Private Lies (Jane Avery Mysteries Book 1)

by Cynthia St. Aubin

  “Aunts?” he prodded. “Uncles?”

  “Don’t have any.”

  “Grandparents?”

  “Dead.”

  “Dad?”

  “Sperm bank.”

  “Friends?”

  “In case you haven’t picked up on this yet, I’m not especially pleasant.”

  “Well, yeah. But I thought your mom might at least have a few friends who might come to watch the graduation with her.”

  “You thought wrong.” I picked at imaginary fuzz on the sleeve of my blouse. “Anyway, we moved around too much to keep up with anyone.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “So is your knowledge of local celebrity gossip. Will Valentine be the first one you question?”

  “Question?” Bixby said.

  “You know, like, ‘Hey, Valentine, why were you meeting with Alexis Avery mere minutes before you were scheduled to give the commencement address at her oddly endearing daughter’s graduation from law school?’”

  “Well, for starters, it hasn’t even been twenty-four hours—”

  “No,” I said. “No. According to section one, title sixteen dash two-point-seven dash one hundred two, subsection four of the Colorado Revised Statutes, and I quote, ‘a law enforcement agency shall not refuse to accept a missing person report on the basis that the missing person has not yet been missing for any length of time.’”

  “Oh, good. You know the law. Then you’ll remember in section one, title sixteen dash two-point-seven dash one hundred three, it states that the law enforcement agency shall then determine the best course of action based on the circumstances. Which is precisely what I am doing now, Miss Avery.”

  “Don’t you ‘Miss Avery’ me. I’ve been studying criminal investigation procedures for the last three years, and I know that leads start disappearing after the first forty-eight hours. You have to start today. Now.”

  “I’m sorry. I understand you’re worried. But there’s absolutely no evidence that says your mother didn’t just take off.”

  “What about the broken window?”

  “Very common occurrence at large events. Thieves often target public parking lots for this very reason. Lots of people, inadequate security.”

  “The security tapes!” I said. “We could review the parking lot security tapes.”

  “And I probably will. But first I have to fill out the paperwork, then it has to be approved by my supervisor—”

  “Fuck your supervisor!”

  “I think that requires different paperwork altogether.”

  “Listen, Bixby. My mother once broke out of the county jail so she wouldn’t miss my debut as Left Badger in the third grade production of Chicken Little. She would not have just walked out of my graduation. Without a text. A call. Something to let me know where she was going.”

  “You’re lying,” he said.

  A familiar filament of shame woke and warmed my face. I had to scan my previous sentence several times through before responding. “I’m really not.”

  “There were no badgers in Chicken Little. And what was your mother in jail for?”

  “Well, there were in my elementary school play. And I’m sure my mother’s criminal record is readily available to you. Should you be inclined to do any actual investigating.”

  “I’m sorry. With the evidence I have here, I can only call this in as a missing person report and a vehicular break-in. I’ll have the car towed down to the station. And you should probably ride over with me to make an official statement. It could be, after my supervisors review all the information, they decide to move forward immediately. Either way, I’ll call you and keep you updated, if you’d like me to.”

  “That would require giving you my phone number.”

  “Which I intend to use only for official correspondence about this case.” He held out the pad where he’d been recording notes about my mother’s car and offered me a pen.

  I reached out as if to scrawl my information but snatched Valentine’s business card instead and took off.

  “Hey,” Bixby shouted. “Come back here.”

  “Fat chance,” I called over my shoulder, willing my legs to remember their brief and unspectacular career in high school track. “You can’t detain me. I know the law.”

  And then I came into contact with a different law entirely. One originated by the powdered-wig-wearing melon of Sir Isaac Newton.

  Objects in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.

  The outside force in this case being the edge of a pedestrian crossing sign I failed to see in my impromptu flight.

  I went down hard, relieving my knees and palms of a couple of layers of skin and folding back several fingernails in a disastrously ineffective attempt to catch myself.

  As I rolled, groaning, from curb to gutter, I had a little time to think.

  Should I take the D line back to my apartment? Or the E line to Archard Everett Valentine’s office? Or the C line to my mother’s house?

  Sure, going straight to Valentine’s office would have an advantage. Get the jump on him before he had time to hide anything and while the memory of my mother was still fresh. Then again, if I went to my apartment, I could change into more comfortable shoes, wash my face, pick the gravel from my teeth. But if I were to go to my mother’s house, I could do all those things in addition to looking for clues as to what she might have been up to these past few days. This was to say nothing of the soothing ointment that leftover maple bacon cinnamon rolls would be to my newly scraped knees, broken fingernails, and probably damaged temporal lobe.

  Done.

  With infinitely less grace than I would have liked, I hoisted myself to a vertical position and staggered toward the approaching train.

  I launched myself through the doors just before the automatic sensors drew them closed. Collapsing into an open seat, I plucked a tissue from the small, cleavage-enhancing mound in my bra and pressed it to one weeping palm.

  As the train trundled into motion, I felt a pang of sympathy for Officer Bixby, now standing at the curb and literally scratching his head.

  I knew just how he felt.

  My mother’s door was already open.

