Crooked Little Lies Read online

  Feelings were hard for him. On Monday afternoon, when she called to tell him Sheriff Audi was writing up Bo’s missing person’s report, JT had taken one sharp breath, and then he’d said he was on his way, that the police would need help setting up a command post. Annie had been surprised at how quickly he’d reacted. It had been a few years since she’d seen him operate in rescue mode. It was as if a long-forgotten switch had been flipped.

  Within an hour of hearing about Bo, JT rounded up some of the guys from his crew, and together, they installed extra telephones at the community center. Then he worked with the sheriff’s department, coordinating the task of arranging for a number to be designated as a tip line. He’d organized the search teams, too, and he was out somewhere now with one of them, waiting for dawn’s first light. Annie knew from seeing him in action before that he wouldn’t stop. Not until Bo was found.

  Rufus spotted Cooper and deserted her, and without him to bolster her courage, Annie hung back, on the verge of retreat, but then Cooper’s gaze found her. He lifted his arm as if he meant her to stay, and the look on his face, some curious mix of delight and concern, compelled her to wait while he crossed the room toward her. In addition to Rufus, there was a woman with him, and before anything was said, Annie knew it was Cooper’s mother.

  The woman took Annie’s hands, both of them.

  Cooper made the introductions.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Gant,” Annie said.

  “Please, call me Peggy.” She searched Annie’s eyes, and like everyone else, her commiseration was palpable, so heartfelt and true, that Annie was undone by it. She had to look away, to harden her throat against the push of her tears, an unwelcome return of the anger she wasn’t entitled to. But, honestly, how could Cooper have done this, brought his mother to meet her under these circumstances? Why couldn’t he see how it would embarrass her?

  Something of her turmoil must have shown on her face, because Cooper’s mother let go of Annie’s hands and pulled her into her embrace. She was tall and solidly built, and she smelled faintly of chicken soup with an underscore of something floral. It was nice, the way she smelled. Annie wanted to lean against her, to give in to what was an overwhelming need for reassurance, but she was too afraid of losing control and stood stiffly erect while Cooper’s mother rubbed her back, murmuring a host of things, all promising a happy ending.

  “We’ll find him, honey. You wait and see. Pat is out there now. So many of your neighbors are. Come daylight, I’m sure the entire town will be back out hunting for him.”

  Pat, Annie thought ruefully. Cooper’s dad, who had fixed her car, who was still waiting for his money.

  Peggy said she’d brought a potful of chicken soup, which explained her soothing smell, but when she offered it, Annie’s teeth clenched. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t take another moment of Cooper’s mother’s solicitude, and broke free of her embrace, mumbling an apology, somehow feeling even more humiliated and angry—at Cooper, at his mother and father, the circumstances, God, whatever. It was unreasonable, and Annie regretted it. She was trembling when Rufus, who was sitting next to her, leaned against her, and her hand, as if it knew the way by now and belonged there, lowered to his head.

  “I think you’ve stolen my dog,” Cooper commented mildly.

  “His heart, for sure,” Cooper’s mother said. Peggy seemed unruffled, if she was even aware of the chaos of Annie’s feelings. “The soup’s in the kitchen whenever you want it,” she said. “I know it’s not daylight yet, but chicken soup is good anytime and so good for the nerves. Good for everything.”

  Annie thanked her. She said “Maybe later” and “It was nice meeting you,” and she took a step, putting distance between them. She knew it was rude, turning her back on Cooper’s mother, but she couldn’t stop herself.

  Cooper caught her arm.

  “Let us help you,” he said.

  “That’s very kind,” Annie said, “but there’s really nothing you can do.” She looked over his shoulder at Peggy and was relieved to see her talking to someone else.

  Carol came to Annie’s side. “You’re supposed to be resting.”

  “Can you talk sense to her?” Cooper asked. “She won’t listen to a word I say.”

  Carol slid her arm over Annie’s shoulders.

