Perfect Lies Read online

  “It’s not what I might want,” Lark said, “but what Ethan would have wanted. He knew he could make more money if he had a store, if he gave classes, if he turned the studio into a kind of commercial center. He knew all that, but he was adamant about not going that route. He wanted to keep his work pure. You start giving classes to people in this town, or to tourists during the summer—everybody begins turning out the same cookie-cutter bud vases—it diminishes the real work, dumbs down the whole art of glassblowing into something that anyone can learn in one easy lesson on a rainy afternoon.”

  “Okay,” Meg said. “But isn’t a little diminution of integrity better than total loss of income?”

  “You don’t lose your integrity in little bits. Once it’s up for grabs, it’s just gone, okay? Ethan knew that. He believed very deeply in what he was doing. I don’t think you really understood that about him.”

  “There was a lot about Ethan I didn’t understand. Until this past weekend. But I’m finally beginning to get the picture. No thanks to you.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You talk to me about integrity, Lark. Ethan’s integrity? For chrissakes—he screwed around on you with every attractive woman he could find. How can you talk to me about wanting to honor the memory of someone who would do that to you?”

  Since Ethan’s murder, Meg had noticed that her sister seemed to have a hard time focusing her gaze. Now, looking distractedly at Meg, Lark said, “You don’t know the first thing about Ethan and me.”

  “That’s because you’ve been doing everything in your power to keep it from me,” Meg said. The time had come to open up on how she really felt about her sister’s so-called happy marriage. “You knew perfectly well what Ethan was up to behind your back. He apparently had a long history of it. But I had to learn the dirty truth all by myself—and then I had to learn how long it’s been going on from Francine and others in this town—from near strangers. Not from my own sister—the person closest to me in the whole world. I can’t believe you’ve been concealing this from me for all these years.”

  “I knew you’d never understand.” Lark got up from the table and walked over to the sink. She leaned against the counter and gazed out the window at the monotone landscape. “You … Francine … nobody can possibly know what it was like. What Ethan was really like. How loving. Protective. We were his nest. His family. We were everything he worked for. Everything he truly loved.”

  “I don’t mean to be cruel, but if that was the case, how can you justify all those other women?”

  “They didn’t mean anything to him. I knew that.He kept reassuring me, but he didn’t have to. I believed him. Listen, I know that Ethan was far from perfect. He had his demons. He had something in him—a drive, a fire, a kind of desperate passion that nobody, that nothing, could seem to satisfy. We talked about it a great deal, especially in the beginning. It did hurt me some then—those episodes. Initially, I saw them as you probably do now—infidelities, betrayals. But, we kept talking, kept trying to figure things out, because I also knew how much he loved me. How much he adored the girls.”

  “And me, too, Lark, remember? He certainly made a point of showing how much he cared about me. Listen, he basically tried to rape me, okay? And if you believed for a single second that I ‘shared’ his attraction, you’d better think again. I was never more humiliated and afraid in my life.”

  “I loved Ethan.” Lark began to cry. “I loved him more than anything in the world.”

  “And he betrayed you. Over and over again. Baby, I’m asking again. Why didn’t you come to me? Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

  “What? You, who’d warned me that he’d break my heart?” Lark shook her head. “Remember, that’s what you predicted would happen? And when it began to appear that you were right—I just couldn’t face you. I wanted you to believe in me. I wanted you to respect us. I couldn’t begin to explain it to you. To anyone. Except him. So we talked. We analyzed. We came to realize what it was. Why it was. It had to do with his creativity. His need to mold, to possess. It was his way of working things through. These women …”

  “Were just a part of his creative process?” Meg said bitterly. “Like firing an oven? Or rotating the pontil? ‘Excuse me, dear, but I have to go out now and fuck some unsuspecting girl so that I can keep my creative juices flowing?’ It was okay because Ethan was an artist}”

  “You see?” Lark replied quietly. “You don’t understand. I knew you wouldn’t. I don’t really expect you to. What Ethan and I shared … it was beyond the bounds of what most people experience. I let him go his own way, I gave him complete freedom, because I understood finally that that was the best way for me to show him how much I loved him. You can’t cage a man like that. You can’t put limits on the kind of marriage we had.”

