Crooked Little Lies

by Barbara Taylor Sissel

  Annie went to her knees and embraced the dog’s neck. “Thank you,” she said, meeting Cooper’s gaze. “I can use his company.”

  “You call me if you need anything,” he said, backing away. “Take good care of her, Doofus,” he ordered the dog.

  Annie got to her feet. The tug of her smile was unexpected, and touching her mouth, she was somehow reminded of Cooper’s kiss. When he returned her smile, she saw in his eyes that he remembered, too. She knew if she made even the slightest move toward him, he would come to her, and she was pierced with sudden longing. Her permission was what he waited for, all he needed. The understanding of this was clear, and it hovered between them, and then it was gone, and a moment later, Cooper was gone, too, walking quickly away to his truck.

  Annie watched him go, then with Rufus at her heels, she went into the café.

  Inside the larder, she took stock of the shelves and found the ingredients she needed to make loaves of orange-cranberry bread and several dozen sausage kolaches. By the time she was pulling baked goods from the oven, the flour-clouded air was tinged pink with morning light and redolent with the smell of breakfast. Setting the kolaches on racks to cool, she put together the batter for a double batch of pumpkin muffins, and she was spooning it into greased muffin tins when she glanced up and saw Hollis Audi. The sheriff’s tall, rangy frame filled the doorway, blocking the light, throwing his face into shadow, making it impossible to read his expression. But he had his hat in his hands, and something about that, a tremor in his fingers perhaps, caused Annie to go very still. A glob of muffin batter dropped unheeded from the spoon she held, half of it falling onto the tin, half not.

  “Is he dead?” she asked.

  “No. I don’t know. Aw, Jesus, Annie, they found a body. Down in Houston. Victim of a hit-and-run. Nobody knows who it is, but it might be Bo. We can’t know for sure until someone makes an identification.”

  The sheriff came toward her as if he meant to comfort her, but she let go of the spoon, letting it clatter onto the countertop, putting up her hands, warding him off. She would shatter if he touched her, and she would not trade her composure for his sympathy.

  Sheriff Audi stopped, looking disoriented, as if he had no idea how to proceed. “I tried calling JT,” he said.

  “Oh, no, you can’t tell him a thing like this over the phone.” Annie met the sheriff’s gaze. “What if it isn’t Bo? I think I should go and see before anyone says anything to JT.”

  “You want to go to the morgue?” The sheriff eyed her doubtfully.

  “Yes. Can you take me?” She didn’t think she could drive herself.

  “You’re sure?”

  She wasn’t, but she nodded, untying her apron. She asked him to give her a minute and went into the washroom where she splashed cold water on her face and ran a comb through her hair. When she came out, she said she was ready, but that was probably a lie.

  “My car’s in front of the community center,” the sheriff said when she reappeared.

  “That’s fine. I need to walk Rufus down there anyway.” She beckoned to the dog, and he sat upright, alertly watching her. She beckoned to him again, and he came instantly.

  Twenty minutes later, as she and the sheriff were leaving the center, Cooper drove up beside the patrol car. “You called him?” Annie asked the sheriff.

  He looked sheepish.

  “I’m coming with you.” Cooper got into the backseat.

  “What about Rufus?”

  “My mom will take him home with her.”

  Annie wasn’t happy to have Cooper along, but whatever breath she might have had to protest was lost to the clamor of her panic. She had never seen a dead body before, other than on television. She was spared the viewing of her mother’s body. There had been no doubt as to her mom’s identity for one thing, but then the coroner and the funeral director had gently suggested the family might want to remember the pretty woman Annie’s mother was when she was living. Annie didn’t know if it was better not to have seen, to be left to wonder about the extent of her mother’s injuries.

  She hadn’t suffered, the coroner said. Death was instantaneous. He’d said that, too, as if that made it all right.

