Reyes’s Raina

by Dale Mayer

  “Melissa tried to commit suicide yesterday morning, as you already know. But she had a heart attack early this morning, and she didn’t make it.”

  Annemarie cried out, her hands instinctively reaching for her husband. He wrapped her up and held her tight. They both studied Reyes.

  “You don’t blame me for this, do you?” his mother cried out.

  Reyes didn’t say anything right away. He turned to look at Raina.

  She sighed, shoved her hands in her pockets and said, “I’ll never really know the truth, will I? If you hadn’t called her, would my mother still be alive? I had planned to tell her and to stay with her, once I confirmed it truly was Reana’s body in the morgue. Would Mom had have taken this step if she hadn’t been alone? Or would she have just waited and tried to commit suicide later? I won’t ever know.”

  Annemarie cried out again. Raina felt sad, but it was the truth. “I am upset you called her, as if to share the latest gossip. I’m pretty sure her heart attack was brought on by her attempted suicide. It’s easy to say it was a broken heart, and she just wanted to join my sister,” she said. “But I will always wonder, if she’d had someone with her, would she still be alive?”

  Annemarie started to cry. “I didn’t mean to hurt her,” she sobbed.

  Harold glared at the two of them. “You can’t seriously think Annemarie’s responsible for your mother’s death?”

  “No,” Raina said quietly. “But I certainly think that the way Annemarie jumped into telling Melissa—and then didn’t make sure she was okay afterward—definitely contributed to it.” She stared at Harold. “Am I blaming her? No. Right now I’m still angry, still hurt, and still very confused,” she said quietly. “I now have two family members to say goodbye to. And one is hard enough.”

  On that note she turned and walked back out again.

  *

  Reyes turned to face his father. “It’s been a very difficult time for Raina,” he said by way of explanation. “First her sister and now her mother.”

  Annemarie rubbed her eyes. “You know I’d never have done anything like that on purpose.”

  “No,” Reyes said. “I don’t think you called her to let her know her daughter was dead, thinking she’d try to commit suicide and then would have a heart attack. But I do think you wanted to be in the middle of something once again.” He knew his words hurt, but he had to tell her the truth. “You had no business informing Melissa. And when you did inform her, you did absolutely nothing to make sure that broken woman was okay. Obviously somebody should have been there with her. And that was Raina’s place to be. And you took that from her. I think, from Raina’s point of view, that’ll be very hard to reconcile.”

  Annemarie sat down slowly in her chair. She grabbed several Kleenexes and wiped her face. “It’s something I’ll have to live with too,” she said painfully. “I know right now it doesn’t matter to you, but Melissa was my friend too.”

  “Yes, she was,” Reyes said. “And now she’s gone from both of your lives.” He glanced back to see Raina standing at the corner of the shop, looking out the window at the plants. “And I’m sure you can see how very confusing and trying this is for Raina.”

  Harold stepped forward. “When are you leaving?”

  “Meaning, that I’ve been here long enough to cause all kinds of hell?” Reyes asked humorously, trying not to take offense, but, in a way, it was hard not to.

  His father had the grace to turn red. “That’s not what I mean,” he blustered.

  “Well, it is, just you aren’t usually so blunt,” Reyes said drily. “I’m staying for Raina’s sake because she asked me to,” he said quietly. “Until the joint memorial service is over.”

  Harold winced. He glanced at Raina. “That will help her.”

  “Yes,” Reyes said. “At least I hope it will. The other thing that will help is to make sure we find out who killed her sister.”

  He turned to face his mother. “Did Reana ever have any of her friends stop by?”

  “I gave the police a list of anybody I knew,” she said. She rubbed her face. “God, this has been a terrible couple days.” She caught Reyes’s look and flushed. “I cared a lot about Reana,” she said. “And her mother was a good friend of mine. These deaths will affect us regardless of what you think of me.”

