Little White Lies

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “All of this is for a scavenger hunt?” I said, waiting for the catch.

  Campbell met my gaze and batted her eyelashes. “What else would it be for?”

  cavenger hunt, my ass. Three hours later, I was ensconced in a limousine with Lily on one side and Boone on the other. Campbell was sitting with her back to the privacy window, which she’d very pointedly raised. Lily held a list of items in her left hand and a handheld high-definition camera in her right.

  Apparently, the annual Symphony Ball Scavenger Hunt was a video scavenger hunt. Limos had been provided for our convenience. The plan was for us to spend the next five hours—between now and midnight—racing around town, videotaping ourselves doing a range of mama-approved challenges in front of famous local landmarks. But to decode exactly which landmarks, we had to answer a series of riddles.

  The list in Lily’s hand contained the first clue, which would lead us to our first location, and, in turn, to a clue that would point us to the next. At the bottom of the card, scrawled in scripted lettering, was the first challenge: One Deb and one Squire must do the chicken dance to a Top 40 song of your choice (no profanity, please).

  “I am beginning to sense that I may have made an error in judgment in agreeing to be the only boy on this team,” Boone stated.

  Campbell rolled her eyes. “You were born for this,” she told her cousin. “And besides, I know you’ll keep your mouth shut.”

  And there it was: the catch I’d been waiting for.

  “Might I ask what Boone will be keeping his mouth shut about?” Lily inquired, her tone taking weaponized politeness to a new level.

  “Simple,” Campbell replied. “My dear cousin Boone and I will do the chicken dance. It will be the best and most hilarious chicken dance any of you has ever seen. And then I’m going to take advantage of the fact that our driver could not be less interested in these proceedings to duck out for a bit.”

  “Duck out where?” Sadie-Grace asked.

  She was the only person in the limo who expected that question to be answered.

  Immediately after Campbell and Boone had finished their chicken dance and the camera had been turned off, Campbell began to strip. She tossed her shirt at Sadie-Grace.

  “Tuck your hair up under your cap,” she said. “We’re about the same size. As long as they only shoot you from the back, no one will know the difference.”

  Suddenly, the fact that Campbell had gone out of her way to make sure the four of us were dressed in matching outfits with our names on them made total sense.

  Six weeks ago, when our former hostage had confronted me at the pool party, she’d told me that the three of us were her alibis. I’d assumed—erroneously, apparently—that she meant her alibis for that weekend.

  What were the chances that the past four weeks of misery had just been Campbell’s way of testing her power over us and making sure we’d do what we were told tonight?

  The manipulator in question tossed her cell phone to Lily. “I recorded some voice memos for when ‘I’ am offscreen. Make sure you catch Sadie-Grace as herself on camera while I’m talking, and I’ll see you girls in a couple of hours.”

  I glanced at Boone. The three of us were being blackmailed. What was his excuse?

  “Don’t look at me,” Boone said solemnly. “She knows where I sleep.”

  Great. While we were parading around town, recording ourselves in front of this statue and that plaque, Campbell would be off doing who knows what. Every bone in my body said this was a bad idea.

  And yet…

  Campbell sidled up beside me. “I’m sensing some reluctance. And I’m sympathetic.” Campbell gave my arm a little squeeze. “Would it make you feel better if I promised you, girl to girl and on my family’s honor, that my intentions are pure?”

  No. The answer was obvious enough that I didn’t bother with it out loud. Campbell didn’t expect me to.

  “Would it make you feel better,” she said instead, “if, after tonight, I promise to give you this?”

  She slipped something out of her purse. The tablet.

  “The security footage is on there, too,” Campbell said. “I haven’t made backups.” There was almost no inflection in her tone. No sugary sweetness, no innuendo, no threat. “I swear that I haven’t, Sawyer, and I promise you that if you three do this for me tonight, I will give you everything I have on Lily—on all three of you.”

  She’s telling the truth. I knew that the way Lily knew exactly which shade of lipstick to pair with a modest pastel—instinctively.

