suppose that’s when Janine saw the car,” Hannah said, as she made the turn off the Taconic to Cold Spring. “I went over all of this with the police, by the way. They’d also heard about my being there that morning, and they found my fingerprints in the studio.”

  Hannah’s business with Self Expression, the gallery in Cold Spring, took less than ten minutes. Meg waited in the car, dissecting what Hannah had told her. By the time they sat down for a quick cappuccino at the café next to the gallery, Meg had her questions in hand.

  “What do you mean about Ethan having it out with Lark that night?”

  “He told her he was finally leaving. He’d had enough of all her passive-aggressive anger. Her setting him up to look like the devil so that she could play at being a saint. What bull!”

  “Lark had every right to be angry,” Meg protested. “I only wish she’d expressed it a lot more.”

  “Oh, please,” Hannah said, sprinkling sugar onto the foam-topped coffee. “Lark was boiling over with rage, and she found every opportunity she could to stick it to Ethan. Not coming to his opening is a perfect example.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Hannah. Fern was sick. Lark’s a very caring mother.”

  “Well, Ethan told me that she could easily have left the children with Janine. She took care of them as much as Lark did, according to Ethan. But no, the fact of the matter was, Lark didn’t want to see Ethan succeed. She wanted to keep him right where he was, in that tight little box of guilty infidelity. She thought she had him so tied up with remorse that he would never leave. She flipped out when he told her he was going. Totally flipped, he told me when I stopped by the studio that morning.”

  Meg was silent for a moment. Then she asked, “Did anything seem odd to you at the studio?”

  “I’d never been there before so it’s hard for me to say. But Ethan himself was odd enough. Emotionally raw, everything exposed. He seemed intent on truth-telling now that he was facing his demons, I suppose. He told me some interesting things….”

  Hannah looked down at her coffee and played with her spoon, running a finger around the lip of the silver oval.

  “He told me that he’d never really been able to love anything deeply but his work. Or anyone—Lark, the girls, all those women. Me. That he kept looking and looking, but it, she, whatever—was always out of reach. Except the art. I really do think he was having some kind of breakdown. He called himself a monster.”

  Hannah signaled for the check.

  “Was there anything else? How did you leave things with him?”

  “You might as well know. He told me it was over between the two of us, as well. He said we were ‘played out’—what an apt way of putting it. All we’d been doing anyway was playing when you think about it. Pretending, and having some fun, and—acting, really. He said he was done with all that now. That he wanted to start being real, stop all the games. So sad when you think about it. Considering how soon after that the games actually did stop.”

  “Did you mention all of this to the police?” Meg asked.

  “That Ethan dumped me?” Hannah replied. “No, darling, I did not. They made me so nervous with all their questions. I’m not good at dealing with authority to start with. And then, they were so suspicious about my being in Red River in the first place that morning. I don’t think they believed me when I explained that I drove up behind Ethan to make him feel safe—I think they thought I was stalking him or something. This whole thing has made me jittery. I’ve even hired a lawyer.” Hannah saw Meg’s expression and intercepted her next question.

  “No, I didn’t murder Ethan. The day I kill a man because he’s stopped loving me is, I can assure you, the day I kill myself.”

  31

  Meg didn’t know exactly what to expect at the hearing in Montville, but it certainly wasn’t this. A small crowd of protesters, cordoned off by metal barricades and watched by two police officers, had gathered to the left of the courthouse steps. They were chanting something that Meg couldn’t make out as Hannah drove up the curving drive. Their hand-lettered posters carried slogans: KEEP OUR TOWNS SAFE and STOP TEENAGE VIOLENCE.

  “Oh, no, she has to go!” was what they were shouting, Meg realized, as Hannah pulled up behind an empty school bus. Meg recognized Paula Yoder and several other mothers from Red River. There were perhaps thirty people altogether, most of them women.

  “Do you mind if I don’t go in?” Hannah said, turning to Meg. “I really don’t feel like getting into the middle of all this. Or antagonizing Lark—for purely selfish business reasons.”

  “I understand,” Meg said, noticing two photographers talking to each other across from the main entrance. A local news van was parked nearby. “But you don’t mind waiting? I’ve no idea how long this is going to take.”

  “I’ll be fine. So long as I don’t have to talk to any more policemen,” Hannah said, and then added as Meg started to climb out of the car, “Good luck.”

  Luck was not all she needed, Meg decided, as she started up the steps. A little chain mail would help. Or a bulletproof vest.

  “Shame on you, Meg Hardwick!” Paula Yoder cried when she spotted her. Meg could he
ar the rapid clicking of cameras behind her. Hurrying now, she pushed against one of the heavy front doors and entered the stately lobby of the courthouse. There was a crowd here, as well, and she quickly scanned the faces, trying to find a friendly one. Peter Boardman had told her he’d be waiting for her near the front entrance; she’d know it was him by the dark blue bow tie he’d be wearing. But it was his calming, grandfatherly voice that she recognized first.

  “You must be Meg,” Boardman said, taking her elbow. He was a tall, stoop-shouldered man in his early sixties with thinning sandy hair and half-glasses. His eyes were a penetrating blue. “Let’s get out of this zoo. We should be starting any minute now.”

  He guided her through the crowd, down the corridor to the main courtroom, a lovely old two-story wood-paneled room with high, bottle-green glass windows. The afternoon light streamed into the room, casting a pale green sheen. Meg spotted Lark immediately, seated between Francine and Janine. Francine whispered something to Lark, who glanced in Meg’s direction, shook her head slowly and sadly, and then purposely turned away from her.

  “There’s Arthur Pearson, the district attorney,” Boardman said to Meg, hoping to distract her. He pointed to a small, dapper man who was deep in conversation with two assistants—one male, one female—both of whom towered over him. Pearson had a head of black hair so full and perfectly groomed that Meg suspected it was a toupee.

  “We’re in luck, by the way,” Boardman went on, speaking to Meg as though they’d known each other for years. There was something about his voice and manner that made Meg feel immediately at ease—and grateful that Abe had steered Lucinda to him. “I don’t think Judge Marin has taken kindly to Pearson’s publicity tactics.” Boardman brought her forward to one of the front rows where Lucinda, free of makeup and looking wan, sat next to a court officer.

  “Did he arrange for that little welcoming committee outside?” Meg asked, smiling at Lucinda. Someone, probably Boardman, had wisely suggested that Lucinda remove her nose ring. Only a few streaks were left of Lucinda’s red hair dye and her new shorter haircut with its feathery bangs gave her face a waifish look. Lucinda, who once struck such a rebellious, in-your-face pose, seemed to cower in her seat. She looked young and vulnerable—and very frightened.