Lies We Bury

by Elle Marr

  A cough breaks through my make-believe. The man is waking up. Moving side to side against the ropes. Loosening around his hands and even more around his feet.

  I tie the three strips together tuck the knot at my feet and start braiding. Over under. Over under. Over under.

  I think back to the Petey the Penguin episode and how it ended. Bruno the Polar Bear got loose and he and Petey became friends. But that won’t happen here. Petey was too nice.

  Staring at the man as he jerks this way and that I know the truth.

  I’m not a nice little girl.

  Twenty-Six

  Four Alarm appears more depressed in the evening shadows, and I hardly recognize it from when I was last here. It’s been a week since the body was discovered. The police officers loitering out front are long gone.

  The marketing director from the Post whose headshot I took said the first person to report a crime often has more to do with it than they let on. What if it’s the same thing for the first location of a crime?

  A breeze skates across my neck as I stand before the white writing on the window. I check beside me, scan the parked cars, then look toward the corner of the street where it shifts into residential housing.

  “Claire?” Topher stares at me from the doorframe. His black hair flops over and across wide-set brown eyes. An apron reaches his knees.

  “Hey. Thanks for the quick text reply.” I follow him inside.

  “Of course. Happy to help. Watch your step; I can’t find the Wet Floor cone.” He points down at the glossy checkered tile. “No one else wanted to come out tonight? Or is the night shift pretty laid-back?”

  “Busy day at the station. No one else was free.”

  He leads me through the dark hallway. Customers lounge in leather booths and on barstools, looking out the window onto the darkened street.

  In an itch of paranoia, I turn to the glass and catch a flick of long black hair disappearing from view.

  Karin? Has she been following me? Since I went to see Chet in prison or before?

  “Claire? We need to move if you want to go down again. I got a table waiting for fresh glasses.” Topher peers into the restaurant dining area, looking for someone. “My manager’s on break, but I can let her know you’re here if you need anything. Detective—what was your last name again?”

  “No, that’s fine. No need to bother her. There’s desk work waiting for me back at the office. I’ll be quick.” I follow him forward, brainstorming more mundane work phrases to whip out, if needed.

  In the cellar, we pass boxes of cutlery, and Topher moves into the opening where the body of the exotic dancer was found. We step over yellow crime scene tape fallen to the ground. The chains have been removed from the wall, and all that remains is a stain on the earth where the victim’s blood likely pooled for hours before she was discovered.

  “Is there anything I can help you with?” Topher asks, ever the good citizen. His eyes shift nervously from my face to my camera case like it might contain a gun. Little does he know I got rid of my gun before moving here. I didn’t like the temptation so close and near my open vodka bottles.

  I examine the space, as though weighing his offer. The construction lamps are already lit. “If I could just have a few minutes here, I’ll come back up and let you know when I’m through.”

  Topher nods, then returns to the cellar opening. If he believes that I’m with the police—and is more compliant as a result—all the better.

  Alone with my thoughts, the same creeping fear as the first time spools down my back. Chet’s basement compound was roomy for most of my childhood. It was only when we turned six or seven, when Lily was becoming more active and Rosemary more unstable, kicking things and drifting into hours of listless depression, that the space began to feel confined. After we got out, I realized that the cereal we had eaten for breakfast every morning tasted sweeter than the store brand we bought, and that the store brand gave me a sugar high whenever I consumed it—the opposite of my experience down below. Sometime after high school, I read about lithium and the sedating effects it can have on children in small doses—as well as its possible long-term damaging health effects. I resented that Rosemary had willfully medicated us, may have stunted Lily’s brain development and exacerbated my depression, even knowing it was a preemptive strategy to keep us all sane down there.

  Rustling comes from farther in the tunnels. Movement. Footsteps. Shuffling forward. Sweat breaks across my chest. The hair on my forearms rises, and I remember that I’m not a police officer, and I brought only pepper spray. “Who’s there?” I call out. “Portland police!”

