Lies We Bury

by Elle Marr

  I turn and lean against the cool wood. Across the room, the digital clock of the kitchen oven glares the time: barely eleven. I peel myself from the door and place my stuff onto the love seat. The laptop bag is old, with cracks in its leather, but an aluminum plate beneath the handle shines with my initials like Rosemary had it engraved yesterday—MCM. The Sweet Sixteen gift was meant to see me through college, but that plan (and those initials) didn’t last.

  A quick glance confirms the studio is exactly as I left it: a bowl rests on the tile countertop of the kitchen nook, stale toast peeking from beside it; the sheets of my full-size bed, rumpled in a ball, are nearly off the mattress in the corner; and a broad coffee table, rescued from a classifieds website, serves as the room’s centerpiece. The flat-screen television—my one splurge, bought with the money I saved from a lucrative senior-portrait season a few years ago—enjoys the place of honor on a grocery crate.

  I grab a glass of water from the faucet, then survey the room; it’s better than the last shoebox I lived in. Its main redeeming quality is the view, ironically hidden by the blinds. Anyone could see inside without them. Beyond the parking lot, an open field leads into the thick forest of a nature preserve—a view of uninhibited space that’s the perfect way to end any day. Access to photographic, idyllic scenery is a major reason why I stayed in Oregon and moved to Portland. When foot traffic dies down for the night, and there are fewer ins and outs through the parking lot, I’ll turn off my lamps, raise the blinds, and gaze out on the trees, illuminated only by moonlight.

  Voices pass outside the window, and I stiffen by instinct. The note folded in my pocket resumes pulsing, announcing my brief reprieve is over. I take it out.

  Four alarms have been shot.

  I retrieve my laptop from my bag, then begin a flurry of internet searches. Portland news brings up an article about the top five best places to live in the country. Portland murder results are dominated by updates on a domestic shooting. The Portland Post is the only website that’s reported on the suspected murder at Four Alarm Brewery. The photos I took yesterday are featured throughout the story.

  A thrill of excitement registers, seeing my work on a leading news outlet, before sobering anxiety resumes its grip. Someone set me up to take those. But was it an obsessed fan of Chet’s or a more sinister stalker? See you soon, Missy could be a threat, and one intended to do more than expose me. Did the author of the note kill the victim in the brewery?

  According to a Post article written by an Oz Trainor, the Four Alarm victim was a local exotic dancer. She was employed at one of Portland’s many strip clubs and had been reported missing last week. The time stamp shows the article was published about thirty minutes ago; the final paragraph notes that the story will be updated as information becomes available.

  What did this woman, this dancer, do that she deserved to die? The truncated sentences don’t elaborate. The body was found in the brewery’s basement. No cause of death has been identified yet, and the article doesn’t say whether she was killed there or moved to the location afterward.

  Most importantly: given the hand-delivered note I received today, what does she have to do with me?

  Find the name I most admire and you’ll find the next one first.

  Suddenly filled with more questions, I open a new browser tab. Searching the words Portland brewery, I get dozens of results—features on local favorites, top-ten lists, and national statistics regarding breweries per capita.

  Twenty years. Twenty beers. All named for leaders.

  The phrase Portland brewery leader names provides just as many links, leaving me feeling more overwhelmed than hopeful. I jot down the addresses of three breweries that seem like a possible fit: McHale’s Brewery, Patriot Brewery, and Bridge City Brewpub; each of their websites boasts a list of beers that seem to be named for real people.

  Navigating back to the tab with the Portland Post’s home page, I hit “Refresh.” No updates on the Four Alarm murder. By now, two hours have gone by since I locked the dead bolt.

  Anyone with access to the internet could dig up the photo of me as a child outside the hospital, clinging to Petey. The author of the note must have known I would see it at the brewery entrance and stop. Then again, the toy was weathered, dingier than mine, since Rosemary was fastidious about our cleanliness belowground; it could have been there for days or weeks.

  I hit “Refresh” again. No updates.