  A distinctly unwelcome sight after the two-block limp from the Littleton–Downtown train stop to the modest turn-of-the-century home where I’d breakfasted only just that morning.

  I checked for signs of forced entry but found nothing. No broken windows. Doorframe intact. Still, in the twenty-eight years I had been my mother’s daughter, I had never known her to forget to lock up.

  I paused near the old-fashioned lamppost halfway up the walk and stared at the sliver of shadow bordering the open door, feeling the darkness stare right back. This small detail in a home bearing three years’ worth of my mother’s cozying influence seemed especially malevolent by comparison.

  Orderly ranks of pink-and-green parrot tulips nodded their greeting, the flowerbeds flanking the cobblestone path that led up to the front door painted my mother’s favorite Tiffany blue. The same color played peekaboo among the decorative woodwork framing the windows and eaves, a Candy Land aesthetic against shingles the color of clotted cream. I’d often thought it looked as if a pastry chef and not a painter had finished the house.

  Still, assorted bad guys and homicidal types could hide in cute houses as easily as they could hide in crumbling tenements.

  I could call the police, I supposed.

  But if they decided to respond to my report of a break-in and found no signs of forced entry and nothing stolen, I’d end up spinning colorful lies to an audience of unimpressed cops, and that never ended well in my experience.

  No. Better hold off until I had some idea of what to expect.

  A quick trip around the side of the house to the small potting shed saw me armed with a hammer and a pointy-edged spade, which I tucked into the waistband of my skirt. Not the Glock 43 I had unwisely turned down as a graduation gift, but better than nothing.

&nb
sp; I kicked off my shoes and proceeded through the grass barefoot. Finding the back door locked, I walked around to the front and tiptoed up the steps and through the front door.

  The little green light on the security system panel in the entryway had turned a dull, dead gray. It hadn’t just been disarmed.

  It had been disabled.

  I stood and listened to the house’s familiar hum. Fridge compressor buzzing in the kitchen. The air conditioner breathing cool air through the vents. Somewhere, a ceiling fan stirred an artificial breeze.

  I stood rooted to the spot not by what I saw but by what I didn’t.

  Not a thing out of place, but everything was ever so slightly . . . off.

  A shift so minuscule I couldn’t be certain whether I saw it at all.

  I slid into the gardening clogs my mother had left by the door and felt the ghost of her feet there. The familiar high arches and the shape of toes she always complained were too stubby. I’d followed those footprints across beaches and over patios, through rain puddles and over sun-warmed sidewalks.

  Now I walked in them through the strange landscape of her home.

  One by one, I wandered through every room in the house.

  Whoever had come here hadn’t been looking for goods to hock. They’d been looking for something far more valuable.

  Something my mother had hidden.

  Like the fact that she’d had an appointment to meet up with Valentine after the graduation.

  In that moment, I felt the weight of a thousand extra beats of silence I hadn’t caught. All the times I’d seen my mother’s smile slip for a split second and hadn’t pressed her when she had said she was okay. The times she’d looked like she’d been crying and claimed allergies.

  Next to the office, my mother’s bedroom had clearly received the most careful attention. Her bed had been made in a rough approximation of the arrangement she favored, with the comforter tucked in at the bottom corners of the bed and the small army of throw pillows congregating in the center of the mattress. Her nightgown hung from a hook on the bedpost like a silky ghost.

  I collapsed onto the bed beneath the canopy of fairy lights, the surge of adrenaline that had fueled my search well gone.

  Exhaustion found me in its wake, bringing every contusion and abrasion on my body to vivid life. Scratched eye. Broken fingernails. Scraped knees. Stomach in the first phases of self-digestion.

  All of which were dwarfed by my aching heart.

  I balled the nightgown in my fist and tucked it beneath my cheek. In the deathly silence, I could hear the plucking sound my tears made as they soaked into the slippery fabric.

  Many times had my troubles found their end in this same spot, my cheek resting against the slick material of my mother’s nightgown, warmed by her skin.

  The many, many nights I’d shrieked myself awake, the terrible sound of my mother screaming haunting my dreams.

  It was just a dream, Janey. Think of something beautiful to send it away.

  And what should I think of now?

  What memory or idea could I now turn over in my mind to make this nightmare end?

  What would she tell me if she were here now?

  My mother’s advice worked its way through my head no less than twenty times a day. All the things she had drilled into me over the course of my life.

  Always start with what you know, Janey. Then, figure out what you can do about it.

  I knew she had been in the auditorium until about 2:30 p.m., when my name was read. I knew her car had been broken into by someone who wasn’t looking for valuable things to steal. I knew someone had searched her house, but had taken the time to at least blur their tracks. I knew my mother had made an appointment to meet Archard Everett Valentine before my graduation.

  What I didn’t know was what my mother might be hiding and who was looking for it.

  Maybe I could do something about that.

  Right after I did something about the ravenous hole where my stomach used to be.

  I padded downstairs and washed my hands at the sink, using a brush to scrub at the gravel imbedded in my palms. Turning the tap to cold, I soaked a dishtowel and pressed it to the throbbing spot over my eyebrow until it no longer came back flecked with rusty blood.

