Tell No Lies (30 page)

"I don't think I—"

"I can't believe he did. He would have done something, I think. Don't you?"

Her tone was insistent. He wondered if she believed, in some distorted way, that she'd already told him everything he needed to know to answer her questions.

"What happened, Jen, after you got home?" He made his own question as insistent as hers.

"We started to get ready for bed. We took showers to cool off. Andrea and I with my mom, and Brian with my dad." She laughed gently, but somewhat bitterly, Jack thought. "My mom was very weird about that, you know—the boys and the girls taking their showers separately. I mean, my God, we were just kids."

All Jack could think was that Jenny hadn't inherited her mother's modesty.

"It took me a long time to fall asleep. Andrea and I slept together and she always jabbered and sang to herself every night for at least an hour before she'd fall asleep. Usually, it didn't bother me. In a way it was like my own personal lullaby. But not that night. I sensed something was different, I think.
 

"Of course, that's another one of those memories that perhaps I've made up. I think to myself—how could I have remembered that? Maybe I've concocted it in my head with the passage of time." She stopped pacing and sat down. "I guess in a way it doesn't really matter, does it? Anyway, at some point I heard Andrea get up. I guess to get a drink of water."

Her back was to him now and he placed his hand on her shoulder. To his surprise, she reached up and grabbed his hand with both of hers and pulled him around to the chair next to her. She continued to hold his hand, tracing and studying the veins on top and then turning it over and doing the same to the creases on his palm. The action saddened and aroused him at the same time.

She breathed in deeply again, and he watched her shoulders rise and fall rhythmically. He knew she was very close, and he questioned where he was taking her, and why.

"Jenny, you don't have to tell me. It's okay." But maybe it was his own fear, not hers, that made him want her to stop. Now that he'd gained her trust, what if he couldn't give her what she needed? What if he couldn't keep his end of the unspoken bargain?

"I think that's what did her in, you know? Her thirst." It was as if she hadn't even heard him. "How does that happen, huh? A little kid is thirsty, so she gets out of bed to get a drink, and she ends up dead. How does that happen?" She began to cry. Once her tears started, they came fast. She was still holding his hand and the tears dropped onto it, hot and wet. "Seems she interrupted some negotiations. They said that she became a bargaining tool. Brian and I saw it because I heard yelling and got scared. Andrea wasn't in our bed so I went to Brian's room, and we snuck down together. The house was dark, but the moonlight lit the room enough to see."

Jack was beginning to understand that Jenny's father must have known his assailant, but other than that fact, the connection between them hadn't been explained.

"We hid in a closet, and we could see them lying on the floor, the three of them."

Her voice was hard to understand through her crying. He leaned in, his face inches from hers, both hands on face, and tried to calm her.

"Shh," he whispered. "Jenny, shh. You don't have to do this. It's okay."

"He had the gun at Andrea's head," she said, her voice breaking. "She was first."

Jack shut his eyes to block the mental image that accompanied her words, but it didn't work.

"My dad's eyes . . . God . . . I've never seen anything like it." She paused. "The whole time, in my mind, I'm getting ready to run if I have to. I wasn't thinking about what I could do to help. I was thinking only of saving myself. Brian told me later, much later when we were grown, that I was shaking and whimpering like a dog left out in the cold, and he had to clamp his hand over my mouth to stifle the noise. I have no memory of that. He told me that the guy searched the upstairs, presumably suspecting or perhaps knowing that Andrea wasn't the only child. I find it ironic that it was Andrea, in a way, and not my parents, who saved us. Don't you?"

Jack was unable to answer her question. Instead, he found himself wondering what he would do in the same situation, what Claire would do. Would the fear paralyze him, as it apparently had Jenny's father, or would he find the courage somewhere within himself to put up resistance? And what about Claire? She was always so strong, in her own quiet way. Would she submit to execution without a fight? He didn't think so, but he envisioned her version of a fight as an attempt at reason, a negotiated settlement.