  “I don’t know where to be,” Annie said in a low voice. “I feel like I should be walking the streets, pounding on doors, asking if anyone has seen Bo, or hunting the roadsides. Then when I’m doing that, I think I should be at home or at JT’s, in case Bo comes there.”

  “Hollis has that covered,” Carol said. “Deputies are driving by both places regularly.”

  “Annie?”

  She turned to Madeleine, who looked exhausted. “You should go home,” she told the older woman.

  Carol agreed. “I’ll drive you.”

  Madeleine shushed them both. “I’m fine. Stop fussing. We’ve had a call, or I should say, they got a tip down at the sheriff’s office.”

  “What sort of tip?” Cooper asked.

  Annie quelled an urge to put her hands over her ears.

  “A man thinks he saw Bo walking along the interstate east of town yesterday evening.”

  “How far east?” Carol wanted to know.

  “Outside the original search grid, maybe just the other side of Marshall? Hollis didn’t say, exactly. But he did say he thought the tip was worth investigating. They’re going to interview the man now.”

  Annie rubbed her eyes. There had been dozens of sightings reported to the hotline since Monday, maybe hundreds by now. Every one had proved worthless. It was the same with Bo’s cell phone. Tracing that had proved useless, too. According to the records law enforcement obtained from Bo’s provider, his last call was to Annie more than a week ago, the same day he’d come to the café and they’d had tea. If he’d used the phone since, there wasn’t documentation of it.

  Madeleine was saying something about dogs. Search-and-rescue dogs, Annie realized, and her breath hitched. Weren’t dogs brought in as a last resort? When most everyone figured the lost person was dead? Weren’t those dogs sometimes called cadaver dogs?

  Cooper looked at Annie. “They’ll need something that belonged to Bo, something that will give the dogs his scent.”

  Annie pulled Bo’s earmuffs from where she’d been wearing them around her neck. “Will these work?” She was reluctant to give them up, even for a good reason. She wondered if she would get them back. She wondered if she put them over her ears right now, would she finally hear Bo. Would he tell her where he was?

  Cooper took them from her. “I don’t know, since you’ve been wearing them. Maybe these and something else. A shirt or something?”

  “I’ll go home,” Annie said, “see what I can find.”

  “I’ll drive you,” Cooper said.

  But Annie said no, she had her own car. “You’ve done enough.” She went in search of her purse.

  Cooper followed her. “You aren’t in any condition to drive.”

  “And you are? Have you slept?”

  “You’re missing the point,” Cooper said. “I’m not as emotionally strung out.”

  “I didn’t ask for this.” She meant his concern.

  He misunderstood. “No one asks for stuff like this.”

  She averted her gaze.

  He cupped her elbow. “Annie, let me drive you.”

  “All right,” she said, and she thought she agreed because she was too weary to argue further. But probably, mixed in with that, was a wish not to be alone, and she was annoyed at herself for it. It didn’t pay to rely on anyone, to need them, because eventually they left. They always left. Or they betrayed you, like Leighton, and then they left.

  Cooper drove through town, along the quiet streets, past still-darkened houses, where porch lights burned at random, surrounded by the s
hadows of doomed moths. Annie imagined the papery whisper of their wings, beating and futile. They flew at the light, heedless of the risk, the way Bo walked the streets, without regard for the danger. Stopping him was no more possible than stopping the moths. Hadn’t she tried, a hundred, a thousand times? Would it have worked if she had tried once more? Had she given up on Bo too soon?

  She directed Cooper into the driveway that led to her tiny bungalow, and when he started to get out of the car, she asked him to wait. He settled back and said, “Okay,” but he looked unhappy.

  So much so that she said, “I’m sorry,” but then letting herself into the house, she wondered what she was sorry for. She wondered what might have happened between her and Cooper if the circumstances were ordinary. Probably nothing. Guys made her nervous. Other than Leighton Drake, she’d never had more than a fleeting relationship with maybe two or three of them. She hadn’t even had a date to her senior prom.

