Truth Be Told Read online

  “Right,” I said, my voice shaking. “But the theory that he went into the lake on purpose to destroy evidence doesn’t hold if someone threw him in.”

  “Maybe—”

  “Ellen, no. That would have to be an incredible coincidence.” I took a deep rattling breath. “Besides, listening to Maggie talk about that night reminded me more about it. I fell asleep early that night. I have no idea whether Lanie was in bed or not. And she was so shaky when she came back upstairs. And sweaty.”

  “Breathe, Josie,” Ellen commanded. “Listen to yourself. Your sister had just seen your father murdered. Of course she was distraught. I would be more worried if she hadn’t been shaky and sweaty.”

  “But yesterday you said . . .” I trailed off, unable to vocalize the worst part, the thing that Lanie had said in the dark.

  “Oh, please,” Ellen said, waving her hand as though she could erase the suspicions she had voiced. “I was buzzed and talking out of my ass.”

  “So you think Lanie saw Warren shoot our father, and then he went to the park where Maggie saw him.”

  “I don’t know,” Ellen said, her voice softer. “Look, you know there’s no love lost between me and your sister. She’s a real asshole, and the ingratitude she’s shown my mother is disgusting. I’ll never forgive her for what she did to you. But I don’t think she’s actively evil, and she certainly wasn’t back then. If Lanie said she saw Warren, I believe her.”

  I nodded, but my chest was still tight with doubt. Before our father died, Lanie had not been the delinquent she would later become, but neither had she been infallibly truthful: she snuck readings of our mother’s diary, hid books, and stole candy. None of those minor offenses rose to the level of perjury, and certainly none of them came close to patricide, but they nevertheless contributed to my profound distrust of my sister.

  A scene from that last afternoon flashed through my mind with sudden clarity: we had just finished the first set of tennis, and Lanie and I sat panting on the side of the court while our father ran around the fence to collect a stray ball. His cell phone rang in his gym bag, and Lanie reached for it, suggesting it might be our mother. When she looked at the caller ID, her face changed.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “No one,” she said, powering down the phone and burying it at the bottom of the bag.

  When our father had come jogging up to us with the errant tennis balls, the smile that Lanie had given him had been cold and mean. She hadn’t mentioned his ringing phone, and I understood from her demeanor that I was not to bring it up, either.

  Could the caller have been Melanie? Could Lanie have known about our father’s affair? Could she have decided to take matters into her own hands?

  • • •

  The thought that Lanie might have killed our father was too horrible for me to entertain, and so I raced to a more comfortable conclusion: Maggie Kallas was lying. I didn’t know why—could someone be paying her?—but I didn’t care. If Maggie was lying, that meant my sister wasn’t. I almost regretted not agreeing to give Poppy Parnell a quote; maybe she would have let me talk directly to Maggie.

  An online search turned up women named Margaret Kallas living in Omaha, Portland, Charleston, Phoenix, and somewhere called Telephone, Texas. Uncertain which (if any) she was, I snagged Ellen’s phone and combed through her Facebook friends. Sure enough, Maggie Kallas was listed, and, in an unexpected boon, Maggie’s number was listed on her profile. I jotted down the number and replaced Ellen’s phone where I found it.

  Later, I hid in the garage and dialed Maggie’s number. I held my breath as the phone rang, nearly choking when she answered.

  “Is this Maggie Kallas?” I asked, even though I recognized her voice from the podcast.

  “It is. Who’s this, please?”

  “This is Josie Buhrman,” I began.

  “How did you get this number?” she demanded, her cordial demeanor vanishing.

  Panicked that she would hang up before I had a chance to learn anything, I blurted, “Are you lying about seeing Warren Cave?”

  All I heard was the subtle click of the call disconnecting. When I tried to call back, the phone rang once and then diverted to voicemail. As I called again and again without success, I wondered what it meant: Was she avoiding me because she was lying? Or just avoiding me because she worried I would accuse her of such? How would I know if she wouldn’t talk to me?

