Identity

by Shawna Seed

  Sharlah sat on the linoleum floor, took a deep breath, and popped the lid.

  The cash was in twenties, each stack held together by a rubber band. She pulled out a stack and counted. It held 50 twenty-dollar bills – a thousand bucks. Sharlah had never seen a thousand dollars in her life, and here was a suitcase full of thousand-dollar stacks.

  She pulled each stack out, adding as she went. She counted twenty stacks of $1,000 each. That made $20,000, stuck in a hole under the house.

  There was a gun, too. She carefully put it to one side, puzzled. When Missy made noises about getting a handgun, Brian had talked her out of it.

  Underneath the money was a plain manila envelope. The metal fastener was splayed to keep it closed. Sharlah pried it open with her thumbnail and dumped the contents into the emptied briefcase.

  Her own face was staring up at her.

  It was a Louisiana driver’s license, bearing her picture and the name Elizabeth Louise Ellsworth. The birth date made Elizabeth, whoever she was, a few months younger than Sharlah. The other statistics were right – blonde hair, blue eyes, 5-3, 110 pounds.

  Brian’s picture was on a license for James Robert Coughlin. His address was in Slidell, and he was 22 – a year older than Brian.

  There were Social Security cards and birth certificates and passports.

  The cops were right. Brian had been planning to run.

  But his mother was wrong. He was going to take Sharlah with him.

  Sharlah was leaning against the tub, trying to take it all in, when she heard a footstep crunch on the gravel driveway outside and froze.

  She jumped up and shut off the bathroom light. Then she sat in the dark and waited.

  One more footstep sounded, coming closer to the house. Then nothing. She held her breath and waited for what seemed like forever.

  Finally, she heard footsteps again, retreating this time, followed by the soft click of a car door.

  Sharlah tiptoed out to the living room. She pulled the curtains aside, just a little, and scanned the street.

  Red taillights receded in the distance. The car stopped at the corner, then turned. As it passed under the streetlight, Sharlah saw the lights on top and the police department seal on the door.

  FIVE

  Sharlah sat up most of the night, puzzling over the briefcase and its contents.

  Brian must have wanted her to find it – why else would he mention the squeaky floorboard? But what did he expect her to do with it? Obviously she couldn’t just tote $20,000 cash down to the bank and deposit it.

  The photo for the driver’s license and passport, she realized, had been taken on a trip to Houston earlier in the summer. They’d been driving around, joking about all the places in the world they’d see one day, and Brian spotted a place that took passport photos. When he’d dragged her in to get her picture taken, she’d thought it was just Brian being his sweet, goofy self.

  Now she saw that he’d planned the whole thing – found the photo place ahead of time, figured out how he’d convince her to go in.

  That meant Brian had been working on an escape plan since June, at least. At Kevin and Lynn’s housewarming in May, he’d blown up at his mom over a cutting comment she made, which totally wasn’t like him. Was he involved with drugs then?

  Had he been doing it the whole time Sharlah had known him?

  Sitting on their couch staring at the briefcase, Sharlah reviewed her nearly two years with Brian, searching for other clues that he wasn’t the person she thought he was, but nothing really clicked.

  No answers came to her. Not sure what else to do, she put the money, gun and passports back in the briefcase and snapped it closed. Sharlah eased the briefcase back into its hiding place, replaced the boards, rolled out the rug and tried to catch a couple hours of sleep.

  Her alarm clock rang way too soon, but Sharlah got up and went to work, yawning the whole way.

  The diner was busy, and she was glad for the distraction and the tips.

  She always liked the working guys who came in early – utility employees with their names sewn on their uniforms, delivery drivers with clipboards, construction workers with steel-toed boots. They left nice tips and never acted like they were better than anybody else.

  The next wave was always office workers and retirees, people who didn’t have to be anywhere until 9 if they had to be anywhere at all. After that would come the stragglers – usually tourists, a mix of families and college students.

