If the Witness Lied (14 page)

Smithy claps her hands, because it seems a better move than wrapping them around Angus’s throat. “Let’s hurry. Maddy and Jacky get out of school at three, so they’ll be home by three-thirty.”

Her sister hates being called Maddy and Jack has never once been called Jacky.

But Angus follows Smithy’s lead. “Maddy and Jacky have a half day at school. He’s at a soccer game with Tris, and Maddy has a dentist appointment.”

Angus sounds like a member of the family. Maybe he’s been
filming for days. It sounds as if Madison is living at home now too, and going to their old school again. Nobody’s told Smithy. But why would they? How stupid to text
what team r u on
to the very people whose team she quit. She’s the one not on the team.

Ten minutes until she gets home. Ten minutes in which she cannot cry, cannot give this man a syllable. She begs Angus to tell her about his work. He goes into detail about a show where the children have dreadful, disfiguring birth defects. The surgical repairs leave hideous scars. He describes the special lighting they use so that these scars can be seen clearly by the viewers.

Angus—the man who will scar Tris for life—takes the exit for Smithy’s house.

*   *   *

“You have any money?” Jack asks his sister.

Madison gives him a twenty.

“Wow. Do the Emmers give you an allowance?”

“No. Wade does. Don’t you get an allowance?”

Aunt Cheryl gives him lunch money. But he doesn’t have an allowance. There’s no time to consider this. “Tris, we’re going to get something to eat,” says Jack. “Find your fire truck and drive it back here.”

“Okay.” Tris sets off. When he comes upon the fire truck, he forgets about driving it back to Jack. He’s on his hands and knees, taking the corners hard, and yelling, “Fire! Get out of the way!”

Jack takes advantage of this gift of time to open his father’s
cell phone. He pulls up the first picture, which will actually be the last one Dad ever took.

At family events, like this night at the restaurant, they used to take turns with the camera, so nobody ended up left out of every photograph. There should be at least one of Dad himself. It’s an unsettling thought. Will Dad look alive, waving like a living portrait in a Harry Potter movie?

But what comes up is not from the Japanese restaurant. It’s a clear but meaningless picture of pale ridges, wrinkles, curves and a red spot.

“Fingers,” says Madison finally, “making a fist.”

“Cheryl’s fingers,” says Jack. “The red is her thumbnail.”

“She didn’t go with us to the Japanese restaurant,” objects Madison.

Jack is puzzled. When did Dad take a picture of Cheryl’s fist? And why? What came later than their final dinner out?

The next photo is also confusing. Blurry darkness with pale blobs around the edges.

Madison is laughing. “Tris’s fingertips,” she says. “Aren’t they sweet? So it’s Tris taking the pictures.”

Jack’s mouth tastes funny. He’s losing the ability to breathe again.

The third picture is Cheryl’s face, very close. Little clots of mascara clog her eyelashes.

He clicks. The fourth photograph is the dashboard of the Jeep. There can be no confusion about where the photographer is—the angle is from the passenger side, and slightly above.

So these photographs have to have been taken after that
dinner out. Taken by Tris. In the Jeep. There is only one time in his life when Tristan Fountain was standing up in the front seat of the Jeep holding Daddy’s cell phone in two hands.

A cell phone not only stores pictures, it dates them. This one presents not just the day, month and year, but also the hour and the minute.

Jack is weak with shock. Tris was taking these pictures as their father died.

The fifth picture shows Cheryl through the Jeep window. No head—just her trunk. She’s wearing the olive wool suit he suddenly remembers from that terrible day. Her arm and hand rest on the window, her ring catching the light.

The sixth photograph is at the Japanese restaurant, taken by Dad, because all four children are in it and Dad isn’t. Not one child is looking at the camera. They are all distracted and unaware.

Nothing changes, thinks Jack grimly.

Now he clicks in the other direction through the five photographs taken by Tris. Timewise, he’s following the action as it happened.