  • • •

  For our last night in Elm Park, Caleb suggested taking Aunt A (and, by default, Ellen) out to dinner. We skipped Ray’s Bistro in favor of one of the self-consciously hip restaurants that recently popped up near campus. These new additions made me smile, remembering how my father used to theatrically moan there was nowhere to get a decent meal on campus. The particular restaurant we visited was a farm-to-table outfit that called itself The Three Sisters and featured murals of the three sisters themselves (squash, corn, and bean) created by local artists. With its herb-heavy cocktail list and water glasses made from repurposed bottles, it would blend seamlessly into our block back in Brooklyn. When I mentioned that, Aunt A surprised me by saying she would love to visit us. She had never expressed interest in New York before—which was just as well, considering the lies I had told Caleb about her—and I was pleased to see Caleb encourage her visit, taking a pen to a paper cocktail napkin and beginning a list of sights she might be interested in.

  The four of us had such a nice dinner that by the time our waiter, a college-aged kid with the beard of a lumberjack, set the letterpress dessert menu on the table, I had almost forgotten that I had ever heard of Poppy Parnell.

  “What do you think, ladies?” Caleb asked with a grin. “Dessert?”

  “None for me,” Ellen said, smiling daintily as she pushed the menu away.

  “Well, I for one could use some indulgence,” Aunt A said.

  “What do you recommend?” I asked the waiter as I glanced down at the selections.

  I froze.

  “My personal favorite is the brown-butter blondie served with vanilla bean ice cream and a cinnamon-chocolate drizzle,” the waiter was saying, but all I could see was the first item on the menu, something called “Ma’s Chocolate Cupcake.” My stomach soured; an unexplainable sense of déjà vu disoriented me.

  “Jo?” Caleb asked. “Are you okay?”

  Ma’s Chocolate Cupcake.

  Why was that dessert so unnerving?

  Ma’s Chocolate Cupcake. Ma’s Chocolate Cupcake.

  A fragment of something flashed across my mind, the same memory that had nagged at me when Adam had mentioned Lanie baking all of those cupcakes. Only suddenly it crystallized and became clear. My stomach flipped, and I pressed a hand to my mouth.

  “The cupcake,” our waiter continued, oblivious, “is also very special.”

  That cupcake was special.

  Abruptly, I pushed myself away from the table, rattling the funky water glasses and startling not only my family and our waiter, but also the other tables surrounding us. I rushed to the dimly lit restroom, thanked my lucky stars that it was a single stall and that it was unoccupied, and proceeded to gag up my $30 piece of fish.

  I remembered the day of the cupcakes.

  The summer I was fifteen, I had a nasty case of the stomach flu. After three straight days of vomiting, I awoke from an afternoon nap feeling slightly better and also ravenous, having eaten nothing for the last fifty hours. I pushed myself out of bed and weakly made my way downstairs.

  There were cupcakes on the table: three of them decorated with small pink flowers on one plate, a larger cupcake with red rosettes resting apart on a blue china plate. The chocolate frosting glistened, tempting me. Too hungry to resist, I grabbed the largest cupcake and took a huge bite.

  As I chewed, I heard the back door open and my mother and Lanie enter the house. I froze. My desperate hunger subsiding, guilt surfaced. Our mother was a frequent baker, but she had little patience for decorating cupcakes unless there was a specifi
c reason. More likely than not, the cupcakes had been destined for an event at my father’s school, or some celebration my mother had been planning. At that point, however, there was no way for me to disguise my bite marks, and so I settled for destroying the evidence and crammed another huge bite in my mouth.

  My mother entered the dining room with a vase full of freshly cut flowers and stopped in her tracks when she saw me.

  “Josie! You’re up!”

  I nodded, chewing furiously while I hid the remainder of the cupcake behind my back.

  She blinked. Her eyes jumped to the empty plate and then back to me.

  “Did you take that cupcake?” she asked, her voice high and thin, a telltale sign that she was irritable.

  Ashamed, I produced the rest of the cupcake. Still chewing, I mumbled, “I’m sorry.”

  She dropped the vase on the ground and flew at me, one hand yanking open my jaw and the fingers from her other hand digging in my mouth, pulling masticated bits of cupcake out and flinging them on the ground.

