The Stories You Tell

by Kristen Lepionka

  My mother wasn’t alone when I walked into my childhood home; Matt was there, along with Rafael Vega, a detective from the property crimes unit she’d started seeing last summer. He was the opposite of my father in almost every way: he was warm, almost silly sometimes, an outspoken liberal, lover of red wine and spicy food. Even physically, he was my father’s inverse—tall and heavyset where Frank had been average height and wired with muscle, a mustache where Frank had declared facial hair to be a sign of weak character, and friendly, light brown eyes where Frank’s had been icy blue and critical. It was strange, the thought of my mother dating someone. But at the same time I was rooting for them. Happiness was something she never quite experienced while being married to my father. Not real happiness. If you’d asked her, she would have said she was happy, that she was madly in love with Frank. But it was the kind of happiness you feel when you get the thing you thought you wanted, not the kind of joy that bubbles up when you’re with someone on the same page as you.

  Rafe was cooking when I walked in. “Roxane, we’re having patacones, hope you’re hungry!” he called over his shoulder. He was wearing an apron, my mother’s—pink-and-brown polka dots. I had to smile. “Smells incredible,” I said.

  My mother and Matt were doing a jigsaw puzzle at the dining room table, one of those photos of a sleeping baby in a ladybug costume. The scene was so idyllic that I almost just turned around and went back to the car.

  “Sit, honey, you can help. You were always so good at these.”

  Matt glared at me from under his beard.

  “Actually, Mom, I need to talk to you.”

  “Okay!”

  “Like, privately.”

  My mother patted the place at the table next to her. “You can say anything you need to in front of Rafe.”

  I nodded at Matt. “What about him? I’m not going to talk about tampons in front of Matt.”

  That did the trick. Matt stood up and said, “I’ll go switch out my laundry.”

  “I can’t believe you still bring your laundry here.”

  “At least I do laundry.” He hipchecked me out of the way as he squeezed by to go into the basement.

  “Fuck off,” I said warmly.

  “Roxie, language.”

  I sat down in Matt’s seat. “Mom,” I said. “I have to tell you something. It’s not about tampons.”

  “I figured that was just code for girl talk.”

  “Uh, yes.”

  “Is it Catherine? Because, honey, I know you love her but—”

  “No, it’s not Catherine. It’s about Andrew.”

  My mother fiddled with one of the edge pieces of the puzzle and didn’t say anything. I could tell she knew already, even just subconsciously.

  I placed the envelope on the table and slid it over to her.

  “He got arrested today. He wanted me to give you this.”

  From the kitchen, I saw Rafe glance over his shoulder at me.

  I continued, “He wanted me to let you know, so you didn’t hear it from anyone else first.”

  My mother was still messing with the puzzle. “Is it because of—” She stopped there.

  “Yeah.”

  “Andrew Joseph Weary,” she murmured. “Is it going to be like the last time?”

  She meant over a decade ago, when Andrew needed bail money and my father wouldn’t help. “No,” I said.

  “Do you think he’s going to learn his lesson now?”

  Telling people what they’d wanted to hear lately hadn’t gone so great for me. But that didn’t keep me from doing it again. “I do, actually.”

  My mother stood up and smoothed down her sweater with one hand. The other was clutching Andrew’s envelope so hard it had crumpled in the middle like a bow tie. “Thanks, honey. I’ll be right back.”

  She went down the hall and disappeared into the bedroom, closing the door behind her. I knew she went in there to read the note and cry.

  I didn’t follow her.

  When we were growing up, she always kept her emotions in check. Probably because my father got angrier the more emotional anyone became in front of him.

  Even with him gone for two years now, some things never changed.

  I went into the kitchen and said, “I can’t stay, but that truly smells amazing.”

  “You want me to wrap some up for you to take home?”

  “No, that’s okay. Listen, Rafe—”

  “I know, sweetheart. I’ll take good care of her tonight.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What are the charges?”

  “Felony three possession.”

  He pushed a spatula around in the skillet for a moment. “So drug court’s out.”

  “Yeah. And it’s worse than that, too. The way it went down, sort of in the middle of an interrogation about something else. Something he didn’t do. You know Blair or Mizuno from missing persons?”

  He shook his head. “Sorry. Missing persons?”

  “You know what, never mind. I don’t want to burden you with this.”

  “Hey, no, no burden. You know I love this weird little family.”

  I felt myself smile in what seemed like the first time in ages. Rafe waggled the spatula in my direction. “Are you sure about this?”

  “Not at all.”

  “That’s right.” He winked at me and opened the cabinet for a takeout container.

  * * *

  Shelby was standing on my doorstep when I got home, her youthful face stiff with worry. “Shel, what’s wrong?”

  “Oh, well, I guess it’s nothing. Um,” she said, “it’s just that there was this guy down here, banging on your door and yelling. I texted you.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Sorry, I was driving. When was this?”

  “Just now. I thought he left so I came down to make sure.”

  “What kind of yelling?”

  “Like, ‘Open up, I know you’re in there.’”

