Tell Me Lies (8 page)

Which could only mean the Point. She’d almost forgotten that once upon a time everybody had gone to the Point to get laid, because they didn’t anymore; Brent and Howie had barricaded the road when they’d built the construction company at the base of the hill, and just a month ago they’d posted a night guard. That meant that the Point as open-air orgy was history for everyone.

Everyone but Brent. Bailey, the night guard, would chase away any would-be neckers, but he’d recognize Brent’s car and let it go past. Bailey wouldn’t recognize her mother’s Accord, though. He’d stop her and then try to talk her out of going up there, and the next day the whole town would know that Maddie had tried to hunt Brent down at the Point.

She’d have to find another way to get up there.

She drove out of town until she was a hundred yards past the drive to the company and pulled off the bumpy road to park under the heavy, creaking branches of the elms that lined the ditch there. The woods between the road and the Point were tangled and thick, but they weren’t impenetrable. She’d gone mushrooming there with her grandparents when she was little. She’d gotten most of her leaf collection for her high school biology class there when she was a teenager. She could catch her husband committing adultery there now. She felt cold at the thought even though the heat still pressed in on her.
I have to know,
she thought.
I have to know for sure before I screw up Em’s life.

The bad thing about how thick the woods were was that she had to push through a lot of brush, and it tended to spring back and slap her, cutting at her hands and tangling in her hair. The good thing was that there was always something to lean on. The ground was spongy, full of leaf mold that smelled peaty as she scuffed through it, and the tread on her running shoes clogged fast, making her slip in places. The crickets chirped frantically, the heat spurring them to record rhythms, and as she got closer to the Point, the breeze stirred the wildflowers, and the sweet smell of the honeysuckle took Maddie back twenty years. She remembered the honeysuckle and the crickets and the heat, and there had been a moon. And most of all there had been C.L. in the backseat of his Chevy, his arms wrapped around her, making her laugh while he fumbled with her bra.

She reached the end of the woods and stopped, one tree in, to stare out at the open graveled space of Frog Point.

Brent’s car was there.

Maddie leaned on a tree, all her energy gone with her uncertainty. So much for Brent’s panties-as-bad-joke theory. The moon was waxing and cast a feeble light into the front seat, and she could see Brent’s head nodding toward whoever was in the passenger side. She could tell from the way he moved that he was talking, arguing, and she leaned forward to try-to see better. The head across from him stopped moving as if the person had seen something beyond Brent, outside the car, and Maddie stepped back again in case the something had been her.

Brent opened his door. His passenger did, too, and Maddie caught a glimpse of pale hair over the top of the car before they both climbed into the dark backseat. Not Beth the redhead, so he’d moved on to somebody new. Whoever it was couldn’t have seen her or she’d have told Brent. Now Maddie could barely see the blobs of their two heads, and then she couldn’t see them at all, and she realized they were down on the seat.

The son of a bitch.

What would happen if she just walked over there and opened the door? Just walked over there and opened the door and said something rude like, “You want to explain that underpants joke to me again?” It was what Treva would do. But Treva would never have to. Treva was married to Howie, the perfect husband. Maddie was the one stuck with Brent.
Damn him.
She thought of the look on his face if she wrenched open that door, of the look on the woman’s face, whoever she was. At least if she walked across that clearing and opened the door, she’d know who those disgusting pants belonged to. This was not a situation that called for politeness, damn it.

Do it,
she told herself, and took a step toward the car. Then something moved in the trees across the way, and she stepped back again and squinted into the darkness. Maybe a deer. Whatever it was had been tall. She leaned forward a little, waiting until she saw the movement again. Definitely tall. Bigfoot, maybe, or that serial killer she’d thought about before she’d opened the door to C.L. Both were impossible in Frog Point, but so was the rest of the day she’d had, especially the moment she was having right now.

She waited a full minute, until she was almost sure that she’d imagined it, and then, just as she was about to move again, a man stepped out into the clearing and edged toward the car, peering inside as he kept his distance. Bailey, the night guard. She slumped back against the tree, too tired to laugh or cry. Of course Bailey would come up to watch. What else was there to do around here at night? And if he’d just stayed in his woods another minute or so, he could have watched her jerk open Brent’s car door and throw the fit heard round Frog Point. And it would have been heard round Frog Point by the time Bailey got through with it.