  Some of the girls liked waiting on the families with little kids, despite the slime trails of spilled milk and dribbled syrup. Sharlah was happy to trade those tables.

  She didn’t dislike kids, but she didn’t go nuts over them the way some of the girls did. She and Brian had a little scare after they’d been together about a year, and the whole time she was waiting for her period, Sharlah watched the parents at the restaurant and tried – without success – to picture her and Brian in their shoes.

  Brian was worried what his parents would say and what they’d do for money, but he wasn’t as upset as she was. Sharlah couldn’t imagine herself as somebody’s mother. Brian, on the other hand, talked about how he was going tuck his kids in when he was a dad, not come home from work at 10 o’clock every night like his father had.

  After the working guys plowed through their three-egg omelets and mountains of hash browns, things got slow. The waitresses all congregated by the kitchen to lean against the wall and gossip. They weren’t allowed to sit, no matter how empty the diner was.

  Sharlah grabbed the newspaper left by the guy who drove the Dr Pepper truck and stood off to one side, reading.

  There wasn’t anything new on Missy, except that police were awaiting the autopsy. The big news was that the trough of low pressure in the Gulf was now a tropical storm named Aileen. It had been the talk of the waitresses all morning.

  Tami confidently predicted it would turn out to be nothing. “A bunch of people cleared out for Allen, when was that? Three years ago? Nothing happened. Big waste of time.”

  Donna called over, “Hey, Sharlah, what does the paper say about the storm?”

  “You guys pretty much covered it,” Sharlah said.

  “Anything new in there on that girl that got killed?”

  Sharlah shook her head. “No.”

  That was all the invitation Robin, the diner’s main gossip, needed. “And there won’t be anything new, either,” she said. “The cops are covering everything up.”

  Tami laughed. “Why would the cops do that?” She was just as opinionated as Robin, which often led to arguments, especially when there weren’t customers needing attention.

  “The police are in on it,” Robin said.

  “I heard it was Mexicans,” Donna put in. “I heard they tied her up and they cut her from…”

  “She was hit in the head.”

  Three faces swiveled toward Sharlah.

  “Missy was my friend,” Sharlah said. She tossed the paper in the trash. “I’m going to make fresh coffee.”

  The lunch rush was just winding down around 1:30 when the cop, Zuk, came in.

  He talked to Joan, and then they walked over to Sharlah at the drink station, where she was refilling Cokes for a table of teenagers. She’d been tracking him across the room, afraid that she knew exactly why he was there.

  “Miss Webb?”

  Sharlah slowly put a plastic glass of soda on her tray, concentrating very hard so that her hands wouldn’t shake.

  “We need you to come down to the station.”

  Sharlah cut her eyes toward Joan.

  “It’s OK, Sharlah,” Joan said. “Go on. I won’t dock you.”

  As she walked back to get her purse, Sharlah saw Robin sidle over, tea pitcher in one hand, to say something to Donna. The diner gossips had new material to work with.

  Sharlah couldn’t figure out how the cops knew she’d found the money. Obviously they’d been watching the house, but she didn’t understand how they could have se
en inside. All the curtains had been closed, and the only window in the bathroom was tiny and frosted.

  They did listen to everything at the jail. Did Brian say too much when he talked about the squeaky floorboard? That seemed unlikely – even Sharlah didn’t get the hint right away. If she hadn’t stepped on the squeaky board, it wouldn’t have occurred to her to investigate.

  Then she remembered something she’d seen when they were searching the house. One of the officers had come around from the back, dusting himself off. Maybe he’d been in the crawl space and found the briefcase? Could the cops have left it to trap her?

  Sharlah decided that if the police started asking about the money, she’d say she wanted a lawyer. She was pretty sure they had to give her one, even if she couldn’t pay. She’d seen that on Hill Street Blues.

  At the station, they put her back in the same room she’d been in on Sunday. The detective she’d talked to that day came in a few minutes later.

  His short-sleeved shirt was blue this time, but otherwise he looked pretty much the same – messy, like an unmade bed. He introduced himself again, and this time Sharlah held onto the name: Detective Downs.

