State of Lies

by Siri Mitchell

  No receipts. No money.

  I picked up the key chain: the car key, house keys for both the front and back doors, key for his bike lock. And one more. A key for what? I fingered it for a moment. Key to his office? It was small and thin. More like a key to a padlock? A filing cabinet?

  Probably something at work. And if that were the case, then I needed to return it.

  I worked it from the ring and set it aside.

  What else was missing?

  Struck by inspiration, I went to get my purse from the bedroom, then came back and dumped it on the floor beside the box. I took my wallet and pulled everything out of it.

  I had most of the same things in my wallet that he did and some cash in addition to several receipts.

  I took my money and the receipts and set them aside. I put my sunglasses on the pile too, along with my mini notebook, pen, assorted hair ties, lip balm, and the coins that lived at the bottom of my purse.

  It was an exercise in uselessness.

  Nothing was missing from Sean’s effects but his Leatherman pocketknife. I sent a quick glance over in the direction of my piles. What about his sunglasses?

  He hadn’t been wearing them. It had been raining that day.

  But then where were his sunglasses? I would have noticed them if he’d left them in the house.

  I tore a page from my notebook and wrote it down: sunglasses. Then I wrote Leatherman underneath it.

  Oh! Where had I put his attaché? I found it on the floor in the pile of things I’d removed from the closet when I’d brought out the box. I took everything out of it and stacked the contents next to the things I’d found in his wallet.

  A couple of pens. A few binder clips. A ruled notepad. It wasn’t nearly as packed as it could have been. Or maybe he’d just never carried much in it. I couldn’t remember.

  Once again, I grabbed hold of my own attaché and compared my contents with his.

  Mine had power cords, my security badge from the office, some folders with notes from the office, my work laptop.

  Laptop! His was missing.

  I added it to my list.

  But it was a government-issued computer. Maybe he’d left it at work that weekend. A definite possibility.

  Anything else?

  My attaché had a security badge. He’d had one too. He’d worn it on a lanyard, putting it on every morning before he left. It usually spent weekends in his attaché. But it wasn’t there. And he hadn’t left it on the dresser either, the way he sometimes had. I would have noticed long before. I added it to the list.

  Mystery item: key.

  Missing items: sunglasses, Leatherman, laptop, security badge. What had happened to them?

  11

  The next morning I called the medical examiner’s office. It was a Sunday, but I was guessing they were open for business 24/7. I asked for Dr. Correy.

  There was a long pause.

  “I don’t want to interrupt him. If he’s in the middle of . . . of . . .” An autopsy? A body? I shuddered at the thought. There was a reason I’d gone into a theoretical science. “If he’s in the middle of something I could leave my number and ask him to return the call.”

  “No. That’s not— I mean, you can’t.”

  “I’m happy to call back.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “Can you tell me when he’ll be in?”

  “No. It’s not that.” The voice on the other end dropped. “He was fired.”

  “Fired?”

  “After he was arrested.”

  “He was arrested?”

  “I mean, yeah. He was taking people’s things.”

  The conversation was making no sense.

  “It’s not as if they needed them anymore. Not that it was—”

  “Dr. Correy was taking things? Whose things?”

  “The dead people’s. Not like, I mean, you never know what you’re going to find when you do an autopsy.”

  I had no idea what to say to that.

  “Sometimes people hide things. In their . . . you know.”

  “In their wallets?”

  “No! In their cavities.”

  “Oh.” Oh!

  “Drugs. People hide drugs. Sometimes Dr. Correy found them. Instead of reporting them, he’d sell them.”

  Just the thought made me feel icky. “Did the doctor ever use any of those drugs he stole?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “There isn’t any chance— It’s just, he’s the one who performed the autopsy on my husband, and it makes me wonder if—”

  “Doc was really good. At autopsies. You should have seen him with that saw. Zizzz-zizzz. If it wasn’t a ’specially difficult case, he’d be in and out like no one you’d ever seen. Don’t worry. If Doc Correy autopsied your husband, he was good to go.”

  * * *

  While Sam played with his trains that afternoon, I did an internet search on Dr. Correy, medical examiner. He’d been indicted and pled guilty to charges of racketeering and conspiracy to distribute. He was serving a three-year sentence in a federal prison. That seemed quite generous for a convicted drug dealer. If he’d gotten time off for good behavior, they’d awarded it before he’d even been assigned to a cell.

  Strange.

  The federal prison was at the extreme southwestern edge of Virginia. It was not reassuring that Sean’s medical examiner had been a drug dealer. But I didn’t have time to drive down there and ask him about it. And beyond that, what would I say?

  My husband didn’t happen to tell you what he’d been doing right before he got hit by that car, did he? He was, in fact, dead when you autopsied him, right?

  It didn’t seem like he’d actually been taking drugs himself. He’d only been selling them.

  But strange was strange.

  Twenty-four hours earlier, there had been no strange people in my life. Now there were two: the bad guy or guys, which Sean had been afraid of, and the medical examiner.

  I googled the number for the prison, called, and asked if I could speak to him. Or at least leave a message.

  “You want to leave a message? For who, now?”

