by Dale Mayer
Raina shook her head. “No, no, no. I think it has to be related to my sister’s murder, but I don’t know for sure.”
The officer nodded and proceeded to talk to a photographer who had suddenly arrived.
Reyes picked her up, carried her down the hallway into the closest bedroom of the three upstairs, a small room, where he laid her on the bed and sat beside her. He pulled the bedcovers over her and said, “Just lie here and rest.”
She stared up at him, her eyes huge wells of pain. “What the hell is going on?”
He gripped her fingers. “You know very well that your mother might have tried to commit suicide if she knew about Reana. They were very close.”
Raina nodded. “That’s what I suspected when I saw her. But I didn’t tell her yet. I didn’t have a chance to,” she cried out.
“I know. That doesn’t mean somebody else didn’t.”
She tried to think of who would have said something. Her mother did have a lot of friends, and so did Reana. It was quite possible somebody talked to her mom before Raina got here.
“Could have even been the police, I suppose,” she said sadly. “Poor Mom.”
“Poor Mom, poor Reana and poor Raina,” Reyes said quietly. “This will be a very difficult time for you.”
She nodded slowly. “But I didn’t have the relationship with Reana that Mom did.”
“That doesn’t mean you won’t miss the connection you did have with your sister. She might not have been the easiest person to get along with, but you did love her. I have no doubt about that.”
She smiled tremulously up at him. “I did,” she whispered. “But it’s a love that sometimes hurt. I kept trying to not compare myself to her, but it was hard. She was larger-than-life. It’s like she was 150 percent, and I was only 50 percent.”
He squeezed her fingers and shook his head. “Just because you were the quiet one, just because you were happy to be in the background, that doesn’t mean you weren’t as important or as nice or as stunning or as smart as she was. She was just one of those who always had to be in the limelight.”
Raina knew he was trying to make her feel better, but nobody could tell her anything about her sister that she didn’t already know. Her sister did have a lot of good qualities. And she would be sadly missed.
“I have to take care of funeral arrangements,” Raina whispered. She wiped her eyes and tried to sit up, but he pushed her shoulders gently back down.
“You don’t have to do that right now,” he said. “If anything, I think you need to go to the hospital for your mother.”
She pressed her eyes closed. “I should already have gone,” she cried out.
“You couldn’t have because I was holding you back. And you’re not driving now either. I’ll take you there myself.”
She looked up at him with questioning eyes.
He leaned down and held her close. “You’ll be okay,” he said.
She shook her head. “I’m not so sure about that. It’s like my whole world has been ripped apart.”
“Murder will do that,” he said, his tone serious. “Death is hard enough, but, when it comes in this form, it can mess up your mind. We don’t know who is responsible or why, but we have to make sure whatever this is, it stops here. Your mother is already a casualty. Let’s not have you collapse over it too.”
Raina wasn’t the kind to collapse. She was the kind who would get on with work, and months and weeks down the road she would finally break down and cry for days. But, right now, it was all bottled up inside while she carried on.
“I need to tell your mother.”
“I will,” he said with firm authority. He pulled out his phone, dialed his mother’s number, and, when she answered, he said, “I don’t know if you’ve been given an update yet, but Raina won’t be in for the rest of today, maybe not for a couple days.”
She could hear Annemarie’s disapproving exclamation on the other end.
Reyes said, “Reana was murdered during the night, and Melissa has collapsed. She’s been hospitalized. Raina is devastated obviously, but is holding it together.”
And again Annemarie’s voice, loud and full of shock, filtered through the phone line. Raina barely heard the words but enough to understand that the restaurant patrons who’d been there at breakfast had already spread the word.
Then something about the police.
Raina frowned. Of course the police had spoken to her mother. The detectives had relayed part of that conversation. It made Raina feel odd to hear everyone discussing her life. And Reyes’s life. This had to be devastating to him. To hear the suspicion in people’s voices, to know they questioned if he’d been involved. … She loved her sister, but having that napkin in her hand at the end …
“We don’t have all the details on Reana’s death yet,” Reyes said. “Because she smacked me yesterday and because of the fact she was found with my name written on a napkin, apparently the police consider me the prime suspect.”
Dead silence followed on the other end of the phone, and then Annemarie exploded with the same passionate outrage Raina would have expected. She smiled to hear her defense of her son. And it made Raina feel better. Reyes had the worst part of the deal.
When he finally got off the phone, she smiled up at him. “Your mother is so much like my sister.”
He nodded. “Yes, and, as my father has repeatedly said, it takes a great deal of patience and tolerance to live with her. He was surprised when I hooked up with your sister because she’s so much like my mother. And I guess that’s also why I wasn’t surprised when I came to the realization I couldn’t go through with that relationship. Ron is very much like my mother and deals with her well, whereas I’m much more like my father. I’m tolerant and silent in the background.”
“As long as you don’t let yourself get run over,” Raina said quietly. “That was my problem. Reana was just bigger than any life force. She was a roller coaster to live with. It was a case of get on board or get run over.”
