Proof of Lies (Anastasia Phoenix)

by Diana Rodriguez Wallach

  We crossed the traffic zipping past Boston General, all blue glass and towering buildings creating a complex of structures renowned for everything from newborn care to Alzheimer’s and anything in between. In the shadows of the towering facade sat a tiny Irish pub with a wooden sign featuring gold letters in an antique-looking font.

  “What if we’re wrong in coming here? What if we screw something up?” Charlotte whined. “What if—”

  I grabbed her wrist, jerking her to a halt on the wide sidewalk, my eyes pleading. “I’m sorry, but I can’t sit around going nuts not hearing from the police. I don’t know how you’ve remained sane for so long. At least I was semi-unconscious for most of this.” I brushed off an image of myself marinating in a bed of filth. “We’re just going to find out if there’s info worth knowing. We’re not hindering anything.”

  I caught a shift in her golden-green eyes. “If we find out something important, we’re telling Dawkins, right?”

  “I promise.” I crossed my heart.

  “Fine.” She nodded. For a girl who’d been illegally hacking into electronic systems for most of this investigation, she was rather squeamish when it came to face-to-face confrontations.

  We entered McFadden’s Pub. As expected, it was packed with hospital employees in pastel scrubs throwing bent darts, eating drippy burgers, and sipping frothy beers. It had glossy amber wood paneling on the walls that released a stale scent of alcohol that probably never washed out. The ceiling was tin, painted a smoky gray, with brass lights barely illuminating the dim space.

  Charlotte swiveled a green leather barstool my way, which had been ripped and sealed with packing tape, and I took a seat. I’d never been to a bar before, unless you count the cafés in Europe, but they’re not really bars. Wine is served in McDonalds there. She signaled for the bartender, and he glanced at us briefly, continuing to dry the dripping pint glass he was holding, then cautiously looked back, eyes squinted.

  “Okay, ladies, you’re hot and all, but there’s no way that girl’s twenty-one.” He pointed at me with the tattered white rag in his hand.

  “She’s not drinking,” Charlotte countered. “We just want to ask you a few questions. About Keira Phoenix?”

  His head jutted back, recognition clear in his eyes.

  “You knew her, right?” I asked, already knowing the answer. “I’m her sister.”

  The look of pity I’d become so familiar with instantly washed over him. He nodded slowly, his brow furrowed as he sucked on his lips, looking sad and a bit uncomfortable. “I’m Seamus, the manager. Yeah, I knew Keira. She was a cool chick. I’m sorry about what happened.”

  “Uh-huh.” I ignored his sympathy. “We’re actually hoping you could help.”

  “Anything. How?” He walked over.

  Charlotte pulled out her smartphone encased in a pink and turquoise cover. Earlier, she’d uploaded a still image from the surveillance footage. She showed it to Seamus. “This was taken at the hospital a few days before Keira was…attacked.” I knew Charlotte wanted to say “murdered,” since it was what she believed, but I was glad she refrained. “We think maybe this is a napkin from your place.”

  Seamus took the phone, pinching his giant fingers across the screen and enlarging the napkin blotted against Keira’s eyes. For being so Irish that he had a name like Seamus, he looked about the size of an NBA all-star. “Yeah, that’s from here. Doesn’t surprise me that he’d have it. He came in with Keira a few times.”

  “You know him?” My pulse hit the accelerator. Seamus had seen them together, more than once.

  “I don’t know his name or anything.”

  “What do you know?”

  “He’s a douche.”

  “No shit,” I grumbled. “Anything else?”

  “They always sat in the back, near the jukebox.” He pointed toward a dark booth in a secluded corner. It would be the perfect place to go if you wanted to be alone. “And there was this one time I took a picture of them, on Cinco de Mayo, and they totally freaked, which was weird. Keira was usually the life of the party. She follows us on Instagram. We get a lot of likes.” He nodded like this was a notable achievement.

  “So the picture’s online?” Charlotte’s eyes perked up.

  “That’s just it. There are lots of pictures of Keira on our Instagram account, which she loved.” He continued drying a pint glass with a rag that looked dirtier than the glass. “But this time, the dudes she was with went ballistic.”

