The List (34 page)

“Stanton called you, he’s having me killed?”

“No,” she replied. “There were five men mentioned in the court article, right? Five
witnesses to the accident?”

“Right.”

“Well, the first one is dead.” Of course he was. “People in small towns really are
in such poor health,” remarked my sister. “He died of heart disease at the age of
fifty-one.”

I didn’t remind her that we hailed from a town with a population of 976. The difference
was that our small town was rich.

“Brilliant. He’s dead. Do me a favor and don’t call me if you find any more dead people.
I won’t be able to finish the day, and I still have eight more articles to write.”

“Is Olivia there?” asked Payton.

“Thank God, no,” I said. “The president is in full fund-raising mode, so she’s constantly
following him.”

“Darn. I wanted to come by and see her. From how you’ve described her she sounds just
hideous. I mean, obviously I’ve seen pictures of her naked, but it’s not the same.
I wanted to get that in-person vibe.”

That would be just fantastic. Payton and Olivia. It would be like having put Muhammad
Ali and Joe Frazier in the ring together without rules.

With the help of headphones, caffeine, and candy, I got through the day. I thought
about Olivia, Sandro, and Stanton only about five hundred times, Sandro in particular.

That night in the car while relaying the message about my career ruin, he had said
I was gorgeous, with long legs and hair. Actually, that didn’t sound so good when
I repeated it. Lots of people had long legs and hair. Conan the Barbarian. Frankenstein.
But the gorgeous part made up for it. If he knew the truth about Olivia, he would
leave her. I knew he would. No man could forgive such a breach of trust. Could he?

I turned off the quiet road and pulled into the long driveway, waiting a few seconds
as the gate slowly opened. I spotted Payton in the outdoor horse ring with our father
riding Gilt, the mare my dad bought in Argentina before I came home. I parked my car
next to my dad’s truck, slipped off my work shoes, and grabbed some extra boots from
inside the barn.

“Adrienne! Look at your sister. Can you believe how calm that devil of a horse is?”
asked my dad when I walked toward him. He was wearing riding clothes and his tall
boots were covered in mud.

I couldn’t. I didn’t even like feeding Gilt because she was the most moody, horrific
horse my father had ever bought. But under Payton, she moved like a Triple Crown winner.

I moved to the fence and sat next to my dad. We watched Payton canter around the ring
effortlessly, the dark brown horse just starting to break a sweat under her.

“I know your sister is mean as hell,” said my dad, “but she can really ride a horse.”

“She’s not that bad,” I said.

“Oh, really? ‘Not that bad’? That may be the nicest thing I’ve ever heard you say
about Payton. Twenty-eight years and you finally like your sister. Well I’ll be. In
that case, I’ll leave you to it. Don’t let that horse buck her off.”

We both looked at Payton and saw we had nothing to worry about. She was like Lance
Armstrong on a bicycle. My father
walked to the barn to put away the lead rope he was holding, and I watched Payton
finish up her ride. When she was done, I let her put Gilt away and waited for her
to join me on the fence.

“Let’s go in the house,” she said. “I’m burning up.”

Our boots crunched along the gravel driveway, and I slipped my cardigan off and let
the heat hit my skin.

“I thought about Sandro way too much today,” I told her as we walked. “It’s pathetic;
don’t think I’m not aware. He wants to get me fired. He thinks it’s a swell idea.
But I bet he wouldn’t think so if he knew what Olivia really did on weekends. I bet
she tells him she’s out of town. The president of the United States is probably her
sex excuse.”

“You’re obsessed,” said Payton, opening the front door and walking in. The screen
door closed in my face and I kicked it open with my boot and followed her to the living
room. We left our riding boots in a muddy pile by the fireplace and collapsed on our
parents’ white sofa. A few leftover olives and artichokes were in small ceramic bowls
on the coffee table and I grabbed them and started shoving them into my mouth with
my dirty hands. I was probably going to contract hoof-and-mouth disease, but what
did I care? My life wasn’t exactly roses right now anyway.

“Work was awful today,” I said, leaning back on the couch. “I had to write an article
about this speech Jill Biden gave at four
P.M.
but I had to be done by the time her speech was finished at four twenty-five
P.M.
Like how is that possible? Time travel? I finished five minutes after and Hardy said
I had the journalistic pace of a Galapagos turtle. A turtle.”

