Perfect Lies (18 page)

Several years before, Ethan had made a number of rubbings from the worn headstones behind the church. He’d framed the charcoal impressions—sad-eyed cherubs and sailing ships—intending to hang them along the hall leading from the entryway to the kitchen. Lark had objected.

“They’re gruesome,” Lark had said during the argument Meg had witnessed at that time. “I don’t want to be reminded of death every time I walk down my front hall.”

“I disagree, my love,” Ethan had replied. “I think they’re funny as hell. Like comics. Man’s little joke on himself. As if angels will be singing as the big ship death pulls into the heavenly harbor. I think it’s hilarious that people can’t stand the thought that when they die they’ll simply be dead. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Meg had forgotten how the rest of the argument had gone, but the rubbings ended up hanging in Ethan’s studio.

The small cemetery was slick with sleet, the gravestones leaning drunkenly, one or two broken in half and tented carefully on their respective graves like oversize place settings. Meg could hear the noise coming from the reception behind her. She wasn’t sure what had drawn her here. Moonlight played through the wands of the gnarled willow tree whose roots had heaved up several gravestones at the southeast corner of the walled-in plot. Meg’s fingers traced the ghostly lettering of a headstone. Pale light illuminated the first name,
mary ellen,
but time and the elements had erased the rest.

Meg tried briefly to imagine who this woman had been, what she had yearned for, what had made her laugh. But it was impossible to know her, or to know anybody. Other people’s lives—even Ethan’s, in which Meg had played such an integral part—were, in the end, mysteries. Ethan, who had lived so large and demanded so much of the world, was soon to be nothing more than a name, like this one, chiseled on a headstone. All that passion and need and ego—the fires that blazed and burned—were no more now than the memories he’d left behind. The chaos he’d created was for others to sort through. But trying to understand the dead, she knew, was as difficult as reading worn stone letters. Like those carvings, Ethan’s life was dissolving into the pieces of a puzzle that she needed desperately to decipher and fit together. Once again she ran her fingers over the gravestone, searching for an impression that was hardly there.

“I
’m just saying we don’t need a lot of outsiders telling us what we know already,” Lester Friedlander said, his words slow and slightly slurred. He stood in the belligerent, shoulders-back stance of a man asking for trouble. An overhead light at the bottom of the steps leading down from the church to the parking lot illuminated the scene. Lester, who had his own construction company; Willie Skylar, the part-time manager of the town’s transfer station and full-time handyman; and half a dozen other men stood in a loose half-circle around Willie’s pickup. A keg of beer gleamed in the back of the truck. It seemed obvious to Meg, who came upon them as she made her way back to the reception, that the group had been helping themselves liberally to the keg’s contents. She stopped just outside the circle of light to listen.

“You just don’t like cops,” Carl Yoder, Mike’s younger brother, shot back. “Ever since Tom hit you with that D.W.I, last year.”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” Les continued, stumbling a little in an attempt to keep his macho pose. “This has nothing to do with me personally, okay? It’s got to do with all of us. My point is this: Who do you think is paying for those state guys to come in here and take up half the rooms at the Rocquonic? Who’s paying for them to pick through the dust balls and shit at Ethan’s studio? We are, folks. That’s who. It’s our hard-earned tax dollars at work, that’s what. And for what purpose? We already know what the hell happened.”

“Hey, it just needs to be investigated by professionals, Les,” Willie said as he refilled his plastic beer mug.

“Like we need some fricking state seal of approval on this thing?” Les demanded. “Come on, that’s just ridiculous. Lucinda McGowan was found with the murder weapon in her hands, for chrissakes. We need Columbo and Matlock to help Tom track down the killer?”

“Well, my observation is that old Tom has a difficult enough time tracking down his reading glasses,” Theodore Weisel observed. A math teacher who lived in Red River and taught at the Montville secondary school, Theo always tried to sound wry and knowing. He was obviously pleased by the round of laughter that followed his comment.

“He sure had them on when he was interviewing Becca Sabin,” Willie observed, smiling as he shook his head. “Should’ve seen the guy helping her out of her car down at the police station yesterday—like she was some kind of visiting dignitary.”

