Truth Be Told

by Kathleen Barber

  “I don’t know,” I murmured, offering a noncommittal shrug. I wanted to tell her that she was right, of course, that Lanie was obviously just confused, that all those years of drug abuse had eaten holes in her brain and made her memory unreliable. Of course our mother—her sister—hadn’t committed the horrific crime Lanie had accused her of. Of course Lanie was wrong. But I had read the words our mother had written in the back of the handbook, and I had seen the look in my sister’s eyes. There had been no confusion there, only horrified realization. Lanie wasn’t wrong, not anymore.

  “This can’t be true,” Aunt A moaned stubbornly, more to herself than to me.

  “Listen,” I said, taking her warm hand between both of mine and squeezing tightly. “It’s been a rough couple of days. No, screw that, it’s been a rough couple of weeks. We’re all exhausted and our emotions are raw. None of us are thinking clearly right now. Let’s just try to put this out of our heads for a bit, okay? Soon Lanie will be home and we’ll have a chance to talk to her ourselves.”

  “You’re right.” Aunt A sniffled, returning the squeeze. “My nerves are completely frayed. I’m going to go upstairs and lie down. Please get me if you hear from Lanie.”

  I nodded.

  She paused with her hand on the doorframe and looked back at me. “You’re a strong woman, Josie. I’m proud of you.”

  I hung my head as she walked away. I wasn’t proud of myself. I was ashamed of my childhood obliviousness to the tension that must have existed in our home, and I regretted the years I had spent at war with my sister. What if I had come home earlier? Might we have put our heads together and figured out the truth? If we had done that, maybe we could have found a way to find our mother and gently approach her, and maybe she wouldn’t have felt compelled to hang herself. Maybe we could have saved an innocent man years in prison. I shuddered to think of Lanie in custody, and I once again reproached myself for allowing her to go unaccompanied with the police. I shouldn’t have let her out of my sight, and I shouldn’t have sat still for so many hours, trusting first the police department and then Adam and the attorney. Where were Adam and the attorney? Shouldn’t they have some news by now? I fired a text message to Adam, a demand for an update phrased as a request.

  There was a sudden knock on the front door. My heart leapt.

  Lanie.

  In retrospect, I should have known that it couldn’t be her. Lanie never knocked. But I was too anxious to think clearly, and I raced through the living room, picking my way through the aftermath of my earlier rampage, and yanked open the door.

  Poppy Parnell stood on the front porch, her strawberry blond hair professionally blown out, her glasses nowhere to be seen. She smiled a predatory, lipsticked smile, and my stomach sank even before I saw the cameraman behind her.

  “Josie,” she said, her voice frothing with enthusiasm.

  “Go away,” I barked, trying to shut the door in her face.

  “Not so fast,” she said, wedging herself in the door. “I have something I think you’ll want to see.”

  “You’re a little late,” I said bitterly. “Didn’t you see our white flag waving? You were right. Warren Cave didn’t kill our father.”

  She glanced over her shoulder at the cameraman. “Did you catch that?”

  “What is all this?” I demanded. “Adding videos to your website? What’s the point? You’ve gotten what you wanted. Don’t you think enough is enough?”

  “Not hardly,” she said, laughing a little. “And, trust me, you want to see this.”

  Barely able to contain her triumphant grin, she held up a thick book. It was missing a cover and held together with duct tape, but I recognized it immediately: my mother’s copy of Anna Karenina.

  “Where did you get this?” I asked, my voice trembling.

  “I have a friend in the LFC.” Poppy smirked. “She found this in your mother’s room and thought you and your sister should have it.”

  “The LFC sent us our mother’s things,” I said, confused.

  “What can I say? She wanted to make sure it reached you. She sent it to me, hoping I could personally deliver it.” Poppy smiled magnanimously and held the book out to me. “And here it is.”

  Sensing a trap but unable to keep myself from falling into it, I snatched the book from her hands.

