Crooked Little Lies

by Barbara Taylor Sissel

  JT looked at her, then back at the television, half shrugging.

  “Something’s wrong. He never goes anywhere without these.” Annie walked over to the TV and switched it off.

  JT sighed, rubbing his eyes. “Almost never.”

  “He was seen on Friday getting into a car with some woman, probably a stranger. He never does that. You know it’s one of his rules, JT.”

  “About the time you figure out his rules, he changes them. Where did you hear this anyway?”

  Annie told him about Cooper’s sighting of Bo at the convenience store.

  “He’s the guy who towed your car, right? You think he knows Bo well enough to say for sure it was him?”

  Annie rolled her eyes. “Everyone in this town knows Bo.”

  JT picked up the remote and turned the TV back on, muting the sound. “He’s probably at the library or down at the rail yard, camping out in one of the boxcars.”

  Bo loved the old switchyard. He went there as often as he did the library, but Annie had looked there. She and Madeleine had spent the better part of Saturday looking for Bo in every one of his usual places, and Annie said so now to JT. “There’s no sign of him. No one’s seen him all weekend.”

  “What about your car? You get it fixed?”

  “Cooper brought it to me this morning.” Annie sat on the edge of the ottoman, where she’d sat so often when her mom was alive. Often enough that the rose-colored piping was worn. Annie traced the cording with the tip of her finger. They were going to re-cover the ottoman and the matching chair. They’d even figured the yardage it would take and talked about fabric, something soft, the color of moss, they’d thought. Maybe chenille. Oh, Mama . . . Annie’s throat closed against the bite of her tears. Would it never go away? The ache of missing her? The need to talk to her, to ask her advice?

  Annie didn’t know how to feel about Cooper and his dad. When she asked Cooper how much she owed for the car repairs, he’d given her an invoice for $123.52, and that included the part, the harmonic balancer, and the labor. She was no mechanic, but even she knew it should have been more, a ton more, maybe as much as three or four or five hundred dollars more.

  Not that she could give Cooper the amount on the invoice. She’d had to admit to him she didn’t have it and ask if she could pay it off, twenty dollars a week. It was the most she could afford. He said it was fine, that they trusted her; he made it easy. Too easy. She hated owing him, hated being treated as if she were a charity case. She had wanted to tell him he could keep the car. She didn’t need it or him. She ended up thanking him instead. But she hadn’t invited him in, and it shamed her to remember. She’d declined his invitation to accompany him and Rufus to the lake, too. She realized it was perverse, and she deplored it, the way she’d cut off her nose to spite her face.

  “Bo wouldn’t go with a stranger,” she insisted now to JT. “He wouldn’t go this long without answering his cell phone, either.” Annie studied Bo’s earmuffs in her lap, passing her hand absently over one red-furred earpiece, smoothing it.

  “I tried a while ago, before you came, to get hold of him. His voice mail’s full.”

  “Of my messages,” Annie said. “I think we should call the police.”

  “Oh, now, I think that’s kind of drastic,” JT said quickly. “Let’s give it another night.”

  “Why? Do you know of any place else he might be, another place he might have gone to?” Something in JT’s expression made Annie ask.

  He didn’t answer. He kept his gaze from hers, too, and it seemed deliberate.

  “The woman Cooper saw Bo with, do you know who she is?”

  JT said he didn’t.

  “Well, there must be some reason why you aren’t worried.”

  “I’m worried. Just not as much as you. Did you check the shop?”

  JT meant Shear Heaven, the hair salon where Annie’s mom had worked as a stylist. “I called,” Annie said. “They haven’t seen him.”

  The silence filled up with the mystery of everything JT wasn’t saying, and it went on long enough that he picked up the remote, but before he could restore the volume, Annie said, “When did you see him last?”

  JT lowered the remote. “I don’t know, a couple days ago, maybe. I’ve been working a job down in Houston and one out here. The days are kind of tangled up.” JT was a telephone-system installer, a whiz with anything electronic. He’d often said that if he could, he’d rewire Bo’s brain. It was always there in JT’s eyes, how much he hurt for his son’s deficiencies. He didn’t show it, but Annie knew he’d give anything to have Bo be right, to keep him safe, to see him happy. JT would give his last dollar, maybe his own life.

