Only Ever Her Read online

  PRAISE FOR MARYBETH MAYHEW WHALEN

  “Marybeth Mayhew Whalen’s character-driven suspense propelled me through the pages with a relentless need to absorb every word. Unputdownable!”

  —Robyn Carr, New York Times bestselling author

  “A missing bride, a handful of unrequited loves, and unsolved mysteries threaten to bring a small southern town to its knees. Each character Whalen has created is a grace note of longing, pain, or strength, and in the search for the missing woman, each is pushed to face the darkest truths he or she has attempted to hide. The characters felt like real people to me, the plot, a singular, haunting melody holding them together. A gorgeous book.”

  —Emily Carpenter, author of Every Single Secret

  “A seductive and emotional page-turner, Only Ever Her is a moving exploration of love, loss, and regret. Told in multiple points of view, where every character has something to hide, this mysterious tale asks the question: How well do you really know the ones you love? You won’t be able to put it down, but you won’t want it to end either.”

  —Karen Katchur, bestselling author of River Bodies

  “A brilliant portrayal of the dark undercurrents of a small town and the complex shadings of relationships between flawed but lovable people, all of whom are keeping secrets. The plot, deftly interwoven through the voices of four characters, builds into suspense that keeps the pages turning all the way to the end. A book club must read!”

  —Kerry Anne King, bestselling author of Whisper Me This

  “The long-buried secrets of a small southern town take center stage in Marybeth Mayhew Whalen’s Only Ever Her, an intricately woven tale about the pitfalls of self-deception and the damage that can ensue when tragedy sends carefully crafted ‘truths’ toppling. Whalen creates a cast of compelling and wonderfully fleshed-out characters, then slowly teases back their layers, exposing their dark places in delicious and sometimes heartbreaking fashion. Engaging, honest, and deeply compassionate, Only Ever Her is one of those wonderful books that teaches us about ourselves and reminds us that in order to live fully and honestly, we must first embrace our truth.”

  —Barbara Davis, bestselling author of When Never Comes

  OTHER TITLES BY MARYBETH MAYHEW WHALEN

  When We Were Worthy

  The Things We Wish Were True

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Marybeth Mayhew Whalen

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503903890

  ISBN-10: 1503903893

  Cover design by Faceout Studio, Tim Green

  For Ashleigh Whalen Fraley, who didn’t go missing.

  CONTENTS

  Start Reading

  Prologue: Wedding Day

  MAY 15–16

  Annie

  Laurel

  Kenny

  Clary

  Annie

  Faye

  Clary

  Annie

  Kenny

  MAY 28

  Laurel

  Annie

  MAY 29

  Faye

  Laurel

  Faye

  Clary

  Kenny

  Laurel

  Clary

  MAY 30

  Faye

  Kenny

  Clary

  Laurel

  Kenny

  Faye

  Clary

  Laurel

  Faye

  MAY 31

  Ludlow Ledger

  Laurel

  Kenny

  Clary

  Faye

  Clary

  Faye

  Kenny

  Faye

  Laurel

  JUNE 1

  Laurel

  Clary

  Faye

  Kenny

  JUNE 2

  Body of Missing . . .

  Faye

  JUNE 3

  Clary

  JUNE 8

  Kenny

  Faye

  Laurel

  Clary

  BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

  7UP CHICKEN MARINADE RECIPE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  I said, “O that I had the wings of a dove! I would fly away and be at rest. I would flee far away and stay in the desert; I would hurry to my place of shelter, far from the tempest and storm.”

  Psalm 55:6–8

  Prologue: Wedding Day

  June 1

  He tugs at his collar and takes a swig of tepid coffee. He doesn’t care for coffee, but he will accept any liquid at this point, especially liquid that contains caffeine. He hasn’t slept in so long, he’s too tired to count up how many hours it’s been.

  The sheriff presses his big, meaty palms on the table and leans in. “Well, Mr. Spacey,” he says. “You ready to give your statement?”

  “Yes, sir,” he says. “I’m ready.” The last time he was sitting across from Hal York like this, he was just a kid, brought in for shoplifting. No one believed him then, either.

  “You going to tell the truth now?”

  He holds up his right hand, pretends to lay his left one on an imaginary Bible. “And nothing but. So help me God.” He hopes his voice sounds sincere.

  “Well,” the sheriff says, “let’s hear your story.”

  MAY 15–16

  TWO WEEKS UNTIL THE WEDDING

  Annie

  Though she has made it as far as parking outside the lawyer’s office, she finds herself unable to go in. She has her fingers around the door handle, ready to tug it open at any moment. The car is new, so the door won’t creak loudly when she opens it like her old car did. (Ah, the Jetta, may she rest in peace.) This SUV, a pristine, mature vehicle choice, will not give her any problems. Like her fiancé, Scott, who selected and bought her the Honda CR-V as an early wedding gift, this car is new and reliable and suitable for starting her new life in a few weeks as Mrs. Annie Hanson.

