Never Tell a Lie

by Hallie Ephron

  She ran from the bedroom and through the kitchen. The storm door screeched and slapped shut behind her. The mail she’d left stacked on the steps and the empty tubs of Ice Melt she’d restacked went flying into the grass.

  She ran out the driveway and across the sidewalk to her car. Hand shaking, she managed to get the key inserted in the ignition.

  Not sand. The bathtub had been filled to the top with white crystals. Ice Melt. A desiccant, she remembered from high-school chemistry, some version of coarse salt. Used to cure meats, like ham. Her stomach clenched as she got into the car.

  Pink toenails. The image plowed through her head. The body—it might be Elaine Gallagher, the woman whose mail was being delivered there. But that nail polish said otherwise. Melinda’s fingernails had been polished that same iridescent pink.

  Call the police. Ivy picked up her cell phone from the passenger seat and flipped it open. She knew full well that if she used it, the police could easily trace the call. They’d come looking for her, wanting to know what she’d been doing in that house.

  She closed the cell phone.

  But she couldn’t not call. If it was Melinda, then the mystery of where she’d gone would be solved and the police could turn their attention to figuring out what had really happened. They’d have to release David, wouldn’t they?

  But she couldn’t possibly go back into that house and make the call. There had to be another way. Maybe she could use a neighbor’s phone. There were lights on in the living-room window of the house next door. That was no good either. She’d be too easily identified.

  There was a gas station just a few blocks from here. Gas stations always had pay phones. She’d make the call, short and sweet and anonymous. I’d like to report a dead body.

  As she turned the key in the ignition, an aching started, deep in her lower back and the pit of her stomach. Please, not again. She gagged as nausea built.

  She closed her eyes and leaned her head back. Her belly had gone rock solid. Breathe. Focus. Ivy counted, One, two, trying to stay in control. Seven, eight.

  She got to twenty before the pain began to abate. When it had passed, she took a deep inhale, exhale, and opened her eyes.

  Nausea. Diarrhea. Cramping. Coming in waves. She didn’t have food poisoning. She wasn’t getting the flu. Though her miscarriages had felt nothing like this, she knew she was in labor.

  How long…? She tried to think. She’d been feeling sick, off and on, ever since leaving the house, three hours ago.

  She remembered Dr. Shapiro’s instructions: When the contractions were regular and lasting thirty seconds or longer, wrangle David and get to the hospital. That time was now.

  Don’t panic. Sarah had told them that over and over in childbirth class. First labors lasted six to twenty hours. Worst case, she was three hours in.

  Ivy started the car. She was taking no chances with this baby. The hospital was barely a twenty-minute drive.

  Clutching the wheel like a life preserver, Ivy threaded her way back to the main street. The traffic jam that had clogged Brush Hills Square had eased out. After a brief wait at the light, she was moving.

  She drove another mile, and another. She pictured the sign for Neponset Hospital’s emergency entrance growing closer and closer.

  When a miasma of discomfort started to take hold, she pulled over. Already the pains had a familiar shape, beginning in her lower back, almost like a menstrual cramp, nausea rising. Ivy gasped as her muscles contracted.

  Find a focal point to enhance your relaxation. She touched her throat. Her grandmother’s amulet—that’s what she’d intended to use. They’d practiced this. She’d rub the charm’s smooth, rounded stone between her thumb and forefinger as she breathed, in through the nose and out through the mouth, while David counted and held her hand. Breathing turned out to be a whole lot easier when the contraction was imaginary.

  As this very real contraction loosened its hold, a tear leaked from her eye. How the hell was she going to get through this without David?

  She picked up her cell phone and dialed Jody’s number. Please, be there.

  After a single ring, Jody picked up. “Finally.” Jody started right in. “The police were here, asking about your neighbor. I’ve been trying—”

  “Jody.”

  “—to call you and—”

  “Jody! Stop!”

  There was silence on the other end.

  “Listen, I’m on my way to the hospital. I’m in labor.”

  “You’re…” In the empty beats, Ivy could hear Jody’s intake of breath. “Who’s driving?”