“And then you ended up learning to dodge her and to get out of her way instead,” he said shrewdly. “It took me a little longer to figure that out, but, once I did, I knew I had to step out of her path and stay out of her path.”
He reached over and gently stroked her cheek. “I should have stayed with you.”
“You never were with me, not the way you were with her,” Raina said sadly. “We might have gotten there, but, once my sister saw you in that light, and you saw my sister that way, … well …” She shrugged. “The rest is history.” She could feel the intensity of his gaze. This gentle investigation of their feelings had her scared to say too much, and yet, scared not to say enough …
“I wonder if you can ever understand what that was like,” he said. “I really wanted to get to know you better, but then I saw your sister again, … and I don’t know what happened. … I didn’t realize what taking that turn in my life would mean.”
At least he said it with a note of humor, as if, looking back on his relationship with Reana, he didn’t begrudge the time that he’d spent with her. Neither did he sound regretful for those “lost” years. Something else she appreciated now that Reana was dead. Maybe not so much had she still been alive …
“She really slept with another woman?” Raina studied his face intently. “That’s the one thing I can’t get out of my head. And yet, it’s one more thing in a long line of craziness that I don’t understand. How does any of this work together? It’s like I didn’t even know my sister.”
“I think it’s quite possible your sister has always had that sexual preference but couldn’t accept it. Like it threatened her image of herself or how other people would view her. It’s accepted more now, but I think it takes the right person and the self-confidence to stand up and to proclaim, This is who I am, and your sister didn’t have that yet. It did make a lot of sense to me when I saw them together. All these little troubling aspects to our relationship never made sense before. But, when I saw the
m in bed together, the tumblers went click, and I finally understood. For all her exuberance and liveliness out of bed, she wasn’t the same in bed.”
Raina stilled. “Are you serious? She used to mock me because I was … What did she say? … Vanilla sex-wise.”
“If you consider she was involved in a lesbian relationship, then that would make sense too.” He studied her and then looked out the window. “Maybe she was fishing. Maybe she was wondering if her twin sister also had the same bent?”
“I have no clue,” Raina said. “I’ve never felt the inclination to do so. I like men,” she said with a smile, “and it seemed to me that my sister adored them.”
“I think she adored what they could do for her as far as society and a lifestyle. But I think women fulfilled Reana on the inside,” Reyes said sadly. “But she couldn’t accept it or wasn’t ready to go public with it, thus she cheated herself and her girlfriend out of what could have been a real relationship.”
“And you,” Raina said with a half smile.
Just then one of the police officers stepped in the doorway. “We’re leaving now. We do need to ask you some questions before we go though.”
Raina struggled to sit up. She leaned against the headboard, pulling the covers to her chest. “If you don’t mind, let’s do it now then,” she said. “I’ll head to the hospital in a few minutes and see my mother.”
They went over her movements for the last twenty-four hours. After she was done, the officer asked Reyes the same questions. When he answered the last one, the officers said they would talk with the other two detectives about this and see if the cases could be worked jointly.
“Is there any chance my mother wasn’t given a choice to take these medications?”
The police officer looked at her in surprise. “You mean, somebody might have forced her to take the pills so it would look like she tried to commit suicide?”
Raina nodded slowly. “I know I’m grasping at straws, but it’s a little hard to understand her behavior.”
“What was her relationship with you like?”
“Big sister,” she said instantly. “Meaning, I was the big sister to my mom.”
The officer studied her. “That’s an interesting description.”
She shrugged. “My sister and my mother were volatile. My mother seemed incapable of handling my sister and used to call me, asking how to handle Reana and what to do about her. For me it was more a case of live and let live and stay out of the way. But, of course, my mother couldn’t accept that. And she wanted me to fix things all the time. She couldn’t fix them, so she always called on me to do so. But I wasn’t any good at fixing them because, honestly, my sister didn’t want to fix anything.”
The officer nodded slowly. “Here’s my card.” He pulled one out of his pocket and handed it to Reyes. “If you think of anything else, or you see anything untoward, anything missing from the house … We don’t think any foul play was involved, but, if something hits you wrong, then call me and let me know.” He turned and walked out.
Raina swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood. “This has been a day I would like to have over with.” She walked into the small bathroom and washed her face.
“Do you want me to take a look at your mom’s room? See if anything is missing?”
She looked at him. “You’ve never been in there before today, have you? How would you know if anything was wrong?”
He gave her a crooked smile. “I wouldn’t, but, if I was a detective working on the case, I wouldn’t have seen Melissa’s room before either.”
She nodded. “Then please do.”
She shut the bathroom door, used the facilities and washed her hands. She opened the door and stepped out of the bedroom and into the hallway to find him studying the layout of the house. “Did you find anything?”
“Did your mom sleep with the window or the balcony doors open?”
“Never,” Raina said. “She always complained about drafts.”
“The bedroom window is totally open,” he said. “That struck me as odd for a woman living alone.”
She frowned at him, rushed into her mother’s bedroom. Not only was the big window open, so were the glass French doors to the balcony. “She never used the glass doors because outside stairs were connected to them. She always kept these doors bolted on the bottom, so nobody could get in.”
