Little White Lies

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  I’d always assumed that Sawyer Thomas was a play on words—Tom Sawyer, reversed. It had never occurred to me that if I’d been born a boy, my mom might have named me after someone.

  Say, for instance, my biological father.

  There’s jumping to conclusions, I told myself, and then there’s the Olympic long jump. Stop it.

  “John David, if you rumple that blazer, I will string you up by your toenails.” In the front seat, Aunt Olivia checked her lipstick in a compact mirror. “And what’s the rule about zombies at brunch?”

  Lily’s phone vibrated on the seat between us. I looked down. My cousin’s manicured hand quickly obscured my view of her phone screen—but not quickly enough.

  Secrets on My Skin. I shot Lily an incredulous look. Seriously?

  My cousin refused to meet my gaze. Her father pulled onto a circle drive and came to a stop under a cream-colored portico. I noticed the valet stand, but didn’t think to look for the valet. My frustration with Lily—and the fact that she was still updating the blog over which she was being blackmailed—may have caused me to throw my door open slightly harder than necessary.

  And then I saw the valet.

  In my defense, I wasn’t used to people opening my car door for me, and he only made a small wheezing sound when it nailed him in the stomach.

  I stood and reached out to steady him by the arm. “You okay?”

  The valet’s hazel eyes rested on mine. “I’ll live.”

  His accent was closer to mine than any I’d heard since entering Deb World. Though he was wearing a white polo shirt emblazoned with the club’s initials, something about the way he stood told me he wasn’t a polo-shirt kind of person, any more than I was a peach-sundress one.

  “Nick.” An older man wearing an identical shirt came up behind him and clapped a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “We could use a runner. G-16.”

  “This way, dear.” Aunt Olivia nudged me toward the building. Soon, I found myself in a foyer with forty-foot ceilings that let off into a hallway just as long.

  I fell in beside Lily to avoid being herded further.

  In what I could only assume was an effort to preempt any comments I might make about what I’d seen on her phone, she spoke first. “Incapacitate any valets lately?” she murmured as we made our way down the hall.

  I murmured back, “Post any borderline-explicit photos?”

  To Lily’s credit, she didn’t blanch. “I know,” she said quietly. “I know. There’s a queue. I need to disable it.” She paused for a moment as a maître d’ came out from behind a podium to greet her parents, then continued, her voice still hushed. “Don’t forget: when eating brunch, you start with the outermost fork and work your way in.”

  Brunch was a four-course affair. We waited for Lillian to arrive before we were seated. Once we’d taken up position at a table overlooking a large, impossibly sparkling swimming pool, John David took it upon himself to give me the grand tour. The salad buffet was in the Breakfast Room, the breakfast station was in the Oak Room, lunch and the carving stations could be found in the Ash Hall, and dessert was in the Great Room.

  I was tempted to go straight for dessert, in part because I believed in prioritization and in part because Boone Mason was currently in the process of stacking a glass plate high with a combination of cookies, miniature cakes, mousse, and crème brûleé.

  If Boone’s here, what are the chances that his father is, too?

  “Salad first,” John David told me solemnly. “And we can only talk about zombies if the zombies mind their manners.”

  When I glanced back toward the Great Room, Boone—and his towering plate of dessert—was gone. It took me two courses to find a pretext to go looking for him. I demurely excused myself to the ladies’ room and made a stop by the dessert bar on the way. Since Boone hadn’t crossed by me on his way out earlier, I tried my luck with the archway on the opposite side of the room. Another seating area, smaller than the ballroom in which my grandmother was currently holding court, was tucked away behind the arch.

  At a table overlooking the golf course, Boone sat with four adults and two empty chairs. I recognized the senator and his wife. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to guess that the other matched pair were Boone’s parents. His mother had deep brown hair, with just enough auburn highlights to remind me that she and Campbell shared DNA.

