Never Tell a Lie Page 15

  And yet Melinda had survived. She’d finished high school. Had jobs in a hospital and in a real estate office. Transformed herself. Ivy remembered her standing in their driveway, her fingers curled around the neck of that green glass swan. Talking about how her mother used to work for Mr. Vlaskovic. About how important it was for “us” to eat healthy, and waxing nostalgic for Doc Martens and stirrup pants—Doc Martens and stirrup pants that Melinda had never had.

  The car behind Ivy honked again. Jerk! A pedestrian on the sidewalk stared at her. Ivy cringed, realizing she’d said the word aloud.

  On impulse she turned onto Belcher Street.

  She drove down the quiet, vaguely familiar block. It was lined, one after the other, with modest bungalow houses, built close together and set back just a few yards from the sidewalk, the silhouette of each like a cardboard cutout of the next. One was painted yellow, another mint green, another tan with bottle green trim. Most had some perfunctory foundation planting, yew bushes or rhododendrons.

  None had the wildly overgrown hedgerow, separating front lawn from sidewalk, that Ivy remembered from the night she’d been on this street trick-or-treating. She could still see Mrs. White standing backlit in the doorway, egg dripping down her face. The memory brought with it a flash of horror and shame—Ivy might not have tossed a single egg, but she’d brought the eggs and joined in with her friends, hooting laughter in the dark.

  She slowed in front of a gray house in the middle of the block. It had the center entrance like the one she remembered. The number 15 was tacked beside the front door. She hadn’t saved the page that Jody had torn from the old phonebook, but she remembered that the name Gereda White had been listed at number 6—or was it 9? Definitely not 15.

  She continued along the blocks, the numbers going down. The house at 9 Belcher had a side entrance. That couldn’t be it.

  A house on the opposite side of the street had a center entrance and a row of waist-high, neatly trimmed hedges out front. Yew bushes on either side of the front entrance were overgrown, the branches a dense tangle of tentacles reaching across a door that looked as if it hadn’t been used for years. There was a garbage can out front with a white 6 painted on it.

  Ivy let the car roll past and stopped at the house next door. She adjusted her sideview mirror.

  There was a small room, like a winterized sunporch, hanging off the side of 6 Belcher Street. Jody had said that Melinda’s bedroom was in a room like that.

  Ivy’s hands tightened around the steering wheel, and the revving of the car’s engine grew to a roar. It took her a moment to register that her foot was pressing down on the gas pedal. She eased up and turned off the engine.

  Before she realized she’d decided do it, Ivy found herself getting out of the car. She started back along the sidewalk toward the house.

  She lifted the lid of the garbage can. It was empty. That seemed odd. Most of the trash barrels and recycling bins in front of other houses on the street were overflowing.

  The more she looked, the more convinced she became that this had been Melinda’s house. The sun was low in the sky, and curls of peeling paint cast dark shadows like gashes in its walls. Plants sprouted from the roof gutters. Had this been a scary place to grow up, or just profoundly sad?

  A gust of wind whipped her hair about her face, and Ivy pulled her jacket around her. She noticed that a shade in a window of what she’d decided had been Melinda’s bedroom was raised a few inches, and a light was on inside.

  Ivy glanced about. She’d come this far. Just a quick peek—what could it hurt?

  She hurried across the lawn, squeezed behind a prickly quince bush, hunkered down, and peered in.

  Ivy’s breath caught in her throat. The color of the walls. Emphatically pink, Jody had called it. Just beneath the window, inches from where Ivy stood, a narrow bed with a maple headboard was neatly made up with a pink and white gingham spread. The light in the room was coming from a lamp on a small desk against the opposite wall. The base was a woman in a swirling yellow ball gown—Kate Winslet in a Cinderella dress.

  It was Melinda’s room, just as Jody had described it. Hadn’t Mrs. White sold the house and moved away?

  The surface of the desk was cluttered with half-burned candles. Ivy shivered and brushed away an insect crawling on her neck.