  “I don’t think badly of you,” he said quietly. “But, like Reana, you’re all about drama. You’re all about getting into things that you really don’t have any right to be in.”

  She stiffened and glared at him. His father stepped forward, and then she burst into tears and said, “No, you’re right. You’re very right, and I’m so sorry.”

  Harold looked from her to Reyes and shrugged.

  Reyes understood his father’s position. It was how Reyes felt around his mother too. “Well, hopefully this has been a lesson for everyone,” Reyes said quietly. “And I’m here to tell you that, if I get a chance”—he turned to check where Raina was, seeing her out in the store—“I’ll convince Raina to move to Texas with me. That will be easier for both of you.”

  Her mother gasped. “Are you two together?”

  He tilted his head to the side. “Would it bother you if we are?”

  She shook her head. “No. It’s a much better pairing than you and Reana. I understand that now.”

  “Yes. It always was Raina for me,” he said quietly. “Things got off track for a while there. But it’s slowly going back in the right direction.”

  “She probably doesn’t want to work here anymore either,” Annemarie said with a sad smile. “I’ve broken something between us.”

  Reyes didn’t know what to say to his mother about that. Communication was strained when he had such a difficult parent. In all the time he’d spent with friends and coworkers, they had never seemed to have anybody in their lives like his mother. He loved her, but she wasn’t easy to live with.

  “Since I haven’t discussed this with Raina yet, I don’t know what she wants to do right now,” he said. “It’s too early for her to make those decisions. For now she’s got a hell of a mess to deal with.”

  His mother nodded, her hands clenched on the table in front of her. “Also some rumors are circulating,” she said slowly, “about Reana having girlfriends. Is that true?”

  He nodded. “It’s why she and I broke up,” he said. “I found her in bed with her girlfriend.”

  Both his parents gasped. “Why didn’t you tell us?” Harold asked, a bit confused. “We listened to what she said and believed her.”

  “Of course you did,” he said drily. “Everybody believed everything Reana said.”

  His mom just stared at him, as she lurched to her feet. “All these years I thought it was because of you. Why did she slap you when you first arrived then?” she asked in confusion.

  “I think she was afraid I might tell everyone the truth,” he said tiredly. “Now that she’s gone, it doesn’t matter anyway.” Reyes studied his mother’s face. “The thing is, you never believed me. You’ve always believed her.”

  His mother once again sat down heavily. She looked like she was about to break apart.

  He took a step toward her, his instincts aroused. “What’s going on?”

  “I saw her,” she whispered. “The night she died.”

  His father turned to look at her. “What?”

  She raised tear-filled eyes toward both men. “I didn’t kill her though. Please believe me. I did not kill her.”

  “What happened?” Reyes asked. He was aware of Raina stepping up behind him; she’d been close enough to hear this most recent part of their conversation.

  “I asked her why she caused the scene with you. I didn’t want her picking on you anymore.”

  Reyes was surprised at the warmth that spread through him. His mother had never been terribly good at defending him. “Why this time?” he asked curiously.

  She flushed. “Because I figured, after two years, you deserved another chance.”

  �
�With her?” he asked incredulously. “I had no intention of ever getting back together with her, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “She’d been saying some pretty rough things the last two years,” his mother admitted. “I figured you wouldn’t have a chance to meet anybody else locally, and I was hoping you would come back to live here.”

  He slowly shook his head. “The only reason I’ll come back and live here is if I don’t enjoy my job in Texas anymore,” he said slowly. “And that won’t happen for quite a while.”

  “But, if you loved somebody here,” his mother argued, “then maybe you’d come back and find work here.”

  This was a side of his mother he had never seen before. “I’m surprised to hear that,” he said slowly, not sure how to proceed. He didn’t want to add to her pain, but he’d never heard anything even remotely as loving as this from her. “Why did you care?”

  She flushed. “I get that you have seen me as a not very caring mother,” she admitted painfully, “but I’ve always loved you.”