  Great, I thought. Half of the people on my Who’s-Your-Daddy shortlist are related to the girl I’m helping hold captive. That might have merited a bit more reflection, were it not for the presence of Boone’s father. Thomas Mason looked very little like he had in the Squire photograph. He’d aged well, grown into features that hadn’t fit together on his teenage face. He had sandy hair, a shade or two lighter than my own, and the kind of tan that I suspected had less to do with solar exposure than genetics.

  “The ladies’ room is this way.”

  I barely heard Lily when she appeared beside me. I knew I was staring, but I couldn’t stop. There were four men on my list, and two of them were sitting at that table. They’d probably been sitting at that table every Sunday for years, their kids growing older together, eating photo-perfect desserts.

  “Sawyer.” Lily gripped my elbow, and the next thing I knew, she’d steered me back through the Great Room, down a long hall, and into a ladies’ room that had about 200 percent more furniture than any restroom I’d ever encountered.

  I flopped down on what I could only assume was a fainting couch.

  “Are you even familiar with the word subtle?” Lily asked me. “Why don’t you just hang out a neon sign saying ‘Thoroughly Up to No Good’?”

  I’d been looking for something back there—a resemblance, maybe, or a feeling buried deep in my gut. But from Lily’s perspective, I’d just been openly staring at the family of the girl she’d kidnapped.

  The girl I had very expertly tied to a chair.

  “Subtle is overrated.” I climbed to my feet and surveilled the restroom. Beyond the sitting area, there was a mirror and a line of sparkling granite sinks, and past that, there were a half dozen toilet stalls.

  Every one of them was empty.

  “If you want to dig up the dirt on Campbell,” I said, turning back to Lily, now that I knew we could speak freely, “you’re going to need to be a little less…”

  “Less polite?” Lily suggested calmly. “Less proper? Less law-abiding?”

  I valiantly refrained from mentioning that law-abiding had gone out the window a while back. “Think,” I said instead. “If you were blackmail material on Campbell Ames, where would you be?”

  Lily closed her eyes. I had the feeling that she was silently counting to ten and also possibly considering throttling me. But when she opened her eyes again, there was a glint in them. “If I were… that… I might be in Campbell’s locker.”

  We had to wait another two courses to make good on the plan. The locker Lily had referenced was in the women’s locker room—completely separate from the ladies’ restroom we’d already visited. Apparently, Campbell was a golfer.

  Didn’t see that one coming, I thought.

  “She won the Junior Club Championship every year when we were kids,” Lily told me, tapping her manicured nails rapidly against the lockers as she looked for the right number. “I almost won once, but Campbell cheated.”

  “How do you cheat at golf?”

  Lily stopped in front of one of the lockers. “You lie about your score.” She closed her fingertips around the metal lock on the locker. “Let’s hope Cam’s still using the same combination she used in middle school.”

  Lily tried the combination three times. After the third unsuccessful attempt, I thought she might actually resort to cursing.

  “Move,” I told her. As much as I hated to provide any support whatsoever for Lily’s assumption that growing up outside the lap of luxury made a person a criminal by default, I had known how to defeat a basic combination lock since I was nine.

  “For the record,”
I told my cousin, “any lock-picking ability I may or may not have acquired growing up has less to do with where I lived and more to do with the fact that I was a very weird, very obsessive little kid.”

  The lock popped open.

  “Impressive.” For once, Lily’s smile looked almost devious.

  With a muted grin, I began going through the contents of ­Campbell’s locker. Golf shoes, deodorant, a makeup bag filled with makeup, a makeup bag filled with tampons, two sports bras, one thong, and…

  “OxyContin.” I glanced at Lily, then turned my attention back to the bottle of pills. “They’re legal—prescribed to her.” Behind the OxyContin, there were two other containers. “Ativan,” I read off the second one. “And a multivitamin.” Like the Oxy, the Ativan was prescribed to Campbell.

  “Ativan is an anxiety medication,” Lily told me, turning her phone so that I could see the description she’d just looked up. “Campbell has never struck me as a particularly anxious person.”

