What You Want to See

by Kristen Lepionka

  I opened the locket and squinted at the tiny picture inside. A little boy in a suit with a bow tie, standing stiffly in front of a tall Christmas tree, not smiling. A thin sheet of cracked, yellowing plastic lay over the image, making it impossible to tell how old it was. I used my thumbnail to dig the picture out, but I still couldn’t tell. The back of the tiny oval offered a portion of the Kodak logo, which probably did not count as a clue.

  Needing another break, I walked away from the box and sat on the edge of the bed. Tried to imagine what someone could find about me while searching my apartment. Probably not much, except the fact that I was bad at housekeeping.

  But I didn’t have anything hiding in my underwear drawer.

  So was any of this stuff worth concealing from her fiancé, or was this just her version of a safe-deposit box?

  * * *

  After I left Arthur’s house, I drove over to Victorian Village for a look at the crime scene before I dove wholeheartedly into researching locket-dating techniques or whatever I needed to do to make something out of the random collection of items I found among Marin’s possessions. Hunter Avenue was a narrow cobblestone strip running through what was probably some of the priciest real estate in the city. On the east side of it, big old mansions facing Goodale Park and their carriage houses, separated from the alley by tall fences. On the west side, a string of apartment buildings and doubles, which, while more modest in their architecture, probably still pulled in four times as much rent as I paid in Olde Towne for more space. Victorian Village wasn’t even necessarily safer, as evidenced by the high number of car break-ins and, obviously, the bloodstain in the middle of the street from Marin Strasser. I stood in the alley with my hands on my hips, wondering why she’d been walking through this area. It was a bit of a hike from the Guild House to this spot, and if she was looking for her car, it seemed a strange choice, since all of the metered spots were bordering the park and closer to the restaurant. Maybe, though, she was blowing off steam after her fight with Arthur. Planning to return to the restaurant after she cooled down, or maybe trying to sober up before driving home. In that case, she could have parked anywhere, and no one would ever find her car or figure out why she was here. I wondered if she kept personal stuff in her car, and if the police had found it or even started looking. I glanced around but spotted no public parking areas in any direction. I didn’t know how hard the police had looked for her Jeep—probably not very, considering that they’d already found a suspect—but it seemed possible that they had looked exactly this hard and then gave up.

  I walked south on Hunter from Buttles to where it dead-ended into the freeway, then looped back along the vaguely Gothic mansions facing the park. The sun was hot on my shoulders. I could keep this up all afternoon and get nothing for my trouble but a sunburn, I realized. But when I got back to the spot where Marin had died, something caught my eye: ruffling curtains from one of the apartments in a U-shaped block of town houses arranged around a small courtyard. All of the apartments had big front windows, and most of them would have had a good view of the street. I headed that way and told myself that I was only taking a break from the search for Marin’s car, not giving up completely.

  A big, anxious, mulleted man opened the door to the town house a few inches and stared out at me with one eye, the rest of his face hidden on the other side of the door. The smell of pipe smoke wafted out from inside the apartment. Eccentric heir to some kind of mundane fortune, like from plumbing parts, I assumed.

  “Hi there,” I said, pushing my aviators into my hair. “I’m a private investigator and I was hoping you might have a minute to talk about what happened here on the street the other night.” I didn’t say murder, not wanting to spook him.

  “A private investigator?” He squinted at me. “You don’t look like a private investigator.”

  “Do you know any?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” I said. I showed him my license. “See there.”

  “Huh. Private investigator.”

  “Yes. Roxane Weary, pleased to meet you.”

  He gingerly shook my hand. “Edward Bennett Wilkington,” he said.

  Definitely an eccentric heir to a plumbing fortune. “Now, did you know there was a shooting out here on Friday night?”

  He nodded and opened the door slightly. The smell got stronger.

  “Were you at home?”

  Another nod.

  “Did you see or hear anything?”

  “No, not until the police came. I was … busy. I didn’t hear it,” he finished. Eccentric heir to a plumbing fortune who missed a murder outside his window because he was playing World of Warcraft, maybe.

