Perfect Lies

by Liza Bennett

  “He’d been getting worse,” Clint finally replied. “His show made him even more self-centered. Totally focused on his own work. You could tell he didn’t really even want us around. We were in his way, though we were keeping this place running for him. But he barely looked at my pieces. Signed off on the fall mail-order catalog without even reading the final proof. And he began to be away more. Down to the city every chance he got. And Janine hated that. Not that we ever talked about it. Not that she ever told me. She didn’t need to. Janine and me—we had decided a long time ago not to talk about the painful things. We both understood. What was the point? But I’d always known about Ethan. How she felt. A blind man could see … and I’m not blind …

  “I knew something was wrong that morning after he got back from New York. He was slamming things around out here and cursing something awful. When Hannah came—I actually heard him crying. Couldn’t believe it. Janine and me overheard all this from the back offices, Ethan wasn’t bothering to keep any of it quiet. You should have seen the expression on Janine’s face! It was like her world was falling apart, too.

  “When Becca showed up, Janine crept out to the hallway. I saw her there, eavesdropping. She was shaking her head as she listened to all that cursing and weeping. And after Becca left, I remember suddenly feeling scared. It was too quiet. It was like I knew something was going to happen. Like I knew what was going to happen. I had to go out to get some firewood, and when I came in up the back stairs, I overheard them. Janine had gone into the studio to see him. To try and comfort him. ‘Ethan, what’s wrong?’ she’d said. ‘What’s happened?’

  “And then he told her, ‘Get the fuck out of here.’

  “ ‘But Ethan, I can’t stand to see you in such pain.’ She begged him to let her help him. Then he yelled at her. ‘Don’t touch me, you cow,’ he said. ‘Don’t you dare slobber all over me—’ He’d called her … a cow. My wife.

  “There was just no question about it in my mind by then. I waited until she was back in the office. He didn’t hear me. Or see me. He’d turned back to the table and I reached in and pulled out the hottest pontil I could find. I must have made a noise then, because he turned. He saw me coming at him. And it’s a funny thing…. He had the time, and he was just as strong as me, but he did absolutely nothing to stop me. It was almost as if he’d been waiting for the blow—”

  It seemed to happen in a second. The rapping on the window. The front door flying open. Clint whirling around to the see what was happening. The cold blowing in. Abe diving low at Clint, trying to pull Meg free. And Clint kicking Abe in the chest, then the face, holding Meg so tightly she could hardly cry Abe’s name.

  Abe was on his knees now, his hands and face bloodied, trying to struggle to his feet. Clint kicked him one more time, a horrible sound of boot connecting with bone and muscle, and Abe collapsed. Then three men in uniform burst into the icehouse, as Clint backed farther into the room. Tom Huddleson, his gun drawn, was flanked by two armed officers Meg didn’t recognize.

  “Hold it right there, buddy,” Tom said, speaking calmly to Clint, his lifelong friend. “Just stop right there. Let Meg go. Nobody’s going to get hurt.”

  Meg had thought that she could stall Clint in the icehouse, confuse him by pretending she believed Becca’s story, keep him pacified until Abe could arrive with help. She hadn’t factored in Clint’s brute strength, or his violent reaction to finally being caught out—and cornered. She realized now that Abe would never have left her alone with Clint for very long, no matter that his return to the showroom had never been part of her plan. Or his getting hurt. Abe. She was more frightened for him now than for herself.

  “Stay back, Tom,” Clint said, his words coming out in dry sobs.

  “C’mon, buddy,” The police chief took a slow step toward Clint. “Don’t make this any worse than it already is.”

  Clint bumped up against something solid—a wall, Meg assumed at first. Then Clint heaved the broken pitcher at Tom, caught Meg up in his arms, and pushed them both through the back door of the icehouse. At the top of the stairs Clint hesitated for a moment as he slid home the doorbolt and tried to get his breath—and it was all Meg needed. She kicked him hard in the right shin with her booted heel, and struggled free.