“I wouldn’t mind helping her with a few things myself,” Carl Yoder commented. “That woman has some body, if you know what I mean.”

“Those state guys were getting an eyeful, too,” Willie added. “I was over there to pick up my hunting license when Becca came by for her interview. They were just falling all over themselves to get her coffee and whatnot.”

“And that plays exactly to what I’m saying.” Les, a bit steadier on his feet now, had also found his voice—and everyone there knew just how much Les enjoyed the sound of his own words. Les paused for dramatic effect and went on in a more measured tone. “I mean, can’t you just hear those state detectives talking up Becca Sabin? ‘And what were you doing, ma’am, the morning that Lucinda McGowan drove a flaming hot metal rod into her stepfather’s chest? Sleeping in, eh? And what were you wearing, please? No, it’s very important to the progress of this case that we get an exact description of your red silk negligee….

To general laughter, Theodore Weisel observed, “Ethan could have provided them with one.”

“That’s for sure,” Willie said, chuckling.

“Ethan probably could have given them a pretty good description of a couple of bedrooms in this town,” Carl added.

“Yeah, including your brother’s,” Les said, prodding Carl Yoder with his elbow. A silence fell on the men and Meg could almost hear them thinking,
Les Friedlander and his big mouth. When he has a bellyful of beer in him, he just doesn’t know how to keep his yap from flapping.

Carl took a step away from Les. “What are you trying to say, Les?”

“Just what the rest of us have known for years,” Les replied defensively, though he sensed with a quick look around at the others’ faces that he was alone on this one. “What you Yoder guys are just too holier-than-thou to admit to yourselves. Paula had a thing for Ethan. A big one. And, knowing the man the way we all did, I’d say he took ample advantage of Paula’s tender feelings.”

Without any warning, Carl Yoder rammed his right shoulder hard into Les Friedlander’s chest. Les’s beer mug flew up in the air and landed on the windshield of a nearby car. The two men fell to the icy macadam and rolled against the back wheels of Willie’s truck. Meg couldn’t see them, but she could hear their angry curses and ragged gasps as they grappled with one another.

“What’s going on here?” Francine had emerged seemingly from nowhere, the bulky parka she had thrown on over her clerical garb giving her a slightly comical look. There was nothing funny, however, about her angry tone of voice.

“Nothing,” Willie Skylar muttered, stepping between the beer keg and Francine’s line of vision. “Just a little friendly misunderstanding. Right, guys?” Les and Carl grunted as they pulled away from each other and crawled out from under the rear of the truck.

“Willie Skylar, have you actually brought beer onto church property without my permission?”

“Now, Francine,” Willie began in his slow, sincere-sounding way, “the keg was already sitting there in the back of the truck when I came to the service. I didn’t bring it specifically for any purpose. And we all just got talking out here, you know, waiting for the wives and kids, not wanting to break things up in there. Didn’t think it would do any harm.”

“You grown men should be ashamed of yourselves,” Francine replied, though Meg could sense her anger seeping away. “Get that keg out of my sight and get yourselves on home now while you can still see straight. The roads are slick and I don’t want any of you idiots rolling drunk into a tree. I’ve had about as much trouble these past few days as I can stand.”

“Yes’m,” Willie replied, as Carl and Les brushed the ice shards off their coats. “Sorry to have caused any trouble.”

“And Les?” Francine added. “Sometimes I think that they left out an eleventh commandment: ‘Thou shalt mind thine own business.’ Do you understand me?”

Meg hesitated in the shadows, not wishing to be caught eavesdropping, as the group broke up and Francine turned and went back to the reception. She overheard one last comment as Willie Skylar climbed up into his truck.

Just before he turned on the ignition, he rolled down his window and called over to Les who was scraping ice off his windshield, “It’s fitting, don’t you think, that Ethan got it with a poker? I mean considering how many he’s poked in his time?”

Les and Theo Weisel, who’d overheard the comment, laughed out loud in the damp, cold night air.

