Little White Lies

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Walker just kept chipping away. “This will just take a second.”

  Nick glanced back at me. Clearly, he wanted me to get lost, but the two of them were blocking the only exit.

  “Is she with you?” Walker demanded.

  “Who?” Nick said. He gestured toward me. “Her? We just met.”

  Walker’s eyes flicked to mine. Clearly, he hadn’t taken note of my presence until that exact moment. “Could you give us a second, Sawyer?”

  Now it was my turn to lean casually back against the wall. “Take all the time you need.”

  I saw the barest hint of amusement on Nick’s face.

  Walker’s next word banished it. “Campbell,” he said, turning back to the other boy. “Is she lying low at your place?”

  Nick stared Walker down. “I think you must be confused.”

  “And I think that you’re my sister’s type,” Walker countered. “Look, who or what my sister does is none of my business. I just want to know if she’s okay.”

  She’s fine, I thought, and given that she didn’t go home after she busted out last night, I’d give it eighty-twenty odds that she’s up to something.

  “I have no idea where your sister is,” Nick said clearly.

  Walker took a step toward him.

  This will not end well, I thought. Walker was taller than Nick, broader through the shoulders. Nick was almost certainly a better fighter. Even though his veneer of calm hadn’t cracked yet, the part of me that had grown up bar-adjacent said that it could.

  “Leave him alone,” I told Walker. To my surprise, someone else said the exact same words at the exact same time.

  “Miss me?” Campbell stepped into the alleyway and placed a kiss on her brother’s cheek. She didn’t look like she’d spent the past two days duct-taped to a chair.

  She looked like she’d been to some kind of spa.

  “Campbell.” Walker turned his irritation on his sister, Nick instantly forgotten. “Still in one piece, I take it?”

  “Aren’t I always?” Campbell returned lightly. “You can go, Nick.” She didn’t even look at him as she issued the dismissal.

  Nick didn’t seem to mind. An instant later, he was gone.

  Campbell is here. Campbell is smiling. This cannot possibly be good.

  “Sawyer, this is my sister.” Manners dictated Walker introduce us. “Campbell, this is…”

  “Sawyer Taft,” Campbell finished with a smile every bit as charming as her brother’s. “I know. Lily introduced us this weekend.”

  “You were with Lily?” Walker asked his sister. “She didn’t say anything.” He turned to me. “You didn’t say anything.” He shifted narrowed eyes back toward his sister. “Since when do you and Lily hang out?”

  Since she KIDNAPPED me.… I waited for Campbell to pull the trigger.

  Except she didn’t. She also didn’t say anything—not a word—about Secrets on My Skin.

  Instead, Campbell gave Walker what I could only describe as puppy-dog eyes. “Look, big brother, I’m sorry about the past couple of days. Would you believe it if I said I’d had my heart broken?”

  That was all it took to throw Walker back into protective mode. “Did someone—”

  Campbell didn’t give him a chance to finish the question. “It doesn’t matter what someone did or did not do. As previously discussed, my physical and/or romantic relationships are none of your business.” She softened her tone. “I needed some space, Walk. I needed Mom not to be breathing down my neck. And…” Campbell looked toward me, and I saw something downright chilling masquerading as fondness in her sparkling green eyes. “I needed some girl time.”

  “Girl time?” Walker repeated.

  “Lily let me crash in her pool house for a few days,” Campbell said, twirling her auburn hair around her index finger, watching my reaction as much as her brother’s. “I would have told you, but Ms. Perfect is a bit of a sore spot for you these days.”

  “Don’t call her that,” Walker said immediately.

  Campbell arched an eyebrow at him. “See?”

  “You and Lily aren’t friends anymore,” Walker responded. “You haven’t been friends since middle school. You don’t have girl time.”

  “Don’t we?” Campbell asked innocently. “Go ahead, Sawyer.” She turned the full force of that innocent expression on me. “Tell my brother where I’ve been the past few days.”

  Or do you want me to? Campbell was as adroit at silent threats as her cousin Boone was at warnings.

