“Ana gave her baby up?” Of everything I’d told my mom in the past hour, that was what surprised her the most. “Why would she do that? Did her parents make her? Did she . . .”
“Did she what?” I asked when my mom trailed off.
“I don’t know.” My mom looked younger than she had at the beginning of this conversation, and a little lost. “It was one thing when Greer had a miscarriage.” Still sitting on Lily’s bed, she pulled her knees up and tucked them close to her body. “But Ana just deciding to give her baby away? That wasn’t the plan.”
I remembered the pictures I’d seen of the three of them, white ribbons tied around their wrists or wound through their hair. That wasn’t the pact.
“You left after your fight with Lillian,” I pointed out. “And Greer had hung both of you out to dry.”
“I tried to get in touch with Ana on my way out of town,” my mom said defensively. Then she wilted. “Maybe I didn’t try hard enough. I felt like she’d abandoned me. This whole time, what if she’s felt the same?”
I shouldn’t have felt for her, not about this. Maybe I wouldn’t have, if Lily and I were still speaking. Greer and Ana were Mom’s people, and then they were gone.
“I still don’t understand why she didn’t look for me,” my mom continued. “Maybe someone threatened her. The baby’s father or his father or his wife . . .”
Before my mom could continue to speculate, there was a knock at the door. I recognized it immediately: light, crisp, three taps.
My stomach twisted.
“Lily,” I told my mom, assuming that she’d know that meant that we should stop tossing around words like baby and pact and, most of all, Ana.
The last thing I needed was to throw gasoline on that particular fire.
“Come in,” my mom called.
Lily opened the door. She looked thinner than she had two weeks ago. Her hair clearly hadn’t been conditioned in a while. Her entire face was makeup-free, and though her skin had tanned early in the summer, right now, she looked wan.
“May I speak with Sawyer?” she asked my mom. “Alone?”
An hour earlier, if you’d told me that Lily wanted to talk to me, I would have felt a mix of trepidation and hope. But after a one-on-one with my mom, I couldn’t afford either. If you don’t expect anything of anyone, people can’t disappoint you.
When my mom left, Lily sat in the exact spot she had just vacated. “It’s John David,” she said without preamble.
That was all it took to snap me out of my head and into the moment. “What’s wrong with John David?”
“Picture this,” Lily told me, her gaze focused on her own hands. “We’re in Walmart with an overflowing cart of supplies. My brother is elbow-deep in streamers and trying to convince me that he needs a minimum of two thousand sparklers to truly bring his golf cart vision to life. And then, out of nowhere, he says, ‘Hey, Lily? You know how Mama says little pots have big ears?’ And I say yes. And then he says, ‘And you know how she also says that eavesdroppers never hear any good of themselves?’ And I say yes, and then he continues with ‘And how Mama always says that this is a one-party consent state with respect to audio recordings, so it’s completely legal to record any conversation you’re a party to?’”
“Pretty sure Aunt Olivia has never said that last one,” I opined.
“Even if she had,” Lily replied, “John David’s version of being ‘party’ to a conversation apparently doesn’t involve being a participant in that conversation, so much as eavesdropping while eating cake and/or pie to fulfill the ‘party’ quotient.”
I read between the lines there. “Aunt Olivia has been grief-baking a lot lately.”
“Not just lately,” Lily replied quietly. She held up a phone. I recognized immediately that it wasn’t hers. Lily’s phone didn’t have a camouflage cover. “He’s been spying on my parents and recording their conversations. For more than a month.”
More than a month. As in, since before we discovered the affair?
“Sawyer?” Lily held the phone out to me. “You have to listen to this.”
With no further ado, she played the audio files for me—not all of them, but three in particular.
“Could you grab the other end of the sheet?” Aunt Olivia’s request on the tape sounded absolutely ordinary. She waited a second, and then added, “I think I’ve figured out why we’re having so much trouble finding the money to finish the remodel.”
She still sounded pleasant enough, but before this summer, the one argument I’d ever heard them have was on this topic.
“I told you,” J.D. said on the recording, “we’re fine, Olivia. It’s going to be fine. Our assets—”
“Just aren’t liquid right now. So you’ve said, repeatedly. But I had a bit of time between projects with the girls, and I took a peek at the books—ours and your company’s.”
On the bed, Lily sat perfectly still. I knew this wasn’t her first time hearing these recordings, but she was listening the way a starving person ate.
“Leave my job out of this,” Uncle J.D. snapped.
“Certain filings are a matter of public record. You know that.”
“Stop telling me what I know, Olivia.”
“You’ve exercised a lot of stock options in the past six years.” Aunt Olivia’s voice had taken on just the slightest hint of an edge.
“We agreed that was the right call. We used my trust—from my family—to do it.”
“At first,” Aunt Olivia said firmly.
There was a long pause. “No matter where the money came from, we agreed about buying the stock, Olivia.”
