Perfect Lies (26 page)

“I saw Ethan watching her. I saw him kind of slowly circling around her. About halfway through the evening, he found a way to approach her. I could see them starting to talk to each other. Then I watched her really begin to take him in. The way her hips started to sway. And you know how Ethan used to run his hands through his hair? I always recognized that as one of his signals. I could just tell he was getting turned on by her.”

“Oh, baby,” Meg squeezed her sister’s hands as Lark shook her head sadly.

“Well, Meggie, you know by that time I was pretty accustomed to turning a blind eye on Ethan’s little ‘things.’ That’s how I used to think about them. I was used to these infatuations—they’d only last a few weeks, maybe a month, always accompanied by a lot of intense activity in the studio. I came to the conclusion that this was simply Ethan’s way of working. Flirtation, sex, his artwork—it was all the same to him. Ethan always came back to us in the end, refreshed, relaxed. I felt that these episodes somehow freed him from his inner demons. So when I saw Becca and Ethan moving toward each other that night, I thought I knew what was going to happen. Ethan had been restless for several months at that point. He’d been increasingly difficult and demanding. Bad moods flaring up at unexpected times. I’d tried everything I could think of to help him out of the black hole he’d fall into at times like that—but I was beginning to feel pretty damned helpless. It seemed to me that these affairs—as meaningless as he always claimed they were—tended to release him. I knew the women meant nothing to him. That helped me get through it each time I sensed he was starting up with someone new.”

“I hate to think of you going through this alone,” Meg said. Lark’s tone was so resigned and matter-of-fact, Meg couldn’t help but wonder how her sister had dealt with her anger.

“Well, at least I’d become somewhat inured,” Lark replied, giving Meg a brief smile. “Poor Abe had no such understanding or help for his humiliation. He told me later how he’d blown up after the last of their guests had gone. He’d accused Becca of doing everything but unzipping Ethan’s fly. He’d begged her not to take it any further. Apparently, Becca had been known to stray a bit before this—that’s one of the reasons Abe wanted them to spend more time in the country. Becca would go off on shoots or runway work, get high on coke and screw around on him. He thought Red River could solve their problems. I guess, for a time anyway, it helped. Then Becca met Ethan.

“Becca told me later that she tried,” Lark continued, her gaze moving back to the window. “Not to see Ethan, I mean. Not to think of him. But, you know how it is up here, Meg. We all get invited to same the parties, run into each other at Yoder’s every other day. You can’t help it. And at some point, Becca didn’t want to help it anymore. She moved up to Red River for the winter, then spring and summer, while Abe commuted from town on weekends. Poor Abe. He thought she was trying to please him, do her bit to keep the marriage together.

“Instead, she began to put herself in Ethan’s line of vision as often as she could. She figured out when he usually picked up the mail, and she’d be at the post office at the same time—juvenile things like that. But she was hooked on him. Janine was right, it was a kind of insanity, because she was so used to getting what she wanted. Becca the Beautiful. But there was one thing about Ethan that she didn’t know. He hated to be pursued. He liked romance to be a mystery, a dance, a series of slightly obscure signals, like lightning bugs on a summer’s evening: ‘I’m here, where are you?’

“The illusion of the chase.” Lark shook her head. “That’s really what he thrived on. Like the high-wire act he did with his sculptures—not knowing, until the penultimate moment, how, or if, the whole crazy thing would turn out. And there was Becca—giving the surprise ending away. Ethan ignored her, stepped around her. He even complained to me that Abe’s wife was becoming something of a nuisance. So when we were invited to a Labor Day party at the Aldridges and he heard the Sabins were going to be there as well, Ethan actually thought about refusing to go. You know the Aldridge place up on Edencroft Road? That gorgeous colonial on the hill with perennial gardens that go on forever? Owen Aldridge is a big mucketymuck on Wall Street, and he and his wife Myra poured millions into fixing up the house and grounds. It was going to be the first time any of us saw all the renovations. Catered. A swing band from Boston. I was the one who talked Ethan into going.

