Never Tell a Lie

by Hallie Ephron

  Poor thing. There she was, about to give birth, stranded in Brush Hills with the clueless Joseph. No Lamaze classes where she could meet other young couples. No “friends and family” phone deals. No e-mail. No MySpace.

  Count your blessings, Ivy heard her grandmother’s voice say. Even though at nine months pregnant Ivy had all the grace of a 1966 Bonneville station wagon, David made her feel like what Grandma Fay would have called a “hot tomato.” She had friends, colleagues, and a job to go back to.

  Ivy rested her hands on her swollen belly. Soon she’d have a child. Even she was starting to believe that.

  Ivy yawned and closed the book. She switched off the light, turned over on her side, and shut her eyes.

  An hour later she was still awake, with David snoring gently alongside her. The smell of mildew seemed to have infested her sinuses. Her mind leapfrogged from the painfully crabbed handwriting to the haunted face that had stared back at her from the sepia photograph to the woman she’d seen through the kitchen window—long dark hair and bangs framing a pale face, partially obscured by dark glasses. Morticia II.

  Ivy covered her head with her pillow, as if muffling sounds would smother the images that crowded into her head. She conjured the charming pen-and-ink drawing on the first page of Madeline—an old house in Paris with vines crawling over the front walls, two chimneys puffing jaunty smoke swirls perched on its tile roof. Her father had read that children’s book to her so many times that she knew it by heart. She’d always found it calming, when she couldn’t fall asleep, to meander through the whimsical illustrations and rhyming text.

  At last it worked its magic, and when it did, Ivy dreamed that she was in the attic of Madeline’s Paris school, an attic awash in mildewed wicker trunks, filled to the brim with rotting feather beds and linens. From somewhere in one of the trunks came an infant’s screams.

  6

  Ivy lay on the examining table in Dr. Shapiro’s office late the next afternoon, listening for the baby’s heartbeat through a stethoscope. A small device that attached to a fetal monitor lay heavy on her belly, where the doctor had slathered icy-cool petroleum jelly.

  Lub-dub, lub-dub. The sounds came against a sloshy background. Ivy’s insides grew warm, and she felt a smile melt across her face.

  David listened, too, hooked up through a second stethoscope, his eyes wide. “That’s a baby? Sounds like a Mack truck.”

  “That,” said Dr. Shapiro, a robust older woman with sensibly cut salt-and-pepper hair who looked like she should be wearing golf shoes and swinging a nine iron, “is what we call a good, strong heartbeat.”

  Dr. Shapiro picked up Ivy’s hand and squeezed it. She’d done an internal exam, Ivy’s first in months. When she’d announced that Ivy’s cervix was becoming effaced and was two centimeters dilated, David had gone white.

  “Perfectly normal. Just means you’re nearing the end,” she’d explained. “But you don’t need me or any of these fancy gizmos to tell you that.”

  With a practiced eye, Dr. Shapiro examined Ivy’s knuckles and palpated her wrist. Checked her ankles. It was Dr. Shapiro who’d told Ivy that the baby she’d miscarried over a year ago had been a little girl.

  “Now, neither of you should get concerned if this one quiets down a bit. They do that toward the end. It’s getting pretty snug in there.”

  “You’re telling me,” Ivy said. “When do you think…?”

  “Could be any day, or it could be several more weeks,” Dr. Shapiro said. “It’s not a science.”

  Any day? The thought was terrifying. But weeks more of feeling like she’d swallowed a hippo? If men got pregnant, they’d have figured out how to fast-forward past this part to the end.

  “She’s been cleaning,” David said, unhooking the stethoscope from his ears.

  “And hallucinating,” Ivy added.

  “Really?” Dr. Shapiro said.

  “Not really,” Ivy said.

  “It’s good to stay active,” Dr. Shapiro said, moving on briskly. “Follow your normal routine. Cleaning is fine, as long as you’re comfortable doing it and as long as you drink plenty of liquids and go easy on salt. And be thinking about names, because this baby is ready to boogie.”

