Authors: Maya DeLeina
The smile disappeared instantly from her face.
She turned to walk up the staircase and headed down the long hallway. Light strategically washed over the walls from the wire track system above. The light captured the memories of their life that decorated the walls. Wedding portraits and vacation photos were carefully patterned, allowing for expansion. The collage was a dedication and symbol to their love, spirit, and hopes for the future. Now, the pictures staring back at her were soulless, merely pieces of decor to adorn the wall. Glass crunched under her house slippers as she walked past the damaged photographs to the bedroom.
In the closet, Ryan’s suits had been reduced to scraps of material, decimated by the sheering of sharp knives. The remains of designer shirts were crumbled into balls and stuffed into several garbage bags. The bags were filled, stretched past their capacity, and the contents were beginning to spill out of the top of the drawstring ties. The bags sat under Ryan’s bare hanging system that now only held a few empty hangers.
Anya stood motionless, sickened with the destruction left in the wake of her wrath. She walked to the master bath and sat her cup on the counter. She stood clutching the counter’s edge as she looked at herself in the mirror. Her eyes flowed with heavy tears that clouded her vision. She knew it was time to begin the healing process and move on with her life. Slowly, she slipped off her wedding band and tucked it away in her jewelry box. Her chest went hollow, and she fell to the ground, sobbing wildly.
The next few weeks turned the pain of Ryan’s abandonment into pure desolation. Living in the house, with so many memories, so many hopes, was insufferable, but she had nowhere else to go.
Online banking statements showed that their shared banking accounts remained untouched by Ryan, but the investment income that supplied the accounts had been greatly reduced, and her weekly allowance supplied by Ryan’s company had stopped. A trip down to the bank revealed that Ryan had emptied out the emergency cash and jewelry that was in the safe-deposit box as well.
Ryan managed all their finances, and she was beginning to uncover that much of their assets were in his name, entity names or had been simply transferred from their joint ownership to various accounts slowly over the last couple of months. She had no access rights to any funds. In fact, she had no rights to account inquiries, either, but most of the information she had uncovered had been made inadvertently by inept bank personnel.
The drive home left her to analyze her finances.
How could he leave me in this financial state?
She pounded her palms into the steering wheel.
This was a thought-out process he was planning for months!
Questions swirled endlessly in her head as she drove.
How could I have allowed this to happen? Why didn’t I insist on a more active role in the handling of the finances? Where am I going to get the money to pay for everything?
She parked the car in the driveway and the recurring thought made its appearance again.
Why did I mean so little to a man that I pledged my life to?
She made her way straight to the kitchen as she entered the house. She threw her purse on the kitchen counter and filled a glass with tap water. Taking a hearty gulp of the water, she headed to the kitchen island. Biting down nervously on her pinky that she slipped between her teeth, she leaned against the island and examined the laid-out bills. She sifted through the stacks of papers in an attempt to occupy her thoughts for a bit. As she organized the bills by due dates, the telephone rang.
“Hello?”
“Hello. I’m calling for Mrs. Anya Evans,” a woman’s voice spoke on the other line. A faint echo reverberated from the line. The silence had a loud, airy quality. Anya realized she was on a speaker phone.
“This is she.”
“Mrs. Evans, this is Detective Doyle from CSPD’s Violent Crimes Unit. I also have Sergeant Stemper with me in the office.”
“Mrs. Evans,” a male voice greeted.
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Mrs. Evans. We have reason to believe that a body that was discovered in a well may be that of your—”
“Husband? Ryan?” Anya interrupted and began to cry.
“No, Mrs. Evans. I’m talking about your sister…Anise,” the detective said. “I truly apologize to have to inform you of this news in this manner, but we feel that immediate notification to family members may help with leads in the case and we’re in need of a positive ID on her belongings.”
The line went silent for a few seconds.
“You thought I was about to refer to your husband? Is something wrong with your husband, Ryan Evans?”
“He left me. Abandoned me, just a few weeks ago, without warning. Actually, it looks like he had been planning it for months and I just never…” Anya started to ramble and caught herself. “Anyway, I thought…Never mind.”
When the detective’s words finally registered, Anya lowered herself to the barstool at the kitchen island.
“Anise? What is going on? You said
body
? What happened?”
“Mrs. Evans, when did you last talk to your sister?”
“Anise and I have not spoken since after my husb—” Anya corrected herself. “I mean, Ryan and I kicked her out of our home over a year ago.”
“Mrs. Evans, I would like you to come down to the office for an interview process as standard procedure in any active case. There’s a lot more I would like to go over with you.”
Chapter Five
Anya sat motionless in her chair.
Inside, her thoughts were restless, searching for answers. As if the state of her marriage and finances hadn’t given her enough to consume her thoughts, her mind was now in a free fall. It was like adding another rung or two to the ladder that ascended from grief and depression, the ladder she had been trying to scale since her parents’ deaths.