  “I hope you don’t mind, but I couldn’t help flipping through it. Anna Karenina is one of my favorites.” She paused to nod to her cameraman, and then turned to me, her cheeks nearly trembling with excitement. “Look at page 880.”

  “No,” I said, my heart beating so fast I felt dizzy. I didn’t know what Poppy was up to, but I would be damned before I was her puppet.

  Poppy’s expression flickered, and she yanked the book out of my hands. She flipped the pages roughly, ripping some of them in her haste, and then shoved the open book at me. Cheeks pink with excitement, she stabbed at the page with a finger.

  “Look.”

  I resisted for as long as I could, stubbornly glaring at her rather than following her orders, but finally a sick sort of curiosity overtook me and I looked down. My heart skipped a beat. The margins of the page were filled with scribbled words, the handwriting undeniably my mother’s.

  Darling girls,

  Those two words alone were nearly enough to undo me. The edges of my world went black, and I nearly dropped the book. Leaning against the doorframe for support, I took a deep breath and read on.

  I write this knowing I will never see you again. There are so many things I want to say to you, but I don’t have the words to say them all, and so this will have to do: I love you. More than I had ever loved anything, and that was why I had to leave you. I loved your father, too, and that killed us both. I beg you not to think poorly of either of us. Your father made mistakes, but they weren’t fatal mistakes, and I shouldn’t have treated them as such. I thought my unhappiness was all his fault, but that was only partially true. Am I being oblique? I’m sorry. I killed your father. I was out of my head. You might think I’m the same way now, but I promise you, I’ve never been so sure of something in my life. You were better off without me, and you’ll be better off with me dead. Take care of each other. Love, Mom

  By the time I finished, my legs were trembling so badly I could barely stand. We had thought she hadn’t left us a goodbye note, but she had. More than that, she had left us a confession. I pictured my thin mother, sitting in a dark room at the commune, hunched over the worn book, pouring her guilty heart out into the margins, and I had to gulp back a hot wave of tears. I ached for the power to turn back time to when things had gone wrong for us, to stop my father from straying or at least to force my parents to confront each other, air their grievances before they mutated into lethal jealousy.

  “Tell us how you’re feeling, Josie,” Poppy said, her smile almost leering.

  “You disgusting vulture,” I whispered. “Get out of here.”

  The cameraman stepped from behind Poppy to zoom in on my face.

  “Get out of here!” I screamed, lunging forward, covering his camera lens with one hand and shoving it downward.

  “Jo?” Caleb asked, jogging into the entryway just as I slammed the door on Poppy and her one-man entourage. “What’s going on out here?”

  I broke down in sobs, and collapsed on his shoulder.

  • • •

  After holding my sister without charging her for more than twelve hours, it took only fifteen minutes for the police to release her once they had seen the copy of Anna Karenina. Even I, who had stormed into the police station nearly incoherent with rage—at Poppy Parnell, at my mother, at my sister, at everyone—was surprised by the relatively quick turnaround. After I had slammed the book into the hands of a poker-faced police officer and explained what it was and how it had come to be in my possession, I had been directed to a small, windowless room. I wasn’t sure if it was an interrogation room or a waiting room, and the officer who showed me inside slipped away before I had the presence of mind to
ask him. I sat on a molded plastic chair under buzzing fluorescent lights, aggressively picking at my cuticles and ignoring calls from Aunt A and Caleb, both of whom thought I shouldn’t have gone to the police station alone. I expected to sit there for an hour or more and halfway wished I hadn’t relinquished the book so I would have something to help pass the time, but it wasn’t long before a different officer escorted my sister into the room.

  I couldn’t help but gasp at her appearance: under the harsh lights, she looked like death barely warmed over. Her hair clung greasily to her scalp, her complexion was sallow, and her under-eyes were a sunken, bruised purple. A capillary had broken in her left eye, leaving her iris swimming in a sea of bright-red blood.

