Crooked Little Lies Read online

  “Are you lost?” she said.

  “Well, if I am, I don’t mind,” he said, wending his way through the crowded store toward her. He was down from Dallas, he told her, killing time, waiting to talk to a guy at a nearby restaurant about a local demolition job. It turned out knocking down buildings and hauling the remains to the city dump was his line of work. He’d gotten into it without much thought after leaving his dream of a pro football career and a good chunk of his heart in a Dallas hospital ER. Lauren was the one who asked him if he’d ever thought of trying to salvage the stuff, the brick and lumber, tile flooring, granite and marble vanity tops, rather than trash it. No one then, in the early to midnineties, was talking much about the economics of reusing building material versus tossing it into a landfill. But Jeff was interested, and while he continued to take on the big commercial salvage jobs, their early dates were spent driving the countryside between Dallas and Houston, appraising smaller buildings—not only old houses but dilapidated sheds and barns with the roofs half-gone. Once they deconstructed an old grain silo. Turned out a lot of folks were agreeable to having an abandoned building on their property removed in exchange for the material Jeff and Lauren and their crew hauled off for free.

  Neither she nor Jeff had wanted to live in the city, so Jeff bought acreage on the outskirts of Hardys Walk, more than enough land to accommodate his heavy equipment and his warehouse along with the inventory from Freddy Tate’s. Lauren had wanted to build a house, something small and cozy, on their business property, but Jeff wanted to live in town, in the posh, gated community of Northbend, and she’d let herself be talked into it. After all the other expenses, there was little cash leftover for a huge wedding, so they were married in a quiet civil ceremony. Tara had been difficult. She hadn’t liked Jeff, but Lauren was too happy to pay much attention. Her thought, if she’d had one, had been that Jeff and Tara would work it out. Now Lauren touched the tip of her finger to the computer screen, to a photo of herself brandishing a pry bar. Jeff was grinning down at her. It was from right after they married.

  From the days when he’d thanked her for saving him, calling her his little toughie.

  Because she was strong for her size and didn’t mind hard work. And because she could get into tight places like old-country-church bell towers, where no reasonably sized man, much less a man Jeff’s size, could go. She hadn’t thought twice about climbing into the belfry two years ago to have a look at what it would take to get the bell safely down, and it was dumb—really dumb—but she hadn’t considered the possibility of bats, either—that as she climbed the ladder, flashlight in hand, one might swoop at her. When one did, she was so startled, she lost her grip and her footing.

  And her joy in her work.

  She had yet to recover that. She tired easily now, and often her hip hurt, not in the sharp, lacerating way it had when her injuries were still new; it was more a dull throbbing, an ache so deep in the joint not even therapeutic massage reached it. No one could say how much better it might get or even if she would improve at all from the place where she was. It was up to her, what happened from here. She should get back into the gym; she should sign up for yoga. She had yet to do either.

  Some days, it was hard finding the will to get out of bed.

  Lauren clicked on the e-mail tab and scrolled through the messages, scanning the list quickly, but then one from Cornerstone Bank, with a subject line that read New & improved sign-in process, caught her eye. But they didn’t bank at Cornerstone. That’s what she was thinking when her cell phone rang.

  She tugged it out of her purse, eyes still on the screen.

  It was Jeff, asking about her head.

  “It’s better,” she told him, but her attention was fixed on the bank notice, catching on random phrases: happy to have you . . . if you have any questions . . . to set up an online account . . . Had they switched banks? She waited, but no recollection of doing that surfaced. Jeff asked where she was. “The office,” she said. “There’s an e-mail here—” Lauren stopped, not wanting to hear it, that she’d forgotten. It would only worry Jeff, and anyway, if she gave it time, the memory would come back. It was how her brain worked now, like a light with a faulty switch.

  “What e-mail?” he prodded.

  “Never mind. How are things going there?” Lauren went to the window that looked out on a field fenced in rusty chain link. There was a scruffy patch of woods in one far corner. She could hear the traffic on the nearby interstate, the insistent percussion of tires pounding pavement.

