Perfect Lies (16 page)

“Happy now, you bastard?” she demanded. She attempted to hit him on the chest, but he stepped deftly aside.

“Spare me the histrionics, Becca,” he told her, and Meg was disturbed to see that he was smiling.

“Feel like a man again?” Becca hissed, fighting his grip. The whole exchange took less than a minute, yet it seemed to compress months of intense loathing. Meg had always believed that couples have one or two core arguments—about money, family, or ambition—that they keep recycling and refining over time. Meg felt that she’d just witnessed that between Becca and Abe. An ugly little morality play right there on the front lawn. It was the first time Meg had seen Abe and Becca together since their breakup, and it was clear to her that the marriage hadn’t just dissolved—it had ignited into hatred.

“Abe, Becca—” Meg hadn’t noticed Lark come around the side of the house, carrying a basket of salad greens in one arm and Fern in the other. Brook and Phoebe trailed along behind her. “I can’t believe you’re fighting here.”

“I’m sorry. “ Abe came to his senses, glancing around at the circle of women. “I better go. We’ll make another date for Scrabble, Brook,” he said as he opened the car door. “Call me if you need anything, Lark.”

“Meg, would you take the girls back to the house?” Lark asked as Abe drove off, handing the basket to Brook and giving Meg the baby. Turning to Becca, she said, “I was going to make a salad for lunch. We’ve been living off these cakes and cookies people have bought us.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t think to bring anything,” Becca apologized, as Lark took her by the arm.

“Meg? You’ll make the girls lunch, please?” Lark said dismissively as she and Becca walked slowly back to the car.

A dispiriting mix of stale cooking smells and damp ash hung in the front hall. The house felt neglected, as though a coat of dust covered everything. But the truth was, Meg thought, that no one was actually living there at the moment. Each of them was existing in her own locked room of sorrow, in a cold gray dimension parallel to the full-color one they used to inhabit.

No one had any appetite either, though Meg put together a big salad and heated up one of the casseroles. Once Brook and Phoebe were seated and picking at their macaroni and cheese, Meg carried Fern back down the hall and slipped into the front dining room, which offered the best view of the turnaround. Becca had turned on her car’s engine and exhaust was pluming down the driveway. The windows were fogged and it was hard to see, but it looked as though both women were smoking. They’d been talking for over twenty minutes. About what? Meg wondered. Didn’t Becca have enough sense to know that this was not exactly the time to burden Lark with her troubles?

Though Meg was never able to make much headway with Becca, Lark had become her closest confidante in Red River. It wasn’t that the two women were friends exactly, sharing time and laughter. It seemed to Meg that Lark was more like Becca’s amateur therapist, or non-denominational Mother Confessor. In the same way Lark turned to Francine for advice and guidance, Becca depended upon Lark. There appeared to be one main problem that they were dealing with, but when Meg had once asked what the hell Lark had been talking to Becca about on the phone for over an hour, Lark had been evasive.

“She just needs someone to listen to her,” Lark had replied. “I know we used to call her Beautiful Becca and all but, believe me, that sort of perfection comes with a price. There’s a good, giving person hiding somewhere under all the hard nails and high gloss. I’m trying to help coax her into the open.”

Lark, the healer. Lark who would do anything, go to any lengths to make the world a better place. As Meg watched, the passenger door opened and Lark emerged from the car, and she felt her heart constrict with love for sister. How pitiful, how sad, that now—when Lark herself most needed comfort and love—Meg was cut off from giving it to her.

Her uselessness was made even more evident later that evening when Francine came by to finalize the plans for Ethan’s funeral the next day. The evening had been filled with phone calls and visitors. Clint and Janine had dropped in, bringing a fully prepared dinner, and Janine had stayed on after Francine had arrived to do the dishes.

“Can I help?” Meg asked Janine, as Lark settled the girls upstairs. Francine was waiting alone in the living room.

“Not really, Meggie honey,” Janine said, her face rosy from the steaming water. “It does me good to be
doing
something. I baked all afternoon just to keep my mind occupied. I’m making some tea now. Perhaps you can take it in to Frannie with that cookie tray?”

