Tell No Lies (23 page)

Finally, she called Josh, and told him about Augusta and Daniel.

“I’ll go see how she’s doing,” he offered. “You stick around and see what’s going on. Call me back the instant you know something.”

“Thank you, Josh,” Caroline said, grateful he was so willing to help, despite all the trouble she had caused him with the paper’s investigation, and despite the ordeal with his mother. Augusta in particular would appreciate his care. Unfortunately, she didn’t have Ian’s number, and wasn’t quite ready to talk to him anyway. Apologies seemed in order—to Augusta, as well. But that was probably why she had asked Josh to go get Augusta. She didn’t know what to say to her sister yet.

She stood on the dock, watching the police boats in the distance, and tried to muddle her way through confusion and guilt over her actions toward Ian Patterson.

She had been wrong.

She had decided Ian Patterson was guilty and set her sights on bringing him to justice. There was no rationalizing her way out of this one. She’d helped put an innocent man behind bars. He might have faced the electric chair, a man who had very likely saved her life. And still she had persecuted him while the guilty party ran around under their noses the entire time: Daniel Greene.

Jack had been right.

Augusta had been right.

She had been wrong.

Nothing was as it seemed.

Augusta awoke in the ER, groggy, though she remembered far more than she wished she did. Horrific images flashed through her brain—a tiny hand in the mud—that terrible sense of nudging her way through a nightmarish orgy of decomposing bodies.

A male nurse hovered over her. He smiled warmly when she met his gaze. “Do you know where you are?” he asked.

Augusta cleared her throat and nodded. Her usual sense of sarcasm failed her completely. She was grateful, remembering how he had helped her through X-rays, his disposition pleasant and far more patient than she could have ever mustered herself. He’d given her a sock for her foot, because it was cold. She wiggled it out of the covers as she stirred. The nurse came to check the rails on her gurney, as though to be sure she wouldn’t roll out. “I guess they abandoned me?”

He winked. “They left you in good hands.”

Augusta tried to smile and found her face hurt. She lifted her fingers to her cheek.

“You’re going to have a nasty bruise and a black eye, but no broken bones, and the cut won’t leave much of a scar.”

Blinking, Augusta reached for her face, feeling tentatively. “Scar?”

“Just a little one,” he reassured, and then winked. “It adds character.”

She vaguely recalled smashing her face into the dory seat, but didn’t realize she had done so much damage. In that moment, all she had thought about was getting away. “Has anyone called my sister?”

“Your husband must’ve. Your phone’s been ringing off the hook.” He picked up her cell phone from a table nearby and brought it to her, setting it down on the bed beside her.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“For everything,” she said, and tried to sit up, but swayed. He came to help again and once she was in a semi-upright position, she checked her messages. Several missed calls from Ian, but none from anyone else. She guessed Caroline must know by now and apparently wasn’t very concerned. She tried Ian’s number first. It rang until it went to voice mail.

It was only belatedly that she recalled the piece of paper she had shoved down her shirt and she patted her sore ribs.

“Looking for this?” The nurse held up a torn and waterlogged scrap of paper and walked over to hand it to her. “We peeled it off during your X-rays. Not much left of it.”

Augusta tried to unfold it but it was stuck together, completely ruined. Faded gray spots were all that remained of the ink and it was ripped, as well.
But she knew what it was.

Sadie didn’t have a malicious bone in her body, but there was a reason she had this codicil in her possession, and Augusta was going to find out why. “It’s ruined,” she said to no one in particular.

“What was it?”

Augusta shook her head, feeling disordered. “More lies.”

At this point, the lies were adding up to epic proportions. Maybe Daniel had discovered the codicil and given it to Sadie? That was the only palatable explanation—unless her mother had written the thing and then changed her mind and given it to Sadie. But that would mean Sadie had lied about its existence. She didn’t believe that scenario either. It seemed more credible to her that her mother had shown it to Daniel and that Daniel had kept it out of the will after her death. She decided he must have given it to Sadie after the fact, because, recalling Sadie’s anger that day on the porch, Augusta didn’t believe any of it was feigned. Whatever the truth, Daniel was obviously not the man they’d thought him to be.

“Are you going to keep me here?”

