A Secondhand Lie Read online

  Dan rubbed his hand along his neck, then warily agreed. “I guess I’ll look into it and see what I find out. But you gotta be honest with me, Derek. Is there anything you ain’t telling me?”

  “Nah, man. Just that I need money, you need money, we all need money—and this is how we can score it quick.” Next Derek turned his attention to Grizzle. “And you—I already know you’re in, right?”

  “Hell yeah. I could use the cash,” was all it took to put the ball in motion.

  Each of the brothers had high stakes at risk—Dan, his family, and Derek, his life—but only one would end up losing both.

  Chapter 5

  2014

  Friday, May 9

  When a man admits vulnerability, he instantly becomes less of a man. At least that’s what my father had always taught me. Until now.

  Vulnerability had instead become my warrior’s sword as I slashed through years of harbored secrets. Although thirty-eight years too late to save our family, I vowed to join my father as a team where I hoped we would someday cut the ribbon at the finish line that would lead us toward a better future.

  Lies were a sin of the past, Dad assured me. And trust was a promise of the future.

  I clung to this as I headed to the Durham Police Station to visit my long-time friend, Evan Williams—Detective Williams, he made me call him when trying to impress his peers. His request always provoked the opposite response from me, however. Something along the lines of Dickhead Williams, which he never saw the humor in.

  So much for my wit.

  With a sense of familiarity I wove through the clusters of cubicles and found Evan sitting behind a stack of files, leafing through an especially thick folder. When I strode up to him, casting a shadow on his hunched form, he hurriedly closed the file in a tight grip. Clearly whatever he was reading was top secret. As he greeted me, I watched his fingers push the file under the stack, out of sight of my probing eyes.

  “Hey, bro. Got a question for you,” I began.

  “You and your questions always get me in trouble,” Evan groused, heaving a weary sigh. “What do you need?”

  Now that I was here, I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Some kind of evidence that would prove my father’s innocence. But what could do that… especially two decades after the fact?

  “How difficult would it be to access a police report from twenty years ago… like, from my dad’s arrest?”

  “Easy. It wasn’t the Dark Ages, Lan. They were electronically filed back in the 1990s. Should only take me a minute to retrieve it. What are you looking into that for? Does it have something to do with your sister’s murder?”

  As Alexis’s murder was still an ongoing cold case investigation, Evan—the only one in the department who seemed to care after so many years—still looked into every possible angle that could lead to her killer. I didn’t know if the home robbery was affiliated in any way or a worthwhile lead to pursue, but considering the close timeline, anything was possible.

  “I’m not sure if it’s related or not, but since the robbery happened barely a month before her death, and it involved some nefarious people, maybe it’s connected?”

  “Sounds like a far reach,” Evan said, his doubt swatting my hopes aside.

  Regardless of his skepticism, his fingers dashed along the keyboard, paused, then he waved me over to his side of the desk. I skimmed the monitor. An arrest report for my father revealed all of the facts about the crime:

  Date of incident: February 12, 1992

  Time: Wednesday evening, around 11 p.m.

  Suspect Name: Daniel Landon Worthington

  Age: 36

  Marital Status: Married

  Hair Color: Brown

  Eye Color: Brown

  Race: Caucasian

  Height: 6’2”

  Victim: Ruby Parker

  Witnesses: Robert Dillon (neighbor)

  Crime committed: armed residential robbery and aggravated assault

  Details: The victim was at home sleeping when she woke up to the sound of breaking glass on the first floor. When she went downstairs, a tall man, approximately 6 feet tall, wearing a black mask, pointed a gun at her using his right hand and told her not to scream. As she turned to run, a shot rang out and the victim was struck in the back of her shoulder by a bullet. The perpetrator fled the scene, but she was able to reach the phone to call 9-1-1. Due to the age of the victim and severe blood loss, the injury turned out to be life-threatening. One shot was fired, based on the recovery of only one shell casing at the scene, a .38 Special. According to eyewitness testimony by the neighbor, Robert Dillon, he was asleep in his home next door when he heard a shot fired. He looked out the window and saw a masked intruder flee the house, get into a brown, early-model coupe, and drive away. He was unable to see the license plate number, but guessed the make and model of the getaway vehicle to be an early 1980s Ford Tempo. Other neighbors were questioned, and all recalled the single gunshot, but none saw anything or anyone.