“Fascinating,” said Payton, dissecting an artichoke and only eating the inside. “Tell
me again why you chose a career in journalism? A love of premature wrinkles and stress
headaches?”

She took her thin hand and brushed it near my eye while mouthing the words “crow’s-feet.”

“I don’t know why I chose journalism,” I answered honestly. “Mom seemed to like it.”

“Mom also paid five thousand dollars to meet Gloria Estefan in Miami. Gloria Estefan.
She’s not of sound mind.”

What was wrong with Gloria Estefan? I pushed Payton’s hand off my face and stood up
to walk out to the barn. I was only a few steps away when I felt something ricochet
off the back of my head. It was an olive, thrown by the hand of my own sister. I turned
around to yell.

“I wasn’t quite done talking to you yet,” she said with a smile before I could get
a word out. Is that what she did when she wasn’t through talking? She threw pickled
bar snacks at people’s heads? She would make a great addition to the United Nations.
Maybe she could throw a cocktail onion at Ban Ki-moon.

“Don’t you want to hear about my day?” said Payton, putting her feet on the coffee
table. I looked at her tan legs, longer and thinner than mine, and decided I didn’t
actually want to hear how her day was. I had a brief lapse of judgment in New York
a few years back and went out on three dates with a plastic surgeon named Stuart from
Franklin Lakes, New Jersey. He told me that while my legs were long and dancerly,
it would help if I had lipo on my knees to have my kneezles removed. Kneezles, as
in the tiny bit of fat that just hangs around on your kneecap. The relationship didn’t
last.

“I had a fascinating day,” said Payton, stretching one of her legs into the air and
then thumping it back onto the table.

“Wad’ya do?” I asked, shoving three olives in my mouth. I chewed them fast and placed
the pits delicately into Payton’s lap.

“Well I’m not going to tell you if you regurgitate food,” she said with a yawn. “Don’t
be such a child. You’re actually very old.”

“Fine.” I put my head in her lap and smiled as big as I could to display my pink gums.

“I went to the Goodstone Inn,” said Payton.

“To the what!” I lifted my head and stared at my sister like she had just said she’d
been to Planet Zorbitron. “Why did you go there? What did you do? Why didn’t you tell
me?”

“Well, I thought about telling you,” said Payton, picking up a magazine from the coffee
table and flicking to the table of contents. “But then I figured, why bother, and
I just headed over.”

She started reading an article about the blood type diet and was probably on the second
paragraph by the time I ripped the thing out of her hands and demanded some information.

“Payton! Stop being such a heartless cow! Speak! Why were you at the Goodstone?” I
asked turning red.

“You’re awfully emotional for a WASP,” she said, then picked the magazine up off the
floor.

Would I really go to prison if I strangled her? Couldn’t I just show the police officer
the picture from 1987 when she put me in a laundry bag and left me out by the trash?
He would let me off then. “Abuse,” he would say. “You’re off the hook.” And he would
go off on his merry way to find real criminals.

“Payton! Tell me why you went! What did you do? Did you tell them I stayed there to
stalk a United States senator? Talk!” I screamed, my candle burning at both ends and
in the middle.

“Well,” she said, calmly continuing. “It really is very picturesque, a little provincial,
but quaint. I see the appeal. Now if I was going to have an affair—and I’m not saying
I am—but if I did, it would have to be in Paris. I just don’t think my clothes could
come off with another man unless we were in Paris. At the George V. In spring . . .
or maybe early fall . . . ”

This was the person I had chosen to confide in. This photogenic, horsewoman lunatic.
Next time I was just going to call Upton, pass him my notes, and keep writing about
Hillary Clinton’s hair.

“I went to the Goodstone because I wanted to see the place, for starters.” Payton
finally put down the magazine and turned toward me. “And then, I figured that while
I was there I might as well ask some questions.”

