Free Foreign Deceit by Jeff Carson

landscapes from exotic forests in countries he’d never seen, flowers on shelves, hanging dried flowers, books on shelves, and all sorts of other interesting things. It reminded him of the Pub in Points, though not to the same gaudy interior-of-a-ski-bar extent.  
    Ambient jazz was playing softly in the background. Pat Metheny , he noted. A few candles were lit and smelled like flowers. She looked to be in the middle of writing in a journal. She bent down and closed it, but not before he caught a glimpse of writing with letters of an entirely foreign alphabet.  
    She offered him a seat on a comfortable recliner chair. A patterned blanket draped on the back of it was reminiscent of Navajo designs he’d seen countless times in his grandmother’s house, but with more vibrant colors, and with flowers lining the edges of it.  
    She saw him looking at it. “It’s a traditional weaving from my home. I am from Romania.”
    “Oh, okay.” He struggled to picture where exactly that was.  
    “It’s directly east of here. You travel to Venice and keep going east, through Slovenia, Hungary, and into Romania,” she said.
    “Ah, I see.” A deep silence fell between them. “Were you dating my brother?”  
    She was staring at her hands in her lap. She began to shake. The beginning throws of a good cry, he recognized from recent experience.  
    “Y-y-y-yes. We have b-b-een seeing each other for a few months.” Her hair drooped across her eyes and she shook lightly. “Had been seeing…”  
    She lifted her chin and tucked her hair behind her ear, a bright smile lighting up her face. “We met on our balconies. He was sitting there on the computer, and I accidentally threw a cigarette on him because of the wind.” She burst into laughter. Wolf couldn’t help but laugh with her. “I heard him shuffling and grunting, and he poked his head out to yell at me. Then he forced me to go out with him as payment for ruining one of his shirts. It was a piece of crap T-shirt.” She smiled, then when into a fresh fit of tears.
    He looked away and steeled his gaze on nothing in particular. They sat in silence for a few minutes.  
    “I have a few questions,” he said finally. “Firstly, do you think he killed himself?”  
    “You don’t think he did?” She looked at him with wet, wide eyes.  
    “No, I don’t. I just don’t think he was that type of person, and…there’s just something going on.”  
    “I have been thinking all along there is no way that he would do that. But then I kept thinking maybe I didn’t know him that well anyways, so then I wasn’t sure. I’ve been so confused.” She looked back at her hands.  
    “Well, I don’t think he did,” he said. “Do you do drugs Cristina? Did you and John do drugs together? Just tell me, I don’t care either way. I just need to know.”
    “No,” she said quickly. “We don’t do drugs…didn’t do drugs. Not even marijuana. We talked about how it made us both paranoid, so that’s why we didn’t like it. Why are you asking?”
    He studied her reaction, her eyes. He believed her. A woman trying to hide her drug use was something he was intimately familiar with, something he’d learned to read on a woman’s face just as plainly as an animal track in fresh mud.  
    “Because there was cocaine found on the table in the living room, and in his nose.”
    She looked genuinely surprised. “I never knew him to take drugs. He and I never did. We would drink wine, and he would maybe have a cigarette with me every once and a while…but that’s it.”
    “Do you know anything about the night he died? That Friday night? What was he doing? Who was he with?”  
    “He was supposed to go out with a friend,” she said. “His astronomer friend, who works at an observatory.”
    “Okay, where is that observatory?”
    “In a town just south of here.”  
    “Okay, do you have the phone number for…what’s his name?”
    “Oh, sorry, his name is Matthew. Matthew