by Jan Burke
Liar
Jan Burke
PROLOGUE
The man who stood beneath the tree on the front lawn had come to hurt his mother. Of that, Travis felt certain.
The boy stood just a few feet behind the blinds, not touching them, his hands curled tightly on the edge of the desk behind him. The lights were out in the house and with the blinds angled in this way—yes, he was fairly sure he could not be seen by the man. The window wasn’t open very far, just a few inches, and the screen was in place. Travis’s pajamas were dark in color, wouldn’t give him away. More likely his pale face would reflect the moonlight.
He’s not looking at me anyway, Travis reassured himself.
The man was staring toward his mother’s window. He had not moved for the last few minutes.
The small anniversary clock on the desk chimed once. Most other children who were Travis’s age were in bed by now, but he was allowed to stay up as late as he liked. Travis was, his mother was fond of saying, the oldest eleven-year-old in the world.
He wasn’t sure that his mother was right about that. His mother seemed not to be right about much of anything lately. At the thought, Travis glanced nervously toward the room upstairs. He hoped his mother would not awaken. She was so afraid of so many things; seeing the man out on the lawn would greatly upset her.
All together, Travis had been watching the man for about twenty minutes now. He had come downstairs to the study when he heard the car. This was a quiet street, and on these breeze-barren summer evenings, windows were open, sounds carried. Even if the engine had been turned off, the kiss of tires on the pavement would have betrayed the man’s arrival. Apparently—and to Travis’s amazement—none of their neighbors had heard the driver’s door open and close.
The man had not parked in front of their house, though it was obviously his destination. Yet once reaching it, he had not tried to come inside, as Travis had expected. Instead, he had stood beneath that tree and stared at the room where Travis’s mother slept.
The man stirred, took a step closer. Did he see Travis then? No, no, he was still staring at the upper story. He took another step, and another. Travis’s palms dampened on the desk.
The man was crossing the lawn now, coming straight toward him.
Move away from the window! Run upstairs! Don’t let him see you! Hide!
But Travis stayed. And watched.
He could see him clearly now, as he stood just outside the window. He was no farther from Travis than priest from confessor. Travis tried to study him objectively, to memorize his features. The man was younger than his mother, taller and stronger. That his mother would probably call the man’s face handsome did not count for much with Travis, especially not if the man intended to harm them. He watched the strange, intense longing on the man’s face; watched him frown in indecision.
Suddenly the man’s gaze fell, and again Travis tensed, thinking he might be seen—but the man’s eyes were lowered now. The man began to move again; he walked slowly out of view.
Travis let out his breath, then suddenly drew it back in again as he realized that the man was not walking toward the street, but to their backyard gate. He heard the sound of the latch being fumbled open, the quiet click as it closed behind the intruder. Travis ran on bare feet to the kitchen, heard the man’s steps clacking cautiously over the bed of black pebbles that lay between the house and fence.
Here, too, the windows were open, but curtains hung over them, blocking any view. The pebbles gave away the man’s movements.
The back door! Had his mother remembered to lock the back door?
Panicked now, staying low, Travis hurried through the kitchen to the laundry room.
No! He could see the deadbolt had not been thrown.
He reached up, turned the latch, pulled his hand back just as he heard the soft sound of the man’s soles on the back porch. Crouching, Travis leaned against the door, praying the man would not see him, had not heard him throw the lock.
There was a long moment of heart-too-loud silence before he watched the knob turn, heard the man lean his weight gently against the door. The man paused, and Travis looked up to see a hand pressed against the glass of the window in the door.
It was red.
Blood.
Had the man cut himself?
No. Travis could see the palm of his hand pressed there, perfect and large and unwounded.
The knob released.
The man stepped back, and Travis heard him leave the porch; he waited for his steps on the pebbles. The sound did not come.
Travis dared to rise up a little, to peer out the window in the door. He saw the man staring up again, this time toward Travis’s own bedroom window. And Travis saw the man’s face, and again his expression of longing, a longing that Travis found mysterious and unsettling.
Travis stood now, and the movement must have caught the man’s eye, for he was looking right at him, right straight at him; the man, with his solemn face, Travis’s own pale, wide-eyed expression reflected on the same surface, boy’s and man’s face in one. For reasons that would elude him for many years, Travis suddenly balled his hand into a hard fist and plunged it through the glass, through the very place where the hand print had not yet dried, watched the red glass splinter and fall, did not cry out as it cut once and then cut again as he pulled his hand back, not shedding tears when his father reached in through the broken window and let himself into the house, not feeling anything like pain until his father took him into his arms.
