by Ann Leary
She was tuning her violin. “Man, I did a number on this last night. I called in a few favors from some of the bluegrass boys. Rick Cohen’s coming over with his bass, and he’s also trying to find a kettledrum for Everett to play. He knows somebody with a fucking kettledrum. I mean, who knows somebody with a kettledrum? Spin said that’s what I need for this part of the score, and he’s so right. He’s going to play some really beautiful Spanish-sounding guitar. We’re going to do a thing we worked out last night. Each night this week, I’ve got somebody coming. I can record everybody, then mix it and have the sample ready for the director by Friday.”
“That’s so great, Sally,” I said.
She had stopped all her messing around with the instruments and said to me, “I wonder why he didn’t want to have sex last night?”
“Were you drunk?”
“No, he wouldn’t have let me drive if I had been. He seemed tipsier than I was.”
“I don’t know,” I said. And I didn’t.
* * *
I wandered over to see why Everett hadn’t come out yet. He always wakes up early, even if he’d been partying heavily the night before. I tapped on his screen door and called in to him.
“Hey, babe,” he called back. “I’m in bed. Come here.”
The house was completely dark. I opened the kitchen shades and saw a couple of beer bottles in the sink. I walked into his bedroom and found him in bed, facing the wall.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” I said. “What happened to you?”
He just made a groaning sound.
“Laurel and Spin are leaving soon. Get up so you can say good-bye, Ev.”
I turned to leave and he said, “Lottie?”
“Yeah?”
“C’mere.”
“Everett, no, really, not now.”
“Baby, I just want to hold you. Please? Please come here?”
He was still facing the wall. I walked over to the bed and sat down. He rolled over, wrapped his arms around my waist, and pulled me down next to him, spooning me. I felt his lips on the back of my neck. He was breathing hard and holding me so tight.
“Babe?” I said. “Ev? What’s wrong?”
“Don’t leave me,” he whispered. “Don’t ever tell me you want to leave me.”
“What? Leave you?”
His breathing sounded halting. I could tell he was crying. I tried to turn over so I could see his face, but he wouldn’t let me. He held me tight. “Lottie, I’m sorry.”
“What?” I asked. “Why?”
“You know why. I’m just sorry. I’ve been taking you for granted. I’m sorry. I’ll be better. I’ll be better to you. Just don’t ever leave me.”
“Everett, baby, I won’t. Why are you so upset? What is it? Is it because Spin’s getting married?”
He didn’t answer right away, but then he said, “Yeah, I guess.”
“Oh, Ev, you know I love you,” I said. “I won’t leave you.” I turned to kiss him. It seemed to me that some very steamy sex was called for, but he held me to him.
“Just let me hold you.”
“Okay,” I said.
We lay there for about twenty minutes or so, and then we heard Spin’s Jeep drive off.
“Wait. I hope they didn’t leave without saying good-bye. C’mon, Everett, get up.”
“Okay, I’ll come over in a few. I’m gonna go for a swim,” he said.
* * *
Spin’s Jeep was gone, but he was in the kitchen, having coffee with Sally.
“Where’s Laurel?” I asked.
“She ran off to get some things at the pharmacy,” Spin said. He seemed agitated. I thought it was his hangover, but then he said, “Sally, this is not your business. You really need to let this go.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Spin just told me that he and Laurel aren’t planning on having a prenup.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, that really isn’t our business, Sal.”
“Thanks, Lottie,” Spin said. He started to stand, but Sally grabbed his hand.
“Please, Spin, listen to me for one minute. I just don’t understand how Jim Haskell—isn’t Jim the lawyer for the trust? I don’t get why he isn’t insisting you do a prenup. Why you aren’t protecting yourself, you know, that’s all. I’m just looking out for you. I don’t understand why Haskell isn’t insisting on it.”