  “That cupcake was special!” she barked. “It was for your father for our anniversary. Can’t you see that? You stupid, selfish girl!”

  “You’re hurting me!” I cried, trying to twist out of her grasp. “I’m sorry. Please stop!”

  “You’ve ruined everything,” she insisted, readjusting so that my neck was lodged in the crook of her elbow, her fingers still in my mouth, choking me. Tears streamed down my face as she continued. “This was supposed to be special, and you ruined it. Everything is ruined.”

  “Mom!” Lanie screamed from the doorway. “Stop!”

  My sister’s voice seemed to bring our mother back to reality, and she immediately loosened her grasp on me. I fell to the ground, choking and gasping. Lanie ran to fetch me a glass of water, but our mother simply began picking up the flowers that had scattered when the vase had dropped. In the end, I learned my lesson: I should have eased my way back into solid foods, and by the time I had returned to my room, I felt ill once more. It was two more days before I could consume anything other than clear liquids.

  Wiping my mouth in the Three Sisters restroom, I stared hard into the mirror. My mother’s dark hair and pale blue eyes stared back at me. The physical resemblance to our mother was uncanny; what else might we have inherited from her? I thought of Lanie throwing the pitcher, her eyes wild and unfocused. Was there something more sinister lurking beneath the surface?

  • • •

  Later that night, I was startled awake by my buzzing phone. 2:32 glowed on the clock radio; Caleb groaned in his sleep. I had cleaned myself up at the restaurant and, after telling everyone I was fine despite the memory now pulsing insistently in my brain, we’d driven home and fallen right into bed.

  “Hello?” I whispered into the phone.

  “Josie?” Lanie’s voice sounded muted and far away. “Are you sleeping?”

  I had forgotten how vulnerable my sister could sound in the predawn hours. Two o’clock had always been her witching hour, when she would whisper across the gap between our beds how much she missed our father, our mother, our bond, our life. The first few such confessionals had left me hopeful, thinking she was returning to the sister I had once known and loved. But then, as always, morning came and she once again armored herself with black clothing, blacker eyeliner, and bad attitude.

  “Lanie? What is it?”

  “First the pearls. Does that mean anything to you?”

  The disjointed phrase and the faint hint of a slur harkened back to those earlier calls and suggested she was not entirely sober. “Have you been drinking?”

  “I can’t sleep. That phrase is stuck in my head, and I can’t remember where it came from. First the pearls. I’m associating it with Mom, but I can’t remember when or where she might’ve said it.”

  “If she said it at all.”

  “Right. If she said it at all.” Lanie sighed in frustration. “I feel like it’s right there, just out of reach. Every time I’m about to get my hands on it, it fades away. I hate how jumbled my memories of Mom have become.”

  My heart beating in my mouth, I asked, “What about your other memories? Are they jumbled, too?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She sounded genuinely befuddled, but I pressed forward anyway. “How certain are you about anything? About any of the things that you think you remember?”

  My sister was quiet, and I thought for a moment that she had hung up.

  “Lanie?”

  “Do you remember the time that Mom gave us that English test?” she asked. “The one where we had to diagram sentences? And you cheated off my paper?”

  “Huh? No. Lanie, I never cheated.”

  “You must have. I was always better at English than you, how else do you explain your perfect score?”

  “Okay, fine. I cheated on an English test administered by our mother fifteen years ago. It was the only time I ever did it, and I felt terrible. So what?”

  “So I gave you the benefit of the doubt. Even when I was sure that you’d cheated, I didn’t contradict you when you said you hadn’t. And when Mom accused you of cheating, I stood up for you.”

  “That doesn’t—”

  “You have to take care of the people you love,” she hissed. “Or you lose them.”

  “What is that supposed—?” I started, but she had already disconnected the call.

  I immediately called her back, but the call went straight to voicemail. Dread collecting in my chest, I almost called Adam, but then I reminded myself that inciting a reaction was Lanie’s raison d’être. I was simply out of practice in knowing how to respond.