  “I am.”

  “Ivy, that’s nuts. Wait right there. I’ll come get you. Where are you?”

  “I’m not far from the hospital. I’ll be fine. Just meet me there. But first there’s something important that I need you to do.”

  “Ivy, you shouldn’t be driving.”

  “Shut up and listen to me.” Ivy heard the panic in her voice. “Find a pay phone, like at a gas station or something. Call the Brush Hills Police. Tell them there’s a dead body in the bathroom at 6 Belcher Street.”

  “Isn’t that—”

  “Then hang up.”

  “How do you—”

  “Do not tell them who you are. Just tell them where to find the body. Please, Jody. I’ll explain everything at the hospital.” She disconnected the call and turned off the phone.

  Minutes later Ivy turned the car in to the emergency entrance at Neponset Hospital.

  “I’m in labor,” she told the man in scrubs who emerged from the sliding doors and approached her car. No, she wasn’t bleeding and her water hadn’t broken. She gave him a rundown of her symptoms as if she were delivering the weather report.

  Ivy peeled her fingers off the steering wheel. An orderly brought around a wheelchair and helped ease her from the car. She was pushed through the brightly lit, cheerful waiting area and over to an admitting desk in a cubicle, buffered from the quiet hum of the ER. An older woman with orangey hair and a pin on her blouse that read ASK ME smiled at her and started her paperwork as another contraction came and went. The woman’s ID badge said that her name was Patricia Kennedy, and in the photo she was a brunette.

  There should have been something calming about being here, getting sucked in and carried along on the conveyor belt of hospital protocol and administrative procedures. But comfort was not what Ivy felt as she was pushed down the corridor and into the elevator. She remembered the last time she was here.

  It had been the middle of a hot July night, a year and a half ago. She was twenty weeks pregnant, finally starting to believe that the pregnancy was going to hold, when the cramping and spotting started. By the time she and David arrived at the emergency entrance, blood was dripping down her legs. She’d been rushed in on a gurney and immediately hooked up to an IV and a fetal monitor.

  The doctors had done what they could to stop her contractions, but night had turned to morning, and the painful cramping had continued.

  She remembered how Dr. Shapiro’s brow had creased as she pressed a stethoscope to Ivy’s belly. The flat line on the fetal monitor told the story.

  She’d never even made it out of the ER. Her whole body had been shaking as one of the attending nurses scooped up the remains of her dead child, the same nurse with kind eyes over her surgical mask who’d explained that the “fetus”—such an ugly word—would have to be sent to pathology.

  David had been there, holding her hand through the ordeal. Melinda had probably been working there as a technician—she might even have been on duty that night when Ivy’s dead baby was taken to the hospital lab.

  Today everything was different, Ivy thought as the elevator doors opened on the maternity floor. She’d gone virtually full term, thirty-seven weeks.

  Amulet or no amulet, David or no David, she was giving birth to a healthy baby girl.

  26

  Ivy was in a bed with both ends cranked up. She wore a hospital gown, and she’d been
hooked up to a fetal monitor. The nurse had left a blood-pressure cuff loosely wrapped around her arm.

  Ivy lay there, her hands on her belly, waiting for the next contraction. Two bright green lines surged and blipped across the monitor screen. She heard a woman in labor moaning in the room next door.

  A light tap at the door, and there stood Jody. She ran in and hugged Ivy.

  “So?” Jody pulled back, Ivy’s hand sandwiched between her own warm palms. “You okay?” Jody’s eyes brimmed with tears.

  Ivy managed a nod. “We’re both just peachy keen.”

  “So it’s showtime,” Jody said with a tense smile. “You doing your breathing like a good girl?”

  “Trying to.”

  “When was your last contraction?”

  “It’s been a while,” Ivy said. “Twenty minutes. Maybe a little longer, even.”

  “And before that?”

  “Seemed like every ten minutes. I had three just on the drive over.”

  “Remember they sent me home from the hospital twice when I went into labor with Riker?”

  “You think they’ll send me home?”

  “Don’t listen to me. What do I know? As my grandmother would say, it’s Doris Day time. Qué será será.”

