Little White Lies

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Lily didn’t say anything out loud, but a slight shift in her shell-shocked expression echoed the question.

  “You two do know that growing up on the wrong side of the metaphorical tracks doesn’t actually give a person any kind of criminal expertise, right?” I said.

  Sadie-Grace frowned. “I thought they were literal tracks.”

  Campbell caught my gaze, and despite the strip of duct tape over her mouth, there was a triumphant glint in her eyes, one that said that we were lesser and she was more, and things would always work out to her advantage in the end.

  I was a strange kid whose even stranger hobbies had gotten her kicked out of Girl Scouts. I’d been born to an unwed teenage mother. I’d been called worse than porn star, and there were boys I’d never so much as kissed who’d claimed we’d done a whole lot more.

  I’d been looked at that way that Campbell Ames was looking at me now more times than I could count.

  “Start from the beginning,” I told Lily, making my way out of the pool house and nodding for my cousin to do the same. “I’m ready to listen.”

  he full story involved blackmail. Campbell was the blackmailer. Lily was the blackmailee. Unfortunately for Lily, she didn’t have anything Campbell wanted, other than complete social submission, indefinitely, forever. From what I gathered,

  when Lily had balked, Campbell had gone to make good on her threat, and Sadie-Grace had, and I quote, “reacted on instinct”

  and “aggressively hugged” the senator’s daughter as a means of restraint.

  Campbell had fought back.

  Both girls had toppled over.

  And Campbell had ended up unconscious.

  I didn’t ask the dynamic duo why they hadn’t gone for medical help, or how exactly they’d transported Beelzebub from the scene of the crime—a local country club—to the Easterling pool house. I didn’t make Lily specify what, precisely, Campbell had been blackmailing her about.

  I did, however, ask her to clarify one thing. “Whatever ­Campbell’s holding over your head, whatever you did—isn’t felony kidnapping just a little bit worse?”

  Lily looked down at her feet. “One would think so,” she said. “But I doubt my mama would agree.”

  I’d yet to see Lily and Aunt Olivia interact directly, but I couldn’t help thinking about the way Uncle J.D. had preemptively told my cousin that she was perfect just the way she was, the way Aunt Olivia would have preferred that the Belle of the Ball title go to Lily.

  There’s trying, I could hear my aunt saying. And then there’s trying too hard.

  I didn’t know all that much about Lily, but I thought it was a pretty safe bet that she tried.

  “Go ahead,” Lily told me. “Say that this is not your problem. Say that I have made my Egyptian-cotton-sheeted bed, and I can lie in—”

  It, my brain finished as Lily went flying. There was a second of processing delay before my brain also registered the fact that Lily had just been ferociously tackled by a red-haired, juice-cleansed ball of fury.

  Sadie-Grace gasped in horror.

  “Did you gnaw through your bindings?” I asked the tackler, impressed despite myself.

  “Get off me!” Lily grappled with Campbell’s weight on top of her. Unfortunately, my cousin fought like a sorority girl at the beginning of a night of drinking, and Campbell Ames fought like one at the end.

  Sadie-Grace pranced toward the fray. “Don’t make me hug you!”

  Campbell hooked an arm around her ankle, and a second later, all three of them were rolling on the grass like a pack of high-society hyenas.

  Say that this is not your problem. Lily’s words echoed in my head. Sage advice, probably. Technically, this had nothing to do with me. Technically, my cousin and I were barely more than strangers.

  Then again, I’d always had a habit of taking technicalities as a challenge.

  Enter the garden hose. I probably enjoyed wielding it on the cat­fight in front of me more than I should have.

  “Wha—”

  “Eeeee!”

  “How dare you!” That last response came from Campbell as she climbed to her feet and stared me down through sopping-wet hair.

  I spritzed her once more in the face for good measure.

  Even wet as a dog and thoroughly tousled, Lily kept her composure. “Sawyer, you don’t have to…”

  “Sign your own social death warrant?” Campbell suggested. “No, she doesn’t. She can turn around and walk away.”

  I’d never backed down from a tone like that in my life.