  “For one of the prisoners. His name is—”

  “Oh, we don’t do that. Nope, nope, nope.”

  “But I really need to talk to him.”

  “Then you really need to get him to call you.” Click.

  So maybe that hadn’t been my best idea ever.

  How could I get Dr. Correy to call me if he didn’t even know me?

  I could write him a letter and ask him to call me, which might entail a several-week turnaround. Or I could contact his attorney. I found the phone number of the attorney’s office and added it to the contacts on my phone. Then I added it to my to-do list for Monday.

  * * *

  Reading the medical examiner’s report hadn’t helped me understand what Sean had been doing when he died. But that didn’t mean I had to stop looking for information. As Sam did some coloring, I read through the police report on Sean’s accident. When I’d received it, I’d only given it a cursory glance before shoving it into a drawer of his desk. At that point, it was redundant. It had only told me what I’d already known: Sean was dead.

  That night I actually read it.

  He’d been killed at Seven Corners, which had taken no one who heard about it by surprise. Five major roads converged at that point into one of the worst traffic snarls in northern Virginia. It was a concrete and asphalt nightmare framed by potholed access roads and parking lots that fronted superstores and other blights on modern existence.

  The accident had occurred at the intersection of Leesburg Pike and Broad Street. Sean’s car had been traveling southeast on Broad Street. He’d been hit on the driver’s side by a car traveling up Leesburg Pike and—

  Something didn’t seem right.

  Pulling my phone from my pocket, I googled Seven Corners and zoomed in, trying to make sense of a truly funky intersection. One road split, two went up and over, and a fo
urth entered from a side, while the fifth just barreled through underneath them all. Okay. So if Sean had been on Broad Street and . . . Why had Sean been on Broad Street?

  Broad Street was past Home Depot.

  I zoomed in even closer. There was no way a car traveling on Leesburg Pike could have hit him. Because at the point where Leesburg Pike intersected Broad Street, it wasn’t called Leesburg Pike anymore. It had a different name.

  Wasn’t that something a police officer would have known?

  But a bigger question remained. Where had Sean been coming from?

  12

  Monday came in the way only Mondays do: with protests, regret, and a vow to do the next weekend better. Clothes, breakfast, vitamin gummy; brush teeth; coat, backpack, shoes. That was the morning routine. But Sam waved off the backpack and sat down on the floor to tug at the Velcro fastenings on his sneakers.

  The order didn’t matter, as long as he walked out the door with both. That’s what I told myself. But I drew the line at superhero capes.

  I didn’t think his teacher, Ms. Hernandez, would appreciate it. But mostly I was worried that some of the kids might make fun of him. Or try to take it and wear it themselves.

  Considering that he was still working at making sense of Sean’s death, and that Sean had called him Super Sam, I would have done almost anything, offered any bribe, in order to keep that cape at home.

  I pulled it out from the collar of his coat and then turned him around so I could undo the tie beneath his chin.

  He batted my hands away.

  “Why don’t we leave this at home today?”

  “Because I can’t be Super Sam if I don’t wear it. And I have to practice for Halloween!”

  “You know what? Superman didn’t always wear his cape. But even though no one else knew he was Superman, he knew it. And that was the important thing.” The other important thing was that I’d gotten the knot undone and the cape lay in a puddle on the floor behind him.

  I leashed Alice, then she and I walked Sam to school past 1920s farmhouses and bungalows with wide front porches; storybook brick Tudors from the 1930s with their arched front doors and steeply pitched roofs; and brick colonials from the 1940s and ’50s in sizes small, medium, and center-hall large.

  Here and there, raised ranches from the 1960s and a rare split-level from the 1970s made an appearance. And—often whispered about, but largely ignored, like a sprawling seatmate on a regional plane—a few mini mansions bumped up against county height restrictions and strained against the outside edges of their too-small lots.

  Alice and I walked back home along her preferred route of boxwood- and liriope-lined walkways. Chris Gregory and his Maltipoo joined us.

  Chris walked his dog around the same time I walked Alice, along the same route. There were dozens of Chrises in our neighborhood. People you talked to because you were walking in the same direction. People you shared your life with for ten or fifteen minutes every day.

  My out-the-door-at-the-very-last-possible-minute schedule assured that I was usually heading into the school with Sam while Chris had already dropped off his son. Although, once or twice, I’d managed to see his son ignore him as he’d waved good-bye.

  I’d found out Chris was a professor at one of the local universities and a fountain of knowledge about all things Boy. He wore a leather-billed baseball cap over his sandy hair and had a penchant for pairing Northwestern T-shirts with his cargo shorts.

  He slid a look toward me. “How are things?”

  I shrugged. “You?”

  “Same. I wanted to offer, with Sean not there, if there’s anything you need help with. Kristy was always asking me to do things around the house. You know—change a lightbulb, kill a fly.”

  His wife, Kristy, had died several years before.

  Chris and Kristy. What could be cuter?