“That’s the thing, John. We agreed about exercising your options, but when I compared the public filings to our balance transfers, every single time you convinced me to fund a stock buy, you took a little off the top. And by a little, I mean a very large sum.”
“I’m not talking about this.”
“Yes, you are.” Now, Aunt Olivia didn’t sound pleasant at all. Her voice was low enough that I wondered if John David had been hiding under the bed in order to get audio as good as he had. Either that, or he’d purchased some pretty high-tech spy equipment off the internet. “It’s one thing for you to have your fun between the sheets, though I confess that I’ve always found your choice of paramour rather… odd.”
“Don’t you dare talk to me about Ana.”
My gaze darted from the phone back up to Lily. Her dark brown eyes were intent and smoldering. She wouldn’t—maybe couldn’t—look at me.
“You’ve been giving her money. And I’m stupid—so stupid—that I didn’t know it until now.”
“You’re very, very stupid,” J.D. said, his voice every bit as low as his wife’s. “And you don’t get to say a word to me about any money that I might or might not have given to Ana.”
After that, the audio cut out. Lily still wouldn’t look at me. I sat down beside her on the bed, my own mind reeling.
“She knew, Sawyer.” Lily shook her head, like that might make what she was saying less true, like she was waiting for me to tell her that she was jumping to conclusions, when she very clearly wasn’t. “Mama already knew about Ana, and she didn’t care.”
How much of the anguish Lily had been through in the past two weeks was out of guilt, for what we’d discovered? For the fact that because of us, her mother had learned the truth, too?
“She cared that he was paying her.” I said that so that Lily didn’t have to.
“I thought . . .” Lily didn’t finish that sentence. Instead, she scrolled through the audio files and selected another one to play.
“I want a divorce.” This time, there were no clues on the tape about where the conversation was taking place—or where John David might have been hidden when his father issued that statement.
“Of course you do.” Aunt Olivia didn’t sound particularly fussed. “But, J.D., honey, we can’t always get what we want. Some of us take our commitments seriously. Some of us don’t make promises unless we’re dead set on keeping them.”
I had a feeling—a very vague one—that there might have been more than one meaning to those words. Her husband’s next statement did nothing to weaken that particular bit of intuition.
“Let me go. Olivia, please . . .”
“Nice manners from a man who’s cheating on his wife.” She’d taken the gloves off more quickly this time.
The second she did, he lost it, at low volume. “You blackmailed me into marrying you in the first place!”
“What?” I said out loud to Lily. She didn’t act like she’d heard me at all.
“I was young,” her father continued on the tape, “and I was scared, and I let you.”
“But now you’re done? Suddenly, you don’t care if the truth comes out?”
“For God’s sake, it was an accident!”
I managed not to say What was an accident? out loud, but only just.
“You won’t tell anyone what happened,” J.D. was saying now. “You have as much to lose as I do if the truth about that body comes out.”
The mention of the body sent an electric chill down my spine. I told myself that I must have misheard.
“Did you ever even try to love me?” Aunt Olivia asked on the recording, her voice quiet and rawer than I’d ever heard it. “I have been nothing but a good wife to you and a wonderful mother to Lily and John David. Even you have to give me that.”
“You love our children. If I had any doubts whatsoever on that score, I wouldn’t have kept up this charade for as long as I have.”
The admission didn’t seem to calm her. If anything, it had the opposite effect. “That’s all it ever was to you? A charade? When are you going to understand that I’m better for you than she ever was?”
“Say her name.”
“Excuse me?” Aunt Olivia was retreating to form—manners, manners, manners.
“Just once. Say. Her. Name.”
“You’re being ridiculous, John.”
“Liv—”
All of a sudden, their voices were blocked by the sound of a familiar—and very deep—bark. Then there was a series of noises that told me some major tussling was going on in the background, and then I heard John David yelp, “William Faulkner, this was not a part of the mission!” and the recording cut off.
I tried to process what I’d just heard, but the parameters would not compute. “What was that?” I asked Lily. She didn’t even try to form an answer in reply. “He said that she blackmailed him into marrying her.” Repeating that didn’t make it sound any more plausible. “He mentioned . . .”
“A body.” Lily finished my sentence for me.
You have as much to lose as I do if the truth about that body comes out. That statement rang in my ears. Before Ana had shown up, alive and well, it had seemed, if not plausible, at least possible that the body at Falling Springs was hers. I’d already let myself come far too close to jumping to conclusions once.
And yet, I had to ask: “Do you think this has something to do with the Lady of the Lake?”
Lily’s only response was to play a third recording. It was significantly shorter than either of the others.
Lily’s father said, “You’re not going to tell anyone the truth, Olivia. You might have, once. But now? I don’t think so.”
Aunt Olivia replied, “Maybe you’re right. And maybe you should consider that I don’t have to tell anyone your oldest, darkest secret to ruin your life. All I have to do to destroy your world is tell Lily the truth about Sawyer.”