  “She’s really been at Lily’s?” Walker asked me. “For the past two days? You knew she was there, and you knew I was worried, and you said nothing?”

  I could have denied it. I could have played dumb, but Campbell was holding all of the cards here. The plan had been to let her go after we’d finished digging up dirt.

  “Campbell was with us,” I told Walker, deeply suspecting that I would regret playing this game. “She asked me not to say anything.”

  All smiles, Campbell walked over to me and hooked an arm through mine. “Sawyer and I are becoming fast friends,” she declared.

  Walker clearly didn’t believe that, but just as clearly, he was done talking—to both of us. As he retreated inside, I stepped away from Campbell’s hold.

  “I thought you didn’t have friends,” I said lowly.

  “I don’t,” Campbell replied, pleased as punch. “I have alibis.”

  ’m the victim here, Officer.” The auburn-haired coquette laid a gloved hand on her chest, halfway between pledging allegiance and a swoon. “Truly.”

  Mackie was skeptical, but he managed a question. A reasonable, logical, by-the-books question that he was only half-sure he wanted the answer to.

  “The victim of what?”

  wo weeks post-pool-party, I hadn’t heard a peep out of my good friend Campbell. School had started for Lily, but from what she’d told me, not one word had been uttered about Secrets on My Skin, the stolen tablet, or the weekend that Campbell had spent bound and gagged in the pool house.

  We still had no clue whatsoever what Campbell needed an alibi for.

  For the sake of my own sanity, I had to concentrate on something other than the ticking time bomb that the senator’s daughter represented.

  “What can you tell me about Charles Waters?” I asked my grandmother, lifting my hand to my face to block the sun. I was still waiting on Boone to make good on his promise to figure out what his father and uncle had been up to around the time I’d been conceived. In the meantime, all I could do was move on to the next name on the list.

  Sadie-Grace’s father.

  “Lillian?” I prompted when she didn’t respond to my query.

  “You really should wear a hat in this sun, Sawyer.” My grandmother looked up from the rosebush she was inspecting. “The elements can be so harsh, and you only get one face.”

  I almost responded by telling her that You Only Get One Face would make an excellent band name, but experience had taught me that smarting off wouldn’t get me any closer to answers. Instead, I slapped on a nearby sun hat and a pair of gardening gloves that Lillian had taken to leaving around when she tended her roses, in case I “decided” to join her.

  My grandmother was big into allowing the rest of the family to make our “own” decisions, with nudges, hints, and guilt trips along the way. In the past two weeks, she’d learned that none of the above worked on me.

  I had learned that if I wanted information, I had to give her something in exchange.

  “When I was seven,” I offered, eyeing the flowers, “I had a brief obsession with poisonous and carnivorous plants.”

  If Lillian had been around when I was growing up, she probably would have nudged me toward more appropriate pastimes, but as it was, whenever I mentioned anything about my childhood, she seemed to drink it up. The predictable flicker of interest in her eyes was enough to make a person wonder why, if she was so curious about what she’d missed, she hadn’t bothered, even once, to take a fo
rty-five-minute drive and be a part of my life until now.

  “I actually tried to join the International Carnivorous Plant Society,” I continued. “I wanted a membership card I could flash around school.”

  “Of course you did,” Lillian said. She almost smiled.

  I took that as an opening. “What can you tell me about Charles Waters?” I asked again. Quid pro quo. I’d given her something. Now it was her turn.

  “Nature can be bloodthirsty, can’t it?” Lillian let her fingertips hover over a rose thorn. “I suppose there are those who would argue that people aren’t much better. Your mama, for one.”

  That wasn’t what I’d asked, but she knew I wouldn’t sidestep a conversation about what my mom had been like as a teenager.

  “Ellie Taft maniacally and devotedly believes the best of ­people,” I corrected. “Even when they don’t deserve it.” Especially when they didn’t deserve it. Especially if they were male.

