Truth Be Told

by Kathleen Barber

  I flung my phone to the ground, cursing loudly. As I bent to retrieve it, my eyes caught sight of a composition book resting on an end table.

  “What’s that?” I asked, pointing.

  “Baseball stats,” Adam said. “I like to keep score while I watch the games.”

  “Lanie used to journal in a notebook just like that one when we were kids. Does she still keep a journal?”

  Adam shrugged. “Not that I’ve seen. Where do you think she’d keep it?”

  “She used to hide it under her mattress,” I remembered.

  “Come on. Let’s go look.”

  I followed Adam upstairs to the bedroom, pausing outside a closed door to listen to Aunt A’s calm, quiet voice reading aloud to Ann. I distinctly remembered the tenderness in Lanie’s expression when she had been discussing her daughter on Saturday night, and it was hard to reconcile that with the fact that Lanie was now gone. Surely she couldn’t believe that her daughter was better off without her.

  In the bedroom, I was surprised by how my chest tightened at the sight of their shared bed, but I forced any lingering feelings of betrayal from my mind and focused on the task at hand. Pushing aside the creamy sheets, I felt around underneath the mattress, disappointed when my searching hands found nothing. I turned to the nightstand, pulling open the drawer and rifling through its contents. I extracted romance novels, night creams, and a handful of pill bottles, but no journal.

  I held an empty pill bottle up accusingly at Adam. “She’s taking Valium?”

  Adam shrugged. “She has a prescription.”

  “You remember she tried to kill herself with this once, right?” I asked, my voice shaking.

  Adam blanched. “That was a long time ago, Josie,” he said unconvincingly.

  “Goddammit, Adam, if she . . .” I trailed off, unwilling to complete the sentence. I rummaged through her closet and chest of drawers without finding anything of interest and then turned to Adam. “Where else can we look?”

  Adam guided us into a downstairs room he referred to as “Lanie’s study.” It turned out to be the only space in that handsome house that looked like my sister. A large library table was being used as a desk, and it was heaped with magazines—all kinds, glossy fashion magazines, National Geographic, cooking magazines—and bits of paper and scraps of fabric, ribbons, and something fluffy that looked like the innards of a stuffed animal. An open MacBook rested in the middle of the floor, next to an empty coffee mug and a plate with a half-eaten cinnamon roll, stale with indeterminate age. A half-painted canvas rested against the far wall, a farm scene gradually taking shape, while a discarded palette dabbed with crusted paint lay before it. A finished painting, this one of a crumbling farmhouse that resembled Grammy and Pops’s old home, was propped up on a chair. I was surprised by the skill demonstrated on that finished piece, and a lump developed in my throat.

  “Sorry about the mess,” Adam said. “She won’t let the cleaning lady in here. She barely lets me in here.”

  I nudged aside a puddled sweater with my foot, revealing an open photo album, and found myself staring down at the same photo of our family that I kept in the bedside drawer. My heartstrings tugged. I picked up the album and flipped a couple of pages, stopping when my hands landed on a familiar picture that looked a bit off. I squinted at it until I realized what the problem was: it was a family picture from the farm, the four of us sitting on bales of hay . . . but, in Lanie’s copy, my father had been snipped off the end.

  “Is that her phone?” Caleb said, interrupting my thoughts.

  I followed his eyes to the ground. Panic fluttered in my throat. Why would she leave her phone behind? Unless . . . I thought of the pills upstairs, and shot a concerned look at Adam, whose complexion had turned gray.

  Caleb picked up the phone and tapped its screen. “It’s passcode protected,” he said, holding it out to Adam.

  Adam shook his head in defeat. “I don’t know her passcode.”

  I reached for the phone, and punched in the date of our birthday—the same insecure passcode for my own phone. The phone unlocked, revealing a snapshot of Ann as the background on the home screen. Adam pressed his knuckles to his mouth and looked away. Quickly, I navigated to her contacts and scrolled through the short list: Adam, Ann’s babysitter, Ann’s doctor, Ann’s school, Aunt A, Ellen, a Pilates studio—and Ryder Strong.

