Tell Me Lies (31 page)

The worst was that Maddie not only wouldn’t talk to him, she wouldn’t talk to anybody. Maddie’s mother seemed concerned but remote, polite while she was having lunch with him but unwilling to discuss her daughter. If it had been his kid who was withdrawing, he’d have talked to anybody and everybody, but Martha Martindale liked quiet.

“I’m grateful you’ve kept your distance from Madeline,” she told him. “There’s so much talk after a funeral anyway.”

He wanted to point out that the problem was that there
wasn‘t
talk, at least not from Maddie, but her mother had that stubborn look in her eye, and he’d heard about the showdown with Helena in front of the bank, so he let her be. She was doing her best in her own way.

His way was different.

He went to see Treva and Howie and didn’t get much further.

“Hey, C.L.,” Howie said when C.L. pulled up next to the Basset garage where Howie was working. “I’ve been meaning to call you. You still want that house?”

“Of course I still want the house,” C.L. said, getting out of the convertible. “The loan should be in place by the end of the month. Candace is pushing it through for me. Why wouldn’t I want the house?”

“Well, I thought with you and Maddie not together anymore—”

“We’re together,” C.L. said. “We’ve just got some distance in our together right now. How’s Treva?”

“Fine,” Howie said, but he looked unhappy. “She’s in the house.”

“Mind if I go in for a while?” C.L. said. “Few things I wanted to ask her.”

Howie nodded, and C.L. knocked on the back door and then went in without waiting.

Treva was cooking a vast pot of something, her frizzy blonde hair made frizzier from the steam.

C.L. inhaled and said, “Chicken soup?” and startled her into dropping her spoon.

“Good Lord, C.L.,” she said when she’d jerked around. “You scared me to death.” She peered into the pot. “And now I have to fish for that damn thing.”

“Let me.” C.L. picked up a knife next to the cutting board.

“Not that.” Treva yanked open a drawer and gave him a long-handled ladle. “Go fish.”

“So what’s new with you?” he asked her as he stirred, listening with half his attention for the clank on the side of the pot that would tell him he’d connected. “You okay?”

“Fine,” Treva said cautiously. “Why?”

C.L. hooked the ladle under Treva’s stirring spoon and brought it to the surface. “Wondered if you’d talked to Mad.”

“Not much.” Treva reached for the spoon as it came clear of the broth. “Ouch. Hot.”

“Like that’s a surprise.” C.L. tasted the broth in the ladle. “Good stuff. I didn’t know you cooked.”

“Take it to Anna,” Treva said, turning off the heat. “We have plenty.”

“Taking food to Anna is like taking gossip to Frog Point,” C.L. said. “Unnecessary and insulting. Why haven’t you talked to Mad?”

Treva put the lid on the pot. “Because she’s not talking to me. I figure maybe she just needs some time to recover. So I’m giving it to her.” She met his gaze with a stonewall stare that said, “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it,” but she looked unhappy and angry and guilty. C.L. thought about staying to worm it all out of her, but he had enough problems with Maddie and Em, and besides, Howie might not take kindly to having his wife cross-examined.

“She won’t talk to me, either,” he said. “I’m just a little concerned.”

“She’ll be all right,” Treva said. “Maddie Martindale is always all right.”

On that note, he gave up on Treva and focused his attentions on his uncle.

“You cannot possibly believe she did it, Henry,” he said after dinner one night for the thousandth time, and Henry, trying to read his paper, finally snapped.

“You want a list of all the evidence we have against her?”

“No,” C.L. said. “But I don’t see you arresting her, either, so you must have doubts.”

“Yeah, I got some doubts,” Henry said. “I’m working on them. But Maddie is still looking pretty good here.”

“But you have doubts,” C.L. pressed.

“I’d like a murder weapon,” Henry said. “And there are a few people around here who might be telling lies.” He picked up his paper and went back to reading.

C.L. fought back the urge to rip the paper out of Henry’s hands, a stupid move if there ever was one. “So what are you doing about it?”

“Nothing,” Henry said from behind the paper.

“Henry,” C.L. began, and Henry put the paper down.

“None of these people are going anywhere,” Henry said. “I’m watching them. And I’m waiting. And after a while, they’re going to get nervous and then one of them will say something. And if it’s Maddie, she’ll still be all right because any fool knows she was pushed to it, and we’ll try it here, and she’ll get a real light sentence, and we’ll all look after her and the little girl. So don’t worry.”

He picked up his paper, and C.L. pushed it back down again.

“Henry,” he said to his outraged uncle, “putting an innocent woman in jail is not your style.”