  “I wouldn’t leave town until that handwriting can be authenticated,” the officer gruffly warned Lanie. He cast a hard look at me. “You, either.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” Lanie sneered as he walked away, handcuffs jangling from his belt.

  “You look terrible,” I said.

  “Trust me, I feel even worse.” She grimaced. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I followed Lanie through the station’s narrow halls and out the front door. She walked briskly, with purpose, and I couldn’t blame her for wanting to make a quick escape. Outside, the sun was completing its final dip below the horizon, throwing long shadows across the nearly empty parking lot. I glanced around quickly, certain that Poppy Parnell and her new cameraman had been lying in wait to ambush us, but they were nowhere to be seen. I exhaled a sigh of relief, thankful for small mercies.

  In Caleb’s rental car, I placed the key in the ignition but then hesitated. I turned to look at my sister, small and disheveled in the passenger seat. Lanie was staring straight ahead, her blood-streaked eyes desperate, her jaw tense.

  “Are you okay?”

  She laughed a short bark, a sound that was anything but amused. “I’ve never felt so fucked in my life. And that’s saying something.”

  I swallowed. “But they didn’t arrest you, right?”

  “Right. You can’t arrest a person for a crime someone else has been convicted of.” She paused to sniff disdainfully. “Or so I’m told.”

  “They can’t think that you had anything to do with Dad’s murder. Especially not now, not after they got Mom’s note.”

  “Thanks for bringing that. And for coming to get me.” She paused, gnawing on her chapped lower lip. “I imagine Adam’s not here because he’s mad at me?”

  “Adam’s not here because I didn’t tell him I was coming,” I admitted. “I wasn’t thinking too clearly when I left the house. He was at your place, meeting with your lawyer.”

  “I have a lawyer?”

  “One of the best, according to Ellen.”

  Lanie sighed and looked out the window. “I suppose I need one.”

  “Maybe not. Adam called him before Poppy showed up with Mom’s note. That changes everything, right?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe they no longer think I murdered my own father, which seemed to be their working theory for most of the day. But I think it will take more than that to convince them that I didn’t purposefully lie about Warren.”

  It was my turn to shrug, and she looked at me sharply.

  “You know I didn’t intentionally lie about that, right?”

  “Right,” I said without conviction.

  Lanie heard the uncertainty in my voice, and her mouth twisted, her expression hurt. “I can’t believe you think I would do that.”

  Old resentment swelled inside me, a familiar acrimony born of my sister once again claiming victimhood based on my perfectly reasonable reaction to her pattern of bad behavior, and I snapped, “Come on, Lanie. Don’t act like it’s completely out of character for you to lie.”

  “I don’t lie to you,” she said, her eyes going wide and shimmery. “I never lie to you.”

  “But you don’t always tell me the truth, do you? All these years and you never told me that it was Mom?”

  “Because I didn’t know!” she shouted, her sudden outburst seeming to startle both of us. She took a deep breath and looked at her hands, tugging at a broken nail. “I know that sounds crazy, Josie, but I swear it’s the truth. I saw her—I’m sure now that I saw her—but I couldn’t understand, couldn’t process it. Somehow I convinced myself that it had been Warren Cave.”

  “I don’t know, Lanie.” I sighed. “I want to believe you. I do. But I just don’t see how that’s possible. You must have known, even if you didn’t want to accept it.”

  “I didn’t,” she said resolutely. “I swear. Sometimes I would have these weird flashes about that night, times when I thought that it might not have been Warren, but honestly, Josie, I never thought they meant anything. I thought they were just nightmares. One shrink I saw thought it was PTSD, another thought it was anxiety. I’ve seen plenty of people and been put on plenty of medication, and no one—no one—ever suggested that my memory might be faulty.”

  “Forget the doctors, though. What about you? You never thought you might be wrong? Never? Not even that summer you tried to smother Mom with a pillow? Can you really look me in the eye and say that had nothing to do with what you’re claiming not to know?”