  “I appreciate you coming in,” he said, which Sharlah thought was weird. Did she really have a choice?

  And that was it for the pleasantries. “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news,” he said. “A body was found late yesterday in a ditch up by League City. This morning, it was identified as Cliff Knorr.”

  Sharlah leaned forward in her chair, not wanting to believe what she’d just heard. “Cliff’s dead?”

  “He was shot in the head.”

  Sharlah wrapped her arms tight around her torso and, without meaning to, began to rock back and forth. “Oh, poor Cliff,” she said. And poor Brian, she thought. He was going to take this really hard.

  Downs pushed a box of tissues across the table toward her, but Sharlah had no tears.

  “We believe he died Friday afternoon, Friday evening at the latest,” Downs said. “Do you understand what that means?”

  Sharlah stared at him, uncomprehending. Cliff was dead. What difference did it make if he died at 3 or 8 or midnight?

  “Missy Burke was at work until 11 p.m. on Saturday, at which point she received a phone call at the bar and asked permission to leave early,” Downs said.

  “Cliff didn’t kill her,” Sharlah said, finally grasping the point. “He was already dead.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Good,” Sharlah said. “I didn’t want to think that he did.”

  “We also got the results of her autopsy this morning,” Downs said. “It appears that sexual intercourse took place shortly before her death.”

  Sharlah’s stomach flip-flopped. “She was raped?”

  “We believe it was consensual. The coroner found a contraceptive in place, one of those new things, a sponge.”

  “She told me she was going to switch to that,” Sharlah said. “She read about it in Cosmo. She thought the Pill was making her gain weight.”

  Then she stared down at the table, embarrassed. Why on earth had she mentioned that?

  “She confided in you about personal things, like her choice of birth control, then?” The detective’s voice was neutral, professional. “Is it accurate to say she talked to you about her sex life?”

  Profoundly uncomfortable, Sharlah said nothing.

  Missy did talk about it, had almost from the time she and Sharlah met. At first, Sharlah was flattered. Missy’s confessions made her feel like they were close, and Sharlah had never really had a friend like that.

  At one point, Sharlah worked up the courage to ask Missy for advice. Glamour and Cosmo didn’t cover everything, and Sharlah hoped Missy, who seemed more experienced, might help. Missy answered Sharlah’s question, but she also joked about it later, in front of Brian and Cliff.

  Sharlah was sick with embarrassment. Brian wasn’t happy, but he was sweet about it. He said Sharlah shouldn’t ever tell Missy something she didn’t want repeated, because Missy couldn’t keep a secret.

  “Miss Webb?” Downs jolted Sharlah out of her memories. “Did your friend talk about things of that nature?”

  “Sometimes,” Sharlah said. “Why are you asking me this?”

  “Do you have any idea who Miss Burke might have been involved with?”

  “Someone other than Cliff? No.”

  “I’m not saying this person killed her,” Downs said. “But he might have seen or heard something that was important, and we really need to talk to him.”

  Sharlah shook her head. “I can’t believe Missy would cheat on Cliff. ”

  “She never mentioned any problems?”

  “Well…” Sharlah thought about the best way to phrase things. “Cliff had been spending a lot of time in Houston lately, and he would stay over at his dad’s or mom’s maybe a couple times a week. Missy would complain sometimes that he wasn’t, um, paying enough attention to her.”

  Actually, what Missy had said was that she had a disease called “Lackanookie,” but there was no way Sharlah was going to tell the detective that.

  “And she never talked about another man in a way that made you wonder? Maybe someone from work, or a friend that she mentioned a lot?”

  “Not really,” Sharlah said. “Missy had a lot of friends, and she could be a flirt, but I don’t know anything about her having another boyfriend.”

  The detective flipped back a few pages in his notebook and scanned it. “One of her co-workers said she hinted about being involved in another relationship and he got the idea that something about it was secret or taboo. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Well, she would have kept it secret from Brian and me,” Sharlah said. “Cliff is Brian’s friend, and Brian would have been caught in the middle. Everybody knows he hates that.”

