Crooked Little Lies (5 page)

Pat ducked out from under the hood and declared she did indeed have a bad harmonic balancer.

“What is that?” Annie asked.

“Well, without getting too technical, it keeps the engine, in particular the crankshaft, working smoothly. But over time, it can get loose, or the rubber wears out, and the engine will run rough and make a lot of noise, or it’ll quit altogether.”

“Is it expensive to fix?”

“Depends. If it’s just the balancer, you’re looking at maybe a couple hundred, but if there’s belt damage or damage to the crankshaft, it’ll run more. Thing is, I don’t have the right parts here to fix it. I’d have to order them out of Houston. I don’t see that many BMWs, especially vintage BMWs.” He smiled.

Annie thought it was kind of him not to call the car what it was, a beater. She wanted to kick the tire again but refrained.

He said, “Might take a day or two. To get the parts, I mean.”

“Oh, no,” she said.

“I can take you to Fishers’,” Cooper said, “and back to town . . . and wherever.” He shrugged.

She glanced sidelong at him, unable to imagine he was as eager as he sounded to become her chauffeur. She thought how uncomfortable it would make her, riding alongside him, taking up his time, being in his debt. But what choice did she have? She thanked him and thanked his dad. She offered Cooper gas money, too, even though she had no idea where it would come from, but he refused.

He said he needed to go to Fishers’ anyway, and when his dad shot him a glance, he said, “What? Mom told me she wanted a pumpkin. I’m going to get her one.”

“Really? Don’t you think you’re a little old for a jack-o’-lantern?”

“Geeze, Dad. Pie. She wants it for pie.”

“Oh, yeah, right.” Pat winked at Annie, and she ducked her head, feeling charmed, feeling the heat from the pleasure she took in their bantering color her cheeks.

“Are you sure it’s no trouble?” Annie asked when she and Cooper were under way. They’d left the tow truck and were in Cooper’s pickup. Rufus poked his nose into the space between the seats, and she gave it a scratch.

Cooper said it was no problem. He said, “I was serious about Mom wanting a pumpkin.”

“Oh, of course. I know that.”

They rode in silence the rest of the way, and after a few minutes, Cooper pulled in through the farm’s entrance, slowing more than was necessary, saying to Annie, “You asked about my art. I made this gate.”

“It’s amazing,” she said, meaning it. The image, rendered in metal, was of a cow and its calf, peering out from beneath the stylized, wide-spreading canopy of a live oak. Across the top of the gate, a row of scrolling letters spelled “Fisher and Sons Organic Farm.” “The detail is so precise. It’s steel, isn’t it? How do you cut steel into those tiny leaves, into the shape of a cow?”

“You’ll have to come by my studio sometime, and I’ll show you.”

Annie didn’t answer. They stopped in front of the farm store just as Len Fisher came across the drive, and she was glad for the distraction. The men backslapped one another and agreed it had been too long.

“I didn’t know you knew each other,” Len said, looking from Cooper to Annie.

Cooper explained about the car. Annie said she’d come for Madeleine’s order and the bushel basket of Small Sugars that Len had set aside for her.

Pretty soon, they had everything loaded in the back of Cooper’s truck, and Annie started to climb inside, but then she stopped, looking across the hood at Len. “You haven’t seen Bo in the last day or two, have you?”

He thought a second. “Nah. Last time was maybe a week, ten days ago. He was walking the overpass near Woodridge and Pike.”

Annie made a face and said what she knew Len was thinking. “He’s going to get killed.”

“I started to pull over and get him. At least to tell him—” Len broke off. He and Annie both knew that neither action would have done any good. Bo went his own way; he did what he wanted to do.

Cooper was looking between them. “Who’s Bo?” he asked.

Annie’s surprise at Cooper’s ignorance was weighted with dismay. She didn’t like having to explain any better than she liked answering nosy questions. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of Bo as much as she hated that once she told people, they backed away. They didn’t want to hear the medical terms, the host of psychological jargon Bo had been saddled with, most of it within the past five years. It angered Annie, too, because there were still periods of time when he was pretty normal, an ordinary person with an extreme amount of intelligence and a few quirks. Who didn’t have a few quirks?

“He’s Annie’s brother,” Len began.

“Stepbrother.” She corrected him automatically. “He has some issues—” Breaking off, she looked at Cooper, but there was nothing to do but say it. “If you’ve ever seen the guy who walks the roads around town, that’s Bo. That’s my stepbrother.”

“I have seen him.” Cooper’s gaze on hers was steady. “In fact, I saw him earlier today.”

“Where?” Annie asked.

“In the convenience store, the one on Bayberry where it crosses I-45. I’m pretty sure he got into a car there, a black Lincoln, a Town Car. A woman was driving it.”

“We don’t know anyone who drives a Town Car,” Annie said. She and Len exchanged a glance.

Cooper looked nonplussed.

“Bo wouldn’t get in the car with a stranger,” Annie said. “It’s one of his rules. He’s fanatical about it.”