  A woman cackles from the parking lot outside my window, and I jump.

  I can’t stay here waiting for—anticipating—another threat to slip under my door, to wake up later tonight at the sound of my window being jimmied open by practiced, calloused hands.

  Grabbing my keys and the list of breweries, I head out. A quick glance through the peephole confirms no one is hiding in the hall.

  The drive back to Portland passes quickly. Most drivers stay to the far right, allowing me to zip along the ten-mile distance with barely enough time to wonder what the hell I’m doing.

  Blue uniforms and blazers stream in and out of Four Alarm Brewery. A crowd forms across the street; yellow police tape ropes off the block, making it inaccessible to cars. I park on the next street south. A plain brick structure, Four Alarm is located in a part of downtown nicknamed the Pearl—a suggestion among Portlanders that there’s hidden treasure inside despite outward appearances. Watching law enforcement cross the threshold now, the word FORENSICS emblazoned across certain jackets, the irony is too fitting.

  A trio of teenagers stands at the corner observing the scene. One of them clutches a sleeping bag and wears a sweatshirt with a retro Mickey Mouse design from the nineties—same as the one I used to own. With a jolt, I take a step toward the group as white-blonde hair turns the corner and joins them. Gia.

  “Hey, do you mind?”

  A man whose path I crossed gestures toward the brewery. “I’m working. You just stepped into my line of sight.” He returns to scribbling in a palm-size black notepad.

  “Sorry.” I keep moving to the right, nearly colliding with a woman who’s stopped walking her dog.

  “Hey,” the man says again from behind me. I turn. Recognition lightens his brooding expression as he points a finger at me. A flash of cold douses my neck.

  He knows who I am. Shit.

  “Claire. Right? You did those photos for Pauline—the photos of the brewery. I’m with the Post. Oz.”

  Oz Trainor. The journalist whose article I read at home. Styled sandy-brown hair complements hypnotic green eyes that focus on my mouth, and suddenly I feel nervous for a different reason.

  I release the panicky breath I’d sucked in. “Uh, yeah, that’s me. Are you covering this all day, then? Have the police confirmed other details?”

  The woman with the dog looks our way, and I’m aware that mine isn’t the only inquiring mind.

  Shouts come from the interior of the building, and Oz squints toward the noise. His gaze flits over our audience. “Just what you find on our home page,” he says, his voice raised.

  To me, he shrugs. “I’m supposed to interview the chief of police in a bit, but she keeps pushing me and the other press reps off. Come to think of it”—he clicks his pen—“you would actually be good to interview. Since you saw Four Alarm the day before the body was discovered. Did anything look unusual to you?”

  Several heads turn to us. Heat flushes my cheeks.

  “Ah, no. Nothing did. Everything I saw you now have in the photos that Pauline bought. If she needs anything else, she knows how to contact me.” Spinning on my heel, I walk toward the corner, the teenagers, and Gia. Oz’s curious stare seems to drill into my back, and I hurry away from the throng of law enforcement and the possibility of actually being recognized, of being called a different name than Claire.

  Gia is gesturing to a guy facing away from me. Her eyes widen; then she scans the sidewalk and the clumps of police in front of the brewery. She says something, but the guy raises his arms. Sunlight glints off metal. A sh
ot rings out, scattering homeless kids and blue uniforms, and I don’t hesitate—I sprint back to my car, away from the scene. As I pass Oz, I see he’s hunched over, scribbling notes furiously, the only person not looking for cover.

  What the hell was that?

  It’s not until I arrive at the address for McHale’s Brewery that I catch my breath. My hands have relaxed enough that the color is returning to my knuckles, but I still can’t grasp what I just witnessed. Why did that boy fire a gun? Was it something Gia said?

  I land a spot directly out front. McHale’s has the typical Pearl-area warehouse exterior, and reviews I found online highlight its twenty specialty beers. Adrenaline hums through my limbs as I cross the street toward the first location on my list that might fit the note’s clue regarding twenty beers. All named for leaders.

