Lies We Bury

by Elle Marr

  I move through a narrow hallway to pass a butler’s pantry filled with bottles of wine and hard liquor. The sitting room mirrors the kitchen, with everything in order. Above a fireplace—itself clean of soot or wood tinder—sits a mounted flat-screen television, while magazines rest in a stack on a lacquered coffee table. A glass of water occupies a marble coaster. Condensation drips from the glass in the afternoon humidity, a twin to the bead of sweat gliding down my back. A glistening umbrella sits in a bucket beside the front door. She must have just returned home.

  Water rushes from down the hall as a toilet flushes. I whirl toward the sound, toward the rooms, and cast around for something sharp. The fireplace poker. I seize it, gearing myself up to confront Nora, to question her. To reveal I know she’s tried to frame me for murders she’s orchestrated, or committed with Shia, as payback for my role in how her life with Jenessa turned out. I’ll demand she turn herself in.

  I whip out my phone and prepare to call the cops when a door opens.

  Chet steps from the hallway bathroom. He wipes his hands on his jeans, then notices me standing frozen in the front room. A smile spreads across his wrinkled features, revealing yellow teeth.

  “Marissa. Just the person I wanted to see next.”

  Thirty

  THEN

  The man’s hair is thin up close. It’s straight and brown but shorter on the top of his head. I’ve never seen the top of his head before. Little black circles stick out of his face, his eyeballs. They remind me of a doll’s because they roll back then forward then back. He’s quiet for a minute. His cheek was red earlier but now it’s purply. I go to work.

  I creep up from the wall with my new braided rope wrapped around my arm. Grab the bit of rope that hangs from his feet. He’s still tied up like a piggy but his feet and hands are farther apart. I take the dangly rope and my new rope and tie them together in a triple knot. The best kind. Then make a figure eight, over one foot then the other foot, one foot then the other foot. Then I go hands. One hand then the other hand. Over under.

  Then I crisscross back again, making sure to wrap around Mama Rosemary’s rope for extra Bruno the Polar Bear strength. I sit down on the floor and pull tight.

  When I’m all done feet and hands are touching and I’m all hot. My nightgown makes my underarms sticky.

  I stand up proud of myself and think how proud Mama Rosemary will be.

  My Petey the Penguin toy sits in my corner. Can’t leave Petey. I grab his arm—the pasta-stained one—and hug him tight then start toward the stairs. I stay away from the stairs ever since Twin fell and hurt her knee but this time I’m going up up up them.

  The man moves reaches for me grabs my ponytail and I jump away but trip and fall flat on the floor and pain all over my ankle. He falls on his side still piggy-tied and I feel his fingers grabbing pulling on my arm to keep me close but I scratch kick move away from him and those hands. I press against the wall and watch his fingers stretch and claw reaching for me still.

  I breathe heavy hard and fast. The man is quiet facing the Murphy bed now. His fingers stop moving.

  My ankle hurts. I try standing but it hurts too much. It’s round now like a ball. Red and bumping like when my head hurts after too much Lith-yum.

  The door is open just above the top of the stairs but there’s too many steps. I count them. Eight steps.

  I try standing again and this time I start to cry because it hurts so bad.

  Mama Rosemary will be outside with police soon and I can’t go to her.

  Hot tears fall down my cheeks but I try not to make a sound. The man’s fingers are moving, trying to shake off the ropes but I tied them too tight. I’m proud again then his feet start moving. He starts kicking. Kicking kicking and I get nervous. Worried that he will get free.

  Then he goes still.

  After a while, I get tired. Bored. I wish Mama Rosemary had turned the television on before she left. My ankle keeps going bump bump and it’s even bigger now. More tears fall down my face and wet my nightgown.

  I wonder where they are. Mama and my sisters. I miss them. But I know they’ll come back for me. And we can be a family living together. I hope we’ll share a bed like we do here and not like siblings do on television. I’ll be too cold if we sleep separate.

  The man looks like he’s sleeping again. He hasn’t moved in three “Row Row Row Your Boat”s that I sang in my head quiet.

