“You knew my mother.” My mouth was dry, but I managed the words.
“Way back when, I was Ellie’s best friend. On my better days, she was mine. How is she? Your mother?”
“Enamored of some guy she met in a bar.”
With anyone else, that probably would have been a conversation stopper, but Lucas Ames didn’t bat an eye. “Good for her. As a committed bachelor myself, I’m glad to know that she hasn’t joined the ranks.”
“The ranks?” I asked.
“Of the domesticated. The tied down. The settled.”
I almost pointed out that my mother had spent the past eighteen years raising a child, but the truth was that some days, I’d felt like I was raising her.
“Sawyer.” Lillian had apparently divorced herself from the conversation with Davis Ames enough to realize that I’d strayed, because she closed the space between us and placed a hand on my shoulder. “Why don’t you go see if you can find Lily?”
My grandmother was the one who’d brought up the idea of me looking for my biological father. She was the one who’d laid the pearls out as bait tonight. But now that someone had actually taken that bait, she was shooing me away.
“Not to put too fine a point on this, but I think I found Lily.” Lucas nodded toward a table near the front of the stage. “And Walker.”
Walker had his cell phone gripped tightly in his hand. Lily appeared to be trying to calm him down. Walker shook her off and started stumbling toward his father. Like a switch had been thrown, Lucas Ames went from carefree bachelor to family man mode in a heartbeat. He crossed to Walker, putting a casual arm around him, though I suspected his grip was iron tight.
“You don’t look like you’re feeling well, kid,” he commented. “Let’s get you home.”
“This is one of her games,” Walker said, the words surprisingly crisp. “Campbell. It’s just one of her little tests. It has to be.”
“What has to be?” I found myself asking.
Based on the look my grandmother shot me, you would have thought verbalizing the question that everyone was thinking was a faux pas on par with running through this whole gala buck naked.
Walker, however, didn’t seem to object. He shoved his cell phone into my hands. I looked down at the screen.
“ ‘Debs and Squires like to play,’ ” I read out loud.
“Sawyer,” my grandmother hissed.
I ignored her and continued reading the text that Campbell Ames had sent her brother. “ ‘If I’m missing… suspect foul play.’ ”
rom what I picked up during the remainder of the evening, Campbell Ames had a reputation for pulling “stunts like this.” It wasn’t entirely clear what constituted a stunt, though I did gather that borrowing cars that didn’t belong to her and wearing white after Labor Day were both in Campbell’s repertoire. Given that Walker wasn’t the only one to receive a copy of that text, his prediction that I wouldn’t be the scandal du jour for long had proved right on the money.
Debs and Squires like to play. If I’m missing… suspect foul play.
Hours later, I rolled my eyes as I scrubbed every trace of makeup from my face. This was what happened when people had too much money and too little sense. Thanks to Campbell Ames and her little stunt, my mother’s good buddy Lucas had left before I’d gotten a chance to ask him whether, by any chance, he and my mom had engaged in coitus roughly nineteen years ago.
Taking a perch on top of the antique desk in “my” room, I played back the day’s events. I scrutinized everything: the exact words Senator Ames had said to me at the department store, the expression on Lucas’s face when he’d placed that first bid, the fact that Davis Ames had ultimately purchased the pearls. At home, I would have gone for a late-night walk as I turned the details over in my mind, but here, I had nowhere to go and nothing to distract me.
If Lucas is my father, his family would want to keep that on the down low. It was a big if. I was assuming facts not in evidence. Just because Lucas Ames had been my mother’s friend, just because he’d tried to outbid my uncle tonight didn’t mean—
“Watch your foot! That’s my head.”
I glanced toward the window, which I had cracked open after getting out of the shower.
“Watch your head,” came the reply. “That’s my foot!”
There was an instant of silence, followed by a muffled shriek.
I don’t want to know, I thought. It’s none of my business. And yet…
I slid off the desk, walked over to the window, opened it, and looked down.