  She ran. Down the rickety back steps. Into the snow-slicked underbrush. She heard Clint curse and start down behind her. She didn’t turn around. It was slippery underfoot, the land sloping sharply to the river. Meg half ran, half slid along the bank. The snow had stopped falling. Stars glittered through the naked branches. She heard noises behind her—echoing through the still, snow-shrouded woods: Huddleson calling out to Clint to stop, the crackle of a walkie-talkie, and then the more distant but more familiar voices of Lark, Hannah, Janine, and—she almost stopped to make sure—Lucinda and Matt.

  The river—a frozen ribbon—wound gracefully through the trees into town. Beyond it, the pond that Ethan had created glimmered beneath the starlit sky—an oval mirror. The voices followed her. Lark cried out her name and Lucinda shouted something. In the frigid air it was difficult to tell where they were coming from or what they were saying—and she couldn’t stop to find out. Twigs and branches snapped as Clint plowed through the underbrush on the bank just above her.

  She slid out on the river’s glassy surface—and fell. Her full weight slammed against the ice. It held her, but she couldn’t find purchase on the slick surface. She stood. Took a step. Slipped. Struggled to her knees. Stood and fell again. The pond was within her reach. But when she looked back she could see that Clint had reached the river’s edge, was already taking a step to follow her across.

  A gun shot—it sounded like a gun shot. A shot that echoed across the still night. And then another. And another. But it was the sound of ice cracking, the surface shattering. Then came the roar of the river, the ferocious river that had been waiting underneath—cold, hungry, and never-ending. It sucked Clint in. And down.

  38

  It was the last run she would probably ever take from her old apartment, Meg reflected, as she started off slowly down Riverside Drive. How quickly things changed. And yet, ten months after Ethan’s death, the difficult period leading up to and following the murder seemed to Meg like something that had taken place in another lifetime.

  “All our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.” Francine Werling had recited Shakespeare in church a few Sundays back. And yes, Meg had mentally agreed during the sermon, life was transitory, a flickering shadow, but not so much a poor fool strutting as a relentless army marching. Less than a year after Ethan had shuffled off this mortal coil, the lives of those he’d left behind had altered almost beyond recognition.

  Lark’s children’s book, Wally of Wall Street, had been published in April and became an overnight hit. Like many of Dr. Seuss’s works, Lark’s simple lyrical story and charming illustrations resonated with adults as well as with children. Meg had been worried that all the publicity and attention would make Lark nervous, but her younger sister, on local television shows and at book-signings, had come across as naturally as if she been speaking from her own kitchen.

  “Greed, the hunger for things and money, that’s what everyone—kids and grown-ups—are struggling with these days,” Lark had suggested to interviewers when asked why she thought the book was so successful. “That’s what Wally learns about—and what we can learn from him.”

  Meg had helped Lark script her comments, just as she helped her sister deal with her unexpected success. There was money flowing into the Red River household for the first time—and it came at just the right time. After Clint’s drowning, after the revelation that he had been the one who killed Ethan and assaulted Becca, Janine closed the studio and showroom and moved up to Vermont.

  Initially, the loss of the income the Red River Studio had generated kept Lark up nights, worrying. But when the book took off, Lark’s concerns were of a different sort. “I want to do everything all at once: fix up the house, turn the
studio into a work space for me, invest the rest of the money in college funds for the kids. I don’t know where to start.”

  “I can look into the investment end of things for you,” Meg volunteered, talking to Lark from the agency during an unusually hectic morning. The new account executive she had hired to handle SportsTech had just poked her head in Meg’s office with a worried look on her face—and new Mac computers were being installed in the art department. These days, though, none of these business concerns came before Meg’s personal ones. “The other things—they’ll all get done eventually.”

  “But you’ve given me a real deadline for getting this house in shape.”

  “Lark, really, I didn’t mean for any of this to put you out.”