  “Tara’s acting like she doesn’t want to sell,” Jeff said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should hold off. The place means a lot to you two.”

  Lauren was taken aback. “Really? But you were so—you said it was the only way.”

  “Yeah. It’s not like she doesn’t need the money, too.”

  He meant Tara, whose financial judgment was as impaired as her relationship judgment.

  “You do realize when we sell, she’ll blow every dime.”

  “We can’t let her,” Lauren said, and she knew how pointless it sounded, but still she persisted. “She’s got to invest it. Talk to her; she’ll listen to you. Just not around Greg.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, he’s not family. It’s not his business.” It was more than that, but Lauren wasn’t up for a discussion that was liable to get heated. It was hard enough on a good day to keep a coherent track of her thoughts, of all that was said, and on a bad day, when something happened to undermine her confidence—like finding that bank e-mail—it was impossible. The words would come, only to scatter like a flock of small birds. “Will you just talk to her?” Lauren left the window.

  “Okay. But honestly? How she spends her money is none of our business, either.”

  “Maybe not, but she ought to be on her knees, praying we don’t die first.”

  When Jeff laughed, the sound was easy, and Lauren laughed, too. She asked if he would need help unloading on Sunday, and he said Greg had offered, sounding surprised. Jeff thought Greg was a lightweight, a party boy. He was always saying he didn’t trust Greg’s commitment to stay off heroin. What Lauren thought Jeff was really saying was that he didn’t trust her. Sometimes she had an unruly urge to call him on it, too, to say how do you know? But that was only pride goading her, and like Jeff, what she wanted more than anything was to be past it, to have her family back the way they’d been. She wanted so badly to be restored in their eyes, to be worthy again of their love and trust. No one could know what the loss of that had cost her.

  No one except another addict—like Greg. Where Jeff doubted him, she rooted for him. She wanted him to succeed. She relied on him. They were friends on a level only they understood, and it was frustrating—their association with 12-step—the private things she knew about him complicated everything.

  Lauren shouldered her purse. “He’s a good guy, Jeff. His heart’s in the right place.”

  “But you don’t want him around Tara. I don’t get it.” Jeff was bemused, rightfully.

  “Even you’ve said he’s too young for her.” Lauren parroted Jeff’s complaint about Greg back at him. At thirty-seven, Tara was six years older than Greg.

  But that was the least of Lauren’s worries. Leaving the office, walking through the warehouse, she wondered if she could keep it up, her pledge to keep Greg’s history to herself. She wondered what Jeff would do if he knew. She thought he might physically manhandle Greg out of Tara’s life, even out of Lauren’s own life. He might ask her to stop attending 12-step meetings with Greg. She hadn’t thought of that before, and it made her heart sink.

  Jeff started to say something, but she asked him to hold on. “I need to lock up.” She turned the key, gave the knob a jiggle.

  “Your sister’s going to do what she wants,” he said when Lauren came back on the line, and she knew more from his tone than his words that he was thro
ugh talking about Tara.

  Lauren might have been annoyed at him. She might have ignored his obvious dismissal and pushed the subject. But more discussion meant taking the chance that she’d blurt out something she shouldn’t. Jeff wasn’t long on patience when it came to Tara’s issues anyway. He thought Lauren tended to put Tara and her needs ahead of his and their children’s—even her own needs. It was a perennial complaint, a bone of contention they fought over on occasion. But Jeff hadn’t been in the picture when her mother and father were killed in a car accident in France, where they went annually to buy inventory for the shop. Lauren had come of age by then, but Tara had still been a minor and at risk of being farmed out, a ward of the state.

  It still scared Lauren all these years later to think how close she’d come to losing Tara. Even though she’d dropped out of TCU, where she was pursuing a degree in fine arts, and returned home, demonstrating her commitment, her maturity, and her willingness to shoulder the responsibility of caring for her little sister, it hadn’t been enough to satisfy Child Protective Services. Not until Margaret stepped in as Lauren’s advocate. She talked to a family-court judge, one whose wife she’d saved, and she used that on the judge, twisting his legal arm without apology. After that, once the papers were signed and Lauren was given guardianship, with Margaret’s continued moral support and advice, Lauren had finished raising Tara the best she could.

