What You Want to See

by Kristen Lepionka

  Shelby’s phone chimed and she looked down at it, grinning.

  “That’s her. She’s here. Roxane, thank you for, you know. For listening. For getting it.”

  I waved a hand. “We can do the emotional thank-you later. You have a date. So go. Have fun. Lots of kissing.”

  She rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t hide how excited she was. “Okay. Bye.”

  “Let me know how it goes,” I called as she grabbed her phone and backpack and dashed out.

  I stood there in my silent, empty apartment for a while, not sure what to do. I could peel my shirt off with abandon, at least, but I couldn’t help but feel lonely. I grabbed a whiskey bottle and a coffee mug from the kitchen and lay on my bed in my skirt and bra for a few minutes. Then I sat up and splashed a little whiskey into my cup and swallowed half of it.

  It was hot going down. For a second, it made me forget about everything. I tossed back the rest and put the bottle on my nightstand instead of pouring another. I wanted to forget about everything, but I shouldn’t.

  Leila confused me. Nate alarmed me. I had no idea what I was supposed to make of any of it. She insisted that Nate wasn’t involved in Marin’s death—and, in fact, he thought I might have been—but she seemed rattled by the idea that he might have been involved in Tessa’s. If nothing else, his car was. The circumstances were already hard to follow, and I hadn’t even gotten to the matter of Agnes Harlow yet.

  I changed into jeans and a tank top and sat down at my desk for the illusion of productivity. There was no proof of anything here, not really. Even Marin’s passport didn’t count, since the object itself didn’t prove where it came from. And none of it explained why she was dead.

  Could Nate have killed her?

  He was obviously capable of it. I knew that much. But why would he?

  “Why were you there, dammit?” I asked the apartment.

  I got up and paced the length of my hallway, twice. I could have another drink, but I didn’t really want one. No, that wasn’t true. I wanted another drink, but only as a stand-in for what I actually wanted, which was to solve my case.

  I sat down again and Googled Herodias.

  A princess of the Herodian Dynasty of Judaea during the time of the Roman Empire.

  Not terribly relevant to my case.

  I kept reading.

  Herodias is most famous for her role in having John the Baptist beheaded after he criticized the illegality of her marriage.

  I leaned forward. Illegality of her marriage. That did seem relevant. Some mix of mandatory theology classes in high school and English in college gave me a partial narrative of that story: Salome and her dance, the king offering her anything her heart desired. So she talked to her mother about what she should ask for, settling on the head of John the Baptist, on a platter. Her mother, Herodias.

  I rubbed the place between my eyebrows. Agnes had hissed Herodias when I first mentioned Marin. Did that mean anything at all? Was Marin Herodias?

  * * *

  The garage door of the Kinnaman house was up again, with Molly and her daughter still hard at work on the garage sale. “Hi again. Suzy isn’t home. But Sam’s around back,” Molly said, pointing toward the rear of the house with a ski pole.

  I thanked her and walked over the bristly grass between the houses. Sam was sitting at a table on the deck, listening to something through white earbuds. He saw me approaching and pulled one out. “Hello there.”

  I climbed the steps and took a seat across from him. “Got a few more questions for you.”

  He hit pause on his music player and removed the other earbud. “Shoot.”

  “Agnes said something, the other day.”

  One of his bushy eyebrows went up but he didn’t say anything.

  “Herodias, that’s what she said. When I mentioned Marin. Do you know why she said that?”

  “Why?” Sam said. He looked at me a bit incredulously. “She’s—it’s a thought disorder. Schizophrenia is. It means her thoughts are not like our thoughts. They’re all jumbled up. No, I have no clue why she said that.”

  “Have you ever heard her say it before?”

  He paused for a second before saying, “Yes.”

  “Do you know when?”

  “When I first got back to town, after her accident—she was talking a lot more then. But she said a lot of things. She’ll recite the entire book of Revelation to you if you let her.”

  “Listen,” I said, “I’d really like to ask her about it. But I don’t want to do anything that would upset her, or be bad for her recovery.”

  He kept quiet again for a while. “She doesn’t talk much in front of strangers,” he said, “but maybe if I go with you. Maybe that would show her you’re not the bad kind of stranger. We’ll clear it with the staff first.”