  She went quickly through her living room and into the tiny room that Bo shared with her sewing machine when he stayed with her. The narrow twin bed was made; there was nothing out of place, a sure sign he hadn’t been there. He was messy, and once he was gone again, she would set about picking up after him, usually muttering to herself, things like she ought not to have to put up with it, him and his stuff he left everywhere, and why couldn’t he at least toss his dirty clothes into the hamper?

  She went around the foot of the bed, not out of hope that she would find some unwashed article of his clothing, but because she was thorough, and there it was, the twisted wad of green knit. Annie yanked on it, recognizing it was a T-shirt of Bo’s, laden with his scent, and relief flooded her. She sat on the end of the bed and spread the shirt out across her knees, smoothing the creases. It was one of Bo’s favorites, dark green, lettered in a pale shade of gold with a quote from his idol, Henry David Thoreau, that read: The moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.

  Annie’s mother had bought it. She had thought it was perfect. She had thought in another time, a simpler world, maybe Bo would have only been considered eccentric, like Thoreau was in his day.

  “Annie?”

  She looked up as Cooper crossed the room and sat beside her.

  “He tested off the charts in some ways,” she said. “Reading comprehension and writing, especially. When he was little, they said his IQ was really high. One hundred thirty-five, I think.”

  Cooper kept his silence.

  “He wanted to take me to my senior prom, but I said no, because by then he was starting to get weird and people thought I was weird, too. By association,” Annie added. “All through school, I blamed him for why I never had a date or any friends.” A sound broke from her chest. She bit it back, balling the shirt in her fists.

  Cooper slid his hand over hers. She felt his palm, warm against the bones of her knuckles. He was close enough to her that she felt the warmth of his breath stirring the hair at her temple, and when she turned to him, he kissed her. It wasn’t a demanding kiss, or she would have pulled away. It wasn’t passionate but tender and filled with mercy. It was a kiss that commiserated, if that was possible. And it was more than that, more than words she knew to describe it, and then it was over.

  He lifted his mouth from hers, searching her gaze, and she was afraid he could see the naked longing in her eyes to burrow into him, to let him hold her.

  She ducked her chin, running her fingers around the cup of her ear. “I can’t do this now,” she said softly.

  “They’re waiting for this.” Cooper touched Bo’s shirt. “We should go.”

  Annie led the way from the room. She didn’t know Cooper’s feelings, whether he hadn’t heard her or if he was giving her space. She felt disconcerted, somehow irked and torn with longing all at once. She didn’t need this, she thought. Didn’t need Cooper Gant. She got into his truck, and she waited for Rufus to push his nose between the seats, then remembered they’d left him at the community center. She missed him.

  Cooper got into the driver’s seat and switched on the ignition. He looked at her. “Is that your phone?” he said.

  She found her purse and fished out her phone. “There’s a message,” she said, tapping the screen. “Oh, my God!”

  “What?” Cooper was backing down the drive, not looking at her.

  “It’s a text from Bo.”

  “What?” Cooper hit the brake.

  “It says he’s at the library in Houston. Downtown. He rode there with Ms. M.”

  “Who’s Ms. M?”

  “I don’t know. I thought his phone was dead. How could it send a message?”

  Cooper said, “We should call Hollis.”

  But Annie said no. She had a sick feeling in her stomach. “We have to go there.”

  “To the library? It’s four in the morning. I think we need to let the police know—”

  “No,” Annie repeated. “We can’t wait for them. We don’t have time.”

  9

  Two years ago, when Lauren found the small, two-story country church on a bright, chilly day the week before Christmas, she’d been driving to her grandparents’ farm. She hadn’t taken the usual route but instead wound her way along a network of tar-drizzled, sun-dazzled rural roads—ranch roads—that uncurled through the woods. She marked the little church from the corner of her eye as she passed it, and stopping, she backed up some fifty feet to have a longer look, feeling somehow drawn to the place. In retrospect it would seem eerie, given all the church would take from her. But the day she found it, she was intrigued.