Sadie-Grace and Lily, dressed in all black, were climbing down an honest-to-God trellis. Who even had a trellis?
It’s not my business if they fall and break their necks, I thought. It’s not my business where they’re going at—I looked at the clock—a quarter to one.
And yet… I had nowhere else to go and nothing else to distract me. I stood there watching them until they had their feet firmly planted on the lawn. And then, as they attempted to sneak down the street in what I’m sure they thought was a very stealthy manner, I shook my head. I rolled up the sleeves of my nightshirt and threw on a pair of running shorts.
And then I climbed down the trellis.
I trailed my cousin and Sadie-Grace for three blocks. They ended their nighttime journey on another cul-de-sac, with homes only a little bit smaller than my grandmother’s. Lily approached the front porch of one of the houses, then slipped something out of her pocket.
A key, I realized as she fit it into the lock. A moment later, she and Sadie-Grace were gone.
Is this really so awful? I heard Sadie-Grace asking in my memory.
I suppose, Lily had replied, that depends on how one feels about felonies.
My curiosity piqued, I headed for the front door myself. They’d locked it behind them, but I made quick work of the lock.
My stance on felonies had always been rather fluid.
The inside of the house was under construction. Tarps blocked off entire rooms. I listened for Lily and Sadie-Grace, but heard nothing. Making my way silently down the hall, I used my phone as a flashlight, and soon, one mystery was solved.
There was a portrait on the wall: Aunt Olivia and Uncle J.D., on their wedding day.
“Okay,” I murmured. “So technically, Lily wasn’t breaking and entering.”
Technically, I was.
The fact that Aunt Olivia’s house was being renovated explained why Lily’s family appeared to be staying at my grandmother’s, but it didn’t explain why my very proper cousin had taken off in the middle of the night like a couture-clad bandit.
I made it to the living room without seeing any signs of Lily or Sadie-Grace. Unlike the rest of the house, this room seemed to be fairly untouched by the remodel. The only sign that the house wasn’t lived in was the trio of boxes stacked carefully next to the coffee table. Each one had been neatly labeled.
The one labeled Symphony Ball was too good to pass up.
Dried flowers. White gloves. A videotape. A pillow with my aunt’s initials stitched onto it in gold. A program from the ball itself. Going through the box was an exercise in masochism. Part of me wanted to know what I was in for with this whole debutante thing, but a bigger part needed to get a sense of my aunt.
My mom wasn’t always the most reliable narrator. My aunt may or may not have been “heartless, image-obsessed, and a pod person,” but it was incontestable that Aunt Olivia had been in her twenties, married, and fairly independent when my mother had been kicked out of the house.
She could have stepped in.
She could have helped.
“But you didn’t.” I flipped open the album only to be greeted with a familiar, fancy script. Symphony Ball, it declared with gracefully looping letters. Keeping an eye on the door—and an eye out for Lily—I thumbed through the album and stopped when I came to a portrait of twenty-four teenage girls in identical white dresses, standing under a familiar marble arch. I found Aunt Olivia, and my mind went
to the Squire photograph I’d stolen from my mother’s drawer. I didn’t need to do a side-by-side comparison to know that the composition was almost identical.
“Another tradition,” I muttered. I ran my fingers over the embossing: Symphony Debutantes. Then I flipped the page. “And Symphony Squires.” Twenty-four boys in long-tailed tuxedos stared back at me. I scanned the photo for Uncle J.D., then froze. My eyes darted to the year embossed onto the photo.
“Sawyer?”
I jumped to my feet. “Lily.”
“What are you—“
“I followed you.” I cut her off, my heart slamming into my rib cage with the force of a sledgehammer, my brain going a thousand miles an hour. On some level, I heard Lily tell me that I should go home. On some level, I realized that Sadie-Grace had joined her.
But on another level, I was twelve years old again. I’d just found the picture in my mother’s drawer. It hadn’t been taped to the back, not then—not until after my mother had discovered me looking at it.