  “Dudes?” I leaned forward, my palms sticking to the tacky surface of the bar. “You mean more than one?”

  “Yeah. They were with some Italian guy.”

  “Italian, like from the North End?” Charlotte asked.

  “No, Italian like fresh off the boat. Accent and all.” He set down the pint glass and grabbed another. A wrinkle tensed above my nose. I couldn’t think of anyone Keira knew who had an Italian accent—not a coworker, former classmate, doctor, no one. It was starting to feel like my sister had a secret life.

  “But after I took the picture, the Italian guy grabbed my shirt, started cursing about what he’d do if I posted it. The guy couldn’t have been much taller than you.” Seamus gave Charlotte a look to emphasize the ridiculousness of the mismatch. Seamus was at least six-foot-four. “I didn’t want any trouble, the customer is always right, you know the drill. So I told them I’d delete it. Instead, the bigger guy grabs my phone and starts deleting all the pictures from that night. Every one. I was pissed.”

  “So why’d you let him do it?” I asked, irritated.

  “The place was filled with a bunch of drunks who’d been downing tequila since noon. It was Cinco de Mayo. I didn’t want a brawl.”

  “Irish pubs celebrate Cinco de Mayo?” Charlotte asked.

  “We celebrate Yom Kippur with a beer special. We’re a bar.” He stated the obvious.

  I slumped, disappointed. “Did you ever see them again? The guys?”

  “No.” He shrugged, then suddenly stopped drying the glass in his hand. “Wait, are they the ones who attacked her? Because that was like two weeks before everything happened, and the cops never came in, so I didn’t say anything. Holy shit, I’m an asshole.”

  “You couldn’t have known,” Charlotte offered politely.

  Though really, he could have. A regular at his bar got kidnapped (or murdered, if you believed the news), and he was involved in a near violent altercation with the two guys she was with only days before. He should have mentioned this sooner.

  “I’m sorry, I just—”

  I cut him off. “You’re positive they deleted the photos? Can we check?”

  “Yeah, but they’re gone.” He shook his head as he pulled his black smartphone from his pocket and handed it over.

  Charlotte scanned the images, skipping back to last May and the weeks before it. I could see over her shoulder that she’d found nothing. “Can I take this?”

  “What?” Seamus’s head jerked as if she’d asked him to part with his leg, not his phone (though Charlotte would react the same).

  “It’s an Android. I have software that can retrieve deleted images. I might be able to recover it.”

  “Shouldn’t the police do that?”

  I cocked an eyebrow at Charlotte. She was the one who insisted we not “hinder” the investigation. Let’s see what she thought now that the lead involved electronic communication.

  She looked at me sideways. “The cops have been giving us the runaround. They’re not telling us anything,” she admitted. “I just want to give it a shot before we surrender the phone.”

  Exactly. I’d happily share whatever we uncovered with Detective Dawkins, after it was “concrete.” It was her rule, after all.

  “I hear ya.” Seamus nodded, grabbing another glass. “Once, I had my car stolen. Cops totally gave me the brush-off. It was the same thing.”

  I stared blankly. This wasn’t exactly the same thing, but I doubted there were enough words in the English language to explain th
at. Besides, Seamus had a potential picture of my sister’s attacker, hopefully in the “cloud” or the moon or wherever regrettable photos go to not die. I wasn’t about to pick a fight.

  “Charlotte knows more about computers than anyone at the Boston PD, and no one wants to find my sister more than me. Please, will you let us try?” I gave him my most pathetic puppy-dog face.

  “What am I supposed to do about a phone until then?”

  “I’ll get you a new one,” Charlotte promised. “I’m supposed to order my assistant a new phone at work. I’ll order two. They’ll never notice. You’ll have it in two days. I swear.”

  “And until then?”

  “Like you seriously don’t have an old phone lying around. Come on, this is life and death,” I insisted.

  He sighed heavily, glancing at the tin ceiling. “Fine. But I’ll hold you to it. I expect a new phone by Monday. Newest model.”