First, Cheryl is outside the Jeep, facing away from the house, toward the rear of the Jeep. Second is the dashboard photo, which places Tris inside the Jeep, standing up on the passenger seat. Third is Cheryl’s face, inches from Tris. At this moment, she is unquestionably inside the Jeep. Fourth, Tris’s fingers, proving who is taking the pictures.

And the final photograph, the one of Cheryl’s fist—

Tris is back, face crumpled in despair. “My truck doesn’t work.”

Jack hands Madison the phone, forcing himself to examine the fire truck. It’s not the batteries, because the lights and sirens are still going. He finds a pebble wedged under the axle that is preventing the wheels from turning. They probably brought the pebble into the library themselves, caught in the soles of a sneaker. He shows Tris the problem. “You be the mechanic.”

Tris’s little fingers work to extricate the pebble.

Madison holds the phone up for Jack to see. With her own long clear fingernail, she taps a point on the final photograph.

Cheryl’s fingers are not making a fist. They circle around something. Cheryl holds it tightly. Its tip is dark and round.

It is the parking brake.

T
HE SIGHT OF
A
NGUS IS REPELLENT
. S
MITHY TURNS AWAY AND
stares out the window on her right. In the exterior rearview mirror, she spots the white television van.

Angus flicks his turn signal and takes the off-ramp. Two cars later, the van also exits.

At the light, Angus signals a left. The van follows.

Smithy feels about five years old. She needs a hand to hold.

She has a sudden memory of Dad taking the four of them shopping. What was the occasion? They weren’t in the Jeep, which wasn’t big enough for the whole family. They were in Mom’s car. (Dad always called it that. “We’ll take Mom’s car,” he’d say.) Smithy sees herself getting out of the Suburban. She’s wearing sandals, so it must be warm weather. She can hear the satisfying clip-clop of flat soles.

Who gets Tris out of his car seat? She can’t picture that. But they let go of him. As soon as he can walk, and certainly once he can run, Tris is on the move unless you have him in a harness. He
doesn’t mind crashing into things so he doesn’t look left, right, up, down or across. He just runs.

“Hold your brother’s hand!” hollers Dad.

Was he yelling at me? thinks Smithy now. Did I hold Tris’s hand? Or was I the one who let go?

Angus Nicolson swings into Smithy’s driveway with the ease and confidence of a frequent visitor. “We’re here!” he cries, as if it’s Disney World. Like Aunt Cheryl, he parks so he has the fewest possible steps to the door. “Home again, home again!” he sings.

I’m not five, Smithy tells herself. And no matter what, this time I have to hold my brother’s hand.

She does not get out of Angus Nicolson’s BMW. She hardens her heart and puts a grim edge in her voice. She looks straight at him. “You film me and I will explain how you groped me. I will tell them where you touched me. I will tell the disgusting things you wanted from me.”

Angus is not expecting this. He shrinks back, visibly calculating how this could damage him.

Smithy enunciates each word. “I don’t want you or your people in my house.” She opens the car door, gets halfway out, and gives her last command. “Call your camerapeople, Mr. Nicolson. Tell them not to step out of that van. They and you are not welcome.”

*   *   *

The firecrackers in Jack’s brain are bursting, but not with pain. It’s more like the wild excitement of a Fourth of July sky.
These photographs are proof. They will stand up in court. They will exonerate Tris.

Tris did get into the front seat. He did play. But not with the brake.

It is Cheryl’s hand on that brake. There’s the unusually deep inward bend of the thumb joint.

We believed her, thinks Jack. We
all
believed her, all the time. Even I believed her! I went on loving Tris. But I believed her.

He’s getting chills and aches from understanding what really happened.

But what happened afterward gives him a fever.

Jack is living with the person who caused his father’s death. Jack has obeyed this woman. Gone grocery shopping with her. Put gas in the tank of her car for her. Smiled at her. Asked her permission for stuff. And as if that weren’t bad enough, Jack has actually protected her.

The police didn’t see these photographs because he, Jack, removed the evidence. He tampered with a crime scene. Cheryl didn’t have to cover her tracks.
Jack
covered them.