“Oh, well, let me explain it, then. It’s because I’m twenty-six, so I get to make my own decisions about how to live my life. Sally, look, I know you mean well, but you probably think I have a lot more money than I do. I don’t have much that isn’t … tied up. Laurel has money, too. She has her book deal. We discussed it, and neither of us likes the idea of a prenup.”
“Spin, you won’t get the bulk of your inheritance until Joanie dies. Anything that you bring into the marriage is your own money, but anything that you acquire once you’re married, well, those become marital assets. Laurel would be entitled to it all. You need to protect that.”
“From what? The woman I’m marrying? Laurel isn’t preying on me for my money.”
“So just explain it to her. Tell her that you’re just looking out for any children you two might have in the future. Because God forbid something happens to you, Spin. She would likely remarry. Your money, your family’s money, could end up in the hands of a future husband, a complete stranger.”
“Laurel would make sure the money went where it was supposed to go.”
I realized that Sally was making some sense. “You really are placing a lot of trust in her, Spin.”
“Yeah, well, my dad placed a lot of trust in your mom,” Spin said, his voice a little lower. “Joan never signed a prenup.”
“But Whit already had come into his money at that point, so she didn’t really have a claim to any of it, do you see?” said Sally. “Besides, Joan is from this town. He knew her parents. He knew he could, you know—trust her.”
“Yes, she’s always been so trustworthy.”
I don’t think I’d ever heard bitterness in Spin’s voice until that moment, but it was loud and clear.
“Wait, Spin,” Sally said. “Why are you mad at Joan? She’s always loved you—you know that. She’s always wanted the best for all of us, you and Perry included.”
“I’m not sure if that’s true. I don’t think destroying my parents’ marriage was the best thing for us.”
“What?” I cried.
I looked out the window to make sure that Joan wasn’t jogging up the driveway. Everett was swimming out toward the middle of the lake, but Joan was nowhere to be seen.
“I can’t believe you just said that, Spin,” Sally said. “Your parents’ marriage was over before Joan and Whit ever got together. I mean, not legally over, but it hadn’t been a marriage, from what I’ve always understood, for a while.”
“Oh, well, I guess my mother didn’t know that, or I wouldn’t be here, would I?”
“What do you mean?” Sally demanded.
“Come on, don’t pretend you never wondered why I was so young when you moved in here.”
“Spin, really, what’s the point of going back over this stuff now?” I said quietly.
“Because I’m fucking sick of acting like we’re one big happy family. What do you think it was like for me and Perry growing up as occasional guests in our own father’s house? A guest in my house. I’m a guest right now, aren’t I? In my own house. How do you think that makes me feel?”
“Spin, no! You’re not a guest. What are you even talking about?” Sally said. “This all has to be coming from Laurel. What has she been saying to you? You’ve never been like this. What’s going on? What has she been brainwashing you with?”
“Laurel? This has nothing to do with Laurel.”
“It has everything to do with her,” Sally said.
“WOULD YOU SHUT UP FOR ONCE?” Spin shouted at Sally.
I burst into tears.
This was so unlike Spin. Sally was actually stunned into si
lence by his outburst, and he leaned across the table and said, right in Sally’s face, “I am so sick of walking on fucking eggshells around you. Pretending that everything is fine, that you’re fine. I defend you all the time. Everybody in this town knows you’re out of your mind. What do you think it was like for me to go to Holden and hear about the legendary Sally Maynard, my own sister? I thought of you as my sister. I idolized you, and then I found out that you were the fucking whore of Holden.”
Sally lunged at him and started swatting at his face, yelling, “What did you just call me? What—”
I was screaming at both of them, pulling at Spin, when the door flew open.
“What’s going on?” Laurel asked. “I heard screaming. Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, let’s get our stuff.”
Sally and I were trying to hide our tears, but Laurel saw that we were upset and she put her hand on my shoulder and said gently, “Charlotte, what’s going on? Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“LAUREL!” Spin snapped from the hallway, and she followed him upstairs.