  11

  It was early on Wednesday afternoon when Lauren got into town, and traffic was light as it usually was on any ordinary weekday at that hour. What was unusual was the number of cars parked along Prescott, the street running in front of the community center. The adjacent streets were parked up, too. Lauren finally found a space three blocks down from the center, in front of Kim’s Needle and Book Nook. Ordinarily, the shop door would have been standing open, Kim would have been inside, and Lauren would have waved to her as she passed by. But today, the door was closed and the lights were off, and while Lauren was aware of the window display that combined a number of fabric pumpkins with groupings of children’s books featuring an assortment of witches and other hobgoblins, what arrested her eye was the flyer posted prominently in the window’s center.

  “MISSING!” The red-lettered word seemed to shout from the page.

  Lauren looked up the street in the direction she was headed and saw there were flyers pinned up everywhere, wrapping the light poles, papering every window. She counted three mounted in a row in the window of Shear Heaven, the beauty salon where she got her hair cut. The salon itself, like Kim’s shop, was dark. No one was working. Had they closed because of Bo? Was everyone out looking for him? It seemed wonderful and terrible all at once that the town would drop everything and pull together to find this young man.

  But where were we before? Lauren wondered. Which ones of us ever stopped for him, thought about him, thought of asking what he might need—before he disappeared? Why did it always take a calamity to get people moving, to make them care, make them do the right thing?

  The flyer posted on the community center door was larger than the others, poster-size, and Lauren paused to study it. The photo of Bo in the center showed him leaning against a porch post, smiling with such open-faced happiness at whoever was taking the picture that Lauren thought he must love the person with the camera very much. She touched the crown of his head, smoothed the tip of her finger down the line of his cheek. He looked so bright, so endearing and likable. But the intensity, the vulnerability she’d seen in him when she’d spoken to him last Friday was there in the photo, too, and it made her heart ache.

  She ran her eye down the bulleted list of statistics: Birth date: May 6, 1991; Height: 5’11”; Weight: 155 pounds; Build: Slender. A paragraph following the list noted he had wavy brown hair and light blue eyes and that he was last seen on Friday, wearing the exact clothing and in the exact location Lauren had described earlier for Detective Cosgrove and his partner.

  Lauren paused, her hand on the door, wondering if she could handle running into them again. She looked back down the street in the direction of her car. It would be easy enough to walk away, but she didn’t.

  Pushing open the door, she stood inside it, scanning the crowd, and while she didn’t see Cosgrove or Willis, there were a lot of other people, more than she’d expected, including several she recognized, answering phones or gathered, talking, in loose knots. But the hum of voices was quiet, the wrong sort of quiet. The hair on Lauren’s neck rose. Had they found him, then?

  Spotting Madeleine Finch across the room, she walked over to her. The usual greetings would have seemed out of place; she didn’t bother with them. “I came to see if I could help,” she said. “Am I too late?”

  Madeleine lifted her hand—in helplessness, pleading?—Lauren didn’t know. She was trembling, though. Even her head wobbled on her neck like an overly heavy flower on its stem.

  “Maybe you should sit down.” Lauren cupped Madeleine’s elbow and slid her hand down her forearm, feeling the rigidity of bone through the looser tissue of her flesh. She hadn’t seen Madeleine in a while. It might have been longer t
han a year, Lauren guessed. She couldn’t remember. She and Tara had used to come to the café for lunch quite often in the days when they were still working together. They’d always commented on how spry Madeleine was, close to eighty and still full of pepper. But she looked exhausted now.

  “Why don’t I take you home?” Lauren suggested.

  “No,” Madeleine said. “It’s very kind of you, but I can’t leave.”

  A woman came to Madeleine’s side. “She’s as stubborn as the rest of us.”

  “Carol, right?” Lauren recognized her. “I was just out at your farm.”

  “Len said he waited on you.”

  Lauren smiled. On another day, she and Carol might have chatted. Lauren might have said how hospitable Len was, that he’d offered her tea and a mini croissant. They didn’t run in the same circle; Carol and Len weren’t aware of Lauren’s fall from grace. They might have carried on talking as if Lauren were her old self. But this wasn’t the day for idle conversation. “This is such an agonizing situation,” she said instead. “I can’t imagine how the family is holding up.”

