If the Witness Lied

  Madison holds the phone up for Jack to see. With her own long clear fingernail, she taps a point on the final photograph.

  Cheryl’s fingers are not making a fist. They circle around something. Cheryl holds it tightly. Its tip is dark and round.

  It is the parking brake.

  THE SIGHT OF ANGUS IS REPELLENT. SMITHY TURNS AWAY AND stares out the window on her right. In the exterior rearview mirror, she spots the white television van.

  Angus flicks his turn signal and takes the off-ramp. Two cars later, the van also exits.

  At the light, Angus signals a left. The van follows.

  Smithy feels about five years old. She needs a hand to hold.

  She has a sudden memory of Dad taking the four of them shopping. What was the occasion? They weren’t in the Jeep, which wasn’t big enough for the whole family. They were in Mom’s car. (Dad always called it that. “We’ll take Mom’s car,” he’d say.) Smithy sees herself getting out of the Suburban. She’s wearing sandals, so it must be warm weather. She can hear the satisfying clip-clop of flat soles.

  Who gets Tris out of his car seat? She can’t picture that. But they let go of him. As soon as he can walk, and certainly once he can run, Tris is on the move unless you have him in a harness. He doesn’t mind crashing into things so he doesn’t look left, right, up, down or across. He just runs.

  “Hold your brother’s hand!” hollers Dad.

  Was he yelling at me? thinks Smithy now. Did I hold Tris’s hand? Or was I the one who let go?

  Angus Nicolson swings into Smithy’s driveway with the ease and confidence of a frequent visitor. “We’re here!” he cries, as if it’s Disney World. Like Aunt Cheryl, he parks so he has the fewest possible steps to the door. “Home again, home again!” he sings.

  I’m not five, Smithy tells herself. And no matter what, this time I have to hold my brother’s hand.

  She does not get out of Angus Nicolson’s BMW. She hardens her heart and puts a grim edge in her voice. She looks straight at him. “You film me and I will explain how you groped me. I will tell them where you touched me. I will tell the disgusting things you wanted from me.”

  Angus is not expecting this. He shrinks back, visibly calculating how this could damage him.

  Smithy enunciates each word. “I don’t want you or your people in my house.” She opens the car door, gets halfway out, and gives her last command. “Call your camerapeople, Mr. Nicolson. Tell them not to step out of that van. They and you are not welcome.”

  * * *

  The firecrackers in Jack’s brain are bursting, but not with pain. It’s more like the wild excitement of a Fourth of July sky. These photographs are proof. They will stand up in court. They will exonerate Tris.

  Tris did get into the front seat. He did play. But not with the brake.

  It is Cheryl’s hand on that brake. There’s the unusually deep inward bend of the thumb joint.

  We believed her, thinks Jack. We all believed her, all the time. Even I believed her! I went on loving Tris. But I believed her.

  He’s getting chills and aches from understanding what really happened.

  But what happened afterward gives him a fever.

  Jack is living with the person who caused his father’s death. Jack has obeyed this woman. Gone grocery shopping with her. Put gas in the tank of her car for her. Smiled at her. Asked her permission for stuff. And as if that weren’t bad enough, Jack has actually protected her.

  The police didn’t see these photographs because he, Jack, removed the evidence. He tampered with a crime scene. Cheryl didn’t have to cover her tracks. Jack covered them.

  His father’s killer sleeps in his father’s room. Successfully places the blame on Dad’s baby boy. Spends the money Dad earned. And even gets a fine reputation as a good aunt.

  He sees now why Cheryl has always been a little bit afraid of him.

  Because if Jack only knew …

  Well, now he does.

  * * *

  How glibly, how casually, Madison tossed out the idea that Cheryl Rand could be a murderer. Now the truth of it fills Madison’s body as if she has cement in her veins. She is hardening. It is such a terrifying sensation that Madison reaches for her favorite lifeline—her own cell phone. She has a text message waiting.

  “Smithy texted,” she reports to Jack, and adds in a snide voice, “Smithy—who’s coming home just to be on television.” Then she reads her sister’s message. Smithy is not coming home to be on television. She’s just coming. Because it’s home. And she is not on board with the docudrama. She’s as upset as they are.

