Crooked Little Lies

by Barbara Taylor Sissel

  Cooper got into the driver’s seat and switched on the ignition. “You’ll be hard to live with now, won’t you, buddy? Got a pretty girl giving you attention.”

  Annie scratched Rufus’s head between his ears and around them, and when he practically swooned, she laughed, delighted.

  “You like dogs.” Cooper sounded pleased.

  “I do, very much.” She fastened her seat belt. “I like cats, too, and just about any animal.”

  Cooper pulled onto the road, and she asked him how far they had to go.

  “About eight miles,” he answered. “Fishers’ is maybe fifteen miles farther on.”

  Annie nodded, and watching the countryside pass, she wondered if she should take him up on his offer to drive her there, if she should impose. She would owe him then, and she really didn’t like that. But if she didn’t get to the farm, Madeleine would have to go, and that would mean leaving Carol on her own at the café. Stifling a groan, Annie asked Cooper about his art. “What do you paint?”

  He met her glance, brows raised.

  “You said you were an art nerd. I assumed you were a painter.”

  “No. I’m a welder.”

  Now Annie raised her brows.

  “Between the oil field–service work and the car-repair gig, there’s always a lot of scrap metal lying around. I make stuff out of it.”

  “Really.” Annie didn’t know what else to say.

  “Yeah.” He glanced at her, then back at the road. “It just came over me one day,” he went on as if she’d asked. “I was looking around at all the pipe and odd pieces of sheet metal and scrap, and I started fooling around with it. Next thing you know, I built my mom an arbor for her garden, then a gazebo. After that, the neighbors started asking for stuff. Now I’m in business. I’ve got orders and customers from all over, more than I can keep up with.”

  “Sounds cool,” she said, because it did. She liked that he’d begun by building something for his mother. She wondered if he would say he’d found his life’s purpose.

  He said, “I tried painting. You know, landscapes, even portraits, but it turned out I was pretty bad. I like working with my hands better.”

  They turned down a gravel road, and Annie saw a metal building and a sign painted in fresh-looking green, white, and brown lettering that read “Gant and Sons.” She’d been by the place before, she realized, passing it every time she went to Fishers’. As they got closer, she saw the garage had three bays, only one of which was empty. There were other cars and trucks, too, parked around the area along with an assortment of heavy-duty machinery. In an adjacent field, dozens of pallets were stacked with pipe of every type, length, and diameter, more than she’d ever seen in one place. The pallets were set apart the width of a riding mower, and the grassy aisles between them were neatly cropped, giving the property an air of orderliness and prosperity.

  The sun was hot on her shoulders after she climbed down out of the tow truck, Rufus at her heels. A man came out of the middle auto bay. Tall, broad-shouldered, and dark-haired like Cooper, he walked toward them, his gaze flashing from Annie to the car and back to Annie.

  “She got you stranded?” he asked, and Annie realized he meant the BMW.

  Cooper made the introductions. “Annie, meet my dad, Patrick Gant. Dad, this is Annie Beauchamp. She works at—”

  “Madeleine’s, in town.” Patrick took Annie’s hand in his warm, rough-palmed clasp. “I know this young lady, or rather, I know her pumpkin muffins. It’s that time of year again, isn’t it?”

  Annie said it was.

  “The café serves the best food in town.” Patrick winked at Cooper. “Other than your mother’s.”

  Annie smiled and thanked him. She said Madeleine did most of the cooking. Unlike Cooper, she remembered Pat Gant. He came into the café fairly often, every couple of weeks, for breakfast, mostly.

  Cooper and his dad got the BMW unloaded and into the middle bay. Pat lifted the hood, and when he gave a sign, Cooper turned the key in the ignition. The engine clattered to life. Annie covered her ears. Rufus bolted. Annie lost sight of him and then, moments later, saw him drinking from a nearby water bowl. When Rufus came back after Cooper cut off the engine, he was holding a scruffy chew toy in his mouth, that resembled a frog with warts. He offered it to Annie, and the look in his golden eyes was somewhere between a taunt and a plea. She took hold of it, wrestling with him, playing his game.