With swollen, cried-out eyes, Anya took in her surroundings.
Everything about the place was harsh. The white walls glared with unflattery, the plastic chairs uninviting, the scuffed linoleum floors lent to the unsightly decor, and the room sat at a frigid-cold temperature.
She couldn’t help but to make the comparison.
The precinct’s reception area was worse than that of a hospital waiting room. At least the hospital had the occasional magazine and wall art to admire, a trail of medicinal disinfectant to linger over. Here, no style, no charm, and no life existed. Everything was stark. How hard was it to spruce up the area, give it a little character, a plant here, a decorative dish there?
This was the last place on earth she wanted to be.
Without a doubt, the waiting triggered it. Anya’s unoccupied moment allowed her thoughts rampant and cyclical, eating at her core. She had wished to stay numb to everything, at least for the time being, but her mind didn’t afford her any leeway in deadening her full-fledged reality. With Anise now gone, she had no family, no identity. Her life was the epitome of emptiness. She gripped the arms of the chair in attempt to compose herself as it hit her.
Her surroundings were a direct reflection of her life.
“Mrs. Evans?” a receptionist greeted Anya “I will take you back now.”
The receptionist led her through a maze of hallways, doors, and offices to the glass door entrance of the Violent Crimes unit. As they made their way to Detective Doyle’s office, Anya glanced into a room that projected Anise’s driver license on the overhead screen. She couldn’t help but notice the stares from the people in the room, as if she’d interrupted their discussion.
“Have a seat.” The receptionist motioned to the chair that sat in front of the desk. “Detective Doyle will be in momentarily.”
Merely seconds after the receptionist left the room, Detective Doyle stepped through the door.
Anya stood and turned around to greet the detective.
Their eyes met and the detective let out a gasp. With a bombshell look in her eye, the detective took in a deep breath, delving deeper into her examination of Anya.
“I’m sorry. It didn’t dawn on me to mention that we are…or were…identical twins,” confessed Anya, realizing her resemblance to her sister was the cause for the commotion.
Shaking her head and trying to regain her composure, the detective said, “I–I don’t know why any of us didn’t pick up on that by the birthdates…”
“It’s easy to overlook. We were born in different years. She on December 31
st
and I on January 1
st
,” interrupted Anya.
“Interesting. Please, take a seat,” said the detective as she took her seat and continued. “Thank you for coming down so quickly. We like to interview family members early in the case. Learning about the victim…I mean, Anise, from a close family member can sometimes help to uncover leads that the evidence couldn’t.” Detective Doyle folded her hands together on the desk and continued openly. “I apologize, Mrs. Evans. This type of meeting is never easy for me. I’m good at stating facts and evidence. I’m not good with the human aspect of it all. Forgive me if I seem straight to the point. I’ll share with you the basic facts that we have at this point and then I’ll have questions for you.”
Anya nodded.
The door to the office slowly opened, and a male voice spoke, “Sorry I’m late, I just got things wrapped up.”
“Mrs. Evans, this is Sergeant Stemper. He was on the line when I phoned you earlier.”
“Mrs. Evans,” greeted the sergeant.
He took a chair from the corner of the office and placed it next to Detective Doyle as he handed her a manila folder.
Turning back to Anya, the detective continued, “Sergeant Stemper is from our criminalist unit. He’s in charge of the evidence in your sister’s case.”
Anya gazed at Sergeant Stemper, noting his handsome face. Although absent of any noticeable accent, he had a slight foreign quality to his features, aristocratic by sorts. Anya nodded in understanding as she inwardly evaluated the sergeant.
“Mrs. Evans, please call me Alex.” He flashed a smile at Anya. “So, let’s start with what we know. The owner of the cattle ranch found Anise’s body in an old well as he was checking the fence lines. Shortly after the discovery, he found her belongings scattered near the well. Her purse was found not far from its contents.”
The detective opened the manila folder that Alex had given her and placed evidence photos of the purse’s contents on the desk for Anya to examine. Anya recognized much of the contents as belonging to Anise.
All of Anya’s early attempts at composure faded, and she started to cry.
“Her body was in the well? She fell in? Why wasn’t the well covered or something?” Anya managed to get out her sentence in between her bouts of crying.
“Mrs. Evans, Anise’s body was
placed in the well and burned,”
Alex explained.
“Burned? Oh my god, Anise!” Anya sobbed heavily at the thought of her sister’s demise.
“Do you know if your sister had any enemies? You know, jilted lovers, angry coworkers, someone she may have owed money to?”
“No.”
The detective flipped through papers in another manila folder. “You and Anise were the only surviving members of your family, is that correct?”
“Yes. Our parents were killed in a crash. They were vacationing in Kauai. On their last day on the island, they decided to take a helicopter tour of the island…” Anya trailed off in a vacant stare. “My mother hated flying.”
“I’m curious, how was the relationship between you and your sister in the past, since it was just the two of you?” probed Detective Doyle.