Truth Be Told

by Kathleen Barber

  I slid the picture behind the sheet music again, flipped over so the image didn’t face out into the room.

  “Josie.”

  I turned to find Peter, Ellen’s husband, standing in the doorway. He was a good-looking man in his mid-fifties, twice as old as Ellen, tall and broad with an expansive midsection, and had the booming voice to match.

  “Peter, hi.”

  “It’s been a long time,” Peter said, pulling me into an awkward half-hug where he clasped one of my hands and also patted me on the back.

  I extracted myself from the embrace and nodded in agreement. It had been three years since Ellen and Peter honeymooned in Fiji, a veritable hop-skip-and-jump from New Zealand, where Caleb and I had been living at the time. The newlyweds had swanned into Auckland, Ellen unnaturally tan, and had treated us to a champagne-filled dinner at a restaurant way out of our price range. After we kissed them goodbye, Caleb had squinted at me, a little drunk and a little dazed, and asked, “This is your family?”

  Peter was a little rounder than he had been then, and his hair was striped with silver, but his affable smile was the same. “How’re you holding up?”

  “I’ve been better.”

  “Well, you look good.”

  “Shush, Peter, she does not,” Ellen said, stepping into the room. “I know you’re just being polite, but honestly. You’re not to give her any encouragement about that hair.”

  “Don’t listen to her,” Peter said, winking at me. “Ellen just wants to be sure that she’s the only blonde in the room.”

  Ellen laughed and swatted her husband away. Their playfulness surprised me; I’d always taken a rather cynical view of their marriage. Ellen claimed vaguely to have met Peter through mutual acquaintances, but she had once drunkenly confided to me they met online. I could only imagine their respective profiles, and assumed that Ellen had selected Peter for his money and power and that he had chosen her for her youth and beauty. If Ellen remembered that too much wine had loosened the truth about their origin story, she pretended that she did not. The one time I mentioned it, I practically heard her eyes narrowing over the phone. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she had said coolly, and promptly changed the subject.

  “Now,” she said, grabbing my shoulders and studying me, “we really do need to do something about that. I called Mom’s stylist, but she’s booked up until Friday. Your mother’s visitation is tomorrow, and we cannot have you looking like an escaped mental patient. Wait here, I’ll run to Target and pick up a box of hair dye.”

  “But—” I started.

  “No buts,” Ellen commanded, holding up her hand and snapping her fingers shut to mime a closing mouth. “I’m in charge here.”

  • • •

  Ellen was a natural choice for a leader: opinionated, confident, and in possession of an enviable head of glossy blond hair. At fifteen, I had so eagerly welcomed Ellen’s guidance that I practically genuflected at her feet. Back then, the anxiety over switching from homeschooling to public school had me breaking out in hives and having dreams in which entire football fields of teenagers queued up to take turns laughing at me. Without Ellen to dictate my wardrobe or provide a map for navigating the school’s social minefield, I would have crumbled. Ellen’s lessons on wielding curling irons and mascara wands distracted me from the devastating loss of my father and the painful unraveling of my mother, and for that I was grateful.

  On my first day of classes, I put on the outfit Ellen had picked out for me, curled my hair the way she had shown me, and painted my face as she had dictated. When I stepped back to look at myself in the mirror, I was pleased. I looked cheerful and pleasant, not at all like someone with a dark past.

  Ellen smiled approvingly as I entered the kitchen.

  “Don’t you look lovely,” Aunt A said, looking up from her cup of coffee.

  As I grinned and pirouetted, my mother floated in for her morning glass of orange juice. Her hand on the refrigerator door, she paused and frowned at me.

  “What do you think, Mom?” I asked tentatively, fluffing my hair for her benefit.

  “The boys will love you,” she said hollowly. “Be careful.”

  Then she slammed the refrigerator shut and retreated up the steps with the juice container in one hand, a dirty glass in the other.

  “She’s just tired,” Aunt A said quietly, laying a hand on my shoulder. “She didn’t mean—”

  I shook her off. “I’m fine.”