  She and Bo had found a dog once when they were kids, some kind of bird-dog mix. He’d had three brown patches on his cream-colored torso and a smattering of tiny brown specks dotting his muzzle. Not so originally, they’d named him Freckles. He’d belonged to Bo more than anyone else. They’d been inseparable, and when Freckles died, Bo, who was seventeen at the time, was hit hardest. He began isolating himself after that. He seemed to live more and more in his head. He’d started walking then, too. The family blamed Freckles’s death, but it would have happened anyway. That was the nature of Bo’s disease, the awful evidence of the loosening connections in his brain.

  The ones that were even looser now in the two years since her mother died, Annie thought. She let Rufus have the frog, running her hands over his head, absently scratching his silky ears. Somehow, despite his symptoms, Bo had managed to graduate high school and work for Madeleine. It was only since her mom’s death that his walking had totally taken over, that his existence had become almost marginal. He didn’t see it that way. He was fine, perfectly fine, in his own eyes. Even when he got confused and thought her mom or Freckles was still alive, it didn’t register that anything was wrong. Sometimes Annie thought they were the reason why Bo walked; he was looking for them.

  Pat ducked out from under the hood and declared she did indeed have a bad harmonic balancer.

  “What is that?” Annie asked.

  “Well, without getting too technical, it keeps the engine, in particular the crankshaft, working smoothly. But over time, it can get loose, or the rubber wears out, and the engine will run rough and make a lot of noise, or it’ll quit altogether.”

  “Is it expensive to fix?”

  “Depends. If it’s just the balancer, you’re looking at maybe a couple hundred, but if there’s belt damage or damage to the crankshaft, it’ll run more. Thing is, I don’t have the right parts here to fix it. I’d have to order them out of Houston. I don’t see that many BMWs, especially vintage BMWs.” He smiled.

  Annie thought it was kind of him not to call the car what it was, a beater. She wanted to kick the tire again but refrained.

  He said, “Might take a day or two. To get the parts, I mean.”

  “Oh, no,” she said.

  “I can take you to Fishers’,” Cooper said, “and back to town . . . and wherever.” He shrugged.

  She glanced sidelong at him, unable to imagine he was as eager as he sounded to become her chauffeur. She thought how uncomfortable it would make her, riding alongside him, taking up his time, being in his debt. But what choice did she have? She thanked him and thanked his dad. She offered Cooper gas money, too, even though she had no idea where it would come from, but he refused.

  He said he needed to go to Fishers’ anyway, and when his dad shot him a glance, he said, “What? Mom told me she wanted a pumpkin. I’m going to get her one.”

  “Really? Don’t you think you’re a little old for a jack-o’-lantern?”

  “Geeze, Dad. Pie. She wants it for pie.”

  “Oh, yeah, right.” Pat winked at Annie, and she ducked her head, feeling charmed, feeling the heat from the pleasure she took in their bantering color her cheeks.

  “Are you sure it’s no trouble?” Annie asked when she and Cooper were under way. They’d left the tow truck and were in Cooper’s pickup. Rufus poked his nose into the space between the seats, and she gave it a scratch.

  Cooper said it was no problem. He said, “I was serious ab
out Mom wanting a pumpkin.”

  “Oh, of course. I know that.”

  They rode in silence the rest of the way, and after a few minutes, Cooper pulled in through the farm’s entrance, slowing more than was necessary, saying to Annie, “You asked about my art. I made this gate.”

  “It’s amazing,” she said, meaning it. The image, rendered in metal, was of a cow and its calf, peering out from beneath the stylized, wide-spreading canopy of a live oak. Across the top of the gate, a row of scrolling letters spelled “Fisher and Sons Organic Farm.” “The detail is so precise. It’s steel, isn’t it? How do you cut steel into those tiny leaves, into the shape of a cow?”

  “You’ll have to come by my studio sometime, and I’ll show you.”