  “Some people, maybe,” Lillian replied. “But her family, our friends? After we lost her daddy, Ellie was… Cynical isn’t the right word. At the time, I might have said sullen. She always took things so personally.”

  That was a loaded statement if I’d ever heard one.

  “I remember when Charles Waters got married.” Up until ­Lillian said that sentence, I’d been convinced she was going to ignore my question altogether. “The whole ordeal caused quite the hubbub, and you would have thought any word uttered about the new Mrs. Waters was an insult directed straight at my daughter.”

  “Were my mom and Sadie-Grace’s father close?” I asked, trying to imagine why a teenage girl would be so defensive of the marriage of a man six years her senior.

  “Not in the least.” Lillian waved away the question. “It was a matter of principle for Ellie.” My grandmother managed not to roll her eyes, but only just. “Charles’s bride wasn’t from around here. She was a ballet dancer from New York, of all places. Of course people were going to talk. Charles was… well, I hate to put this fine a point on it, but he’s always been a bit… erudite.”

  Awkward, I translated.

  “His mother was a Kelley,” Lillian continued. “Oil family. Charles was the only heir, and you’ve seen the man. He’s no stranger to handsome. He could have had any girl he wanted, but the poor boy seemed genuinely unaware that the gentler sex even existed until he came back from a business trip to New York married. Of course that was going to raise a few eyebrows.”

  Of course.

  “So what you’re saying is that people were nice to his wife’s face and talked about her behind her back, and my mom—heaven knows why—seemed to find that offensive?”

  Lillian must have heard the heavy wallop of sarcasm in my tone, because she was quiet for a moment. “You don’t care much what people think, do you, Sawyer?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Your mama did. I wish I’d seen that then. She’d get all riled up and talk about how she hated it here, but my Eleanor wanted people to like her. She wanted to be noticed.”

  That hit me hard, because my mom had been wanting—and longing and searching—for as long as I could remember.

  “What happened to the first Mrs. Waters?” I asked abruptly. I hadn’t come outside to talk about the hole in my mom’s life that she’d spent the entirety of mine trying to fill.

  “Sadie-Grace’s mama passed away when she was little,” Lillian said. “Poor thing.”

  “How—” I started to ask, but before I could get the rest of the question out of my mouth, the door to the backyard opened.

  Lily stepped out onto the patio, still wearing her school uniform. Her hair was neatly parted down the middle, her lips recently glossed. Her already perfect posture straightened the moment she saw our grandmother.

  “How are your roses, Mim?”

  “Bloodthirsty,” Lillian replied lightly. She glanced at me. “And beautiful.”

  “How was school?” I asked my cousin, willing our grandmother to look at her, not me. Two weeks had been more than enough time for me to realize just how badly Lily wanted to please the great ­Lillian Taft.

  “School was lovely,” my cousin said. “Thank you for asking. Mim?” Lily swung her eyes back to our grandmother’s. “Do you think I could borrow Sawyer for a moment?”

  “You girls go right ahead,” Lillian declared, removing her gloves. “I’ll make some lemonade.”

  Lily waited for the screen door to close behind our grandmother before she crossed the lawn. “We need to talk.”

  I waited for her to elaborate.

  “It’s Campbell.”

  And there it was, after two weeks of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  “She says she has security footage of the pool house.” Lily swallowed, hard enough that I could practically taste the bile rising in the back of her throat. “And she’s gone through all of the files on my tablet.” Lily closed her eyes. “There are pictures. Uncropped copies of the ones on Secret—before I edited out my face.”

  As far as proof went, that was ironclad—and almost certainly an order of magnitude worse than whatever Campbell had on Lily before.

  “What does she want?” I asked flatly.

  “For now?” Lily opened her eyes and tried not to look like she was in dire need of a fainting couch. “Campbell’s demanding your presence—and mine—at a party she’s throwing tonight.”

  ampbell’s party wasn’t what I’d come to expect of the Debutante set. There were no hors d’oeuvres. The music was not instrumental. The alcohol—and there was plenty—was served in kegs.