  She lets go of the door handle and glances down at the letter on her lap, sees her name in the salutation just above the fold, her name as it is now: Ms. Annie Taft. She is not Annie Hanson yet. She has things she must do before that can happen. And showing up for a meeting at this attorney’s office is one of those things.

  She looks at the building just in front of her, a two-story redbrick colonial-style office that could house any sort of business at all—an insurance agency or dental practice or accounting firm. She scans the numerous windows as if someone might be watching her out of one of them. But there are no faces framed in the windowpanes, no pairs of eyes peeking through the blinds. No one is even aware she is here.

  She didn’t call to make an appointment, even though the letter had suggested she do so. She wanted no guarantee the attorney would have time for her. All the better if he told her to come back and then she just never did. She’s going to be very busy in the coming days, after all. She will scarcely have time for anything besides preparing for her wedding. Then she can tell herself—and anyone else—that she tried. She can say she did the right thing. Annie cares very much about doing the right thing; it is a part of
who she is.

  But what is the right thing? That is the question.

  In her head, her aunt Faye starts to speak, reiterating what she, Faye, thinks is the right thing. (Which is not what Annie is now doing, for the record.) Some people hear their mother’s voices in their heads, but Annie hears her aunt’s, the closest thing she has to a mother. Annie quiets Aunt Faye’s disapproving voice by distracting herself. She checks her makeup in the visor mirror, smiling to make sure there isn’t any lipstick on her teeth. There’s nothing on her teeth, but she sees that she could use a touch-up. She’s chewed at her bottom lip so much that the lipstick she applied this morning is mostly gone.

  She gets out her cosmetic bag from her purse and plunks it right on top of the letter, hiding it from sight. She pulls out her favorite lipstick and reapplies a swath of berry stain across her bow of a mouth. (She has her mother’s smile, everyone says. Based on the photos she’s seen, this is true.) Then, just for good measure, she touches up her nose with fresh powder. The early-summer heat is making her shiny, and sitting in this car isn’t helping.

  She should just get out and go inside. Pull the trigger, rip off the Band-Aid, as they say. But then she notices her eyebrows—the bright sunlight reveals some stray hairs that need to be plucked. She pulls tweezers from the cosmetic bag and removes the offensive hairs. It’s always good to look your best when meeting anyone new, she reasons, and this attorney is someone new. He is a total stranger who has barged into her life uninvited through this letter he sent to her, presuming more about her than she is capable of.

  Dear Ms. Annie Taft,

  I am writing to deliver some news about my client, Mr. Cordell Lewis, a man I believe was unfairly sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole after being wrongfully convicted of the death of your mother, Lydia Taft. As a witness—and a key part of the prosecution’s case against him—Ms. Taft, I understand that for you this story is a part of your past, but it is far from that for Mr. Lewis. It’s very much in the present, and to any hope he has for a future.

  I would appreciate it if you could come in to my office for a short meeting to allow me to inform you face-to-face of some new developments in the case as well as ask for one small favor. I look forward to meeting with you at your earliest convenience, as time is of the essence. Please know that, as the information I will be passing along to you is sensitive in nature, this meeting will need to be strictly confidential. Again, I will look forward to hearing from you and to sharing with you the exciting things that are happening.

  Thank you for your time,

  Tyson Barnes

  It is a short letter—not a lot to it, really—but long enough to levy the right amount of guilt to get her here for this meeting, to talk about doing “a small favor” for the man she’s grown up believing murdered her mother. But what if he didn’t? Her stupid conscience keeps asking this one unending question. One she has to entertain before she can start a life of her own, a life away from here. That is part of her plan with Scott: get married, move somewhere else, start fresh. At the time they devised it, it sounded like a good plan. But the closer she gets to leaving, the more she wonders if she can.

  She inspects her face one final time before flipping the visor back into place and stowing her cosmetic bag in her purse. Her stomach rumbles, and she thinks about her lunch appointment—another thing she doesn’t want to do but feels obligated to show up for. If she isn’t careful, she’s going to be late for that. If the attorney is in and does want to talk, she might miss it altogether. She can’t decide which would be worse: talking to the attorney who is trying to get Cordell Lewis, the man currently in prison for her mother’s murder, released or showing up for an interview with a reporter from the town paper to talk about her wedding.

  Annie is certain the reporter will find a way to also ask about Cordell Lewis’s upcoming hearing. She suspects that this is what the reporter really wants to talk about, that this interview is just subterfuge. She and Laurel, the reporter, went to high school together. Laurel was always the aggressive type, and Annie doubts she’s changed much in the eight years since graduation. If anything, her years away from Ludlow working for larger papers has probably made her more relentless. Lewis’s release is a bigger story than Annie’s wedding, after all. Annie wouldn’t put it past Laurel to pull something like that. She will be on her guard.