“C.L.,” Henry said. “Get your goddamned hand off my goddamned paper.”

C.L. gave up and let go.

He didn’t give up on anything else. He called Maddie’s house every day, at first to hear her voice, and then after a while to talk to Em, to find out how the first week of school was going (“Okay,” Em said, but her tone said, “Awful”), to talk about Phoebe and make her smile and once even laugh a little, and to tell her to take care of her mother. “Are you ever coming over here?” Em asked toward the end of the week, and his throat had gotten tight when he’d said, “Not for a while, honey, but I’ll call you every day.”

He was being patient, he understood that Maddie needed time to recover, but there was a limit. Sooner or later, she was going to have to see him, even if she was only there to open the door so he could see Em.

School was a lie, too. Everybody pretended everything was fine, and everybody knew it wasn’t. All the teachers were really nice and looked at her like they were really sorry, and the kids all looked at her like she was from a zoo, so she ignored them all except for Mel, and she didn’t talk to Mel much. Then after Thursday lunch, she didn’t talk to Mel at all. They’d been opening their milks, and Mel said, “The kids are saying your daddy was shot, is it true?” Em had heard the whispers, too—the first time she’d heard it, she’d almost thrown up—but she got up now and said, “That’s a lie,” and moved away. Mel called, “I’m sorry, Em,” but Em kept on moving, and on Friday she sat alone at lunch. Anything was better than talking to people. Later that afternoon, Em didn’t have her math homework done, and her teacher said, “That’s all right, Emily,” and she wanted to scream, “I forgot to do it, it’s not because my daddy died, everything isn’t because my daddy died,” but she didn’t. They would have thought something was wrong with her if she’d screamed that.

Em was starting to really want to scream.

When she got off the bus after school and walked in the house, it was quiet, no phone ringing, nobody talking, just Phoebe running to her. She took Phoebe out and five minutes later she watched her mom pull into the driveway in the rental car C.L. had gotten them, home from the high school. Her mom got out of the car like she was old. When she saw Em, she waved and smiled, but it was an awful smile. Nobody would believe a smile like that.

Em waited until her mother went in the house, and then she called to Phoebe and went in and sat down at the kitchen table, folding her hands in front of her so they didn’t shake. “I need to talk to you,” she said, and her mother looked at her as if she weren’t sure she knew Em at all.

“What, honey?”

“I need to talk to you.” Em made her voice sound strong even though inside she was sick. “Mel said Daddy was shot. She said Daddy died because somebody shot him. With a gun.”

Her mother sat down hard in the chair across from her and closed her eyes. “Em, I told you it was an accident. I told you—”

“I want to know the truth.” Em gritted her teeth, trying not to scream. “You tell me the truth.”

“Somebody shot your daddy by accident,” her mom said, but her eyes didn’t meet Em’s and Em felt sick.
Another lie.
“I told you, it was an accident. He didn’t hurt at all, Em. He didn’t even feel it. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to think about it. Just try not to think about it. It was an accident.”

Another lie, another lie.
Em felt so mad she was sick with it, and that scared her. If she was mad at her mom, if she didn’t have her mom, who would take care of her? But her mom was lying and that was wrong and Em wanted to yell,
You tell me the truth,
but she couldn’t, so instead she said, “Who did it?”

“We don’t know,” her mother said, sounding tired, but sounding like she was telling the truth, too. “Sheriff Henry is trying to find out. He s working hard on it.” She raised her eyes to Em’s and she looked so awful that Em felt ashamed for making her talk. “We don’t know who shot him, Em.”

“I just want to know the truth,” Em said. “I want to know what you know.”

Her mother jumped a little at that, and then shook her head. “I don’t know anything, baby. I’ve never been so confused in my life.”

“Okay.” Em stood up, knowing she should go hug her mother and make her feel better, but somehow, she just couldn’t. “Okay,” she said again, and walked out of the kitchen feeling really mad and really sad even though Phoebe was trotting behind her.

This is nothing,
Maddie told herself, and did a quick search of the house, ridiculous since the bike was gone, and another sweep of the backyard and the garage, and then she stood in the middle of the backyard and told herself not to panic, that everything was fine.

Who to call?
Calling the police would be overreacting, except maybe not. Maybe Em had gone to her grandmother’s or to Mel’s or—

“Maddie, is everything all right?”

Maddie focused on Gloria, myopic over the fence. “Have you seen Em? She was out here just a minute ago.”

“No.” Gloria moved down the fence to get closer to Maddie. “No, I haven’t. Is she lost?”

