Crooked Little Lies

by Barbara Taylor Sissel

  “The business? You would sell the business?”

  “Hold on a sec.”

  Lauren could hear him talking to someone. The UPS guy from the sound of it.

  He came back on the line. “You still there?”

  “Are you really considering selling Wilder and Tate?”

  “We could move to some no-name island in the Caribbean—if only that would fix it.”

  “Fix what?”

  He laughed, but the sound wasn’t funny. “You must be kidding, right?”

  “Jeff? What is going on?”

  “Trust me, you don’t want to know.”

  She groaned. “Do you have any idea how tired I am of hearing that? We’re in this together. The property, our life, assets, debts—all of it has my name all over it, too.” She waited, and when he didn’t respond, she said, “Did it ever occur to you that I might have some ideas about ways to help?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like we could see an attorney, file bankruptcy.”

  “Oh, hell no, Lauren.” He paused. “You know what? Never mind. I think I’ve got it handled. For now anyway.”

  “Fine, but you want to know what scares me?” Lauren’s voice shook with her aggravation and the sense of some dark foreboding. “That you’re going to kill yourself, and then where will the children and I be?”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “Really? Can you guarantee it? Because at the rate you’re going—”

  “Can we change the subject?”

  “Fine.” She matched his clipped tone. She wasn’t any happier with him than he was with her. “The police were here.”

  “What? What the hell?”

  “They asked me about Bo Laughlin.” They brought up drugs. Lauren wanted to say this, too. But she was afraid of the effect it would have. Jeff was already wired. And the fact that she couldn’t talk freely to him was disconcerting, so much so that she felt a sharp pain, as if she’d stepped off the curb and come down hard on her ankle.

  “You didn’t call them, did you?”

  “No. They called me. Evidently, I was one of the last people to talk to him.”

  “Jesus, this is all I need.”

  “A boy is missing,” Lauren said.

  “I understand that, and I’m sorry, but he isn’t your responsibility. You can’t get involved.”

  “Can’t?”

  “I mean I’m up to my ass here, and I could really use your help. I thought it was what you wanted, to be treated like a partner.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Look, you’ve already done everything possible to help, right?”

  Lauren thought about it. Had she? “The detective said there’s a huge search effort going on. They’ve set up a command post at the community center in town.”

  “That’s great, Lauren, but speaking for myself, I’ve got enough on my plate, trying to help my own family.”

  Another silence fell, one she didn’t feel like breaking.

  “You aren’t considering going there? Volunteering?”

  “What if I am?”

  “We should talk.”

  “About Bo?”

  “About our situation. Our partnership.”

  “So talk,” she said without hope or conviction.

  “Not on the phone.” He hesitated. “Please don’t go into town. Come here instead, okay? I need you.”

  He was asking, sincerely asking, and she answered she would be there as quickly as she could. And maybe, in the moment, she meant it.

  But perversely, after the dealership finally delivered the Navigator around lunchtime, instead of heading to the warehouse, she drove to the community center. Her interview with the detectives worried her. Willis’s mention of drugs, his seeming inference that she might have been complicit in some deal with Bo, that she might have handed him cash in exchange for Oxy, had gotten under her skin. She kept going over her encounter with him, and nowhere in her recollection was there anything of the sort. She would remember if she’d traded him money for the Oxy. She wasn’t that far gone. The voice in her brain was insistent on this point, cycling through its litany of reassurance even as it dished up the whole question of the Oxy tabs she’d found in the study later, on the same day she’d met Bo.

  How could she explain that to Cosgrove or Willis if they asked?

  What would she say?

  10

  Bo wasn’t at the library. At four on Wednesday morning, there was no one there other than a homeless man who muttered, “Piss off,” when Cooper disturbed him.

  “It was worth a shot,” Cooper said as they walked back to his truck, and Annie was grateful when he didn’t seem to require a response from her. As if he accepted that coming to the library at such an insane hour, expecting to find Bo, was a reasonable idea.

  It wouldn’t be for anyone else. But what defined normal behavior for most people didn’t work for Bo. Even as a young child, he’d done things, acted in ways that were difficult to classify, that seemed nuts but might as easily have been hallmarks of some off-the-chart, oddball intelligence. She remembered a time when he’d counted things, canned goods in the pantry, squares of toilet tissue, the individual pieces of kibble in Freckles’s dog dish. He’d driven them crazy, dragging things out of cabinets and closets, stringing them across the kitchen table or the floor to numerate them: one, two three . . . a hundred one, a hundred two.

  He arranged the canned goods in reverse alphabetical order. Using selected letters from each label, he created a secret code, then a poem, then two paragraphs that told a story. It was bizarre and funny and brilliant. Then it was over. The obsession passed. He was imaginative, creative, and curious, her mother said. Exceptionally so. Annie’s mom had used that description a lot when she talked about Bo.

  She looked at Cooper now, and said, “Bo can be delusional. I don’t mean from taking drugs,” she added quickly, and from the glance Cooper gave her, she saw he wasn’t sure how to respond. No one ever knew, which was why she didn’t like talking about Bo. She looked down at her hands, picking her thumbnail. “He might have dreamed he was going to the library with someone named Ms. M. It happens sometimes, but it isn’t a dream to him.”