  “Bingo,” I said. “Ryder Strong.”

  “Lanie isn’t friends with Ryder anymore,” Adam said. “That number must be years old.”

  “She was at the funeral,” I reminded him, dialing the number. Either it wasn’t as old as Adam thought or Ryder hadn’t changed her number in years because after three rings, Ryder answered, her gravelly voice rushed and hopeful.

  “Lanie? Jesus, you scared me.”

  “No, Ryder, it’s her sister, Josie.”

  “Oh,” Ryder said, her voice cold. “I’m on my way out the door.”

  “Wait, please,” I begged. “I’m looking for Lanie.”

  The only thing I heard was the soft click of Ryder disconnecting the call. I immediately redialed. This time there was no answer. I cursed loudly, tears springing into my eyes.

  “What’s happening?” Ellen asked, reaching for my arm.

  “She hung up on me,” I grumbled. Tapping out a text message that I hoped Ryder would not be able to ignore, I wrote: “Lanie disappeared and left a strange note. I think she might hurt herself. Please tell me if you know anything. Life or death.”

  And then I waited, too tense to breathe.

  Within seconds, Lanie’s phone vibrated.

  “Josie?” Ryder said hesitantly.

  “Thank you,” I breathed. “What do you know?”

  “First tell me what the note said.”

  “It reads like a suicide note, Ryder. And I just found an empty bottle of Valium in her bedroom, so stop wasting my time and tell me what you know.”

  I saw Ellen’s eyes go wide at the mention of the Valium; she remembered that awful night.

  “Shit,” Ryder said quietly. “Look, I didn’t know.”

  “I don’t care. Have you seen her?”

  “Yeah, I saw her.”

  I exhaled in half-relief. “Where? When?”

  “Here. She showed up this afternoon, saying she hadn’t slept in days and wanting to know if she could sleep here. I told her sure, and she fell asleep on the couch. I thought she might want some coffee when she got up, so I ran out to grab some milk. By the time I got back, she was gone.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t say.”

  “Think, Ryder,” I pressed, unwilling to believe we were so close and yet still knew nothing. “Please. This is really important. Think hard. Did she say anything else?”

  “Nothing you want to hear. I asked her why she came to me, seeing as how she hadn’t seen fit to call me in months. She said she didn’t have anywhere else to go, that she couldn’t be with Adam anymore and that she couldn’t go over to your aunt’s place because you were there and you didn’t want to see her.”

  I bit my lip, remembering how harsh I had been on the phone that morning. “Did she say anything else?”

  “Not really. She said she was tired, and she said some nonsense about wanting to sleep so she could stop being herself.” Ryder sighed. “I don’t know, Josie. To be honest, it sounded like she was on something.”

  My spine prickled as I recalled the faint slur to her words during her early phone call. “Do you know what she took?”

  “I didn’t see her take anything,” Ryder clarified. “But I mean, I’ve been around Lanie enough times when she’s messed up to recognize it.”

  “Yeah,” I acknowledged grimly. “Can you tell us anything else? Anything at all?”

  “Not really. All she said was that she was tired and wanted to sleep. Oh, wait. She said something about wanting to turn back time to where she was brave. To end this, I think she said.”

  “What?�
�� I gasped in horror.

  “Yeah, but like I said, I think she was stoned. I don’t think that actually means anything.”

  “Jesus, Ryder,” I breathed. “I sure hope it doesn’t.”

  I hung up and sank into Lanie’s desk chair, body trembling with unshed tears.

  “Calm down, Josie,” Ellen said soothingly, putting a hand on my shaking shoulder. “What did Ryder say?”

  “That Lanie was there this afternoon. She said she hadn’t slept in days. She also said that Lanie said something about going back to where she was brave. Does that mean anything to you?”

  Adam furrowed his brow. “Not specifically. Anything else?”

  To end this. I swallowed and looked away. “That was it.”

  “So we still don’t know anything.” Adam sighed, his shoulders slumping.