  “Young? Old?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Well, that didn’t exactly matter. I assumed the angry man had been Addison’s father—true to his word, he’d come to me.

  “Sorry,” Shelby added.

  “It’s okay. I’m sorry if he freaked you out.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Oh, just someone who’s worried about someone,” I said, which probably applied to everyone in the world.

  I left Jordy another message. She hadn’t called me back after the first one, but I was still hoping she could help smooth things over with Jason Stowe.

  He didn’t seem like a good person to be on the wrong side of.

  SEVENTEEN

  I dressed up for my police interview—black trousers and an argyle cardigan over a silk blouse, plus a little copper eye shadow like Sunny Castro had recommended for my blue-grey eyes—in the hopes that looking the part of a calm, collected professional would somehow assuage my nerves. I’d gone downtown to talk to cops about a million times, but only because a case of mine overlapped with a police matter, never because they thought I’d done something. I wasn’t sure exactly what they thought I’d done, though. Helped my brother dispose of a body? When Julia Raymund had called me last night, she advised against talking to them.

  “Blair said he wants to talk to you, but of course he’s going to say that. Remember, talking to the police is like—”

  “Yeah, the shitty metaphor, I remember.” I’d been heating up the patacones and the kitchen was filled with the smell of fried plantain. I couldn’t remember when I’d eaten last and I was that kind of hungry that mostly just feels nauseous. “But I’m the one who’s been asking around about Addison, not my brother. So I can probably give them more information than he can, and if I can help his situation, I’m going to do that. Even if it’s like a trip to Target.”

  Julia had sighed. “You might not help, though. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “But can it hurt? How could it hurt?”

  “It may not hurt him, but it could hurt you
.”

  I still had the feeling that she didn’t entirely believe my story of what happened, and it pissed me off. “It’s fine,” I said. “I want to talk to them, set the record straight.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  In the morning, though, I was less sure. A lot less. I’d eaten the last bit of rice and plantain for breakfast right before I left—cold, straight from the fridge, still just as good that way—and it now sat in my esophagus like I’d swallowed a golf ball as I walked up the front steps of the police headquarters. Julia Raymund was waiting inside with a massive briefcase and a general look of irritation. “Now,” she half-whispered as we signed in at the desk, “this is very important. You need to listen to me. If I tell you not to answer something, don’t answer it. I know you think you know everything, but you didn’t go to law school, okay?”

  I actually laughed. “Trust me, I don’t think I know everything.”

  She gave me that thin-lipped smile of hers and didn’t respond.

  Detective Mizuno was waiting for us at the third-floor elevators and led us down a narrow hallway and into an interrogation room—small and clinical looking, with white walls and beige carpet and a table, empty except for a single, facedown piece of paper, around which only three chairs were arranged. The other detective, Blair, a big guy in a small suit with sandy, thinning hair, made a big show of getting another chair. Julia shot me a look and said, “I’ll stand.”

  I sat on one side of the table and Mizuno and Blair sat on the other. Mizuno fiddled with a recording app on an iPhone. I felt like I was about to be interviewed for some job I didn’t really want. I squeezed my hands into fists in my lap.

  “Thanks a lot for coming down, Roxane. It’s real good to just get a few things cleared up. Maybe you got off on the wrong foot with Detective Mizuno here yesterday, but we just want to talk, make sure we have all the info we need to find this young lady. That’s all we want. I’m sure you want that too.”

  I nodded.

  Mizuno said, “You’ll have to give a verbal answer, for the tape.”

  His partner said, “Isn’t it funny, how we still call it a tape?” He shook his head at the mystery of life. “Gives me a real good chuckle every time.”

  So he was the good cop to Mizuno’s bad cop. I restrained the urge to comment on this knee-slapper of an observation and just said, “Yeah.”

  “So let’s talk about when your brother called you. In the middle of the night. Was that unusual?” Mizuno said.

  “A little,” I said, “but we’re close. We’re both night owls.”

  “So what happened when you got there?”

  I told the story again, for what felt like the hundredth time. I could kind of see how people wound up confessing to crimes they didn’t commit—the conversation was circuitous and confusing, à la “What you’re saying is…” when that wasn’t what I’d been saying at all. I also could see why Julia had warned me against sitting down with them. But in the end, it was worth it, because I learned something: after an hour of talking in circles about everything I’d learned so far, Mizuno pulled out a photo.

  “You know who this is?”

  “No,” I said. I didn’t. The picture was a grainy computer printout of a guy who looked like his wardrobe was comprised solely of Affliction T-shirts, with floppy, chin-length hair, a colorful dragon tattoo curling up his forearm, and an expression that could only be considered smoldering. “Who is he?”

  “Looks kind of like Andrew, don’t you think?” Blair said.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “He has a tattoo and longish hair, but that’s it. This guy looks like a douchebag.”

  Behind me, Julia cleared her throat.

  I’d promised to watch my language during the conversation; apparently nice, law-abiding citizens didn’t say douchebag.

  I added, “Who is this?”

  Mizuno flipped the image back over, but not before I glimpsed a familiar icon in the bottom right corner—the BusPass logo.