  “Let me guess,” I said over the sound of three dozen teenagers in various stages of inebriation and the bass line emanating from a very expensive sound system, “Campbell’s parents aren’t home.”

  “This isn’t Campbell’s house.” Lily somehow managed to make herself heard without yelling as we pushed our way through the foyer. “It’s Katharine Riley’s.”

  “Let me guess,” I said, modifying my previous statement, ­“Katharine Riley’s parents aren’t home.”

  Lily herded me toward a breakfast nook off the kitchen, ­Sadie-Grace following in our wake.

  “Katharine’s parents are out of town,” Lily confirmed, the acoustics providing a break from the bass line. “So is Katharine.”

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly. “What?”

  “Katharine and her family left yesterday for an out-of-town wedding. Today, Campbell just started asking people if they were coming to Katharine’s party.” Lily shook her head. “Within an hour or two, everyone else was doing the same thing. Half the people here probably don’t even realize that Katharine’s not.”

  I glanced back toward the kegs. “Campbell’s version of throwing a party involves breaking and entering?”

  “Oh, you make it all sound so sordid.” Campbell Ames strolled over to stand in the midst of our group. “So glad that you three could make it.”

  Lily allowed her chin to jut forward. “I don’t recall being given a choice.”

  “Relax, Lilypad, I’m doing you a favor. What exactly has a life of propriety and rule-following gotten you? A reputation for being boring and self-righteous, a boyfriend who got bored and self-­righteously dumped you, and so much pent-up sexual frustration that you spontaneously decided to self-destruct.” Campbell laid a hand lightly on my cousin’s cheek and then gave it a solid pat. “Live a little.”

  Her tone left very little question that it was an order.

  “In fact,” Campbell continued, “live a lot. I, personally, would love to see you making friends and influencing people. Have a beverage or two. Dance on the table.”

  “I will do no such—”

  “You will,” Campbell said sweetly. “And you’ll like it. And you…” She turned to Sadie-Grace. “You’ll stay busy picking up after my guests. We can’t have the Rileys coming home to a mess, now can we?”

  Sadie-Grace flushed. Like everything else, it was a good look for her. I deeply suspected her vulnerabil
ity wouldn’t have been quite so enticing to Campbell if she’d been less of a knockout.

  “Put that down,” I told Sadie-Grace when she tentatively picked up a Solo cup someone had abandoned on the ground.

  “Sawyer,” Lily said, her voice low.

  “You,” Campbell barked back at her, “dancing on the table.” She narrowed her eyes at Sadie-Grace. “You, trash. Unless you two want me to publish a new entry to Secrets? One that includes our lovely model’s face.”

  Lily paled. Sadie-Grace picked up another cup. Satisfied that the two of them had no choice but to jump at her command, Campbell allowed her full attention to land on me.

  “Let’s you and I take a little walk,” she said. “Shall we?”

  Our walk took us to the second story of the Rileys’ home. A marble balcony overlooked the open floor plan below. Campbell leaned her elbows lightly against the wrought-iron railing.

  “I suppose that Lily mentioned the darling memento I have of our girls’ weekend?” She angled the cell phone in her hands toward me. “I especially like this shot of you tying my hands behind my back.”

  The photo had obviously been captured from a video. I’d held out some hope that Campbell had been lying about the security footage, but clearly, she hadn’t been.

  “If you were going to do something with that footage, you would have already,” I said.

  I’d been willing to bet against Campbell going to the police two weeks ago. The fact that she’d waited this long to make a move had done little to change my mind.

  I leaned against the railing next to her. “I’m guessing at least one of your parents would find a way to blame the whole sordid ordeal on you.”

  That was a stab in the dark, but my metaphorical blade drew blood.

  “You don’t know anything about my parents,” Campbell snapped.

  “I know that Walker bought the story that you took off for an entire weekend because you needed breathing room from your mother.” I let that sink in. “I know your father’s a politican.”

  I know that your family is, in Boone’s words, a merciless lot.