  “He thinks it’s real.”

  “Yeah.” Annie’s assent came on a sigh that was part plea, part protest.

  “Is he . . . ?” Cooper began and then stopped.

  Annie heard his doubt, his wish not to pry, his care in addressing her, and her heart opened. And her guard that had been firmly in place since Leighton left fell, allowing in a warm rush of emotion against her will. She said, “People think when you have delusions or hallucinations that it automatically means you’re on something or you’re schizophrenic, maybe even violent.”

  “I can’t see Bo being violent,” Cooper said.

  “No,” Annie said. “But not that long ago, I couldn’t have imagined he’d prefer living on the street, either.” She looked out the window, loosening her glance, letting it travel beyond the interstate’s edge to the gas stations, mini-marts, and business parks they passed, the forest of signs, the tangled webbing of power lines, all the commercial litter that was backlit now in the dirty golden glow of the oncoming day.

  Cooper checked the rearview and changed lanes, leaving a space. She could continue talking or not as she chose.

  “It always feels like an invasion,” she heard herself say, and the rest followed, spilling out of her in a lamentable torrent. “Whenever I talk about Bo, I feel this wall of defense come up. It’s all the labels. People attach so much weight to them. They conceive an image based on a word, and Bo becomes that. He’s schizo or bipolar or a druggie or whatever. No one can act naturally around him. They’re afraid of him or they’re sorry for him.”

  Annie pushed her hands down her thighs and thought how she was talki
ng too much. She thought how Cooper had that effect on her. She didn’t know if it was a good thing. Somehow it felt good and bad all at once. She didn’t know how to feel when he didn’t respond, either, but then she felt the warmth from his palm when he covered her hand with his own. And she let it be there.

  She didn’t move.

  Sheriff Audi wasn’t at the community center when Annie and Cooper got back. Another deputy was watching the door for Annie’s arrival, and when she handed him Bo’s shirt, he was brusque, unhappy with the delay. The dog handlers were waiting, he said.

  She apologized and explained about the text from Bo, and even as the deputy interrupted her, advising her that she ought to have contacted the sheriff’s department before taking matters into her own hands, she was talking over him. “I didn’t want to take the time in case Bo was there; he could leave. I know it sounds crazy. Obviously the library’s closed, but Bo’s message said he was there.”

  The deputy asked to see her phone, and she handed it to him.

  Cooper said, “I’m wondering if the delivery of the message was delayed. I think that happens sometimes, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” The deputy tapped the screen, studying the data that appeared. “This message was actually sent on Friday. Friday afternoon at 1:32.” He held it so that Annie could see, pointing out the date.

  “Why didn’t I get it on Friday?”

  “A glitch in the server would be my guess.” The deputy shrugged.

  Cooper said, “So Bo might actually have been in Houston at the library last Friday, or at least it was his intention.”

  Or Ms. M and the library trip could be a figment of Bo’s imagination, Annie thought. She could have said it, that often what Bo wrote down or said was only as real as the moment he conceived of it. She could have said that pinning him down was like catching smoke. Most of the time. But not always. Not everything Bo did was irrational.

  “We’ll send someone to talk to those folks down there, show his photo around. Maybe someone will remember seeing him.” The deputy returned Annie’s phone to her.

  “Don’t you have his cell records?” Annie said. “There must be a record of this text, right? Someone should have already gone there.”

  “Could be it was overlooked. In any case, it’s Wednesday now.” The deputy paused, giving Annie time to see it, that if Bo had been there, he was long gone. “It’s frustrating, I know,” the deputy said.

  No, Annie thought. You really don’t.

  He kept her gaze. “I guess you don’t know who Ms. M is.”

  He wasn’t asking, but Annie answered no as if he were. She nodded at the shirt the deputy held in his hand. “I want to go with you when you take that to the dog team.”

  “That’s not a good idea,” Cooper said, and the deputy agreed.

  “Why not?” she asked, and then she was annoyed—at herself for asking and at them for treating her like a child. “It isn’t as if I haven’t already been out there,” she reminded them.

  “Yes, but we’ve got plenty of people, trained personnel now,” the deputy said. “We do this for a living, Miss Beauchamp. Trust me, if your brother’s out there, we’ll find him.”

  Not alive. They didn’t expect to find Bo alive; that’s why they refused to let her go there. The intuition rose quick and merciless, riveting Annie’s attention, loosening her knees along with her hope, and she slammed her mind shut against it. She looked after the deputy, then called out, “Wait,” and when he turned, she said, “I talked to some high school kids last night. They were taking flyers into Houston, and one of the boys, Sean Hennessy, acted as if he might know something.”

  “Like what?” the deputy asked, flicking his glance at Cooper.

  Annie frowned, thinking about it. “I don’t know, really. The kids were talking about everyone at the high school loving Bo, but Sean said not everyone did. I know when Bo was in school, there were kids who made fun of him.”

  “Anybody do more than run their mouth? Did it ever get physical?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “How does Bo react to that?” The deputy stepped toward her.

