Crooked Little Lies (15 page)

Annie folded her paper napkin in half and then in half again. She ran the tip of her index finger along the crease. “People think I should be relieved it wasn’t Bo at the morgue, but I don’t know if I am.”

“I don’t see how it could be a relief to see anyone in that place.”

“I feel terrible for the man’s family, but I envy them, too. At least they know where he is and what happened to him. And if they find whoever hit him—” Annie didn’t finish, but Lauren didn’t need her to.

Justice.
Annie meant they would have justice. Maybe closure, Lauren thought, if such a thing existed.

Annie put her empty cup and napkin into the paper sack. “I haven’t been the best big sister.”

“Me, either,” Lauren said.

“You have a brother?”

“Sister.”
I think she and my husband are plotting a way for him to leave me and take my kids.
The thought popped up in Lauren’s mind, an ugly surprise. She set her teeth against it. Where had it come from?

“I always wanted a sister,” Annie said. “Are you close?”

“Maybe not as close as we once were.” Lauren wasn’t sure where that came from, either, and she was grateful when Annie didn’t pursue it. But then, after a moment, as if Annie had asked the nature of the difficulty, Lauren said, “Tara and I inherited a family business, but after I married, we merged it with my husband’s business. It was fine until last year. Tara got into trouble financially, and she had to sell her share to my husband and me, and ever since then, she—we—” Lauren faltered to a stop and looked out into the thin blue air. What a lie it was, using the buyout, accusing it, accusing Tara of being the one who had changed, who had caused the ten thousand tiny fault lines that were cracking beneath them and breaking apart the ground of their relationship. While there were lingering hurt feelings over the buyout, the real trouble hadn’t started until the moment Lauren began doping herself in secret. “We’re still working through it,” she said.

Annie nodded, and they shared a silence.

Lauren broke it. “Madeleine told me about your dad and mom, that you lost them. I hope it’s okay. I was so sorry to hear.”

“I don’t really remember my dad, but my mom was my best friend.” Annie took a breath.

Lauren sipped her latte, which had grown cold.

“My mom died in a car accident two years ago.”

“Oh, both my parents did, too. It’s awful, isn’t it? The suddenness is such a shock.”

“Madeleine really helped me. I’m not sure I would have come through it without her.”

Thinking of Margaret, Lauren said she understood.

“People think they know her because of the way she comes across, kind of unfriendly. But just because you’re alone and you keep to yourself doesn’t mean you’re a snob or that you don’t have feelings, that you aren’t capable of love.”

A pause as light and awkward as a newly fledged bird perched between them. Lauren didn’t know what to do about it. Annie spoke before she could decide. “It was my fault,” she said.

Lauren looked at her.

“Mama wouldn’t have been in the car on the freeway at two o’clock in the morning if I hadn’t called her to come and get me.” Annie ran her fingertip along the table’s edge, keeping her eye on it. “I’ve never said that to anyone—that I was to blame.”

“Can you explain? Do you want to?”

“You’ll hate me.”

“No. We all make mistakes.” Lauren waited a beat, then added, “You have no idea.”

“There was a party in Houston. I don’t usually go to parties. They make me nervous. I never know what to say, especially to guys, and I don’t usually drink.” Annie extended her arms on the tabletop.

Her cheeks were flushed, but otherwise she was very pale. She looked to Lauren as if she were suffering more from a fever than embarrassment, and Lauren quelled a fresh motherly impulse to pull Annie’s face around and flatten her palm against Annie’s brow. She so badly wanted to wrap this tiny slip of a girl into her embrace and promise her everything would be all right. But no one could make that guarantee, least of all Lauren.

“For some reason, I decided to go that night,” Annie said. “I drove myself there in my mama’s car, and I drank. I broke every one of my rules.”

“You tried to drive home afterward?” Lauren thought she understood.

“I wish I had. Then maybe I’d be the one dead and not my mom, and Bo wouldn’t be missing, because she took better care of him than me.” Annie wiped her hands down her face. “I knew I was too drunk to drive, and I called her to come and get me. She had to borrow our neighbor’s car since I had her car, and this semi driver rear-ended her and pushed her—pushed her right off the 610 Loop onto 59. They said—said he passed out at the wheel. If I hadn’t called her—if I’d found another way home—”

Lauren touched Annie’s arm but nothing more. Sometimes appearance was all that remained of your dignity.