  “I also promise,” Campbell continued, “that if you don’t do this for me tonight, I’ll leak the footage of my kidnapping and upload every naughty, uncropped picture of Lily I have.”

  Also true.

  “One way or another,” Campbell said, “this ends at midnight.”

  Whatever the senator’s daughter was planning to do, whatever she needed an alibi for—it mattered to her more than continuing to torture the three of us.

  She’s a spoiled Southern belle who likes to play mind games, I thought. How bad can what she has planned possibly be?

  “Do we have a deal?” Campbell asked.

  I glanced back at Lily. I was only in this mess because of her, but day by day and week by week, she’d grown on me. Being blackmailed was something of a bonding experience.

  I turned back to Campbell and lowered my voice. “Deal.”

  awyer Taft,” Mackie repeated. He’d definitely heard

  the name Sawyer in the girls’ various natterings, but the last name?

  Taft?

  That was new.

  “About yea high,” the boy said, gesturing lazily. “Smart mouth. Packs a hell of a punch.”

  Oh, God, Mackie thought. The lock picker is violent.

  Out loud, he opted for: “Taft?” Mackie cleared his throat. “As in… er… the Rolling Hills Tafts?”

  t took an hour for us to film the first three clues—and about that long for Sadie-Grace to get the hang of pretending to be Campbell. It took two hours for me to realize how much this whole exercise was weighing on Lily. Six weeks of living in the bedroom across from hers had taught me that my cousin straightening her hair and tucking it behind her right ear was a bad sign.

  The worse Lily felt, the more she needed things to appear perfect.

  “Oh, Lordy. I can’t watch.…” Offscreen, Boone played one of Campbell’s voice memos. She was cracking up laughing. ­Sadie-Grace was currently on-screen, in her own shirt, attempting to make up a rap about good citizenship while standing in front of an enormous statue of praying hands.

  It was going only slightly better than Boone’s attempt to impersonate a camel at the entrance to the local zoo.

  Lily held the camera in her left hand, as her right secured her hair in place once more.

  “That’s enough.” I put Sadie-Grace out of her misery. Mid-rap, she’d gone from rond de jambe–ing to a battement, which was never a good sign.

  “Oh, good,” Sadie-Grace said, her entire body sagging with relief. “I was having a really hard time thinking of a rhyme for hospitality.” She turned to retrieve the next clue from the base of the praying hands.

  Next to me, Lily let her left hand—and the camera—fall gently to her side. I waited for her right hand to make its move.

  Another hair tuck. “It’s going to be either Maynard Park or the fountains,” she murmured. “Or, if they’re feeling daring, the bluffs.”

  I hadn’t been aware that our region of the country had bluffs. But prior to this evening, I had also never been to the botanical gardens or the historical society. Tonight was a night of firsts.

  “Ladies,” Boone called out. “Our destination is Maynard Park. To the Bat-limo!”

  “See?” Lily said. The resignation in her tone sounded so raw that on the way back to the limo, I broke my cousin’s cardinal rule and asked about her feelings, which, to Lily, was pretty much the equivalent of inquiring about her underwear.

  “Y
ou okay?”

  “I’m fine.” Lily’s reply was immediate, but she followed it with a shake of her head, negating that sentence.

  “Care to elaborate?” I prompted gently.

  “It’s just…” She trailed off, then surprised me by forcing herself to continue. “Whoever put this list together might as well have simply asked Walker for a list of places he used to take me when he wanted the night to be memorable.”

  My cousin’s relationship with Walker Ames was right up there with Secrets on the list of topics that Lily Taft Easterling did not discuss.

  “He gave me a promise ring, you know.” Her voice was quiet. Not bitter, not sweet. “Last spring. He was getting ready to graduate. We were at the botanical gardens. And then two weeks later…”

  The Ballad of Lily Easterling and Walker Ames, I thought, remembering Boone’s words at the auction. A tale for the ages to be sure.

