Tell Me Lies (2 page)

Maddie held the knifepoint to the center of the brownie. Precision work. Gritting her teeth, she shoved the knife into the center where it jammed, the brownie still refusing to split into edible chunks. Maddie exhaled through her teeth. She’d never met a more irritating piece of fat and sugar. Just her luck: one damn brownie in the house and it had to be male.

She picked up the knife, and the brownie stuck to the end, impaled. It was a nice image, full of vengeful satisfaction. She carried the knife to the stove, turned up the gas burner, and began to toast the brownie like a marshmallow over the flame. The smell of burning chocolate filled the room.

Who was it this time? Beth? Or somebody new? Her mind ticked over the usual adultery suspects.

Gloria next door?

His secretary, Kristie?

Somebody at the bowling alley?

Somebody he and Howie had built a house for?

Did it matter, really?

Maddie turned the flame up higher. After it happened once, did it matter who it was the next time? This was Brent’s fault, he was the one doing it to her. And to Em. Oh, God, Em. She hoped he—

The phone rang, and Maddie snarled in frustration before she turned off the gas and went to answer it, the knifed brownie still in hand. “Hello?”

“Maddie, honey, it’s Mama.”

Maddie closed her eyes and waited for her mother to say, “Maddie, you’ll never guess what I heard about Brent today.”

“Maddie? Are you all right, honey? I tried to call about fifteen minutes ago, but there was no answer.”

Maddie swallowed. “We were outside cleaning Brent’s car.”
And guess what we found.
She went into the living room and sank down on her blue-flowered overstuffed couch, stretching the phone cord tight across the room as she dropped. Maybe if she propped the knife up in the living room, Brent would come home and trip over the phone cord and fall onto it. She pictured his body toppling, massive and solid, and the scrunch the knife would make going in.

“Well, it’s too hot to clean cars,” her mother was saying. “You stay inside.”

“We are,” Maddie said. “Now.” She gripped the knife until her knuckles turned white and gnawed a small chunk off the corner of the brownie. It was hard and icy, but it was chocolate. She sucked on it, making it melt with the heat of her angry mouth, and then swallowed it, choking a little as it went down.
Slow down,
she told herself, and drew in air through her nose.

“Are your allergies acting up?” her mother demanded. No.

“Well, take a Benadryl just in case. You sound wheezy. I won’t keep you, I just wanted to let you know that you’re getting company any minute now.”

“You’re kidding.” Maddie gnawed off another corner of brownie.

“It’s Sheriff Henley’s nephew, the one you went to high school with.”

“Nephew?” The news took a moment to sink in, and then Maddie dropped her knife, brownie and all. C. L. Sturgis. He’d been her first mistake. If she’d stayed a virgin, none of this would be happening. She tried to sound uninterested as she groped around on the navy carpet for the knife. “I don’t remember.”

Her mother did, but that wasn’t unusual. Her mother’s memory was a natural database of all the times everybody in town had screwed up, so she’d definitely have a file on C.L. And now her file on Maddie, never small to begin with, was about to get bigger.

“I ran into him outside the police station,” her mother was saying. “He was looking for Brent, but I told him you were home this afternoon, so he said he’d try you next.”

Thank you, Mother
. Where was that damn brownie?

“And oh, Maddie, I was so embarrassed.” She lowered her voice. “I couldn’t remember his name. I knew he wasn’t a Henley because he was Anna’s sister’s son, but I couldn’t for the life of me think of who he was. He was a year behind you in school. He was always in trouble for fighting and such a reckless driver, remember?”

“Sort of.” Maddie put her head between her knees so she could think and found the knife and her brownie on the floor under her legs, only slightly hairy from the carpet. So C.L. was back, was he?

Maddie picked up her knife and shoved herself up off the floor so she could pace. Gee, and just yesterday she’d been thinking her life was boring and empty. Well, bring back yesterday. Her skin prickled and her breath came funny again. She tried to focus on brushing the debris off the brownie, but it was difficult one-handed while she was pacing.

