Free Liar by Jan Burke Page A

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.”

7
    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