The story was from the Laredo Morning Times, a local newspaper for a city a few hours south of Austin, where I lived. I clicked on the link. My screen filled with the bold headline and two black-and-white family photos, divided by a dramatic stylized tear. In the first photo, captioned 1978, a man named Fabian Rivera and his wife, Dolores, held a pair of oversize scissors at some kind of ribbon-cutting event. Her curly black hair was feathered over each ear, earrings dangling to her jaw. She was laughing, her cheeks round, chin slightly tilted, as though she’d been about to look up at Fabian. She wore a harsh shoulder-padded skirt suit, and Fabian stared at the camera with a small twist of a smile at the corners of his lips and eyes. Beside them, two dark-haired boys, twins—captioned as Gabriel and Mateo Rivera—grinned, as if they were doing bunny ears behind their parents’ backs.
The other photo was taken in 1984. It was a studio portrait with a cheesy Christmas backdrop: glittering fist-size snowflakes suspended above the branches of a heavily ornamented pine. This time the same woman—Dolores—leaned into a different man, captioned as Andres Russo. He smiled broadly, his right arm around her shoulder. Dolores’s palm rested on the shoulder of a laughing teenage girl, who wore slouch socks and Dr. Martens with her plaid skirt. Beside her, a boy of eleven or twelve was wide-eyed behind dark-framed glasses.
Nothing in either photo suggested a crack in the couple’s intimacy—but then, my own parents had chopped onions and bell peppers side by side for fajita night right up until the very end. They’d held hands in the car, singing to the Eagles. On every anniversary, they retold the story of how they met: two nineteen-year-olds craving Baskin-Robbins on a rainy winter night. Fate.
The way things seemed meant nothing.
I took a sip of cold coffee and began to read.
Penelope Russo was 15 when she met Dolores Rivera, the woman who would become her stepmother—and change her life forever. It was December 1983, and they spent that first meeting decorating the Christmas tree in Penelope’s father Andres’s Mexico City apartment. The tree was small and artificial, because Penelope’s brother, Carlos, then 12, was allergic to the real ones. The whole endeavor took 20 minutes, and then they went to Churrería El Moro for hot chocolate and churros.
Even from the start, Penelope could understand her father’s infatuation with the new woman. Dolores was 33 years old, a successful international banker from Laredo who still had her job in the midst of the devastating peso devaluation. She was smart and magnetic, Penelope remembers, with sparkling brown eyes and a contagious laugh.
The memory, it is clear, comes at a painful price: to recall Dolores is to recall the pain of being deceived, the shock of trusting someone—loving someone—whose every word turned out to be a lie.
Already, my curiosity was mutating, growing limbs, sprouting new and reaching fingers. I imagined a part of my mother, left in me, quivering like a magnet sensing its opposite.
I had to know more.
The Laredo Morning Times didn’t have much of a presence on Twitter, but on Facebook, local readers tagged each other eagerly, whittling the degrees of separation between themselves and Dolores: someone’s aunt used to work with her; someone’s dad had asked her to go around in high school; wasn’t she the lady on that bank billboard on San Ber a few years back, the one close to the bridge? Pobrecitos los esposos, imagine! and Qué agüite, did they take away her kids? and No fkn way, that’s my neighbor! Always outside watering her jungle. About half the comments were in English, the other half in Spanglish or full Spanish, so that I had to open Google Translate to understand them.
Occasionally, obvious outsiders chimed in: a man with an American flag as a profile photo wondering whether Dolores was still fuckable, or a ruddy-cheeked white dude in a fisherman’s hat writing, Fucking Mexicans. Not one but two incels emerged from their semen-scented basements to say this was why women should be kept as sex slaves—it was the only way innocent men could protect themselves. To these comments, the women responded with variations on Go fuck yourself, pendejo, no one else will.
I wouldn’t exactly call it nuanced commentary.
When the front door creaked open, I was still sitting on the gray love seat that doubled as my office. “Shit,” I hissed, looking at the time. It was after four. My fiancé’s family farm was three and a half hours from Austin with no traffic—as if there was ever no traffic—and they were expecting us for dinner at eight. I hadn’t even started to pack.
“Hey, pretty lady,” Duke called, his initial grin fading when he took in my open laptop, my socked feet.
“Before you ask,” I said, meeting him at the door, “I’m not quite ready yet.” Duke was broad and sturdy, his skin silty with sweat, and he smelled like pit fire and honey when I kissed him.
Duke hated to be late. That was the thing about growing up on a dairy farm: if you don’t milk a cow or goat when you’re supposed to, she’ll wail and stomp in agony that you caused. So Duke had grown up doing what he was supposed to do when he was supposed to do it. I’d loved that at the beginning of our relationship, how he called and texted and came by exactly when he promised. But it didn’t leave a lot of room for error.
“Work,” I added, noticing the glimmer of irritation on his face.
“Oh.” Duke’s expression relaxed as he opened the fridge, making sure nothing would go bad while we were away. “The Antone’s retrospective? I’m excited about that one.”
Duke was highly supportive of my noncrime freelance work. To him my obsession was macabre, the way I could binge hour after hour of crime shows, from prestige documentaries to Forensic Files, depending on my mood; the stack of books on my nightstand with dark covers and long, bold lettering. The podcasts I listened to during my walks—once wandering eight miles around the lake because I had to hear just one more episode of Serial—and the message boards I returned to when I couldn’t sleep, my late-night tumble of rabbit holes. The folder on my desktop labeled “Interesting Crimes,” where I dropped articles and screenshots and early research. All of this in addition to working on the blog for fifteen hours a week.
But then, look where Duke came from. Parents who still held hands forty years later, who called on Sundays and sent dry-iced care packages of crème fra?che, goat milk yogurt, honey, and jams. Siblings constantly blowing up the group chat with photos and memes and personal news. Childhood memories of brushing horses’ flanks until they shone like water, and literally coming home when the dinner bell rang. Even after meeting his family, I’d sifted through his stories for hidden resentments, secret trauma, and found nothing. He was boyishly open, untainted. I loved this about him. But it meant he believed people were inherently good and didn’t like looking at evidence to the contrary. I never wanted to be surprised again, so I looked and looked until even my dreams were bloody.
“I filed the Antone’s piece last week,” I said. “No, I found this story about a woman—a mother—who was secretly married to two men at the same time back in the eighties. One of the husbands ended up murdering the other.”
Duke gave a half laugh, throwing out some ham on the verge of going slimy. “Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to get normal work updates from you.”
“Imagine how much effort it took to pull that off,” I continued, powering off my laptop. “And why, you know? What makes a woman, a mom, do something like that? Not that mothers always put their children first”—I should know—“or even that they should, but this is something else.”
“Yeah, it’s definitely weird. But, Cass—” Duke jangled his keys, a nervous tic he never noticed.
I glanced up, on alert. “Yeah?”
He crossed the room to where I crouched, pulling my charger from the wall. “We’ve hardly seen each other lately. Can we take a break from work this weekend? Maybe leave the laptop behind and make it, like, a murder-free zone?”
I laughed, though my grip tightened on my charger. It was easy for him to suggest leaving work behind—it wasn’t like he could smoke the brisket for his food truck at the farm. And if Sal called with a problem over the weekend, he’d obviously answer. The food truck was his business. Crime was mine. Sort of.
But he was right. For weeks we’d only been catching each other in moments: a twenty-minute dinner break at the food park; the occasional mindless movie on Netflix; half-asleep sex that almost felt like a dream in the morning.
“Okay.” I exhaled as I set the charger down, already feeling strangely limbless. “Sure. Family time. No murder. Promise.”