Gathering Lies Read online

  Wiping my brow on the tail of my shirt, I got on the floor, lying prone to see under the stove. There was debris under there, some scrap papers from my desk—but no manuscript and no disk. Something glinted way in the back, however. I tried to use a long piece of debris as a stick to slide whatever it was toward me, but it was wedged too tightly under the stove. To retrieve it I would have to try lifting the stove even higher.

  It was old, and heavier, even, than I had thought it would be. I wondered if it was made of cast iron inside. At home, I’d been able to move my range out from the wall for spring cleaning. It was not a job I liked, but I could physically do it. This range, though it was smaller, weighed a ton.

  By a lengthy process—similar to the building of the pyramids, at least according to some—I managed to wedge increasingly larger objects under the top edge of the stove. Finally, I was able to fit the two-by-four under it, propping the stove up high enough at this end to see under it completely.

  Relief swept over me as I recognized the Allegra case. Thank God. Something is going right. I reached back carefully and pulled the case out.

  Quickly, I opened it to see if it still held its treasure inside. It did. Lonnie Mae’s fishnet stockings lay there in the sealed plastic baggie, still intact.

  My release was so great, I nearly fainted. My vision went dark, then came back. My hands shook uncontrollably. Closing the case, I held it to my chest, breathing in and out, trying to regain my strength.

  Behind me, I heard a footstep, and shoving the case quickly inside my shirt, I began to turn around, expecting to see Timmy. She must, I thought, be looking for me by now.

  Something landed on my head, heavy and crushing. Pain split me in two, and everything went black. I felt my bones go slack, and my body slid the rest of the way onto the floor. Then I was conscious of the fact that I was moving—moving over rubble and dirt, though I couldn’t see who was dragging me.

  After that, nothing.

  10

  When I came to, I was in the farmhouse kitchen, lying on the big dining table. Grace and Luke were standing over me, and there was something soft pillowing my head. Someone had thrown a blanket over me, and Timmy was at the kitchen sink, rinsing blood from a rag. The pain in my skull told me the blood must be mine.

  “What happened?” I said, groaning as the effort of speaking shot daggers through me.

  “We found you unconscious on the path to the farmhouse,” Luke said, stroking my forehead. “You must have crawled there. Do you know what happened?”

  “I know I didn’t crawl there. Somebody dragged me.”

  “Dragged you?” He and Grace looked at each other. “Why would anyone do that?”

  “Why would anyone clobber me over the head?” I snapped, groaning again.

  Timmy spoke worriedly from across the room. “I don’t like this. I don’t like it at all. It just gets worse and worse….”

  I looked at Luke. “She means,” he said, “that now that someone’s attacked you, it’s more likely than ever that Jane was attacked, too.”

  Suddenly, I remembered the Allegra case. I put a hand over my chest to see if I could feel it inside my shirt. It wasn’t there.

  Panicked, I tried to sit up, but Luke pushed me back down. “Wait. Give yourself time.”

  “You don’t understand. I lost something. It must have fallen out, and—”

  “You don’t understand,” Grace said. “Sarah, you’ve got quite a lump there, and whatever was used to hit you, it cut through your scalp.”

  I lifted a hand and felt for the wound, which was on the back of my head and about two inches long. My fingers came away bloody. Timmy came and put a clean, damp rag over it, pushing me gently back down to hold it in place. In her eyes were sorrow and concern. She fussed over me, trying to get me to drink water, but I choked on it and pushed it away.

  “You didn’t see who hit you?” Luke said. “Nothing at all?”

  “You must have seen something,” Grace said.

  “I told you, I didn’t!”

  And why were they so relentless about this?

  That scene in the woods came back to me. There was something going on between Grace and Luke, that much was clear. But did it have anything to do with whoever clobbered me?

  “Please, Sarah, try to drink some of this,” Timmy urged, holding the water bottle to my lips again. She lifted my head, carefully avoiding the cut. “I’m so, so sorry, my dear.”