  Carol and Madeleine exchanged a look that worried Lauren.

  “Do you know Annie, Bo’s sister?” Carol asked. “She left with Sheriff Audi a while ago. He’s taking her to the morgue in Houston.”

  “Oh, no,” Lauren said.

  “A young man was found dead in the street last night on the north side of the city,” Madeleine said. “Word is that someone hit him and left him there. He’s the right age, wearing similar clothing . . .” She broke off.

  Now it was Carol who took Madeleine’s arm, who told her she needed to sit down. “You need a cookie, too, and a cup of tea, something in your stomach. And no arguing,” she added. She looked at Lauren. “Would you like to join us?”

  Lauren thanked her, declining the invitation, head swimming with the memory of how close she had come to hitting Bo herself.

  “What sort of person leaves someone to die in the street?”

  It was a woman behind Lauren who asked. More than asked, demanded, Lauren thought.

  “Some kind of monster.” A second woman answered in a voice that was as hard and affronted as the first woman’s.

  “Well,” said the first woman, “if they catch the driver, I hope they kill him.”

  “Not me,” the second woman answered. “I hope they lock him up in prison for the rest of his life, where he has to wake up every day and remember what he did, you know?”

  Lauren didn’t know which punishment was right. She only knew that neither one would bring Bo back.

  12

  You won’t have to see him,” the sheriff said as if he could discern Annie’s thoughts, the thready pulse of her fear. “The actual body, I mean.”

  Annie looked over at him.

  “They’ll show you a picture of the face, or if that’s not . . . They’ll try to find an identifying mark, something else that’ll . . .” The sheriff lifted his hand, letting it hover above the steering wheel, obviously flustered.

  Annie didn’t need to hear the words he couldn’t bring himself to say. She understood that if the victim’s face was battered beyond recognition, the way she imagined her mother’s face had been, they would hunt for some other distinguishing mark to photograph. She felt Cooper’s hand on her shoulder, and she wanted to turn to him, to look into his eyes. She wanted to climb over the seat and into his lap. She wanted to tell Sheriff Audi to stop. To say I can’t do this. But she didn’t move. She kept thinking of JT, that a father shouldn’t have to see his son dead.

  “Sometimes, when nothing else is available, they match dental records,” the sheriff said.

  Annie wouldn’t ever remember whether anything was said after that, and she wouldn’t recall very much about the actual morgue visit, either, other than a handful of details: the waxed sheen of the floors through an endless network of corridors, the sparse furnishings of the room she and the sheriff and Cooper were eventually led to, the flat black hands on a wall clock that jerked with the passing sweep of each minute.

  A man joined them eventually, introducing himself, inviting them to sit. She wouldn’t ever recall his name or his face. She didn’t look at him but at his shirt cuffs. They were pin-striped and just visible beyond the hemmed sleeves of his starched white lab coat. In particular, she noticed his wrists, the space where they joined his forearms. The knobs of bone there seemed large, excessively so. The man, possibly a lab technician although she’d never know, slid photos out of an envelope and set them in a row, directing her attention to them, but she only wanted to study his wrists.

  Cooper, sitting next to her, laid his hand on her arm, looking from her to the photos and back at her, and his glance was meaningful, somehow urgent. She kept his gaze, aware of the ringing in her ears, of her blood passing, thick and logy, through her veins. Cooper nodded once at her, and she took strength from that, from him, enough so that she was able to turn her attention to the photos. There were three altogether, and in each one, the face was peaceful. There wasn’t a flaw, not a mark on it.

  He looks like he’s sleeping. Did she actually say it or only think it? Or was it merely that she’d heard it a hundred times on television? It was another detail that would elude her.

  Looking up at no one in particular, Annie said, “It’s not him.”

  “You’re sure, Miss Beauchamp?” the tech asked.

  She was, she said.

  “It’s not,” the sheriff said.

  “No,” Cooper said, and Annie realized he and the sheriff had known before her the man in the photographs wasn’t Bo. That was why Cooper had been so insistent that she look. He’d wanted her to know it, too, as quickly as possible. She imagined Cooper expected her to feel relief, but she was uncertain of what she felt.