NINETEEN
“Did you hear what he called me? Did you hear him call me a whore?”
Sally was whispering in my ear. We were lying together on my bed.
“Yes,” I said. I couldn’t stop crying. “I don’t understand.”
“I do. It’s her. I hate her. I’ve been onto her from day one.”
“Shhhh, Sally, no, be quiet.”
But she carried on, her voice ranging from a whisper to a near shout and then back to a hoarse whisper.
“I haven’t wanted to say anything because I KNOW nobody believes ANYTHING I SAY around here, but I saw who she was from the beginning. You can see that she’s empty, there’s nothing inside but black. EVEN THE DOGS DON’T SEE HER. It’s because she doesn’t have a soul. She doesn’t have a scent. You can’t tell. Most people can’t. BUT THE DOGS CAN TELL. SHE DOESN’T HAVE A SMELL. That’s how they can tell. How do you think she’s been getting texts on her cell phone the whole time she’s been here?”
I could hear footsteps out in the hall. This house is so old, you can hear everything. “SHHHHHH, Sally,” I said.
“We don’t have cell service on this fucking lake,” Sally said, and now she was laughing, “but her phone lights up day and night with texts. She’s on a different web. She’s hooked up to the dark web, the deep web, the deep, dark web. I’ve had to keep my mouth shut this whole time.”
“Those are e-mails, not texts,” I whispered. “She’s not getting texts.”
I heard their car doors slam. Sally also heard it, and she jumped up to look out the window.
“Thank God they’re going. We have to plan. We have to protect ourselves,” Sally said.
“No, Sal,” I said, trying to keep my voice very calm. “The things Spin said, they had nothing to do with Laurel. It sounds like he’s been holding on to some bad feelings for a long time. I just don’t understand how we didn’t know he was so unhappy.”
Now she was pacing back and forth between the two windows, looking out of each one as she ranted. “He wasn’t unhappy. It’s her. She’s poisoned him. Have you seen how black her eyes are?”
“No,” I said. “Sally, stop.”
“There goes Everett. EVERETT!” she called, banging on the window.
“No, Sally, we don’t need Everett,” I said.
“EV! Ev! Ev!” Sally called again through the open window. I heard him asking her what she wanted.
“Come up here, quick. It’s an emergency.”
“Oh, Sally, don’t say that.”
But it was too late—he was running up the stairs.
Everett still looked a little rough, even though he’d had a swim and a shower. He stood in the doorway and I could see he knew, without her saying anything, that Sally was off. He just stood there with his shoulders sagging, watching her pace back and forth. She stopped every few seconds to peer out the window like a fugitive.
“What if they come back?” she said. “What if they come back? Let’s lock the doors. Everett, run down and lock the doors.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ, what now?” Everett said to me.
“The thing to do is to change the locks, Everett,” Sally said. “Laurel’s been brainwashing Spin. She’s been telling him all sorts of lies, sick lies about us, about me.”
“What kind of lies?” Everett asked. “Sally, what lies?”
I tried to get his attention. It’s never a good idea to get her to elaborate. For Christ’s sake, what was he thinking?
“He thinks that we’ve made him feel like a guest. She wants us out. She called me a whore. She thinks we’re all whores.…”
“No, Sally,” I said, and as she continued ranting, Everett came and sat next to me. I quietly filled him in on what had taken place in the kitchen. “Laurel wasn’t even there, but somehow Sally thinks she was behind it.”
“She was behind it,” Sally said. “Everett, you know how wicked she is. She’s evil; you know that. I know you know. If anybody in this house would know that, you’d know.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Everett said. He jumped up and lunged at her. He grabbed Sally by both her shoulders, shook her, and said, “WHAT ARE YOU SAYING? WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY?”
This was as uncharacteristic of Everett as Spin’s flare-up had been. I screamed his name. He let go of Sally and took a step back.