  And here was something else that Lauren knew that Jeff didn’t seem aware of: when it came to parenting, guilt was part of the package. And whether Jeff agreed or approved of it, Lauren felt she was as much Tara’s mother as she was her sister. She felt responsible for Tara’s shortcomings; she felt it was her fault in some way that Tara couldn’t form a lasting relationship and couldn’t handle her money. And the thing was, she didn’t know how to stop, how to unfeel those feelings that only seemed to grow thicker, becoming even more stubbornly entrenched as time went on.

  She started the Navigator.

  Jeff asked what her plans were, and she said she was going home, adding that she was tired.

  “Why are you there anyway, wearing yourself out?” he asked. “You didn’t need to go in at all this weekend. I told you I had it covered.”

  Lauren felt a jolt of surprise. He sounded almost angry, the way he had in the early days following her release from the hospital when he’d followed her around, hovering and clucking like a mother hen. A psychologist she’d seen while in rehab had said it was normal behavior for a primary caregiver, especially one like Jeff, who took his responsibility so seriously. That mood had passed, though, once Lauren was stable again and more her old self. “I’m fine, Jeff. Everyone gets tired.”

  The noise he made suggested she wasn’t everyone. “Go home, okay?” he said. “Get some rest.”

  She said she would and then drove to Cornerstone Bank instead. It was after-hours, and the suburban business center where the bank was located was nearly deserted when she pulled into a space in front of the building. She sat a moment, studying the image of her SUV in the plate-glass window, trying to picture the office inside and the face of the bank official she and Jeff would have spoken to about opening an account. Nothing came.

  But maybe that was because she’d never been inside. The bank could have sent the message by mistake. Or someone using their name could have opened the account. Lauren straightened, mind leaping. She should have realized—considered the possibility of identity theft. Didn’t it happen all the time?

  She drove home, only subliminally aware of the sky and landscape as they receded into dusk and of the oncoming headlights that flashed by her like small moons. Leaving the SUV in the driveway, she walked quickly through the house, flipping on lights as she went, to dispel the evening gloom. In the study, she sat at the desk, waking the computer, and after she found the e-mail from Cornerstone Bank, she clicked on the link it offered, where she was prompted for a password. Carter2000. She typed in Drew’s middle name and birth year, their standard password, and received an error message. Her breath hitched. She tried Kenzie’s middle name and birth year and then her own, with the same result. None of the alternatives worked. So—

  Sitting back, she thought for a moment, then found her way to the bank’s main web page. She would call them, get to the bottom of this. By now, her pulse was tapping so quickly and loudly, she could hear it in her ears. Thoughts collided in her head: that it was unnerving to discover someone had stolen your name, that Jeff would be so pissed. There was a mounting excitement, too, as she dialed customer service, that she could handle this crisis, that she was handling it. Her call went through, the line rang, and that’s when she saw it—the folder on the desk, with a page poking out, one that had the Cornerstone Bank logo on it. She’d set her purse down on the file, she realized, ending the call. Looking through the thin sheaf of documents, copies of the originals, she saw that she and Jeff had, indeed, opened an account there. In mid-September, around six weeks ago, according to the date. There was her signature.

  Lauren returned the papers to the folder and nudged it to the far corner. Tears threatened, and she pressed her fingertips to her eyes, stopping them. She wouldn’t cry, wouldn’t beat herself up. It’ll get better. You’re on the right track. Recovery is never a straight line. Everything her physical therapist and half a dozen nurses had said to encourage her ran through her mind. Relax, they’d said . . .

  Who knew? Maybe now that she’d seen the paperwork, if she could relax, the memory would come back to her, hopefully by the time Jeff mentioned it. If it didn’t, she could fake that she knew. She’d done that before, feeling terrible for it. Feeling more scared and separated from her family than ever. But when she told them how her brain blinked off and on, or when she couldn’t manage to hide it, Jeff, the kids, and Tara—they all looked at her with such pity. They looked at her as if she were a ticking bomb and they were just waiting to see when and how horribly she would go off.