  The movement stops. Then starts again, shuffling, moving forward, coming closer but still outside the sphere of light emanating from the construction lamp.

  A rat emerges, trailing a plastic grocery bag caught on its crooked tail. It makes a wide arc around me before zeroing in on the exit into the restaurant.

  I gasp out several expletives and clutch my chest. All this slinking around can’t be good for my health.

  Last night, I dreamed of the day Mama Bethel shared that she was going to have a baby—Lily. I was so excited, I remember jumping up and down, despite the looks of anxiety that flashed across all three women’s faces. An early memory, from when I was three or so, it proves that things weren’t completely awful for us. What else does Shia know that I’m unaware of?

  Without the rat’s plastic shuffle, the space feels cavernous, empty, and full of secrets. I take a step backward and land in the brown circle of bloodstain. In a snap of memory, I recall a similar dark stain that we all avoided on the mattress—each of us, except for Lily, because it was hers. The only tangible item she had of her mother, the stain containing the fluids that accompanied her birth.

  I creep forward, bending my head slightly beneath the low dirt roof, farther than I saw the police standing when I poked my head into this passageway against Sergeant Peugeot’s instructions. The dry-goods cellar and orbs of safety become smaller until my cell phone’s flashlight is the only source of light. I hold my breath. Remind myself that I can get out, back up to fresh air and the surface as soon as I want. My eyes adjust to the semidarkness, and bleary shapes become recognizable.

  Once, Rosemary refused to succumb to one of Chet’s visits, and the next day he turned off the electricity to the basement. It was February. We passed the time by singing songs, making up rhymes, and huddling together for warmth until three days later when the heater kicked back on. I remember, when the batteries on our light-up toys gave out, the darkness was all-consuming. Rosemary stopped talking the last day.

  The pathways keep going to the right, curving under the portion of Northwest that was forgotten about. Shovels and police tape are piled together to the side, along with handheld machines, maybe depth gauges. A mound of discarded rocks lies farther ahead.

  Except they’re too smooth to be rocks. There’s a plastic sheet over them, or a tarp.

  Inching closer, I wave my phone across the mass, and a sharp patch of white stands stark against the black earth. A hand protruding from the lump.

  I stumble backward, stifling the cry that bursts from my mouth. A body. A fourth one.

  But there were no new notes today, none on my car or shoved under my door or written on my bathroom mirror, so how could this be happening? Is the killer nearby, still prepping the scene?

  I whirl to shine my phone behind me, back toward the brewery. Nothing but semilit ground.

  Slowly, I turn toward the body. And listen. Water drips from somewhere in the distance. I’m at least a city block away from the brewery, underground. The only breathing I can discern is my own.

  Before I think better of it, I raise my camera to what I thought was a pile of rocks and hit the shutter button. Twice. Three times. A fourth from a higher angle.

  Another patch of white reflects the camera’s flash. A business card.

  I inch closer to the body, ready to recoil at the slightest movement. Nudging the rect
angular paper out from under the arm with my shoe, being careful not to touch it directly, I bring my cell phone’s flashlight down low and read the two lines of text I spent hours crafting: CL PHOTOGRAPHY. HEADSHOTS. SENIOR PORTRAITS. GRADUATIONS. The business card that I used for all of three weeks before I regretted creating the paper trail.

  Scratching reaches my ears. Shuffling. Footsteps.

  I grab the card, then turn and sprint to the cellar opening, panic pushing me harder and faster away from the dark. Launching myself up the stairs and into the restaurant, I pause to listen for whether anyone is pursuing me, and my heartbeat fills my ear canals. I cast an eye for the rat, but it’s nowhere in sight. Long gone, as I should be.

  Topher’s voice sounds from somewhere deeper within the restaurant. Instead of seeking him out, I walk toward the front entry as if I were simply a customer who’s finished downing my evening beer. A figure blocks the exit. Oz.

  “Claire. I thought you were going home.”

