Living Lies

by Dawn Brown

  “Why didn’t he sell? It’s not like he kept it for the income potential. He never rented the place.”

  She hated Dean then, for forcing her to make excuses for her father. “He also never believed she was dead.” Memories of her father diving for the phone when it rang, even years after Michelle had been gone, assailed her. She took a deep breath and steadied herself. “He hoped that if for some reason she was afraid to come home she would try to contact my grandmother. He didn’t want someone else living in the house in case she did. He also kept her phone line active and had an answering machine that he checked three times a day until he died.”

  “It could have been a cover.” Dean shrugged.

  She dug her fingernails into her palms. “A cover?”

  “Like I said, the house just tied the rest of it together.”

  “What else is there?”

  “The day I was fired I found a bag with his coveralls in it, and they were stained with what looked like blood.”

  His calm, quiet voice scraped her nerves raw. “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You have them now?”

  “No. I showed them to Nate. He convinced me it was furniture stain and put them back in the crawlspace behind the tool cage. When I looked a few days ago, they were gone.”

  “You believed Nate then, but not now?”

  “I never believed him. I wanted to, but I didn’t.”

  “It had to be stain.” It had to be.

  “Nothing we worked with smelled like that. Besides why hide the bag? Why not just throw it out?”

  “Maybe to get it out of the way.”

  “Someone took everything out of the tool cage and pulled shelves out because the bag was underfoot? Come on Haley, you were never stupid.”

  “I don’t know about that, I’m still listening to this bullshit. Even if the coveralls were stained with blood, you had access to them. It was you who conveniently pulled them from their hiding place.”

  He opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off. “You have yet to tell me something that truly implicates my father. The only thing I’ve heard so far is an opportunist trying to pin a murder on the only person no longer here to defend himself. So tomorrow you can tell anyone you want about this because there’s nothing here that can’t be explained or tied to you.”

  Dean tossed a sheet of paper onto the table between them. “That’s a copy of your father’s death certificate. His first one.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Look at the date. The year. According to this, your father died when he was three years old.”

  “Obviously that’s a mistake,” she snapped impatiently.

  “I’m afraid not. Everything your father did was very deliberate. Especially changing his name.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Once I realized your father had changed his name, I wasn’t sure how to go about finding out who he’d been. Then I remembered Nate and your father endlessly reminiscing about their high school days when I worked for them. So I tracked Nate’s records until I found his high school.” Dean thumbed through the papers until he found the one he wanted. He slid it from the pile and dropped the photocopy in front of her. “From an old yearbook. Your father’s real name was Thomas James.”

  Before she could say anything else, he added another sheet. “That’s a copy of a marriage license with your father’s name on it, dated two years before he married your mother.”

  “My father wasn’t married before.” Her voice had a strange, almost robotic quality, to the tone.

  He set down another photocopy. “This is a copy of a newspaper article about his first wife going missing. These—” more papers on the table, overlapping the others, “—are articles explaining that your father had been questioned as a possible suspect. Nothing ever came of it. Without a body, the police lacked sufficient evidence to move on him. He and I had a lot in common, wouldn’t you say?”

  The blood drained from Haley’s face as she stared down at the photocopies, and Dean wondered if she might pass out or throw up. When her dark bewildered gaze met his, it was like a kick in the gut. He looked away, hating himself.

  He’d wanted truth, he’d wanted vindication, and this was the cost. Again he hardened his resolve. The opportunity to clear his name had come, and he was taking it.

  “How did you find all this?” she asked, the heat gone from her voice.

  “I started at the clerk’s office and followed the leads.”

  Haley lifted the marriage license and slowly lowered herself onto the couch. “This has to be a mistake.”

  “It’s not.”

  “But this says he lived in Toronto. He never did. He moved here from Ottawa.” She set the license down and reached for one of the articles.

  Dean shrugged. “He lived there for about two years, working as a loans officer. He met his wife, Eleanor, at the bank where he worked. She’d been a teller there. They’d only been married about five months when she disappeared.”

  “You learned all that from the clerk’s office?” Her brow quirked.

  “No.” He shook his head. “I spoke to Eleanor’s brother. He’s still alive and well. Still blames your father for what happened.”

  “You think this proves my father murdered Michelle?”

  “I think he’s a much more likely suspect than I ever was.”

  “Why would he have killed his daughter?”

  “I don’t know,” he told her. “That’s the only part I can’t figure out.”

  “Because he didn’t kill her. Everything you have here is interesting, but none of it proves a thing.” Her hands trembled and she was so pale. His stomach churned. “You’re just shifting the blame to get yourself off the hook.”

  “I was never guilty.”

  “So you just wildly accuse someone else?”

  “No. I accuse the man responsible.”

  “My father has an alibi, unlike you, and no motive, unlike you.”

  Temper smothered conscience. “Really? I’d be interested to hear about this alibi.”

  “He and my mother were at a dinner party. They got home around eleven and went to bed. Together.”

  He shook his head. “Do you honestly believe that after a party your mother would know if he was there or not?”

  “Bastard.”

