Lie Still Read Online Free PDF Page A

heels. Short, casually spiked dark hair, a heart-shaped face. A small dollar sign encrusted with diamonds hung off the silver chain around her neck—a little irony with her last name that I’d bet was intended.
    Misty Rich straddled the line between Peter Pan fairy and punker. She was instantly my favorite person within a radius of 11,000 square feet.
    She raised her wineglass coyly at me, brushing her hand against a green frond, familiar, as if we were already playing a game.

3

    A fter two hours of a maverick card tournament that involved drinking, dice, musical partners, and trivia questions, my eyes blinked in slow motion. My mid-trimester bedtime clock had set itself at 9 p.m. and the alarm had buzzed about twenty minutes ago.
    I was pretty sure I could fall asleep sitting up in this chair, in spite of the din of voices and laughter that rose with each bottle of Prosecco consumed. At Caroline’s wish, we’d “removed” ourselves to a game room set up with eight card tables of four chairs each. The buffet that ran along the wall was heaped with chocolate truffles, raspberries, and ice buckets chilling about a thousand dollars’ worth of fizz.
    I’d played Bunko before, but this oddball Southern version required more than tossing the dice and luck. Good for me, since luck had never been my thing. But I was good at facts. Ever since winning the sixth-grade geography bee by knowing that thesmallest country is Vatican City (what good Catholic girl doesn’t know that?), I’d realized the power of storing loose pieces of information.
    To the delight of my multiple partners, including a frail old woman named Gert who called me Ruby all night, I was able to rack up bonus points by knowing that Audrey Hepburn won an Oscar for her debut role in
Roman Holiday
, that Van Gogh sold exactly one painting in his lifetime, and that the collective noun for a group of crows is a
murder
.
    An hour and a half in, I gave up trying to remember too many names that ended in
i
or
y
or
ie
. I’d learned through rapid partner swapping that not everyone was a “regular” and that permanent admission into this club required Caroline’s approval, a “donor’s fee,” and maybe the selling of a teeny bit of one’s soul. Caroline didn’t play. Instead, she wandered from group to group, with her mouth drawn up like a coin purse. The purpose of a hostess is to make everyone relax, but her arrival had the opposite effect. Everyone swigged whatever she was drinking.
    Caroline slipped past my table just as Marcy on my right began to yell into the most blinged-out, bejeweled phone I’d ever seen. “Really?
Seriously?
You’re bothering me with
that
right now? I have no idea where the frickin’ weed whacker is. We have a
service
, for Christ’s sake.”
    She tossed the phone into a Louis Vuitton bag that could hold a horse’s head and scooped up her cards. “My husband just called to ask what I’ve done with the weed whacker because it isn’t hanging on the hook in the garage. He doesn’t want to use it. God forbid that he’d ever touch a tool. We pay someone $200 a week for that. He just wants to know where I put it. Jezus. Our son probably sold it on eBay. More power to him.”
    Jenny’s boobs bounced stiffly as she tossed a round of sixes. “Last week, Rick called me at my best friend’s fortieth birthdaylunch at Le Cinq to tell me the dog crapped a loose one all over the upstairs rug. I’m in Paris eating things I can’t pronounce and he wants to know what he should do.
He runs a multimillion-dollar business
.”
    The owner of the Louis Vuitton purse smirked. “What did you tell him?”
    “To be sure that when I walked in the door, it was like it never happened. Jesus, call the professionals.” Jenny nudged me. “What do you think, Emily? I thought New Yorkers had lots of opinions.”
    The three of them waited expectantly, the dice still.
    “Well,” I played it deadpan, “I think these things are never really about