  Lanie shuddered and looked away. “I don’t know, okay? Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. I don’t really remember; I was tweaking pretty bad. Anything I thought that night is just as likely to have been drug-induced paranoia as it is to have been an actual memory.” She dug her dirty fingernails into the soft flesh of her palms and winced in pain. “Do you think that’s why she left? Because she thought I knew?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said gently, seemingly biologically programmed to soften when faced with my sister’s anguish, no matter how skeptical of her I felt. “That’s not what it sounded like in the note, anyway. Did you ever raise it with her another time?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head fiercely. “I couldn’t have. I didn’t know! Besides, Josie, you remember what she was like then. Even if I had remembered something, do you honestly think I could have talked to her about it?”

  An image of my mother’s blank face, her eyes pale and vacant, filled my mind, and my stomach tightened. Lanie might have been the twin unfortunate enough to witness the murder, but should I have known, too? Were there clues that I had missed, telling behavior on my mother’s part that I had overlooked? I thought back to that awful night in October, remembering the sound of the slamming door, the way color drained from Lanie’s face when she looked out the window, the urgency in how she had pulled me into the closet.

  “Lanie,” I said suddenly. “Do you remember what you told me the night Dad died? When we were in the closet, in the dark? You said, ‘It’s my fault.’ What did you mean by that?”

  Her eyes darkened. “I knew Dad was sleeping with Melanie.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. I snuck a peek at Mom’s journal. She wrote about it.” Lanie dragged her nails up the inside of her arm, squirming. “But I didn’t understand the significance of any of it until it was too late. I should have said something, done something . . . If I had, then maybe things would have been different. We could have stopped it. I could have stopped it. And when I saw Warren—or who I thought was Warren—come through the back door, I knew it was because I hadn’t spoken up, hadn’t saved our families. And then I froze. I couldn’t stop it, even then. It was my fault.”

  She clenched her jaw so tightly her teeth ground audibly, and I realized for the first time the true extent of the pain and guilt my sister had carried since the night our father was murdered. It went beyond witnessing his death, it even went beyond seeing our mother be the one to pull the trigger—it was the unrelenting torment of unconsciously believing she could have done something to stop it, that she was responsible for the loss of our parents. I reached across the center console for her hand. Understanding the depth of her misery didn’t excuse all that she had done over the years, but it did begin to explain it.

 
“It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I know that now,” she said, squeezing my hand so tightly the bones overlapped and throbbed with pain.

  “A lot of things were your fault,” I couldn’t help but add, “but that wasn’t one of them.”

  She smiled ruefully and loosened her grip on my hand. “Do you think we can ever start over?”

  “You and me?”

  “All of us. You, me, Adam, Aunt A, Ellen. My daughter. Warren Cave. Do you think we can just put this awful past behind us and start over?”

  “I’m not sure it works like that. We might be able to move on, but I don’t think we can ever start over.”

  She swallowed and tentatively shifted her hand so that her fourth finger was hooked around mine. “But you think we can move on?”

  I looked down at our hands, joined together in that long-ago sign. So much had changed since we had invented it, so much death, betrayal, and estrangement. I didn’t know if it was possible for us to find our way back to being the kind of sisters who had a private handshake, the kind who whispered secrets to each other in the dark.

  But I didn’t know that it wasn’t.

  “Well,” I said, entwining our fingers more firmly, “we can try.”

  Excerpt from transcript of Reconsidered: The Chuck Buhrman Murder, Episode 6: “The Finale,” October 5, 2015

  Welcome to the final installment of Reconsidered: The Chuck Buhrman Murder. I want to take a moment to thank everyone who made this project possible. From the good folks at Werner Entertainment Company to my assistant, I’m grateful for the support. Most importantly, though, I want to thank you, my audience. During this program’s short life span, I’ve been repeatedly humbled by the insightful responses received from listeners like you. I appreciated every tweet, email, and phone call sent my way, and trust me when I say that this program could not have happened without you.