Barbara Sissel - Safe Keeping

Roy made a sound that could have meant anything. He took his cup and plate to the sink, thanked her for the toast. It was only after she heard his office door close behind him that she realized he’d taken the Houston paper with him, and her head livened with a fresh buzz of anxiety. He was bound to see the photo and the article now, she thought, and she closed her eyes. It was happening again just as Roy feared. She could feel it to her core. And this time, when Roy insisted they cut their ties to Tucker, he would mean it.

2

LISSA PULLED HER pickup in behind her dad’s truck and killed the engine, but she didn’t get out right away. Instead, she distracted herself, looking along the sidewalk in front of her parents’ house where the sharp morning light planked an angular path across the generously proportioned front porch to the door. How many times did she and Tucker paint that porch, all the balusters and assorted gingerbread trim? Tucker had resented every minute, but Lissa hadn’t minded. She loved the house her great-great-grandfather, Hiram Winter, built. It was one of several of his designs in the neighborhood, a Queen Anne. He had favored the Queen Anne and Georgian styles. Deep porches, cornices, pilasters, colonnaded verandas and gingerbread were architectural details that Lissa loved, too. The classically fashioned bungalow she and Evan recently finished building on acreage west of town, in a newish subdivision, was a compromise. They were in the process of completing Lissa’s art studio and a gazebo, too, in a style to match the house.

She gave the front porch another look. The newspaper was gone, which meant her parents had been up long enough to retrieve it. It would be lying open on the kitchen table, folded to show the dead woman’s photo, and her mom and dad would be sitting over it in a worried stew of complicated silence, suffering the same nasty jolt of déjà vu as Lissa. It was inevitable given the eerie similarities between Miranda’s and Jessica Sweet’s deaths. According to the news report Lissa heard earlier, Jessica’s car was found abandoned in the same strip shopping center where Miranda’s car was found, and now Jessica’s body had turned up in the same location, a mere matter of yards from where Tucker discovered Miranda’s body a year ago. The manner of death was the same, too. Both women appeared to have been strangled. While the report hadn’t mentioned Tucker’s name in connection to Miranda’s case, which remained unsolved, Lissa thought it was only a matter of time.

She looked out at her parents’ house. She didn’t need to see them to know they were as panicked by the news as she was. What could she say to them, anyway? It will be fine? She couldn’t offer that kind of reassurance, not now. Maybe later. Maybe if she gave it a little more time Tucker would show up. She started the truck.

“Hey!”

Lissa froze, as if she could pretend she hadn’t heard her dad’s shout, hadn’t caught sight of him from the corner of her eye, crabbing his way down the front steps. She looked through the windshield at her dad’s pickup, at the license plate that had Disabled Vet printed across the top. He would allow the tag that labeled him a cripple, but if anyone were to suggest the use of a cane, he’d growl like an injured bear.

He met her at the gate, swinging it open for her. “Guess you came looking for your brother and thought you’d just skip on by if he wasn’t here.”

“No, Daddy, I was coming in.”

“The hell you were.”

“You look like hell,” she said. Up close, she could see his face was sweaty and pale under his iron-gray buzz cut. His leg was bothering him again, or she should say the lack of his leg. The pain was worse, Lissa guessed. Ordinarily, he was never bothered by it. In fact, people who knew him often forgot he was missing a limb. According to her mother, though, the ill effects of her dad’s amputation, the aching and tenderness, had resurfaced recently. Probably the result of stress, Lissa thought. He wasn’t handling retirement very well, and there was Tucker, always Tucker. Lissa loved him—they all loved him—but the joke, the painful family joke, was that he could drive God to drink.

She followed her dad into his office. When she and Tucker were young, her dad kept it locked because of his gun collection. Of course, the precaution only heightened their curiosity; they had looked for ways to be in here, to handle the weapons, and their wish was granted. Over their mother’s protests, Daddy schooled them—the same as their mom—in their use. He taught them to hunt and claimed Lissa had a dead eye.

She sat in a club chair across from him now, and she was wary. She couldn’t quite sort out his mood. She asked if he was okay.

No answer. There was only the sound of his breath, the creak of the leather as he shifted his weight in the tall wingback desk chair.

Dropping her glance, she saw the morning newspaper folded on the desk’s corner, the photo of Jessica Sweet staring out. It looked as if it had been taken from a high school yearbook of roughly the same vintage as Tucker’s. Lissa thought she had read somewhere they were the same age, thirty-four, and it worried her. It made it seem more likely Tucker might have known her. She started to say something, to make some comment, or offer the customary reassurance, but then she saw the ledger—the old-fashioned, leather-bound business ledger that her dad insisted they keep the family company’s, Lebay-Winter’s, financial records in because he didn’t trust computers, the ledger that was supposed to be at the office that she and Evan shared in town, but instead was sitting here, open on the desk blotter.

“What are you doing with that?” she asked.

“Not the right question,” her dad answered.

“So, what is?”

“Oh, I think you know.”

They sat, eyes locked, while silence rose, like a rigid wall. Lissa’s dad, the former decorated United States Army drill sergeant, said a guilty man, a soldier in her dad’s case, who had something to hide, couldn’t handle the silence. Pretty soon, he’d break down, say whatever came into his mind just to fill the void. Eventually, he’d hang himself. Her dad was waiting for that now, for Lissa to hang herself.

She set her teeth together.

“I’ve been going over the numbers,” he said finally. “You and Evan have been bullshitting me. We’re not in good shape the way you said. In fact, this is looking like the worst year we’ve had in the past five. You want to tell me why you lied?”

“About the numbers?” When had he gotten the ledger? Lissa tried to put it together even as she said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Come on, Lissa!” Her dad smacked the desktop with the flat of his hand. “I’m retired, not senile.”

“I understand that, Dad, but I assumed that since you retired and turned over control of the company to me, and to Evan, that meant you trusted us to run the place.”

“I built that goddamn business from nothing, worked it thirty years. You can’t push me out.”

“Oh, Daddy, we’re not trying to!” Lissa was nonplussed at the emotion in his voice, the way it slipped and caught.

He held her gaze, and she saw that his eyes were dark with anguish and, amazingly, filmed with tears. In her entire life, she had never known him to cry; he counted a man’s tears as weakness. It alarmed her; it hurt her heart. He could be gruff, even hard; he might take your head off if you made a foolish mistake. But the very same man had spent hours building her the exact replica of a dollhouse from an illustration in a book she’d fallen in love with, and she could still recall the shapes of the calluses that spanned his palm from all the times he’d taken her hand when he’d walked her to school. He’d taught her to drive and never once raised his voice, not even when she’d driven them into a ditch and he’d had to call a tow truck to get them out again.