  “Done.” Charlotte tucked his phone into her pocket and turned to me, excitement fresh in her eyes. If anyone could find out who my sister was with in that photo, it was my hacker friend.

  It was like I was starting to feel my sister getting closer.

  Chapter Twelve

  All she needed was a few illegal software programs and one sleepless night, and Charlotte was able to do what the Boston Police Department didn’t even know they were supposed to be doing—retrieve the photo of Keira’s attacker (or attackers, plural. We really weren’t sure anymore.).

  “I deserve a medal,” Charlotte boasted as she pulled the cord that connected Seamus’s smartphone to her silver laptop. “Seriously, how awesome am I?”

  “Pretty awesome.” I yawned as I stretched my aching back. I didn’t have much to contribute to her hacking endeavors, but I stayed up all night out of moral support. Plus, I wanted to be present the moment she found my sister’s image.

  “Just give me a second. I’ll open all the pictures in Photoshop and blow them up.” Her fingers clicked away as I waited beside her at the kitchen table, sipping my fifth cup of coffee.

  “Okay, done.” She punched a key. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  She opened new windows for each image time stamped with the date of May fifth. There were twenty-two. We began skipping through them, her cursor jumping from frame to frame—smiling drunks in sombreros, gigantic neon margarita glasses with sloshing green liquid, and cheap plastic leis rung on sweaty necks (though I didn’t see how leis connected to a party commemorating a Mexican military victory being hosted by an Irish bar). My vision blurred as I forced myself to stay alert, focusing on the too-bright glow of her laptop.

  Charlotte continued clicking until suddenly I froze mid-yawn, blinking once.

  Charlotte was just as still.

  There was Keira.

  She was seated in a booth in McFadden’s Pub, right next to the jukebox where Seamus said she’d be. Three half-drank pints of amber beer cluttered the table before her, along with a spread of crumpled and now very familiar napkins. To her right was the guy who haunted my nightmares every night: six-foot-two, dark blond greasy hair, greenish eyes, and a noticeable scar on his lip—Craig the Psycho. He even looked like he was wearing the same T-shirt he had on in the surveillance footage. Maybe he didn’t own more than one.

  Across from her was a man as Italian as a stereotype—olive skin, cropped dark shiny hair, near-black eyes, and the short stocky frame of a wrestler.

  “That’s Craig and Keira,” Charlotte choked, almost in disbelief, touching the screen as if the image might disappear. “I can’t believe it. Wow. So who’s the other guy?”

  “Luis Basso,” I answered, my drained voice sounding as stunned as I felt. “I know him.”

  ...

  An hour later, we sat at the kitchen table with another photo added to our collection—one from an album that belonged to my parents.

  It wasn’t easy to locate. Not because I didn’t know where it was, but because to find it, I had to enter my parents’ bedroom. I was never the type of grieving kid who took comfort in smelling her mother’s perfume or in handling her father’s cufflinks. It just hurt. All of it. Pain, pain, and more pain. And now the room had the added feature of an ominous bathroom that seemed to pulse with images of blood like the hallway from The Shining. I hadn’t stepped foot inside since Keira went missing.

  But I did it.

  I got through it.

  I crept to the closet, swung open the door, and yanked down all of the dust-covered albums (the ones with the plastic film and sticky paper that destroy pictures as much as they preserve them). My family had gone to Italy as part of Keira’s high school graduation gift. All four of us traveling through Europe for three weeks: London, Paris, Munich, Prague, and Tuscany. Then we spent the rest of the summer living in Madrid. The trip was well documented, photos galore, including one very nice snapshot of a family from Tuscany.

  I tapped it against the kitchen table. Click, click, click.

  “You’re sure she never mentioned that she ran into this guy?” Charlotte asked for the third time.

  “I’m positive. Don’t you think I would have mentioned it?” I stared at the matte image with thin white borders.