  “So could you,” I pointed out. “You could forget this ever happened, forget whatever idiotic game you’re playing with my cousin, and just walk away.”

  Campbell tossed wet hair over her shoulder. “I’m an Ames. We never forget.” She smiled. “And once I’m done with your very naughty cousin—neither will anyone else.”

  I had no idea what Campbell was blackmailing Lily about, but her tone left very little ambiguity about the fact that when she said naughty, she meant slut.

  A muscle in my jaw tightening, I tossed the garden hose to the ground.

  “You could say I’m something of an expert at knot tying,” I commented evenly, before turning my gaze from Campbell to the other two. “I’m going to need some rope.”

  After I’d introduced Campbell to my superior rope-tying skills, I confiscated the cell phone I found on her person. I had literally no idea how she’d managed to send a text from it while bound and gagged, but between that and the Houdini-like escape she’d just pulled off, I wasn’t taking any chances. I removed the phone’s battery and smashed the rest of it beneath my heel. I may not have been a criminal mastermind, but I had spent a lot of time watching police procedurals.

  And telenovelas.

  “The way I see it, we have two options,” I told Lily and ­Sadie-Grace, pulling them back outside—and out of Campbell’s hearing. “First option: let her go.”

  “Pardon me?” Lily’s pale eyebrows skyrocketed.

  “Let her stew a little bit longer, and then call her bluff,” I clarified. “Campbell’s father is a senator. I’m guessing he’s not a fan of the type of teen drama that makes national press. She won’t sue us. She won’t have us arrested. He won’t let her.”

  Lily did not seem to find that convincing.

  “She had a phone,” I pointed out. “Lord knows how she managed to use it, but instead of contacting the police, she sent that text. She’d rather get people talking than deal with the cops.”

  “Great,” Lily replied weakly. “That just leaves the threat of utter social annihilation.”

  “Been there, done that,” I said. “The secret is not to care.”

  I might as well have been telling the wind not to blow. Lily was the kind of person who tried. She cared.

  “It might help,” I told her, “if I knew what Campbell was blackmailing you about.”

  Silence. Then my cousin’s phone buzzed. Lily looked down at it. When she saw the message, her pursed lips paled. After an elongated moment, she lifted her brown eyes to mine and held out the phone, like the very act of doing so was the equivalent of baring her soul.

  I studied her gaze for a moment before looking down at the screen. Secrets on My Skin had posted a new entry—a particularly salacious one, etched in gold ink along the arc of a girl’s porcelain-white inner thigh. I was surprised that my prim and proper cousin had subscribed to the blog.

  Right up to the point when I wasn’t.

  Keep telling yourself that, porn star. That was what Campbell had said before Sadie-Grace had muzzled her. Back at the auction, Boone had said that he was “almost partially sure” that the anonymous model in the pictures went to Ridgeway Hall.

  Would you like for me to tell you how Miss Propriety over there spends her spare time?

  Lily closed her eyes and bowed her head, saying nothing. I hit the link to go to the Secrets website and scrolled back through the entries. The photographs weren’t identifiable, b
ut the build and coloring fit my cousin’s. None of the pictures were nudes—but the model was awfully fond of strategically draped sheets.

  An entry had just been posted, but it wouldn’t have been difficult to set it to post on a delay.

  “You want to know what Campbell has on me?” Lily said, forcing her eyelids open. “This.”

  Lily Taft Easterling was a Southern lady. A lover of twinsets. A connoisseur of the proper utensils to use at a formal dinner.

  She also, apparently, had a borderline-explicit photo blog.

  “What kind of proof does Campbell have that it’s you?” I asked quietly.

  Lily shook her head, unwilling to answer. I didn’t press her. I knew from experience that when it came to girl-parts and what girls chose to do with them, the damage was not, in any way, proportional to the “proof.”

  “The first option is to let Campbell go and hope she’s bluffing.” Lily managed to paraphrase my own words back at me. “What’s option two?”

