“I lied to you.” Seri blurts out the words, bringing me out of my musings, but I have no idea what she’s referring to.
“About?”
“My sister. She didn’t die in a car accident.”
“Okay.” I wait for her to say more, but she just sits there and stares at her hands. “So, how did she die?”
“She was murdered.”
A chill runs through me.
Chapter 10
“My sister Iris was a bit of a wild child,” Seri says. “She spoke her mind, which our conservative, old-fashioned, military father didn’t care for too much. She ran around with a lot of different boys in high school. Mom was sure she was into all kinds of drugs, but I think she only smoked a little weed sometimes, nothing more. Not in high school, anyway.”
“She was your older sister?” Though I had previously not wanted to hear anything about Seri’s past, the mention of her sister’s murder has me intrigued. Maybe intrigued isn’t the right word. Is there a word for it when intrigue also scares the shit out of you?
“Yes, she was older, but only by two years. She always seemed much older and wiser than I ever felt. She knew what to say, when to say it, and was never afraid of what other people would think of her. She didn’t care, not even when Mom and Dad were mad at her. She and our dad fought all the time, especially right before she graduated from high school and moved out. She went away to college and didn’t even come to visit until Christmas. She always responded to my text messages, though, and told me everything was going great.”
I sense Seri’s change in tone, going from lighthearted childhood memories to something more ominous.
“She didn’t come home at all during the summer, and soon after, she stopped responding to my texts. We found out later that she’d dropped out of college. One of her friends from high school went to the same college as Iris, and she said Iris was hanging out with these two guys from town. They weren’t students or anything, and everyone said they were drug dealers. People were even saying that Iris might have been supporting herself as a prostitute. I know that wasn’t true—she would never do something like that—but it’s what other people thought.”
I swallow hard. I’d known a few pimps in prison, and they were nasty characters. If Seri’s sister got caught up with people like that, it’s no wonder something bad happened. The way Seri dismissed the idea of her sister selling her body is enough to convince me that it was probably true.
“Just after the first of the year, the police called my parents’ house, asking when they had seen her last. The officer said Iris’s landlord filled out a missing person’s report on her when the rent wasn’t paid and that no one had seen her in a week. Dad was sure she had just taken off without telling anyone, but when the police put her picture up on television, a woman came forward with information.”
Seri’s voice becomes monotone as she continues.
“The woman was a known heroin addict and a prostitute. She said her boyfriend was a drug dealer and that he and his partner thought Iris stole some of their
drugs. She said the men beat Iris up, trying to get her to admit to stealing, but she wouldn’t tell them anything. She is a fighter.”
Another chill runs down my spine, and I watch Seri closely as she recounts the tale like a police reporter standing in front of the press and reading facts from a dossier. I don’t miss that she used the present tense when she called her sister a fighter, but I don’t think Seri even noticed the slip.
“The woman said she saw them haul Iris out of the house and into a truck and that she was bleeding when they took her,” Seri says, continuing her toneless narrative. “She didn’t have additional information that was helpful. The police investigated the men but discovered nothing to link them to Iris other than the witness. Two days later, two boys found her body at the edge of the river.”
For the first time, Seri’s voice cracks slightly.
I look at her face and watch tears form in her eyes. She stares into the fire for a few moments before she looks at me. Her voice is small and quiet when she speaks again.
“The boys were only eleven or twelve,” she says as her voice cracks again, “just riding their bikes home from school. They stopped their bikes by a big tree with a double trunk, and when they moved closer to the bank, they saw her in the mud. They wanted to help, but they realized quickly that she was gone. The police were called.”
Seri stops speaking and looks up at me as a shudder runs through her body, and the tears begin to fall. I know I should do something to comfort her, but what? Hold her hand? Give her a hug? Maybe I should offer her a drink—I know I could use one about now.
As I debate the options, Seri wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. She has been holding herself together pretty well up until this point, but my stomach tightens up as I wait for an inevitable meltdown that I won’t know how to handle.
“She had…” Seri stops and closes her eyes for a moment. I don’t think she’s going to be able to finish, but she takes a few breaths and then starts again. “She had been in the water long enough that any evidence on her had been washed away. She had been so badly injured, they had to use her dental records just to identify her.”
“Shit.” I mutter the curse under my breath. It’s not so much my shock or horror at her words but the similarity to my own case regarding dental records for identification.
“You want to tell us who that is in there?” The officer tightened the cuffs around my wrists and then shoved me into the back of the car. He leaned against the doorframe and stared at my blood-stained face.
I didn’t respond.
“I assume it’s the owner of the house,” another officer said.
“They’re going to have to put his teeth back in his skull just to use dental records.”