Fine, she’d wait until they got out again.

The shadows in the backseat began to move, and Maddie closed her eyes. They were having sex while Bailey watched and she waited. It was too damn much. She turned her back and slid down to sit at the base of the tree she’d been leaning against. She just wanted a good look, she just wanted Bailey to leave, she just wanted to go home. She was sitting in leaf mold while her husband had sex with another woman, and the thought made her ill. What difference did it make, anyway, who it was? She’d know soon enough when she left Brent. And she was leaving him. That was all that mattered. She was going to leave him.

The hell with it. Maddie stood up. She’d had enough for one day without entertaining Bailey, too. Brent would have to come home sooner or later, and then she could have her fit in private. The important thing was, now she knew. Now it didn’t matter how dumb he made her feel with his stupid explanations. Now she knew.

She began to pick her way back down to the car. The way down was much faster, although she slipped again in the leaf mold. When she was back at the car, she took her muddy shoes off and put them on the floor of the backseat on the newspaper her mother kept there for umbrellas and anything else that might make a mess. The least she could do was try not to make a mess for her mother. Then she climbed in the front seat and let herself slump back, her head throbbing as the painkiller wore off.

Oh, hell,
she thought,
just hell.
And then she put the car in gear and drove back home.

He almost went to her. If there was anybody in the world who shouldn’t be hurt and alone, it was Maddie. Unbidden, the memory of elementary school Anna had dredged up earlier came flooding back, clear and sharp still.

It had been the last week of school at the end of fifth grade, on the dusty playground at Harold G. Troop Elementary School. C.L. could taste the dust in the air, remembering, and the blood in his mouth. He’d just finished walloping Pete Murphy for calling him a creep, and he was on the lam, sure that Mrs. Widdington was going to nail him but running anyway on the slim hope that she’d forget about it before the noon bell. He’d rounded the corner to hide out in the black iron fire escapes and come face-to-face with Maddie Martindale, one of the dumb girls in the sixth grade who thought they were such big stuff. He started to duck away and then stayed, caught in spite of himself.

She was sitting about six steps up on one of the fire escapes, and she looked like something out of the Sears catalog. Her brown hair had been tied back in a glossy ponytail with a big red bow, and she was wearing a red plaid dress with a wide white collar, so white that it glowed in the sun. C.L. remembered wiping the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, his other hand going up to his ripped shirt, trying to brush some of the dust off. His hands had been so dirty from the fight that they’d made his shirt worse, and he’d looked from them to her hands, her fingertips polished with the same bright red as her dress. That’s when he’d known something was wrong because she was chipping the paint off her right thumbnail, leaving it pink-stained and blotchy.

“What’s wrong with you?” he’d demanded, wiping his hands again, this time on his pants, embarrassed by his own dirt and enraged that he was embarrassed.

She’d raised dry, swollen eyes to his and said, “My daddy died.”

Even for C.L., the king of I-Don’t-Care, this was significant. Of course, his daddy was dead, too, a long time ago, long before he could remember. “When?” he demanded, and she said, “Tuesday.”

He counted back. It was Monday. Six days. “That’s bad,” he told her, and then feeling that something more might be needed, he added, “Sorry.”

She nodded and went back to chipping her nail polish, and he was seized with the need to do more. She was so shiny and bright that somebody should make her feel better. He jammed his hands in his pockets, but all he could come up with was a broken stick of gum. Juicy Fruit. Even the yellow wrapper was dirty.

He looked up to see her watching him. “Here,” he said, and gave her the gum.

She took it carefully, and it seemed so dirty in her fingers that he almost grabbed it back and ran. But before he could move, she unwrapped it, first the yellow paper and then the foil, peeling it gently from the sticky gum. Then she pulled the stick apart at the break and offered him half.

He swallowed the lump that had somehow clogged his throat and took it, and when she moved over on the fire escape he sat down beside her, careful not to let his dirty shirt touch her sleeve. They chewed the gum together in the sunlight.

It was possibly the best moment of his ten-year-old life.