“Everybody who was anybody in the county was there: all the wealthy weekenders, the local elite, a couple of TV stars who had been doing summer stock in the Berkshires. It was a beautiful, crystal-clear night. Tons of stars. I remember seeing them all reflected in the Olympic-sized swimming pool the Aldridges had put in. Dinner and cocktails were served around the pool. Dancing on a raised platform under a striped tent. It was truly elegant. Ethan and I steered clear of the Sabins, which wasn’t all that hard to do as there were so many people.

“After dinner, we danced. He’s—he was—a very good dancer. He had that grace. We were happy, having such a good time, and then Abe asked if he could cut in. I learned afterward that Becca had put him up to it. Abe had actually forgotten or—who knows?—repressed what had happened the night of
their
party. That had been nearly a year before. We were all getting to be friends now, or so he thought.

“I don’t recall what Abe and I talked about, but I remember thinking how much I’d come to like him. My personal barometer for judging people these days is the girls—if they go for someone I just automatically trust that person. Brook and Phoebe adore Abe—well, you’ve seen them all together. And Abe can always make me laugh, even when things are really bad. Whatever happens, I get the feeling with Abe that he’s already been there—whatever down place you’re at—and he has great empathy, I think that’s the word. That’s why it was so awful to see his face, to feel his whole body go kind of dead, when he saw them. Talk about making love on a dance floor; Becca had plastered herself against Ethan, moving her hips in that way. And Ethan, well, I can’t pretend that he was exactly pushing her away, but she was definitely all over
him,
rather than the other way around. People were staring. And laughing a little to each other. I was so hurt and embarrassed, I just wanted to cry. But Abe—he saw it all in a flash and he lost control. He went after Ethan right there on the dance floor.

“And Abe is, what—three inches shorter than Ethan was? Twenty pounds lighter? It was a joke. Ethan overpowered him from the start, but Abe wouldn’t give up. It was awful. Abe took a real beating. Of course, Becca and I tried to stop them. Finally Owen and two other guests pulled them apart and Owen asked us all to leave. It was pretty terrible. But that was just the beginning of it. Ethan was furious with Abe for accusing him publicly like that of coming on to Becca when she had spent the past nine months or so throwing herself in his path. So he got his revenge the one way guaranteed to hurt Abe the most.”

“He started up with Becca,” Meg said for her.

“With a vengeance. About two really intense months of it. Just enough to totally destroy the marriage. Not that the Sabins weren’t heading for the rocks before Ethan came along. But he made sure the thing shattered for good.”

“So that’s why they divorced. And why Abe hated Ethan.”

“They wouldn’t have lasted anyway. I’ve gotten to know Becca and Abe awfully well through all of this—and that marriage was definitely a case of opposites attracting—for a time. Becca is totally self-involved—to her, nothing is more interesting or important than the drama that is her life. Initially, I think, Abe liked that—the intensity, the self-absorption. Abe thought Becca was high-strung, a bit neurotic, you know—this overly sensitive, exotic flower. But he also thought she loved him, when what she was actually responding to was his love for her—the flattering, comforting reflection in the mirror.

“Ethan was the first man Becca ever knew who pulled her out of herself—who forced her to look at herself and wonder what was lacking. It made her nuts, in the beginning, when he rejected her advances. But it also made her think. Take stock. She came to realize that she didn’t want to simply be adored. She wanted to be
known
—ravished, diminished, redeemed—all the things that a deep physical passion can do. What she was really after, and I see this now, was to grow up. And Abe kept wanting to protect her, to keep her this sheltered special woman-child. It was just the opposite of what she needed.”

“Janine said that Becca couldn’t cope with Ethan ending the affair. That she continued to pursue him when everybody else knew it was over,” Meg prodded.

“Janine.” Lark frowned. “There’s a twelve-step word for her: co-dependent. She’s gotten so into this family that all of our dysfunctions have become her own. She sort of feeds off us—emotionally, I mean. But that’s her choice. And, yes, she’s right—when Ethan threw Becca over for a second time, she had a really bad time dealing with it. She couldn’t believe it, after giving up her marriage for Ethan, that he didn’t seem to care. He’d been cooling way down on her for months and then, after he got the Judson show, he just cut her off.