  Yet another opportunity to know that she, Madison, is not the good guy.

  The cement encloses her heart; there is no room for it to beat. She knows—she knew all along—that dumping Jack and Tris and Smithy was wrong. But the fact in the photograph—the fact of her brothers’ caretaker as killer—is so huge that Madison does not see how she can rise above it.

  How amazing that Smithy ran away from school the very same morning Madison found the courage to head home. Did each sister sense, at the same moment, that their family was again being threatened? Did a dead parent send a message?

  But if a dead parent could do that, their dead mother would have sent Dad a message to get out of the way of a rolling vehicle. And if there were a way to communicate with dead or missing minds, Madison would get daily advice from her mother and father.

  Oh, Lord, prays Madison. Can I still do something good?

  She holds her phone for Jack to read Smithy’s message.

  “Why were we so sure that Smithy was coming home to be in the docudrama?” asks Jack.

  Because I’m a bad person, thinks Madison. I leap to nasty conclusions. I don’t have faith in my own brothers and sister.

  Jack answers his own question. “Because Cheryl said so.”

  The list of Cheryl’s lies is getting long. What else have they accepted, just because Cheryl says so?

  Jack turns his wrist over. Like their father, he wears the face of his watch on the underside of his wrist. Madison also checks the time. It’s two o’clock.

  Madison is filled with dread. Cheryl is a brilliant engineer. She’ll have a plan. Maybe she’s always had a plan—maybe from the day she showed up, she had a plan. She’s moving ahead with it, while Jack and Madison are bungling and stumbling.

  We have to have a plan too. But what?

  * * *

  Home is where your mother and father are. Except in Smithy’s case. She is reduced to her aunt Cheryl.

  At the front door, Aunt Cheryl embraces Smithy, steps back to admire her, makes little cooing noises of affection and embraces her again.

  Smithy peels her off. “They’re not coming in,” she says, gesturing at the camerapeople. “Go back inside, Cheryl. Shut the door behind you. We have to talk.”

  Cheryl hovers uncertainly on the threshold. She makes an error in judgment and heads for Angus. Smithy steps in alone, closes the front door and bolts it behind her. Immediately she’s sobbing. “Mommy!” she wails, stumbling toward the kitchen.

  Back Before, when Smithy came home from school, the destination was always the kitchen. The children always came in through the breezeway. If their shoes were muddy—Jack’s were always muddy—they kicked them off outside the kitchen door and ran around in their socks. Food was always the plan. Usually it was waiting on the counter or coming out of the oven.

  They played a lot of games in this kitchen—board games, card games, video games. Mom was also the art director. Crayons and paste when they were little, paint and beads when they were older. In this room, Dad and Jack went through a model train stage. Their enthusiasm didn’t last, but the slab of plywood on which they fastened tracks and added a little town stayed a long time.

  The kitchen is so empty.

  Her mother’s life created piles. Knitting alone meant old projects, new projects, half projects and swatches. Laura Fountain was also a reader, so books were stacked and marked and sp
layed open. She was a musician, so her CDs, tapes and ancient recordings spilled everywhere. There used to be mounds of concert programs and calendars and committee agendas. And always that faint dusting of flour.

  The faded old sofa is gone. A small sleek couch is in its place. If there is such a thing, it’s a one-person couch.

  The big TV is still in the front room. Dad almost never went there. After eating dinner, and putting Tris to bed, and cleaning up, he’d lie on his sofa, using the little kitchen TV as radio, listening but not looking, letting a sports commentator be his lullaby. Smithy often snuggled up. Sometimes they didn’t even talk. You don’t always need to talk. Sometimes you just warm yourself by the fireplace of your dad’s presence, and everything is better because he is there.

  Tris will never know that feeling.

  Smithy’s cell phone rings. She can almost feel Cheryl’s rage bouncing off transmitters on distant hills.

  Worse, Angus will be over his shock. He’ll be planning how to turn Smithy’s behavior to his advantage. The camera crew is probably out of the van. Perhaps Angus is narrating into a microphone. The dear saintly aunt, in her struggle to keep the sad remnants of this family together, locked out of her own house by the—

  But the caller is Madison.