  I took a few sips, then sat and swung my legs to the floor, wincing as pain shot through my entire body. “I have to get up,” I said. “I need to look for something.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Luke said, standing squarely in my way.

  “Tell us what you’ve lost,” Grace said. “We’ll look for it.”

  “No. No…I can’t.”

  I didn’t know what else to say. Even when Luke and I had talked earlier, I hadn’t thought it a good idea to tell him about the evidence I had against the Five, or the fact that I’d brought it here with me. Now that it was missing—unless it had simply fallen from my shirt and was still lying back there—I didn’t feel safe telling anyone. Even if I could trust Luke, he would almost certainly tell Grace about it, now that they were getting close.

  No, I couldn’t risk it.

  “I want to go myself,” I said. “I need to walk and get my strength back.”

  “You need to lie down and get your strength back,” Luke argued.

  “What the hell is so important?” Grace said. “Just tell us what it looks like. We’ll find it.”

  I wasn’t going to win this one. And if I pushed the argument much more, I’d be giving too much away.

  “It’s Jane’s locket,” I lied, remembering that it must still be in the pocket of my other shirt. “Gabe found it at your house after the fire, Luke. I’d like to give it to her children, if I can find them when this is over.”

  “That’s all?” He raised a brow. “Sarah, don’t you realize that whoever struck you down could still be out there? The locket can wait until we figure out who did this to you.”

  “No. No, it can’t wait. You don’t understand.”

  Grace’s manner changed, suddenly. “You know what? She’s right, it can’t wait. Let’s go look for the damned thing, Luke. She won’t give us a moment’s peace till we do.”

  “I agree with them,” Timmy put in. “I’ll make you some hot tea, Sarah. I found a wonderful old thermos jug, and I saved hot water in it from the fire Amelia made out back this morning. I even found an old can of crackers, the English kind, that come in a tin. I think they must be from way back when I had the bed-and-breakfast, but believe it or not, they’re still good.”

  I couldn’t stop Timmy from wanting to take care of me, and I couldn’t stop Luke and Grace from leaving. I finally had to let them go on their fool’s errand—looking for Jane’s locket—and pray they wouldn’t find the Allegra case in the process.

  Or that if they did find it, they wouldn’t understand what it was.

  Momentarily, I considered following them, thinking I might find it first—but when I stood up I realized how weak and rubbery my legs were.

  Timmy helped me outside to a lounge chair in the sun, then brought me the hot tea, and crackers wrapped in a white linen napkin with the Thornberry Bed-and-Breakfast logo on it in an elegant, satin script—TB&B. Those napkins were memories of better times for Timmy, and I wondered how she was finding the strength to keep going through all this. If, as Amelia had said, Timmy had been close to bankruptcy, finding an investor must have seemed like a last-minute miracle. I could only imagine how thrilled and relieved she must have been. And now, to have lost Thornberry this way…Would she ever recover from the loss?

  She tucked a blanket around me and left me there, saying she had chores to do in the kitchen. I wanted to talk to her, ask her how she was feeling, but she seemed closed down, turning away when I tried to make contact. This, I thought, is how she’s dealing with it. Shutting reality out
as much as possible.

  I settled for thanking her, then sipped the tea, slowly feeling my spirits revive. I couldn’t choke down the crackers, though. Instead, I stared at Lucy’s grave, and thought of Jane. Two down. Almost three, with me? Lucy, of course, had been an accident. But we still didn’t know about Jane.

  And if someone wanted to kill me, wouldn’t they have done more than hit me over the head?

  Of course, they might have been dragging me into the woods to do just that, when Luke and Grace came along. Whoever it was might have dropped me when he or she heard them coming, then hidden in the woods, watching to see if Luke and Grace would find me or go in another direction.

  But it would have to be two someone’s, wouldn’t it, if everyone had stayed in pairs the way they were supposed to?

  Two killers? On one small island?