  Stuck to the wall over the candles was a dense collage of photographs and newspaper clippings. They were too far away and too jumbled to see clearly, but one jumped out at her. It looked like a clipping with a photograph of a football player, pedaling backward, arm raised, about to throw a pass. The white number 7 on the dark football jersey was clear as could be.

  Seven. That had been David’s number.

  “Bitch.” The voice that seemed to come out of nowhere was her own.

  Ivy wanted to reach through the glass and tear David’s photo from the wall. Search the room for other pictures of him and God knew what other mementos Melinda had saved—more evidence the police would say linked David to Melinda. She knew the reasoning: Women were killed by lovers, not casual acquaintances.

  If she could just get inside long enough to destroy what she knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, had to be evidence of an obsession, not a relationship…Ivy felt Jody’s presence, like a devilish sprite perched on one shoulder and urging her on.

  She tested the window, but it was locked shut. Good thing, too, because climbing wasn’t remotely possible, given her current state. Walking in through a door seemed the more prudent option. Assuming that no one was home.

  Ivy crossed in front of the house, picking her way across uneven ground, the lawn a mess of crabgrass, weeds, and bald patches. Shades were drawn in all the other windows. No cars were parked in the driveway.

  She scanned the street. No traffic. No neighbors looking out through the windows of nearby houses.

  She climbed the crumbling brick front steps. Behind the branches of the encroaching yew bushes, thick layers of white paint coated the door—icing on gingerbread. The witch’s house, that’s what the kids used to call the place. A mail slot was duct-taped over, as was a doorbell. She peered in through the small pane of glass in the door. She could barely make out a dark entrance hall with a doorway leading back to another shadowy room. Who was living here, and why were Melinda’s things still there, preserved as if in a time capsule?

  Ivy knocked. Seconds ticked by as she stood shivering in the murky gloom. No lights came on. No footsteps. She knocked again, harder. Waited. Then pulled the end of her sleeve down over her hand and reached for the doorknob. She turned it and tried to push the door open. It wouldn’t budge.

  There had to be a side or a back entrance, maybe both.

  Ivy crossed back in front of the house and moved quickly up the driveway. Past a ragtag herb garden—some mint, a scraggly chive plant, and a patch of yellow flowers like button-size chrysanthemums—was a door.

  Ivy climbed two concrete steps. A few envelopes and a large cardboard mailer, its side starting to split open, were wedged inside a storm door. That seemed reassuring. Anyone who’d recently returned to the house would have taken in the mail.

  Ivy bent down. She could just make out the addressee, “Elaine Gallagher.” If Elaine Gallagher had bought the house from Mrs. White, then why did that little bedroom look as if Melinda White were still living in it?

  Ivy wrapped the end of her sleeve over her hand again and pulled open the storm door. The mail toppled out onto the top step. Through a small panel of glass in the door, she could see a dark kitchen.

  She reached for the knob, fully expecting the door to be locked. But it wasn’t. When the door opened, Ivy gasped and slammed it shut, yanking her hand away as if it had been scalded. The bang seemed to rattle the windows and echo up and down the street. The storm door crashed shut in its wake.

  Backing away, Ivy tripped over a pile of nested plastic tubs that had been stacked by the door and sent them rolling into the grass.

  Were those footsteps from inside? H
eart pounding, Ivy waited for lights to come on.

  Car headlights lit the street, and a dark sedan drove past. Thank God, not a gold Crown Vic. But what on earth had she been thinking? She knew that the police were keeping tabs on her. Her presence would only draw attention to the house.

  Ivy scrambled to gather the plastic tubs. They turned out to be empty five-gallon drums of Ice Melt—probably a ten-year supply for this modest driveway and front walk. She restacked the containers and returned them to the back step.

  She started to pick up the mail that had scattered. The split in the side of the oversize mailer had expanded, and some of the contents spilled out. Envelopes. Mail within mail? Maybe these were letters forwarded to Elaine Gallagher from her previous residence.

  A bank statement. A credit-card bill. What looked like a check from the Social Security Administration. As Ivy stuffed them back into the mailer, her eye snagged on the addressee—Gereda White, P.O. Box 519, Naples, Florida.