  Jody pulled the easy chair over closer to the bed and sat.

  “You made the call?” Ivy asked.

  Jody nodded.

  “What did they say?”

  Jody looked around as if someone might overhear her. “I didn’t give them a chance to say. I told the operator there was a dead body, gave the information, and hung up.”

  Ivy could picture the police arriving at the house. Knocking. Finding the side door open, as Ivy had. Going inside. Raising Melinda’s body from its bath of salt crystals. At last searching for evidence that they should have searched for days ago, evidence that would either exonerate David or prove, even to her, that he was a murderer.

  “You think it’s Melinda?” Jody asked.

  “Seems likely.”

  “So tell me what happened,” Jody said.

  Ivy explained how she’d taken a spontaneous detour down the street where Melinda used to live. “There was a traffic jam in the square. Otherwise I’d never have turned off.”

  She told Jody about the mailer addressed to Elaine Gallagher but packed with mail for Melinda’s mother. About Melinda’s old bedroom. “Jody, it’s still just the way you described it. Pink walls. That funky lamp. What look like her clothes in the drawers, her books on the shelves—just like she was still living there. And she had pictures of David. She had our engagement picture from the newspaper, only she’d cut—” Ivy sobbed. “She’d cut my face out of it.”

  The whisper of soft-soled shoes and the clatter of a metal cart drifted in from the corridor. Jody got up and closed the door.

  “All I wanted to do was destroy the pictures of David and get out as fast as I could.” Ivy told her how she’d taken the photographs and then started to feel sick. How she’d just made it to the bathroom in time.

  “That’s where I found her,” Ivy said. She told Jody about the salt-filled bathtub, the painted toenails.

  They sat for a few moments in silence.

  “I hate pink,” Jody said.

  “The police are probably there now.”

  “On the drive over, I passed a couple of police cars with their sirens going,” Jody said. “What did you do with those pictures?”

  “They’re in”—as Ivy said the words, she felt her stomach harden—“my pants pockets.” Finally another contraction.

  Jody got up and opened the narrow closet. She pulled Ivy’s pants from a shelf inside where they were folded and emptied the pictures from one of the pockets.

  “I told you she had a thing about you guys. But do you believe me?”

  “I believe you”—Ivy gritted her teeth as the pain built—“now.” She could barely squeeze the word out.

  Jody dropped the pants and rushed to Ivy’s side. “Here we go.” She stroked Ivy’s forehead. “Relax. Breathe. Let your muscles do the work for you. Don’t fight it.”

  Ivy focused on Jody’s soft touch. On the sound of her voice as the pain grew.

  “Good, good. You’re doing great. Hang in there.”

  This one didn’t seem nearly as bad—or maybe it was just that it was easier to bear with Jody there. Already the contraction began to ease.

  “Fifteen seconds at least,” Jody said.

  Ivy took a deep breath and blew out.

  A nurse pushed open the door and entered the room. She was young, with long straight hair, even darker than Ivy’s, tied at the nape of her neck. She examined the monitor screen and checked Ivy’s blood pressure.

  Before the nurse left, she wrapped the cord of the emergency call buzzer so it dangled from the bed railing. “You need anything, you just press this.”

  Jody picked up Ivy’s pants and the photos from the floor where she’d dropped them. She dug the remaining pieces of paper from the pockets and spread everything out at the foot of the bed.

  “Looks like this one’s pretty recent,” Jody said, smoothing out the photograph of David in front of Rose Gardens. “She’s been taking pictures of him. Stalking him. David didn’t suspect? You had no idea?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “Scary.” Jody picked out the bowling score sheet. “Kezey’s. Good God, do you remember that place? Just say the name and I can smell the smell. Sweaty socks and”—she wrinkled her nose—“crayon wax and stale cigarette smoke. And remember Old Man Kezey?”

  Ivy did. The place was run by a greasy-haired man who carded kids who came without a grown-up—anyone who couldn’t pull out a driver’s license that showed he or she was eighteen had to pay a dollar surcharge to bowl. Still, Kezey’s was the only show in town—the only place to hang out where kids could get to without a car.