“I’m sorry, Sal,” Everett said after a moment or two. He leaned back against the wall.
“It’s okay, Everett,” Sally said. Now she was crying, and he put his arms around her.
“Let’s all just calm down,” he said.
Joan walked into the room just then and said, “What on EARTH is all the shouting about?”
* * *
Joan, Everett, and I spent the afternoon cleaning up the yard and the beach. Sally had gone into the music room. She started out with the same melody she had been playing all week, and then she moved into a livelier one. She went back and forth with the doleful, melancholy tune, lilting, lilting, then suddenly flew off into the fast reel. When I recall that afternoon now, it seems like the perfect score, that chaotic melody. It lulled you into a sense of calm and then it was on fire again. When we were outside, the sound of it was very faint, but I strained to hear it, and I know the others did, too. It was like listening carefully to an erratic heartbeat so that you could tell when it became steady again.
The sky was a perfect summer blue, and the lake was dotted with sailboats. A motorboat sped back and forth in front of the house, pulling an inflatable tube that carried children who laughed and screamed as they bounced across its wake. Everett was stacking the chairs and tables. Joan and I picked up litter, empty bottles, and cigarette butts, and we shared disjointed thoughts in passing.
“He told me he was hungover. He wasn’t feeling well,” I informed Joan when she dropped some paper plates into a garbage bag I was holding. “I’m sure that was a big part of it.”
“A guest?” she said a few minutes later as we carried some empties up the steps. “He feels like a guest?”
“He was probably still half-drunk,” I said on our way back down the steps.
“How could he have felt like a guest?” Joan asked when we were back in the kitchen washing up.
“I have no idea.”
Everett carried the tables and chairs down to the boathouse and then he came into the kitchen. Sally’s music had become quieter; she seemed to be working out a sequence of chord changes. Joan was going through some leftovers that somebody had covered up and left on the table.
“Everett,” she said. “There’s some fried chicken left from last night.”
“Yeah?” he said, and he sat down.
“No, guys,” I said. “It’s been sitting out all night.”
But they ignored me.
“Tastes good,” said Everett quietly.
“Yummy,” said Joan. “Everett, have a beer. The fridge is f
illed with beer. Charlotte, get Everett a beer.”
“Nope,” Everett said. “I’m good. I drank too much last night. I like the sound of what Sally’s got going in there, with her fiddle.”
“A beer will make you feel better. Hair of the dog,” said Joan.
“No,” Everett said. “Listen to that. She’s got this kind of Turkish, almost Arabic-sounding thing going on there, then she dives back into the hillbilly reel.” He was tapping out a rhythm on the table with his fingers.
“What’s the movie about?” Everett asked me.
“It’s set in the nineteenth century, I think. A sort of Western. I don’t know. Yeah, I see what you’re saying about this tune. It’s mountain music, but you could see somebody belly-dancing to it.”
He listened for a few more minutes and then he got up and rummaged around in our silverware drawer until he found four spoons that he liked, then he left the room.
A moment later, we heard Sally stop her playing. When she started up again, we could hear the tap-tap-tapping of the spoons. They sounded like the little cymbals that belly dancers hold in their palms. They were just the thing. We heard Sally let out a whoop of delight.
“Joan,” I said. I listened to make sure that they were still playing. “Mom, did Whit ever find out what happened to Sally?”
“That’s sweet, I like it when you call me Mom,” Joan said. She had now moved on to some cookies that somebody had left in a Tupperware container with a Christmas tree on it. “You girls always called me Joan. I think it’s because you were so little. You called him Whit, and Perry called me Joan, so I can see where it would get confusing.”
“Did Whit ever know about Sally and the boys from Holden that night? Did he find out?” I asked.
Joan looked at me then with a confused expression. “Did Whit find out? Of course he did. I told him that night.”
“What? No, that can’t be,” I said, blinking hard, trying to keep the tears from coming. “I mean, I always thought that if he knew…”