  Disposition: An anonymous tip called in on Thursday, February 13, 1992, claimed Daniel Worthington was responsible for the robbery. When vehicle registration records were pulled, the make and model matched a vehicle registered to Worthington, a 1984 brown Ford Tempo coupe. The physical description also fit.

  As I read the incident report, my first question was who the getaway driver could be. If my dad’s certainty that Uncle Derek and this Grizzle guy weren’t involved proved true, that left me with nothing. My second question was who reported the anonymous tip. A hunch told me that the same person who called in the tip would lead me to the perpetrator’s front door.

  “Did they do ballistics to match the bullet to a particular gun?” I asked, reaching for any possible angle investigators hadn’t considered twenty years ago.

  “We didn’t do gun ballistics back then. We only gathered obvious details based on the shell casing—a .38 Special, which could point to any number of revolvers,” Evan explained. “Regardless, the evidence has been long discarded. Since the case was adjudicated with no appeal, we got rid of the evidence years ago. Sorry, Landon. I wish I could give you something more, but for cases as old as this one, there’s not much we can do.”

  No evidence. No leads. Nothing tangible to cling to. Any lingering faith I had deflated like a week-old balloon as the prospect of exonerating my dad grew dimmer. And then there was that nagging question that perpetually loomed: What if my dad wasn’t being honest with me?

  I was a dog chasing a car on a busy road—futilely pursuing something I’d never catch, and more than likely to get my ass run over in the process.

  **

  I knew it was conniving. Sneaky. Distrustful. But I had to do it regardless.

  No matter how much I wanted to believe my dad, I simply couldn’t do it on blind trust. Trust no one. Not even myself. It was my motto. There was only one way to know for sure whether my dad was telling the truth.

  “Mom, you home?” I called out as I walked through her front door. The smell of homemade marinara sauce enveloped me as I walked in, and immediately my salivary glands started working overtime.

  “In the kitchen, honey,” she replied as I heard metal clinking in the background.

  As I rounded the entryway, I noticed the pristine shine of the hardwood floors and slipped off my shoes, leaving them against the wall. A subtle hint of lemon Lysol wafted over me—of course she had dusted too. The woman never rested.

  I found her in the kitchen pulling a steaming casserole dish from the oven, and I recognized the layer of melted mozzarella immediately. Lasagna. One of her specialties… though I’d long ago lost tabs on my list of favorite homemade dishes. Over the years Mom had become a goddess in the kitchen—either her way of making up for my childhood of frozen dinners, or a means to pass the time alone and single.

  The dinette table on the far end of the kitchen was set for two, a stark reminder that I was all she had. Red wine filled a pair of cheap wine glasses, and a Caesar salad sat in a decor
ative bowl in the center. A loaf of Italian bread was sliced and waiting next to a ceramic, floral butter dish.

  “Dinner’s ready, honey,” Mom said, gesturing me to sit down as she carried the entrée to the table.

  “Before we eat, Mom, I wanted to talk to you about something.” I hated to ruin a perfectly fine meal with talk about Dad, but it had to be done. Now. I couldn’t wait any longer.

  “Sure. What’s going on, hon? Everything okay?” A typical worried mother response to my vague request.

  “Yeah, everything’s fine. I wanted to ask you about the night Dad got charged with that robbery.”

  Her faltering hands didn’t escape my attention as she set the hot pan on a pansy-adorned trivet and swiped at a stray hair across her forehead. Without a word, she waved for me to follow as she headed up to her bedroom on the second story. As she climbed the stairs, I noticed the slight slump in her shoulders, her slow and weary gait, and the way her soft yet wrinkled hands slid up the railing as if releasing it would send her falling into an abyss. Mom was aging, but more than that, she was giving up.