  Annie didn’t answer. They stopped in front of the farm store just as Len Fisher came across the drive, and she was glad for the distraction. The men backslapped one another and agreed it had been too long.

  “I didn’t know you knew each other,” Len said, looking from Cooper to Annie.

  Cooper explained about the car. Annie said she’d come for Madeleine’s order and the bushel basket of Small Sugars that Len had set aside for her.

  Pretty soon, they had everything loaded in the back of Cooper’s truck, and Annie started to climb inside, but then she stopped, looking across the hood at Len. “You haven’t seen Bo in the last day or two, have you?”

  He thought a second. “Nah. Last time was maybe a week, ten days ago. He was walking the overpass near Woodridge and Pike.”

  Annie made a face and said what she knew Len was thinking. “He’s going to get killed.”

  “I started to pull over and get him. At least to tell him—” Len broke off. He and Annie both knew that neither action would have done any good. Bo went his own way; he did what he wanted to do.

  Cooper was looking between them. “Who’s Bo?” he asked.

  Annie’s surprise at Cooper’s ignorance was weighted with dismay. She didn’t like having to explain any better than she liked answering nosy questions. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of Bo as much as she hated that once she told people, they backed away. They didn’t want to hear the medical terms, the host of psychological jargon Bo had been saddled with, most of it within the past five years. It angered Annie, too, because there were still periods of time when he was pretty normal, an ordinary person with an extreme amount of intelligence and a few quirks. Who didn’t have a few quirks?

  “He’s Annie’s brother,” Len began.

  “Stepbrother.” She corrected him automatically. “He has some issues—” Breaking off, she looked at Cooper, but there was nothing to do but say it. “If you’ve ever seen the guy who walks the roads around town, that’s Bo. That’s my stepbrother.”

  “I have seen him.” Cooper’s gaze on hers was steady. “In fact, I saw him earlier today.”

  “Where?” Annie asked.

  “In the convenience store, the one on Bayberry where it crosses I-45. I’m pretty sure he got into a car there, a black Lincoln, a Town Car. A woman was driving it.”

  “We don’t know anyone who drives a Town Car,” Annie said. She and Len exchanged a glance.

  Cooper looked nonplussed.

  “Bo wouldn’t get in the car with a stranger,” Annie said. “It’s one of his rules. He’s fanatical about it.”

  5

  All Lauren could think about were the Oxy tablets. Where had they come from? How had they happened to be buried in that basket? Did Jeff know about them? That was the question that left her cold. When he called on Saturday morning, she waited with breath held while he talked about sorting through her granddad’s tools, and an old Hoosier cabinet he’d found in the barn. But Lauren was listening so hard for the other—an accusation about the drugs—she didn’t really register what he said or even how she responded. What if he was waiting for her to say something about the Oxy? What if this was a test? The notion crashed into her brain. She imagined his response if she were to try to defend herself, if she were to tell him how near dawn, after doing little more than dozing all night, she’d bolted upright, tossed aside the covers, gone into the bathroom, and swept the tablets into the toilet, flushing it before she could stop herself.

  At first, she was horrified—what had she done?—and then almost immediately, she felt ridiculously righteous and celebratory, but she was no closer to figuring out how she’d come to have the drugs in her possession, and even if she could explain it, Jeff would never believe her. He’d get that look on his face. She could picture it: the faint curl of his lip, the way he had of rolling his eyes.

  After Jeff let her go, Lauren called her sponsor.

  “Maybe I was hallucinating,” she said. “I’ve done it before.”

  “While you were still in the hospital, you mean,” Gloria said.

  “Yes, but I’ve done it since I got home, too. Once. I woke up from a nap convinced I’d been to the grocery store and bought stuff for dinner, a chicken, potatoes, even a Caesar salad. I mean, I could feel it in my hand. You know how those salad bags are cool and kind of moist? But later, when I looked for the chicken, it wasn’t in the fridge. None of what I could have sworn I bought was there. Crazy, huh?” Lauren laughed shakily, but the memory still frightened her.