Then Mrs. Widdington came round the fire escape, and yelled, “C. L. Sturgis—” only to break off when she saw who he was with. “Hello, Madeline,” she said, nice and soft. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” Maddie said.

“Well, good. That’s good.” Old Widdy had looked foolish for the moment, and then she turned back to him. “Come with me, young man,” she said with the murder back in her voice.

He thought about running and discarded the thought. Maddie was watching. He stood up, still careful not to brush against her, and went down the steps to his doom.

Widdy grabbed him by the collar and started to march him off, but she stopped after a few steps and turned back to Maddie, her fist jammed up under his ear as she talked. “Is there anything you need, Madeline? Anything you want?”

He’d looked back over his shoulder, caught in Widdy’s grip, and Maddie had nodded.

“Yes,” she’d said. “I want that boy to stay with me.”

After a moment’s surprise, Widdy had said she was sorry, but no, he was bad, and had dragged him off to the principal where he’d gotten paddled to teach him not to hit others, but it hadn’t mattered at all because Maddie had said, “I want that boy to stay with me.”

Then he got expelled for a week, and then school was out, and the next year she was at the junior high, and even when he got there, she was in the smart classes and he was in the dumb ones because he was a behavior problem, so he didn’t see much of her. He didn’t have to. All he had to do was close his eyes and she was there, saying, “I want that boy to stay with me.”

But she wasn’t saying it now. He watched her walk slowly, carefully, from the car to the porch, and he wanted to go to her. She shouldn’t be alone. But she shouldn’t be alone with him, either. People would talk; they were probably watching now. And Henry would have his hide. He was considering going out to the farm for Anna when Maddie leaned against the porch rail as if she just couldn’t move anymore, and he got out of the car.

“Maddie?” he called, and she turned as he came up the walk. “I was waiting for Brent. Are you all right?”

“Oh.” Her voice sounded thin and flat. “I thought you might be stalking me. It’s been that kind of a day.”

“Well, it’s almost over,” he said, trying to sound hearty. “Half an hour to midnight.” She wavered for a moment. He reached out to put his hand under her elbow to support her and noticed for the first time that she was barefoot, and her vulnerability laid him low. “Are you all right?” he said, moving to help her to the porch, but she leaned into him instead, so he slid his arm around her shoulders to hold her up and felt his heart kick even faster. This was bad. “Maddie, do you want me to call a doctor?”

She shook her head once, her forehead against his chest, and her curls brushed his chin. They were so soft that he gave up and put both arms around her and held her, wanting to keep her safe and also, treacherously, just plain wanting her. “I’m sorry, Mad. I don’t know what this is about, but I hate it. What can I do?”

She drew a long shuddery breath. “Well, don’t be nice to me for starters or I’ll cry all over you.”

“That’s okay,” he said, even though he hated women crying. It was okay. She could wipe snot all over his shirt if she wanted, as long as he could hold her. “Go ahead. Howl.”

She clutched him closer for a moment, and he held her tighter in response; then she said in a voice that was almost normal, “Do you realize we’re standing in the middle of my yard? The whole street can see.” She lifted her head, and he saw a watery smile, and his heart lurched. “This is going to ruin your reputation.”

“Oh, damn,” he said, trying to keep his voice light. “And up to now I’ve been so appreciated.”

“I appreciate you,” she said, and he forgot to breathe for a moment. Then she took that moment to step away from him, and he felt emptier than he could have imagined. “Thanks, C.L.,” she said. “I needed to not feel alone there for a minute.”

“You’re not alone.” He thought about kidnapping her and taking her out to Anna and making sure she was never this unhappy again. But there was Brent in the way, and she had a kid, a daughter, he thought, and it was too late for them. “Take care of yourself, Mad,” he said as he turned to go. “Yell if you need anything.” Her soft “Thank you” followed him down the path, and by the time he was back in his car, she was inside the house.

He sat and watched the lights go out in her house and tried to think unexciting thoughts while his mind and body ached for her. He had to get out of there.

C.L. put the car in gear. Tomorrow he’d find Brent. The son of a bitch couldn’t hide from him forever. And then he was going to leave, no matter how much Frog Point needed an accountant.