  If Mrs. White lived in Florida with Melinda’s sister, Ruth, then why were her credit-card bill and her bank statement and her pension check being forwarded to her here?

  Ivy turned over the cardboard mailer. Who the hell was Elaine Gallagher?

  24

  Ivy steeled herself and pushed open the door. A sour, almost-rancid smell greeted her. Taking shallow breaths, she stepped into a dark kitchen. Shades were pulled in the windows, and the house was silent and cold. Empty countertops and closed cabinets greeted her. Through a half-open doorway, she caught a glimpse of a back bedroom.

  She fought the impulse to run, to get the hell out of there as fast as she could. No one was home, she assured herself. The noise she’d made banging the door shut would have wakened the dead. It would take only a minute or two to get rid of that photo and anything else that had to do with David.

  She forced herself across the kitchen, through a small dining room, and into the front hall. She hurried on, through the living room. Dust coated a maple cobbler’s bench loaded with Hummel figurines in front of a brown and black plaid sofa. In no way did this feel like a house that someone had bought and moved into a year ago—it felt like a house that no one had lived in for years.

  She stood in the doorway of the sunporch that had been Melinda’s bedroom. To her right was a tall, narrow bookcase. Beside it was the desk she’d seen through the window.

  Ivy stepped inside. Her scalp prickled as she examined the wall over the desk. There was the football photo she’d seen through the window. Around it were snapshots of Melinda and her mother, taken before Melinda had lost all that weight and transformed herself. Among them were more pictures of David.

  There was his graduation picture, the one that had been reprinted in the Brush Hills Times annual issue where they ran all the high-school seniors’ photos. There was a newspaper clipping of David standing proudly alongside the brand-new sign for Rose Gardens. There were unposed snapshots, too. One of David in front of their house. Another of him getting out of the pickup truck he’d sold two years ago. David sitting on their front porch, wearing the sweatshirt Ivy had given him last Christmas. In every one, David seemed unaware of the camera.

  Ivy steadied herself on the edge of the desk as nausea bloomed and filled her like a noxious cloud. She sat in the chair and lowered her head. She tried to keep breathing. A bellows heaved in her skull, and the room seemed to shift and twist like a carnival ride. She grabbed the trash can from under the desk, sure she was going to throw up.

  Mercifully, the queasiness passed. Ivy sat up, took a deep breath, and stood.

  She reached for the clipping of David throwing the football and stopped. Fingerprints. She pulled her jacket sleeves over her hands like mitts and rubbed the edge of the desk she’d been holding. She tore down the clippings and snapshots and put them into her pants pockets.

  She paused at two strips of photo-booth head shots tacked side by side. She took them down. One strip looked like Melinda in high school, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old, with frizzy hair and glasses. The other strip seemed more recent, more like Melinda at the yard sale. Older and slimmer, but with the same eyes, broad forehead, and round face as in the earlier photo strip.

  Damn you. Ivy crumpled the two strips together and jammed them in her pocket as well.

  Beneath the layer of photographs was a half sheet of paper. A bowling score sheet. It was dated March 9, 1992, and hand-stamped at the top: KEZEY’S GOOD TIME LANES. That was the bowling alley that had been in the basement of the hardware store in Brush Hills Square.

  Ivy was about to leave the score sheet on the bulletin board when she noticed some of the names of the bowlers, printed in the left-hand column in careful, childlike block letters. EDDIE. DAVID. JAKE. THEO.

  Eddie Walsh and Jake O’Connor had been on the football team with David and Theo. This must have been a souvenir from one of the many times when they’d played at Kezey’s.

  Ivy took the score sheet and stuffed it into her bulging pocket.

  She jerked open a desk drawer and rifled through it, then another, looking for anything else that might connect Melinda to David. She checked the bookcase for scrapbooks or diaries. The top shelves were filled with textbooks. Basic Medical Laboratory Techniques. Fundamentals of Urine and Body Fluid Analysis. A book on prepping for the Massachusetts real estate exam and one called How to Buy and Sell Houses Fast.

