Little White Lies Read online

  As I made my way toward the second door on the left, the person who’d said my cousin’s name spoke up again, tentatively this time. “On a scale of one to bad, is this really so awful?”

  The reply was delicate and demure. “I suppose that depends on how one feels about felonies.”

  I cleared my throat, and the occupants of the room turned to look at me. I recognized my cousin Lily from the portraits: light hair, dark eyes, small waist, big bones. Every hair was in place. Her summer blouse was freshly pressed. The girl next to her was stunningly beautiful and also, based on her expression, on the verge of projectile vomiting.

  Then again, I probably would have been nauseous, too, if I were lying on my stomach with my back arched and the tips of my toes touching the back of my head.

  “Hello.” Cousin Lily did an admirable impression of someone who had decidedly not been discussing felonies a moment before. For a girl who looked like she’d just stepped out of a magazine spread entitled “Tasteful Floral Prints for Virginal Ivy League Hopefuls,” she had balls.

  This girl and I share one-eighth of our DNA.

  “You must be Sawyer.” Lily had her mother’s way of saying the word must: two parts emphasis, one part command.

  The contortionist on the floor unfolded herself. “Sawyer,” she repeated, her eyes wide. “The cousin.”

  She sounded just horrified enough to make me wonder if she considered cousin synonymous with ax murderer.

  “Our grandmother sent me up,” I told Lily as her friend attempted to stand very still, like I was some kind of bear and any motion might be taken as reason to attack.

  “I’m supposed to help you get ready for tonight,” Lily said. She caught the gaze of the doe-eyed girl next to her, who was noticeably wringing her hands. “I’m supposed to help her get ready for tonight,” Lily repeated. Clearly, she was trying to get some kind of message across.

  “I can go if you two are in the middle of something.” I echoed Lily’s emphasis.

  My cousin turned her dark brown eyes back to me. She had a way of looking at a person like she was considering dissecting you or giving you a makeover or possibly both.

  I did not like my chances.

  “Don’t be silly, Sawyer.” Lily took a step toward me. “You aren’t interrupting a thing. Sadie-Grace and I were just having a little chat. Did I introduce you to Sadie-Grace? Sadie-Grace Waters, meet Sawyer Taft.” Lily had clearly inherited our grandmother’s penchant for rendering her own questions rhetorical. “It is Taft, isn’t it?” She plowed on before I could reply. “I apologize for not being there to greet you downstairs. You must think I was absolutely raised in a barn.”

  I’d spent six months at age thirteen learning everything there was to know about gambling and games of chance. I was willing to lay good odds right now that my oh-so-felicitous cousin hadn’t been particularly enthused about the idea of a blood relation from the wrong side of the tracks being suddenly foisted upon her. Not that she’d admit to a lack of enthusiasm.

  That, I thought, would be almost as ill-mannered as threatening fratricide.

  “I was pretty much raised in a bar,” I replied when I realized Lily had finally paused for a breath. “As long as you can refrain from breaking a chair over someone’s back, we’re good.”

  Emily Post had apparently not prepared either Lily or ­Sadie-Grace for offhanded discussions of bar brawls. As they searched for an appropriate response, I drifted toward a nearby window. It overlooked the backyard, and down below, I could see shimmery black tablecloths being spread over round-top tables. There were easily a half dozen workers and three times that many tables.

  There was also a catwalk.

  “Were you really raised in a bar?” Sadie-Grace came to stand beside me. She was tall and willowy thin and bore a striking resemblance to a certain classic beauty best known for marrying into the royal family. Her delicate fingers worried at the tips of ridiculously thick and shiny brown hair.

  Wide-eyed. Anxious. Prone to yoga. I cataloged what I knew about her, then answered the question. “My mom and I lived above The Holler until I was thirteen. I wasn’t technically allowed in the bar, but I have a slight tendency to take technicalities as a challenge.”

  Sadie-Grace nibbled on her bottom lip, looking down at me through impossibly long lashes. “If you grew up like that, you must know things,” she said very seriously. “You must know people. ­People who know things.”

  A quick glance at Lily told me that she didn’t like the direction this conversation was going.