  Sheriff Audi scooped the photos into a pile and handed them to the tech. “Thank you,” he said.

  “Thank you for coming.” The tech returned the photos to their envelope. “Good luck with the search.” He looked at Annie. “I hope you find your brother.”

  She looked at the envelope. “I hope you find his family,” she said. “It’s harder, not knowing.”

  But she wondered, riding back to Hardys Walk, if that was true. Maybe it was better this way. At least when you didn’t know for sure, you could invent whatever story you wanted, to explain the circumstances, like Bo was buried in the stacks of a library in another town, having forgotten the world, or he’d hopped a train that was headed to California.

  She had Sheriff Audi drop her off at the café. Facing the mess she’d left there was preferable to facing the folks at the community center. Many of them teared up at the sight of her, as if her very presence brought them pain. She didn’t know what to do with that or their kindness, the scope of their sacrifice. She didn’t know the answers to their questions.

  She picked up the bowl of pumpkin-muffin batter, and giving it a stir, decided she might as well finish spooning it into the tin. Who knew? Maybe the muffins would turn out. She was surprised and somehow gratified when she pulled them from the oven to see they were fine. After they cooled, she stowed them under a glass dome and set to work washing up the small mountain of bowls, pans, and utensils she’d used. She was hanging the kitchen towel when a man said her name: “Ms. Beauchamp?”

  Her back was to him, and she wheeled.

  He apologized for scaring her, flipped open a badge. “I’m Detective Jim Cosgrove,” he said, “with the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office? I wonder if you have a minute?”

  Annie was still clutching the towel, and she twisted it now in her hands, searching his gaze for some sign of what he might have come to tell her. She nodded at him, mute in her alarm. He wore a suit instead of a uniform, but his civilian clothes only made him seem more intimidating.

  “Is there someplace we can sit down?”

  Cosgrove’s apparent co
ncern flustered Annie, and instead of answering him, she asked whether he’d like a muffin. “They’re fresh,” she said.

  Cosgrove declined.

  She went past him into the café, sliding into a booth.

  Cosgrove sat opposite her.

  “Do you—? Have you found him?”

  “No,” he said kindly. “Nothing like that. I need to ask you a few questions, is all.”

  “I’ve told Sheriff Audi everything I know.”

  “Yeah, but I’d like to hear directly from you, you know, things like who his friends are, where he likes to hang out, whether you ever knew him to use or sell drugs.”

  Annie made a sound at once rueful and annoyed. “I knew this would happen.”

  “What?” Cosgrove asked.

  She leveled her glance at him. “Bo’s disappearance has got nothing to do with drugs, okay? He’s not taking drugs now, or selling them.”

  Cosgrove kept her gaze, and she squirmed slightly under his regard. She had the sense that making her nervous was his intention. “I know he’s taken drugs in the past, but he stopped, last summer.”

  “What happened last summer?”

  She hadn’t told Sheriff Audi when he asked, but she had to say it now, Annie thought, no matter how it pained her, in case it meant anything at all. “I dated a man, Leighton Drake.”

  Something flickered across Cosgrove’s expression.

  He knows, Annie thought, and looked at her hands. Why should it surprise her? Probably everyone in the whole town knew what Leighton was, except her. She’d learned the hard way. “He wasn’t who I thought,” she said, wishing Cosgrove would let it go at that.

  He didn’t. “What do you mean?”

  It irritated her that he would make her say it, what he already knew. “He’s a drug dealer. Bo told me he was when Leighton first asked me out, but I didn’t pay attention. Not until Bo made me go with him to Leighton’s condo, and there it was—the proof.” Annie remembered her first sight of Leighton’s inventory. The stacks of small cartons—packed with everything from marijuana to pharmaceuticals, amphetamines, cocaine, and even heroin—had been stored alongside neatly rubber-banded bundles of cash, so much cash she had not believed her eyes. Her brain kept telling her it was a mistake. Leighton had said he sold pharmaceuticals, all right, but legally.