  * * *

  When we walked into the community center at Brighton Lake, several nurses greeted Sam by name. He responded warmly but muttered to me, “They just want my business. Ha! The joke’s on them. I’m broke. Suze’ll just put me on a raft and shove me out into the ocean when I can’t take care of myself anymore.”

  “Oh, I’m sure that’s not true.”

  He flapped a hand at me. “You’re young. You don’t know anything. Now, look here, it’s Miss Zahra.” He took my arm and pulled me toward a woman in a batik-print scrub top, who turned and beamed at us. “Nothing happens here that Miss Zahra doesn’t know about, isn’t that so.”

  They embraced. “Oh I don’t know about that,” Zahra said, smiling down at the older man. She was tall, dark-skinned, her hair woven into French-braid pigtails. She spoke with a lilting Ethiopian accent. “But I try, I try. Who’s your friend, Sammy?”

  “Zahra, Roxane, Roxane, Zahra. She’s the nurse-manager in this joint. How’s my girl doing today?”

  “Oh, she went outside for a bit this morning, to watch the birds. She said she misses her cats. She’s calm today, a little more lucid than she was when you were here last.”

  “Think she’s up for a new visitor? I want to introduce her to my buddy Roxane.”

  Zahra nodded. “I think so.” Her eyes flicked over to mine. “Ten or fifteen minutes at the most, though. Our Agnes gets overwhelmed easy.”

  I followed Sam down the hall to Agnes’s room. Today she was holding the bible Sam had been reading from on Monday, running the thumb of her good hand over the edge of the pages. She looked up when we entered, her mouth folding into a distrustful grimace at the sight of me.

  “It’s okay,” Sam said, “Agnes, I brought my friend with me. She’s nice. Her name is Roxane. She’d really like to talk to you.”

  “Talk,” Agnes said. She stared at me silently for a while. Then, her eyes flicking back and forth between Sam and me, she added, “You can talk to anyone.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “I’d like to talk to you, though.”

  “It doesn’t need to and shouldn’t be me, not when there are spirits with poison darts in every corner of the fortress. I could talk about that, but I won’t.”

  Sam took a seat beside her bed. “No, who needs to talk about that? Nobody.”

  “That’s right. Nobody.” She went quiet again, but her hands were still fiddling with the book, and her eyes were bouncing around the room. Her demeanor was very different from the other day. “Will you look at this?” she asked, pushing the book toward Sam. “I looked but I think it happened again. The words. They came loose. I can’t read them when they’re loose. Are you fucking her?”

  “What—Agnes, Lord have mercy, no. We’re friends. Roxane, come, sit down.”

  I didn’t want to do that. But I sat on the edge of the other chair.

  “You should fuck her. Or someone. Before you die. Not that you’ll die until five thousand years but there’s no sense in wasting the now.” She looked at me. “Do you speak? Because for someone who wants to talk, you aren’t.”

  My heart was hammering in my ears. “Hi,” I said. “Can I ask you a few questions?”

/>   Agnes picked up the book and resumed running her fingers over the pages. “That’s already a question. So if I say no, you already got away with it. But I’ll say yes, because I owe a debt only I can repay, not that I ever will but I owe it, is what I am saying. Ask me your questions. What are we questioning now?”

  I took a deep breath. “Could we talk about Herodias?”

  Agnes dropped the book, and it slid off the bed. Her eyes narrowed to slits. “You know about her?”

  “Who is she?”

  “The whore wife who got me killed in the dungeon, of course.”

  “Your brother’s wife?”

  “Brother. I don’t have any siblings. Why would you come here and ask that? Herodias. This is a trick, isn’t it? You tell me I have it wrong and then I just lay my head on the platter for you, is that right? I’ve told everyone already. Herodias will steal the kingdom again, you have to watch her like a hawk but no one is watching, because they’re watching me. I told A.J. all about it, and she silenced him too, there is no other explanation. He wouldn’t leave me to languish here, waiting to repeat that night over and over and over and over and over and over—”

  “Agnes, honey, it’s okay,” Sam said, but she stabbed a finger in his direction.