5

A
ll Lauren could think about were the Oxy tablets. Where had they come from? How had they happened to be buried in that basket?
Did Jeff know about them?
That was the question that left her cold. When he called on Saturday morning, she waited with breath held while he talked about sorting through her granddad’s tools, and an old Hoosier cabinet he’d found in the barn. But Lauren was listening so hard for the other—an accusation about the drugs—she didn’t really register what he said or even how she responded. What if he was waiting for her to say something about the Oxy? What if this was a test? The notion crashed into her brain. She imagined his response if she were to try to defend herself, if she were to tell him how near dawn, after doing little more than dozing all night, she’d bolted upright, tossed aside the covers, gone into the bathroom, and swept the tablets into the toilet, flushing it before she could stop herself.

At first, she was horrified—what had she done?—and then almost immediately, she felt ridiculously righteous and celebratory, but she was no closer to figuring out how she’d come to have the drugs in her possession, and even if she could explain it, Jeff would never believe her. He’d get that look on his face. She could picture it: the faint curl of his lip, the way he had of rolling his eyes.

After Jeff let her go, Lauren called her sponsor.

“Maybe I was hallucinating,” she said. “I’ve done it before.”

“While you were still in the hospital, you mean,” Gloria said.

“Yes, but I’ve done it since I got home, too. Once. I woke up from a nap convinced I’d been to the grocery store and bought stuff for dinner, a chicken, potatoes, even a Caesar salad. I mean, I could feel it in my hand. You know how those salad bags are cool and kind of moist? But later, when I looked for the chicken, it wasn’t in the fridge. None of what I could have sworn I bought was there. Crazy, huh?” Lauren laughed shakily, but the memory still frightened her.

“I had vivid dreams, too, getting off booze,” Gloria said, “and I remember once after I stopped, about a year later, my husband found a half-empty fifth of bourbon above the ceiling in the garage. I must have hidden it there, but I had no recollection of it. Maybe that’s what happened with you. Maybe the effect is even more intense because you hurt your head.”

Lauren considered the idea. “The dream, though . . . finding the Oxy like that, right after—I don’t know. It just seems . . .”

Is there a more logical explanation?

The silence filled up with the question.

Lauren would celebrate her first year of sobriety next month, while Gloria was an old hand at recovery, twenty-three years down the road. She was calm and reassuring. She said Lauren was doing great. “But maybe you should call your doctor.”

Lauren said she would if it happened again, but even that was a stretch. Bettinger would order tests, all kinds of scans. He’d pull out his trusty pad and write out a script for some medication. She wasn’t going back to that. She wasn’t living that life anymore. She couldn’t bear to listen to his warning that there might be increasingly more terrible symptoms lurking in her future than the ones she had already experienced. Seizures, for instance, or going totally bonkers. If she wasn’t already.

“Put it behind you for now, then,” Gloria advised.

And Lauren tried. By Saturday afternoon, when her headache was completely gone, she drove out to the warehouse. Jeff had left the store in the charge of the two part-timers for the weekend, who in addition to being students at the University of Houston were also the sons of neighbors. She let them go, shooing them away when they protested, thinking they were around the same age as Bo Laughlin. She didn’t know why, but his situation weighed on her. He was like a loose bolt, an odd part, rattling around the streets. She worried for him; she worried for herself.

Had she hidden those Oxy tablets the way Gloria had hidden her bourbon? Suppose there were more in the house and Jeff or one of the kids found them?

Going into the office at the back of the warehouse, she sat down at Jeff’s desk, intending to check their e-mail, but instead, when she woke the computer, her attention caught on the screen saver Jeff had created using a montage of photos from past deconstruction projects. There were a few of the old dairy barn they’d taken down five years ago and a couple of the two circa-1900 Craftsman bungalows that had been in the same tiny town, even on the same block. The town’s name slipped her memory now. There was one taken in Houston of a 1970s-era, ranch-style house, where of all things, they’d recovered a thirty-six-inch Wolf gas range in near pristine condition. There were several shots of Jeff and a crew that included Lauren and Tara in hard hats, holding pry bars, filthy and grinning at day’s end, standing in front of the goods they’d salvaged: piles of lumber, vintage windows and doors, light fixtures, cast-iron sinks, a claw-foot tub, hand-turned porch posts, ornately carved cornice trim, ceiling medallions, all kinds of hardware—a veritable treasure trove of times gone by, that once it was cleaned up could be repurposed to become a beloved part of someone else’s history.

That was the heart of it for Lauren, what she loved most about the work and where she derived the most satisfaction. A couple of the nurses, even Dr. Bettinger, had asked her how she could do it, why she would do such hard, dirty work, as if the salvage business was no place for women. But there was a lot a woman could do, from taking down chandeliers to unscrewing cabinet door fronts to gently prying vintage beadboard from lath walls. But where she often made a difference was in her size. She was five seven, slim and lithe, where Jeff was big, broad shouldered, and tall at six and a half feet.

The day they met, Jeff’s size was the first thing Lauren noticed about him. It was three years after her parents died, and Lauren had taken over running their antiques shop. Named for her father, Freddie Tate’s was in the Rice Village then and catered to clientele who preferred higher-end, handpicked European furnishings with a decidedly French flair. Lauren had kept up that inventory, and the shop was crammed with a collection of Louis XV armoires and buffets, assorted chairs and tables. The day Jeff walked in, Lauren glanced up to see this enormous man, standing in the doorway, staring at the crowded collection of period furniture and locked, glass-fronted display cases loaded with priceless china, and the what-am-I-doing-here look on his face was so comical, it made her laugh.

“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.