  “Where’s your sister?” Ellen demanded, pouring herself a bowl of cereal.

  Aunt A checked her watch and yelled up the back staircase. “Hurry up, Lanie! Don’t want to be late on your first day!”

  It was another ten minutes before Lanie finally slunk down to the kitchen. Ellen paused with a spoonful of Special K on its way to her mouth.

  “What the hell?”

  “Language, Ellen,” Aunt A scolded.

  I swiveled in my chair and followed Ellen’s gaze. Lanie was barefaced and plainly unshowered, her thick dark hair knotted and hanging in her face. She was wearing a black thermal undershirt that I recognized as our mother’s, the same beat-up Levis that she had been wearing for at least the last year—the ones that had the beginnings of a hole in one knee and an ink stain on the pocket—and a pair of ratty cross-trainers.

  Without a word, Lanie headed for the box of granola bars on the counter.

  “Hey,” Ellen said, standing up. “What happened to the outfit I picked out for you?”

  Lanie shrugged, unwrapping a granola bar. “I changed my mind.”

  “You can’t wear that,” Ellen said, crossing her arms over her chest.

  “Says who,” Lanie demanded, jutting her chin out. Her eyes glittered with an unfamiliar relish of challenge, an eagerness for a fight.

  “That’s not what we agreed on,” Ellen insisted.

  “Leave her alone,” Aunt A commanded. “Your cousin can dress herself however she sees fit. She doesn’t need your approval.”

  “I’m just trying to help, Mom. She’s going to make a bad impression on the first day.”

  “Your opinion has been noted. I’m sure Lanie will take it into consideration, but the decision is hers.” Aunt A paused and turned to Lanie. “Although, dear, you might want to brush your hair.”

  Lanie smirked through a mouthful of granola bar.

  She didn’t brush her hair that day, or for a week thereafter. Only when it was so greasy and gnarled that the school counselor called home to check up on her did she consent to wash it. Her clothing never improved. Despite Ellen’s repeated attempts to cajole (and some days force) her into clean pants and sweaters, Lanie continued to dress herself as though she were a vagrant and developed the habit of rimming her eyes thickly in black liner.

  But it was more than just her appearance. Ellen, in her quest to aid our transition to public school, had compiled a list of unsavory characters best avoided. The list took up two pages of college-ruled notebook paper, front and back, and warned us away from, among others, terminal nerds, band geeks, the entire girls’ volleyball team, and kids who listened to My Chemical Romance. Topping that list was anyone in the Strong family, and it was Ryder Strong who Lanie immediately gravitated toward. A skinny girl with a mean little mouth, scabby arms, and overprocessed kinky blond hair, Ryder was infamous for coming to class in seventh grade with a flask full of Jack Daniel’s and stabbing one of her many cousins with an X-Acto knife during a school assembly that past fall. In no time, Lanie was running around on Ryder’s sneakered heels, smoking Marlboros in the girls’ bathroom, and cheering as guys with stick-and-poke tattoos nearly killed themselves with skateboards and half-pipes.

  It wasn’t much longer before Aunt A began to get phone calls from the school saying that Lanie had skipped class, and then Lanie started coming home smelling like sweet smoke, and then she started not coming home at all.

  • • •

  After Ellen had returned my hair and eyebrows to a shade closer to th
eir natural hue, she proclaimed herself exhausted and retired with Peter to her old bedroom. I snickered at the thought of Peter’s large, distinguished form sleeping under Ellen’s pink plaid comforter underneath her old Britney Spears and *NSYNC posters.

  But me? I dreaded the thought of going up to my and Lanie’s old bedroom almost as much as I dreaded being alone with my thoughts, so I was grateful when Aunt A opened a bottle of red wine. We poured it into coffee mugs, shamelessly filling them to the brim, and sat on the couch together, Bubbles stretching his soft, ancient body across our combined laps.

  “She did a good job,” Aunt A said, nodding toward my hair.

  “What, you didn’t like the blond, either?” I asked, trying to make a joke even as my voice cracked.

  Aunt A reached over and squeezed my hand. “Are you all right, sweetheart? It’s okay if you’re not. This family has had a rough go of it.”