  It broke my heart.

  We headed into her bedroom, a flowery den with a rose-covered bedspread, matching valances, and a pale pink area rug, all perfectly suited to a woman whose sense of interior design was stuck in the early eighties. Old-fashioned but tasteful and scrupulously clean.

  She opened the top dresser drawer where a simple hairbrush and mirror sat, and pulled out a wooden box, then handed it to me.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Open it,” she urged.

  So I did.

  A small bronze clasp held the box shut, and after fiddling with it for a moment, I lifted the lid. Inside I discovered a stack of letters and a single rose, ancient and dried but intact, its once vibrant red now darkened into an ancient burgundy. The trace scent of vanilla emanated from the notes within as my fingertips gingerly flipped through the contents. Attached to the rose was a card.

  “Read it,” Mom said, pointing to the card.

  I pulled the aged card out, the fragrance of timeless memories captured on yellowed parchment wafting upward. It was a haunting sensation, delving into my mother’s musty secrets while she watched over my shoulder.

  “To my beautiful wife, Jenny,” I read aloud from handwriting I recognized.

  I know I’m not the man you deserve, but give me a chance to become him. I want to give you the life we’ve always dreamed of, the family we always talked about, the fulfilled hopes we always clung to. I love you, darling, and I want to fix what I’ve broken. Please let me prove my worth to you.

  Love always, Dan

  Below my father’s name was a date:

  February 12, 1992.

  The day of the robbery.

  Dad was indeed buying flowers for my mom the same night he was supposedly robbing a place? It didn’t sound logical, even to the most cynical of skeptics—me.

  So he wasn’t lying after all.

  “Your father camped outside the front door holding a bouquet of flowers and this card the night of the robbery. He waited and waited for me to answer the door, but I had been drinking and was acting belligerent, until I finally sent him away sometime after one in the morning. Poor guy couldn’t even leave with some dignity because of that damn car stalling out. Took over ten minutes for him to finally get it started.”

  We both chuckled at recalling Dad’s infamous Ford Tempo and the god-awful sound it made, like a yowling cat with a smoker’s cough, whenever he tried to crank it. Not once did it ever start right up, and it was a toss-up whether that or the car’s hideous color, a sickly turd brown, was the bigger embarrassment.

  “I never told you this, but there was no way he could have been part of that robbery, because he was sitting right outside the entire evening—for hours. He was that determined to win me back,” she said, a hint of a smile playing upon her lips.

  I watched the reminiscence capture her, drawing her into a moment that only she intimately knew and could appreciate—the undying love and fortitude of her long-lost husband pursuing her with everything he had.

  “You let Dad go to jail for something he didn’t do? Why?”

  “At the time I wanted nothing more than for him to do time. I needed to get away from him. After losing your sister, I blamed him. He hadn’t protected her, and I heaped the fault on his shoulders. I was so angry, Landon.”

  “But you could have said something to the cops to help him, Mom!” I yelled, frustrated at her part in dissolving our family.

  “I just… couldn’t let him stay in my life, Landon. He was toxic. You wouldn’t understand. Besides, it wouldn’t have mattered. No cop would have believed me back then. My reputation was, well, less than credible at that point in my life. Plus your father strongly felt that I should let him go, that I’d be better off without him. He also believed he deserved jail for his sins… the ones you don’t know about and don’t need to know about. Please forgive us, but we did what we needed to do. And we’re okay now. It’s not ideal, but we’ve moved past it. So should you.”

  No words could describe the rush of emotions sucking me into their depths—anger, betrayal… and resolution.

  Maybe she was right. They did what they felt was right, and I couldn’t possibly understand the why behind it. Regardless, Mom still trusted him after all those years of neglect, forgave him for all the devastation he left in his wake. So why couldn’t I? What bitterness was I clinging to, harboring in my heart so protectively that I was willing to let my father pay for a crime he didn’t commit?