  And now, courtesy of the Symphony Ball Committee, Lily was being forced to relive their greatest hits.

  She can’t take another three hours of this, I thought. What I said, as the four of us piled back into the limo was: “This is ridiculous.” Lest Lily think I was talking about her, I continued. “I am not…” I looked down at our next challenge. “Attempting to recite Robert Frost while stuffing my mouth full of marshmallows.”

  “I volunteer as tribute!”

  “And neither are you,” I told Boone. We still had three hours to burn. Based on the deal I’d made with Campbell, we had to continue to document her presence with us.

  But who said that we had to continue to do so here, with a parent-­approved list?

  If we’re stuck being Campbell’s alibi, we may as well enjoy ourselves. Sick of playing by the rules, I crawled toward the front of the limo and lowered the privacy window. I gave the driver our next location—not Maynard Park.

  “That’s a forty-five-minute trip,” the driver said.

  “So it is,” I replied. I reiterated the address and rolled up the window.

  “Where are we going?” Sadie-Grace asked, her brow furrowed as the limo pulled away from the curb.

  I leaned back in my seat. “I believe people around here refer to it as the boonies.”

  As far as I could tell, Lily, Sadie-Grace, and Boone had all been to Europe, but not one of them had ever driven more than twenty minutes outside the city limits.

  Why would they?

  “Are we allowed to make the driver come all the way out here?” Sadie-Grace asked when it became clear just how far off the beaten path I was taking them. “Isn’t that, like, grand theft auto?”

  “Grand theft limo,” Boone corrected sagely.

  “Hey,” I cut in. “Bonnie, Clyde, if you two are done complaining, we’re almost there.”

  When the limo came to a stop, my three companions followed me warily out onto the street, like they half expected to step out into the Dust Bowl.

  Either that, or they’d noticed the town’s lone strip club across the street.

  Home sweet home. I hadn’t been tempted, even once, in the past six weeks to make the drive, but now, knowing my mom was back in town…

  “It’s… a vacant lot.” Lily aimed for diplomacy as she followed my gaze to the address I’d given the driver.

  “No,” I corrected. “It’s the lot.”

  The town I’d grown up in may not have had botanical gardens, but we did have landmarks of our own. The lot had been empty for as long as I had been alive. The grass was uneven and slightly ­overgrown—but only slightly. That was one of the oddest things about the lot. I’d never seen anyone cutting it. Given the contents of the field, I wasn’t sure anyone could cut it, but the grass never seemed to grow long enough to completely mask the objects people left there.

  It had started, so the local rumors went, with bottles. Glass bottles. It wasn’t hard to imagine people tossing an empty into a vacant lot, but somewhere along the way, someone must have noticed the way the sunlight—or moonlight—caught on colored glass, because slowly, the lot’s purpose had evolved. People left mirrors, metal, anything that might catch the light. At some point, the bottles weren’t tossed anymore—they were placed.

  Some people left notes in them.

  A thousand notes in a thousand bottles in an empty lot that would have run the length of a city block, if we’d still been in the city. But we weren’t.

  By my calculations, we were roughly three and a half worlds away.

  Beside me, Lily clutched her purse tighter. Clearly, she’d spotted the strip club. Instead of telling her that her wallet was safer here than it was in the city, I looked up. The night sky wasn’t quite clear, a waning moon disappearing behind smoky clouds. I walked back to the limo and made one last request of the driver. Obligingly, he angled the car toward the field and flashed the brights.

  Light caught on glass. A thousand bottles, a thousand notes, and between them, mementos—scrap-metal sculptures, patches of glittery fabric, the occasional hand-fashioned cross.

  “Wow,” Sadie-Grace said. “This is…”

  “Trash?” I suggested, because I half expected one of them to say it.

  “No.” That response came from unlikely quarters. Lily’s grip on her purse relaxed. Her lips curved slowly upward. “This is a place that Walker Ames has never ever been.” She lifted the camera up and turned back to Sadie-Grace, her eyes alight. “Get out there, ‘Campbell.’ ”

  I took them to Late Nite Donuts. We visited the Methodist graveyard and the secondhand shop behind Big Jim’s that always had the mannequins in the window decked to the nines and posed like they were in crime scenes.