  Annie put on Bo’s earmuffs, waiting to hear Bo speak to her, listening in her mind as if he might tell her where he was, but what came was fear, spilling through her, a river of ice.

  She didn’t sleep well that night, and the following day, Monday, when Cooper came into Madeleine’s at the tail end of the lunch rush, her nerves were frayed and raw. She didn’t want to see him, to take his order, to speak to him at all. She didn’t return his smile or his wave, and it was rude. He’d been nothing but kind to her.

  But why? What did he want? She couldn’t imagine he was interested in her, and even if he were, she was too tired and too broke and, now, too panicked over Bo to think of romance. She watched Cooper take a stool at the near-empty counter and looked around for help from Carol, but she was working two booths and a table near the door. Minding the tables closer to the kitchen and the counter was Annie’s chore. Reluctantly, she walked over to Cooper, said hello, and asked what she could get for him.

  “Nothing, thanks,” he said. “I came in to see if you’ve heard anything.”

  She shook her head, and the fear in her stomach pushed its fist into her throat.

  “Don’t you think you should let the sheriff know?”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling her.” Madeleine came out of the kitchen. “Well, look. There’s Hollis now.”

  Annie followed Madeleine’s glance to the front of the café, where a tall, silver-haired man wearing a sheriff’s uniform was coming through the door. “You called him?”

  “He’s come for his lunch,” Madeleine answered, but she wouldn’t meet Annie’s eyes.

  Cooper raised his hand. “Sheriff Audi.”

  Annie’s heart faltered. She recognized him. She had waited on him many times, but she didn’t know him other than he made her nervous. It wasn’t personal. Hollis Audi had never given her any reason to be anxious. Something about police in general had that effect on her. She didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if she’d ever had any dealings with them, not so much as a speeding ticket.

  “He’ll be wanting his sandwich,” Madeleine said, and she went into the kitchen.

  Sheriff Audi came over. “Hey, Coop.” The men shook hands. Then, as if he registered a disturbance, he divided his glance between Annie and Cooper. “What’s up?”

  “Her brother’s missing,” Cooper said.

  “He’s not my real brother,” Annie said and wondered why. Because Bo was related to her in every sense that mattered.

  “Bo? We’re talking about Bo Laughlin?” Audi asked.

  “You know him.” Cooper was matter-of-fact.

  “Sure, everyone in town knows Bo.” Hollis Audi said the same thing Annie had said last night to JT. “He’s missing? Since when?”

  “Friday.” Cooper answered again, because Annie seemed incapable. “Really, before that, I guess.” He looked to her for confirmation.

  She said, “I haven’t seen him for nearly a week. No one I know of has, except Cooper, and I’ve checked everywhere I can think of.”

  “When did you last see him? What day?” the sheriff asked.

  “Last Wednesday,” Annie answered. “He came here. We had tea.” She looked over at the bo
oth nearest the door, where Bo liked to sit. So he could get away quickly? So he could see out? Annie wasn’t sure, but he always chose that spot. If it was occupied, he’d wait for it or he’d leave altogether.

  Last Wednesday when he came into the café, the booth was empty, and Annie had sat with him, watching while he sugared the already-sweetened tea and stuffed down two of the carrot-and-cinnamon muffins that were leftovers from the batch she’d made and served to that morning’s breakfast crowd. She remembered nagging him about eating so much sugar; she remembered he’d been agitated and jumpy. I could tell you something. He’d said that to her more than once. But she’d been focused on the sweets, determined to get her point across by basically venting her disgust over his diet.

  Why hadn’t she asked him what was wrong? Why hadn’t she slid in beside him and put her arms around him? She bit her lip. How many times in that single afternoon, after she’d spoken to him in her brittle, authoritarian voice, had he told her he was sorry; he would do better, he promised. But just listen, he’d said, I heard talking . . .