  “God, you should hear yourself! Justifying Ethan’s outrages so calmly … so patly!” Meg moved her chair backward, scraping it along the floor. She stood now, too angry to sit any longer. Lark also rose and retreated to the pantry. Meg watched as she shuffled through an untidy drawer, pulled out a packet of rolling papers, and started to lay out a row of cigarettes on the counter.

  “He really had you fooled, didn’t he?” Meg continued. “Francine told me that he had a kind of funny way of knowing just which buttons to push with a woman—what her secret longings were, where they were hidden. He knew yours all right—he knew how you fancied yourself a free spirit—unconventional, undemanding. And if you were so free with your spirit, why shouldn’t he be free with his love? But, you know what, Lark? I don’t believe for a single minute that it was okay with you. I think it must have killed you a little bit inside every single time you discovered he was screwing around with someone new.”

  “What Ethan did on his own time was his own business,” Lark said. “It was separate from me, from us. I didn’t condone it, Meg. But I could forgive it. We were a family.” Her voice was wobbly but Meg couldn’t decide if it was from conviction or anger.

  “And Lucinda? Wasn’t she a part of that family? Look at her now.”

  Lark lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, her eyes roving over the pie cupboard, its shelves stacked neatly with tiny blue and green bottles of homemade tinctures, the bouquets of dried herbs hanging upside down above the old porcelain double sink next to them. She turned to face Meg. The fact that she had lost weight since Ethan’s murder didn’t surprise Meg; Lark hadn’t been eating much of anything, subsisting, it seemed, largely on a diet of herbal smokes and green tea. But now she noticed that Lark had lost something else as well. The glowing eagerness that once infused her face was gone. Her features seemed to have congealed into a dark mask of uncertainty and deep sorrow. Though Lark was mother to three young girls, Meg had always thought of her—up until Ethan’s death—as a girl herself. Spontaneous and carefree, Lark had been the confiding, giving, almost ridiculously optimistic one. All that had been snuffed out. The woman who faced Meg now would never laugh with the abandon of pure happiness again. And though Lark no doubt thought that her world had started to collapse with Ethan’s death, Meg now believed that the damage began the day Ethan McGowan walked into her sister’s life.

  “I was asking for your advice,” Lark said after a moment. “Not your approval.”

  “Okay.” Meg touched Lark’s shoulder. Lark didn’t flinch and Meg kept her hand there. She said, “Let the Lindberghs take on the studio for six months. See how it goes. You can always change your mind later if you think it’s not working out.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “That way you can concentrate on your own work—the book, the girls. You can get on with your life.”

  Meg knew that she was offering the most banal of platitudes, but Lark nodded her assent. They stood there together for a moment, an arm’s length away. And then, sighing, they walked into each other’s arms. They might never be able to forgive or truly understand what had happened between them but they still needed one another, Meg knew. And that was all that
mattered now.

  19

  Meg hadn’t planned to stop and see Lucinda on her way back to the city the day after Ethan’s funeral. Usually, she took the scenic, meandering back roads down to the parkway. But she needed to make it back to Manhattan by early afternoon to deal with work that had piled up at the office, so she opted for the more direct route through Montville. When she found herself near the hospital, she pulled in. At the time she told herself it was purely an impulse. Later on she realized that she’d probably put herself there on purpose. She had so many questions on her mind, and she knew that she needed to resolve the most pressing one first: Did she believe Lucinda’s claim of innocence? That the girl hadn’t killed Ethan?