  I get sleepy, too. I slide under the bathtub just in case he wakes up before me or he’s a liar and only pretending to be asleep. My foot pushes a bunch of puzzle pieces out of the way.

  I close my eyes and lay my head on my arms. I prop up my ankle on my other foot. It feels a little better but not so much.

  I miss Mama and Twin and Sweet Lily and wish they’d come back already. I close my eyes because I’m tired.

  I start to dream of running with my sisters and Mama making pasta in the kitchen. Then someone calls my name and my head hits something hard. The bathtub. New tears come because my head hurts just like when I burned my arm on the stove. I slide out from under the bathtub and rub my hair then push back quick against the wall far away.

  The man is still on his tummy. His head flipped over and he’s watching me now. He smiles. He is a liar.

  “That is your name, isn’t it?” he says. “Why don’t you untie me, sweetheart? I’ll get you more candy. You like Mars Bars, right?”

  I don’t answer him. Instead I cradle my ankle and think about the way Mama Rosemary smells. How warm her arms are.

  I feel so sleepy and the man looks so awake.

  Mama Rosemary better hurry back soon I don’t know how much longer I can stay awake.

  I touch my head again where it hurts most. Something wet. I pull back quick and blood is on my fingers. When I look up, the man sees, too.

  He smiles.

  Thirty-One

  Chet and I stand unspeaking, eyeing each other across the neatly furnished sitting room. Nothing decorates the walls apart from a shelf displaying trinkets from another era. Miniature Russian dolls line up in a row beside a lone wine cork. From down the hall, a buzzer sounds; Nora must be doing laundry.

  As the video clip—and the dozen user comments beneath—suggested, Chet appears rested, clean-cut. He regards me with ease now that he’s out from behind the six inches of glass in the prison visitor wing. As if he hasn’t been locked up the last twenty years for crimes so heinous, only a few twisted individuals can be considered his contemporaries. The tan leather jacket he wears fits his narrow shoulders, as if tailored to his measurements.

  With a sickening drop in my stomach, I recognize his tapering frame in my own. Whereas Rosemary’s broad shoulders balanced wide hips, I’ve always been slender to the point of androgynous. Dark eyes the same shade as mine return my stare with an unnerving ability to forgo blinking.

  “What are you doing here?” I finally ask. Gripping the fire poker tighter in my fist, I widen my stance. “Shouldn’t you and Karin be halfway to Canada by now?”

  He lifts thin eyebrows. “Isn’t it obvious? I wanted to reconnect. To see all of you. I have no intention of breaking parole, Marissa.” His tone is chastising, as though he’s deluded himself into believing he has paternal rights.

  A shiver rolls across my neck. “You don’t get to connect with any of us. You don’t get to be here,” I hiss.

  He takes a step toward me, and I step back, still wielding the poker.

  “Didn’t Karin tell you?” he begins, lifting both hands palms out. “I tried to make it clear when you came to see me. I only want some sort of relationship with you girls. It’s too late for me and Karin to have kids—she found me too late.”

  I shake my head, feeling my nerves fray, unraveling at the ends. “Bullshit. You’re a terror. A sexual predator. What are you doing here?” I repeat.

  Chet’s appearance at Nora’s home, right when I arrive, can mean only one thing. “You’re working with her, aren’t you?”

  Not Nora
and Shia. Nora and Chet.

  Chet shakes his head. “I think you’re not feeling well, Marissa. Is this stress related, from your job? For about three years I immersed myself in Buddhist philosophy, and it’s so important to—”

  He takes another step closer, and a freeze-frame image of him fills my mind, looming over me as a child with desire in his eyes. Something wild and feral in me rises and shatters my sense of calm, of safety. Being with him in a room again with no prison guards around us—and where is Nora?—saps the bravado that energized my journey from the light-rail station.

  “Stay away from me!” I slash at the air with the iron poker, and the asshole actually smiles.

  “Marissa, I’m not here to hurt you. I just want to start over with all of you and make amends for what I did.”