  I wasn’t used to having cousins. It was still a little alien for me to think of the word family meaning anything other than just my mom. But I couldn’t have stood by and watched a total stranger being blackmailed about something like this by someone like Campbell.

  And Lily wasn’t a stranger.

  “Option two also involves letting Lucifer go.” I squared my shoulders, like a general on the edge of leading her troops into battle. “But first, we dig up enough dirt on the devil to blackmail her back.”

  lackmail is such an ugly word.”

  Mackie knew that the eyelash-batting rabble-rouser was baiting him. He knew it, and he didn’t care, because the lock picker was right.

  He had no idea why the girls had been arrested.

  “You blackmailed someone.” He tried to make it a statement, rather than a question.

  “Campbell,” the prim and proper one said, “shut up.”

  aking up in a canopied bed might have felt dreamlike and surreal, were it not for the hundred-pound Bernese mountain dog sitting on my head.

  “Don’t mind her,” a pleasant voice said from somewhere above me. “She just wants a little sugar.”

  Still half-asleep, I shoved at William Faulkner, who obligingly rolled over and presented me with her belly.

  “You’re not allergic, are you?” Aunt Olivia asked from the direction of the closet. “Imagine not even knowing if my own niece is allergic to dogs.”

  Imagine not knowing that your own daughter’s pastime of choice involves artistically inscribing the secrets of the upper crust on her bikini line.

  Imagine having no idea that the person who knocked up your teenage sister was a member of your social circle.

  Imagine not even knowing there’s a Debutante bound and gagged in your pool house.

  The events of the previous day came flooding back, and I sat up in bed. William Faulkner, tired of waiting for a belly scratch, decided to give me some sugar of her own.

  “Well?” Aunt Olivia said. “Are you?”

  I swiped slobber off my cheek with the back of my hand and gave the Bernese mountain dog a scratch behind the ears before she could launch another affection attack. “Am I what?”

  “Allergic,” Aunt Olivia reiterated. “I swear, you girls have the attention span of gnats. I caught Lily coming out of the bathroom wearing mismatched pajamas this morning.”

  If the idea of clashing pj’s was enough to engender a tongue cluck, I did not want to imagine how my aunt would react if she knew more about Lily’s extracurricular activities.

  “Not allergic,” I said. I pried myself from the bed and became acutely aware of the sound of hangers skimming over a metal rod. “What are you doing?”

  “Hmmmm?” For someone who’d just accused me of having no attention span, my aunt was awfully easily distracted. Before I could repeat the question, she popped out of the closet and held up a white lace sundress for my inspection. “What about this one?”

  “What about it?”

  “You do sound like your mama sometimes, don’t you? But never mind that, miss—what do you think about this dress for brunch?”

  “Brunch,” I repeated.

  Aunt Olivia faltered, in the way of someone who fears she has just committed a great faux pas. “Do they have brunch where you grew up?”

  You would have thought she was asking me if we’d had running water.

  “We have brunch,” I said. I was tempted to add And it’s finger-lickin’ good, just to see the horrified expression on her face, but restrained myself. “I just hadn’t planned on going to brunch today.”

  “We always do Sunday brunch at the club,” Aunt Olivia said, like Thou Shalt Brunch on Sunday was the Eleventh Commandment. “Depending on where you fall on the scale of heathen to devout, you’re also welcome to join us for church this morning. No pressure, mind you.”

  “No pressure about church,” I clarified. “But brunch…”

  “Brunch is a family affair,” a voice said.

  Aunt Olivia and I turned toward the doorway. My grandmother was standing there in black pants and a white linen jacket. She wore a rope chain necklace, casual the same way the houses in this neighborhood were modest.

  After eyeing my bed-head and the gargantuan dog now tangled in the sheets beside me, Lillian turned her attention to her daughter. “Perhaps not white,” she said, giving the dress in Aunt Olivia’s hand the once-over. “Do we have something in a peach?”

  Aunt Olivia went back to the closet and came out again holding the exact same dress in a different color.

  “When a style and cut are flattering,” my grandmother lectured genteelly, “you buy in more than one color. One can never have too many basics.” Without pausing a beat, she plucked the dress in question from Aunt Olivia’s hands. “I’ll take it from here, dear.”