  I knew all I needed to know.

  Now I just needed to prove it.

  “Come on, Landon, food’s getting cold,” Mom said.

  I had forgotten all about dinner. But suddenly I was ravenously hungry.

  Chapter 6

  1992

  Tuesday, February 11

  9:42 a.m.

  The knock on Derek’s front door jarred him awake from his slumber on the sofa, immediately putting him in a nasty mood. The interruption pulled him out of a lusty dream from a Baywatch scene—his closet television vice. The latest addition to the cast, a busty blonde named Kelly Packard, was spilling cleavage out of her red one-piece swimsuit while hovering over him, oiling him down on a deserted California beach… when a set of knuckles on wood stopped her mid-rub.

  Derek squeezed his eyes shut and willed her to straddle him, conjuring the sand, the ocean, the hot babe to return.

  But the knocking persisted. So he got up, ready to kill.

  Cursing all the way to the front door, he barely cracked it open when Dan bowled through him.

  “What are you thinkin’, man? The deal is off!” Dan yelled, giving Derek little time to pull his thoughts off of Kelly and on to reality.

  “Whatcha talkin’ bout?” Derek asked hazily.

  “Uh, this Friday, ya idiot. I’m callin’ it off.”

  “Why? What happened?” Derek rubbed his eyes clear of the caked eye goo and reached for a day-old half cup of black coffee on the floor, downing it in one gulp, grimacing.

  “You never mentioned she has a gun. Or that she still lives there. Where’d you get your info, anyways? Looks like you’ve been set up.”

  Shaking his head, Derek struggled to comprehend what his brother was saying. “A gun? What the shit! What’d you see?”

  “I was parking out front this morning, just to get a feel for the neighborhood and all. Sure, fancy houses and rich cars. I’m taking mental inventory of the layout, seeing where we could break in undetected. So there I am, watching the house, when I see an old lady walk right out the front door. So I’m thinking to myself, Okay, she wasn’t moved out after all. But that’s not all. Next I see her pull a handgun—a gun, Derek!—out of her purse to check the safety. She was real discreet about it, but I know what I saw. I don’t even own no gun, and here’s an old lady packing heat! And you’re about to send us in there to get ourselves killed? Are you crazy?”

  Fe
eling the heat rising off his brother, Derek tossed his hands up, hoping to defuse his anger. “I swear I had no idea. A buddy of mine gave me the details. He must not ’ve known,” Derek insisted, knowing it was better to be vague about his source. “But… but ya sure you wanna call it off?”

  Dan’s eyes widened with shock. “Hell yeah I wanna call it off! I’m not bustin’ into a house with a bull’s-eye on my chest. And neither are you.”

  “Lemme talk to Grizzle first and see what he thinks. Maybe you were scopin’ the wrong house.”

  “Whatever, man. I’m out of it. Do what you want, but I’m warning you that you’re gonna git yourself killed if you step foot in that place.”

  As Dan turned to leave, Derek touched his arm. “I need to tell ya something before you go.”

  Derek noticed Dan’s clenched knuckles whitening as he slowly turned to face him. Derek was about to get knocked out, but he didn’t care. Family was at stake.

  “So tell me,” Dan seethed.

  “What if I told ya that something bigger was at stake?” Derek’s words came out in a quiver.

  “Bigger—like how big?”

  “Like if we don’t do this job someone might hurt Jennifer, or Alexis.”

  No words were angry enough to surface. Just silence—a staggering, timeless hush. Knowledge was written on Dan’s weary face. Clearly he had suspected something like this.

  Then a sentence. A solitary statement that could make all the troubles go away. “Who, and how much? And when do you need it by?”

  “A loan shark I borrowed from. Ten grand. And I need it this week.”

  Dan nodded weakly. “I’ll figure it out. Until then, talk to no one, go nowhere, and stay out of trouble. You risk my family’s life again, Derek, and I’ll kill you myself.”