  She makes her decision and turns off the car, deciding that she will do what she came here to do, selecting the lesser of the two evils. She will go in and talk to—she looks down at the letter again to double-check the name of the man she has come here to see. She reads the signature line, imagines telling the receptionist that she is there to see Tyson Barnes. The receptionist will either say, “Oh yes, he’s been expecting you. Right this way!” Or she will say, “I’m so sorry, but he’s in court. Would you like me to let him know you stopped by?”

  Whatever the outcome, Annie must go through with this. She must go and hear what this attorney has to say about Cordell Lewis, who has spent the last twenty-three years in prison for killing her mother. According to his letter, Tyson Barnes thinks that Cordell Lewis is innocent. He thinks he was wrongly convicted all those years ago and that Annie was part of the witch hunt that made the wrongful conviction stick. He wants to talk about what she can do now, as a twenty-six-year-old woman, to make up for what she did as a three-year-old child. He thinks she can help set things right.

  Annie knows one thing: nothing can set things right. No matter what she does or does not do, her mother will not be there when she walks down the aisle in a matter of days. Her mother will not wear a mother-of-the-bride dress that is slightly dowdy but appropriate for the occasion. She will not give Annie a family heirloom to be her “something blue.” She will not offer marriage advice based on her own years of wisdom. Because Annie’s mother did not have years to grow wise. Lydia Taft died when she was twenty-three years old. She didn’t even get to live as long as Annie herself has.

  “Okay, Tyson Barnes,” Annie says aloud in the car. “You’ve got fifteen minutes. And that’s all you get.” Then she opens the car door and steps out.

  Laurel

  She has sorted the sugar packets by color, then in alphabetical order—the Splenda should be before the Sweet’N Low—and then created a repeating pattern of white, then pink, then yellow, then blue, a rainbow of packets. Done with that, she scans the restaurant, huffing her frustration as she, again, comes up empty. She checks her watch. Annie Taft is twenty-two minutes late and, though Laurel really has nowhere else to be other than this restaurant in the middle of the lunch rush, she is unhappy at being kept waiting this long. Five minutes, okay. But twenty-two? It’s disrespectful.

  She dumps the sugar packets out on the table, uses her hand to make them into a jumbled array, pondering the many options there are now for making life sweet, many of them noncaloric—all of the sweetness, none of the guilt, she thinks. Isn’t that what we all want? She opens the notebook in front of her, jots down her thoughts. This might make a good essay. She could sell it to a magazine, she thinks. One like Good Housekeeping or Woman’s Day. She adds these two magazine names down beside her idea, then draws stars around it, if for no other reason than to look busy—and less alone than she does right now sitting at this table waiting for someone who has most likely stood her up.

  The server comes over and points at Laurel’s empty water glass, the ice cubes sinking into each other as they collapse. “Would you like some more water?” the girl asks. She is probably twenty years old, with a high ponytail that pulls the corners of her eyelids upward, making her look perennially surprised.

  “No, thank you,” Laurel replies in her kindest, most patient voice. Thankfully, the girl scurries away without asking more questions. Like the most obvious one: “Do you think the person you’re waiting for is going to show up?”

  Laurel picks up her phone and stares at it, debating whether to just text Annie and ask where she is already. But that looks
desperate and might make her seem like a nuisance. As put off as she is, she’s also proceeding with caution. Though she is ostensibly at this restaurant to interview Annie Taft about her upcoming wedding (“The wedding of the year!” as Laurel’s mother keeps saying) for the local paper, she is also here for her own reasons.

  She thinks about her book idea—the one with Annie’s murdered mother at the center of it, the one that could allow her to finally make her mark as a writer. Seeing as how nothing else she’s tried has worked out. Annie Taft granting her access could make all the difference. So she will take things as they come; she will not push too hard. She’s been known to push too hard when she wants something really badly. Just ask her family or her last boyfriend.

  She puts down her phone and picks up her pen again, using it to cross through the sugar essay idea. If she’s going to be a great writer, she needs to spend her time on truly worthy efforts. An essay on sugar is just a silly distraction. She’s got to do better, govern herself better. She’s got to be more intentional and not flit around from idea to idea. She’d be better served to do more research on the man they’re supposedly letting out of prison. Yes, that would be a better use of her time. Perhaps she could track down his attorney, ask him some questions. She thinks of Professor Sharp, who taught her that “the enemy of great writing is distraction.”

  She wonders what Professor Sharp would think of her now, his prized pupil who has slunk back to her hometown after having been let go from yet another paper, writing instead for her tiny town paper, which is no better than a high school newspaper when you get down to it. Hell, she’d guess the Ludlow Ledger is actually beneath some high school papers. She thinks of her “boss,” Damon, and cringes. She is far, far away from the dreams that lit her from within when she was a writing student a mere matter of years ago.

  She gathers her things and puts them in her new tote bag, a colorful designer thing her mother bought her as a “welcome home” present, complete with her monogram in huge curlicue woven letters smack-dab in the center. Glynnis, her mother, thinks her homecoming is something to be celebrated, not something to be mourned. She bought her the tote to take to the country club so she can sit by the pool and “get some color.”