I forced my mind back to the present.
“Maybe we should tell her,” Sadie-Grace was saying. “She might be able to help.”
“Tell me what?” My voice was calm. The album was dead weight in my hand, but it only took a moment of misdirection and some elementary sleight of hand before I had the picture out.
Twenty-four teenage boys in long-tailed tuxedos, standing under a marble arch.
“It’s late,” Lily said, sticking out her chin. “You should go.”
She was backlit by a light in the hallway. It wasn’t until she turned her head away from me that I saw the tear tracks on her face. For a split second, she looked like my mom.
How many times, when I was a kid, had I come across her with that look on her face exactly?
“I could go,” I told Lily, unable to tear my mind completely away from the picture in my hands. “I will, if you ask me to again. But…” I let the word hang in the air. “I could also stay.”
I could stay, and she could tell me what was going on.
I could stay, because we were family.
I could stay and come up with an excuse to go through everything in my aunt’s keepsake box with a fine-tooth comb, because this picture I’d just pilfered—the picture of twenty-four squires my aunt’s age, her husband included?
It was identical to the photograph I’d stolen from my mom.
The only difference was that the year on my mom’s picture had been scratched out. Four of the faces had been scratched out. I’d assumed that my mystery father had done Symphony Ball with my mother. I’d assumed that was why she had the photograph in the first place.
I’d assumed wrong.
“I think we should tell Sawyer,” Sadie-Grace said decisively. “She grew up in a bar.”
Lily hesitated, then finally managed to form a single question. “Can you keep a secret?” she asked me.
I thought of the picture I’d just stolen—not to mention the implication that my mystery father would have been an adult when my mother was just seventeen. “Like you wouldn’t believe.”
Wordlessly, Lily led me through the house, out the back door, and to what appeared to be a pool house in the backyard.
“Before you say anything,” she told me primly, “you should know that we can explain.”
“Explain what?” I said.
In reply, Lily opened the door to the pool house. There, inside, was a teenage girl, bound, gagged, and duct-taped to a chair.
“Sawyer,” Sadie-Grace said ruefully. “Meet Campbell Ames.”
s it turned out, if there was one thing capable of distracting me from the major clue I’d just found to my father’s identity, it was the kidnapping and unlawful detainment of a senator’s daughter.
“What the hell, Lily?”
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Sadie-Grace assured me. “We’ve been feeding her.”
I could feel a migraine coming on.
“Well, not feeding her exactly,” Sadie-Grace rambled on, “because she’s in the middle of a juice cleanse, but—”
The phrase juice cleanse was the last straw. “If someone doesn’t tell me what’s going on here, I’m walking out that door”—I jerked my thumb toward the exit—“and calling the police. Or worse: our grandmother.”
Lily responded as if I had slapped her—or possibly farted deliberately in her direction. “You will do no such thing, Sawyer Taft.” She lifted her chin and met my eyes. “This is just a little misunderstanding.”
From behind her duct-tape gag, Campbell Ames objected vehemently to that characterization of the situation.
“We didn’t mean to.” Sadie-Grace was nothing if not earnest. “It just… sort of… happened.”
“How do you accidentally kidnap someone?” I meant it as a rhetorical question, but Sadie-Grace seemed to miss the incredulous tone in my voice.
“It starts,” she said very seriously, “with accidentally knocking them out.”
“Also known as felony assault,” I clarified.
“Believe it or not,” Lily said, delicately clearing her throat, “we aren’t the bad guys here.”
Tangled auburn hair fell in Campbell’s face as she did her best to lunge at my cousin, but whatever they’d bound her to the chair with—it held.
“Honestly, Sawyer,” Lily continued pertly, “if you can’t be bothered to keep an open mind, I hardly see the point of telling you anything at all.”
“An open mind?” I stared at Lily, waiting for some hint that she recognized how ridiculous it was to accuse someone of being closed-minded about kidnapping.
Nada.