  He shared a glance with his father. “What brought this on?”

  She shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know,” she said, “but … maybe suddenly seeing how much Reana was like me? She was a very difficult person sometimes. And I know I haven’t been very easy to live with.” She glanced apologetically up at her husband and then over at her son. “Like seeing a mirror image of myself. One of those snapshots of awareness and I thought, well, maybe I could do something to help Reana too. I wanted to talk to her about not attacking you. First time she sees you in two years, and she walks up in a public place—our family’s business—and slaps you hard. I never did get a chance to tell you how much I admired the fact that you didn’t turn around and belt her one. I know that’s not what I said at the time because I wanted you to stop her, but you couldn’t be the one to hit her,” she said painfully. “Honestly I’m the one who should have. It would take another woman to hit her back, and it’s probably the only way she’d ever stop. She was becoming more abusive in so many ways, and I guess that’s what I saw in myself.”

  “She was more abusive,” Raina said quietly from his side, “because she was so unhappy with who she was. She truly loved Jenny. Jenny wanted to go public with their relationship, and Reana didn’t think she could handle how people would look at her—would judge her. She wasn’t ready to take that step. Yet, she really wanted to be with Jenny. Apparently Reana was a completely different person when she was around Jenny.”

  “I could see that,” Annemarie said. “I wish she’d told us though.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered to me,” Harold said. “I was happy with her being herself. I didn’t care what her sexual orientation was.”

  “No, and maybe I would have understood the breakup more,” Annemarie said. She glanced up at Reyes. “She kept telling me how she caught you in bed with another woman.”

  “That’s because she didn’t want you to know the truth,” Reyes said. “The fact is, I found Reana and Jenny in bed together. I didn’t know her name at the time. It was a newish relationship, I believe, for them.”

  “She was with Jenny even way back then?” Harold asked in surprise. “She dated a lot of guys after you left.”

  “All part of that mixed-up persona of who she was trying to portray versus who she was,” Raina said sadly. “What I don’t understand is who, in the final moments of her life, was pissed off enough about that to kill her.”

  “Can you know for sure that’s what it was about?” Harold asked. He glanced at Annemarie. “And where and when did you see her?”

  “I saw her at the brownstone. I got there just as she was walking up the stairs.”

  Reyes straightened. “Did you talk inside or outside?”

  “Outside on the front step. She said she had somebody inside waiting for her and wouldn’t invite me in. And I was okay with that. But I wanted her to stop her abuse. I wanted her to treat you nicely. What can I say? It was something I finally felt I had to do.”

  “And did she just agree and go inside?”

  His mother laughed. “No.” There was bitterness in her voice. “I got really angry, and I smacked her.”

  Chapter 16

  Raina studied Annemarie in horror. “You do realize I saw that smack on her face at the morgue right?”

  Annemarie’s eyes filled with tears. “You said she was beaten up, and I was terrified that that’s what you meant.” She shuddered, wrapping her arms tight around her chest. “I swear to you. I only hit her once.”

  “How many times have I told you that you’ve got to stop lashing out at people? Verbally is bad enough but physically?” Harold said, his voice harsher than Raina had ever heard before.

  Annemarie bit her lip. “I just lost my temper.” She looked at each of them and turned. “Like Reana did when she saw you, Reyes.”

  “But that wasn’t temper,” Reyes said quietly. “It was fear. Is that why you hit her? Were you afraid of something she was doing?”

  His mother swallowed hard.

  He leaned forward and said, “This is the time to come clean.”

  “I was afraid she was stealing from the company,” she said, the words coming out in a rush. “And I wanted to talk to her about it. But I was also so angry about how she treated you.”

  “I highly doubt she was stealing from us,” Harold protested.

  “It’s just something she said. Something about Reyes would pay for it. That she’d make sure there was nothing for him at the end of the day.”