  “Your wedding reception putting me out? You’ve got to be kidding—it’s the single most important thing you’ve ever asked me to do for you. Actually, Meg, it’s one of the very few things you’ve ever asked for. And, believe me, it’s going to be hands-down the most spectacular party Red River has ever seen.”

  There was still a tendency on Lark’s part to want to make up for her treatment of Meg, and to try to hurry up the process that would mend the painful rupture that had so transformed their relationship. Lark constantly strived to make everything better, to help Meg forget that she had misjudged her, and Ethan, and so much else in her life. Though Meg had forgiven her sister long ago—and in many ways still felt responsible for the pain they had both endured—she knew that they should never allow themselves to forget what had happened. Ethan would always remain an important lesson in their lives, a reminder that love can blind anyone. That the best of intentions can lead to the worst mistakes.

  Perhaps that was why she and Abe had taken things so slowly. Though he’d only suffered a broken collar bone and surface cuts, his confrontation with Clint had shaken him. For weeks afterward, he kept chastizing himself for not being able to prevent Clint from manhandling Meg. Though she repeatedly pointed out that she hadn’t experienced anything worse than nervous shock, while he was the one running around with his arm in a sling, Abe was not easily appeased, “But it’s what could have happened,” Abe insisted darkly.

  Yes, they had all narrowly escaped some pretty serious “could haves.” Lucinda and Matt, who had holed up in a cheap motel in Montville after Lucinda had hitchhiked back to the area from Meg’s, had been trying to piece together their own solution to the puzzle of Ethan’s death. It was Lucinda who told Meg about that long, depressing week when the two teenagers came to the conclusion—indisputable in their minds—that Lark had killed her husband. On their way to Lark’s to confront her, they had met Abe arriving at the house after he had called the police.

  Francine had been so relieved to have Matt return in one piece that she managed to control her temper when he announced at his high school graduation party that he was going to be leaving home again. Boston University had offered him a full academic scholarship and, without telling Francine, he had accepted. And Lucinda was coming with him.

  “I’m going to get some kind of a job,” Lucinda told Meg proudly. “And I’m going to study for my high school equivalency exam.”

  “That’s great. But aren’t you two a little young to be living together?”

  “What does age have to do with it? I think when you find someone who makes you happy—no matter when, or where—you should just go for it.”

  Out of the mouths of babes, Meg thought, and, slowly, cautiously, she began to test Lucinda’s advice. To a degree she barely noticed in the beginning, Meg’s life began to revolve around Abe’s. At first, it was just a toothbrush, hair dryer, and nightgown left at his apartment. They spent the evenings when they were together at his place—a spacious modern co-op in the west Fifties that was an easy walk to his law office. On the nights they didn’t see each other, they talked for at least an hour on the phone. Most weekends they commuted to the house in Red River, every foot of which Abe had decided to redecorate. It was never said, but Abe’s renovations felt like something of an exorcism to Meg: an attempt to finally excise the bitterness over Becca.

  Becca, on the other hand, seemed to be the only one of them who wanted to keep the murder front and center in her life. Clint’s assault on her and the reasons prompting it had made front page news in the local papers and had been picked up by a New York tabloid. Suddenly, Becca’s career was hot again. She even managed to get on a television talk show about models who’d been stalked and slashed, though, as Abe pointed out, her attack had absolutely nothing to do with her vocation.

  It seemed clear to Meg that Abe had put Becca behind him. Though Meg was beginning to believe that you never totally got over certain people. You moved on as the past stayed buried in your heart—a secret ache, something it was necessary to live with. Now, slowly, sometimes painfully, she was learning to live with, and for, someone other than herself. By late spring it seemed that Meg was stopping by her apartment only to pick up fresh clothes. In June, over dinner after an opening at Hannah’s gallery, Abe asked Meg if it wouldn’t be more convenient for her to move in with him.

  “Is this a question of convenience?” she’d asked.

  “No,” he’d replied. “That was just a ploy on my part, appealing to your practical nature. Because I sense you are somewhat leery of the other ‘c’ word.”

  “Commitment? Is that what you want?”