  Maybe, but what he said was true. He couldn’t remember Claire without a cocktail in her hand. As far as her drinking went, Michelle’s disappearance had only sped up the inevitable.

  “And as for my motive, no one was more baffled than I was when Michelle accused me of stalking her.”

  “You think it was all Lara?”

  “I don’t think, I know. She also agreed to admit it to the police.”

  His words seemed to give her pause. She stared at him for a long moment then asked, “How long have you been trying to pin the blame on my father?”

  “I wasn’t trying to pin the blame on him. I was trying to clear my name.”

  “How long?” she ground out.

  “Close to two years.”

  “Why wait until now to come out with it?”

  “I told you, where Michelle was found made me certain.”

  She nodded slowly as if digesting all that he’d told her.

  God, what a bastard he was. Hours ago she’d been attending her sister’s memorial and now he was shoving the proof that her father was a murderer in her face. He needed to go, to get out of there. For every minute he stayed looking at her so small and shaken, his resolve eroded a little more. “I’m sorry,” he said, getting to his feet. “I really didn’t want it to be him.”

  “I appreciate that.” Her voice sounded dispassionate, a million miles away. Then she stood and met his gaze. A faint, vertical frown line marred her forehead just above her nose. He shoved his hands in his pockets to stop himself from smoothing it.

  “I wonder if you could do me a favor?” she asked.

  “What?”
>
  “Give me a day to prepare Paige and Garret and my mother before you go to the police.”

  Dean shrugged. “Sure.” After twelve years, what was one more day?

  Chapter Eight

  Lara hurried through the throngs of frazzled shoppers, nearly stumbling over a small boy who had broken free of his mother’s hand and ran madly toward one of the mall’s over-crowded toy stores. Damn Erin. Of all the places to host her latest melodrama, why a shopping mall two weeks before Christmas? Lara stepped onto the escalator and descended to the food court. The combined odors of grease, vinegar and BO made her eyes water.

  As she left the conveyer stairs, she scanned the blank faces of people standing in long lines, or hovering with trays of overflowing fast food, waiting for one of the molded plastic tables to free up. She spotted Erin alone at a table for two, her coat and shopping bags piled on the chair opposite her.

  “Where have you been?” Erin demanded as Lara approached.

  “Standing in line mostly.” Lara draped her coat over the back of the chair after passing Erin her belongings, then sat down. “So what was so important?”

  “Dean’s back.” Erin sipped from her cup, her gaze never leaving Lara’s face.

  “I know. I spoke to him yesterday.” Lara bit her lip to keep from smiling when Erin’s eyes widened.

  “When?”

  “After the funeral. He was waiting for me outside your in-laws’.”

  “What did he want?” The urgency in Erin’s voice sent a chill through her.

  “He knows I was the one who told people he was still seeing Michelle. I think he suspected me of killing her.”

  “Why would he think that?”

  “Maybe because the rumor I started had half the town believing he was a murderer and I didn’t say anything to the contrary.”

  “So what did you tell him?”

  “That I didn’t come forward to defend him because I didn’t want to spoil things with Jonathan. That I was young and selfish and so very sorry, and could he ever forgive me?”

  “Did he believe you?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe.”

  “Why did he come back?”

  “I think he’s trying to clear his name.”

  Erin said nothing and Lara hesitated before telling her the rest. “I’m going to help him. I told him I would admit that I made everything up.”

  “Even you can’t be that stupid.” Erin’s eyes darkened, her mouth contorting into an ugly scowl. “Nothing’s changed. If you tell anyone what you did, who do you think the police will suspect?”

  “Is that what you’re afraid of? That if anyone knew you helped me, they would think you had something to do with killing her?”

  Erin’s hands shot across the table, gripped Lara’s and squeezed tightly. Painfully. “Did you tell him that?”

  “No.” Lara shook her head, her heart thundering in her chest. Her knuckles ached where the bones ground against one another.

  “You better not have.” Erin released her abruptly. A sunny smile lit her features. “And I’d think twice about admitting to anything if I were you. Do you want everyone to know how jealous you were of Michelle? Poor little Lara, living in Michelle’s shadow. She had everything and you had nothing. You were invisible when she was in the room and everyone knew it. You showed her, though. You got Jonathan, and Michelle got murdered.”

  Lara stood and gathered her coat, its image turning blurry through unshed tears. “You hated her too.”

  “That’s true, but I’m not stupid enough to admit it.”

  Haley raked her fingers through her hair and let out an exasperated sigh. Nothing. As she stood slowly, her gaze swept the cramped space again. Only ancient bolts of fabric and boxes of forgotten tools. No sign of blood-soaked coveralls anywhere. No sign that anyone had been back there in years, except for smeared footprints in a thick layer of dust.

  Not that she had expected otherwise. Still, she couldn’t help but feel a weight had been lifted. When she had started pulling out shelves in the tool cage, she’d been afraid of finding something that would give Dean’s claims verity.