  I stare at him, unsure of how this conversation is supposed to go. Unsure of anything after what I just discovered. There’s a fourth body, a business card I made and scattered around a college town—accessible to anyone who visited coffee shops and student dining halls—wedged underneath. The killer has always been one step ahead of me. Returning to a former location, without notifying me, to leave another item from my past.

  Oz’s features blur in my vision. He waves a hand in front of my face, peers at me with more than concern after I ditched him to return to this crime scene. “What is going on? I received an anonymous tweet telling me to come here.”

  My muscles clench, preparing to run. Whoever tweeted Oz wanted him to find me here, emerging from below—or simply to find the body and my card together. It’s Oz’s job to sniff out the truth and alert the public, the authorities, about it.

  “I got to go. I just remembered, I have to—” I push past him, then slip on the tile and land hard on my shoulder. The breath gets knocked out of me, and my world becomes the rotating ceiling fan above.

  “Whoa, are you okay? Claire? You all right? Man, the floor is all wet. Where the hell is a caution sign?”

  Animal noises struggle from my throat. I gasp for air but can’t move, can’t breathe.

  “Oh, hell. Claire, you’re okay. Listen, you’re going to be fine. The wind. You had the wind knocked out of you. Breathe.”

  Thanks, genius. I’ll try that. The fan’s blades rotate in quick turns, mesmerizing to watch from the cold tile that Topher warned me about. Where is Topher?

  But I didn’t yell—didn’t scream. I only fell like deadweight. Like the dead body down in the cellar.

  I struggle to my elbows, and a sharp pain shoots down my right side where I landed, sending spots through my vision all over again. Fuck. The inhale I manage to take feels like sucking air through a straw. After another meager effort, the animal noises subside and I’m able to breathe.

  “Uh. Claire? Your stuff scattered everywhere. I tried to wipe your things off.” Oz’s voice is flat, strained, and I lift my eyes to his frightened expression. In his right hand, he holds my driver’s license and a dish towel. In his left, he holds my camera. Panic tightens my chest—terror—separate from the spill I just took.

  “Your ID says ‘Marissa Claire Lou,’” he continues. “You’ve been using your middle name. That much I can understand if you don’t like Marissa. But what is this?” He holds up my camera, turning the square display to face me. The last photo I took glows on the screen: a pale, prostrate body lying beneath a plastic tarp.

  “What the hell is this?” he whispers.

  I grab my camera and my ID from him. “It’s not what it looks like.”

  “What does it look like, Claire—or Marissa? I’m curious to know.”

  I sling the camera strap around my neck, avoiding his eyes while I hoist my messenger bag onto my good shoulder. But the engraved label—MCM—catches his eye.

  Understanding blanches his skin. “Marissa Claire Mo. You’re Chet Granger’s daughter. Each of the details from the Granger incident report—the penguin . . . the bracelet you were wearing . . . the baby blanket—showed up near these victims. You’re the murderer.” He takes a step backward. “Our killer is a woman, after all.”

  I reach out a hand. “No, Oz, that’s not—”

  “Stay away from me!” he yells.

  A pair of men at a table stops their conversation and turns toward the noise. Topher raises his head from behind the bar.

  I run.

  Bursting through the front doors, I don’t slow down until I’m a block away at the corner. Fear strangles my breath, pulsating from every pore, as I look behind me. Oz stands outside the brewery entrance, a hundred yards off. Instead of shock knitting his features, his face is calm, relaxed. Determined. As if he’s already decided what he must do next.

  Twenty-Seven

  In the fifth grade, I was surprised to learn no one really knows why we dream. We theorize that dreams help us work through problems from our waking hours and that dreams help us to store memories—but as my teacher then said, science doesn’t yet know. I left school that day feeling certain that I did. Dreams were meant to store memories. It was for that reason that I embarked on a sleep strike. Every six months or so, I would dream for several nights in a row that I was back in the basement. I thought if I could stop sleeping, I would interrupt that storage cycle and hopefully remove those memories altogether.