  But she must not have been handy like I was. Sean and I had an unspoken agreement. The person most bothered by something became the person responsible for the fixing of it. So when the towel rack in the bathroom started tilting toward the floor or the front door started to stick, Sean got out a hammer or a wood file and went to work. But when the fridge started gurgling or the air conditioner stopped working, I got out my multimeter, my power drill, and my set of screwdrivers and unfastened the panels labeled Do Not Open—Danger of Electrocution so I could take a look inside and figure out what was going on.

  Sean had been the first one to comment on the dripping faucet. It wouldn’t have taken me long to fix it, but that faucet had been his.

  Chris’s hazel eyes crinkled at the corners as he slanted a smile at me. “It would make me feel useful again. And I’ve got this great set of screwdrivers.”

  That made me smile.

  He glanced at his watch, then inclined his head. “Anyway. Just let me know. Sorry to ditch you, but I’ve got to go.”

  As his stride lengthened and his pace quickened, I wondered what it would be like to establish a life with someone so normal. So solid. Someone who was exactly what he seemed.

  Alice and I looped toward home. Along the way, a garbage truck stalked us, halting with a grinding shudder and starting up again with a hydraulic hiss. When it drew even with us, we stepped from the sidewalk into a yard, waiting for it to pass.

  Alice tensed.

  I tightened my hold on the leash and ordered her to sit.

  That’s when I remembered.

  Trash!

  I hadn’t put out the trash.

  I’d meant to. But the previous night I’d been focused on the police report. And that morning there’d been the issue of Sam trying to leave the house with his cape around his neck.

  Alice’s muscles bunched and then, before I could take any deterrent measures, she’d whipped the leash from my hand and was off down the road, scampering after the truck, legs a-blur.

  “Alice!”

  She didn’t used to run after garbage trucks. She only started after Sean died. We all had our ways of dealing with grief. Without Sean as her alpha, her preferred method was to pretend that she’d forgotten all of her obedience training.

  “Alice, stop!”

  Skidding to a halt just before our house, she sat down—with an odd, sharp bark—in the middle of the street, just the way Sean had taught her to do on command.

  A pleasant surprise.

  As I recovered the leash, she stretched her neck up and let out another short bark. The garbage truck disappeared around the corner, two garbage men hanging on to the back.

  I trudged up to the house, scowling at the yellow fall crocuses that had magically appeared the previous week in the front yard along the fence. They were supposed to have been spider lilies. I knew that because Sean and I had planted them with Sam.

  I hated fall crocuses. When crocuses pushed up out of the earth in the spring, it was cause for celebration. When fall crocuses did the same, they seemed like latecomers, irritatingly out of season. The party? It’s over. Ended months ago. Everyone’s gone home!

  I was so focused on despising them that I almost ran into my trash cans.

  But I hadn’t wheeled them out. I was certain I hadn’t. I flipped the lids shut and hauled them back up the driveway anyway. God bless Jim. He must have rescued me. Again.

  I’d thank him later.

  As I came back around the house toward the front yard, a gas company van drove up. Slowed. Parked on the street in front of the house.

  Men in white coveralls popped out of the back as if it were a clown car. One of them waved me over.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Is emergency.”

  13

  “With my gas?” I peered past him out to the street. Orange cones had already been placed along the perimeter of my property. “What emergency?”

  “System say need repair.”

  The neighborhood was nearly a hundred years old. Something was always breaking down. One week the fire hydrants would be flushed out. The next week the power company would shu
t down the lines for a few hours to put in a new transformer. Just as soon as the county repaved a street and filled its potholes, the water company would come along and dig a trench right down the middle to pull up an old pipe or replace the main. If you thought too long or hard about the aging infrastructure, you’d never be able to sleep at night.

  I led him through the house to the kitchen. Alice wanted to come too, but I ordered her to stay.

  Surprisingly, once more, she obeyed.

  We walked down the bare, scarred wooden stairs to the partial, cinder-block basement. Pulling the string for the light, I pointed past Sam’s train table to the gas pipes, which snaked along the wall.

  He gestured toward the meter. “Is old.”

  It most certainly was. I’d asked the gas company about the regulator before we’d moved in. They said they’d be happy to replace it. On our dime. Unfortunately, by then we’d already spent all our dimes buying the house, so I’d made myself feel better by reading up on the decades-old, mercury-regulated device. It had the effect of making me feel worse. I finally made my peace with it by inspecting it every week and building a cage of sorts to keep Sam and his friends away from it. Mercury didn’t have a discernible smell, but it did leave traces and would give off toxic fumes if it spilled.

  I removed the cage and gave it a once-over, then glanced at the floor beneath it. “I don’t see any spills or leaks.”

  “Is, uh . . .” He waved a hand toward the regulator.

  I raised a brow.

  “Inside.”

  “The leak? That’s impossible.” When the units fail, they fail because they’ve been improperly moved. The spills are external. I’d read all about the incidents near Chicago back in the early aughts.

  The man shrugged and nodded at his clipboard. “Is on list.”

  “For what?”

  “For fix.”

  “How?”

  “We fix.”

  “With a new one?”

  He nodded.

  Uh-oh. The problems in Illinois had been made worse when poorly trained contractors removed the old mercury regulators. “So you’re going to use a vacuum cleaner, right?”