Perfect Lies (21 page)

“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 dismissed 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?

I
t
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.

And Meg had decided to take comfort these days anywhere she could find it. She stopped briefly in front of the bench where she had sat with Ethan. It seemed utterly impossible now that it had been only six weeks ago. Her world had changed in so many ways since then. No, she corrected herself,
she
had changed. In almost every area of her life, she could feel herself being more cautious. She thought twice before voicing her opinions. She took more time to think about problems at the office. She was now aware of things that she had previously taken for granted: her staff at the agency, the business itself, her friends, and, probably more than anything else, her family.

Since returning from Red River after the funeral, she’d spoken to her sister on the phone at least a dozen times, sometimes for hours on end. She tried her best to feel Lark out about her feelings toward Ethan—the anger, the humiliation that might have led her to kill him. But Lark assiduously avoided any subject that was the least bit depressing. These calls were like their old conversations, rambling digressions, mostly about Lark’s day-to-day concerns—the girls, the Lindberghs, the studio, her writing.

“It’s so hard to get back into it,” she’d confided to Meg during their phone session that afternoon. “I’ve been through so much… and my little characters are still exactly the same. They seem so innocent, so cute—I feel like kicking them in their adorable butts.”

“I know what you mean,” Meg said. Ethan’s murder had also altered some of her relationships in subtle and sometimes subversive ways. She had been talking to an old college friend who had complained about problems she was having with her longtime boyfriend: He didn’t know how to be truly intimate; he was spending too much time at his brokerage firm; he’d forgotten their two-year dating anniversary. Had Meg really listened to this kind of whining with interest before? She just wanted to scream: “Grow up! You have no idea what real problems are like.”

The old Meg would probably have responded with much less concern to the ongoing bad news about Frieda Jarvis. The new Meg was growing increasingly alarmed. While her phone calls to the wayward fashion designer went unanswered and her letters were ignored, three more articles on Jarvis appeared in the business and trade papers, each mentioning that the financially troubled apparel company was looking for prospective investors to staunch its hemorrhaging cash flow. The best-guess earnings that one of articles had given for Jarvis’s most recent quarters were a mere half of what Meg had been owed for the past six months. This finally made her pick up the phone to call Abe.

“What if there’s no money left?” she had asked Abe, “I kept thinking that she was just slowing down on paying me because she knew I would be more lenient than her other creditors. Now I’m afraid I’ve waited too long.”

“Welcome to the real world,” Abe said. “I won’t say I told you so.”

“Oh, come on, you know you just did. But listen, Abe. I’m worried. I’ve been putting off suppliers for a couple of months now. Haven’t paid some of the bigger media, hoping they won’t notice. But I can’t go on like this. Bad credit for an advertising agency is the same thing as a death knell.”

“We’ll have to sue her,” Abe said without hesitation. “Believe me, I’m sure others are lining up to do so as we speak. But you’re out a lot of front money here, more I’d guess than any of her other vendors. We’ll rush the papers through. We should have everything in order by the end of the week.”

When Meg didn’t immediately respond, Abe continued in a more conciliatory tone: “I’m sorry about this. I know you two began as friends. But there’s literally no other recourse at this point than the law. I’m sure this is hard on you, but—”

“The only thing that’s hard on me is the realization that I should have listened to you three months ago.”

“Getting tough.”

“Gotten,” Meg said. “About a lot of things.”

“You know, one of the qualities I’ve always admired in you,” Abe said, “is that you’ve conducted business on your own terms. It’s true that you haven’t been particularly hardheaded. You’ve given people the benefit of the doubt when you probably shouldn’t have. But you’ve been strong without losing—you’re going to have my head for this—without losing your femininity. I think that’s one of the reasons so many of your clients are loyal. You’re
you.
Not some by-the-numbers advertising exec.”

“And by this you’re trying to say?”

“Don’t get too tough.”

After the mob scene at Fifty-seventh and Fifth, the crowd began to thin out. At the Plaza Hotel, Meg crossed over to the east side of Fifth and walked north along one of the most expensive stretches of real estate in the world. Doormen nodded to Meg as she strode past the canopied entranceways, chandeliers gleaming behind them in the marble-covered lobbies. Meg had the look of someone who might belong there. With her good eye and access to the sample sales of all the top designers, she dressed with conservative flair. Blacks and beiges and navy blues. Cashmere, linen, silk. The lines were what mattered, the magic of a perfect bias cut fluttering at the knee, the jacket collar resting on the shoulders like a mantle.

Money. You could smell it on the chill night air. A subtle perfume, nothing too strong or memorable but lingering, elusive, like the cushioned interior of the chauffeur-driven Mercedes that stopped as Meg passed. The car door opening, the gloved hand on the upholstered handle, the casual way the occupant’s black leather heels touched—one, then two—the sidewalk. Money. And leisure.

Leisure—Meg didn’t have it. The nonchalance of the brown-and-white striped Bendels shopping bags, the perfect posture of a woman who never had to make a deadline in her life. The surety that the world would wait for you. That when you were ready, someone blew a whistle, and a limo or taxi pulled up to the curb. Nothing had ever simply
been
there for Meg. She had to drive herself to go out and get what she wanted. She had to learn what it took to get things done. There was in her very walk a certain competence that comes only from working—and working hard. It was an attitude that would forever separate her from the woman who emerged from the Mercedes and, without a word to the driver or a smile for the doorman, sauntered through the gleaming double bronze doors.

Don’t get too tough,
Abe had said and yet, though Meg had always been a firm believer in creating your own destiny, sometimes life just blindsided you. That’s what Ethan felt like to her now: a bad accident that had left her both physically and emotionally damaged. Meg, who had never been afraid of anything or anyone, was now more than a little wary of the one person she thought she could always count on: herself. How she’d allowed herself to be duped by Ethan, how she had actually come to believe he was good for her sister she would probably never understand. It didn’t help that she hadn’t been alone in misunderstanding Ethan’s true character. The fact that he’d manipulated countless women over the years did not make it any easier for her. Because Meg had always prided herself on knowing about men. She could generally size up a man within the first three minutes of meeting him. And she had rarely been wrong. So how had her signals gotten so disastrously crossed with Ethan? How had she let him insinuate himself into her life? This destructive man had left an enormous amount of damage in his wake—a trail of distrust, betrayal, and emotional pain, the extent of which Meg was only beginning to fully comprehend.

Meg had promised Lucinda that she would help her—though she’d admitted that she didn’t know how she would go about doing so. Red River and everyone associated with the murder were two and a half hours north of the city. Though she planned to visit Lark over the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend, she didn’t have much time these days for more than the occasional morale-boosting phone call to Lucinda, who remained in the hospital, mending slowly. For the time being, her hands were tied, though her mind kept returning to the subject of the murder and its aftermath.

Recently she had begun to think about Hannah Judson. She had seemed so eager at the funeral to talk to Meg about Ethan—perhaps Hannah herself could cast some light on Ethan’s final weeks. She’d called Hannah and they’d chatted on the phone. At the end of the conversation, the gallery owner had invited Meg on a private tour of a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum.