Irretractable

A month after Memorial Day weekend, it was in her second sweep of the condo that Lana found something the police had missed : a small sticky-note on the partially obscured side of the refrigerator.

The investigator thought "S note" likely meant "suicide," but her subsequent, frantic searches hadn’t turned-up a suicide note or the merest hint or crumb trail toward the shadow of a clue about her missing sister.

Gibson turned out to be an attorney who had a generic, store-bought will with nothing out of the ordinary.

The lady at the Humane Society had been kind enough to look-up the records listing Jana’s reason for leaving her cat of 12 years as, “Found animal starving in neighborhood,” not adopted but destroyed which only brought on more crying jags from Lana for Jana.

Jana seemed moody and withdrawn before disappearing and--after analyzing the sticky note-- police surmised that she may have taken her life in the ocean, reasoning that no bank transactions occurred, no travel could be linked to timing in the vanishing of the early-30s executive assistant and, frankly, the woman didn’t have a reason or enough liquidity of assets to drop out of view, society or even life.

A razor-sharp knife separated the skin from the flesh of the overripe mango, hitting the cutting board with a loud rap as Jana contemplated how long she could hide-out in Belize, after purchasing a no-questions-asked passport and citizenship from that government with money she’d embezzled from L.A.’s most accomplished and unsuspected cocaine importer.