  The closer I get, the more anxious I become, until I’m at the curb and able to read the sign in the window:

  AFTER FIFTEEN YEARS OF BUSINESS, MCHALE’S SADLY

  CLOSES ITS DOORS.

  A laminate banner above the glass entryway announces that Tia’s Taqueria will open for business in a month. Frustration punts the hope in my chest: this can’t be the author’s intended location.

  I face my car, debating my next move.

  Across the street, someone is staring at me. A man, wrapped in a quilt and wearing swim trunks that reach his knees. We lock eyes. Another moment passes; then he picks up a reusable shopping bag stuffed with clothing and walks to the corner, turning out of sight.

  Five

  As a child, post-captivity, I was always aware that we were different. We didn’t have a father or a regular nuclear family—we had all the game pieces, but they were spread out. Chet was in prison; Rosemary raised Lily and me after Lily’s mother, Bethel, died in the basement; Jenessa was raised by her mother in the Portland metro area. We were like cousins who saw each other a few times a year, and the ache of not growing up with both my sisters began to weigh on me after only a few months.

  Kids in school, once they learned about our sordid past, were merciless. They teased me, calling me Bad Blood, and pinched Lily whenever a teacher wasn’t watching. But I was. Whenever I could get away with it, I made sure to kick those brats in the shin or groin, and I expertly applied burns by gripping their small arms and twisting my hands in opposite directions. I learned at a young age that people assumed the worst of us, due to our origins; I learned to leverage that fear, if that meant safety for the ones I loved.

  Too rattled by the day’s events and the closure of McHale’s, I headed home to the safety of my locked door without visiting other breweries. This morning, sunshine streams through the blinds of my east-facing windows. Mrs. Henley’s dog paws around the corporate flower beds outside, snorting as he goes. Rumpus lost a nasal passage to cancer, leaving him with the phantom smell of a treat always just out of reach. He pads insistently around the pansies every morning until Mrs. Henley tugs him away. I’ve taken to leaving him cooked chicken among the flower roots.

  Although I only recently moved in, I’ve tried my best to make this studio feel like home—maybe not my home but, rather, a safe space. From my love seat, the framed photos I’ve kept over the years perch on a shoe-rack-turned-display-shelf: an image from my hometown, of Arch’s downtown shopping scene, which always struck me as charmingly normal; a photo of half-drunk coffee cups on a table stained with brown rings; and a shot of the treetops lining the University of Oregon campus, a scene both eerie and tantalizing, suggestive of being unmoored, running loose in this world. An art gallery owner I was trying to sell prints to commented that each image suggested a fascination with the mundane. He didn’t buy any. No doubt he smelled my desperation for both validation and money.

  The only nonphoto in my collection is a framed drawing Jenessa sent to me when we were nine years old of a flower in bloom. Beneath its pretty pink-and-yellow petals and its single green leaf, she wrote in messy, little-kid handwriting, Miss you, kiss you, see you soon!

  On the shelf beneath the frames sits a cardboard box. Scribbled on the side are the words Wasted $50. Don’t be this dumb again. I kept three dozen of the business cards—out of nostalgia? Fear that someone else might find them and plaster them all over the internet? I’d ordered them out of a foolish desire to advertise my photography business around the college town. Foolish, because within a week of my distributing them to coffee shops in the area, a man with a full gray beard began showing up to the diner I worked at. When he sat at my table and addressed me as Missy, my terror made delight stretch his lined features. He said he’d researched family names on Rosemary’s side—Lou seemed as good as any—and found the website I had created. Said he helped people find their family members on lineage platforms and called himself an adoption angel. He’d used a computer program to age me from a photo that was published when I was seven. More importantly, he said, I carried myself like a dog that had been kicked too many times—probably why I sympathize with Rumpus so well.

  After dumping lukewarm coffee—the diner’s specialty—on him, I quit my job. I knew then that any paper trail gave people like him the power to out me, to expose me in record time as Missy Mo, one of three children born of false imprisonment. I shut down the website immediately. Then I returned to each of the coffee shops and dining halls, gathered what was left of the business cards, and threw them into a box. It took me another year to save up enough money to move to Portland, but I knew if the adoption angel could find me, more like him would follow.