He'd been staring at his hand, at Jenny's fingers nervously weaving their way through his without any awareness of the movement. Whom was he betraying just then, by thinking about his family, about Claire? Surely Claire, merely for his being there. And Jenny? Did her sharing this with him elevate their obligations to each other to an even higher level than their actions just an hour before? He knew that it must, yet he didn't know what she expected from him, and he was afraid to ask.
 

"Really, I have no memory of anything past the actual gunfire," she continued. "Everything else I learned from Brian, or later from the news stories and police reports."

"Was he prosecuted?" It seemed like a logical question when it was in his head but out loud the words sounded ridiculous. As if that could matter to her, really.

"Well, they caught him."

The ticking of the clock on the wall behind her punctuated her sentence. He jumped when one of her cats rubbed up against his leg, and as a result, he missed the nuance of her answer; it wasn't until much later that he would realize his mistake.

To his surprise, she smiled slightly. "You're behaving like I'm telling you a ghost story, Jack. You're all jumpy." Her smile lingered and he returned it, but he didn't know what to say. It
was
a ghost story, wasn't it? And he still felt the weight of it, but she seemed lighter now. He'd asked to carry her burden and she'd let him; now he didn't know what to do with it.
 

"The picture. It's your sister?" he asked.

She knew without explanation what picture he was referring to. "Yes."

"So who schooled you at home?"

"An aunt. My dad's sister. For some strange reason, she thought it would be too hard for us to go back to school. But that was exactly what we needed."

"Yale, Jenny. She must have done something right."

She shrugged. "Yeah, well, I'm not talking about the academics. You want some more OJ?"

He nodded and handed her his glass. Just like that, she'd moved on. Did she sense he couldn't hear more? Or had she finished, anyway? But she hadn't explained her father's connection to the murderer. She hadn't explained the "interrupted negotiations."

She stood, letting the shawl fall onto the chair behind her. She went to the refrigerator and refilled his glass. He'd never seen a woman so comfortable in her own skin. He wondered what the aunt had been like. Who had instilled all this confidence?

"Do you have pictures?" he asked. "Of your family?"

"Upstairs. Come on, I'll show you."

Her bedroom seemed warmer now. The wind still blew, but the air it pushed in felt almost tropical compared to earlier. He smelled rain as he cranked the casement windows, leaving them open just a crack. She waited for him on the bed with an old photo album.

"That's my mom and dad," she began when he joined her, pointing to a picture. "I have to admit that it's hard to know which of my memories are real and which I've created from looking at pictures. But I remember my sister so well. Isn't that funny?"

Jack looked at the man and woman in the photo. His eyes immediately focused on the woman. There it was. There was what he'd seen in Jenny the first night they'd met, what in his white-breaded ignorance he couldn't identify. There was the darkness, the black hair.

"She was born in India, in Kanpur," Jenny explained.

"And your dad?"

"Oh, he was a full-fledged American. As Waspy as they come. Like you, Jack." He couldn't tell if he'd just been insulted. "According to my aunt, neither set of parents was too excited when they married. His didn't speak to him for a few years, but finally softened when us kids came along. Hers disowned her, but she was already in the States by then, so there wasn't much they could do to stop it."

Jack looked at the man in the picture. He appeared to tower above his wife. Jenny might have received her coloring and her lips from her mother, but Jack could see that her other features most definitely belonged to her father. The little sharp nose, the prominent cheekbones, her height.

"How'd they meet?"

"She was in the States on a student visa."

"Show me your sister."

She flipped a few pages, searching, and then stopped when she found the page she wanted. Jack saw the same little girl from the photo on her dresser, but in these pictures she looked more childlike, more innocent. In one picture she played on the floor with two kittens, her mouth wide open in endless giggles. In another, Jenny sat in front of a birthday cake with a big pout on her face, her sister on one side of her, Brian on the other. Frosting and more giggles lit her sister's face; the cake in front of Jenny had been poked and the culprit wasn't trying to hide anything.

"She was younger than you."

"Yes, by almost three years."