“Meg, I need to get the girls home.” Lark came up to her as she walked back into the basement. The reception was winding down, the crowd now massed around the coatracks. A row of small children, ornery with fatigue, sat on folding chairs as parents tried to get them into their snow boots. Meg had watched Lark sail through the funeral and reception with a luminous calm. Her eyes glistening, her head high, Lark, publicly at least, was handling her husband’s murder with dignity. Detachment. With the “love,” Lark had told Meg she wanted to display. But now Meg couldn’t help but wonder what was behind her sister’s forbearance. Clearly, Ethan was not the husband or father that Lark pretended he had been. Meg was obviously not the first or only woman he had tried to seduce. It didn’t make her feel any better that Ethan hadn’t singled her out, but it did make her question everything she thought she knew about her sister’s marriage. It had been far more complicated and compromised than Lark had ever let on. Lark, who had confided to Meg the smallest minutiae of her daily life, had managed to gloss over what was surely her biggest problem: her husband.

“I’m ready to go, too,” Meg replied, trying to read her sister’s expression, but Lark didn’t meet her eye. Looking tired and irritated, she scanned the departing crowd.

“Actually, I’m going to ask you to stay and help Francine clean up. I was counting on Janine to do it, but apparently Clint’s had too much to drink and she’s got to get him home. Where the hell did all the booze come from?”

“Willie Skylar had a keg in his truck,” Meg began.“There was a fight—” Though she wanted to confront Lark with what she knew, she thought better of it when she realized that Brook and Phoebe were following sleepily in their mother’s wake.

“These men,” Lark said disdainfully, but then her expression softened as her eyes fastened on someone across the room. Meg followed her gaze to where Abe was struggling with an armload of coats.

“Okay, guys,” Abe said as he passed Brook and Phoebe their parkas. “Time to saddle up.”

“Abe’ll help me get us all home,” Lark told her. “Francine offered to drive you back when you’re done here.”

Meg knew she had no choice but to do Lark’s bidding, though she felt her anger welling. Lark had purposely made Meg feel guilty and miserable—while keeping her sister in the dark about so many things. The haven of love that in Meg’s mind had been Lark’s beloved home had collapsed as swiftly and completely as a house of cards. She thought of the anguish she’d endured on Ethan’s behalf—all of it in an attempt to save Lark’s marriage and family. But now she knew that her sister’s married life had been no better than her parent’s ill-fated union. All those years that Meg had envied what Lark possessed—could it really have been nothing more than a trick of the heart?

Meg didn’t know the two other women in the congregation who stayed on to help with the cleanup. They knew how to operate the three large industrial dishwashers, so they concentrated on the kitchen while Meg and Francine picked up the main hall, folding chairs, bagging trash.

“Shall we do the tables?” Francine asked when the chairs had been stowed away in the storage room behind the coatracks. Meg helped Francine ease the first table over onto its side and then unclasp and push the metal legs inward. They hadn’t exchanged more than ten words over the twenty minutes or so that they’d been working together, though it didn’t surprise Meg when Francine finally spoke. It was as though they were already in the midst of a long, ongoing conversation on the subject.

“I saw you out in the parking lot. I saw the look on your face, Meg. Could it be true that you really didn’t know about Ethan until tonight?”

“Well, I knew—from personal experience—that he had his problems, but I guess I didn’t realize the extent of them.”

“You couldn’t see it for yourself?”

“When I first met Ethan—a decade or so ago—I had my doubts.” Meg looked down the edge of the table at Francine and felt for the first time the gentleness of her pale, disarming gaze.

“Yes.” Francine nodded, encouraging her, “Lark told me about Bennington.”

“But, over the years,” Meg continued, feeling the release of confession, “as their marriage lasted, as the girls were born, I guess I came to believe in him. In them. More than that, I grew envious. They seemed so united, dedicated to each other and the girls.”

“Ah … yes. I see,” Francine said, nodding, as they started to collapse the next table. “The grass is always greener. Need, desire … they can be such positive driving forces. The emotional fuel to get us from place to place. And yet, so often when we get there, what do we find? Well, life is never what we expect, is it?”

“So everybody in this town knew the truth about Ethan?”

Francine drummed her fingers on the table as she met Meg’s eyes. She hesitated. “Truth? When it comes to the actions and motives of mankind, I sometimes think the word truth just doesn’t apply. God deals in truth. We seem to traffic in something much baser. But, to answer your question, I can at least give you facts. You’re sure you want to hear them?”