  “I’d better be clear with you. I want a lot more than that. I want a real marriage. I want a child, maybe even two. And I want them with you.”

  It wasn’t just doubt on Meg’s part. It was an all-encompassing, paralyzing fear. What Abe was offering—with such obvious love—was exactly what she had always longed for in the world. All she had wanted for as long as she could remember. Everything that she had long ago convinced herself she would never have. She realized now that something Ethan had pointed out to her nearly a year ago was actually true. She purposely entered into romantic relationships in the past knowing full well that they were wired to go wrong. Telling herself she wanted love and commitment, time and again she went for men who had only the most temporary of friendships to offer. She’d been looking for love in all the wrong places, knowing in her heart that she wouldn’t find it anywhere.

  Why? She realized now that she had been afraid. Early on in her life she had to face so many disappointments and shoulder so much responsibility that she’d learned to limit her expectations. If she didn’t wish for too much—sober, caring parents and a normal, comfortable home—then she wouldn’t have to be too let down when these hopes didn’t come true. This way she was never too hurt. When you cared little about another person, then it didn’t much matter when things didn’t work out.

  But now she found herself caring so much that all the old mechanisms that had kept her from really loving—fear of rejection, the terror of loss—simply broke down and lost all usefulness.

  So she moved in with Abe and put her co-op on the market. At the end of July, when Abe officially asked her to marry him during a romantic weekend vacation in San Francisco, she said yes without hesitation. She took the plunge, and discovered that it meant she had learned how to fly.

  Francine was to marry them in the First Congregational Church over the long Labor Day weekend. Brook and Phoebe were to be flower girls, Lark the matron—and Lucinda the maid—of honor. Abe’s younger brother Jack, whom Meg found she liked enormously, was to be the best man. The ushers were an amalgam of Abe’s and Meg’s Manhattan and Red River male friends, including Matt, whom Abe had been trying to talk into pre-law. Hannah and her new flame, the latex rubber sculptor, were hosting a rehearsal dinner at Montville’s fanciest restaurant. Frieda Jarvis, blaming all her financial and business problems on her now ex-husband, insisted on designing Meg’s wedding dress—free of charge, of course. She would have to call Frieda about the design, Meg reminded herself; the dress needed a few alterations now.

  Meg slowly jogged through the last half mile of the run. Though still early in the morni
ng, the August sun was already beating down on the surface of the Hudson. And, though she felt strong and healthy, she knew shouldn’t overdo it. She and Abe had a long day ahead, packing up the rest of her apartment. She was closing on the sale of the co-op in three days, and she had put most of her furniture into storage. Now they needed a new place to live. But there was no hurry, Abe had said, they had plenty of time to look around for something larger than his one bedroom.

  Actually, there was less time than he realized. As she started her cool-down stretches, Meg felt the strange new flutter—part nausea, part excitement—in the pit of her stomach. She’d suspected it for several weeks now, and the bright blue plastic test tube had confirmed it just that morning: She was pregnant. She would to tell Abe that night, over dinner, when they celebrated the sale of her apartment. She could hardly wait to see his expression when she told him what else they had to celebrate.

  She wondered what a child of theirs would look like, with her pale blond looks and his dark, intense coloring. What kind of a person they would make, between her drive and his sharp intelligence and both of their somewhat stubborn and demanding natures. As she walked into the lobby, the Edleson twins stepped out of the elevator, laughing and whispering about something. This summer they had outgrown their passion for skating. Now, they had polish on their fingernails. They passed Meg, with a quick “hi,” too intent on their own conversation to notice much beside themselves.

  They were growing up so fast, Meg reflected as she pushed the button for her floor. Well, aren’t we all? she told herself with a contented smile, her arms folded over her wonderful new secret. The doors closed, and the elevator rose swiftly upward.

  About the Author

  LIZA BENNETT is the author of several previous novels, written under different names. She is the founder and president of a Manhattan advertising agency and lives with her husband in Manhattan and West Stockbridge, Massachusetts.