  “Boogie Rose,” David said as he drove them home in Ivy’s car. Traffic on the highway was starting to congeal as the evening rush began in earnest. He glanced over his shoulder and shifted lanes. “What do you think? Works if it’s a boy, works if it’s a girl.”

  “Works if it’s a band,” Ivy said.

  “Well, we can’t keep calling her Sprout.”

  “Gwyneth Paltrow named her baby Apple.”

  David tipped his head back and smacked his lips, as if he were tasting the name. “Not bad. Or better yet, how about we name her for a food I really like?”

  “Forget it. We’re not naming this kid Sam Adams. Besides, it’s a girl.”

  “You don’t know that for sure.”

  “Betcha a million bucks.”

  David snorted. He took the exit ramp and pulled up at the end of a long backup of cars at the first light. “Beer Rose. Has a certain…cachet.”

  “The first name can’t end in r.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because our last name starts with R. Beerose,” Ivy said, running the words together. “People will think her last name is Ose.”

  “Or her first name is Bea.”

  “And a one-syllable first name is out,” Ivy went on.

  “Ah, Rule Number Two,” David said. “You’re just full of rules, aren’t you?”

  “Jane Rose. Jill Rose. A one-syllable first name sounds kind of stumpy with Rose for a last name.”

  “Stumpy Rose.”

  “Tah-dum Rose. Or Tum-te-de-dum Rose. And—”

  “Lily Rose? Honeysuckle Rose?” David signaled to turn.

  “Lily’s not bad, actually. But don’t you think two flowers are a bit much? Ivy Rose is bad enough.”

  David turned the car onto their street. “Hey, one flower has always seemed a bit much to me, but nobody ever asked my opinion. Besides…” His voice died. A police cruiser was pulled up in front of their house. “What the…?”

  Ivy’s immediate thought was Mrs. Bindel. A heart attack? A stroke? But there Mrs. Bindel was, standing behind her storm door, her cardigan pulled tight around her narrow shoulders, knuckles to her mouth.

  A uniformed police officer was in front of their house, crouched alongside the wicker trunk, talking into his cell phone. The trunk lid was raised. He looked up as David let the car roll to a stop at the curb.

  The officer closed his phone, lowered the trunk lid, and stood, unfolding long and lean, like a praying mantis.

  David got out of the car. Ivy followed.

  “You folks live here?” the officer asked, jerking his head in the direction of their house, his expression somewhere between a smile and a grimace. His eyes drifted down to Ivy’s pregnant belly.

  “We do,” David said.

  With the heel of his hand, the officer tipped back his cap. His thinning hair was the color of straw.

  “Officer Fournier. Brush Hills Police.” He flashed his badge and then showed them a photograph. “Has either of you seen this person?”

  Ivy recognized this version of Melinda White—a pudgy young woman, posed against a painted background of clouds and blue-blue sky and giving the camera a closed-mouth smile.

  “That’s Melinda White,” she said.

  “So you know her?” Officer Fournier asked.

  “Sort of,” Ivy said. “Not well. We went to school with her.”

  “And you last saw her?”

  “She was here this weekend. Saturday morning,” Ivy said. Ivy couldn’t read the tense look David shot her. “We had a yard sale.”

  “Why? Did something happen to her?” David asked.

  Officer Fournier pocketed the picture and drew out a pad. He pulled out a pen and clicked it open. “That’s what we’re trying to determine.”

  He t
ook their names and jotted a few notes. Then he squinted into the setting sun. “So you folks talked to her? Saw her leave?”

  David opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

  “I talked to her,” Ivy said. “She bought a swan dish…you know, a green glass swan. Depression glass. Actually, she didn’t buy it. I gave it to her. She said her mother—or was it her sister?—collected swans and…” Ivy realized she was babbling. “She was here. Yes, we talked to her. She likes to be called Mindy now, and she looks a lot different from that picture.”

  “Different? How?”

  “Hair’s lighter, straighter, shortish.” Ivy held the side of her hand just below her ear to show how short. Officer Fournier took some more notes. “She’s not so frumpy, if you know what I mean.”