  She stretched her aching back, cramped from hunching over for so long, then turned and started fitting the heavy shelves back into place. As she bent to lift the second to last one, a dark spot on the concrete floor caught her eye. She crouched down and rubbed away the dust until the dark brown splotch nearly glowed against the pale gray cement.

  A chill danced up her spine and she couldn’t stop the shiver that gripped her body. It could have been anything. The workshop floor had a number of marks from various stains and varnishes. So why did this one, slightly smaller than a quarter, leave her with a sick feeling in her stomach?

  “What are you doing?”

  Haley stood and turned, sliding her foot over the mark. Paige waited, her arms folded across her chest, on the opposite side of the cage.

  “Looking for something. Why are you here?”

  “I think it’s time we have a little chat.”

  The hair on the back Haley’s neck bristled. “Well, by all means, let me just drop everything I’m doing.”

  “You do that.” Paige moved to lean against the workbench and Haley joined her.

  “What do you want, Paige?”

  “I understand you’re still angry at me for what happened at Dad’s funeral, and you have this tremendous need to punish me for it, but enough is enough.”

  “How am I punishing you now?”

  “You took off yesterday. Garret and I got stuck doing everything. You missed an incredibly glamorous moment when our dear mother took a drunken header down the stairs.”

  “I’ve seen it before and you and Garret weren’t there to help me.”

  “Well, now we’ve been taught our lesson,” Paige said. “Look, I’m stuck here until that detective finishes with me, but I’m not going to sit back and let you dump Mom on me just because I’m staying there. You’re going to have to become involved whether you like it or not.”

  “You are going to lecture me on involvement?” Haley asked in disbelief.

  “If that’s what it takes.”

  “I can hardly wait to hear this. I’m sure I’ll remember it always, and if over time I forget, you can give me a refresher, say in another four or five years when we’re all treated to another one of your visits!”

  “Enough!”

  Both women turned sharply to find Nate standing in the doorway dividing the shop from the store. As the heavy door swung closed behind him, Haley caught a glimpse of Billy with a customer at the counter. Both stared wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

  Damn. She closed her eyes and mentally counted to ten, angrier with herself for letting her temper get the better of her than Paige.

  “Lower your voices and stop acting like spoiled brats,” Nate hissed and turned his angry stare on Paige. “This is your sister’s store. For you to come in here and shoot your mouth off is not only—”

  “Go play the boss somewhere else, Nate, this isn’t your place anymore. Haley and I are having a discussion.”

  “A screaming match is more like it. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, Paige. Your sister does everything for you and Garret, and you still have the nerve to demand more.”

  “Oh, yes, poor Haley.” Paige glared at her. “I’m surprised you can manage to take enough time away from your cross to even run a business.”

  “You bitch,” Haley said.

  Nate’s face was practically purple with rage. “Get out of here, Paige.”

  “Gladly, but before I go, I’ll finish what I came here to say. I have a meeting tomorrow that I can’t get out of, so I won’t be there to take care of Mom. You’ll have to check in with her. But have no fear, I’ll be back the very next day and you can continue sticking it to me until that detective lets me get out of here.” Paige pushed away from the bench and stormed out. As the door closed there was no sign of Billy or any customers. Damn.

  “Are you oka
y?” Nate asked.

  Haley choked back a bitter laugh. Oh, I’m great. Everything I knew about my father may be a lie. He’s about to be blamed for murdering my sister. Added to that, fighting with my still-living sister just chased away the few customers I had. Things couldn’t be better.

  “I’m fine,” she said, instead. How many times had she claimed those words in the last week? She should just have the phrase tattooed on her forehead and be done with it.

  “Your sister is some piece of work.”

  The derision in Nate’s voice surprised her. “I had no idea you disliked her so much.” Not that she couldn’t relate. Hell, Paige was blood related and she didn’t like her much either.

  “There’s always been a hard streak in her. A selfishness. She’s not like you or Garrett. You both remind me of your father.”

  Haley didn’t entirely agree. She, Paige and Garret were not all that different. Not when she considered Garret trying to manipulate her into moving back in with their mother. And Paige had been right. Haley was trying to stick it to her, and had been since Paige arrived home.

  Oh, forget it. She had enough on her mind without analyzing her relationship with her siblings.

  “I appreciate you coming to talk to me,” Haley said, opting for a change of subject.

  “I just got your message. I was house hunting this morning.”

  “You’re moving back?”

  “Yes. I’d started making plans after Joan passed away. With her gone, there’s nothing left for me in Ottawa. My family is here. Being with the girls these past few days has made me realize how much I’ve been missing. They grow up too fast.”

  Hope sparked inside Haley. “That’s wonderful news. But the store?”

  “Don’t worry.” Nate smiled. “The store is all yours now.” The spark fizzled as if doused with cold water, and she forced herself to smile in return. “So what was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

  Now, how to broach the subject when she was well aware of the reaction her questions would undoubtedly produce. No point in dancing around it. She had less than twenty-four hours to stop Dean. After everything her family had been through, she wasn’t about to stand by and let him destroy her father’s reputation. She wouldn’t let an innocent man take the fall so Dean Lawson could shirk the blame.