  No judgment.

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “Do you want to come in?”

  I turned back. “For?”

  Now he blushed a splotchy pink. “I have some lavender lemonade. It’s good for anxiety. Not that you are, um, anxious or anything. I just thought. Ahem.” He had the eyes of a drowning man.

  “I can’t right now, but thank you,” I said, giving him one of my cards. I wondered if a woman had ever graced his front porch before. “If you happen to remember anything, okay?”

  He took the card like I’d just given him a sacred artifact. “Is this your phone number?”

  I wondered if I would regret giving Edward Bennett Wilkington my contact info. I had been wondering if I would regret a lot of things lately. But I nodded. It was hard to dispute that the number was mine.

  “Okay, bye,” he said, and slammed the door.

  It takes all kinds, I reminded myself.

  I went from door to door, trying all of the apartments that faced the courtyard. Most of my knocks were unanswered, and I got quite efficient at scribbling a note on the back of a business card and sending it through the mail slot. The people who were home were from the odder spectrum of humanity. I spoke to an old woman who’d heard the gunshots and then hid in her cellar for the next hour, as well as a teenage babysitter who didn’t live in the neighborhood and a pair of stoners who weren’t even aware that there’d been a murder just outside their front door. Finally, in one of the last apartments in the building, I found someone who could possibly help me.

  “I called 911,” the woman said. Her name was Meredith Burns and she was in her mid-forties with grey hair in a long braid that hung down her back. “As soon as I heard the shot. You always hear people saying, oh, maybe that was just a car backfiring, in the city you never know. Well, clearly they’ve never heard an actual gunshot right outside their window. I knew. It was horrifying.”

  “Yeah, it’s kind of different up close and personal.”

  She shook her head. “That poor woman,” she said. “I even heard them arguing before it happened, a woman and a man. And I was just annoyed at the racket. I was watching television and I even got up to close my window.”

  “Really,” I said. “Did you see anything?”

  She shook her head again. “It happens a lot around here, especially in the summer. Drunk people arguing in the street.”

  “They sounded drunk?”

  “Well, not really. But at first I just assumed.”

  “Did you hear what either of them said?”

  Meredith pressed her lips together, thinking. “The man said something like what did you do. That’s what he said right before I closed the window. What did you do? And then I turned a fan on, because it gets so hot in here without the windows open. And just a few seconds after that, bang. I grabbed the phone right away and went into the bedroom and I didn’t come out until the police came.” There was something guilty in her face. “The 911 operator told me to stay inside so that’s exactly what I did.”

  I showed her a picture of Marin, but she had no recollection of seeing her in the area before. Ditto for a black Jeep.

  I guessed it was back to the locket.

  FOUR

  At home, I sat down and dumped my meager collection of clues onto my desk: a business
card for a business that might not exist, an unused passport, a locket with some kid’s picture, and a weird paper slip. I examined it closely, still not sure what I was looking at. I Googled slip of paper with QR code as a warm-up, not expecting much. I got a few pages of results concerning lottery game slips, cryptocurrency, contest entries, transit tickets.

  Fascinating.

  I looked at the locket next. Not much bigger than my thumbnail, the locket was a tarnished silver oval with the letter “M” engraved into the surface, a spray of flowers behind it. It hung on a rope chain, slightly tangled. I slid the picture out again and examined it under a loupe. The kid was blond, slightly chubby, maybe six years old. I scanned the photo into my computer before I lost it forever in the mess on my desk, then set the necklace aside.

  The passport was useless. Its leather Kate Spade cover spoke to Marin’s good taste, like her clothes, her shoes, her glossy blond hair. I thought again of the outdated furnishings in Arthur’s house.

  Sophisticated decor for your home.

  I picked up the business card. Name, phone number, email. I ran a few searches on the three in various combinations, finally hitting on something when I typed in her phone number with Columbus sophisticated interiors.