His father’s killer sleeps in his father’s room. Successfully places the blame on Dad’s baby boy. Spends the money Dad earned. And even gets a fine reputation as a good aunt.

He sees now why Cheryl has always been a little bit afraid of him.

Because if Jack only knew …

Well, now he does.

*   *   *

How glibly, how casually, Madison tossed out the idea that Cheryl Rand could be a murderer. Now the truth of it fills Madison’s body as if she has cement in her veins. She is hardening. It is such a terrifying sensation that Madison reaches for her favorite lifeline—her own cell phone. She has a text message waiting.

“Smithy texted,” she reports to Jack, and adds in a snide voice, “Smithy—who’s coming home just to be on television.” Then she reads her sister’s message. Smithy is not coming home to be on television. She’s just coming. Because it’s home. And she is not on board with the docudrama. She’s as upset as they are.

Yet another opportunity to know that she, Madison, is not the good guy.

The cement encloses her heart; there is no room for it to beat. She knows—she knew all along—that dumping Jack and Tris and Smithy was wrong. But the fact in the photograph—the fact of her brothers’ caretaker as killer—is so huge that Madison does not see how she can rise above it.

How amazing that Smithy ran away from school the very same morning Madison found the courage to head home. Did each sister sense, at the same moment, that their family was again being threatened? Did a dead parent send a message?

But if a dead parent could do that, their dead mother would have sent Dad a message to get out of the way of a rolling vehicle. And if there were a way to communicate with dead or missing
minds, Madison would get daily advice from her mother and father.

Oh, Lord, prays Madison. Can I still do something good?

She holds her phone for Jack to read Smithy’s message.

“Why were we so sure that Smithy was coming home to be in the docudrama?” asks Jack.

Because I’m a bad person, thinks Madison. I leap to nasty conclusions. I don’t have faith in my own brothers and sister.

Jack answers his own question. “Because Cheryl said so.”

The list of Cheryl’s lies is getting long. What else have they accepted, just because Cheryl says so?

Jack turns his wrist over. Like their father, he wears the face of his watch on the underside of his wrist. Madison also checks the time. It’s two o’clock.

Madison is filled with dread. Cheryl is a brilliant engineer. She’ll have a plan. Maybe she’s always had a plan—maybe from the day she showed up, she had a plan. She’s moving ahead with it, while Jack and Madison are bungling and stumbling.

We have to have a plan too. But what?

*   *   *

Home is where your mother and father are. Except in Smithy’s case. She is reduced to her aunt Cheryl.

At the front door, Aunt Cheryl embraces Smithy, steps back to admire her, makes little cooing noises of affection and embraces her again.

Smithy peels her off. “They’re not coming in,” she says, gesturing at the camerapeople. “Go back inside, Cheryl. Shut the door behind you. We have to talk.”

Cheryl hovers uncertainly on the threshold. She makes an error in judgment and heads for Angus. Smithy steps in alone, closes the front door and bolts it behind her. Immediately she’s sobbing. “Mommy!” she wails, stumbling toward the kitchen.

Back Before, when Smithy came home from school, the destination was always the kitchen. The children always came in through the breezeway. If their shoes were muddy—Jack’s were always muddy—they kicked them off outside the kitchen door and ran around in their socks. Food was always the plan. Usually it was waiting on the counter or coming out of the oven.

They played a lot of games in this kitchen—board games, card games, video games. Mom was also the art director. Crayons and paste when they were little, paint and beads when they were older. In this room, Dad and Jack went through a model train stage. Their enthusiasm didn’t last, but the slab of plywood on which they fastened tracks and added a little town stayed a long time.

The kitchen is so empty.

Her mother’s life created piles. Knitting alone meant old projects, new projects, half projects and swatches. Laura Fountain was also a reader, so books were stacked and marked and splayed open. She was a musician, so her CDs, tapes and ancient recordings spilled everywhere. There used to be mounds of concert programs and calendars and committee agendas. And always that faint dusting of flour.