“Overnight?” The nurse shook his head. “We can release you any time, but I can’t let you leave unless I know you have someone to drive you.”

“I feel fine,” Augusta lied.

Although she didn’t have any broken bones, on the inside, she felt ravaged.

And a far more insidious thought was working its way through her brain—something she didn’t want to believe. In trying to protect Sadie, could Daniel have staged his own burglary and later the attempted robbery at their house, as a means to retrieve the codicil? She knew it hadn’t been Daniel at Sadie’s house, but what if he’d hired some thug to do his dirty work—like last time? It was a kid who’d stolen her purse after leaving Daniel’s office last month, but that person could have easily handed her phone to someone else to lure Caroline to the ruins. Only Daniel had known exactly where she was that afternoon because she had been at his office, and if it was true that Jennifer’s car was registered to him and that he was Karen Hutto’s attorney, as well, then he had a traceable connection to nearly every victim.

The nurse helped her sit the rest of the way up. “Do you have someone you can call?” he persisted. “The Diprivan wears off fast, but you’re not supposed to drive within twenty-four hours of an administered dose. We can’t release you unless you have someone to take you home.”

“I can find someone,” Augusta assured him, realizing it was a battle she wouldn’t win.

“Good. Then if you’ll wait a minute, I’ll get your doctor.”

“Thanks,” Augusta said, and dialed Ian’s number again as the nurse walked away, her thoughts centered on Daniel.

 

Worrying her fingers in her lap, Sadie sat waiting at the Lockwood station for someone to let her know she could see Daniel. She’d come straight from Queenie’s after his phone call. Whatever it was they were doing back there—interrogating him, arresting him—it was taking forever. But now something else was going on. Uniformed men rushed by her.

She knew enough about the law to know that they could only hold him for a certain amount of time without filing charges, but she refrained from calling Josh to find out exactly how long, reminding herself that Daniel knew the law. And he was innocent. She knew that, but she was getting a bad feeling in her bones . . .

She didn’t want to talk to Josh right now—nor to Augusta or Caroline—leastways not until she gathered her thoughts . . .

She heard them saying so as they rushed by, thinking no one could overhear their hushed conversations. But there was a room full of people waiting, and every one of them exchanged looks, putting pieces together.

She remembered
that
day as though it were yesterday. He came runnin’ to her, scared and uncertain what to do. It was hot that day, hadn’t rained for nearly a month—since long before Sam went missing. The watermarks were low and even lower at low tide. She was cutting potatoes for a salad and he came in and said he knew where Sammy was.

Sadie hadn’t really believed him, but she’d always had a strange feeling in her breast where her son was concerned, so she followed him out into the marsh at low tide. He led her to a place on the spartina flats where the tide had created a pocket in the marsh. That was where she’d found Sammy’s body trussed up, covered by debris, like alligators did to save their meals for later. But the water was low now, and his body was exposed.

Josh admitted he’d found the body a few weeks earlier, said he stumbled over it by accident and was afraid they would think he’d hurt Sammy, so he kept it from everyone—including Sadie. She’d believed him . . . back then.

Sammy’s body was already badly decomposed and he was long gone, so telling everyone after all that time would have been both cruel and suspicious. They had already searched every nook and every crevice of every beach and every inlet. But they hadn’t found Sam because he was hidden so well.

Only now she was beginning to understand why.

A terrible feeling settled in her breast—and this time, it planted itself stubbornly and refused to go away—no matter how much she reasoned with herself. No matter how many excuses she made. No matter what she tried to tell herself.

She sat there, thinking about all the times she had denied her suspicions and felt heartsick. But what sort of mother thought such horrible thoughts about her son?

She felt guilty, thinking maybe she’d put all those bad thoughts on him because of his father—because she never actually
saw
her son hurt anyone.

He’d told her Sammy’s drowned body had washed ashore—and it could have happened just exactly that way. Sadie had believed the worst was over. The poor baby was gone, and the funeral was long over with. No one could help that Sammy had drowned, but it was a different time, back in those days. She’d thought they would blame him, too—her little boy—so she had buried Sammy in a good place . . . somewhere with shade and flowers and she had prayed every day for his soul . . . and for the soul of her son . . . and her own.