  I turned back to Sadie-Grace. “Are you by any chance fixing to ask me what my stance is on felonies?”

  “We need to get you a dress for tonight, Sawyer!” Lily smiled brightly and shot laser eyes at Sadie-Grace, lest the latter even think about answering my question. “We’ll hit the shops. And goodness knows we could stand to do something about those eyebrows.”

  I took that to mean that Lily had come down on the side of makeover over dissection, but I got the feeling that it had probably been a pretty close call.

  Beside me, Sadie-Grace assiduously avoided eye contact, her bottom lip still caught between her teeth.

  I don’t want to know, I decided. Whatever my cousin’s gotten herself into, whatever I overheard, I really and truly do not want to know.

  ’m not saying this is Sawyer’s fault,” the prim and proper one said delicately. “But.”

  Mackie waited for her to say more. The young lady, however, seemed to consider that a full sentence.

  “It was an accident! You can’t arrest someone for an accident!” That, from the one who literally looked like a Disney princess come to life.

  “Clearly, Sadie-Grace, they can.”

  “But it was only maybe ten percent on purpose!”

  “Girls,” Mackie said in what he hoped passed for a stern voice. “One at a time. And start from the beginning.”

  “The beginning.” The coquette of the group—the one who’d blessed his heart—sashayed forward. “I, for one, couldn’t begin to say where this began. Could you, Lily?”

  The calm, well-mannered one weathered that blow predictably calmly and with predictably good manners. The lock picker, however, seemed to take umbrage. Her eyes narrowed at Miss I-Couldn’t-Begin-To-Say.

  “Now that I think about it,” the coy instigator continued, “I do seem to remember something.…”

  The lock picker stepped forward. Her white-gloved hands started to curl themselves into white-gloved fists.

  Oh no, Mackie thought. This could get ugly.

  ow would you describe your style?” The saleswoman—excuse me, personal shopper—had the poise of a beauty pageant contestant and the power-hungry gaze of a politician.

  This did not bode well.

  After ascertaining that my dear cousin Lily was blocking my exit—smart girl—I resigned myself to answering the question. “Do you consider ‘grease stains’ a style?”

  Sadie-Grace’s mouth dropped open in a perfect O. There was a single awkward beat of silence.

  “She’s looking for something classic,” Lily put in smoothly. “Less than semi-formal, more than business casual, and I believe my grandmother said something about a certain shade of blue?”

  “Yes.” The personal shopper stretched a blink out long enough that I wondered if she was meditating on the color blue. “Cerulean. Or possibly sapphire. Less formal than semi-formal. Cocktail?”

  “Yes, please,” I muttered.

  “Cocktail attire,” Lily emphasized, shooting a warning look at me, “could work, if you keep in mind that the event is outdoors.”

  “Something summery,” the personal shopper offered immediately. “A-line, in a fabric that breathes.”

  I’d never been much of a shopper. “Grease stains” really was the closest thing I had to a personal style. And I definitely hadn’t spent any time in Miss Coulter’s, the only department store in three counties, Lily had informed me, to carry certain brands.

 
Maybe, if I back away very slowly…

  Lily sidestepped to block the exit. The personal shopper didn’t notice a thing. “If you girls would like to take a look around,” she told Lily, “I’ll just pull a few things for your friend to try on.”

  “Cousin.” Lily seemed to regret the correction the moment she made it, but that didn’t stop her from raising her chin and repeating, “She’s my cousin.”

  I could see the exact moment the woman in front of us accessed her mental store of family trees and realized who, exactly, that made me.

  This was a city, not a small town, but from what my mother had told me about her life growing up here, I knew that the circles the illustrious Taft family ran in were very small. My mom tended to talk about the country club set the way a claustrophobic might have reminisced about time spent trapped in a storm cellar.

  “Your cousin!” the personal shopper chirped. “How lovely. Now that you mention it, I can see a family resemblance.”

  I was on the small side of petite. Lily was taller, broader, and in undoubtedly better shape. Her face was heart-shaped, her skin pale, and her eyelashes nearly as light as her silk-straight hair. In contrast, I was perpetually suntanned, could have made a fortune if freckles were a monetizable commodity, and had mud-brown hair that was even less well-behaved than I was.