  “We know she was at Ryder’s this afternoon,” I said. “She had quite a pill collection up there, and Ryder said she seemed out of it. Maybe we should call the hospitals again. Caleb, can you do that? And I suppose there’s a chance she got picked up for DUI, so maybe Ellen could call the police station. Adam, call anyone and everyone you can think of who might have some connection to Lanie. And I . . . I’ll do something.”

  As I hung up the phone, Aunt A came into the room. “Josie, Adam, you’re back. Did you find any leads?”

  A pit forming in my stomach, I brought Aunt A up to speed on what I had learned from Ryder.

  “Oh, no,” Aunt A said, her eyes starting to water. “Oh, honey. I can only imagine what you’re thinking. I still remember the worry that your mother gave me, and it was nearly unbearable.”

  Of course, I thought. Our mother.

  • • •

  The dashboard clock read 11:00 p.m. when I pulled up to the cemetery gates. They were locked, with a sign informing me the cemetery closed at dusk. I knew posted hours would not deter my sister, and so I parked the rental car down the street and scrambled over the fence. I immediately tripped over a low tombstone, and reached for my phone to illuminate the path but found I had left it in the car. Involuntarily, I shivered, suddenly realizing I was locked in a cemetery in the middle of the night. A breeze shook the leaves of a nearby tree, producing an ominous rattle.

  I swallowed my sense of unease and picked my way through the dark, stricken with the irrational fear of falling into an open grave. At one point, I thought I heard someone moving across the dry grass, an eerie shuffling sound. I froze. It could be the caretaker, come to place me under citizen’s arrest for trespassing, or it could be some degenerate skulking around the cemetery, like Warren Cave claimed he used to like to do.

  Or it could be my sister.

  “Lanie?” I called, my voice coming out a tiny croak. “Lanie, is that you?”

  There was no response.

  I held my breath and waited, but I could no longer hear the noise. The cemetery was completely still.

  Unsettled, I continued my path to my parents’ final resting places. My mother’s grave was easy to find, the only plot topped with fresh earth. My chest tightened as I drew nearer and saw no sign of Lanie. No flowers or trinkets had been left adorning the graves, no mascara-stained tissues hid in the grass. She hadn’t been here—or, if she had, she was gone. I turned to leave, eager to get out of the creepy cemetery, but something held me back. I knelt before the headstones marking my parents’ side-by-side graves and stretched out a hand to touch their names.

  I don’t know what I had hoped for, but I felt nothing. Disappointed, I sat back on my heels. Somewhere in the distance, the shuffling sound started up again, and I jumped to my feet and ran the entire way back to the car.

  From Twitter, posted September 29, 2015

  chapter 21

  Once I was safely back in the car, I began to cry tears of frustration. My mind raced in aimless circles, replaying the previous day’s events over and over on an endless loop. I had the nagging sensation that I knew something—or should know something—but it felt just out of my field of vision.

  I replayed our last conversation in my head, concentrating on every word I could remember, turning each inside out to look for clues. I came up empty. She had mentioned our mother a couple of times, but if she wasn’t at the cemetery and she wasn’t in California . . .

  Was I sure she wasn’t in California? Adam said she hadn’t used her credit cards to buy a flight, but what if she had a secret credit card? Or what if she had paid cash? Hands shaking with desperate energy, I pulled up an airline’s phone number, the first step in an impractical plan to call every potential air carrier and describe my sister. As I listened to the automated message, I remembered Caleb saying it would be difficult to find the LFC, even if we got to California.

  It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Worse—a needle in a barnful of hay.

  I hung up the phone.

  Lanie’s paintings. The hay Adam had seen in her hair.

  I knew where my sister was.

  • • •

  A neon-lettered NO TRESPASSING sign was affixed to the rusted gate, but the gate itself hung open. My heart leapt; someone was here. Even though the early-morning sky was still inky dark, I turned off the car’s headlights as I pulled through the gate, allowing me to creep undetected along the rutted dirt road. I could hear the feathery tops of weeds brushing against the car’s undercarriage as I slowly inched forward in the darkness, squinting to make out the confines of the overgrown road. There was a time I could have found my way to the farmhouse in my sleep, but now I worried about missing a subtle curve and finding myself mired in the marshy grass surrounding the pond or driving out into the fields. I considered switching the headlights back on, but I was too close to finding my sister to allow some farmer with a gun and strong sense of personal property to keep me from her.