  It was dark and she was exhausted by the time she ate the leftover mac and cheese she found in the refrigerator, heating it up in the microwave, standing at the sink. She took a hot shower, hoping she would sleep, craving it. But it didn’t happen, and toward midnight, she got up, and going into the bathroom, she flung open the medicine cabinet, pattered her fingers along the shelves, scattering the collection of bottles, a thermometer, the Band-Aids, hunting for it, the small plastic sleeve that contained the six Oxy tablets. Of course they were gone; she knew it. What an idiot she’d been to toss them. Jesus Christ, what had she been thinking?

  She searched the bookshelves in the study, took things out of the cabinets in the kitchen; she hunted through drawers, but it was useless. If she’d hidden more Oxy, she didn’t know where it could be. Back in the bedroom, she sat on the bed’s edge, head in her hands, trying to sort out what was worse: imagining you’d done a thing you hadn’t, or doing a thing and not remembering? After a while, she lay back, crooked her elbow over her eyes, and surprisingly, she slept.

  The next morning, on waking, she was glad for whatever it was, act of bravery or stupidity, that had prompted her to flush the dope she’d stumbled across. She felt pleased with herself for once, as if she’d won a contest or gotten something over on herself. She ate the toast she made, tossing the crumbs outside to the birds when she finished, then went into the study to look again at the bank forms.

  Her mood wavered, but no. She wouldn’t sit here and brood. Instead, she drove out to Fishers’, where she bought Swiss chard, sweet potatoes, Brussels sprouts, pears and apples, and the first of the fall tomatoes plus three pumpkins to carve into jack-o’-lanterns, and on the way home, she told herself she was fine. All she had to do was to hold on to this, her sense of routine, of what was usual and ordinary. All she had to do was stop scaring herself.

  Drew was home first that Sunday, and when he lifted the lid of a red-handled foam cooler to show her the body of the five-pound smallmouth bass he’d caught early th
at morning, she looked into its fishy eye, and she was glad for it, for the project she and Drew would undertake together in getting it to the dinner table. She didn’t even object to the fishy, river smell rising off the slick iridescence of its scales. She got out the big cutting board and found the boning knife. Drew filled a bowl with ice water to drop the fillets into once they were cut, and they took everything outside.

  “I tried to call Dad, to tell him.” About catching the fish, Drew meant. He set down the bowl of water and knelt beside Lauren on the deck. “He’ll freak when he hears.” He took a bite out of the apple he’d pulled out of the sack Lauren had left on the kitchen counter. “I even tried Aunt Tara, but she didn’t pick up, either.”

  “Huh.” Lauren had tried calling Tara, too, and she’d texted her without success. They hadn’t been in touch since early Saturday. Her silence was vaguely disquieting. Lauren had sent her a message to that effect early this morning: Hey, just give me a word so I know ur ok. Jeff said u might be having 2nd thoughts??? She made a deep cut behind the fish’s gills. “Do you see how I’m doing this?” she asked Drew.

  “Let me do it.” He set down his apple core.

  She looked at him. “Can you?”

  He took the knife. “Sure. Who do you think cleans the fish me and Dad catch?” He flashed a look at her, and then he said, “I guess you weren’t around when I learned. You were still out of it probably.”

  She looked away. Did Drew mean out-of-it hurt or out-of-it doped? But what difference did it make? The thing was, for whatever period of time it had taken her to come back to some semblance of normalcy, the better part of a year at least, she’d been absent—first physically, then mentally, and in that time, her children and her husband had done things together, shared experiences she’d never know about. She listened to their talk about them, like now, and she felt hurt, ashamed, and resentful. Some twisted combination. It was wrong. She knew they’d gone through hell, too. Drew had told her that back in September, in a hard, unforgiving voice. Six weeks into the school year, when his grades kept him from playing football for the high school JV team, to his and Jeff’s everlasting embarrassment, he’d blamed Lauren for it. It was her fault, the chaos she’d caused in their lives. How was he supposed to concentrate with all the drama going on?