  It didn’t seem likely. But if so—who?

  I told myself the very idea was absurd, but more and more I kept leaning toward Luke and Grace. Grace was the one amongst us who had never seemed to fit. And now Luke had apparently joined forces with her.

  If he had, this wasn’t the Luke I knew. Or thought I’d known. My thoughts moved back over the years, and I remembered a hot August day, that year when Luke and I were seventeen. We’d been sitting on the Ransford lawn under a blue-and-white canvas gazebo his parents had erected for entertaining guests during the cocktail hour. Luke and I faced the Sound in white wooden lawn chairs, sipping lemonade, while his father and mother, and mine, talked at a round patio table. Luke’s father said something about needing a stronger police force in Seattle, and that ever since the Vietnam riots people had been getting out of hand. There was too much disrespect for the law, he said.

  My father argued that the police were getting out of hand, and that a lot of the arrests they made during those years were phony. Most of those people were released without charges, he said, and besides being immoral, arresting innocent people was a complete waste of the police department’s time.

  It’s funny I hadn’t remembered that, till now. My father, a liberal?

  Well, what other kind of lawyer would—right or wrong—defend white-collar criminals as if they were angels? That I’d never thought of him as a liberal before was due, most likely, to my having been his child, and the fact that children seldom see their parents clearly.

  Luke, to my surprise, had taken his father’s side that day. Not that we shared in the adult conversation, but we had begun making snide remarks, in under-tones, about nearly everything they said.

  Luke had snickered at my father’s comment. “Your father,” he said, “could make Hitler look good.”

  I had bridled at that. “Your father would jail Jesus if he showed up today.”

  “My father would at least put Judas where he belonged,” he replied.

  “And my father would get him out!”

  When I realized the absurdity of my argument, I burst into giggles, and Luke laughed along with me.

  Luke’s mother called to us. “What are you two children doing over there?”

  Children. We were seventeen.

  I turned, and saw that she was patting her neck and face with a handkerchief, blotting the perspiration away. She wore a long, flowered dress that day, and a floppy sun hat. I seemed to recall that she even wore white gloves, and I wondered why she always had to put on a show. My own parents had dressed in shorts and shirts, the same way they did at home on weekends.

  “We’re just talking, Mother,” Luke replied.

  “It sounds to me like more than talk,” his mother said coyly, and by this time everyone was looking over and snickering at us—the two teenagers who had nothing to do but spend their time giggling and horsing around.

  Luke stood up and grabbed my hand. His eyes met mine with an unspoken message. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

  “Where are you going?” his mother called out.

  “For a walk,” he answered, his hand nearly burning mine with its urgency.

  “Well, don’t be gone long. It’s nearly dark.”

  “We won’t,” I said, already wet with anticipation. “Don’t worry.”

  It was after midnight when Luke took me home to Thornberry. By then, my parents were wild with worry. We couldn’t have cared less. I had already brushed the leaves and twigs from my hair, but my lips still felt bruised from Luke’s. It wasn’t a painful bruising—more like that of grapes when their sweetness is released into an elixir; a heady, intoxicating, balm.

  Now, sitting here all these years later, I had to admit to myself that it was way past time to take a good hard look at the kind of men I’d been attracted to over the years. Luke was not bad, but he was a “bad boy” type—the kind most young girls, and many women, are attracted to. He seldom followed the rules, seldom listened to his parents or did as he was told. If there was something Luke could do that was averse to convention, he did it.

  And when it came to women, he was fickle, at best. Back when his parents were having those lawn parties that I wasn’t allowed to attend, he always had a different girl to dance with, always someone new hanging on his arm.

  Until he and I got together that last summer. After that, I didn’t see him with other girls, and I thought he’d finally found The One. Me.

  Maybe he had. Or thought he had. Summer loves. Why do we always think they’ll last forever? And why are they so exceptionally sweet?

  Well, Luke seemed to have reverted to the old ways now. Grace in his arms in less than seventy-two hours? For all I knew, that might not even be a record for Luke, the grown man.

