Page 45 of Deadly Little Scandals
I shouldn’t have felt for her, not about this. Maybe I wouldn’t have, if Lily and I were still speaking.Greer and Ana were Mom’s people, and then they were gone.
“I still don’t understand why she didn’t look for me,” my mom continued. “Maybe someone threatened her. The baby’s father orhisfather or his wife…”
Before my mom could continue to speculate, there was a knock at the door. I recognized it immediately:light, crisp, three taps.
My stomach twisted.
“Lily,” I told my mom, assuming that she’d know that meant that we should stop tossing around words likebabyandpactand, most of all,Ana.
The last thing I needed was to throw gasoline on that particular fire.
“Come in,” my mom called.
Lily opened the door. She looked thinner than she had two weeks ago. Her hair clearly hadn’t been conditioned in a while. Her entire face was makeup-free, and though her skin had tanned early in the summer, right now, she looked wan.
“May I speak with Sawyer?” she asked my mom. “Alone?”
An hour earlier, if you’d told me that Lily wanted to talk to me, I would have felt a mix of trepidation and hope. But after a one-on-one with my mom, I couldn’t afford either.If you don’t expect anything of anyone, people can’t disappoint you.
When my mom left, Lily sat in the exact spot she had just vacated. “It’s John David,” she said without preamble.
That was all it took to snap me out of my head and into the moment. “What’s wrong with John David?”
“Picture this,” Lily told me, her gaze focused on her own hands. “We’re in Walmart with an overflowing cart of supplies. My brother is elbow-deep in streamers and trying to convince me that he needs a minimum of two thousand sparklers to truly bring his golf cart vision to life. And then, out of nowhere, he says, ‘Hey, Lily? You know how Mama says little pots have big ears?’ And I say yes. And then he says, ‘And you know how she also says that eavesdroppers never hear any good of themselves?’ And I say yes, and then he continues with ‘And how Mama always says that this is a one-party consent state with respect to audio recordings, so it’s completely legal to record any conversation you’re a party to?’”
“Pretty sure Aunt Olivia hasneversaid that last one,” I opined.
“Even if shehad,” Lily replied, “John David’s version of being ‘party’ to a conversation apparently doesn’t involve being a participant in that conversation, so much as eavesdropping while eating cake and/or pie to fulfill the ‘party’ quotient.”
I read between the lines there. “Aunt Olivia has been grief-baking a lot lately.”
“Not just lately,” Lily replied quietly. She held up a phone. I recognized immediately that it wasn’t hers. Lily’s phone didn’t have a camouflage cover. “He’s been spying on my parents and recording their conversations. For more than a month.”
More than a month. As in, since before we discovered the affair?
“Sawyer?” Lily held the phone out to me. “You have to listen to this.”
With no further ado, she played the audio files for me—not all of them, but three in particular.
“Could you grab the other end of the sheet?”Aunt Olivia’s request on the tape sounded absolutely ordinary. She waited a second, and then added,“I think I’ve figured out why we’re having so much trouble finding the money to finish the remodel.”
She still sounded pleasant enough, but before this summer, the one argument I’d ever heard them have was on this topic.
“I told you,”J.D. said on the recording,“we’re fine, Olivia. It’s going to be fine. Our assets—”
“Just aren’t liquid right now. So you’ve said, repeatedly. But I had a bit of time between projects with the girls, and I took a peek at the books—ours and your company’s.”
On the bed, Lily sat perfectly still. I knew this wasn’t her first time hearing these recordings, but she was listening the way a starving person ate.
“Leave my job out of this,”Uncle J.D. snapped.
“Certain filings are a matter of public record. You know that.”
“Stop telling me what I know, Olivia.”
“You’ve exercised a lot of stock options in the past six years.”Aunt Olivia’s voice had taken on just the slightest hint of an edge.
“We agreed that was the right call. We used my trust—from my family—to do it.”
