Jan Burke - Liar

How did he know she was Catholic? Rachel asked. Did she belong to his parish?

He wasn’t sure if she was of his parish; he attended the Spanish-language Mass at nine o’clock and he didn’t think the lady spoke Spanish. But he knew she was Catholic because she carried the key chain with the St. Christopher medallion on it, and because she had ashes on her forehead when she had shopped on Ash Wednesday.

The lady had been coming to his store only for a few months, but he liked her. She was shy, he said, and he never asked her name. Now he regretted this, too, but at the time he had not wanted to be presumptuous. Once, he said, she told him that she was sorry she had never learned Spanish, and told him that her son spoke it very well. “I think she missed her son,” he said. “She only mentioned him once, but when she did…” He gestured to his face. “She looked sad.”

A man came to the register, and Mr. Reyes introduced us to his customer, and again a round of condolences was offered. Did we need any help? Was there something they could do? Did I know, the customer asked me, that the store owner’s wife had made an altarcito -a marker, a little shrine with a small cross-and put some flowers out on the corner where the accident happened? That she had even arranged for a Mass to be said for my aunt? That she had asked everyone if they knew anything about the lady?

After expressing my gratitude, I listened as Mr. Reyes and the customer told us more about Mrs. Reyes’s activities following my aunt’s death. Soon I saw that I was indebted to this woman I had not yet met-and saw how it was that the LAPD eventually discovered where Briana lived.

Mrs. Reyes had described the lady who had been killed to anyone who would listen, and some of her customers, who lived in this neighborhood, remembered seeing the lady with the cane. One customer had often seen her walk from this street to that, another had once seen her walking back from the store in a certain direction. Mrs. Reyes passed her information along to the police, who thanked her, but had not told her the results of her efforts.

Rachel asked a few more questions, confirming that none of them had ever seen Briana come to the store with anyone else; no one they knew had seen the car that struck her, although they were told there were witnesses who had talked to the police. No, Mr. Reyes told us, she was not carrying a handbag-she always arrived with nothing more than a small coin purse, which she kept in the pocket of her sweater or coat. It was perhaps, he ventured, a little cool for her, living near the water, because she always wore a sweater or coat. On that day, a warm spring day, he recalled, she had worn her blue sweater.

We thanked him and the customer for their time, and I asked him to please convey to his wife that my family deeply appreciated her help, that it was very kind of her to remember my aunt with the shrine and the Mass. If ever I could do anything for them-

“De nada,” Mr. Reyes protested. “It’s nothing.”

We stopped off at Aunt Mary’s house on our way back home. As might be expected, Rachel and Aunt Mary hit it off instantly. While I worked at hanging Briana’s clothes in the closet of one of Mary’s guest rooms, Rachel told Mary about our day’s discoveries.

“I didn’t know you spoke Spanish,” Mary said to me.

“Not as well as Rachel, but I studied it even before the Express started requiring all of its reporters to learn Spanish.”

“Hmm. Paper should have done that years ago. You said you went back to the apartment after you talked to Mr. Reyes. Did the neighbors recognize Travis from any of Briana’s photos?”

I still wondered if James McCain had more to do with Rachel’s decision to make the return trip than Travis did, but McCain had left by the time we got there. To Mary, I said, “Not really. They said Travis might have been the younger of the two men who helped her move in, but they weren’t certain-Briana and that young man hadn’t behaved toward one another as a mother and son would, they said-hardly spoke to one another, and the young man had not been back since.”

“Who was the other man?”

“A priest. When he came to visit other times, he was wearing a collar, they said.”

“What priest?”

“We asked that, too. They didn’t know.”

Mary looked troubled, then straightened her shoulders and began to ask Rachel a lot of questions about her work as a cop in Phoenix and as a private eye here in Las Piernas. When I hinted that grilling the volunteer help might show a lack of manners, she told me to mind my own damned business.

I was hanging up Briana’s moth-eaten wool coat, half-listening to them, when I impulsively reached into one of the pockets, thinking the trait of forgetting to empty one’s coat pockets might run in the family. My fingertips met a stiff piece of paper, and my imagination ran ahead of me-this would be a three-by-five card with Travis’s address on it. Instead, to my dismay, I withdrew a holy card.

I might have sworn, but Saint Somebody-or-another was looking right at me, and there are limits to my sacrilegiousness. It was a familiar image, a monk in long brown Franciscan robes, holding a stalk of lilies and the child Jesus. I turned the card over to see who it was and received a shock that made me reach clumsily for the edge of the bed, where I sat down hard next to Rachel.

“What’s gotten into you?” Mary said sharply.

“Arthur-”

“What?”

“Arthur Spanning. He’s dead. This is a holy card from his funeral Mass.”

On the back of the holy card-a likeness of St. Anthony of Padua, as it turned out-was a prayer for the dead. A few added lines of print indicated that Arthur Anthony Spanning had died three weeks ago at the age of forty-eight.

We each took turns looking at the back of the card, not speaking for several moments.

“Poor Travis!” Aunt Mary said softly. “Both parents in such a short period of time!”

“They followed one another to the grave a little closely, didn’t they?” I said. “A week apart.”

Rachel nodded. “Exactly what I was thinking.”

“This funeral home,” I said, studying the card, “is in Las Piernas. Do you think he died here?”

“Kind of strange to think of him living here in town all this time, isn’t it?” Rachel said.

“Yes. And Briana must have been in contact with him, or kept track of him, anyway. Otherwise, how would she know about his funeral? I wonder why she went to it?”

“Maybe to make sure he was really dead,” Rachel said. “You know, if he faked the wedding…”

Aunt Mary was pacing, ignoring these remarks. “This is going to be very hard on Travis,” she said.

“Was he close to Arthur?” I asked.

“I have no idea. I used to see them once in a great while when Travis was little. After Briana moved from Las Piernas, she and I never exchanged more news than would fit on a few lines at the bottom of a greeting card. She never mentioned Arthur, and only wrote ‘Travis is doing well in school,” or ’Travis is growing so tall,“ things like that. She did tell me that he wasn’t going to be living with her at the new apartment, but I suppose I just thought it was high time he was on his own. I asked for his new address, but she never sent it.”

“Maybe he already knows about his father’s death,” I said. “He may be the one who told Briana about it.”

“But to lose his remaining parent so quickly!” Mary said, pacing again.

“You have her old address? The place where she lived before she moved to this apartment?” I asked.

“Yes, I think I have it somewhere around here.”

“That might help us find Travis,” I said. “Maybe one of her former neighbors will know where he’s living these days.”