Free Liar by Jan Burke

this corner?
    His face changed entirely, and once again I received condolences I had not earned. Yes, he told us, this was the corner where the lady was killed. He was obviously upset about it.
    His wife, who also worked at the market, was visiting their daughter today-she would feel sorry to have missed us. They were both in the store on the day of the accident. They had not seen the accident itself; they had heard the sounds of the impact and of the car speeding away. When his wife looked outside and saw what had happened-he shook his head sadly. After a moment, he went on, saying that he was the one who had called 911. The ambulance came, but everyone knew it was too late. He glanced at me and quickly said that they were told the lady had not suffered.
    Although the police had questioned them, they had not been told of any outcome of the police investigation. They had been worried that the woman was still unidentified.
    “Su tia?”
he asked me again.
    “Si, mi tia,”
I answered.
“La hermana de mi madre.”
Yes, she was my aunt, my mother’s sister.
    Again he expressed condolences, and then asked me if I would please say my aunt’s name again. He repeated it softly to himself several times, as if memorizing it, changing it slightly but making it sound no less beautiful with Spanish pronunciation. He patted his pockets and found a pen, wrote
Briana Maguire
on the back of a receipt, then paused and looked up at me as if to verify the spelling.
    “Bueno,”
I said.
    He talked to us again of his concern over the accident, and was obviously relieved that someone had claimed the body; he was Catholic, and knew my aunt was Catholic-they were concerned that my aunt had not received a Catholic burial.
    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