Her mother was still talking. “He married Sheila Bankhead and moved away, but then she left him and took him for everything he had. Don’t you remember? Maybe he’s come home because she’s getting married again. What was his name? Something strange.”

Maddie cradled the phone on her shoulder as she dusted the last of the lint off the brownie and her mother ran down a list of wrong names. When her mother ran out of steam, Maddie gave her the right one: “C. L. Sturgis.”

“That’s him! That Sturgis boy. He should be there any time now.” Then her mother’s voice changed. “Now, how’d you come to remember his name?”

“Lucky guess.” Like she could forget. Well, the hell with C. L. Sturgis. The hell with all men. Especially the hell with Brent. She started to pace again, chewing off chunks of the thawing brownie as she walked.

“Well, anyway, Sheila’s marrying Stan Sawyer.” Her mother sighed. “He’s dumber than squat, but she’s probably after his money, not his brains. He just inherited all that Becknell money from his aunt. Cancer. Terrible. At least Sheila’s better than that Beth he was dating.”

Maddie stopped as her stomach started up her esophagus again, full of brownie this time. Beth. She tested herself, looking for the rage she’d felt for Beth five years before, but it wasn’t there. She should be mad at Beth. She definitely didn’t like her. But hating Beth didn’t solve anything. At least, it hadn’t solved anything five years ago. Beth wasn’t her problem, even if it turned out that she was the one missing the underwear. Brent was her problem. She should leave the son of a bitch. Then he could marry Beth. That would be one way to get even with Beth.

Her mother was still talking. Her mother would talk through the Second Coming, doing the play-by-play. “And now the sinners are in the lake of fire. I can see Beth the slut from here. I believe, yes, she’s doing the backstroke.” Maddie could sympathize; she felt as if she were in the lake of fire, too. Going down for the third time with Brent tied around her neck. She leaned her forehead against the wall as her mother moved on to another topic.

“I talked to Candace Lowery at the bank. She was wearing a beautiful beige jacket. To look at her, you’d never think she was a Lowery.”

“Mom.” Maddie could hear Frog Point talking now.
She stayed with him after the first time, what did she expect? The way she acts, you ‘d never think she was a Martindale.
She rolled her shoulders back against the wall and clenched the knife in front of her and ate another chunk of brownie.

“I ran into Treva at Revco. She said Three’s home from college for a month. Doesn’t that sound like a long time?”

“It sounds nice.” Maybe she’d go see Treva. Maybe she’d say all these thoughts out loud, and Treva would make sarcastic remarks about her being paranoid, and they would have a good laugh. They were long overdue. She hadn’t talked to Treva since last week.

“Didn’t you know? She’s your best friend, and you didn’t know her son was home?” Her mother’s voice was starting to rise.

“We’ve been busy.” Maddie didn’t know why she hadn’t seen Treva, and at the moment she didn’t care. One trauma at a time. She shut down all thought and ate the last of the brownie. It was a very good brownie, considering its circumstances.

“Busy doing what?” her mother said, and then the doorbell rang, and Maddie let her head fall back against the wall.

C.L.

“It’s summer,” her mother was saying. “Teachers don’t do anything in the summer—”

The doorbell rang again, and Maddie straightened away from the wall. “Mom, there’s somebody at the door, I have to go.”

“That Sturgis boy. Maybe you better talk to him on the porch. You know how people are. I’ll hang on until you find out.”

“No, Mom, I’m going to go now. I love you.” Her mother was still talking as Maddie hung up. Just her luck, she’d answer the door and there would be a serial killer, and he’d murder her on her doorstep, and then at her funeral her mother would tell everybody, “I told her not to hang up, but she never would listen.” Some screwups lasted beyond death, and answering the door right now was probably one of them.

She did not need C. L. Sturgis. She especially did not need C. L. Sturgis right now because every time things went wrong with Brent, C. L. Sturgis was the memory that popped into her head.
Things could be worse,
she’d tell herself.
You could have married C. L. Sturgis.
Except that things couldn’t get much worse, and C.L. was not that bad a memory, and for all she knew, in the twenty years since he’d lured her into his backseat, he could have improved. Brent hadn’t, but that didn’t mean C.L. couldn’t have.