She did, did she. Sherlock Holmes in a pair of linen pants. I was ready to scream.
I was pretty sure that fire was going to come from my mouth and all of Payton’s pretty
hair would be singed off, but my father chose that exact moment to walk into the living
room and sit down on the other side of the couch. “My lovely daughters,” he said,
smiling and patting Payton’s hand. She smiled at him like a girl who knows she’s everyone’s
favorite. “Are you two tired? How about a game of Trivial Pursuit? Think you can beat
Payton now that you have that big-time job, Addy?” he asked, eyeing an antique chest
where we kept boring things like board games and photo albums.

“We can’t,” answered Payton, taking her feet off the coffee table and standing up.
“Adrienne has chlamydia. I’m helping her resolve the problem.” She took my hand and
led me out the door toward the barn.

“Chlamydia! Seriously? That’s the first excuse that came into your warped mind?” I
yelled as I marched behind her toward the barn. “ ‘Hi, Dad, Adrienne has the clap!
Sorry we can’t partake in family board game night!’ ”

“Calm down,” said Payton as we headed up the stairs. “He knows I’m kidding. Not all
of us are as literal as you.” She opened the door to my apartment, which, like my
car, was never locked, and made herself comfortable on my bed.

“So as I was saying before you interrupted me with your crazy temper tantrum, I happened
to stop by Goodstone. And while I was there, I chatted with a few people.”

“A few people . . . ” I was standing at the foot of my bed,
watching her recline like a monarch waiting for me to fan her with an ostrich feather.

“Okay, I talked to a few members of the cleaning staff.”

I had visions of Payton sitting down with thirty people in a boardroom and handing
them all crisp hundred-dollar bills for inside information. I was going to cry. There
went all ethics, all journalistic standards.

“I can see that tiny little brain of yours working itself up into a frenzy,” said
Payton, rolling over onto her side. “It’s not like
you
went there and questioned the staff. I did. I’m just your source. I happen to be
your sister, but that’s never really been proven, so just consider me a source. A
really good one, actually. Maybe I should call Wendi Murdoch next.”

I flopped down next to Payton and looked at the ceiling. “Fine, source. Then be a
source and tell me what you found out.”

“They’re still there,” said Payton, smiling. “Every weekend. They still go there,
right to the Bull Barn.”

Maybe she wasn’t that bad after all. What was a little bribery here and there?

I rolled over to face her. “Seriously? Are you sure?” I asked, forgetting my anger.
“I assumed they would have stopped going there by now. I’ve been too freaked out to
go back, now that the staff has seen my face. They can’t be stupid enough to keep
coming back, right?”

“They are indeed stupid enough,” said Payton. “I walked to the horse stable, which
is just down the hill from the Bull Barn, and started talking to the two guys mucking
the stalls. They were pretty cute, from Winchester they said. And they were very happy
to chat with me.”

“Did you bribe them?” I asked cautiously. “Or do anything else?”

“Like what, Addy?” Payton rolled her eyes. “You’re far too paranoid. All I did was
ask a few questions. I was just doing
your
job. One of them told me that he cleans the Bull Barn, too, and that he knocked on
the door last weekend to clean it and Stanton and Olivia hadn’t checked out yet. He
said that an older man and his daughter—with red hair? I offered, and he confirmed—were
still there. The same ones that he’s seen every week.”

“He said daughter?” I asked, concerned that Stanton might actually have a red-haired
daughter.

“He was just trying to be proper,” said Payton. “He knows they’re banging. He also
said Stanton had the barn rented out indefinitely. He was told to always have these
birch wood logs in the Bull Barn on Fridays, to keep doing it until he was told otherwise.
And he hasn’t been told otherwise. So, I got all that out of him and then I gave him
a hundred bucks.”

I knew it. I knew she had bribed him. I was screwed. Or was I screwed? I hadn’t bribed
him. My unscrupulous sister had. And I couldn’t do anything about it now except take
the very helpful information and run with it.

D
espite Payton’s completely unethical behavior, I allowed her to book us a trip to
Arizona. Alison, who had Saturday duty, agreed to take my Sunday if I covered both
days the following weekend. Hardy moaned and groaned and said he was signing me up
to work on Labor Day, but he bought my sister-is-sick lie and approved my time off.
I hadn’t taken a minute off since I started. My sister, I explained to all the Style
girls, was visiting from Argentina and had fallen off a horse and needed some minor
surgery on her hip.