“Mama didn’t ask any questions or lecture me when I called her. She told me to wait, and she’d come. She said she loved me, and she was glad I didn’t try to drive.” Annie bit her lip.

Lauren offered a clean napkin, and Annie dabbed her eyes.

“She said I did the right thing, that she was proud of me. Can you believe it? She was proud of me?”

Lauren found Annie’s gaze and held it the width of two heartbeats, three, five.

“My daughter, Kenzie—” she finally said. “She’s eleven now, but I hope I can be as calm as your mom if she calls me in a situation like that.”

Annie blew her nose. “Thank you,” she said.

“I didn’t do anything,” Lauren said.

Annie looked at her. “You didn’t try to talk me out of blaming myself.”

Lauren made a face. “What I hear is that forgiving yourself takes time, but if it counts for anything, I don’t think your mom would like it, that you blame yourself.”

“No, she wouldn’t.” Annie stuffed the napkin into the sack with the rest of their trash. “I’ve imagined the worst, you know? When it comes to Bo, I mean.”

Lauren said it was human to do that. She said, “Your mind can run away with you.”

Annie said, “I think Bo’s dad—I think JT knows something.”

“Oh, well . . .” Lauren felt unsure of herself. Everyone knew things.

“It’s just a feeling. Probably crazy. Like you said, your mind plays tricks sometimes.” Annie looked off. “Bo’s a grown man. He could have left of his own free will, you know? Ms. M could be someone who means something to him, someone he never told me or JT about. What if everyone has gone to all this trouble, and Bo just decided to leave town with her?”

“He had money,” Lauren had to say it, at least that much. “He showed it to me.”

Annie made a face and said she figured he did. “It’s a bad habit of his, taking out his cash.”

Where had Bo gotten it?
Did Annie know? Lauren looked into the middle distance.

“He isn’t stupid; that’s the thing. He’s not retarded the way some people think. In fact, in some ways, he’s really kind of—”

Lauren interrupted, “The white-haired woman had a dog!”

Annie frowned.

“Bo was laughing when he got into her car, not at her but at the dog in the backseat. I just remembered.” Lauren touched her temple. How could she have forgotten something so important?

“He might go with someone who had a dog, even if they were a stranger.” Annie was apprehensive. “You’re sure?”

Lauren nodded. “It was a brown-and-white dog. Medium size, I think. Short fur. There was a black blaze down his nose. His eyes—” She paused.

“What about his eyes?”

“They were blue. The dog turned its face and looked at me out the window when I passed. The eyes were blue.” Lauren was sure of it.

Annie stood up and carried their trash to the receptacle. “We should go back to the center and find Detective Cosgrove or Sheriff Audi. The police should know. It might help them find her.”

“I’m so sorry,” Lauren said. It shook her that she’d forgotten. There wasn’t an excuse for it. It wasn’t fueled by emotion or related to her family but completely independent of them.

Annie said it was okay, but her expression was marked with something that suggested aggravation, disbelief, some mix of the two. At least that was how Lauren interpreted it, but then she was angry at herself and more than a little frightened. She felt disoriented.

“I have trouble with my memory sometimes.” Lauren fell into step beside Annie, and when she caught her questioning glance, she said, “I fell a couple of years ago and took kind of a hard knock on my head.”

It was obvious from Annie’s expression that she didn’t know what to say, and Lauren felt terrible about her discomfort. She felt she had to explain now. “I was helping my husband take down an old church. I fell from the bell tower, a couple of stories. I was in a coma for a bit. I don’t like talking about it.” It was all Lauren wanted to say, but somehow it wasn’t enough; she felt she owed Annie more, so she gave her the rest, leaving out her struggle with the Oxy.

“It sounds as if you’re lucky to be alive,” Annie said when Lauren finished.

“I’ve heard that before.” Lauren followed Annie through the community center door.

“There’s Sheriff Audi.” Annie directed Lauren’s attention to the man in a uniform across the room, talking to Madeleine.

Once Annie introduced Lauren to the sheriff, it took only a few minutes for her to repeat the story of her Friday-morning encounter with Bo, this time including the details about the dog. As Detective Cosgrove had done, Sheriff Audi wrote down everything Lauren said in a small notebook.