  Discussion thread on www.reddit.com/r/reconsideredpodcast, posted September 29, 2015

  Episode 5—Lanie credibility (self.reconsideredpodcast)

  submitted 4 hours ago by jennyfromtheblock

  I just listened to episode 5 and I think I have some concerns about the way that Poppy is using Lanie’s high school years to evaluate her credibility. These people are all saying that she had an attitude problem after her father was shot. Wouldn’t you feel the same way?

  elmparkuser1 10 points 3 hours ago

  But Josie didn’t react that way. She was on the soccer team and student council and ran around with the popular kids.

  jennyfromtheblock 3 points 3 hours ago

  So people react differently. I still think that Lanie’s reaction was totally within the realm of reason.

  chapter 19

  Caleb and I bought tickets for an 8:30 p.m. flight out of O’Hare, and we planned to leave Elm Park around four, allowing us plenty of time to drive to Chicago, return the rental car, and make our way through the TSA line. By three thirty, our bags were packed, Ellen had laden my arms with a stack of fashion magazines (the pages with haircuts she liked for me helpfully flagged), and I had promised Aunt A we would come back for Christmas. The one thing I had not been able to do was connect with Lanie. I had been calling all day without getting a response, and I was growing increasingly anxious. Her post-midnight phone call seemed like a portend. Something bad has happened.

  The tenth time I mentioned Lanie within a span of so many minutes, Caleb handed me the keys to the rental car. “Why don’t you go on over there?”

  “Thanks,” I said, kissing him on the cheek. “That’s a good idea. I’d rather say goodbye to her in person anyway.”

  I opened the front door, so focused on my sister that I nearly plowed over her daughter, who was reaching for the doorbell.

  “Ann!” I said, surprised. “What are you doing here?”

  “Mom said I should come here and see you,” she said with a bright smile.

  Unease rumbling in my stomach, I glanced up and down the street for evidence of Lanie. “Where is your mother?”

  With her mother’s superlative talent for avoiding a question, Ann handed me a sticky envelope. “Mom asked me to give you this.”

  My name was scrawled on one side of the envelope in smeared pencil, and the
flap was sealed shut with jagged lengths of tape. An indistinct buzz of worry sounded in my ears, and my hands shook as I ripped open the envelope and extracted a sheet of notebook paper. The paper was dotted with coffee rings, the green-inked words scrawled in painfully familiar handwriting.

  Josie-Posie,

  it began, employing the nickname Lanie had used for me when we were kids.

  I shouldn’t have called in the middle of the night. I’m sorry. I forget other people sleep. I don’t anymore. No rest for the wicked, and all that.

  The benefit, though, of not sleeping is that you have plenty of time to think. The world is awfully quiet at three a.m., and that makes it easier to hear yourself. And this is what I’ve realized: I ruin everything. Do you remember King Midas, that mythical ruler whose touch could turn anything to gold? I’m like him, but in reverse. Everything I touch turns to garbage and spoils.

  The one thing that I haven’t managed to wreck yet is my daughter, but I know that, given enough time, I’ll ruin her, too. It’s inevitable. She deserves better than me. Adam deserves better than me. You deserve better than me. You’ve always been right about me: I’m untrustworthy, I’m a traitor, I’m a horrible human being. My hope is that, when I’m gone, you, Adam, Ann—all of you—can move past the mess that I’ve made of everything and just remember this: I always loved you. I know it doesn’t make anything any better, and it doesn’t absolve me, but it’s the truth. I love all three of you, just like I loved Mom and Dad, and love and loyalty—along with a hearty dose of bad judgment—are my downfalls.

  God, Josie, I’m just so tired.

  Always,

  Your Sister

  “Oh, bloody hell.”

  Caleb, reading the letter over my shoulder, summed up my feelings perfectly. Turning to him in bewilderment, all I could say was, “I never called her a horrible human being.”

  He rubbed my shoulder quickly, and then knelt down to Ann’s level and affected a friendly smile. “G’day, little lady. Did your mum bring you here?”

  “I got a ride with the mailman.” She frowned slightly. “He wouldn’t let me deliver any mail.”