Page 82 of Deadly Little Scandals

“You don’t need to know that.”

She stared at him, impassive, until he answered.

“Since you were twelve.”

It took me a second to register the fact that J.D. Easterling had just claimed that he’d been giving Ana money before he’d had a physical relationship with her at all.

As far as I knew, he’d never given my mother a dime.

“Why were you paying her?” I asked. “If you weren’t sleeping with her, if you were just getting to know her—why give her money?”

J.D. didn’t answer. Lily shook her head, disgusted, because he couldn’t even give us this.

“I’m not paying Ana anymore.” J.D. tried to make it sound like he’d taken a stand, but taking into account what Campbell had said about the late Victor Gutierrez’s will, I saw straight through that.

Lily did, too.

“Is there anything else you want to know?” she asked me.

I was on the verge of saying no, of telling J.D. Easterling that I didn’t need or want anything else from him, when I realized that was a lie.

There was one thing. Even if he wouldn’t say a word about bodies or blackmail, even if he wouldn’t acknowledge me, there was one answer he could give me.

“You said that you got to know Ana when Lily was twelve. Where was she before that? Did she tell you anything? Where did she disappear to when she left town, back in the day?”

J.D. didn’t shrug off the question. He didn’t shrugmeoff this time. “I don’t know exactly, Sawyer. She mentioned something about spending some time in a small town near the lake when she was pregnant, and after that, she traveled. Sweden—her mother was Swedish. New York. California. Paris. Everywhere that wasn’t here.”

Inside the house, Aunt Olivia was washing dishes—by hand, even though we had a dishwasher. That had her positioned near the window, where she could see.

Where, with the window cracked open, she could hear every word.

Beside me, J.D. was talking to Lily again. I didn’t really hear what he was saying to her, because the sound of my own thoughts was suddenly deafening.Open window. Hear every word.I flashed back to the trip Sadie-Grace, Boone, and I had taken. I saw Ellen in my mind’s eye.

I heard Beth, Ellen’s granddaughter, screaming through the open window with each contraction.

Anything bought or sold in that town,Lillian had said of her sister,she has a hand in it.

The simple, ugly truth of the matter was that Ellen had been perfectly willing to sell Beth’s baby to Greer. It hadn’t occurred to me at the time to wonder if Sadie-Grace’s new little brother was the first baby Ellen had sold.

She mentioned something about spending some time in a small town near the lake when she was pregnant.J.D.’s answer to my question replaced everything else in my mind.

“A small town near the lake,” I said. I didn’t realize how loudly I’d said it until I realized that both Lily and her father were staring at me. I gathered myself. “What was the name of the town?”

J.D. claimed he didn’t know the answer.

But I did. Or, at least, I thought that I might.Two Arrows.

awyer, you do realize you sound both paranoid and delusional, right?”

“Bite me, Campbell.”

“That’s a pretty way to talk to the person who got you out of that hole.”

“I’m not paranoid. Or delusional.”

“Okay, well…I’m just saying. I’ve known your so-called kidnapper my entire life. She doesn’t have it in her to use the wrong fork at the dinner table, let alone drug a couple of Debutantes and throw them in a hole.”

“I’m not going to argue with you about this, Cam. She threw us in that hole, and I got the distinct feeling that after she got whatever she wanted from us, she was going to bury us alive. We have to get out of here.”