“There was a lot in New York to keep him occupied,” Lark went on, looking down at her hands. She picked up a rubber band from her drawing board and started twisting it tighter and tighter as she spoke. “And nothing in Red River to keep Becca going, to keep her from obsessing about the whole thing. I got to hear all about it. She turned to me for comfort. Me, of all people. But, you know, Francine and I had been talking a lot about forgiveness and forbearance, about learning to live with the world as it is given to us. I decided that I could actually help Becca. I knew what Ethan was like. Once he was through with someone—that was it. I wasn’t jealous of Becca anymore. And the more I listened to her pain, the more I felt sorry for her. She was so pathetic, Meg. This beautiful, glamorous woman—groveling for information about Ethan. She kept asking me if there was someone else. Someone new. Who could it be? Who?”

“How in the world did you stand all of this, Lark?” Meg said. “I think I’d have killed Ethan, if … ”

I
t was Sunday morning and Meg could hear Lark and the girls getting ready for church, Brook admonishing Phoebe to hurry up because they were all going to be late again. Meg had begged off going to the service the night before. She’d told her sister that work was running her ragged and she just needed a morning to sleep in. Now, she could hear her sister whispering to her daughters on the stairs to be quiet—Aunt Meg was still sleeping.

Actually, Aunt Meg had been wide awake for several hours. She’d been lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking through everything she knew so far about Ethan’s murder. But her thoughts ended up leading her around in circles, spinning uselessly through motives and opportunity, going back to a question that she’d raised with Lucinda: Would you kill someone because he’d stopped loving you? Could Lark, or could Becca have murdered Ethan for that reason? Would you destroy the object of your passion—or try ever harder to win him back? And then the question of passion had led Meg’s thoughts in an entirely different direction.

Abe.
Abraham Leonard Sabin.
She remembered examining his business card when he first suggested years ago that she call him if she needed advice on starting her agency. They were both in the early stages of starting their own companies then. The very next week she had taken him up on his offer.

After an exasperating meeting at her bank, Meg said to him, “They want to know what kind of business I’m going to have. I said an advertising agency, but apparently that wasn’t what they meant. I need to file something or other with the state. They told me a lawyer would know.”

“And luckily, they’re right,” Abe said, laughing. “There are different kinds of corporate entities—Chapter S, sub-chapter S. Come on in and we’ll go over the details. It’s pretty simple really.”

He’d made it fun as well. He was able to explain things—her office lease, the eventual credit line from the bank, the papers of incorporation—in a way that was clear without being condescending. The first year she was in business, she called him at least twice a month on one issue or another.

“This new client, Jonas Sportswear, wants to know when I’m going to send over the contract agreement. I haven’t got one Abe—you know me, I prefer to conduct business on a handshake.”

“Jonas puts you in the big leagues, now,” Abe pointed out. “And it’s probably time we drew up a standard contract. I’ll call their lawyers and see exactly what they have in mind. And I also think it’s time I started charging you my regular rates.”

“Jesus, Abe, how the hell much money do you lawyers make?”

“It’s disgusting, isn’t it? But then I saw your third-quarter financial statement. I’m not exactly going to bankrupt you.

Most of their conversations over the years had been about business. The news. The goings-on in Red River when Meg shared a ride up there with him. Gradually, as he became a close friend of Lark’s, and especially after his marriage to Becca, she began to open up to him about some of her problems with men.

“I’m beginning to think I was born without that radar most women seem to have,” Meg had told him after the fiasco with the sports broadcaster. “You know, the ability to properly read male signals. They can be literally right on top of me before I realize that I’m seeing some triple-timing egomaniac.”

“Were your parents happy?” Abe had asked. “There’s an awful lot of learned behavior that we pick up from them. I’m beginning to realize that I’m just like my father.”

“Which means what about you, Abe?”

“I’m a romantic. I fall in love like a ton of bricks.”

“I think that’s wonderful,” Meg said, curious about his rueful tone of voice.

“Sure, until you hit the ground.”

They were both older and wiser now. Meg doubted that Abe could have any illusions left after Ethan stepped in and tore his marriage apart. And Meg? After what she’d been through recently, could she really still believe that she’d eventually find the real thing? After what she now knew about the only married couple she’d ever respected—did she honestly think that a good marriage was even possible?