  Officer Fournier stopped writing, glanced up from his pad and gave her a blank look.

  “Frosted hair. Manicured nails,” Ivy added.

  “Do you remember what she was wearing?”

  Ivy said, “Baseball cap. Dark pants. A blue and yellow flowered maternity top. Black-eyed Susans.”

  David gave her a surprised look. What could she say? She noticed clothes.

  “Maternity top? She was pregnant?” Officer Fournier asked.

  “Very. And she was carrying a white canvas bag, about the size of a shopping cart,” Ivy said.

  “And you’re certain this was the woman you saw?” Fournier asked.

  “She introduced herself,” Ivy said.

  “Neither of us would have recognized her if she hadn’t,” David added. “We haven’t seen her since high school.”

  “Like I said, she’s changed,” Ivy said.

  “How did you know she was here?” David asked the policeman.

  “Her sister reported her missing, and we located her car. It was parked down the block. There was a copy of the Weekly Shopper on the front seat, with your yard-sale ad circled.” Officer Fournier paused. “She never made it home, and her apartment looks as if she had every intention of coming back. She left her coffeepot turned on.”

  Officer Fournier said nothing more for a few moments, his gaze shifting from Ivy to David. “She didn’t go to work and didn’t phone in sick. Her sister’s been calling and calling. Quite distraught, as you might imagine.”

  Ivy’s neck prickled as he continued to watch them closely.

  “So let me see if I’ve got this right,” he went on. “Yard sale starts at nine. Melinda White shows up. What time was that?”

  “Early,” Ivy said. “Must’ve been a few minutes after nine. We’d just opened up.”

  “She introduces herself?”

  “Right,” Ivy said.

  “Either of you notice her talking to anyone else?”

  “I didn’t,” David said. Ivy agreed.

  Officer Fournier scratched his head. “So she’s here for what—five, ten minutes?”

  “More like twenty or thirty,” Ivy said. It had felt like an eternity.

  “Maybe you noticed her leaving with someone?”

  “She…” Ivy was about to say that David had taken Melinda into the house, but something in David’s look stopped her. “I didn’t notice when she left,” she said, biting her lip.

  “No one followed her?”

  “The place was hopping, Officer,” David said. “We were selling off a huge accumulation of junk, left here by the former owner, and there were people crawling all over the place.”

  “Perhaps you know some of Ms. White’s friends?”

  “Sorry,” David said. “You see, we don’t really know her know her. We just went to the same high school. Ages ago. Brush Hills isn’t that big, but there were over a thousand in our graduating class. I was never friendly with her. You either—right, Ivy?”

  Ivy nodded.

  “Mmm,” Officer Fournier said, shutting his pad. “And this belongs to you?” He jabbed his pen in the direction of the wicker trunk.

  “No…yes,” David said. “I guess it does now. Our neighbor”—he jerked his head toward Mrs. Bindel, who was still watching from behind her screen door—“sort of gave it to us.”

  “Sort of?”

  “She was throwing it out,” Ivy said.

  “And now you’re throwing it out?”

  “Right,” David said. “Long story.”

  Officer Fournier clicked his pen open and shut and waited.

  “It’s a neat old basket,” Ivy said. “I was curious to see what was inside. I thought maybe there’d be some things in it worth saving.”

  “And were there?”

  “Some. And at first I thought I might be able to refurbish the basket itself. But the bottom’s rotted, and it stinks.”

  “I see,” Officer Fourier said. “So you left it out at the curb for garbage pickup?”

  “That’s right,” David said. “If there’s a problem leaving it out until tomorrow, we can drag it into the garage—”

  “No, no problem,” Officer Fournier said. “Not under normal circumstances. However…” He pocketed his pad, then reached out and raised the lid of the wicker trunk. With the end of his pen, he hooked something from inside and lifted it.

  Ivy recognized the blue cornflower and black-eyed Susan pattern. The fabric had been crisp and clean when Ivy had seen Melinda White wearing it.

  Now it was crumpled and stained with splotches of rusty brown.