  And then, under a moonless sky, the farmhouse took shape. My heart caught in my throat; I let the car idle as I stared up at what was once a home so picturesque it could have been a Grant Wood painting. Now the paint was peeling from the house in chunks; what remained had faded from bright white to a dingy gray. The wooden railing surrounding the porch was missing spindles, and the steps leading up to it had rotted and fallen away. It looked more like something from a horror flick than the site of rose-tinted family memories.

  The farmhouse was empty, and clearly had been for some time. Frankly, I was surprised the house remained at all. Family farms had long gone out of fashion, and I assumed the farm’s new owners would have razed the building to make way for more money-making fields. But, for whatever reason, they hadn’t, and the house stood before me, neglected and ominous.

  I turned off the car and stepped outside. I heard nothing other than the frenzied chirping of crickets and the occasional eerie call of an owl. I crossed to what was left of the porch and hoisted myself up on the rotted beams beside where the stairs once stood. The wood was soft and damp, and I could feel my feet sinking slightly with each step. I held my breath as I carefully neared the front door. I took the knob in my hands and twisted, almost expecting the door to spring open as it had in my youth, unleashing the scents of freshly baked bread and Grammy’s cinnamon-scented candles. The knob rattled uselessly in my hands, unyielding.

  I took a step back, surveying the house. One of the front windows had been smashed in, and I eased through the gap, stepping around shards of broken glass.

  Then I was in the carcass of my grandparents’ living room. Their things—the patriotic plaid couch, the circular rag rug, the framed family photos assembled on the plain Shaker furniture—were long gone, the furniture carted off and sold at auction, the family photos and memorabilia tucked safely away in cardboard boxes in Aunt A’s attic. Without their belongings, the room felt naked. The bold floral wallpaper still clung to the walls, and even in the dark I could see the ghostly imprint where an oil-painted pastoral scene once hung above the fireplace. Now, instead of tiny farmers plowing fields while tiny cattle grazed nearby, someone had spray-painted a tag in
yellow characters.

  I held my breath and listened for sounds of life. Nothing.

  “Lanie?”

  No answer, not even a creaking of floorboards.

  “Lanie?” I tried once more.

  Despite the complete silence, I refused to give up. There was a pulsing beneath my breastbone, a familiar urgency that was telling me my sister needed me. I moved from the living room into the dining room, the striped wallpaper there covered in graffiti and the moldering carpet littered with crushed beer cans. Without the large dining table, the one that Pops had assembled by hand and that had since taken up residence in Aunt A’s dining room, the room seemed much smaller than I remembered. I moved into the kitchen, pausing to yank open the door to the pantry. But there was nothing other than empty shelves and the furtive sound of mice feet. Standing on the peeling linoleum, I closed my eyes and remembered helping Grammy stir fresh blueberries into pancake batter and slicing lemons for lemonade with my sister. I could almost smell the sugar, the fresh fruit—but it was just a mirage. I was about to start up the back stairs to the second floor when I paused to look out the window.

  The moon had emerged from behind a cloud, illuminating the stretch between the farmhouse and the barn. And glimmering in its light I saw the shiny black of my sister’s SUV. The vehicle was parked haphazardly in front of the barn, the door of which was yawning open like a sleepy beast. The lock on the house’s back door stuck, and I nearly broke it in my hurry to get outside. I rushed toward the barn, the loud drumbeat of my heart sounding my arrival.

  The vast, absolute darkness of the barn stopped me at its threshold, and I stood there, blinking without seeing. I activated the flashlight function on my iPhone and swept the barn with the feeble beam, revealing little more than blurry columns of dust and the vague outlines of discarded farming equipment.

  “Lanie?” I called. “Are you in here?”

  There was no response, but the sensation that my sister was here was too strong to ignore. I stood stock-still, straining to hear something, anything.