  Scrolling through the internet on my laptop, I see that other news outlets seem to have caught up to the Post. KGTV 8’s and the Portland Metro Times’s websites dedicate the most space to details of the Four Alarm death, with the Portland Post now coming in third.

  According to the Times, the body was discovered not in the basement but in an adjacent tunnel. The infamous Portland Shanghai Tunnels, once thought to be used to kidnap men at the turn of the twentieth century and force them into labor aboard steamer ships, lie about a mile east; the Times suggests this tunnel beside the brewery may be a forgotten passage.

  Jesus. Shanghai Tunnels?

  The victim’s identity has been confirmed, but family is still being notified. The cause of death has been preliminarily called a homicide, due to the restraints found near the body. This woman was held against her will, then left to die—or killed—in the darkness belowground. I sit, glued to my computer screen, struck by the similarity of her end to my beginning.

  At the same time, without more details, it’s hard to speculate how her death relates to the note I received. Although she was killed around the time I took photos of Petey the Penguin, and the note suggests that her death is the first of at least two, the author doesn’t explicitly claim responsibility.

  A slow curl of tension tightens my stomach. Memories of scratchy blankets and the white noise of a television tiptoe around the edge of my senses. Blurry happiness slides forward to wrestle with vibrating fear.

  I slam my laptop shut. I can’t do this. I can’t presume we’re to blame—I’m to blame, somehow—for this woman’s death. I can’t create some relationship to this victim where there’s none. If the killer is the author of the note, it’s coincidence he saw me taking photos and recognized me.

  My phone buzzes with an unknown number. I let it ring another three times before I hit “Accept.” “Hello?”

  “Claire, it’s Pauline Adebayo of the Portland Post. Do you have any free time today? We need new staff portraits, and I was hoping you could assist.”

  “Uh, yeah. Sure, I’m free,” I reply, eyeing my framed photo of the treetops. I agree to meet at the office in an hour, then hang up and grab my keys.

  Monday morning traffic puts yesterday’s to shame, and I sorely underestimate the drive time. When I finally find a spot on the street about six blocks over from the Post’s building, I make a mental note to research nearby parking garages.

  The ground floor is crammed with people when I walk in—“M
ostly interns,” Pauline says, weaving through the room—and the low current of laughter and phone calls feels like a college dorm hall, from what I’ve seen in movies. As we approach the stairwell, we pass desks that were empty on the weekend, now occupied by people, stacks of folders and paper, and breakfast food wrappers.

  “Hey, Claire,” a voice calls. Oz Trainor waves at me from beside two young women. His smile is relaxed as his eyes trail down my neck and chest. “Good to see you again.”

  I lift a hand in return, then follow Pauline up the stairs.

  “So the digital marketing team has an influx of new hires, and they all need headshots for our internal website. That is your specialty, right? Headshots?” she pauses on a step to ask.

  “I do a little of everything,” I lie.

  “Even better.” She turns onto the second-floor landing and down a hallway lined with framed newspaper pages. At the end, we continue straight into a conference room. A long white table occupies half of it, while tall bookcases filled with binders, videocassettes, and books take up the rest of the space. A woman with a topknot and natural curls sits in a deep armchair near the mini library.

  “Claire, meet Amanda, our marketing director. If you could start with her, she’ll send in the next person to be photographed until we get the whole team’s gallery completed. I’m looking for business casual, not too stuffy. I don’t think it should take more than a couple of hours or so, and I’ll pay you five dollars per portrait. I want some light retouching to make everyone look their best. Sound good?”

  This new rate is still not ideal, because retouching can be painstaking work if you’re a perfectionist like I am, but I don’t have any bargaining power. Hopefully it’s enough to cover my apartment company’s late fee. “Yeah, that’s fine. Thanks again for thinking of me.”