  7

  The ground felt as if it were tilting sideways, and Ivy’s head filled with a metallic smell, like the inside of a soup can. She tried not to gag as Officer Fournier dangled the stained blouse from his pen for inspection.

  “Any idea how this got in there?” he asked.

  “What the hell is that?” David said. “It was not in there yesterday, when we put the trunk at the curb.”

  “It wasn’t?” Officer Fournier asked, deadpan.

  “That’s right. I repacked it myself,” Ivy added, surprised that her voice sounded calm and steady. “Lots of people stopped to check it out. Someone else must have put that in there, because we certainly didn’t.”

  “Someone else? Right.” Officer Fournier let the blouse fall back into the trunk, dropped the lid, and stood. “How about we go inside?” He squinted toward the house, then at David. “I’ve got a few more questions, and I’d like to have a look around, if you don’t mind.”

  David folded his arms over his chest, and his jaw stiffened. “Actually, I do. This is our home. We’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “What’s the problem?” Officer Fournier’s polite tone had taken on a hard edge. “That is, assuming you’ve nothing to hide—”

  “And I don’t like your implication,” David said.

  “I understand. Of course it’s your prerogative. But here’s the thing: Either I go inside now and take a quick look around, or I get a warrant and bring in a team that will search your house. Thoroughly. If I’m not mistaken, any judge would agree that this”—with his knee he nudged the trunk lid up a few inches and eyed the blouse with detached interest—“is more than sufficient for probable cause.”

  What would have happened next, Ivy wondered, had David simply said, “Sure, whatever,” or “Be my guest,” when Officer Fournier had asked to come inside? An hour later she felt trapped in a surreal replay of the yard sale with the “mute” button engaged. Only it wasn’t morning, and those weren’t buyers assembled at the end of the driveway, eager to surge in. They were gawkers, keeping their distance but tethered by morbid curiosity, their movements herky-jerky in the blue and white police strobes.

  Cars slowed as they drove past. Across the street, neighbors watched from lit windows. A stranger with a bicycle had his cell phone turned toward them. Transmitting a picture?

  Ivy felt sick to her stomach, caught at the wrong end of the view-finder. She desperately wanted to run into the house and slam the door, but a uniformed officer stood barring the way.

  Right away, David had called his friend Theo, an attorney. Theo’s terse instructions had been, “Cooperate. Be po
lite. Don’t argue. But do not—repeat, do not—answer any questions until I get there.”

  The crowd across the street seemed to grow larger by the minute, and now the man on the bike was talking into his cell. A gold Crown Victoria pulled up. The headlights flicked off, and a man wearing a dark suit emerged. He did a squinty-eyed 360, surveying the tree-lined street and houses, and conferred briefly with Officer Fournier. Then he strode over to Ivy and David.

  Ivy barely registered the badge he showed them, barely heard him introduce himself. She was focused on the papers he handed David.

  David cursed and crumpled the pages in his fist. “Search warrant,” he said. “Where the hell is Theo? His office is just around the corner, for Chrissakes.”

  Tight-lipped, David climbed the steps and unlocked the front door.

  The newcomer and the uniformed officers swarmed into the house, leaving a single patrolman outside to guard the entrance.

  David and Ivy retreated to under the porte cochere. Waiting in the gloom, at least they were sheltered from prying eyes. There was a nip in the early-evening air, but the bone-chilling cold Ivy felt was more than that. David had his arm around her, but he seemed disconnected, radiating little warmth as he watched, tensing each time a car approached and drove past.

  At last a black Lexus pulled up. Theo climbed out. Looking thoroughly corporate in his dark suit and overcoat, he gave an uneasy glance at the crowd gathered on the street.

  “Thank God. It’s about time,” David said, waving him over.

  Theo walked toward them. He set down his bulging cordovan leather briefcase. “I’ve heard of police vigilance, but this is ridiculous,” he said, sputtering under his breath. “I’m sorry you have to go through this. Especially now.” He gave Ivy a sympathetic look and hugged her, enveloping her in musky cologne.