“Was she nervous living here alone?”
Raina raised both hands, palms up. “Why ask me? Apparently I don’t know anything about my family anymore. As far as I’m aware, she wasn’t nervous, but she didn’t like the idea of anybody coming into her bedroom, day or night. So she kept both the window and the balcony doors locked and bolted. She never went out there, never used that little balcony. At least not that I’m aware of.”
He nodded and stepped out on the balcony, studying the layout of the backyard.
She joined him. “But I suppose it’s easy for somebody to have gotten into her room, isn’t it?”
“Or to have left this way, yes.”
“And what about fingerprints? Wouldn’t they have left fingerprints on the door latch?”
“It’s possible,” he said. “But then we have to assume he—or she—was an amateur.”
Raina froze, then turned slowly to stare at him. “You’re not thinking my sister’s killer had something to do with my mother’s attempted suicide, are you?”
He sighed. “I’m not suggesting anything,” he said. “We have to assume nothing at this point. But, considering your mother and her mental state right now—if she already knew about your sister’s murder—suicide would make sense in response to that. However, what if she and your sister had a major fight? Would she have still committed suicide?”
“I don’t think so,” Raina said. “They fought all the time. Besides she’s the one who asked me to get in touch with my sister last evening. When I finally did, I contacted Mom and told her that Reana was fine.”
“Maybe Reana came over to talk to her. What if Reana had told your mom that she was a lesbian. How would your mother have reacted?”
At that, her heart beat heavily, and her stomach sank. “My mother would not have accepted that,” Raina said slowly. “Mom was against many things in life, and lots of them didn’t really matter to her, but that one did. She said there was no reason for lesbians to exist, that something was wrong with them. She felt, if they could get the proper counseling, they would go straight.”
“So, if your sister didn’t dare tell your mother before, but then, for whatever reason, she decided to come clean …”
“It would have been one hell of a fight,” Raina said. “And I’m not sure who would have won that one.”
“Reana would have,” Reyes said. “I have no doubt.”
“I don’t know, but I highly doubt my mother would have turned around and committed suicide over it. But she definitely would have wanted to kill Reana.” She listened to the words as they came out of her mouth and shook her head. “No, no, no, no. I didn’t mean that. No way would Mom have killed Reana.”
But it was already too late. Reyes leaned against the glass doors, his arms crossed over his chest. “But would she have?”
Raina swallowed hard. “You’re thinking she might have killed my sister and then tried to commit suicide?” She started to hyperventilate. It was so damn hard to make her chest move to get air into her lungs again, and suddenly she found herself bent over double with Reyes pounding on her back. Finally she took several gulping breaths and collapsed onto the small balcony floor.
“Don’t say things like that,” she cried out. “Enough is going through my head without you putting more disturbing ideas in there.”
“I didn’t put the thoughts in there,” he said. “You did.”
She stared at him and bit down hard on her lip. She shook her head. “I would hope my mother would not have killed my sister. And I would hope that, if she had done something like that, she wouldn’t have tried to commit s
uicide. But, when you lay it out like that, it is definitely possible. It’s not very feasible, but it is possible,” she admitted. “And now I feel like I’ll be sick.”
She bolted inside her mother’s bathroom, where she opened the toilet just in time for her stomach contents to empty. She sat on the floor at the base of the toilet for a few minutes, waiting for the heaving to stop, and then Reyes handed her a glass of water. She rinsed her mouth and spat it out, flushed the toilet, slowly made her way to her feet and back out to the bedroom.
She thought about her mother lying there and the empty pill bottles on the bathroom counter, and she shook her head. “That doesn’t explain why the doors and window are open. She would never have left them open.”
“I know,” he said. “We don’t have any answers, no matter all the questions. I’m just throwing out ideas.”
She lifted her straying gaze to his. “Then please come up with other ideas. I don’t think I can handle these. To find out my sister has been murdered and then to think my mother could be the perpetrator? If she comes to, and that’s what she says to me, I don’t know how I’ll live with it.”
“You’ll live with it the same way you always live with everything,” he said. “With kindness and grace, being as understanding as you can be. Because obviously it would have taken an awful lot for your mother to have taken that step. And we don’t know that she did. So let’s keep an open mind, and we’ll try to find the right answers, not just any answer.” He walked toward her, wrapped her up in his arms and held her close.
*
He hadn’t thought to have this opportunity to hold her so close, but her world had blown apart, and he couldn’t do any less. She’d been an important part of his life at one time. She’d always been in his thoughts, even when he’d been away.
But he’d always wondered. Then he’d gotten into Reana’s web, and he’d been lost, trying to figure a way out. Raina had been no help as she’d turned her back on him—something he could understand if she’d liked him and had been upset that he was going out with her sister. At the time she didn’t seem to like him so much, and the more she’d turned away, the deeper into Reana’s clutches he went, happy to have someone appreciate him. As he thought about it now, it made him realize just how young he’d been. But he was gone much of the time with his naval ops, and then it was easy to forget and dismiss all that was wrong in his relationship with Reana.