  She looked at Bo in her mind; he’d been wearing his earmuffs. She was certain of it, and if that was true, then at some point after leaving the café, he’d gone to JT’s and left again without them. The fact that he’d forgotten them worried her even more now. Clearly he’d been upset; his mind had been in more than its usual turmoil. I heard talking . . .

  What had he meant? Had he heard voices in his head? Real voices? Why couldn’t she have shut up for five seconds and let him tell her?

  “Bo wouldn’t go this long without touching base.” Madeleine had rejoined them and was answering some question the sheriff had posed that Annie had missed. “A couple of days is his limit, wouldn’t you say, Annie?”

  Madeleine sounded so definite that Annie agreed even as she searched her mind for an exception, and not finding one, she said, “I can’t think when he’s ever gone this long without at least calling or texting me.”

  “Something else,” Madeleine said. “I paid him last week, in cash like I always do. He showed me some other money he had then, wrapped up with a rubber band around it. He wouldn’t say where he got it.”

  Sheriff Audi looked from Madeleine to Annie.

  “It isn’t stolen, Sheriff. Bo’s not a thief,” Annie said.

  “Is he using, dealing drugs again? Because you know we’ve run him in for that.”

  “Not lately; not in a long time. He’s not on anything.” Annie crossed her arms tightly around her middle, hoping she was right, praying she was.

  “You’re sure.” Sheriff Audi wasn’t. Annie could tell by the way he sounded.

  “I’d know,” she said, flatly, although that wasn’t true. Under the weight of Cooper’s glance, she felt pushed to explain. “He hears voices in his head sometimes, and when they get really loud, when they shout—” Annie’s throat closed around the threat of tears.

  She felt Cooper cup her elbow in his palm to steady her. “It’s okay,” he murmured, and it wasn’t, but Annie was somehow reassured anyway.

  “He self-medicates,” she said. “He won’t take the doctor-prescribed meds, but he’ll take the stuff a stranger, a—a dope dealer on the street hands him—or he did. But not lately. Not in nearly a year now. I’d know,” she reiterated.

  “People have been known to take advantage of him,” Madeleine said, and Annie heard her reluctance, shades of her hovering fear.

  “Yeah,” Sheriff Audi said, and he blew out a sigh as if the thought of such cruelty depressed him.

  Annie said, “Bo was working other places besides here. He did odd jobs for JT, for the neighbors. They could have paid him. That might be where he got the extra cash.”

  “I told him not to go showing it around,” Madeleine said. “I said to him that very morning showing off that money would invite nothing but trouble.” Her voice shook. “What are you going to do about this, Hollis?”

  “Put out a BOLO,” Sheriff Audi answered, and when Madeleine frowned, he interpreted for her. “It means ‘be on the lookout.’”

  “Ah,” Madeleine said. “Sounds very Hollywood. But this isn’t the movies, is it? It’s real life.”

  “Yes, ma’am, that it is.” The sheriff was respectful. But everyone treated Madeleine with courtesy. You didn’t dare do otherwise. Sometimes Annie thought she might be the only one in town who was aware of the softness that formed the center of Madeleine’s heart.

  She said she’d made Sheriff Audi his usual lunch, ham and Swiss on rye toast.

  “Can you sack it up for me?” he asked.

  Madeleine said she would.

  “You want to sit there?” The sheriff addressed Annie. He indicated an empty booth. “I can work up a description.”

  Annie hesitated. To accompany this man, to help him with his report, would make it real; it would confirm there was good reason to be afraid, and she didn’t want to believe it. Even though she knew better.

  She had called JT on her way to work this morning and told him if she didn’t hear from Bo by the end of her shift, she was going to the police. In a way, she’d meant it as a test. She couldn’t shake her sense that JT knew something about where Bo was, and after she warned JT of her intention, she thought for sure he’d tell her not to bother, that involving law enforcement wasn’t necessary. But he didn’t say anything, didn’t respond at all, and fear came, jolting up Annie’s spine, ringing in her ears so loudly, she had to pull off the road.

  “You really don’t know where he is?” she demanded.