Frannie. It seemed an unlikely, girlish nickname, Meg thought, for such a substantial and serious woman. But then Janine tended to cuten up everything around her—from people’s names to the little smiley face she drew in the upper loop of the J in her signature. No one seemed to mind it, because, Meg thought, nobody really bothered to notice. She worked so hard at pleasing others that it was easy to forget that Janine, too, must have emotions and needs.

“How are you taking all this?” Meg asked.

“Oh, I’m just—” Janine’s high-pitched voice warbled and broke. “It’s just… so sad.” Janine was shaking her head, and, though her wide back remained resolutely turned, Meg could tell that she was crying. Not only had she lost a good friend, Meg realized, but her livelihood had been wiped out with that fatal blow. Ethan’s designs and masterly technique were what made the Red River studio so successful. It seemed unlikely that Clint and Janine could carry on without him.

“I’m sorry,” Meg said, taking a step toward her, though something kept her from reaching out a comforting hand. “It’s a tough time for everybody, I know.”

“No-no-nobody can know how hard it is.” Janine sighed and visibly made an effort to pull herself together. “But it’s kind of you to at least ask.”

Lark had joined Francine in the living room by the time Meg came in with the tea.

“Thank you,” Francine said, as she reached for a mug.

“You’ve done so much today, Meggie,” Lark said quickly. “You must be exhausted.” Meg was being dismissed, she realized. Lark would be turning to Francine for the comfort Meg would so willingly have given. She felt Ethan’s long shadow following her up the stairs as she went up to bed. Even from the grave, his powerful presence had managed to come between her and Lark. Unwilling to tell his wife the truth, perhaps unable to face up to it himself, Ethan had implicated her in his own wrongdoings. And now the seeds of doubt and jealousy he had sown were taking root… and spreading.

Much later, when she woke up and heard Lark crying downstairs, Meg started to get out of bed. Then she heard the sonorous rhythms of Francine’s voice, though she couldn’t hear what she was saying. Francine seemed to talk on endlessly, intent on some explanation or instruction. And Meg lay awake, listening to the meaningless river of sound, feeling herself overtaken by an intense, irrational fear. She was certain now that Lark had told Francine about Ethan and her—had passed on the lie that Ethan had started and that now Meg was unable to set right.

Francine seemed, in some way that Meg couldn’t explain, to know about all the dark, complicated workings of the town. The minister looked out over her congregation, heads bowed in prayer, and knew the sins and secret thoughts of every worshiper. Meg felt chilled. Now that Francine had the leverage to do so, she was afraid that the minister would try to drive the wedge between Lark and herself deeper and deeper—until the mistrust and the pain that Ethan had so selfishly inflicted robbed Meg of the one heart, the one home, where she once thought she would always be welcome.

T
he First Congregational Church of Red River had been built in the mid-1880s and was a fine example of classic nineteenth-century New England religious architecture: white clapboard frame and steeple, red arched double doors, simple, stained glass windows, a pipe organ behind the pulpit and choir chapel. The pews, divided by one main aisle, were crafted of local maple and hemlock. A needlepoint banner of gold thread on burgundy velvet, sewn by a group of female parishioners in the 1920s, hung above the organ as the visual centerpiece for the altar. It was composed of two doves holding aloft the scripted letters: THOU WILT SHOW ME THE PATH OF LIFE.

Although the church had always been well-supported by the town, Francine Werling had, during her tenure, enlarged the parishioner base even further by introducing community-oriented programs such as after-school care and meals for the elderly and homebound. Built on a hill, the church basement was actually the first floor, accessible from the large macadam-paved parking lot. The church basement had become the social center of the town. Wedding receptions, town meetings, bake sales, chicken roasts, reading groups—the weekly schedule of events was posted on the glassed-in bulletin board to the right of the double front doors.

Though a school- and workday, the church was packed on the afternoon of Ethan’s funeral. The morning had dawned cold and windy and by two o’clock, when the service was scheduled to begin, the first sleet of the season was gusting through the town. It sounded as though handfuls of pebbles were being thrown angrily up against the large stained-glass windows. The wind howled each time the doors were opened in the entry hall at the back of the church; it whistled down the aisles and fluttered the ribbons on the funeral wreaths grouped around the altar. Bad weather would have done little to deter country folk from coming, though there were people in the congregation that afternoon who hadn’t set foot in the church for decades. Ivar Dyson, Ethan’s neighbor who owned the goat farm, was one, dressed in the only suit he had ever owned, now several sizes too small for him.