  It was close to the road’s edge and surrounded by a crooked lacework of wrought-iron fence. The gnarled canopy of an ancient live oak bowed over the small building, as if it meant to lift it into its embrace. The effect was magical, a habitation for fairies despite the evidence of dilapidation: white clapboard that was rotting, a roof that sagged. The four Queen Anne–style windows Lauren could see were cracked and broken, puzzles rendered in jeweled colors of stained glass. What a shame, her mind whispered.

  The gate screeched, piercing the silence when she opened it, and she winced. A paper taped to the padlocked entry doors indicated the property was scheduled for demolition, giving a date and a number to contact. Lauren took down the notice, folded it, and tucked it into her coat pocket. She stood back a bit, looking up at the steeple, catching her first sight of the bell behind the louvered enclosure. Even then, she knew she would be the one to go up there, to determine what would be necessary to dismantle the tower and bring down the old bell. Her heart leapt at the prospect.

  She thought Jeff would say the job was too small, and he did, but once he saw how much she wanted to do it, he made time on the schedule, lined up the crew and the equipment, mostly hand tools. Lauren wanted to preserve as much of the church’s architectural history as she could.

  It took a couple of weeks to make the arrangements, locate the property owner, halt the demolition, and gain the proper permits for deconstruction. In the meantime, an old parishioner Lauren spoke to, a woman in her eighties, said her grandfather had built the church and his brother had fashioned the furniture, but then the nearby farms had fallen on hard times and were sold, and most of the congregants moved away.

  Standing outside on the day they were to start work, remembering the old woman, Lauren thought how she would like to take her a souvenir and wondered what it should be. She was still thinking about that when she climbed the stairs and then the ladder that led into the steeple. The light filtering through the rotting louvers glistened like opals; the dust-laden air smelled musty, reminding Lauren of the attic at the farm. She called down to Jeff that she was within sight of the bell, and it was right after that, when the bat flew at her, startling her, that she fell.

  Like a bird shot from the sky, she plummeted to the floor of the church narthex, landing with a wet-sounding thwack—poetically it would seem—dead center inside
yet another church treasure, a marble-tiled wreath of white lilies. Jeff, who had stepped out of sight into the sanctuary, said later that when her body hit the floor, the sound it made reminded him of the summer day when, as a kid, he’d dropped a ripe watermelon off the back of a truck. He told the ER doctor that when he first knelt beside her, he thought Lauren was dead.

  But she was only broken, cracked up worse than Humpty Dumpty.

  She would never clearly recall the hours she spent in the emergency room or in surgery. Jeff told her later she hadn’t been expected to live. He said he prayed for her, an act she found hard to believe. She’d never known Jeff to pray. She had a faint memory of him pacing beside her bed, saying how terrified he was of raising their kids alone, but she didn’t know if it was real. Even when she was fully wakened from a medically induced coma, when Dr. Bettinger spoke to her about the damage to her brain and her body, she couldn’t take it in. She thought she was dreaming.

  But it wasn’t as if she could pretend it was someone else who was strung up like a joint of beef on a spit. The metal rod attached to a contraption above her bed was skewered through her knee, not the knee of another patient. Bettinger explained it was intended to stabilize her smashed pelvic and hip bones, giving them an opportunity to knit themselves together in some fashion that might once again support her.

  But understanding of that came later. Initially, Lauren’s single awareness was of pain. Pain and Jeff. The touch of his work-roughened fingertips across her brow, the calluses on his palms when he cupped her cheek. His mouth at her ear murmured a nonsense of words meant to comfort, to pull her through. He basted her cracked lips with an ocean of soothing balm. Sometimes as she lay immobilized, trapped and grunting like an animal in her agony, he held her hand. The nurses marveled at his devotion. Isn’t it something? they whispered.