  “How would you know?” I felt a stab of guilt, stronger than any I’d experienced as I’d tied Campbell to the chair. When someone played dirty, I played dirtier. That was the law of the jungle. But even power-hungry gossip queens deserved some privacy.

  I wasn’t about to blackmail someone—anyone—about their mental health.

  To distract Lily, I moved on to the vitamins. They were over-the-counter and—not surprisingly—brand name. I unscrewed the top and looked inside to verify that rich-people vitamins were virtually indistinguishable from CVS brand. They were, but that wasn’t my biggest discovery in that moment.

  I tilted the open bottle toward Lily so that she could see what I was seeing. The pills were white, but when I rattled the container, there was a flash of silver.

  “What is that?” Lily asked.

  “Only one way to find out.” I fished the metal object out. It was somewhere between the size of a nickel and a quarter and shaped like a heart.

  “A charm?” Lily guessed. “Lovely. I can blackmail Campbell by threatening to out her as the only person over the age of ten who still has a weakness for charm bracelets. This will surely ruin her.”

  I dangled the heart closer to Lily’s face. “Not a charm. A tag.” I had a neighbor who lost her cat 1.5 times a week. I knew that of which I spoke. “I’m betting it came off a collar.” I tapped the writing etched into the tag. “Name. Phone number.”

  “ ‘Sophie,’ ” Lily read. “Is that the owner’s name, or the pet’s?”

  “The real question,” I replied, “is why Campbell’s hiding a pet tag in a bottle of vitamins in her golf locker.”

  Over a few rows and to our left, I heard the door to the locker room open. Moving quickly, I grabbed the last thing in the locker—a plain white envelope—and shut the door, clamping the lock back on just as a woman rounded the corner.

  “Lily.” Greer Waters greeted my cousin first, her smile a little too broad. “I didn’t know you were playing this morning. Will your mother be joining you?”

  Greer was holding a tennis racket. It felt, somehow, like she was holding a weapon.

  “I was just showing Sawyer the locker room,” Lily lied smoothly. “She’s never played tennis before. Or golf.”

  I had, in fact, played tennis—much like I had, in fact, eaten brunch—but decided to roll with Lily’s assertion, which Greer found suitably horrifying.

  “Oh, you poor dear,” she said immediately. “I’m sure your grandmother could get you private lessons.”

  “I’m really more interested in fencing.” I couldn’t help myself and picked an obscure sport at random. “Or horseback riding. Possibly badminton…”

  Lily nudged me, and I pushed down the urge to mention yachting. We’d managed to distract Sadie-Grace’s stepmother from the fact that we weren’t actually standing in front of Lily’s locker. The envelope was still in my left hand, the tag in my right.

  Now would be a good time to make our exit.

  “We should be getting back,” Lily told Greer. “I promised my grandmother we’d be quick.”

  The mere mention of Lillian Taft did something to Greer. It was like she was a dog who’d just smelled a steak. An Irish setter, I thought, eyeing her hair. Best of Breed and desperate for Best of Show.

  “Do tell your grandmother hello for me—and thank her for all of her help last night.”

  Somehow, I doubted Lillian considered herself to be the one who had “helped” with the auction.

  “Will do,” I said, pushing past Greer to the door. I held it open for Lily and was almost out myself when Sadie-Grace’s stepmother closed the distance between us. One second she was by the lockers, and the next, she was laying a hand on my shoulder.

  “Sawyer,” Greer said, her voice low and serious. “It occurred to me when I got home last night that I might have been a bit short with you when you asked me about your mother. I want you to know that you can ask me anything.”

  People were fundamentally predictable. They didn’t do complete 180s without a reason.

  “In fact,” Greer was saying, “if you have questions, I’d caution you against asking anyone else. When your mother took her leave, she left quite a few social fires in her wake. I’m sure you understand. There are things you simply do not talk about in polite company.”