  That was Boone’s favorite. Lily’s was the library. There was an actual library, one town over, but I’d always preferred this one myself.

  “Someone made this?” Lily asked, standing at the base of the tree and looking up.

  “Not the tree itself,” I said. “Obviously. But the rest of it? Someone carved the shelves when I was a kid.”

  I was pretty sure we were on private property, but the fence was easy enough to jump that the owners couldn’t have wanted to keep people out too badly.

  I suspected they were at least partially responsible for keeping the library’s shelves stocked.

  Recesses had been carved into the trunk of the old oak, three feet wide, a little over a foot tall, one on top of another on top of another, a makeshift bookshelf filled with tattered copies of books that even the used-book store wouldn’t accept.

  This was where I’d gotten my first tome on medieval torture.

  “Maybe we should get back,” Sadie-Grace said suddenly—and with no small amount of reluctance. “What if Campbell—”

  “Campbell wants an alibi,” I cut in. “I have no idea where she is or what she’s doing, but I’d lay good money that we’re farther away from the eye of the storm now than we would be if we’d stuck to the rules.”

  “The farther away we are,” Boone summarized, “the better Campbell’s alibi.”

  I told Lily to turn on the camera and issued a challenge of my own. The library wasn’t the library until you climbed it.

  “What’s next?” Sadie-Grace had dirt on her face, grass in her hair, and a scratch on her elbow. She still looked like she’d come straight from a royal engagement—or stepped out of a fairy tale.

  I checked my watch: forty minutes until the limo driver was supposed to circle back to the lot to pick us up. “I figured we’d swing by the gas station,” I said. “Then we’ll end at The Holler.”

  I didn’t know what it said about me or the first eighteen years of my life that this was all I had to show them. Probably the same thing it said that I hadn’t made the drive back here until now.

  “What’s the gas station?” Lily asked. Unlike Sadie-Grace, she had survived the tree climb completely unscathed. She literally could have sat down to brunch at the club without adjusting so much as a hair.

  “The gas station,” I said dramatically, “is… a gas station.”


  They all stared at me blankly.

  “The Holler is a bar,” I offered.

  “Your bar?” Sadie-Grace asked.

  I smiled.

  rick did a double take when I walked through the door, but it didn’t take him long to recover. “How’s trouble?”

  I could see him taking in the motley crew I’d brought with me. The overly manicured, slightly dirt-smeared motley crew.

  “What’s the rule about bringing the underaged into my bar?”

  I knew the answer by heart. “No one serves them, if they cause problems, you’ll take it out on my hide, and we slip out the back if there’s a fight.”

  “That’s my girl.” Trick observed me for a moment. “Though I have to say, there’s something different about you, Trouble.”

  The hair. The nails. The clothes. The company.

  “Don’t make me explain in excruciating detail how a Judas chair works,” I warned. The last thing I wanted was anyone to start waxing eloquently on my whole-body—and whole-life—makeover.

  As Lily, Sadie-Grace, and Boone finally made their way past the entrance, I worked up the courage to ask Trick, “Has my mom been in?”

  “Since she left me high and dry two months back?”

  I wouldn’t have blamed him if he didn’t give her the job back. How could I?

  “She’s been in, and you can stop worrying, Trouble—she still has a job.” The old man put me out of my misery. “In fact, I believe she’s on her break out back.”

  That hit me straight in the gut. As much as I’d told myself this detour had been for Lily’s benefit, I wasn’t fool enough to believe that it was coincidence that my mom had arrived home today, and here I was.

  “Thanks for letting her come back,” I told Trick.

  He wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “I wouldn’t have been able to hold the job for her, but your…” He stopped midsentence.

  “My what?”

  Still no answer, and I thought of all the times that this man should have fired my mother, but didn’t—all the times he’d looked after me.