But deep down . . . she knew . . . some folks were born bad . . . no matter how much you loved them . . . no matter how much you did for them.

Josh had everything, but he always seemed to want more. Florence had loved him too well, doting on him, giving him everything her son should have had . . . through the years, Sadie had compensated by giving him less, though she had given him the greatest mother’s gift of all—blind faith.

The thought of it brought hot, stinging tears to her eyes.

A vision came into her head of the first dog they’d kept before Tango—a black Lab named Bear. She remembered Josh calling that dog out into the water where he was sitting in his fishing boat. He knew that cottonmouth was lying right there in the dog’s path, but he called that poor animal even knowing Sadie had gone in to phone animal control. When he thought she was out of earshot, he insisted the dog come, his voice mean as a devil.

They couldn’t save Bear. But it was something about the way her son had watched the animal die that had disturbed her down deep in her bones—that soulless look in his eyes as he’d watched the animal in its death throes. Josh swore he was simply trying to get the dog out of harm’s way. But Sadie had had a bad feeling that day—a bad feeling she’d ignored.

She ignored it again the day Josh showed up with Sam in his arms, covered in ant bites. He said the baby had gone and sat in an ant pile.

But Sadie wondered. She hated herself for wondering, but she wondered as she dabbed at every one of his angry bites with bleach to stop the itching.

Josh had never done anyone real harm. It was simply an odd feeling she always had that something wasn’t right—the feeling that somehow her son orchestrated very bad things—like a conductor in a symphony.

She’d had that feeling again the morning they’d found Florence. He’d come over to her house very early in the morning, even though he never visited on Saturdays. That morning he insisted they go visit Flo to make pancakes . . . for old times’ sake . . . as though he knew what they would find in that house.

He had watched Sadie’s reaction with a detached calm as they found poor Florence lying there at the bottom of the stairs, as though she’d fallen down. He’d even helped Sadie turn over the big mirror so Florence’s body wouldn’t be trapped in the glass. He chastened her about silly superstitions, but he had helped her turn it nevertheless, and then he had kissed her on the cheek and asked her if she needed him to stay . . . because he had to go.

It felt bad then . . . but now it felt worse.

There were too many lies, too many secrets.

And they were getting harder and harder to keep.

“Excuse me!” she said to a police officer who passed by her seat. “Where exactly did they say they found those bodies?”

He knew who she was, and looked at her apologetically. “You know I really can’t say exactly, ma’am, somewhere near Clark Sound.”

Sadie nodded woodenly and sat back down, but only for a moment to gather her courage. This was the hardest thing she would ever have to do.

But it was long past time.

If her son was innocent, the law would discover the truth. She had to believe that with all her heart. And if he was guilty . . . then she had raised a monster and he had to be stopped.

Choking back a wave of guilt for all her ugly suspicions about her own flesh and blood, she got up from her chair in the hall and set out to make a long overdue confession.

 

 

After speaking briefly with Caroline, Augusta understood why no one was answering their phones. As it turned out, her sister’s cell was simply charging and she spoke to Augusta long enough to say the police had taken a search team into the salt marsh where Augusta had discovered the bodies. Apparently, Ian was out there, as well, working with Jack, although Caroline had only heard bits of information through one of Jack’s men, because she had yet to speak with Jack directly. Sadie was at the police station, but Caroline hadn’t spoken to her either, and Josh was on his way to pick Augusta up from the hospital.

“I would have come to get you myself, but Josh was closer,” she said. And then she paused a moment, adding, “Thank God he went looking for you.”

The effects of the sedation were wearing off, but Augusta was momentarily confused, certain Caroline wouldn’t have meant to praise Ian. “Josh?” she asked.

“No,” Caroline said, and waited another moment to clarify, as though it pained her somehow to say it. “Ian.”

Augusta refrained from pointing out that it was the second time Ian had saved one of them from harm. But it was enough that Caroline had acknowledged his part in Augusta’s rescue. She knew her sister well enough to know it was a start. Pushing her now wouldn’t get them any further. They had that in common—that same, stubborn quality they had both inherited from their mother.

“He should be there soon,” Caroline promised.

They hung up, and Augusta sat on the bed, waiting for her discharge, feeling strangely disconnected.