  “Melinda used to work at Kezey’s,” Jody said. “I remember seeing her there after school. And…cripes, here she is.” Jody held up the older of the photo-booth strips.

  “There’s another strip of photos there, too,” Ivy said.

  Jody found the other strip and held the two side by side. “What do you think? Is this Melinda’s sister, Ruth?”

  “Her sister?” Ivy let the words out slowly. That was a possibility she hadn’t considered.

  Jody picked up the engagement picture with Ivy’s face cut out of it. “Sick. This is really sick.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “What do you want to do with all these?” Jody gathered the photos and clippings into a pile at the foot of the bed.

  “Burn them.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Jody settled back in her chair. “So Melinda White really is dead. And here I kept thinking that any minute she was going to turn up. I wonder if there’s anything on the news yet.” She picked up a remote control from the windowsill and pointed it at the TV mounted on a rack hanging from the ceiling. “You mind?”

  “Go ahead,” Ivy said.

  Jody turned on the TV and flipped until she found a late news broadcast. There was a fire in a triple-decker in Southie. An attempted carjacking on the Pike. A volleyball left in a paper bag had shut down security in the Delta Air Lines terminal at Logan.

  Nothing about the body of a missing woman found in a Brush Hills home.

  Ivy felt a wave of exhaustion. She could barely lift her head. A commercial came on, a white butterfly flitting through a landscape to the music of harp strings. She closed her eyes and let the sound wash over her. She laced her fingers over her belly and wondered how long it would be before it hardened again.

  She didn’t even realize she’d fallen asleep until she awoke with a start. Dr. Shapiro was standing over her. Jody, who looked like she’d been snoozing in her chair, yawned and stretched. The TV was turned off, and it was after midnight.

  Dr. Shapiro drew the curtain around the bed and examined Ivy. Afterward she pulled the monitor screen closer to the bed.

  “Thi
s line is monitoring your contractions,” Dr. Shapiro said, indicating a top line that was lazing along. “And this”—she indicated the bottom line that rose and fell, rose and fell—“is your baby. See? Looking good, just not ready to come out yet and greet the world.”

  “So I’m not in labor?”

  “Happens all the time, especially with a first baby.”

  “The pains, diarrhea—I thought for sure…”

  “You were having good, strong contractions when you were admitted. But for the last hour, nothing. If your labor doesn’t heat up by morning, we’ll release you. You’ll be more comfortable sitting this out at home. Babies have their own timetables. Eventually they all come out.”

  “You don’t have to stay,” Ivy told Jody after Dr. Shapiro had left. “Looks like a false alarm.”

  “I’ll leave in a bit. Then I can come back in the morning and drive you home.”

  “But my car—”

  “Oh. I forgot. Your car’s here,” Jody said.

  “I can always drive myself.”

  “Would you stop? Don’t even think about it. I’ll get someone to drive me, and one of us will drive your car home for you. I’ll take care of it.” Jody folded her arms and stared Ivy down. “Go back to sleep.”

  It had been a long day since waking at Jody’s. Returning home to that perfumy smell. Jody staying with her to search the house and finding nothing—nothing except for that box of books that testified to another of David’s lies. Her computer with its record of visits to travel Web sites—another lie.

  Then finding Mrs. Bindel. The ambulance had probably taken her neighbor to the closest hospital. In the morning, if her labor hadn’t kicked in again, Ivy would see if she could find her. Maybe Mrs. Bindel remembered what had happened when she and her dog—

  The dog! Poor Phoebe. She would still be tethered to the clothesline, forlorn, waiting for Ivy to return.

  “Jody, one other thing…” Ivy started. But Jody was curled up in the chair, already fast asleep.

  Outside, Ivy heard a wailing siren grow louder and louder, then fall silent as it pulled into the hospital’s emergency entrance. She imagined the crime-scene tape that would be cordoning off the bungalow house on Belcher Street. The media vans, once camped out in front of her house, would be parked up and down the street. Police investigators would be inside collecting evidence and dusting for fingerprints.