  I managed a smile every bit as fake as hers. “Of course.”

  fter brunch, I called the phone number on the tag. The line was disconnected. As far as blackmail material went, that didn’t give us a lot to go on, but I’d spent a good chunk of my life obsessed with watching professional poker, and Lily had spent the entirety of her childhood in a world ruled by etiquette and unspoken rules.

  We both knew how to bluff.

  It took several hours before the two of us were able to “go for a walk and catch some fresh air”—also known as visiting our hostage. Sadie-Grace was already there when we arrived. She was holding a blender.

  “Campbell says no more kale.”

  Personally, I thought that Campbell wasn’t in much of a position to be issuing orders, but I had a feeling that Sadie-Grace was the kind of person who got ordered around a lot.

  “Let’s see what else Campbell has to say,” I suggested.

  I opened the door to the pool house and dragged a chair opposite Campbell’s.

  Turning the chair around backward, I sat down, my legs spread to either side.

  “I have some things that belong to you.” I held the tag up first. There was a brief flicker of something on her face, gone too fast for me to tell what it was. “You have to admit,” I said, taking my time with the words, “it’s a weird thing to be keeping inside a vitamin bottle.”

  “You broke into my locker at the club?” Campbell meditated on that for a moment, then smirked. “However will I deal with the life-altering information you’ve surely acquired?”

  When it came to sarcasm, Campbell’s delivery was several paces beyond Lily’s.

  “I mean, you know what kind of tampons I use…” Campbell simpered. “For shame.”

  There were many ways to bluff and many kinds of tells. Based on this performance, I was guessing that Campbell’s go-to maneuver was deflection.

  “I called the number on the tag,” I said.

  There. The flicker was back, for longer this time. I had no idea what this tag meant to Campbell, but I’d gotten confirmation that it meant something, and I was betting that she didn’t know the number was out of service.

  Taking advantage of the moment, I removed the envelope from my pocket. I’d already seen what was inside, but let her think I was opening it for the first time. “Not a letter,” I observed, emptying the contents of the envelope into my hand. “Not even paper.” I brandished the object. “A key.”

  Campbell tossed her hair back over one shoulder. “Did Dame Dance-A-Lot over there tell you that I am totally and utterly over kale? Forget my juice cleanse.” Campbell brandished her teeth. “If you don’t want me to starve in here, you’ll bring me a b
urger.”

  “You don’t like hamburgers,” Lily burst out.

  “And,” Campbell shot back, “I don’t like you. But I will like outing you as the downright indecent little flesh kitten you are. Really, Lily, in your position, I’d be less concerned with what our circle will think than what the elder generations will say. Your mother. Your grandmother. How will they ever hold their heads up in public again?”

  “We were friends once.” Lily stared at Campbell. “Do you even remember that?”

  “Oh, sweetheart.” Campbell had mastered the art of sounding sympathetic. “I don’t have friends. I have people who’ve proven themselves useful and those who’ve outlived their usefulness.”

  One guess which one you are, I could practically hear her saying.

  I took my time standing up. Campbell wanted us to think she’d won this round, but I’d scored some points. We might not have had blackmail material yet, but this interaction had convinced me that Campbell did have a secret.

  Maybe more than one.

  When Lily extracted herself from the pool house, she retreated back inside the house. I followed her, and Sadie-Grace followed me. Lily didn’t say a word as she pushed through a thick plastic sheet over one of the doorways and began ascending a wooden staircase.

  The second story wasn’t under construction. The decorating scheme was clearly Aunt Olivia’s doing—nearly identical to the one in the house where she’d grown up.

  Lily paused in the doorway of a bedroom—hers, I assumed. After a long and painful moment, she walked over to the queen-sized bed and reached under the mattress to remove a tablet.

  “I never used my computer for the posts,” she said softly. “It seemed safer to use something I could hide.”

  I wondered what else Lily had used for Secrets. A camera? A tripod? A few packages of Egyptian cotton sheets?