  According to the nurse who had met Meg at the elevator and led her to the infirmary, Lucinda was still on the IV because of an infection that had spread from the third-degree burns on her palms. This sort of thing wasn’t at all unusual, the nurse assured Meg, but they’d needed to take precautions nevertheless. The intravenous feeding had caused Lucinda to drop some weight. That, combined with a new short haircut the state provided the patient free of charge, had dramatically altered Lucinda’s appearance. Her complexion remained pasty and uneven, there was a pimple on her chin, but the weight loss bought out the structure of her face: the high cheekbones, the wide expressive brow. With the red dye nearly gone, her hair was now a thin mousy chestnut color. Short bangs accentuated the liquid amber of her brown eyes. There was a new vulnerability in Lucinda’s expression, the stripped down, raw, and authentic look of someone who had little left to lose.

  “Meg? Thanks so much for coming…” Lucinda said, her eyes widening with surprise as Meg approached. She tensed when Meg leaned over and kissed her forehead. This, too, was something different—Lucinda was grateful. Meg noticed that the bandages on Lucinda’s hands were far less bulky than when she had visited two days before; the taut bands of gauze looked something like the fingerless gloves pop star Michael Jackson used to wear.

  “How are you feeling?” Meg asked.

  “Terrified,” Lucinda whispered. “I think that they’re out to get me, Meg. And I think they’re going to do it.”

  “Boardman’s an excellent criminal lawyer,” Meg reassured her, repeating what Abe had said. “He’s done a lot of juvenile cases. You’re in good hands.”

  “Oh yeah?” Lucinda had tears in her eyes when she said, “He was here yesterday, and we had a big old talk. I went through the whole thing with him again. As far as I can tell, he has me signed, sealed, and delivered. He discussed term stays with me. Good behavior. How everyone is looking for leniency. Well, you know what I think? I think you all should spend some time looking for the fucking truth.”

  “And what do you think the truth is?” Meg asked her, pulling up a chair and sitting down by the bed.

  “I don’t know,” Lucinda said. “I keep going over in my head all the people I know in that town who didn’t like Ethan. There were plenty, Meg. I think I knew more than most people did about the uglier side of Red River. Everyone saw me as a troublemaker, a bad seed, you know? And one of the main reasons they didn’t like me—I mean, right off the bat—was because they knew I was from Ethan’s past. Forget the fact that I wasn’t even related to the bastard. It was guilt by association.”

  “Is there any one person, though? Anyone with a clear-cut motive you can think of?”

  “Well, let’s start with all the husbands of the women Ethan fucked. That already gives us a list about as long as your arm.”

  “Yes, but all of those affairs were in the past,” Meg pointed out. “From what I can tell, Ethan went through women one at a time. And we both know where he’d turned his attention before he died. I can’t think why a husband would suddenly get jealous—enough to put him into a homicidal rage—months after the fact.”

  “Well, how about the women themselves?” Lucinda asked, sitting up a bit in the bed. “Maybe one of them still had a thing for Ethan. Maybe she was pissed that he’d moved on, you know.”

  “That could be. But she would need to have been really furious with Ethan—and seriously in love with him. I don’t know… would you really murder someone because he didn’t love you anymore?”

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “You mean Lark?” Meg said, meeting Lucinda’s troubled gaze. “I’ve been thinking about her since you told Abe and me two days ago that you didn’t kill Ethan. You see, when Lark told me you’d had a miscarriage—and implied Ethan had been the father—I was convinced you’d murdered him. And I totally understood why. I knew how aggressive and manipulative he could be. I would have gotten on the stand to testify as such. But when you said Ethan hadn’t so much as touched you …”

  “Meg, I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles,” Lucinda said eagerly.

  “I’ve a feeling you’ll have to swear on at least one,” Meg said. “The thing is—I suddenly realized that your scenario made sense. Also, why would you be holding the burning end of the pontil? I think your hands were burned because you did pull it out—that you did try to save Ethan’s life rather than take it.”

  “So, you really do believe me, Meg?” Lucinda’s eyes were brimming, her face bright with expectation.

  “I think I do, but I still have a lot of questions. Why did you flush the fetus down the toilet, Lucinda?”

  “Because I didn’t know I was pregnant?”

  “I wish I could believe you. But I don’t think I do. That’s the one thing you’re holding back, as far as I can tell. You did know you were pregnant—and you were relieved when you lost it. You thought no one would be able to tell what had happened to you. You hoped that you were flushing something away you’d never have to deal with again.”

