J.T. Ellison - Lie To Me

The doorbell rang.

“Better go get that,” Ivy said. “It will be the police. I’ll keep looking here for a minute, see if she left anything unfinished in her files. And I’ve only ever gotten mail from her from this account. But, Ethan, anything’s possible.”

“Ivy, you don’t think...”

“What?”

He shook his head. “Never mind. You keep looking.”

THE POLICE ARRIVE

Two officers stood on the front porch, appraising the house. Ethan knew the effect it had on people—the wide, graceful wraparound screamed Southern luxury. The double doors with their lion’s head knockers, the dormer windows, the tower. The whole house was special, each piece lovingly crafted, and it showed.

He’d always taken pride in it, though it was Sutton who’d made it a home.

One cop was a young woman in uniform. The second was an older, grizzled man in his fifties wearing a rumpled blue suit. The woman spoke first. “Sir? I’m Officer Graham, and this is Sergeant Moreno. We understand you’ve reported your wife missing?”

“Yes, I—”

A voice from the street called, “Hold up!”

Joel Robinson was motoring up the sidewalk as fast as his short legs could carry him. The white picket fence—for God’s sake, they even had a white picket fence—had a kissing gate, and Robinson fiddled with the latch for a moment, then barreled through, smiling, hand outstretched. “Roy, you old dog. How are things? How’s Beverly?”

Moreno shook hands with Robinson.

“Bev’s fine.”

“Still making that tuna noodle casserole for the church ladies?”

“She’ll never stop.”

“Give her my best, will you? I’ve missed the last few weeks, getting ready for a trial, you know how it is.”

“I do. Why are you here?”

Robinson stepped past the cops and took up position at Ethan’s side. “Ethan’s a friend. I thought I’d stop by and see if there’s been any news on Sutton. Has there?”

Ethan shook his head mutely.

“Well, then, let’s go inside and have a chat. Terrible thing. Terrible thing.”

And he hustled everyone inside. Ethan was starting to get an idea of why Joel Robinson was so respected as a criminal defense attorney.

Inside, Moreno introduced Graham. Robinson was all smiles again. “I know your daddy, he’s a good man. Fair, and not unwilling to admit it when he’s wrong. You tell him his pal from the other side of the fence says hello, will you?”

“I will. He’s spoken of you to me before. He says the same thing about you.”

“Good to know, good to know. All righty, then, let’s get down to business, shall we? We’ve got ourselves a gorgeous redhead to find.”

GLORY DAYS

Then

“Oh, Ethan. I love it! It’s absolutely perfect.”

They were standing on a sidewalk in the quaint downtown community of Franklin, Tennessee. The house was Victorian, ruined, and needed a ton of work. All he could see were dollar signs, but Sutton was bouncing around like a puppy on crack, begging to call the Realtor and look inside, and he couldn’t say no to her. He never said no to her. It wouldn’t kill them to look. Looking wasn’t buying.

Half an hour later, the Realtor gave them the key. “Take a walk around the place, see what you think. It’s not the turnkey you were hoping for, but the bones are there. She could be a real stunner with a little work and TLC.”

And the commission would be twice what the Realtor would get from the other houses she’d shown them, but Ethan bit back those words and followed his lovely wife into the run-down beast.

The Realtor was right, it did have good bones. The house had been abandoned; the previous owner ran into bad times and couldn’t make the payments, and the bank had foreclosed on this monstrosity. The floors were blond teak but scraped and scratched; the owners must have had a large dog. The front porch needed a complete overhaul; he could see a large crack in one of the plaster Doric columns.

Sutton came tearing around the corner from what he assumed was the kitchen. She had a smudge of filth on her cheek and was smiling wider than he’d seen since the first time he’d taken her to bed. Her eyes danced with happiness.

“Oh, Ethan,” she breathed, and he knew, without a doubt, the cause was already lost. They’d be putting in an offer this afternoon. This was their new home.

Would he have allowed her to fall in love with the old wreck had he known where the house would lead them? The agony they’d experience behind these very walls?

Bloody well not. The house would bring them nothing but pain and sorrow. He didn’t care if they were supposed to learn and grow from their experiences, this place was damned, and he’d known it that day when he’d allowed her to fall in love, allowed her to deviate so wholly from their plan. They’d had a plan, and if they’d just stuck to it, none of this would have happened, none of it.

They didn’t need five bedrooms and three fireplaces and an albatross of a house that would require an entire renovation inside and out to make it livable. They didn’t need anything but each other, a bed, a bottle of champagne, and their laptops.

He started to tell her so. He did. Something told him, as lovely as the house could be, they were making a mistake. But the words wouldn’t pass his tongue, and then Sutton was there, pressed against him, lush lips against his, her excitement coming through in passion and fire and promises of things to come, a future of love and happiness, and the next thing he knew, he was dizzily writing a check for fifty thousand more than asking, cash, to assure they wouldn’t get into a bidding war.

He wanted to say no, but he didn’t know what was to come.

So he walked out onto the falling-down porch and signaled to the Realtor, whose face lit up like a candle from within when she saw the rectangle of paper in his hand, mirroring his wife’s delighted visage.

They moved in a few weeks later, having painted the living room a soft dove gray and installed a sofa bed. They were planning to do most of the renovations themselves, but had found a local carpenter-cum-handyman who was going to do the detail work.

Days of scraping and painting and gutting bathrooms ensued. When they weren’t working on the house, they were working on their books, individual islands of words, adrift in the chaos around them. Their breaks consisted of runs to Home Depot and Porter Paints. They lived on takeout until the appliances arrived: the massive Sub-Zero they had to knock down part of a wall to fit in, the double convection oven that just barely slid into the wall space Ethan had designed, the Bosch dishwasher that made no noise when it was running. And then it was time to pick the counters, and Sutton fell in love with that bloody gorgeous marble, and the fighting began.

It was a stupid thing to fight over, a large slab of marble. But fight they did, and the house must have fed off the negative energy, because suddenly everything started going wrong. The paint peeled in the living room, they found asbestos in the attic that the inspectors had missed, a family of mice took up residence in the bedroom, partying and carrying on at all hours of the night. The crack in the damn Doric column gave way, and the porch crashed to the yard below, ruining $500 of plants and shrubs they’d put in the day before.

There were tears and arguments and cold shoulders, and when Ethan began to worry they wouldn’t find their way back, he gave in on the marble. Like a hurricane’s passing, life suddenly calmed. The fights ended. The house came together. They moved the furniture in from the storage unit, and then they were happy. So happy. Sitting together at the kitchen table over their cereal bowls, that big bloody slab of marble glowing gently under the soft white lights, their days were finally unencumbered by the specter of renovation.