  “Maybe,” Sadie-Grace said thoughtfully after the woman had departed, “the resemblance is in your auras.”

  Three hours, one platinum credit card, and only two minor breakdowns—courtesy of our personal shopper and our personal shopper’s replacement—later, I had a dress. And shoes. A tasteful evening bag. And murder in my heart.

  “Almost done!” Lily told me cheerfully.

  I would have been cheerful, too, if I’d somehow worn down my opponent until said opponent would have agreed to going to tonight’s shindig naked if it meant getting out of this department store alive. Lily Taft Easterling was a force of nature. A delicate, demure, seemingly soft-spoken force of nature who took fashion almost as seriously as she took proper etiquette in the face of adversity.

  I was the face of adversity.

  I’d vetoed dress after dress. I’d flat-out refused to try on any more. I distinctly remembered refusing to even tell her my shoe size.

  And yet…

  “I’ll just pop over to the cosmetics counter,” Lily continued blithely, “while you and Sadie-Grace get to know each other.”

  I would have staged a walkout then and there were it not for the halfway-hopeful smile on Sadie-Grace’s face. I’d never met someone so close to the societal ideal of beauty and so utterly unsure of herself. If I’d had to pick two adjectives to describe her, I would have gone with vulnerable and cheerful, with a close third on naive.

  Damn you, Lily, I thought. Growing up, I’d been the kind of kindergartner who punched fourth graders for making second graders cry. It hadn’t exactly endeared me to the second graders, but I couldn’t do nothing any more than I could turn my back on the girl beside me now.

  “So,” I said flatly, earning a beaming grin from Sadie-Grace. “Is there anything to do besides shopping hereabouts?”

  Sadie-Grace thought long and hard, then opened her mouth to reply, but instead of words, she let out a sound somewhere in the key of eep. Lily, deep in discussion with someone at the cosmetics counter, didn’t notice Sadie-Grace’s attempt to duck behind a display of designer evening bags.

  “Sadie-Grace?”

  She shushed me, then peeked out from behind the purses. Almost of its own accord, her left foot began tracing out graceful little half circles on the floor.

  “Are you… dancing?” I asked.

  With great effort, Sadie-Grace stilled the rogue foot. “I rond de jambe when I’m antsy,” she whispered. “It’s involuntary, like the hiccups, but with ballet.”

  That statement was ten kinds of odd, but I didn’t have a chance to explain that to her before Sadie-Grace eeped again and ducked behind me. I followed her line of sight through the cosmetics department, past the designer scarves, and straight to a couple looking at cuff links. They were in their forties, closer to Aunt ­Olivia’s age than my mother’s. There was something vaguely familiar about the man.

  “Senator Sterling Ames,” Sadie-Grace whispered behind me. “And his wife, Charlotte.”

  The senator looked up from the cuff links. He scanned the room with casual precision, and his gaze came to rest on Lily.

  “Your cousin used to date the senator’s son, Walker,” ­Sadie-Grace whispered. “He’s nice. But the senator’s daughter…”

  Sadie-Grace almost started rond de jambe–ing again, but she caught herself.

  “His daughter?” I prompted as the senator and his wife began making their way toward Lily.

  Sadie-Grace crossed herself, even though I was fairly certain she wasn’t Catholic. “The senator’s daughter is the devil incarnate.”

  ’d spent the majority of fourth grade learning to draw faces. I’d sold portraits for two bucks a pop on the playground, but I’d never managed to draw my own. It was like there was something missing, some facial calculus I could never quite capture because I couldn’t trace the details that separated my face from my mother’s back to their source.

  Maybe that was why I found myself assessing the senator’s features, even though he was almost certainly too old to have been a Squire the year my mother was a Deb.

  “Campbell Ames is Lucifer,” Sadie-Grace reiterated beside me in a dramatic whisper. “Beelzebub. Mephistopheles. Old Scratch. The devil.” She sighed. “Let’s get this over with.”

  “Get what over with?” I asked.