1
I don’t want to give the impression that my sister, Barbara, is a liar. I will admit that I have long thought that her flair for melodrama has been wasted on her usual audience, a family that has more often called for the hook than begged for an encore. I am the last remaining member of her immediate audience, and time has not deepened my appreciation of her skills.
The most recent performance began late one Friday afternoon at my front door; I was summoned to this makeshift theater by the repeated ringing of the doorbell. Even the overture provided by my barking dogs and yowling cat was unequal to the script she had prepared.
“Irene!” she cried, throwing herself into my arms. “There’s a stranger in my grave!”
I disentangled myself and asked a question I’ve often asked her. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Someone else has been buried in my grave!”
I looked her over. “From the eyebrows down, you appear to be alive. Customarily—”
“Well, of course I’m not dead yet. I mean, someone is already in the grave I’ll be buried in when I die,” she said.
“Who?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I came to you for help.” She peered over my shoulder. “Why aren’t you letting me in? Is the house dirty?”
“No, it’s not,” I said, then thought of the time I had found her carefully washing out all of the covers on the light fixtures in her home—Barbara would not wait for a burned-out bulb to necessitate the chore. “The house isn’t dirty by the standards of human beings with real lives,” I amended.
“Frank is too lenient with you about keeping the place neat,” she said, pushing past me.
I issued an invitation to come in as she made her way to the living room. I put the cat in the bedroom and the dogs outside, as much for their benefit as hers. I offered her something to drink, but she politely declined as she took a seat in our grandfather’s armchair. She often sits in that chair when she visits me. Barbara has always been annoyed that our father passed that family heirloom on to me instead of her. She ran her fingers over the upholstery and frowned. I know that kind of frown. On Barbara, it’s the equivalent of a labor pain before the birth of a critical remark.
“You came here to ask for my help?” I said.
The frown became a smile. “You’re a reporter—here’s something you can investigate. I think this would make a great story—”
“Uh, Barbara, I don’t think the Express is going to be all that interested in—”
“Of course it will! You don’t want the LA Times to get this story first do you? It’s exactly like that case that was in the headlines awhile back. Cemetery fraud. Illegal burial. Selling the same burial plot to two different people.”
I sighed. “I’m sure it’s nothing more than a simple mistake. If you’re certain the plot is yours, just go into the cemetery office and show them your receipt.”
“Receipt? I don’t have a receipt.”
“You lost it?”
“No. No one sold it to me, but it’s where I’m supposed to be buried. You know that.”
I felt the beginnings of a headache. “What cemetery are we talking about, Barbara?”
“Holy Family.”
“Where Mom and Dad are buried.”
“Yes. I’m supposed to be buried next to Mama.”
“Supposed to be buried next to Mom? Let me guess who’s doing the supposing.”
“Of course I am! I knew her longer than you did, Irene.”
“Don’t start!”
“Okay, okay. I’ve always wanted to be buried there, but even having you buried there would be better than some stranger lying next to Mama for all eternity.”
“Barbara, I don’t own that plot and neither do you. The cemetery can bury whomever they want to in that space. It’s not up to us.”
“You never have cared about their graves!”
“Oh, for pitysakes—”
“You haven’t. I’m the only one who visits them.”
I stood up and walked over to the sliding glass door that leads to our backyard, looked out at my husband’s carefully tended garden, felt myself relax a little. Trying to stay calm, I said, “For you, it’s important to go to the cemetery. I respect that. But for me, it’s… not where Mom and Dad are.”
“You think someone else is buried in their graves?” she asked in alarm.
I turned to look at her. “No. I mean, the cemetery is only where their remains are—that’s all that’s there, what’s left of their bodies. Not who they were or who they still are in my memories of them.”
She shook her head. “Honestly, Irene. As if you can only have it one way or the other. Besides, if you did care about their memories, you’d honor them on important dates.”
I felt my spine stiffen. “I know that Tuesday was the anniversary of her death, Barbara. If you think I’ve forgotten the day she died, you are seriously full of shit.”
“But you didn’t bring any flowers to the cemetery, or you would have noticed that no one was in my—in the grave next to hers on Tuesday. And if you had returned on the anniversary of her funeral—”
“You think it’s healthy to be that obsessed with death and funeral dates?”
“If you had returned today,” she went on forcefully, “you would have noticed that between Tuesday and today, someone was buried next to our mother without our permission!”
“Maybe that person’s family—whose grief must certainly be fresher than yours—has every right to bury someone there without our permission.”
She folded her hands in her lap and looked down at them.
“Not the praying bit, please, Barbara.”
At least she didn’t say them aloud. After a moment, she looked up and said, “In the whole world, I have only one living relative.”