  “Like you would know what all went on.” She folded her arms over her chest, her eyes up on the ceiling again.

  “Maybe this was a bad idea,” I said. “I’m sorry if I upset you, Agnes.”

  “Not upset,” she hissed. “Just tired of this bullshit all the time. I’ve explained it again and again. She will steal it, and everyone will have nothing.”

  I thought about what she was saying. She’ll steal the kingdom again. That didn’t sound like part of the story of Herodias and Salome, but possibly of Marin and the Harlow family home. I said, “Are you talking about your house?”

  Agnes looked at me sharply. “Not my house.”

  “I want to help you,” I whispered. “How is she going to steal it?”

  “A.J. knows. Ask him. I’m not good with the details of such things, the certified copies and all that. He knows how to walk the walk. To get the optimal results. I told them about the quetiapine here, but I don’t think they have an endorsement deal. The special notebook and the clicky pen that I thought would write pink but it’s just regular old black. Oh, who cares, that’s the stuff that shuts me up. I didn’t want to talk anyway.”

  She turned on her side and faced away from us, and she didn’t say anything else.

  Sam looked at me and shrugged, the kind of shrug that said I told you so.

  * * *

  On the ride back to his house, I asked Sam if he knew Agnes’s case manager, A.J. He said, “Yeah, I met him once or twice, a couple years ago. Come to think of it, he never called back. When Suzy contacted him after it happened. That’s … odd.”

  I chewed my lip. He hadn’t returned my call, though I hadn’t expected him to. But he didn’t call Meredith Burns back either. Did that mean something? I said, “Do you have a cell-phone number for him or anything?”

  “At the house, sure.”

  When we reached his house, his daughter-in-law was in still in the garage, sorting baby clothes into two piles that were in danger of merging together as one. Sam shuffled inside to get A.J.’s info, and Molly held up a tiny seersucker jacket. I almost laughed out loud at the thought of a baby wearing it.

  She smiled at me pleasantly. “Do you have little ones at home? Because I have a small fortune’s worth of Janie and Jack right here.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Not yet, anyway,” she said, sly.

  “No, not ever.”

  She looked put out, the way people got sometimes when you expressed no desire to have what they have. “You think that now, but just wait,” she said.

  TWENTY

  When I left the Kinnaman house, I saw that I had eight missed calls. I went through them on speaker as I drove home, and groaned. Ambulance-chasing law firms and auto-body shops, calling to wish me a speedy recovery and offer their services. Thanks to the police report, I would probably be getting these calls for the rest of the month. Solicitations in the mail, too.

  Their concern was touching.

  The second-to-last voice mail was from a Cincinnati area code. A man brusquely said, “Yeah, Jerry Pauwels here, Hamilton prosecutor’s office, returning a call from you regarding Nathan Harlow’s larceny conviction.”

  I quickly called him back, eager to hear what he had to say.

  “Well, I gotta tell you, I normally wouldn’t bother with a private eye, no offense, but I’m delighted and not surprised to hear that Mr. Harlow has popped up on somebody else’s radar.”

  “Especially because he’s out of your jurisdiction.”

  Pauwels chuckled. “Not least, that.”

  “So can you tell me about the case? I couldn’t find out much online.”

  “I can send you over the transcripts, but the long and short of it is, a family by the name of Colberg hired Harlow and his mother, if you can believe it, to redecorate their living room. Harlow was involved with the Colbergs’ daughter, I guess. They all said that mother and son seemed like the warmest, kindest, most trustworthy people you could hope to find.”

  “Famous last words.”

  “I’ll say.” Pauwels cleared his throat. “This is not a cute mother-son team. Nice-looking, but this is a woman with a criminal record going back thirty years, drunk driving, possession, shoplifting, check kiting. And Harlow, he’s nineteen, Mr. All-American, polite. So the family went out of town during part of the renovation, and when they got back, the house had been cleaned out. Top to bottom. Art, antiques, jewelry, guns, electronics, even some fancy chair, a what was it, an Eames chair.”

  I laughed out loud.

  “Funny?”

  “Not funny,” I said. “Kind of familiar, though. What happened then?”

