It was almost midnight when we crawled into Duke’s old pine bed, my back to his chest, his hand on my hip. Sleep on the farm was usually like a hole I stumbled into in the dark, one moment tethered to the ground, the next falling. Gone.
But not tonight. Tonight, my thoughts kept flitting between Andrew and Dolores Rivera. If something was wrong, Andrew would have called again, I reassured myself. He would have texted me. And why was it that some people, like Duke, could hear about a woman who’d lived a complete double life that led to a murder, and simply move on, while others, like me, worried the threads of that story like yarn between fingers, scraping the skin raw?
Duke kissed the spot below my jaw that made me shiver. “I’m so happy we’re going to get married here,” he whispered.
“Me too,” I said, though my mind was still on Dolores, thinking about the buy-in you’d need for someone to believe you’re essentially alone in the world. What had Andres Russo’s family and friends thought of his wife, a woman with a foot in two countries? Who had gone to their wedding? Didn’t anyone wonder why she had no family in attendance, no friends?
My stomach lurched as I realized my own side of the aisle would be nearly as empty—everything, everyone I was missing creating its own gravity, impossible to ignore. The truth is it doesn’t take elaborate lies, only being with someone who doesn’t push to know the things you don’t want to reveal.
When Duke’s arm loosened around me in sleep, I pulled my phone off the charger and texted Andrew: Sorry I missed your call. Is everything okay?
The ellipsis appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again, followed by: Yeah.
I stared at the word until my eyes burned. Yeah. Simple, curt. He may as well have written Fuck you.
Okay, I responded. I’ll call you soon so we can catch up. I hesitated, remembering the warmth of his skin on mine so long ago. I miss you.
This time, nothing appeared after the ellipsis. My heart was a comet trailing fire in my chest.
I put the phone away and closed my eyes, but I was viciously awake. Carefully, I edged out of bed, plunging my hand into my duffel bag and rummaging below jeans and tops and underwear until I felt the familiar comfort of cold steel. Then I pulled out the laptop I’d promised Duke I would leave behind.
I settled cross-legged onto the floor, my back against the bed. The computer chimed softly when I turned it on. Duke shifted as the room lightened with electronic blue. I held my breath, curved over the screen, dimming it with my body. After a moment, the covers stilled. His breathing deepened.
Exhaling, I pulled up the Laredo Morning Times piece again. Dolores Rivera and Andres Russo had been married for just under a year, together for nearly three, when Russo’s body was found at the Hotel Botanica, a motor inn in Laredo, on August 2, 1986. It wasn’t long before the police discovered that Russo, who lived in Mexico City, was in town to visit his wife, Dolores Rivera. (So why was he staying at a motel instead of with Dolores? Where did he think she lived?) He was believed to have been “shot the evening before, on a day temperatures soared to a record-breaking 117 degrees before a much-needed rain cooled things off.”
The detectives at the time, Manuel Zamora and Ben Cortez, had questioned both Dolores and Fabian, but if she’d been a suspect initially (which of course she was), soon Fabian eclipsed her as a person of interest: a clerk had seen him leaving the motel around 10 P.M. on August 1, which turned out to fit squarely within the window of Russo’s time of death.
Fabian was no criminal mastermind—he’d also left a partial print in Russo’s room, and the slug lodged in Russo’s body was later matched to ammunition found in Fabian and Dolores’s home, ammunition used for the Ruger Mark II .22 caliber pistol Fabian claimed to have lost. The bullet had entered from the right side of Russo’s chest, tearing through his eighth rib to lodge within the soft tissue of his lateral right back. It fractured the rib and punctured the lower right lung. Russo had drowned in thirteen and a half ounces of his own blood.
The reporter traded gleefully in these details, though I’d been writing my own grotesqueries long enough to know what they masked: a lack of any real insight into the crime. Not only the murder, but the crime that had led to the murder—Dolores’s double marriage. Instead, there were quotes from Dolores’s former stepdaughter, Penelope Russo, calling her a monster who’d used their family and thrown them away, like trash. As a treat, the reporter indulged in a little armchair pathologizing, questioning whether Dolores was a psychopath or merely a narcissist, and maybe that shouldn’t have pissed me off, but it did—he was one step away from calling her crazy, that one word with the power to dismiss every aspect of women’s emotional and intellectual lives, our motivations and desires. Which, especially in their absence, were the most interesting parts of this story.
The first search results for Dolores Rivera’s name paired with Laredo were the article and its various comment threads. The paper’s online archives only went as far back as 2005, with similar results for all other major Texas cities. Whatever had been written about her at the time of the murder was relegated to a reference library somewhere.
After the Laredo Morning Times piece, there was a retirement announcement from five years ago—astonishingly, from the same bank where Dolores had worked in the eighties. It featured what I assumed was a semi-updated headshot: Dolores with a thick, straight collar-length bob, her hair mostly still dark, wearing red lipstick and a matching silk shirt. Her brown eyes were warm, competent, and amused. She was still an attractive woman. Had she been in other serious relationships since the murder? Who would be able to trust her after what she’d done?
After the retirement announcement and an outdated LinkedIn page, the results lost accuracy, linking to Spanish GoFundMes and college volleyball game write-ups. I searched for her on social media with no results. Then I reopened the Laredo Morning Times article. There were Dolores and Fabian, with their hands on the oversize scissors.
And their sons.
Mateo and Gabriel Rivera must be in their midforties now. I started with Mateo: easy. He owned a veterinary clinic in San Antonio and reminded me of the serious runners at the lake, tall and greyhound-lean, with silvering dark hair. Mateo didn’t have any personal social media, but the clinic maintained an enthusiastic Instagram account. In photos with animals, Mateo was almost always smiling: caught midlaugh between three lion-headed pit bulls at an outdoor adoption event, or beaming as he held a drooping pug puppy with an IV taped to its arm: Clyde is off oxygen! But with other people Mateo seemed serious, almost awkward—too much space between him and the person beside him in a group shot, a hand hovering instead of resting on a shoulder.