  Next, I retrieved a handful of ibuprofen from the medicine cabinet and washed them down with a few swallows of the whiskey my mother squirreled away in the seldom-used cupboard above the fridge.

  I nearly wept when I spotted the unmolested maple bacon rolls on the counter beneath a blanket of foil.

  After finishing off the pan along with several more swigs of whiskey, I pulled Valentine’s business card out of my bra and stared at it.

  Once upon a time, I’d thought Mom and I could tell each other anything.

  She’d never once mentioned Archard Everett Valentine.

  Okay, not entirely true. She’d pointed him out a couple of weeks before graduation when we were getting pedicures at our regular nail salon, handing me our favorite local gossip rag—Mile High Grapevine—along with a Coke she’d filched from the employee fridge. Thus began our weekly ritual.

  After we’d read the most cringe-worthy personal ads aloud, Mom handed the tabloid over—the rumpled cover facing up—and turned on her chair’s back massager.

  “Have you heard about this guy?” she’d asked.

  I followed suit, my voice colored by vibrations from what I presumed to be the Nuclear Kidney Slap setting on my remote. “That guy is giving the commencement address at my graduation,” I reported.

  “I hope they plan on sanitizing the microphone after he uses it. Especially after what they caught him doing down on Colfax last night.”

  I looked at the magazine sitting in my lap. “Looks pretty grainy. You can’t even see his face.”

  “They got a positive ID on the license plates.”

  “Plates can be swapped,” I said.

  “I’ve taught you well.” She lifted the Coke from my cup holder and took a swig. “But this guy’s guilty. Went home and dirty-dicked his soon-to-be ex-wife after spending his evening with several local working girls. She was livid.”

  The petite, dark-haired pedicurist glanced up from her pumice stone.

  “And thus he winds up on the front page of the Grapevine,” I said.

  “Which is the least of his worries.” Mom’s head dropped back against the headrest, and her eyes fell closed.

  “What do you mean?” I’d asked.

  “I mean that the hookers always come first. Then the blow. Then the embezzlement.”

  “Well, hookers and blow don’t come cheap.”

  “Neither do defense attorneys,” she’d said.

  I jerked back to the present when the fridge clicked on, grabbing for the hammer. It twitched in time with my pounding heart. When no boogeymen rose up to throttle me dead, I set it back down and let my head fall into my hands.

  Sitting in the kitchen of my mother’s home—a place where every gleaming surface once testified to her calm and orderly presence—tuned my all-encompassing sorrow into a fine, piercing ache at the base of my throat.

  All the more irritating, then, when the muscular arm wrapped around my neck.

  Chapter Four

  As the hairy forearm turned my head into a purpling balloon, I remembered my first real lesson in hand-to-hand combat.

  My eight-year-old self rose up on the backs of my eyelids, wreathed in the charming branching of veins one sees before passing out.

  I was a cute little squirt. A small girl with dark hair sprouting weedy and wild out of the meticulous french braid my mother had spent a full episode of Care Bears arranging.

  In my lunch box, an uneaten brie-and-kiwi sandwich languished, the result of an unhappy hour spent in the principal’s office.

  In my hand, a surly note from the teacher about how I’d bitten Brandon Fike when he said I was lying about my father being killed by charbroiled janitor Freddy Krueger.

  That Brandon was right
and I was lying through my tragically bucked teeth did nothing to lessen my righteous fury at the time.

  “Janey, this is unacceptable,” my mother had said, licking a gob of cookie dough from her brass knuckles. She was a multitasker, my mother. “I thought I taught you better than this. You bit this boy, and you didn’t even draw blood?”

  I had looked up from the yellow ducklings on my ruffled socks to find her grinning at me.

  “It’s all about applying the proper pressure in the correct place,” she continued. “And never bite unless you’re going to bite hard enough to keep them from coming back for seconds.”

  Then she had explained to me that a swift kick to the nuggets was much more effective, a revelation that forever changed the way I felt about barbecue dipping sauce.

  Fast-forward twenty years.

  The memories swam into my head as what remained of the blood pumped out of it. From my current vantage point, with an elbow flexed beneath my chin and a hand pushing my head forward into the choke, I had no hope of a clean nugget shot. And digging at the ropey forearm beneath my chin would only serve to waste precious oxygen and energy.

  My best shot at surviving this was to stop my unseen assailant from doing what he was doing, and the fastest way to do that was to inflict the maximum amount of pain possible.

  I’d unwisely abandoned my hammer when I dove headfirst into maple bacon roll nirvana.

  But I still had the spade.

  I pulled it from my waistband and swung it up behind me at the approximate level of my attacker’s head as hard as I could. It made a satisfying thwack when it hit bone.

  My hair muffled an incoming jet stream of curses and pained grunts.

  I repeated the action three times in quick succession like I was knocking on a door instead of a cranium, feeling a surge of victory when my assailant released the hand behind my head to get hold of my wrist.

  The pressure behind my eyelids eased incrementally, and the lights in the room brightened. Hot blood surged up through my neck and into my head, where my pulse thundered in my ears with renewed vigor.

  He jammed my hand hard against the stainless-steel fridge door, knocking the spade from my grasp. It fell to the floor with a clang.