  Three middle shelves were paperbacks, mostly romance novels. The bottom shelf held videotapes with handwritten labels—Sex and the City, Extreme Makeover, The Swan. The final title reminded her of the glass swans Melinda had said her mother collected. Ivy hadn’t seen any in the house.

  Ivy picked through a small bureau filled with women’s clothing reeking of mothballs. In the bottom of the last drawer, she found another clipping. Curled and yellowed with age, it was Ivy and David’s wedding announcement, the same photo that had run in the newspaper that morning. Only alongside David, where Ivy’s head should have been, was a neat hole.

  She had a thing about you. You and David both.

  Jody had been wrong. It hadn’t been both of them—David had been the object of Melinda’s obsession. Ivy was the one she wanted cut from the frame.

  Ivy jammed the mutilated clipping into her pocket. She ran her hand across the desk, sweeping away the ridiculous votive candles.

  She was about to look in the closet when she heard a scuffling overhead. Her heart leaped, and instinctively she ducked her head. There was a thump.

  Ivy took off. She ran from the room, through the living room.

  There couldn’t be anyone upstairs, she told herself—there was only roof over Melinda’s bedroom and barely room for a crawl space above the rest of the house. But reason didn’t slow her down. Through the front hall she ran.

  The sounds she heard had to be squirrels or birds or wind blowing debris across the room’s flat roof. Still she ran. She wanted out, into the cold, clear night, as far away as she could get from this house with its noxious smells and moist, clammy interior.

  When she got to the kitchen door, queasiness overtook her. She gasped, unable to breathe as it grew, like a churning wave of swamp water. Gas pain doubled her over. Beads of sweat popped on her forehead and upper lip. She needed a toilet. Now!

  Ivy staggered into the shadowy bedroom. Pushed past the bed and double windows that must have overlooked the backyard.

  A door was partway open and, in the dark room beyond, a tile floor. In three steps she was there. She’d never been so happy to see anything as she was to see that toilet seat with its matted furry cover. She made it, not a second to spare.

  There was nothing to do but surrender and let her body take charge. She sat on the toilet, doubled over. Was it something she’d eaten? She’d had only orange juice and nuts. She’d turned down the sausages, eggs, and coffee that Jody had offered, and the mere thought of them now made her want to puke.

  That was all she needed, to be erupting at both ends.

  Ivy closed her eyes. The
last time she’d felt sick like this, it had been in the airport in Mexico City. All she’d wanted then was to be home, in her own bathroom with her own clean-smelling towels, her bed and fresh sheets to crawl into.

  Now it was as if that safe place had ceased to exist.

  Ivy waited. And waited. And waited. Finally it stopped. At least there was toilet paper on the roll.

  Afterward, her shirt glued to her back, she could just make out her face in the mirror in the dark bathroom as she washed her hands, using a cracked bar of soap. Her skin was pasty and her bangs stuck to her forehead. She splashed water on her sweat-slicked face.

  A hand towel hung over the edge of the tub. She touched it and recoiled. It was stiff, almost like cardboard. Ivy wiped her forehead with the back of her arm.

  Her stomach clenched again. Please, no more. She bent over and grasped the edge of the tub as the nausea built and finally, slowly receded.

  That’s when she noticed, just beyond the edge of a pale green plastic shower curtain, that the tub was filled to the brim. With what? Beach sand? The surface was smooth and flat.

  Ivy reached for the shower curtain. It crackled as she pushed it aside. Whatever filled the tub was white and crystalline. At the near end, there was something sticking up out of it.

  She turned on the light switch. A fluorescent tube over the mirror tinked and fluttered to life. Ivy winced away the bright light, but even after her eyes adjusted, it took her a moment to identify what she was looking at.

  Just visible, above the white sand that filled the tub, were toes with pink polish on the nails.

  25

  Ivy screamed and screamed and screamed. Then she just stood there with her hands over her face, fingers splayed and her mouth open, no sound coming out.

  She backed out of the bathroom. Get out of here!