He looked up. “You didn’t mention a breed. Do you know it?”

“The blue eyes make me think it was an Aussie. Australian sheepdog,” she said at the sheriff’s questioning glance. She and Tara had an Aussie named Blue when they were growing up. “It might have been some other kind, though, a mixed breed of some sort.”

“But you’re sure about the eye color? Sure the dog was brown-and-white and medium size?”

Lauren looked away. Was she? Would she testify to it in a court of law? Swear it on a stack of Bibles? Should she explain about her memory that was as shot full of holes as an old, moth-eaten quilt? Would that make her seem like less of a hapless idiot? She looked back at the sheriff. “You know, I only saw the dog for a few seconds.”

He nodded, putting away his notebook.

Lauren turned on her phone, and it immediately rang. Without looking, she knew it was Jeff and excused herself, saying, “I have to take this.”

“Would you like me to get your purse for you?” Madeleine asked.

“Oh, yes, would you, please?”

“I might want to talk with you again,” Sheriff Audi said.

Lauren nodded distractedly, taking her purse when Madeleine brought it, talking over Jeff—he tended to shout when he was worried—telling him she was on her way, that he should calm down. She realized too late it was the wrong thing to say.

“Calm down?” His voice was a sharp bark. “I’m out of my mind here! You said at eleven this morning you were coming in. Now it’s after four in the afternoon! I’ve been calling and calling—your cell, the landline at the house. When I called the dealership, they said they brought you a loaner so you could get to work. Jesus, Lauren! How can you do this?”

“I’m sorry . . .” Her head felt light, and she touched her temple.

“Lauren? Sweetheart, are you all right?”

It was hearing him call her sweetheart that made her throat close. Suddenly, she longed for him. “Oh, Jeff, I don’t know. I—I only came by the community center to see if there was something I could do to help find Bo. I—I lost track of time.”

She quick-stepped toward the entry. A man arriving from outside the door at the same time pulled it open, allowing her to pass, and when their eyes caught, despite how her mind was caught up in its own web of anxiety, she was moved by the aura of grim exhaustion that seemed to emanate from him. She nodded her thanks, trying to place him, why he looked familiar. It came to her once the door closed behind him, that the man was Bo’s dad, JT. She’d seen him with Annie on the news last night, pleading for anyone with information about his son to call the police or the hotline.

Yet earlier, when Annie mentioned JT, she had sounded suspicious of him in a way that made Lauren think JT might somehow be involved in Bo’s disappearance. She stopped to look through the center’s plate-glass window, following JT as he crossed the room to join Annie and the sheriff. JT put his arm around Annie, and they seemed to sag against each other. Lauren’s heart constricted. It was such a terrible situation. She felt awful for leaving—

But Jeff was talking, saying something about the loaner again, that she needed to get it back to the dealership. “You need to pick up your car before the service department closes.”

“But I already have my car.” Lauren was thoroughly confused. “Someone, a guy named Danny, brought it to the house, around noon. There must be some mistake.” She searched ahead for a sign of the Navigator’s dark roof, expecting to see it, waiting to see it.

Except she didn’t.

The SUV wasn’t where she’d left it.

A gray Nissan Altima was parked in its place.

“Oh, no . . .” The protest, not much over a whisper, slipped out. Tiny prickles of alarm burst under her skin.

“Lauren?”

“It’s not here.”

“Where are you?”

“In front of Kim’s shop on Prescott, where I parked.” Lauren shut her eyes tightly and opened them again as if that might make the car appear. Poof. Like magic, the Altima would become the Navigator. But it didn’t happen. She backed away a step, gaze whipping from side to side. Maybe she had parked in a different space nearby. Her feet followed the thought, half running first to one end of the block, then to the other before she paused again in front of Kim’s shop, scanning the opposite side of the street.

But there was no SUV within her view that resembled hers even remotely.

“Oh, God, Jeff. It’s been stolen!”

“No, Lauren,” Jeff said reasonably, calmly, patiently. “It isn’t stolen. It’s at the dealership. You’re driving an Altima, a gray Nissan Altima. A 2011, I think they said. Do you see it there?”

“Yes, but how—? This isn’t right. I distinctly remember driving the Navigator here. I gave Danny a tip for bringing it to me.”