  Smithy sobs into the phone. “Madison! What’ll I do? I’m in the house. I locked Cheryl out. The TV crew is in the front yard. I’m in here alone. Madison, it doesn’t even feel like our house! Come and get me. No, don’t! They’ll just film us.”

  * * *

  Yet again, Jack puts Tris’s helmet on and straps him into the bike seat. Dunkin’ Donuts will be warm. Tris loves donuts, and they can sit as long as they want.

  Jack’s route takes him past the empty football field. Incredibly, the school day is not yet over, so the team is not yet practicing.

  His friends tell Jack, Leave Tris in day care. He isn’t your responsibility. Let your aunt pick him up! Get back on the team!

  They’re right, and Jack has never been sure why he took on Tris like a permanent after-school job. Now he knows. At the back of his mind, he has known all along: this woman is evil. Jack cannot leave his little brother with her.

  Jack misses sports so much his muscles ache. When he watches a game (Watches! How has this happened to him? How can he be a spectator, and not a player?), his hands feel the texture of the football, his toe pivots to change direction, his arms tighten to make the throw.

  Baseball is his true love, of course. He’s teaching Tris. They use a foam ball and a light plastic bat. It’s pretty boring.

  This whole season long, whenever Jack starts to watch a ball game on TV, he has to walk away. What good is it without Dad there to cheer and yell? Dad always kept up a running commentary on the plays—courteous if Mom was around to listen; swear words and vulgarities if she was not. Jack and Dad shared an easy conspiracy in their baseball attitudes.

  Time is elastic. Time softened his sisters, and eventually Time will give him the sixteenth birthday he yearns for. But the time in which they can stop Cheryl is slipping away.

  Suppose Jack goes to the police this afternoon with these photographs and his new explanation about how Reed Fountain died.

  Suppose they believe him. The first thing they will do is remove Tris from Cheryl’s care. They won’t give him to Jack. Online (the only place Jack has ever done research), the worst stuff is the easiest to find. Jack has turned up hideous situations where foster parents abuse the children with whom they’re entrusted. He knows most foster parents must be good people who love little kids. But life has already thrown Tris around. Jack can’t risk letting anything else happen. Besides, online it says that the average stay in foster care is three years.

  Tris would be six.

  And suppose Jack goes to the police and they don’t believe him?

  Cheryl will have the ammunition she needs to put Jack in foster care. Jack can probably find parents of friends who’ll take him in temporarily. Or maybe Wade will find a boarding school for Jack, too, and ship him out of state. Or maybe he’ll end up in a juvenile detention facility where everybody else is a drug dealer.

  Jack would survive any of that. But would Tris? Because there would be no Tris protection team left to prevent the filming of the docudrama and no big brother to stand between Tris and his own father’s murderer.

  Jack makes a quick detour into the parking lot of a chain pharmacy that has a large photo department. Once again, Jack frees his little brother from his child seat, fibbing about why they’re here. Now he has to distract Tris, who will want to push all the buttons and examine all the photos. “Down this aisle?” he says to Tris. “Toys. Candy. Pick one of each. I’ll meet you at the checkout.”

  Please don’t anybody kidnap him right now, Jack thinks, jogging over to the self-service photo counter. The procedure is fast but takes a lot of steps. Jack makes mistakes. He’s sluggish from the shock of Cheryl’s lies and actions. While he’s waiting, he downloads the pictures to his own e-mail, to Madison and Smithy and, after some thought, to Wade.

  For a long time he had the idea that Wade was the guy’s first name. It’s actually Mr. Wade, a classmate of Dad’s from college who does not live nearby. He was executor of Dad’s will, and the judge appointed him trustee of the money. Now he will be the trustee of something else.

  Jack takes a white envelope from the pile on the counter, slides the prints in, seals it and puts it into his backpack along with the boots.

  Wait.

  If the photographs are not sufficient evidence, Jack can’t just give up. Obviously, his next move is to find more evidence. Not only has he never looked in Dad’s cell phone before, he’s never looked in Dad’s laptop or briefcase. He didn’t save these for their content—he saved them because he saved everything that was Dad’s.