  I bit my lip and shook my head. “I don’t know how any of us could be all right. Mom’s dead, and we can’t even properly grieve her because of that stupid podcast.”

  “That podcast,” Aunt A spit, her words wobbling with venom. “Honestly. What trash. How dare that woman call herself a journalist. Journalists cover real news. They don’t spend their time interfering in decade-old closed cases. It’s disgusting.”

  “It is. I feel sick every time I overhear some stranger talking about who really killed Chuck Buhrman.” I swallowed the question that began to rise: But what if it wasn’t Warren Cave? I hated Poppy Parnell for making me doubt the only closure we’d ever had.

  “You know who we have to thank for all this, don’t you? Melanie Cave. As if that woman hasn’t done enough. Carrying on with your father, raising the monster who killed him, and now refusing to let him rest in peace. She paints herself as a victim, but she’s the real linchpin in all of this.”

  I remembered how fascinated I had been with glamorous Melanie Cave when she, her husband, and her son had first moved next door. With her perfectly coiffed ash-blond hair and enticing apricot-colored lipstick, she had seemed the polar opposite of my own mother with her loose, inky hair and bare feet. My interest would later feel like betrayal when I learned I wasn’t the only Buhrman fascinated with the contrast between Melanie Cave and Erin Buhrman.

  “Have you listened to it?”

  Aunt A nodded with a grimace. “The first two episodes. Have you?”

  “Same. I downloaded the third episode at the airport, but I haven’t listened to it yet.”

  “Don’t,” Aunt A said, shuddering. “I’m not listening anymore. I wish I hadn’t started. The only reason I did was because everyone was talking about it, from the folks on TV to the other teachers at school. Even the students, and they’re no more than thirteen years old. I thought I owed it to your mother to know what they were saying about her. Well, that and I wanted to understand why there were so many people camped out in my front yard.”

  I twisted around to look out the picture window. I saw no evidence of campers, just a row of pedestrian trash cans lined up on the curb, awaiting garbage pickup.

  “They’re gone now. Apparently, they have some human decency and have made themselves scarce since your mother’s death. But before that, there’d be ten or twelve of them out there at any given time. They were mostly young people with iPhones and handheld video recorders. I couldn’t even step outside to pick up the mail without them shouting for a quote for their YouTube channels or blogs or whatchamacallits, or asking about the whereabouts of you girls.”

  I flinched, hating the idea of Aunt A facing down aggressive fans on her own. “I’m sorry you had to deal with that. I had no idea it was so bad. They never found me in New York.”

  “I suppose that’s one benefit of living in that concrete jungle. There are enough people there that you can be anonymous when you want to be.”

  I nodded silently. The city’s sheer crush of humanity did make it easy for a person to blend in, but I suspected Poppy Parnell and her fans hadn’t been able to find me—assuming they had tried—because I had legally changed my name from Buhrman to Borden. Aunt A knew about the name change but seemed uncomfortable with it, sending all holiday and birthday cards addressed only to “Josephine.”

  “I’ve called the police several times already,” she continued. “They’re usually able to dispel the campers for the night, but they just come back . . . and bring their friends. And the police claim they can’t do anything about that so-called journalist unless I get a restraining order, which seems like making a mountain out of . . . well, out of a smaller mountain.” Aunt A shook her head wearily. “Maybe I should. I know your sister’s thoughts about it. She said that Parnell woman has been going through her trash. Her trash. If I catch that woman anywhere near the trash cans, I won’t be able to set that court date fast enough.”

  “Lanie . . . lives in town?” I asked, piecing together her words.

  Aunt A smiled gently and took my hand. “She does. You should call her, Josie. Let her know that you’re here. You two have a lot of catching up to do.”

  I pulled my hand away. “There’s nothing I want less than to catch up with my sister.”