  “Stop calling me that.” My arm shakes beneath the poker’s weight as I keep it lifted between us. “Make amends? You can never make up for the years of agony you’ve put us all through. For what you’ve driven us to.” Remembering the look in his eye—“You tried to . . . with me, you wanted to . . .”

  But the memory shifts and disappears, and I can’t be sure what to say.

  “You’re sick. I don’t believe any of this rehabilitated crap. And now you’re here to complete what you began with Nora while still in prison. Where is Karin? Is she hiding somewhere, waiting to jump out, too?”

  His eyes narrow to slits. “Karin is making me a welcome-home dinner. I came here alone. What do you mean when you say ‘complete what I began’?”

  “Don’t play coy, Chet. You’ve been planning this whole network of violence and pain with Nora. You guided her on how to kidnap people, how to imprison them, probably during visits to you. You are godfather to this latest act of murder in this city.”

  “I never killed anyone—”

  “You killed Mama Bethel!” I scream. My breathing comes fast and shallow. “You killed her when you left her alone to give birth in an underground hellhole. I remember how small she was, even though I was barely four years old. She was all belly—the rest of her was gaunt from malnutrition. You did that to her.”

  He pauses as though actually considering my words. “Hey, you’re right, in that I could have done more for her. In hindsight, I should have done more for her.”

  He stands taller as he talks, and I get the impression I’m witnessing some of the speech he gave to the parole examiners.

  “But I haven’t done anything to anyone in twenty years, Marissa. Think about it. How could I?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know. But your coming to Nora’s house to see her now is more than telling. Why would you both try to frame me for these murders? Why, when you keep giving me this speech that you want us to be a family?”

  Chet hesitates. “Marissa, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not trying to frame you for anything—least of all these tunnel murders that everyone’s upset over. And I didn’t come here to see Nora. I’m not allowed to contact my victims while on parole.”

  I pause. The hair on the back of my neck rises, stands on end. “If you’re not here to see Nora, who are you here for?”

  Footsteps shuffle toward us from the bedrooms. Long black hair swings forward in the hallway’s dim lighting, a curtain that covers rich, tawny skin and a blue T-shirt. The last time I saw Nora years ago, she’d chopped her straight hair to her jaw, sick to death of shampooing the “thick rug,” as she called it. The wavy curtain sways; then a gloved hand reaches back and tucks the hair behind her ear. Jenessa fills the doorway before lifting a gun.

  “Me.” She fires a shot, piercing Chet in the back, and he flies to the floor at my feet.

  Wide eyes turn up to my face, pain dilating his pupils into black spheres. With a moan, he drops his head, collapses onto the hardwood.

  Trembling, I lift my gaze to my sister’s. “Jenessa?”

  She stares at Chet, horror stretching her mouth. We look at each other, neither of us knowing what to say. Then she jerks forward, her expression wild. “Claire, you have to go. The police are looking for you. Here, take the gun for protection.” She raises it flat in her glove. “Take it.”

  I reach for it, then pause. The shot continues to ring in my ears. A pool of blood seeps from Chet’s body.

  “Take it,” she says again.

  I hesitate, conflicted. Adding my prints to a murder weapon would be a mistake on top of everything else. I wouldn’t be able to explain that away. I lift my free hand and find my fingers shaking. “Jenessa. Where is Nora?”

  She doesn’t flinch. The terror that made her cheeks taut relaxes. In a smooth, collected gesture, she resumes her grip on the gun’s handle, then points it at my heart. “Well, if you insist on staying.”

  “Nora—”

  “She’s buried. Beneath the hydrangeas out back. Take a seat, Marissa. We have a lot of ground to cover. And we can add Chet to your killing spree another way.”

  My mind races—my heart beats, cracks, whips against my chest—computing what I should have known and recognized all along. I drop the fireplace poker inside the umbrella bucket.

  My sister is the murderer. And as she trains the pistol’s barrel on my chest, I realize she’s already chosen her next victim.