"More of a trouble-maker than you, huh?"

She smiled, just barely. "It seems so, doesn't it? I think I just took over where she left off."

A gust of wind slammed one of the windows shut. Jack turned at the sound, but Jenny's voice brought him back. "He had a mistress."
 

"What?" The statement took Jack by surprise. She was still gazing at the picture from her birthday, and the only "he" in the picture was her brother.

"My dad. They said he had a mistress. But she denied it."

Jack swallowed. "Jenny, I don't think—"

"You know what the only real memory I have of him is? You know, a memory that's not overshadowed by that night? He built this raft with us. Told us we were going to be just like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and take that raft out on the river. My mom thought he was crazy—swore he'd have us all drowned before it was over. But we could all swim well, we weren't worried." She shrugged. "My mom didn't really understand the allure of the Mississippi. It wasn't the Ganga so it held no meaning for her."

"The
Ganga
?"
 

"Hindus believe that bathing in the waters of the Ganges River will wash away their sins," she explained.

"We'll have to book a trip soon, then."

She gave him a bittersweet smile but didn't say anything.

"Do you miss them?" he asked.

"I don't know. I barely knew them."

"I guess." He watched her turn the pages of the album slowly without really looking at the pictures. "You seem sort of mad at them."

She turned to him, glaring. "Why would I be mad at them, Jack?" Her tone was smart, challenging him. But the answer seemed obvious to him.
 

"I don't know." He tried to speak gently. "You just seem angry. At your dad, especially, like it was his fault."

 Her eyes pierced into him. He heard himself swallow. He wanted to take back what he'd just said.

"You are fucking amazing, Jack Hilliard. Who the hell are you to analyze me and my dead parents? It's taken you nine years to even acknowledge that my skin is darker than yours, but you think you can come in here and in five minutes psychoanalyze our relationship?"

"What are you talking about? Nine years to acknowledge your skin is darker than mine?"

She grunted. "Give me a break, will you? You think I don't know why you're so attracted to me? Like I'm some dark, exotic thing compared to your lily-white wife."

"You're wrong," he said quietly, shocked.

"Yeah, why don't we analyze that, since you seem to want to play amateur psychologist tonight? Why don't we analyze why you're here instead of in Jeff City, where you're supposed to be? Huh? Or, better yet, why aren't you at home, in bed next to Claire?"

The use of Claire's name made him wince in a way her use of the generic term
wife
hadn't. He reached for her left hand, but she raised it and shook it to brush his away.
 

"Fuck you, Jack. You've got a lot of nerve."

He rolled onto his side, propped his head up with his left arm, and watched her staring blankly at the photo album. They lay there like that for what seemed to him forever, while he waited for the tension in her jaw to relax and her eyes to clear. When he thought she wouldn't rebuff him, he reached up and touched her hair, tucking it behind her ear. She let him, closing her eyes as he did. "This is so wrong," she mumbled.
 

He leaned close to her face. "Jenny, I'm sorry," he whispered. "I just thought you wanted to talk about it."

She nodded and spoke without opening her eyes. "You want too much from me. You're moving way too fast."

"I'm sorry," he said again. When he laughed a little, she turned to him. "First you complain that it takes me nine years to notice the color of your skin—"

"Acknowledge," she interrupted, correcting him.

"And then you tell me I'm moving too fast." After a moment, he said, "Tell me something."

"What?"

"Did it float?"

"What?"

"The raft."

"You're changing the subject."

"Did it?"

"I don't know. We never got the chance to take it out before that night."

"What happened to it? Afterward, I mean."

"I don't know that either. Maybe my aunt put it out for the trash one day. Brian and I never asked. Didn't want to know, I guess."

Rain began to fall outside, gently at first, and then picked up force. No more wind, though; the sheers hung still. Despite the horror of the story she'd told him, this, finally, was how he'd imagined it: her opening up to him, letting him in.
 

"Jenny."

"Hmm?"

"I think we've got a problem."

"Yeah, and what's that?"