  “So not that she was stealing from you but that she might?” Raina asked. She frowned, thinking about her sister. “I do know that, when she was very angry—or as Reyes said, afraid—she would make a lot of threats. But I highly doubt she would have carried it out. It would have crippled her career.”

  “I know, but it was enough of a fear factor for me to go to her brownstone,” Annemarie said. “However, I only hit her once, and, when I left, she was alive.”

  “Why did you go there?”

  “I followed her from work,” she confessed. “I didn’t think anything of it. I just reacted.”

  “She lived with Jenny there,” Reyes said quietly. “But these last few days, maybe even as long as a week after they broke up, she’d been staying with Melissa.”

  Annemarie looked at him in surprise. “Well, she walked from the street, up the stairs and had the keys in her hand.”

  “Jenny started moving out a week ago,” Raina said. “She was hoping she and Reana would make up again, but it didn’t happen.”

  “So when Reana went to the brownstone, no one was there?” Harold asked.

  “Jenny was no longer living there,” Reyes corrected. “But you said she was meeting someone inside?”

  Annemarie nodded. “Yes, but I didn’t see who it was.”

  “Reana didn’t say anything?”

  Annemarie shook her head. “No, she didn’t. We talked, and she went inside and slammed the door in my face, and I stormed off.”

  Reyes studied her for a long moment. “Did you see any other vehicles around?”

  “Of course,” she said. “There were lots. But how would I know if any of them belonged to the guy or woman inside?”

  “What vehicles did you see?”

  She shrugged. “I remember a van and a sports car. But I don’t remember much else.”

  “What kind of sports car?” Reyes asked, feeling Raina look at him with something akin to excitement. “What kind of sports car, Mom?”

  “How would I know?” She gave a hard laugh. “I don’t know anything about cars.”

  “Can you describe it?”

  She thought about it for a moment and then opened her laptop. “Let me see if I can find a picture. Though I don’t know if that’ll help.”

  They waited as she searched on the internet for sports cars.

  “Aha,” she said, flipping the laptop around. “It was like this. But it was black.”

  Raina stared at it,
turning to look at Reyes. “What kind of sports car does Jamie drive?”

  “According to Ice, a Mitsubishi Spider,” he said with a note of satisfaction. “That vehicle. And it’s black.”

  “Who’s Jamie?” Harold and Annemarie asked together.

  “Jenny’s brother,” Raina said. “Now I think that moves him up our priority list.”

  “Let me contact the detective first,” Reyes said.

  *

  Reyes stepped out of his parents’ office and got Detective Burgess on the phone. “We think Jamie was the last one to see Reana before her death.”

  “Explain,” he said.

  Reyes told the detective about his mother’s confession and about the fact that a Mitsubishi Spider was parked outside and about Reana’s comment that she was meeting somebody inside the brownstone.

  “We called Jamie today, but we didn’t connect.”

  “Maybe you should do a home visit,” Reyes said. “Not to mention, somebody needs to do a wellness check on Jenny.”

  He heard the detective suck back his breath. “Look. I’ll get ahold of Jamie. Send a black-and-white to his place. You see if you can track down Jenny and get back to me.”

  “On it,” Reyes said. He called Jenny, thankful Raina had asked for the number. When there was no answer, he frowned and dialed again.

  “Still no answer.” He called the detective back.

  “And Jamie didn’t go to work today,” the detective said, his voice grim. “We’re on this. You just stay out of the way now. We can’t have you getting into the middle of an operation and getting shot.”

  Reyes snorted. “So far we’re the ones who have found all the information.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” the detective said. “Time to back off.”

  When Reyes looked up from his phone, he saw Ice standing in front of him, a frown on her face.

  “Did I just hear that last part?”

  He filled her in on the rest.

  “Sounds like we need to get some men there,” Ice said.

  “Sure, but the detective just warned us off.”

  She shrugged with an elegant movement that made Reyes smile. “First off, they have to figure out where Jenny and Jamie are. Do you have any idea?”