  • • •

  Our old bedroom was just as we had left it: the walls covered in blue-and-white-striped wallpaper; the twin beds spread with matching blue-and-white quilts; a long-forgotten stuffed bear propped against the pillows on my bed. The hulking computer still sat atop the white desk, the corkboard behind it still dotted with faded snapshots and ten-year-old invitations to high school graduation parties. Dusty pink bottles of Bath & Body Works body sprays and Victoria’s Secret perfume still lined up on the dresser, and there was an Ashlee Simpson album still inside the CD player/alarm clock.

  I picked up a small model of the Washington Monument from the desk, rubbing my thumb over its jagged tip, broken when Lanie, angry that I had told Aunt A she skipped school, had flung it at me. It had once been a tangible reminder of happier times, a memento from a family vacation to Washington, DC, taken the summer before everything had been completely destroyed. It was our father at his best: eager to share his extensive knowledge of American history, almost giddy during the tour of the White House’s East Wing. Even our mother, though she disliked crowds and had been in a rather bleak mood at that point, seemed to enjoy herself. We took in the cherry blossoms and the monuments as a family, and then my father and I headed for the National Museum of American History, while my mother and sister went to the National Gallery of Art, chattering excitedly about the impressionist works they would see.

  I set down the souvenir and crossed to the family photos Aunt A had assembled for us, framed snapshots clustered on the walls. My fingertips brushed the dusty frames, skirting the images within that seemed from another lifetime: Lanie and me as grumpy infants in our mother’s arms, her eyes tired but her smile wide and genuine; Lanie and me at five years old, looking on with giddy grins as our father carved a jack-o’-lantern with a wicked-looking kitchen knife; Lanie and me flanking Ellen as the three of us perched on a bale of hay, Pops holding bunny ears up to Lanie’s head, Grammy laughing and only half in the shot. I stared at my sister’s childish, innocent face and fought the urge to rip all the frames from the wall.

  Instead, I sank down onto the bed, pulling the stuffed bear into my arms. Lanie and I had received matching bears as Christmas gifts when we were five. I had named mine Brother John after the oversleeping friar in the nursery rhyme. We had learned the song from our father, who would sing it to us each night. Because our father otherwise never sang—he always said he couldn’t carry a tune even if it had handles—the song took on an almost mythic quality. Brushing matted fur out of the bear’s beaded eyes, I began to sing quietly.

  “Are you sleeping, are you sleeping? Brother John, Brother John. Morning bells are ringing, morning bells are ringing. Ding dang dong, ding dang dong.”

  Without knowing why, I shivered. Why had the familiar tune unsettled me?

  I squeezed the be
ar to my chest and wished desperately that my arms were around Caleb instead of this little sack of fake fur and beans. Poor Caleb, alone in our apartment and still weary from jet lag. He was probably too tired to make himself dinner and had ordered in pad thai. I struggled to remember if there were even any groceries in the refrigerator. I wanted to be home, taking care of him.

  I texted him to say that I had arrived in Elm Park and that I loved him, but I was almost immediately overwhelmed by a flurry of responses inquiring about the morales of Ellen and myself and when I wanted him to come. Any answers would have been lies, and I couldn’t bring my fingers to form them. Instead, I closed my Messages app and promised myself I would send him a note in the morning, a ploy that would permit me to ignore the questions and simply apologize for failing to respond. I could claim I turned my phone off so I could get some sleep, or better yet, that my phone had died and I had forgotten the charger at home.

  And then someday, maybe I would finally stop lying to the man I loved.

  In the meantime, I flouted Aunt A’s warning to not listen to any more of the podcast, plugged in my earbuds, and hit Play.

  Excerpt from transcript of Reconsidered: The Chuck Buhrman Murder, Episode 3: “The (Un)Usual Suspects,” September 21, 2015

  One of the questions I’m asked most often is: “Poppy, if Warren Cave didn’t kill Chuck Buhrman, who did?”

  I don’t really have an answer. To be perfectly clear, I’m not even certain that Warren Cave didn’t kill Chuck Buhrman. He seems sincere to me, but gut feelings aren’t the same thing as evidence. He might have shot Chuck Buhrman, he might not have. All I’m doing is considering all the possibilities.

  Let’s explore some of the alternate suspects.