  A Craigslist ad posted to the antiques section twenty-nine days ago, titled “BEWARE!!!!! THIEF IS BACK.”

  I clicked to read the rest of the text.

  There is a lady listing a RARE Taylor neon thermometer for sale but she is a THIEF DO NOT BUY PLZ BEWARE I bought a 9 tube herschede from her in January 2007 and she said she was an interior designer selling antiques for her customers. SOPHISTICATED INTERIORS yeah right later I found out she STOLE the herschede and the police came to MY SHOP about it and I had LOTS OF LEGAL PROBLEMS FOR MONTHS!!!!!!! Well now she is BACK selling this taylor neon thermometer and unless you want to get ACCUSED OF BEING A FENCE and IN TROUBLE WITH POLICE then avoid this seller she is a LIAR AND A THIEF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! If anyone knows who this lady is PLZ CONTACT ME because someone needs to stop her!!!!!!

  It went on to give Marin’s phone number and a physical description of her—“rude trashy blonde”—plus a screenshot of the neon-thermometer listing in question.

  I laughed out loud in bewilderment. There was a lot going on here. “Liar and a thief” definitely seemed to fit Marin’s MO, but I stared at the date—January 2007—and figured it had to be a typo. Unless this person had been nursing a grudge for over ten years?

  There was no way to identify whoever posted this, because Craigslist used an anonymous email relay system, but I could possibly convince the poster to reveal themselves. I clicked the reply button on the ad and copied the email address to send them a quick note to attempt just that.

  For verisimilitude, I did a quick search to see what the hell a “9 tube herschede” was—an expensive antique grandfather clock—then wrote:

  Hi, saw your CL post about the clock lady and I think I know who she is! Can we talk in person? Would rather not discuss on email. Thanks!

  I sprinkled in a few more exclamation points for good measure and sent the message.

  * * *

  I went to my mother’s house for dinner every Wednesday—just the four of us now, my brothers, my mother, and me in the kitchen of my childhood. Beige tile floor, plaid wallpaper. Original to the house, so this was probably the kitchen of another family’s childhood too. I always felt the tiniest bit out of place here, like it was still my father’s house, like he still made the rules. Even with him gone now for over a year, the rules still stood—like how my mother still wouldn’t smoke in the house, or how she still wouldn’t go into his office upstairs—Frank’s personality so strong that he could keep us all in check just through his memory. Not all the memories of my father were bad. But they weren’t all good, or even okay, not in my mind, and not in my mother’s, either. She’d never say it out loud, though, one of the many ways that I was more like him and not like her.

  “Rita’s daughter-in-law just had her baby, did I tell you that?” my mother, Genevieve, was saying while she poked at something in the oven. I stood at the counter with a cutting board and a jumbo Vidalia in front of me, because she was an eternal optimist and still thought I’d learned how to chop an onion properly at some point in my life.

  “A boy. Ten pounds! His name is August. Isn’t that cute, Roxie? A June baby named August.”

  “I wonder how many times the kid will hear that joke in its life,” my brother Matt piped up from the living room, where he was watching LeBron crush it in the NBA playoffs.

  “Its?” my mother said. “Matthew, this is Pietro’s son. You remember how he idolized you way back when, right?”

  Matt, cranky as usual, grumbled something unintelligible.

  I wiped away the beginning of an onion tear. I had not, to my knowledge, ever met Rita’s daughter-in-law, although Rita had lived next door to my mother as long as I could remember. Then I got an idea. “Rita’s youngest girl. She still commuting to OSU?”

  My mother nodded, gingerly setting a pan of crescent rolls from the oven onto a cooling rack. “Why?”

  “Just wondering if she has plans to move out, get her own place with another girl. I know someone who might need a roommate soon,” I said. Shelby’s living situation was still weighing heavily on my mind.

  She looked at me with hesitation. “I don’t know. Alexandra’s real shy, such a sweet girl. Sheltered.”