  “Well, the house had a security camera on the garage. Caught the two of them going in and out of the house with all this crap. Dead to rights, basically. Harlow tried to pawn some of the jewelry and for once the broker actually read the notice the police faxed over, specifying in exquisite detail the stolen items. Harlow was real convincing, and there was one girl on the jury who looked at him like she had the hots. But that videotape made an easy conviction, let me tell you. I remember all of this because Harlow scared the hell out of me. One minute he’s charming, or crying these big crocodile tears, but convincing. He’d tell you exactly what you wanted to hear, get you on his side. Then he could just turn it off like a switch and he looks at you with these dead eyes. I thought it was a miracle that larceny was all he’d done.”

  Not anymore. “What about Marin?”

  Pauwels paused for a moment before answering. “Ah, you know about her already. Don’t believe I mentioned her name.”

  “She’s what started all of this for me,” I said. “Was she charged?”

  “Sure was, but she was in the wind. And since she had that record, too, I doubt she would’ve gotten off as light as her son did. And after we started looking for her, it turned out there were a bunch of other individuals she’d scammed with this interior-decorator bit. She’d get a retainer, take some property under the guise of getting it appraised, or maybe to match a color, and then disappear with the money and the goods. By all accounts she was very knowledgeable about antiques and whatnot. People were shocked that she was a crook. I would’ve loved to get her. I used to check the visitor logs at the prison he did his time in, to see if she’d been by to see her son. But she never came.”

  “Cold.”

  He chuckled again. “So yeah, the saying is true, like mother, like son.”

  “Do you know when he got out?”

  “Last fall. September.”

  “Parole?”

  “No, he served every minute and then some of his sentence. Young Nate could not behave behind bars. I gotta ask you. What’s your interest in Harlow?”

  “Well, I’m n
ot sure about the extent of it yet. But Marin is dead—I can tell you that much.”

  “Huh,” Pauwels said. “Well, may she rest in peace, though I suspect not.”

  * * *

  A woman answered A.J. Watson’s phone when I called the mobile number on his dog-eared business card. “Hi, this is Emily,” she said pleasantly.

  I frowned. “I’m trying to reach A.J. Watson?”

  There was a ruffling of papers and a concerned throat-clearing. “Are you a client?”

  “No, I’m just trying to reach him. I was told this number is his.”

  “Yes,” Emily said simply. “I supervise the case managers. Is there something I can help you with?”

  This was odd. I leaned back in my desk chair and propped my feet up. “Does A.J. have new contact information?”

  She sighed. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but he’s no longer … with us.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Did he leave recently?”

  “Leave?” She cleared her throat again. “No, that’s not—A.J. died, recently.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes. Quite a shock. But all of his cases have been reassigned, so if you have a care-related issue…”

  “No. I don’t. Um, can you tell me what happened?”

  More ruffling pages. “No, I—no, I’m not comfortable discussing that.”

  I winced. “Right, of course. I’m sorry. Take care.”

  I hung up and lifted the lid of my laptop, quickly pulling up A.J.’s obituary on the Dispatch website. It showed a photo of a thirtyish black man with a wide, bright smile, hair worn long in dreadlocks and pulled back at the nape of his neck.

  Anwar James “A.J.” Watson departed this life much too soon on Sunday, April 10, 2017. He was born to Stella Watson on May 3, 1987 in Cleveland, Ohio, and attended Cleveland State University, the first of his family to do so, where he earned a Bachelor of Social Work degree with a minor in psychology. He went on to graduate school at Ohio State and was expecting to complete his masters degree next year. He spent most of his professional life as a mental health case manager and counselor. A.J. worked at Ohio Hospital for Mental Health, where he was instrumental in coordinating care for Central Ohio individuals struggling with mental health issues, enabling them to return to society. A.J.’s infectious smile and huge, loving heart will be missed by everyone he touched. Those left to cherish his memory include his wife, Alecia; his mother, Stella; his half brother, Darius (Lucille) Porter; cousins Danny, Aisha, and Sonya; aunts, uncles, and other family members and friends. In lieu of flowers, please consider donations to Mental Health America of Franklin County.