  Thirty-Two

  A car alarm howls somewhere on the street, triggered by the reverb from the gunshot. My legs are frozen. Numb. I lift a finger to my cheek. Red comes away. A pool of blood stemming from Chet’s torso touches my sneaker. I blink hard, taking in the scene, expecting the edges to blur and remind me that I’m dreaming another nightmare. But everything remains crisp.

  Chet is dead—the demon who made me, in more ways than one, who kept me and my family prisoners, and who died believing he could make up for it. Somewhere not so deep inside me, gratification glimmers, content that he’ll never have the chance.

  “You weren’t supposed to come here,” Jenessa says, her tone flat.

  I take in her brittle mien, the stiff ridge of her upper lip, the gun, and don’t reply. Blood drops splatter her blue shirt, blowback from shooting Chet from behind. My own shirt feels thick, warmer than it should. I look down; the same gruesome pinwheel pattern covers my chest.

  “Sit down,” she commands.

  I step over Chet’s body in a daze, careful not to track blood in Nora’s—Jenessa’s?—house. Shock twines through my system as I pat my chest, confirm the bullet didn’t travel through Chet’s sternum and into my own.

  I stumble to a couch cushion. Slide to the back of the seat. Jenessa’s face is not one I recognize. Disgust hardens the features I always thought beautiful, if demanding.

  After a silent moment, she begins to pace. Walks from one end of the cramped room to the other, then turns and retraces her steps. Her head sways from side to side, and the long black hair she so loves swishes behind her. Back and forth. Back and forth. It’s mesmerizing. Allowing me to completely check out from this situation and the danger ready to consume me with its barbed tongue.

  She whirls to face me. “You’re not supposed to be here. Chet wasn’t supposed to be here. Did you two talk beforehand? Did you coordinate this when you visited him in prison?”

  I shake my head, my mouth still uncooperative. Light shines through closed shutter slats behind me, making the water glass gleam. A pair of steel scissors lies beyond it.

  Jenessa shifts her weight to one foot and tucks the gun beneath her elbow. “I contacted him, too, you know.”

  I don’t say anything, too scared to move.

  She nods, pursing her lips together. “Yup. I asked him for tips, tricks, ideas on how to lure people or kidnap them—all hypothetically, of course, so the warden would allow my letter to go through—but he wouldn’t give up the goods. He replied to me with some load of crap about me getting help and him seeing the error of his ways. I wanted to go to him in person, to get the real deal from him, but I couldn’t risk my plan being linked back to him. His coming here was probably an attempt to reason with me, given tha
t I used Nora’s address on the letters. I guess I won’t ever know.” She glares at his body. “He deserved to die years ago.”

  “What happened to Nora?” I clear my throat—try to work through some of the fear billowing up as bile. Make sense of everything that’s happening. My shoulder aches, and I recall how badly I slipped and fell yesterday at Four Alarm. Was that yesterday?

  “You killed Nora,” I whisper, unwanted tears filling my eyes. “Why hurt her, after everything we survived?”

  Jenessa cocks the gun, then uncocks it. Cocks, then uncocks. She stares at me, as though debating killing me right here and now. “What about me, Marissa—or Claire or whatever you’re calling yourself these days? What about what she put me through?”

  “I know she wasn’t a great mom. She had her problems, but she loved you—”

  “Do you know how I spent my tenth birthday?” Her jaw works back and forth waiting for a response. “Do you?”

  I shake my head.

  “She sent me to score drugs for her. Somewhere over the river. Antidepressants, oxycodone, and the same lithium that Chet used to give Rosemary to put in our food and keep us subdued. She said she’d developed a taste for it and couldn’t function without it. Know how I spent my eighth birthday, the year after we got out?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Alone. I was alone, as a child, in her apartment, while she blew what was left of her settlement money at the casinos.” She spits the words, glaring at me, as if I, too, am to blame. “When I got older, she made me pose for men. Take photos in lingerie and post them online in cybersex chat rooms. I was fourteen.”

  “That’s awful. I’m so sorry,” I say slowly and try to remember what I was doing then, why I didn’t help. At fourteen, I was dealing with my own self-disgust, surfing the internet archives—likely too self-involved to realize anything was wrong with her. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”