  “The person who heard this got the idea it might be a man of another race, for lack of a better word. Can you think of anyone that might be?”

  Sharlah shook her head. “They’re wrong.”

  “You seem really sure about that.”

  Sharlah tried to think how she could answer without making Missy look bad.

  “Missy was really against that. I’m not saying I agree or anything, but she was... prejudiced, I guess. Brian says it’s the way she was raised. You couldn’t even talk to her about it. We tried.”

  “Can you think of anyone new who has been hanging around, maybe not around Missy necessarily, but a new friend for Cliff, or even Brian?”

  It was pretty sneaky, Sharlah thought, the way he tried to slide a question about Brian in there, not that it mattered.

  “I don’t know of anyone new around Cliff or Missy,” Sharlah said. “We hadn’t seen much of them lately. For sure Brian didn’t have any new friends.”

  She didn’t say so, but at the moment, it didn’t seem that Brian had any friends at all.

  The same cop, Zuk, took Sharlah back to her car. She thought, since he was dropping her at the diner, he might mention the times she’d waited on him, but he didn’t. Maybe he didn’t remember. Maybe she’d been just an orange blur with a coffee pot to him, even though he’d been enough of a regular that she knew his order by heart.

  To the cops, she knew, she was “the suspect’s girlfriend” or “the dead girl’s friend.” It was just like her hometown, where she was known for things she couldn’t control – “Arvin Webb’s kid” or “the sister of the guy who killed Danny Ott.”

  The only identity she’d ever chosen for herself was the life she’d made with Brian, and now it felt like other people – maybe even Brian – were trying to change that, too.

  She could accept that Brian had done something wrong and would be punished for it. But she felt like she was being punished, too, and that didn’t seem fair.

  Brian was the only person she could turn to – really, the only person she’d been able to count on in her life. And now she could see him only through glass, with someone listening in.


  Tears stung her eyes. Sharlah hated to cry, and lately she seemed to be doing a lot of it.

  She turned the radio on, hoping music would make her feel better, but every station was full of talk about Tropical Storm Aileen. She switched it off.

  She was so distracted that she was practically in her driveway before she noticed the Lowry Marine truck parked in front of her house and the two men arguing beside it.

  Kevin Lowry was trying to get in his truck. A neighbor was blocking Kevin’s way, his arms crossed over his chest, his thick legs planted wide. Kevin had several inches and at least 50 pounds on him, but the neighbor wasn’t giving ground.

  She and Brian didn’t really know the neighbor – he worked an evening shift at the post office and was hardly ever around. He was an older guy with long hair and a fondness for tie-dyed T-shirts, and, in cooler weather, a green Army jacket. Brian said he was one of those hippies who got stuck in the 1970s and never got out. Sharlah thought he was kind of creepy and didn’t like the way he always seemed to watch her. She didn’t even know his real name. Everybody just called him Well.

  She got out of her car and walked up to the men. “Kevin? Well? What’s going on?”

  The tension immediately went out of Kevin’s body. He turned to Sharlah and smiled. “Hey, Sharlah.”

  “You know this guy?” Well poked his finger at Kevin. “I saw him looking in your windows.”

  “He’s Brian’s brother.” Sharlah turned to Kevin. “What are you doing here?”

  “Looked to me like he was trying to break into your house,” Well said.

  “You didn’t answer when I knocked, but I thought I heard music, so I was looking to see if you were home,” Kevin said, addressing Sharlah and ignoring the neighbor. “Must have been coming from next door.”

  Well still seemed to be spoiling for an argument. “Her car wasn’t here.”

  “You’re right,” Kevin said. “I should have noticed that.” He shook his head. “Sorry to alarm you. I wasn’t thinking.

  “We’ve got a lot on our minds, don’t we, Sharlah?” Kevin smiled at her then, a tired, sad smile that reminded her of Brian.