  The way she said it made it sound like anyone I’d know would undoubtedly corrupt shy, sweet Alexandra. I wasn’t sure if I should be offended or not. I knew she didn’t really mean anything by it, but still. I opened my mouth to say something but then my other brother breezed into the house on a cloud of cigarette smoke and aftershave.

  “Andrew!” my mother exclaimed, tipping her face up toward him for a kiss on the cheek.

  Andrew was her favorite among the three of us. I didn’t blame her for that, because he was also mine.

  “Brought you something,” he told her, holding out a bottle of white wine with a swank label. He deftly passed a whiskey bottle to me with his other hand and winked. We had it down to a science here, the delicate art of pretending my father’s liquor cabinet wasn’t empty. Neither Andrew nor I wanted to call attention to how quickly we’d cleared it out by making a show of restocking it. “This is called a traminette. It’s sweet. You’ll like it. Rox, you want me to help with that?”

  I looked down at the mound of large, uneven onion chunks on the cutting board. “Sure,” I said. I let him take over. I couldn’t exactly deny that I was doing a shitty job with the onions. The kitchen was too small to have three adult people in it at the same time so I grabbed two rocks glasses from the cupboard and relocated the whiskey bottle to the dining room. The bottle of Powers was open already, probably nicked from the hotel where Andrew was a bartender.

  He was also the first stop hotel guests made when they wanted to unwind with an ounce of weed along with a drink.

  But he probably hadn’t brought any of that.

  My mother was saying, “Did you get that adorable invitation to Tom’s party? Pam is just such a sweetheart. She’s so good for him.”

  There was that word again: sweet. Every time my mother said it was like a reminder that she’d never use such a word to describe me. Probably no one would. Which was fine, because I wasn’t. But it was something my mother valued in a person. Their sweetness. Their niceness. Yet another way in which I took after my dad. The very last thing he ever said to me was Be nice but not too fucking nice. So was it really any wonder that I turned out this way? I swallowed the inch of whiskey I’d poured into my glass and closed my eyes.

  “Can I see the invitation?” I said. I knew about the party, all right. I’d somehow found myself agreeing to help Pam plan it. In fact, I was meeting up with her tomorrow to discuss the arrangements. Tom was going to hate every minute of a surprise party, possibly as much as I was going to hate party planning with his girlfriend. I wasn’t aware Pam was sen
ding out invitations though. I refilled and carried both glasses back into the kitchen.

  “I’m sure yours is in the mail, hon,” my mother said. “It’s on the sideboard, by my purse.”

  Andrew said, “You can’t miss the thing, it could be seen from space.”

  I looked at him. “You got an invitation?”

  “Well, it’s not like I’m going.”

  Neither of my brothers liked Tom much. I was never entirely clear on why—maybe something to do with the fact that my father was fonder of Tom than he ever was of either of them, or of me, really.

  I didn’t mind Tom.

  But I had my own reasons.

  “Andrew, we should all go,” my mother said. “Tom’s always been like a part of this family.”

  I went back into the dining room and located the invitation in a stack of mail on the sideboard, a shiny affair proclaiming SECRET SUMMER SOIREE. I wondered again why I hadn’t just said hell no when Pam asked me to help her. Or, more importantly, why she even thought she needed my help in the first place. Clearly she had it all figured out. I set the little card back down on the stack, catching a glimpse of a thick, folded, legal-looking document. I nudged it, took in the somber text identifying it as the last will and testament of Francis J. Weary.

  Over a year later, and the estate still wasn’t settled. I already knew that. But something stabbed at my chest when I thought about my mother having to deal with the day-to-day of it. She put up a relentlessly cheerful front, but if there was anything the Weary family was good at, it was putting up fronts.

  As quietly as I could, I refilled my glass again.

  FIVE

  The neighbor’s car had been broken into during the night. At a quarter after eight, she started screaming bloody murder about it, so much raw emotion in her voice that I grabbed my gun from my desk drawer and dashed outside, only to see her sobbing in front of the busted front window of her Honda. Bluebird—or whatever her name was—looked at me and wailed, “Oh thank God. You have to help me! What do I do?”