  Sadie-Grace was perplexed. She looked from me to the cosmetics counter, where the senator’s wife was kissing Lily’s cheek, then back at me. “What do you mean what? We have to go over there and say hello.”

  “Point of fact: we don’t.”

  “But…” Sadie-Grace was at a loss for words. She listed toward Senator and Mrs. Ames like they were a black hole, sucking her in. Apparently, it didn’t matter that she’d tried to bodily hide herself from view or that she’d just referred to the senator’s daughter by no fewer than five different names for Satan. In Sadie-Grace’s world, when an adult you knew came within an eight-foot radius, the choices were chitchat and combust.

  I followed her into the fray and ignored the grateful look she shot me in return. I had my own reasons for playing nice—and they had nothing whatsoever to do with decorum.

  “We miss seeing you at our house, Lily.” The senator’s wife had a voice that carried: high and clear and cavity-sweet. “I just know that Walker is going to come to his senses one of these days.”

  Salt, meet wound, I thought as I came to stand beside Lily. I knew nothing about my cousin’s relationship with her ex, but I was beginning to understand this much about Lily: The more it hurt, the harder she smiled.

  And this hurt a lot.

  Maybe that shouldn’t have mattered to me, but I’d never excelled at standing by and watching other people bleed. It must have mattered to Sadie-Grace, too, because she overcame her jitters enough to draw the senator’s attention—and more importantly, his wife’s—away from Lily. “Have y’all met Sawyer?”

  That did the trick. One second I was standing there minding my own business, and the next, Charlotte Ames had my hands held firmly in hers.

  If you say one word about my cheekbones, I thought, I cannot be held responsible for my actions.

  “We were just helping Sawyer pick out a little something for tonight.” Lily’s power smile was still firmly in place.

  “Your first Deb event!” The senator’s wife squeezed my hands. “How exciting! You’ve missed a fitting or two, of course, but I’m sure that Miss Lillian will have you caught up in no time. That woman can move mountains.”

  The vat of perky subtext was clear. You were a last-minute and probably unwanted addition! Your grandmother strong-armed someone into letting you in!

  Luckily, the experiences
that had inspired me to get a GED instead of finishing out high school had left me well and truly subtext-­immune.

  “I take it we’ll see the two of you there tonight?” Lily asked the senator and his wife politely. I wasn’t sure if she’d redirected the conversation for my benefit or for theirs. “And Campbell?”

  Beside us, Sadie-Grace made a small, wheezing sound.

  “Sterling.” Charlotte Ames laid a hand on her husband’s arm. “We really should see about getting you a new pair of cuff links.”

  “We’ll be there,” the senator told Lily. He hesitated—no, I thought, that’s not the right word. Men like Senator Sterling Ames didn’t hesitate. They took pause.

  They assessed.

  “I can’t say I knew your mother well,” the senator told me. He had blue eyes, black hair, and a face you could trust but absolutely shouldn’t. “However, the Taft women I do know are a force to be reckoned with.” He offered Lily a small, controlled smile, then turned the full weight of his gaze back to me. “If you’ve inherited anything from that side of your family tree, I suspect you’ll handle the Symphony Ball—and tonight’s auction—just fine.”

  And what about the other side of my family tree? I thought as I watched them walk away.

  “Sawyer?” Lily lightly touched my shoulder, more incisive than I’d given her credit for. “Are you okay?”

  It had been a long time since I’d expected—or allowed—anyone else to take care of me. If you don’t expect people to surprise you, they can’t disappoint.

  “Auction.” I recovered my voice and stepped back from Lily’s touch. “What auction?”

  he Pearls of Wisdom Charity Auction was apparently a Symphony Ball tradition. An hour later, I was still unclear on who or what was being auctioned.

  I was fairly certain I didn’t want to know.

  “Sit still, Sawyer.” Lily’s tone was pleasant, but the look in her eyes was befitting of a stone-cold assassin.

  A stone-cold assassin with tweezers.

  I batted her hand away from my face. “I would rather be trapped inside a Sicilian bull than let you continue to tweeze the bejeezus out of my eyebrows.”