  I succeeded in staying awake for three days. I dozed off a few times, but I woke myself up whenever the dreams started.

  The next six months came and went with no basement dreams, and I was ecstatic. Empowered and overjoyed. I thought I had excised those bastard nightmares from my mind, and I told my teacher so.

  Two years went by before they resumed. The year I turned twelve, I stole my first pack of cigarettes.

  After I left Oz staring at me from the doorway of Four Alarm, I dreamed I was running back and forth, touching first one wall of Chet’s basement, then the other, increasingly frantic, like a hamster in a cage. I knew I wasn’t ever leaving again, and the knowledge fueled my hysteria. When I lifted my hands in the dream, thick red liquid coated my palms, sticky and pungent—blood, dripping in fat drops to the concrete floor. I followed their trail and found the drops formed a pool in which the fourth body lay wrapped in rope made of bedsheets.

  Lately, memories or images I’d suppressed from childhood seem to blend with my imagination and create that same sense again—that I’ll never get out of the basement. Never be anything but trapped.

  Seated at our usual table in Ezra’s Brewery, Shia makes notes in that bound journal of his. When he spots me, his mouth shifts into a frown. “Almost thought you wouldn’t show. You’re late.”

  “I’m here. My emotional baggage just slowed me down today.” I slide into a tall bar-height chair. Shia’s head remains bent over a page, but his expression brightens. I rub my shoulder and wince from the deep-purple bruise that was noticeable in the bathroom mirror this morning.

  Trying to stop the killer from exposing me has only led me to spending more time with Oz and Topher Cho, the combination of which has outed me in record time. Is that what the intruder’s message in my apartment was referencing? It’s time to come clean about my family history, to the police department, to the Portland Post?

  I packed a suitcase last night. Debated leaving town at five in the morning. The same doubts I’ve had since discovering the windshield note, however, stopped me: What would I do? Where would I go and with what money? With no attractive answers, I woke up, showered on autopilot, then drove here in a daze.

  My stomach turns like I might be sick. When I focus on Shia’s face again, he’s already watching me. “Should we get started?”

  I flag down a server and order a plate of tater tots, this establishment’s prime offering after beer. The restaurant side is packed with patrons today, all of whom seem to be on their cell phones. Noise carries from the brewery si
de of the building—the usual raucous shouts. “What do you want to discuss?”

  Shia leans forward and hugs his elbows. “I didn’t think you’d show. Not because you were late. But because of . . . today.”

  I place my hands flat on the table and try not to look like I’m craving an aspirin. The lacquered wood tabletop is cool, soothing against my skin. “What do you mean?”

  “Claire, look around you. You think this many people normally come to a brewery this early on a Monday? What do you think they’re reading on their phones or watching on the TVs right now? What could be so important to them today—and to you?”

  The chill returns. It skates across the back of my neck, gliding beneath my ponytail, like a rope. The shouts from the bar seem to shift and morph into clear words that make me wish I’d ordered whiskey instead of tots.

  Chet.

  Chet Granger.

  Chet Granger is free.

  Shia dips his head, his eyes never breaking from mine. “That’s right, Claire. What day is it?”

  I swallow hard, no longer sure how I made it out of bed at all. “Monday. The day of Chet’s parole.”

  “Correct,” Shia murmurs.

  I gasp—suddenly feeling like I’ve hit the tile floor again, the wind gone from my chest. “What’s happening? What is everyone watching?”

  Shia’s hand touches mine, but I focus on the scratches carved into the tabletop.

  “It’s only news coverage at this point. Local stations have been camped out in front of the prison since six this morning. Nothing much has happened, so it’s mostly been weather reports. ‘Sunny skies the day that Chet Granger is released.’ Did you really forget about it?”

  The basket of tots arrives, and I grab a handful and swallow, barely chewing. Hunger and anxiety meld together like ravenous mice in my belly. “No. Yes. I don’t know. Do we know if he’s already out or still signing paperwork or whatever?”