Deciding there was one and only one way to speed up the process of figuring out what was going on here—and how likely I was to be arrested as an accessory after the fact—I crossed the room before Lily could stop me and peeled off Campbell’s gag.
“I am going to sue you, have you arrested, and utterly decimate you socially.” Campbell glared daggers at my cousin. “Not necessarily in that order.”
“Campbell Ames,” Lily replied, in an unfettered tone that would have been more appropriate if the two of them had just sat down to tea, “I’d like to introduce you to my cousin, Sawyer. She clearly did not think this through.”
Considering I had neither kidnapped someone nor threatened my kidnappers in a way that incentivized them not to let me go, I was pretty sure I was currently winning the foresight prize in this room.
“We said we were sorry!” Sadie-Grace edged back from Campbell, until her back literally hit the wall.
Campbell made a show of raking her eyes over Sadie-Grace, top to bottom, bottom to top, then turned to me. “Have you ever wondered,” she said, her voice dripping honey, “what total insecurity and a complete lack of social awareness would look like personified?”
Sadie-Grace made a muffled sound. I didn’t need to look down at her feet to guess that she had gone into ballet mode.
“Well, don’t just stand there,” Campbell commanded imperiously. “Untie me!”
Clearly, I’d been mistaken for the help. Unfortunately for Campbell, there were two kinds of people in this world: those who weren’t condescending and needlessly cruel and those I was pretty content to leave duct-taped to a chair.
“Now are you ready to listen?” Lily asked me quietly.
“Are you ready to talk?” I shot back.
Lily pressed her lips together, no smile. “Campbell is…” she managed after a moment. “She’s…”
Campbell smiled sweetly. “I’m what, Lillian?”
Somehow, I doubted the use of Lily’s full name—our grandmother’s name—was accidental.
Personally, I wasn’t a big believer in subtle threats. Or subtle insults. So I swung my attention back to the least subtle person in the room. “Secrets are like bandages,” I told Sadie-Grace. “Just rip it off.”
Sadie-Grace took a deep breath and then opened her mouth. Campbell grunted, bucked against the chair like a wild pony, and began scre
aming at the pitch of breaking glass.
“Make her stop!” Sadie-Grace sounded frantic.
“Why?” I replied, raising my voice just loud enough to be heard over Campbell’s ongoing shrieking. “There’s enough space between houses that no one can hear her. If she wants to turn her head around three hundred and sixty degrees and puke green slime, it’s no skin off my back.”
Sadie-Grace took a moment to digest that. “We have been feeding her kale juice.”
Campbell abruptly stopped with the banshee impression. She gave me a once-over, then slid her gaze back to Lily. “Cousin, you said? Now, would that be on your daddy’s side or your mama’s, Lily?”
“The scandalous one,” I replied, planting myself firmly in front of Campbell’s chair. “And speaking of scandals, I’ve only been here twelve hours, and I’ve already gathered that they’re a particular specialty of yours. You like attention, and you like to break the rules. I can’t help but assume that if you tried to tell anyone about this, and it was your word against Lily’s…”
I trailed off, waiting for the implication to sink in.
Campbell let out a light peal of laughter. “Aren’t you just precious?” she asked. Giving every appearance of being utterly delighted, she leaned forward, as much as she could given the restraints. “Would you like for me to tell you how Miss Propriety over there spends her spare time? When she’s not volunteering for charity, studying for the SATs, standing up straight, and practicing her most virginal smiles, of course.” Campbell was getting way too much pleasure out of this.
“How I spend my time is none of your business,” Lily said, her voice low—and desperate.
Campbell snorted. “Keep telling yourself that, porn star.”
The sudden silence following that insult was deafening.
Abruptly, Sadie-Grace jackrabbited forward. She slapped the duct-tape gag back over Campbell’s mouth, scurried backward, and crossed herself.
Twice.
Then she turned on her toes and eyed me beseechingly. “What do we do?”
Little White Lies Page 6