“Am I adopted, or did Aunt Mary die? Not to mention the ones that live a little farther away—”
“One living sister,” she amended. “One sister to go to when I’m upset, or need help, or any of the other things that sisters do for one another. And even though you don’t like me much—”
“Barbara—”
“I hope you know that if you ever needed me, even for something much more significant than this small request I’ve made of you—”
“All right, all right! I’ll go to the cemetery first thing tomorrow—”
She smiled. “They’re open until sunset.”
“Frank will be home any minute now. I’m not going to the cemetery tonight. I’ll go in the morning.”
“That’s fine, that’s fine. I’ll probably find some way to go to sleep tonight.”
“I’m sure you will.”
She seemed to figure out that she had obtained her most important objective, and that she wasn’t likely to push me into any further concessions just then. Before she left, she told me again how much she appreciated my help and gave me a kiss on the cheek—which surprised me. A sisterly hug between us isn’t unheard of, but a kiss on the cheek is rare. I had some idea of how important this request was to her then, and found myself standing on my front steps, holding my hand to my cheek as I watched her drive off.
But in the next moment, I realized that once again I had let her con me into doing something I really didn’t want to do. She’s my older sister, but somehow I’ve ended up solving a lot of her problems. There was no reason she couldn’t have gone into the cemetery office on her own and asked who was buried next to our mother, but I saw now that Barbara wanted to get me involved at this early stage for a reason. Later, if a confrontation was necessary, I’d be asked to do her fighting for her.
I went back inside the house, disgusted with the knowledge that the one thing that definitely wasn’t buried in that new grave was my old habit of rescuing my sister.
“Let’s go over there now,” Frank said when I told him about Barbara’s visit. “Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.”
“You just got home from work. Don’t you want to relax, have some dinner?”
“No, I’m not really hungry yet. Let’s go now—Jack wants to take us sailing tomorrow morning. He’s invited Pete and Rachel. Cassidy might come along, too.”
Although Pete and his wife are at our home quite often—Pete is Frank’s partner—I hadn’t seen Thomas Cassidy in a couple of weeks. He’s a detective with the Las Piernas Police Department—as are Frank and Pete. But Cassidy rarely works with them—Frank and Pete are homicide detectives, Cassidy spends most of his time as a negotiator on the Critical Incident Team.
Jack Fremont, our friend and next-door neighbor, must have noticed the same things all of Frank’s friends had noticed lately. He had lost weight he didn’t need to lose, wasn’t sleeping well. All to be expected, Cassidy told me, of someone who had survived being held hostage.
A day out on the water might be good for him; the companionship undoubtedly would be.
“Sure,” I said. “We can go out to the cemetery now, and save tomorrow for sailing.”
2
As we drove through the gates of the large old cemetery, Frank asked, “Which way do I turn?”
Throughout the drive I had worried that in the seven or eight years since I had been there, some essential landmark within the sprawling grounds would have changed, that I wouldn’t be able to find my own parents’ graves. In order to spare myself that embarrassment, I had a strategy prepared.
“We don’t need to go out to the graves,” I said. “Let’s just pull into the office over here on the right.”
He raised an eyebrow but said nothing as he parked the car. I got out and hurried to the office door, wanting to get this business over and done with. I planned to walk into the office and ask whoever was on duty for the name of the person who was newly buried next to my parents, Patrick and Maureen Kelly. Simple. I yanked on the glass door, but it didn’t budge. I read the lettering on the glass and swore softly.
“Closed?” Frank asked from behind me.
I turned and nodded. “At five. We’ve missed them by an hour. I guess the office closes before they lock up the cemetery itself.”
“Let’s just drive over to the graves, then.”
“What good will that do? Barbara said there isn’t a stone in place yet. We won’t be able to learn anything.”
> “We might be able to learn something from the surrounding graves. Besides, I’ve never seen where your parents are buried.” He frowned, then added, “But if it’s something that will be too upsetting to you, or is too personal—”
“No, no, of course not,” I said.
We got back into the car and I directed him down a road that I was fairly certain would at least take us to the right section of the cemetery. I remembered that we needed to pass the oldest part of the grounds first; the one with crypts and tall, ornate headstones inscribed with poetry and scripture. Frank drove slowly, but soon there were fewer and fewer worn and weathered tombstones and more and more modern-style flat stones that lay flush with the ground. As we entered the newer part of the cemetery, I was relieved to see statuary that seemed familiar to me: various angels, one of Mary alone and then a copy of Michelangelo’s Pieta. I suddenly recalled that my parents’ graves were across the road from a section with many children’s graves in it. My parents’ graves on the right side of the road, the children’s graves on the left. I looked across the road and saw a statue of the Good Shepherd—Jesus depicted as a shepherd holding a small lamb.