“Yes. Call her phone. She’ll pick up.”
There was no ring, only the raspy breathy sound of Ramani trying to breathe and speak at the same time, the mere word hello.
“You don’t have to talk,” Serene said. She put her phone on speaker and was silent for a moment, listening to Ramani’s labored breathing. “I just finished watching an old home movie your parents made when you were a girl.”
A whistle of breath came through the speaker.
“And it made me realize how you’ve always cared about justice and society. The thing is…” Serene closed her eyes and took a moment to steady her voice. “The thing is, I know.” Know came out a whisper and Serene cleared her throat. “I know that you are Dora. And Dora was brave. Maybe that’s why I sometimes like to be Dora, even if I can’t remember.”
Ramani coughed and Serene could hear a sniffle.
“Serene,” Ramani rasped.
“Yeah?”
“Let Jesse’s beauty shine, and keep Sara strong. And Barbara.” Ramani took a breath. “Barbara is Barbara. Lovely girl.”
“I love you, Mom.” Serene couldn’t remember if she had ever told Ramani she loved her, or the last time she called her Mom.
“That’s something…” Ramani paused, taking a few more deep breaths, “we could all use more of.”
The phone went dead, Ramani’s usual style of goodbye. Serene’s gaze wandered to the window and the yard, images of Brenda Dora Wilson giggling and blowing bubbles, wishing her future children peace on earth, playing over and over in her thoughts. A breeze picked up and blew a cloud of purple flowers off the Jacaranda. Serene pocketed her phone and headed out the door to join her family.
Epilogue
Enzo Moreno stood when the two detectives stepped into the conference room at the Baker and Barnes law firm. Enzo's attorney, Larry Swartz, gestured to the table where the detectives could set down their audio recorder and notebooks for the interview. Larry had one end of the room and Enzo the other. Even with a mask, Enzo recognized Greiner and it gave him a small jolt. She was quite possibly in her mid-sixties now. He hadn’t expected her to still be with the department. After all these years she hadn’t changed too much. She had kept her hair dyed the same brown color. Her figure was a little thicker and, aside from a few extra lines on her forehead, she looked remarkably the same, the detective’s dark eyes sharp as ever. Three horizontal creases ran across her gray skirt and she smoothed down the material before taking a seat, the skin around her eyes crinkling with a smile.
“Enzo Moreno, it’s been a little while,” she said.
“Detective Greiner,” Enzo replied with a curt nod of his head. He knew how disarming she could be and wasn’t fooled this time by her easy-going nature.
“Lieutenant,” her partner corrected him, his body language all business. There was no smile hidden behind his mask.
“This is Detective Wolfe,” Greiner introduced the officer.
When the two were situated, Greiner opened her notebook and officially let them know that she and Wolfe would be recording the interview.
“I’d like to go back to the night of July fifteenth at roughly 10:30 PM when you found Taylor Davis on your sofa,” she began.
Enzo nodded. He’d turned over Mara’s diary to his attorney. The diary contained his late wife’s written confession in the form of a journal entry, one year after she’d accidentally murdered her friend. Only two years ago, she’d extended that confession to him, the guilt finally getting to her. The guilt having turned her into a nighttime alcoholic over the past several years. Enzo wasn’t sure what made him decide to come clean about Mara. Maybe it was the fact that Dora was still under suspicion of Mara’s death. A few of Dora’s hairs were found at the Topanga house. And the way Mara had fallen, he was told, judging by the impact to her cranium, Mara had either dived off the precipice or somehow been yanked off. The yanking was what confounded forensics. How would that have played out? But Enzo knew it must have been suicide or an accident.
Something snapped in him when Steve Bates mentioned that an old friend of his, Dylan, the kid Steve used to skateboard with, had lost everything in the lightning fires in northern California. The decimation of people’s homes and businesses and lives, lost in the raging fires, propelled Enzo to take a hard look at himself and what he had in his possession, what could possibly be lost. Would he, like Mara, forever regret not coming forward?
What a year 2020 was turning out to be, Enzo thought mournfully as Larry laid Mara’s old teen diary on the conference table for the detectives. Like the fires, the pandemic had raged through communities and the economy, leaving a wake of devastation.
His wife’s death had cast a pall over all the other struggles his family was going through with the pandemic, the shuttered schools, the closing of his restaurants and his having to eventually let go of much of his staff when the aid from the government ran out. He had reopened only one of the restaurants, the other two not having viable space for outdoor dining. Enzo’s parents were in Italy, having returned a few years after Taylor’s murder and settling in the Lombardy region, specifically Milan, where the virus had been swift and especially vicious earlier in the year. All over the world people’s lives were upended in one form or another.
That night so many years ago, he’d raged at the girl he loved, at her betrayal, only to find her dead on his sofa a mere half hour later. The investigation had been brutal, the guilt staggering when he and his parents paid a visit to Taylor’s mom. Enzo’s depression later played out in a bout of chronic insomnia that led to a life-long reliance on sleeping pills, his grief manifested in an extreme drive to excel in whatever held his focus––football,