  I closed my eyes and leaned my head back, letting the thin, white April sun warm my face. There was so much more to think about than Luke, or any man. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” The past three months had brought with them more than enough of that—my arrest, my father’s death, my mother’s move to Florida.

  I didn’t understand my mother—never had, though there were many poignant memories of her, like the one of her starching and ironing her lace curtains every Saturday. I had thought her very rigid, to be so particular about whether her curtains were spotless all the time.

  Apparently, she wasn’t all that rigid. Under the surface lived a married woman who had taken Luke’s father, a married man, as her lover.

  I must have dozed off for a while. When I opened my eyes again, the sun had dropped low in the sky, and Amelia and Gabe Rossi were back. The pungent scent of fish cooking over an open fire reached my nostrils. I assumed Gabe Rossi was behind the kitchen cooking it, as Amelia’s and Timmy’s voices drifted through the broken window behind my head.

  “He’s pretty handy to have around,” Amelia was saying. “I wonder what his real story is, though.”

  “Real story?” Timmy asked.

  “If you ask me, there’s something odd about the way he showed up here.”

  “I don’t know if it’s all that odd,” Timmy remarked. “The first thing we did was check out the other houses on the island for either people or supplies.”

  “That’s true. Maybe it’s something else about him, then…”

  Amelia’s voice trailed off, as other voices came from the path leading from the cottages. Luke and Grace. I knew they couldn’t have found Jane’s locket, because I still had it in my other shirt.

  But had Luke and Grace found the Allegra case?

  My stomach tightened as they came into view. Part of me wanted them to have found it, while another part hoped it was well hidden somewhere in the bushes. The alternative was that a third, unknown person had knocked me unconscious and taken the case for his or her own purpose.

  Luke and Grace were both empty-handed. Grace was looking at Luke and smiling—until she saw me sitting there. Then the smile faded. She shoved her hands into her pockets and walked over to me with the usual swagger.

  “Not a sign of that locket,” she said. “Sorry. We looked everywhere.”

  “She’s right,” Luke said. “We looked everywhere
it could have fallen—if you’d been dragged from the cottage. Sarah? I’m confused. We didn’t see any sign that somebody dragged you. The dirt on the path didn’t look as if it had been disturbed.”

  “Maybe whoever attacked me smoothed it out,” I said.

  “I suppose that’s possible. But are you certain you’re remembering correctly? Might you just have staggered out onto the path?”

  “No. I distinctly remember being dragged.”

  “Maybe you’re remembering wrong because of the knock on the head,” Grace said.

  “I am not remembering wrong, Grace.”

  “All right, all right! You don’t have to get testy about it. Anyway, we didn’t find it. Maybe a blackbird took it.”

  “A blackbird?” I squinted up at her.

  “Well, you know how they like shiny things.”

  “I thought that was magpies.”

  “Same difference. Is that fish I smell? Thank God.” She turned and went toward the back of the kitchen, sniffing.

  I looked after her. “For a city girl, Grace seems to know a lot about the country,” I remarked to Luke.

  “Oh?” He sat cross-legged in front of me, on the ground.

  “Well, rats, blackbirds, magpies…”

  “I think they’ve got all those in New York City,” Luke said mildly.

  “So she told you she was from New York?”

  “I guess she mentioned it. Why?”

  “Oh, just that you two seem to be hitting it off. I haven’t seen Grace actually nice to anyone since we arrived here.”

  He grinned. “Are you jealous?”

  “Me? Jealous of Grace? Don’t be silly.”

  “Aw, come on now. Say it. You still have feelings for me.”

  “Sure I do—and we’re on a Hawaiian island right now, with hula dancers and a pig in a pit. Dream on.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted you still to have feelings for me. I just said that you do.”

  “Ha. You’d love it. Then you’d have two of us fawning all over you.”

  “Fawning? You think that’s what Grace is doing?”