  “If he gets pushed hard enough, he’ll push back.” Annie realized it scared her. If Bo was hurt, if something awful had happened to him, he might have brought it on himself.

  The deputy wrote down Sean Hennessy’s name. He said a detective named Cosgrove was going out to the high school. “I’ll pass this along.” He tucked the notepad into his pocket and took his leave.

  Annie pulled out her cell and called JT to ask if the initial M meant anything to him, leaving a message when he didn’t answer.

  “I bet he’s with the dogs,” Cooper said, “or else he’s gone to question the guy who called in the tip.”

  “He’s going to kill himself,” Annie said.

  “Maybe I can find him, see if I can talk him into coming back here to get some rest.”

  “I doubt you can.” She kept Cooper’s gaze.

  “What?”

  “JT’s certified SAR, did you know?”

  “As in search and rescue, you mean.”

  “Yes. He’s a certified EMT, too. Certified everything rescue, actually. He used to belong to a team of professionals. They were always getting called out.” Annie remembered the nights when the phone would ring, waking her from sound sleep, and the hurried whispers and quiet rustling that came afterward as her mom and JT gathered his gear together. She hadn’t realized then the toll it took on him, but her mother had worried about it. Her mother had said JT felt things too deeply. He felt the need to make things right, to perform miracles, and maybe, a while back, that had been true.

  “A team like EquuSearch?” Cooper prompted.

  “Not as big as that or as famous. It’s an organization based here in Lincoln County. They’re called Emergency One.”

  “I’ve heard of them,” Cooper said. “Met a few of them, looking for Bo.”

  Annie said she had, too, and after a beat, she said, “I doubt JT ever thought he’d be looking for his own son.”

  “No,” Cooper agreed. “It’s not like I know JT that well,” he added after a pause, “but it doesn’t surprise me. That he’s SAR, I mean.”

  Annie wondered what Cooper had picked up on. Something similar to what her mother had seen in JT. Something Annie was only beginning to see.

  “You said used to. When did he quit?”

  “Around four years ago.”

  The call, what turned out to be the final call JT would respond to, came during the daylight hours, on a rainy Saturday. Annie and Bo were playing rummy on the back porch. She was winning a fourth hand, and Bo was pouting. He always pouted when he was losing. She could see the two of them in her mind’s eye, and she could hear JT’s voice in the background, rising and growing sharper as he talked into his cell phone. “Slow down,” he said, and he said it again. Then, “I can’t understand you . . .”

  Annie found Cooper’s glance. “It was the wife of one of his coworkers, who got into trouble. He asked JT to help, and JT went even though he had to drive all the way into Louisiana.”

  Cooper wanted to know what happened, and Annie felt the warmth of color faintly stain her cheeks. “It’s kind of bizarre. They were camping east of Natchitoches, in the Kisatchie National Forest—the husband and wife, and they had . . . had . . . you know . . .”

  “Oh, right.” Cooper nodded his understanding, saving Annie the trouble of having to say it, that the couple had had sex. It would have been too intimate, at least for her. Annie liked Cooper for understanding, for respecting her feelings. She liked his smile, the faint teasing light in his eyes.

  She cleared her throat and said, “Yes. Anyway, they argued at some point after that, really badly argued, I mean. So badly, she took off. She wasn’t wearing any shoes or a stitch of clothing.”

  “You’re kidding.
”

  “I told you it was crazy.”

  “Her husband let her go?”

  “Yep. He was mad and figured once she got cold and soaked, she’d come back, but she didn’t, and by the time the guy called JT, it had been a couple of hours, plus it was over a three-hour drive for JT to get there. Even the other search-and-rescue people were delayed because of the weather.”

  “The rain must have washed out any trail she might have left anyway, and if she was naked with no shoes—anything might have happened to her.”

  “It was all so ridiculous and tragic.” Annie found Cooper’s glance. “It took a lot away from JT when he didn’t find her. Mom said it was because he made the mistake of promising the guy he would, when he knew better. But they were close friends as well as coworkers, plus the couple had two little kids.”

  “Jesus. That’s terrible.”

  “I know. JT was in bad shape for a while after that, not eating right or sleeping. He took off from work so much he nearly got fired. I don’t know how my mom put up with it, but she was so patient, and after a while, he started to pull out of it.” Annie looked off. She wouldn’t go into the rest, how when her mom died, JT had pretty much given up again, spending most of his spare time sitting in front of the TV. Until last Friday anyway.

  “It sounds as if he wanted a miracle to happen,” Cooper said.

  “It’s sort of the same now.” Annie met Cooper’s glance. What if there’s no miracle here, either? She couldn’t bring herself to ask, but she could tell by Cooper’s expression that he saw the question hanging in the frightened shadows of her eyes.

  He plowed a hand over his head. “What about you?” he said. “Can I talk you into going home? I’ll drive you.”

  “No, thank you,” Annie said. “I’m going to the café to start the baking. These people need to eat.” She gestured at the volunteers, the ones standing around in small groups, the others who sat waiting behind phones that were mostly silent at this early hour.

  Cooper seemed to know it would be of no use to argue. He walked out with her, Rufus at their heels, and when she headed up the alley toward the café, he ordered Rufus to go with her.