The doorbell rang again, and Maddie walked into her white-on-white hall and yanked the door open.

Sure enough, there on her porch, lit by the sun, was C. L. Sturgis, choreographed back into her life by her mother and a malignant Fate, looking better than he had any right to after twenty years. He said, “Hey, Maddie,” and she adjusted her memory of C.L. at seventeen to the real C.L. at thirty-seven. His face was more lined, and he was taller and broader through the shoulders under his blue-striped shirt, but his dark hair was still thick and rumpled, and his eyebrows still did that V thing that made him look like Satan’s delivery boy, and he still had those hot, dark eyes and that wide, brainless, sheepish grin. Yep, it was C.L., all right. Rebel without a clue.

“Maddie? Your mom said it was all right to stop by.” C.L.‘s voice was light and his grin was still in place, but his dark eyes had cooled to wary. What had she ever done to make him look at her like that? Well, besides dumping him after one night in his backseat. He couldn’t still be holding that grudge after twenty years. C.L. took a step back on her porch, and Maddie’s frown hardened. Sure he could. The way things were going today, somebody she’d pushed on the playground in second grade was probably heading her way with a grenade.

He ducked his head and peered at her, and for a minute he looked seventeen again, unsure of himself and doubly dangerous because of it. There was nothing worse than C.L. looking vulnerable, she remembered, because he so rarely was. “Uh, bad day?” he asked.

Oh, great. He knew about Brent, too. Maddie scowled harder at him. “What makes you think so?”

He pointed at her left hand. “The knife. Big sucker, too.”

She glanced down. She still had the blade clenched in her hand, poised to jab. “I was eating a brownie.”

C.L. nodded, looking not relieved at all. “Sure. That would explain it. Listen, I don’t want to keep you.” His eyes went back to the knife. “Is Brent here?”

It was so surreal. An hour ago, her life had been fine, and now she was talking to C. L. Sturgis, who wanted to talk to her cheating jerk of a husband. “You know, my mother told me you were coming over, but somehow I just didn’t believe it.”

He kept his eyes on the knife. “Believe it. About Brent—”

The hell with Brent. She waved the knife to get his attention. “Look, C.L., I’m kind of busy right now—”

He reached out and took the knife from her so swiftly that she was left staring at her empty hand. “No offense, Mad, but it’s been a while, and for all I know, you’ve gone homicidal on me.” He stepped back off the porch and shoved the knife up to the hilt into the flower bed by the steps. He still had the same great butt he’d had in high school, Maddie noticed, and from the condition of his jeans, they could have been from high school, too. Then he came back to her and smiled again, and she could have sworn his smile was the same it had been in high school, part happiness, part invitation to trouble. It was impossible to be cold when he hit her with that smile. There was something about C.L. that insisted you smile back even though you knew it was a mistake.

She relaxed, exhaling in relief as some of the tension left her neck. “I’m sorry. I’m having a bad day.”

He nodded, warm and sympathetic, and she remembered why she’d climbed into his backseat twenty years before. “That’s because you’re still living in Frog Point” he said. “Every day here is a bad one. You look great, by the way.”

Maddie looked down at her soap-stained pink T-shirt, still blotchy with the water from the sink. “You know, C.L., there’s such a thing as carrying politeness too far.”

“No,” he said. “You really do look great. Just like in high school.”

He wanted something. He had to; nobody could look at her and say, “Just like in high school,” not after twenty years of wear and tear and Brent. She felt the chill return. “Thanks,” she told him. “So what do you want?”

C.L. looked taken aback, but not for long. “Well, now that the chitchat’s out of the way, and we’re all unarmed, is Brent home?”

Brent. The son of a bitch. Everywhere she went, there he was. She glared at C.L. “No. I’m busy. Try the office.” She swung the door closed, but he put his foot in the way and stopped her.

“Wait a minute. I tried there.”