  I looked for a hint of tension between them, some clue that my aunt didn’t care for being dismissed, but if Olivia resented being ousted from my room, she gave no sign of it. If anything, she seemed comfortable doing what she was told.

  Comfortable being the good daughter, I could practically hear my mom saying as Aunt Olivia called for William Faulkner to follow her out the door.

  Once we were alone, Lillian laid the dress she’d chosen for me on the foot of the bed. “I could ask you what exactly you and your cousin were doing last night that necessitated sneaking back in at three in the morning, but I would be lying if I implied that I was anything less than pleased to see you and Lily taking to each other so quickly.” She ran a hand over the dress to smooth out the hem. “Girls can be… complicated. Family, more so. If your mother and Olivia had been closer…” Lillian pressed her lips together, then shook her head. “You’ll fare better with Lily on your side than you would alone.”

  “Right.” I brushed Lillian’s statement off. I might have come down on Lily’s side the night before, but the idea that she might be on mine was still a little hard to wrap my mind around. I was good at being relied on.

  Relying on others was more of a gray area.

  “Brunch,” my grandmother declared, ignoring my response to her last statement, “is not optional.”

  I could not swear that there was not a brunch clause in my contract, so I didn’t argue.

  I negotiated.

  “I’ll go,” I said climbing out of bed. “I’ll even wear the dress.” I opened the drawer to my nightstand. “I just need you to do something for me first.”

  Late last night, when I’d finally crawled back through my window and detoxed from the debutante drama, I’d taken the photograph I’d stolen out of my pocket. With a thick black marker, I’d drawn four circles—one around each Squire whose face my mother had scratched out in her copy of the photo.

  I handed the picture to Lillian. “I’d like the names of those four.”

  I could probably have made some other attempt to identify the boys in the photo, but they were men now, and I didn’t believe in taking the scenic route when a blunt question could get y
ou there directly.

  Lillian was quiet for a long while as she took in the faces in the photograph. I saw a flurry of indecipherable emotions pass over her face. Anger? Bewilderment? Surprise? Regret?

  It went on for long enough that I was starting to think that no answer was forthcoming, but the family matriarch surprised me. “I assume you recognized your uncle.” She pointed to the first of the four. “He’s got that boyish look about him even now.”

  He was the only one I had recognized. I hadn’t thought much about what that might mean.

  I hadn’t wanted to.

  “The one who’s not quite looking at the camera is Charles Waters. I believe you two met last night.” Lillian didn’t so much as pause to give me a moment to process. “The tall, smug-looking one in the back row is the oldest Ames boy. The senator.”

  Ames. As in Walker Ames and Lucas Ames and the blackmailer bound and gagged in the pool house.

  “The one on the edge,” my grandmother continued, her manner and tone suggesting none of this was of much import, “is the senator’s brother-in-law. He wasn’t much back then, but the Ames family paid his Squire fees. Eventually, he ended up marrying their daughter, Julia.”

  “Does this man who married Julia Ames have a name?” I asked.

  Without a word, my grandmother replaced the photo in my nightstand drawer. She pressed it shut before answering my question. “His last name is Mason. I believe you met his son, Boone, last night.”

  And the small world just keeps getting smaller.…

  “First name?” I asked, as much to show her that none of this information had gotten to me as anything else.

  Lillian smiled. I wasn’t sure if that was a reflex—or a warning. “Thomas,” she said. “Thomas Mason.”

  Suddenly, I felt like I’d been gargling cotton balls. My name was Sawyer Ann. My mom had told me once that even if I’d been a boy, she still would have named me Sawyer.

  But in that case, it would have been Sawyer Thomas.

  he family SUV was a Mercedes. It was also a tank. As Uncle J.D. pulled past the guard gate and began the ascent up the long and curving road to Northern Ridge Country Club, I was aware of two and only two things: John David’s ongoing monologue on the defensibility of our position in the event of the zombie apocalypse and the name Thomas Mason.