  “No. My God! Don’t you think I would have told you?”

  Doubt hardened the silence. The very air had felt consumed by it and by their mutual foreboding. Annie didn’t remember now if they said good-bye.

  “Go on.”

  Annie glanced at Madeleine.

  “Carol and I can finish up,” she said. “Cooper, stay with her, okay?”

  Annie wanted to say she didn’t need Cooper, but it wasn’t true. She was glad for his presence when he slid into the booth next to her.

  The sheriff got out a notebook, and when he asked, Annie told him everything she remembered about the last time she saw Bo. She described what he was wearing, a blue-plaid cotton shirt and gray chinos, and said she had no reason to believe he would have changed his clothes. “He’ll only shower at my house or at JT’s.” She didn’t add that Bo often complained the water in other places was infested with alien microbes. It would only add to the sheriff’s suspicion of drug use. She did tell Sheriff Audi about Bo’s earmuffs, that he’d been wearing them when he came to the café on Wednesday, but he wasn’t wearing them now.

  “So he must have gone to his dad’s house at some point after you saw him on Wednesday and taken them off, is that right?” The sheriff looked at Annie. “He could have changed clothes then, too, couldn’t he? Did you look? Would you know?”

  “I’m not sure, but I can check,” Annie said.

  “Also, if you have a recent photograph, that would help, too.” Sheriff Audi glanced up from his notepad, in anticipation of her answer.

  As if he thought she should whip out a photo on the spot. “I can probably find one. I just don’t know how recent it will be. I’m sorry.” Annie wondered why she was apologizing. Because they weren’t the all-American family? Or any sort of family? Because they didn’t take pictures? They had been better at those family sorts of things before her mother died. Her mom had been the tie that bound them.

  Sheriff Audi said they would use whatever she could find. “Is it possible JT saw Bo later in the week than you, that he could confirm what Bo was wearing?”

  Annie said she doubted it. “I don’t think he pays much attention to Bo’s clothes.”

  Until JT married her mom, he pretty much dressed Bo in whatever he could find at the Goodwill store. Bo was thrilled when Annie’s mom took him to JCPenney. Brand-new clothes, he
kept saying. Shirts and pants no one else had worn. Annie remembered the care he’d shown afterward, folding them carefully when he took them off. Sometimes he’d slept in his favorites. Annie had rolled her eyes. She’d made fun of him and called him a dork. Why?

  Cooper said, “I’m pretty sure when I saw Bo on Friday he was wearing what Annie described.”

  “Gray pants, blue-plaid shirt.” The sheriff leaned back. “You say the car he got into was a Lincoln?”

  “Yeah. Town Car, maybe 2010, 2011. Black. I didn’t pay attention to the license plate, but the woman driving it was older. At least her hair was really white. I didn’t get any sense it was a dangerous situation, though. Bo got into the front passenger seat under his own power. He was talking a blue streak. You know how he goes on.”

  Sheriff Audi nodded.

  Annie’s cheeks warmed. The understanding of Bo that Cooper and the sheriff seemed to share seemed almost intimate. It made her want to defend Bo, to say You don’t know anything about him, even though it was clear there was nothing to defend, that they were only sorting through the facts, trying to find a direction, a way to help.

  “He and the woman were laughing,” Cooper said, “as if Bo was telling her jokes.”

  “Bo doesn’t joke,” Annie said.

  Both men looked at her.

  She thought of what JT had said, that as soon as you worked out Bo’s rules, he changed them. But Bo didn’t laugh easily or show much emotion, except when an animal or a person was hurt. When that happened, he felt it, too. She remembered the time Freckles was sick with some virus. Bo stayed up all night, holding him. She remembered when she had tonsillitis, he walked nearly a mile each way to the Baskin-Robbins because she loved their French-vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup the best. By the time he got home, the ice cream had softened, but that only made it better; all that melty, chocolate-swirled ice cream had felt so soothing and cool against her raw throat. She could still taste it, could still see how Bo sat on her bed beside her, how he cared that she hurt. It brought her to tears, remembering these things about him. She pressed her fingertips to her eyes.