  There’s got to be a reason Cheryl took a terrible risk and did a terrible thing. Can there be a virtual or paper file or clue?

  Tris tugs at his pant leg. His little brother has chosen Cheetos, which Cheryl never buys because they turn his fingers yellow. Cheryl never lets him have anything that will render him sticky, which is practically every food out there. Tris’s normal state is sticky. For his toy, Tris has picked out a set of tiny metal cars enclosed in heavy plastic. Big print says “Ages five and up.”

  “Fine,” says Jack.

  * * *

  How calm and reassuring Madison’s voice is. Smithy hasn’t heard it in so long. It’s like really good music.

  “Go straight out the back door, Smithy. I’ve got my car. I’m coming for you. I’m at the library, so I’m just a mile away, it’ll take me only a few minutes. Go through the woods and I’ll meet you on Kensington. So far today Jack and I have each run through the woods, so those people are used to it; they figure we’re nutcases who are always thrashing through thorns. Don’t look behind you. There’s no video value in the back of somebody’s head. I can’t stay on the phone with you. It would be too crummy to get pulled over for talking on my cell while driving, and what else do the police in this town have to do?”

  Smithy is out of the house like a shot. She’s halfway across the wet grass before the glass door of the breezeway slaps shut behind her. She races toward the path Dad and Jack made so many years ago, in that other life. Are the TV people laughing at her? Will Smithy’s role in this horrible documentary be her backside as she gallops like a cow across a pasture? “Mad, I can feel them back there snickering.”

  “They don’t matter,” says Madison, which is the lie of the century. TV always matters.

  Smithy is into the trees. Madison disconnects. I won’t cry, Smithy tells herself, but she’s been crying since she entered the kitchen. She has to use her sleeve to mop her nose. She slips in the wet underbrush, scrambles to her feet mud-streaked and bruised and slips a second time.

  She can see where Jack went through—the thin roller mark of his bike tires—and geometric sneaker prints that may be Madison’s. The skid marks are her own. The ne
ighbor is not going to be happy. On the other hand, the neighbor is not the outdoor type and with any luck, he won’t come down here till spring.

  Smithy staggers up the slope from the little wilderness and comes out on Kensington. It’s a civilized street, with careful landscaping, symmetrical shutters and sealed garage doors. Smithy yearns for a life like that: neatly arranged, tidy and predictable.

  Down the block, a car flashes its headlights.

  * * *

  Jack’s phone rings. There’s no law against speaking into your cell phone while riding your bike. He flips it open.

  It’s Cheryl Rand.

  Can he speak to this woman? Should he? Holding on to his waist is the little boy Cheryl orphaned and blamed.

  We don’t have a plan yet, Jack thinks. We still need time. We haven’t even collected Smithy yet. I have to keep pretending that nothing’s happening, because the instant I admit that I know, Cheryl will head in some direction that I can’t control.

  Not that Jack can control any direction anyway.

  “Hello, Cheryl.” He’s amazed how even his voice sounds.

  It’s the first time Jack has omitted the word “aunt.” It’s liberating. The courteous acknowledgment of kinship is over. She’s not his aunt. She never was. She’s a predator.

  There’s a pause, which is not like Cheryl. Either she notices he’s not calling her aunt or she’s got witnesses and is choosing her words carefully. “Jack, honey,” says Cheryl.

  She’s got witnesses.

  “It was wonderful of you to pick up the baby and take him to the soccer game. But it’s been raining on and off all day. I’m worried that he might catch a chill. I’ll come get you both.”

  Jack has a brainstorm. “Valley,” he says. Valley Regional High School is a thirty-minute drive. “I’ll meet you in half an hour at the front door.” He disconnects, and notices Diana’s message waiting. He listens to her offer of help.

  They reach Dunkin’ Donuts. Jack gets Tris down, removes both helmets, locks his bike and takes Tris into the warmth. His parents were big coffee drinkers who ground their own beans. The rich, coffee-scented air brings back the image of his mother brewing coffee, his father adding milk, the clink of spoons, the texture of bathrobes.