  This was a profile picture from the dating app.

  It took every bit of self-control I possessed not to blurt that out and demand more information—which they obviously wouldn’t give me—and I just sat there, quietly, law-abidingly, until they’d asked all their questions.

  While Julia and I waited for the elevator, she said, “See?”

  “See what?”

  “That wasn’t exactly the silver bullet you thought it would be, was it?”

  “I don’t know. The picture was interesting.”

  Now her expression turned suspicious. “Do you know that guy?”

  “No, of course not, but did you notice the logo in the corner? It’s from BusPass, the dating app. That’s probably the guy she’s been talking to on there.”

  “I really don’t see how some dating app has anything to do with your brother.”

  “It doesn’t. That’s why it’s good news. Now we just have to figure out who he is.”

  “We?” Julia said as the elevator dinged open. “You’re a witness here, maybe even a potential suspect. You can’t go digging around anymore.” She held the elevator for me, her hand spinning a hurry up gesture.

  “Think I’ll take the stairs,” I said.

  I paused in the stairwell to leave another message for Jordy Meyers, my second in as many days.

  “Jordy, this is Roxane Weary. Um, again. I’d love to talk to you to clear things up—”

  A few lines into it I realized this probably wasn’t helping my cause. I hit the pound sign, hoping to activate the menu that let you listen to your voice mails and then delete them, but it told me invalid entry so I ended the call.

  Tom was at his desk when I got down to the second floor, watching a YouTube video with one white earbud in. “Planning to become a vlogger?” I said.

  He stabbed the space bar to pause the video. The girl on the screen was frozen in time, her mouth in a perfectly round O. Tom said, “Someday, we won’t even need to interrogate suspects. We can just pull up their social media and listen to them confess.”

  “What’d she do?”

  “Asked her four thousand followers if anyone would be willing to assault her ex-boyfriend for her.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes, and spoiler alert, someone wound up dead, and it isn’t the ex-boyfriend.”

  “The poor schmuck who offered to do it?”

  He nodded. “What’s up? You’re looking very fly today.”

  I felt myself smile. “This is my polite citizen who never says ‘douchebag’ look. I was just upstairs talking to Blair and Mizuno.”

  “And how’d that go?”

  “About how you’d expect. Why does this keep happening? Me, at odds with the police.”

  “Well, to hear you tell it, that’s been happening your whole life.”

  “What, so this is just carrying on the tradition I had with my father?”

  “Maybe so.”

  I leaned my head back against the burlap wall of his cube and closed my eyes. “I should’ve called you the night this happened. I thought about it. But now here we are. What would you have done?”

  “If you’d called me the night Addison was at your brother’s? Probably exactly what you did—go to her apartment and see if she was there. And if it looked like she’d been there and left again?” He shrugged. “That would’ve seemed like the end of that.”

  “But Andrew wouldn’t be in jail right now because some missing persons’ detectives think he knows way more than he’s saying.”

  “Your brother’s in jail because he had drugs in his house, Roxane. That could have happened any time in the last however long he’s been doing that.”

  “Since we were in high school.”

  “Then it’s a small miracle it hasn’t happened before now. It sounds like he was prepared for it, even.”

  “But the circumstances.”

  “I know. I wonder who signed off on that search warrant, b
ased on nothing but a voice mail.”

  “My brother’s lawyer seems to hate me and I’m pretty sure she’s sleeping with him. So that’s awkward.”

  “Never a dull moment with the Weary family.”

  “Unfortunately,” I said.

  We looked at each other. I had the sudden desire to bury my face in his collarbone and weep, but I didn’t. Instead I said, “I should go.”

  I squeezed his shoulder and walked out of the cubicle maze, blinking fast.

  As I crossed the lobby, I almost ran smack into a woman who was coming down the steps. “Jesus Christ, watch it,” she said, her voice thick with tears.

  I recognized the voice. “Sunny,” I said.

  The woman paused and looked at me. “Oh, it’s you,” Dillman’s ex said. “I didn’t—the copper shadow. See?”

  “You were right.”

  “I’m always right about eye shadow. Can you believe this?” She seemed stunned. Grief, in its many incarnations, had a way of doing that. Then she grabbed me in a tight hug.

  Because she looked like she needed a friend about as much as I did at the moment, I hugged back.

  EIGHTEEN

  We went up the block to the Leveque Tower and got a table at the Keep. Near the window, where the views were usually good, but the midwinter city just looked like grey on grey. Thin light slanted in on us and cast Sunny’s face half in shadow.

  “We used to come here a lot,” she was saying. “Any time we had something to celebrate, or we just wanted a nice meal. Not that I’m celebrating right now.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I’m responsible for making all these decisions now—he left me responsible for making decisions about what happens. And I can’t just say, ‘Do whatever you want.’ No one gets to say that. His family has no idea we were splitting up. So I have people expecting me to be the grieving widow. But I’m not. I’m also not not, if that makes sense. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing and it feels terrible. You wouldn’t even believe how many decisions have to be made. Actually, I guess you know that already.”