A town like Red River, still steeped in agrarian tradition, never failed to stop for death. A life, like nature itself, had its seasons. A murder, however, was something else again. That Ethan’s existence was cut short so tragically was the equivalent of the tornado that ripped through the valley in the early 1970s. It was unnatural and terrifying. The congregation that afternoon was subdued and tense. There had been a lot of angry talk about Lucinda’s bad behavior and her disrupting influence on other teenagers in town. Some stated privately that the family brought the tragedy on themselves.

“Maybe Ethan and Lark were trying to do the right thing,” Meg had overheard Paula Yoder confide to several customers in the general store that morning. “But they put us all in jeopardy with that girl running wild.” When Paula had blocked Lucinda from entering the store after she had been caught stealing cigarettes, Lucinda told Paula that she’d “be getting hers someday.” It was a threat that Paula was now taking too much to heart. In any case, there was a general sadness and confusion in the crowded church, a need for answers and reassurance.

The front right pew had been reserved for the immediate family. At two-fifteen, when people were standing five deep in the back of the church, Clint Lindbergh stepped quietly into the small office off the entranceway where Meg, Lark, and the girls had been waiting. Meg hadn’t seen much of Clint since the murder, though she was aware that he had been running errands for Meg and Francine and had done a yeoman’s job getting the church arranged for the funeral and reception. As the church organist, he usually hit as many sour notes as pure ones, but he was a dutiful and well-meaning musician, putting up with the gibes and insults that his playing prompted with his usual unruffled humor.

“You guys ready?” he asked gently. He was wearing a black suit that looked suspiciously like a slightly altered dinner tux, though the jacket fit his barrel-chested frame with surprising elegance. He’d trimmed his beard and neatly parted and combed his thinning hair; he looked almost handsome. Though he smiled at them all and patted Phoebe’s shoulder affectionately, his red-rimmed eyes gave away his true emotional state. And Meg thought she caught a whiff of beer on his breath.

“I’m going to go around to the organ loft now, and when you hear the first couple of chords of the Bach piece, just start down the aisle.”

One can’t really anticipate a moment—how it will actually feel, the exact combination of impressions that will add up to the reality. Meg thought she’d be able to get through the funeral just fine. This wasn’t her town. She wasn’t a part of all this. And yet, as she walked behind Lark, who was carrying Fern, and Brook and Phoebe, who were holding hands and crying, she found how much she
did
belong to Red River. In the moment, her aching heart suddenly bursting within her—demanding that she face the truth. Before her were many people she knew from town … and others who’d come up from the city. Hannah was there. Becca… Janine… Abe… Seeing them all, and then the flowers at the altar, and then—why hadn’t she been prepared for this?—the coffin with Ethan’s body inside, it really hit her. Ethan was dead. Ethan was gone. And though her feelings for him had changed radically over the last month, he still remained an essential part of her life. Over the last few days, his death had seemed impossible, and therefore, somehow, something she could deal with later. Now it was irrevocably true. It rose before her like a dark mountain. And she knew she had no choice but to climb it.

“Friends.” Francine held her arms up, embracing them all. “Dear family.” Francine nodded to Lark. The minister was dressed in a white robe with a red satin mantle and gold-corded sash. When she looked out over the congregation above the half lenses of her reading glasses, her luminous gaze seemed to meet each and every eye.

“Ethan McGowan was not a religious person.” Francine looked down at her notes and then up again. “He was not the kind of man you could label easily. For some in this town he was a good friend. For his daughters … he was the best father you could ever ask for. And for Lark … I think we all understand how special Ethan and Lark’s marriage really was….

She was trying, Meg thought. Francine was making a real effort to sound the appropriate notes of sorrow and affection. But it was only after she had paid the necessary tributes to Ethan, only when she had moved on to her prepared sermon that Francine’s face took on its characteristic beaming glow and her words—always carefully crafted—found a life of their own. Meg listened to her tone as much as to her message—the lulling, almost hypnotizing promise in her voice.