  There were four sons featured alongside their father. The older gentleman was gray-haired, about sixty, distinguished, with kind eyes and a soft belly. His teenage sons stood beside him, their arms locked around one another’s shoulders, no more than two inches separating their height. Each had dark hair, cropped and shiny. Their builds were athletic, and not one was taller than five-foot-nine. They almost looked like quadruplets.

  The one standing closest to their father was also in the photo at McFadden’s Pub with Keira—Luis Basso.

  “Well, what do you think they were doing with him?” Charlotte glanced back and forth between the pictures. He looked exactly the same, almost ageless.

  “I have no idea. It wasn’t like that part of the trip was very memorable. I can’t imagine Keira kept in touch with Luis. Maybe they just ran into each other randomly?”

  Luis’s father, Salvatore, was a friend of my parents. Well, friend might be too strong a word. He was an antique dealer, and my parents bought a rustic wooden writing desk from him during our trip. It still sat in my parents’ bedroom. Apparently, they’d met during their travels years before and fell in love with his quaint little shop in Cortona, Italy, not far from Florence. They insisted we pit stop during our travels, only the visit dragged on longer than two kids in an antique store could tolerate.

  The town is miniscule, with one row of souvenir shops and one coffee shop. That left Keira and I idly playing tic-tac-toe with the dust on the furniture for amusement until Luis, the oldest son, offered to take us for a ride outside the walls of Cortona. He sped up a narrow, windy, unpaved hill in his tiny, beat-up car, and parked at the peak. There we sat on the white car’s dented hood, layered with grime from diesel fuel, and stared at the rolling hills of emerald and gold, dotted with skinny cypress trees and postcard-worthy cottages.

  All the while, Luis meandered along the graveled edge plucking wild flowers. There was no guardrail. Every time a car turned the curve, it had to perilously swerve to avoid him. He never flinched, as if getting hit and tumbling down the mountain never occurred to him. He just continued picking straggly flowers for the family dining table with the confident swagger of someone who thought nothing could go wrong. Then he drove us back to the shop, and I hadn’t thought about him since.

  I didn’t think Keira had, either.

  Charlotte glanced at me nervously. “Keira was talking about your parents on the surveillance footage, and Luis knew them. He could have been helping her somehow; he could be involved in what happened to her.”

  I rubbed my temples with locked fingers, my head throbbing. So far, there was no motive for what happened to my sister. All we really knew was what wasn’t true. It wasn’t a lovers’ quarrel, and it wasn’t a random attack. My sister was secretive in the weeks before everything happened. I thought
it was because she was dating someone we wouldn’t like (and truthfully, I wouldn’t like Craig the Psycho under any circumstances), but things no longer looked that simple. Keira and Craig weren’t just dating; they were discussing my parents. She was investigating my parents. Then she disappeared.

  Now it turned out that right before our tub filled with blood, she spent the evening with a guy from our parents’ past who was capable of threatening a bartender over a simple photo.

  “We have to show these pictures to the cops,” said Charlotte.

  “I know.” I peered at her, my eyes weary. “But not tonight.”

  “Why?”

  I sighed heavily. “Because I need a minute. They’re going to ask me tons of questions about the Bassos, about Luis, and I don’t know what to say. It’s like we’re talking about someone other than Keira. How could all of this have been going on and we not know?”

  “Because we weren’t her keeper.”

  “Actually, she was my keeper. She was my guardian, is my guardian,” I quickly corrected. Keira was out there, alive somewhere. I had to believe that. If I didn’t, the funk would swallow me whole.

  Charlotte’s freckled face grew concerned, as it did every time I insisted my sister was alive. “False hope” was a term used often by the people around me, but what they didn’t understand was that searching for Keira was the only thing keeping me from drowning in her absence.

  My phone buzzed in the back pocket of my jeans, and I slid it out onto the kitchen table. It was a text from Marcus. Ever since he and Madeline left, he’d been texting for frequent updates, for more ways he could help, for us to get together. But we hadn’t seen each other since. I told myself, and him, that it was because I was busy, but I didn’t think either of us believed it. The truth was, a tiny part of me leaped every time I saw Marcus’s name on my screen, then the rest of me took turns beating that tiny traitorous part to a pulp.