Unrevealed

voice, his orange flip-flops collecting another layer of dirt and gravel with each step.
    He’s looking more familiar at this point, but I still can’t place him. I nod to him but keep up the wall around me.
    “I guess we’re gonna be related by marriage now,” he says with a smile, “me the cousin of the bride, you the sister of the groom.”
    God help me , I’m thinking.
    “This’ll be a different kind of wedding for you and me, huh?” he says.
    I bite. “Different in what way?”
    “Well, for one, we’ll remember it, and for another, we won’t make asses of ourselves.”
    And that is when I knew where I’ve seen this guy. He sits across from me on the plaid couch with the bad springs in the basement of the Methodist church where they hold the weekly AA meeting.
    For those of you who didn’t get the memo, I’m sober. (I’m also back working in Denver Homicide after some “negotiations” with Sergeant Weyler. Now I’m Sergeant Detective Jane Perry, for what it’s worth.)
    I’m still getting used to regarding myself as a recovering alcoholic instead of a drunk. There’s so much more to explain when you’re recovering than when you’re just another tedious, piss-ass alcoholic. People are more likely to accept you when you say you’re a drinker, but when you’re recovering ,
there are the inevitable questions of how long you’ve been sober, what prompted you to get sober, how does it feel to be sober, blah, blah, blah. If I made a habit out of indulging in all that shit, I’d have to get a load on just to suffer through it. I’m a very private person. I don’t feel a need to wear my addiction on my sleeve and regurgitate my dramas to everyone in earshot. I prefer to stand outside the group and recover alone. But they say you need to have those fellow recovering drunk shoulders to lean on when you start, so I play the game…to a point. I don’t have a sponsor. I just can’t bring myself to get cozy with some well-meaning ex-alky who keeps insisting that I meet her for coffee so we can “chat.” For me, it would feel like an Amway sales ambush. “Do you have a few minutes, Jane? I’d like to talk to you about your sobriety!” No thanks.
    Am I keeping my sobriety a secret? Well, no, obviously not, since I’m writing about it and you’re reading it. Did I keep my drinking a secret? Well, yes, in fact, I sure as hell tried. But I had a little trouble keeping the hangovers under wraps and my frequently bloodshot eyes tended to tip my drunken hat. But even so, there were still a few acquaintances who didn’t quite appreciate how far I’d fallen into the bottle. But I’ll say it again: they weren’t observant . Just like Mike’s Jewish “shaman,” all I had to do was come up with a good cover story and more than one schmo bought this shiksa’s lame excuses.
    As they say in AA: “You’re only as sick as your secrets.” And let me tell you, there are a lot of people out there keeping a whole helluva lot of secrets. Our secrets often stalk us, continually reminding us that we’re one revelation away from having our human frailties or youthful transgressions laid bare. Some of our secrets are minor, but other secrets
take on their own identity, framing and defining an individual’s cloaked life. For those souls, their secrets haunt them, holding them hostage to the fear that one day they will be discovered. The mere thought of being exposed is enough for a few of them to kill; for others, it’s enough to make them take their own lives rather than face disgrace.
    As I’ve commented many times while working in Homicide, people kill for one of three reasons: sex, money or gettin’ even. When you think about it, secrets inhabit each of those motives: Sexual secrets, financial secrets and sundry secrets that force a person to seek revenge. I had to keep all of that in mind when I worked a case recently involving Mr. Winston Gambrel.
    I was paged at 2:22 a.m. a few weeks ago and summoned to Mr. Gambrel’s upscale home after Mr. Gambrel hysterically called 9-1-1 to get help for his wife. She had fallen down their circular staircase and sprawled in her lilac nightgown on the Italian tile near their front door. When the paramedics arrived, 65-year-old Gambrel answered the door nude, hyperventilating and sweating profusely. His 59-year-old wife, Abbey, showed signs of serious trauma on her chest and shoulders. Tossed across the entryway, under an 18thcentury secretary from Britain,