  Lucinda, her eyes squeezed shut, couldn’t keep the tears from slipping out. She lay back on the pillows and, with her eyes still closed, said with a sob, “It’s not any of your fucking business, okay? All you need to know is that Ethan had absolutely nothing to do with it.”

  “I know,” Meg said gently. “I believe you about that. And for now, at least, I won’t ask you anything more about it. But at some point, Luce, I’m going to have to know. Everything. If you want my help—I’m going to need your total honesty.”

  Lucinda’s eyes flew open.

  “You’re going to help me then?”

  “I don’t know how yet,” Meg said, “but, yes, I’m going to try.”

  In some ways, Meg could understand why so many people wanted to blame Lucinda for Ethan’s death. It would be so simple and somehow appropriate to have this troubled outsider be the culprit. Knowing what everyone certainly did now about Lucinda’s miscarriage, they could assume what Lark had already insinuated: Lucinda killed Ethan because he’d gotten her pregnant. Good riddance to bad trash, the town could declare with impunity. Two birds killed with one stone. It would have been easier for Meg, as well, because the murder would then make sense and Lucinda would be seen as a victim herself in the eyes of the law. The leniency Boardman predicted would be forthcoming. Yes, Lucinda would no doubt have to spend some time in prison. But, with good behavior, she’d be out in time to pick up the pieces of her life and move on. Just as Red River would have moved on—quickly, quietly, smoothing over whatever ugly truth they all seemed so determined to hide.

  All the way back to the city Meg turned over the next question in her mind, and it was a far more complicated and dangerous one. If Lucinda didn’t murder Ethan, who did?

  Meg considered the people she knew personally who didn’t like Ethan. Francine and Abe came immediately to mind. But they’d both been so free and frank about their objections to Ethan; surely, if either one had been driven to kill the man, he or she would have not been nearly so forthcoming. Then Meg thought about those who cared for Ethan, those who seemed to have loved, or at least admired him: Hannah, Clint, Janine. Ethan was a man who inspired strong emotions in others—who provoked response. Arrogant, demanding, charming, impossible, he either loved you or dis
missed you. He had no patience for the middle ground. And there seemed to be no one close to Ethan who didn’t respond to him with the same degree of passion. Meg reminded herself then how easily love could turn to loathing, admiration to anger.

  A murder victim’s spouse is always the most obvious suspect, she knew. And, in this case, she was well aware that once the police began interviewing people in the town, the facts about Ethan’s philandering would lead the authorities to go back and requestion Lark. Yes, Lucinda had been found with the murder weapon in her hand. But it was Lark who had come up with the motive—she’d started the speculation about Ethan being the father of Lucinda’s miscarried baby. Why had Lark done that? Lucinda had made no bones about her promiscuity. But it was a big leap from promiscuity to sleeping with one’s stepfather. Had Lark meant to mislead? Or had she simply jumped to the wrong conclusion during a time of extreme emotional stress?

  As Meg thought about these problems, she returned again and again to the most important question. Did she have enough strength, enough determination, or enough courage to look for Ethan’s real killer… even if it meant she might find her own sister?

  20

  It was over forty blocks from Meg’s offices off Bryant Park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but once she realized that she would never be able to get a taxi at rush hour and with nearly an hour to spare before she was scheduled to meet Hannah at the museum, Meg decided to walk. She cut diagonally through the park behind the New York Public Library and crossed the great rectangle of lawn, the high windows of the office buildings surrounding the park glittering through the gathering dusk with an alluring intimacy. She loved the city at night, especially during the week, when one could almost feel the pulse of urban life—the commuters running for the subway, the theatergoers hurrying off to an early dinner, the worlds within worlds ebbing and flowing around her. The collective power of crowds had always moved her; listening to the national anthem in a stadium full of fans sent a shiver down her spine. She found comfort in numbers, in knowing that others were there beside her, in recognizing that everybody knew the same words by heart.