“Oh.” Maddie flapped a hand at Gloria and made her escape up the back steps. “Of course not. She just left without telling me, which will get her grounded for life, that’s all.”

“Because she might have been kidnapped,” Gloria said. “That’s on the news all the time now.”

“Not in Frog Point, Gloria,” Maddie said as she pulled the screen door open, not even pretending to be polite. “She was not kidnapped.” She let the door slap shut behind her and then stood in the kitchen for a moment, trying very hard not to be terror-stricken.

She was not kidnapped. She was probably at Mel’s.

“Treva?” Maddie said as soon as somebody picked up the phone at the Bassets‘.

“What’s wrong?” Treva said. “Why are you squeaking? What’s wrong?”

“Have you seen Em?”

“Oh, dear God.” Treva’s voice faded as she turned to yell behind her. “Mel, have you seen Em?”

Maddie strained to hear the faint conversation, but it didn’t last long enough for her to hear.

“She hasn’t seen her, Mad,” Treva said. “She says Em’s been real quiet at school all week, so everybody’s sort of letting her alone. She said she’s tried to talk to her, but Em just looks at her.”

“Oh.” Maddie tried not to think about Em just looking at a kidnapper or the murderer. “Listen, it’s probably okay. She probably went to my mom’s. I’ll call there. Don’t worry.”

“If you don’t find her, we’ll look for her,” Treva said. “We’ve got three cars here, we can cruise the whole town. Call me back and let me know.”

“Right.” Maddie nodded at the phone and let her head wobble. “Right.”

Her mother was even less help.

“Where is she? Oh, my goodness, Maddie, that child could be anywhere. Why would she run away? What did you do?”

“Mother.”
Maddie took every iota of self control she had and shoved it between herself and the phone. “You are not being helpful. If she’s not there, she probably just took Phoebe for a ride. I’m going out to look for her. You stay there in case she shows up.”

“Well, I’m calling Henry Henley,” her mother said sharply. “Somebody has to find that child.”

Maddie banged the receiver down and tried to think. If not Mel’s or her grandmother’s, where would Em go? Not back to school, she’d been miserable there all week. The Revco downtown maybe. Or the bank to do the stamps again. Or—

The hell with thinking. Maddie grabbed her purse and headed for downtown Frog Point, driving slowly so she could check out the side streets as she went. Em wasn’t at Revco, but Sheila was, and when she heard Maddie ask Susan at the checkout counter if Em had been by, she promised to keep an eye out and bring her home. At the bank, Candace did the same.

“This is awful,” she said. “She’s such a little sweetie. I’ll check with the rest of the tellers, but she always came to me.”

The counter help at Burger King hadn’t seen her and neither had the clerks at the Dairy Queen, nor had Kristie at the company. “I haven’t seen her since the funeral,” Kristie told her. “I’ll watch for her and call you if she comes in.”

Maddie went out to the car and put her head down on the steering wheel.

This could not be happening. She had a deal with God, one she hadn’t recognized before, but still a definite deal, that she would put up with anything He threw at her as long as Em was safe. Em was off limits. This couldn’t be happening.

Maddie drove home by a different route, staring down side streets as if she could make Em appear if she just strained her eyes enough, and she even made a loop around the school, but it was hopeless. When she turned in the driveway, Em’s bike still wasn’t back. She went inside in time to catch the phone.

“Maddie? This is Henry Henley. Have you found her yet?”

Right.
The guy who wanted to convict her of murder for her own good. “No, Henry. I looked downtown and at the company, but no, I didn’t find her.”

“Well, we got everybody out looking for her, so we’ll find her. You stay home now in case she calls, okay?”

“Right.” This was good advice, and Maddie felt a stab of guilt that she was being so flat with the man who was trying to find her child. “I appreciate this, Henry, I do. I’m just. . . scared.”

“I know, honey,” he said. “I’m not happy about it, either, but we’ll get her. I have to. Anna’d never let me in the house if I didn’t.”

“You would anyway, Henry,” Maddie said. “That’s just you.”

“That’s my job,” Henry said. “Now, you sit tight and wait till she calls, you hear?”

“I hear,” Maddie said, and five minutes later when the phone rang again, she prayed it was Em.

Instead it was somebody with laryngitis, whispering over the phone to her in a raspy voice. “Mrs. Faraday? You have a nice little girl.”

“What?” Maddie’s mouth went dry. “Who is this?”

“Emily is real nice.”

“Who is this?”

“If you want to see Emily again, you tell Henry about the gun and the money you found. You turn yourself in or you won’t see your kid again.”