  “I had vivid dreams, too, getting off booze,” Gloria said, “and I remember once after I stopped, about a year later, my husband found a half-empty fifth of bourbon above the ceiling in the garage. I must have hidden it there, but I had no recollection of it. Maybe that’s what happened with you. Maybe the effect is even more intense because you hurt your head.”

  Lauren considered the idea. “The dream, though . . . finding the Oxy like that, right after—I don’t know. It just seems . . .”

  Is there a more logical explanation?

  The silence filled up with the question.

  Lauren would celebrate her first year of sobriety next month, while Gloria was an old hand at recovery, twenty-three years down the road. She was calm and reassuring. She said Lauren was doing great. “But maybe you should call your doctor.”

  Lauren said she would if it happened again, but even that was a stretch. Bettinger would order tests, all kinds of scans. He’d pull out his trusty pad and write out a script for some medication. She wasn’t going back to that. She wasn’t living that life anymore. She couldn’t bear to listen to his warning that there might be increasingly more terrible symptoms lurking in her future than the ones she had already experienced. Seizures, for instance, or going totally bonkers. If she wasn’t already.

  “Put it behind you for now, then,” Gloria advised.

  And Lauren tried. By Saturday afternoon, when her headache was completely gone, she drove out to the warehouse. Jeff had left the store in the charge of the two part-timers for the weekend, who in addition to being students at the University of Houston were also the sons of neighbors. She let them go, shooing them away when they protested, thinking they were around the same age as Bo Laughlin. She didn’t know why, but his situation weighed on her. He was like a loose bolt, an odd part, rattling around the streets. She worried for him; she worried for herself.

  Had she hidden those Oxy tablets the way Gloria had hidden her bourbon? Suppose there were more in the house and Jeff or one of the kids found them?

  Going into the office at the back of the warehouse, she sat down at Jeff’s desk, intending to check their e-mail, but instead, when she woke the computer, her attention caught on the screen saver Jeff had created using a montage of photos from past deconstruction projects. There were a few of the old dairy barn they’d taken down five years ago and a couple of the two circa-1900 Craftsman bungalows that had been in the same tiny town, even on the same block. The town’s name slipped her memory now. There was one taken in Houston of a 1970s-era, ranch-style house, where of all things, they’d recovered a thirty-six-inch Wolf gas range in near pristine condition.
There were several shots of Jeff and a crew that included Lauren and Tara in hard hats, holding pry bars, filthy and grinning at day’s end, standing in front of the goods they’d salvaged: piles of lumber, vintage windows and doors, light fixtures, cast-iron sinks, a claw-foot tub, hand-turned porch posts, ornately carved cornice trim, ceiling medallions, all kinds of hardware—a veritable treasure trove of times gone by, that once it was cleaned up could be repurposed to become a beloved part of someone else’s history.

  That was the heart of it for Lauren, what she loved most about the work and where she derived the most satisfaction. A couple of the nurses, even Dr. Bettinger, had asked her how she could do it, why she would do such hard, dirty work, as if the salvage business was no place for women. But there was a lot a woman could do, from taking down chandeliers to unscrewing cabinet door fronts to gently prying vintage beadboard from lath walls. But where she often made a difference was in her size. She was five seven, slim and lithe, where Jeff was big, broad shouldered, and tall at six and a half feet.

  The day they met, Jeff’s size was the first thing Lauren noticed about him. It was three years after her parents died, and Lauren had taken over running their antiques shop. Named for her father, Freddie Tate’s was in the Rice Village then and catered to clientele who preferred higher-end, handpicked European furnishings with a decidedly French flair. Lauren had kept up that inventory, and the shop was crammed with a collection of Louis XV armoires and buffets, assorted chairs and tables. The day Jeff walked in, Lauren glanced up to see this enormous man, standing in the doorway, staring at the crowded collection of period furniture and locked, glass-fronted display cases loaded with priceless china, and the what-am-I-doing-here look on his face was so comical, it made her laugh.