The Poisoned Koi

Chapter 2 The Explanation Rights

Elena sat at the kitchen table in her robe and listened to me with her hands wrapped around her mug. When I finished, she did not look shocked. That was the part that hurt. She looked resigned, which meant she had known, on some level, for a long time, what her brother was.

"He'll bring it back," she said.

"He won't," I said.

"He always brings things back, Daniel. He brought the throw back."

"He brought the throw back because I left it on the sofa where he could pretend he had never taken it. He brought it back because it was easier than having a conversation."

She set down her mug. "So what do you want to do?"

That was the question, and it was the question I had been holding for months, and I had an answer, and I knew she was not going to like it. I took a breath.

"I want to report it."

She stared at me. "Report it. To who?"

"To the police. It's theft. It's grand theft, actually. The fish is insured for forty-two thousand dollars."

"Insured." Her voice went flat. "You insured the fish."

"I insure everything."

"You insured a fish for forty-two thousand dollars and you didn't tell me."

"I told you it was a rescue."

"You told me it was a rescue from a dealer who was closing his store." She stood up. "You lied to me."

"I simplified it."

"You lied to me, Daniel. And now you want to call the police on my brother because he stole a fish that you lied to me about."

I did not raise my voice. I have never raised my voice at Elena, not once in six years of marriage, and I was not going to start now, because I knew that the moment I raised my voice, she would stop listening, and I needed her to listen. I said, "Elena, this is not about the fish. This is about the fact that your brother has been taking things out of this house for two years, and that he has a key, and that he knows the code to the alarm, and that he has never once apologized or even acknowledged it. I am not doing this to hurt him. I am doing this because if I don't, nothing changes."

She started to cry. Not the loud kind. The quiet kind, where the tears just come and the face stays still. She said, "He's my brother."

"He is," I said. "And I am your husband. And I am telling you that I cannot keep living in a house where I have to count my things after every visit."

She wiped her face with the back of her hand. "Give me a week," she said. "Let me talk to him. If he brings it back, you drop this."

I wanted to say yes. I wanted to give her that. But I had made copies of the footage, and I had mailed a drive to my lawyer, and I had already crossed a line in my own head, and I knew that if I said yes, I would be telling her that the last two years had not happened.

"I can't do that," I said.

"Can't, or won't."

"Won't."

She walked out of the kitchen. She went upstairs and closed the bedroom door, and I sat at the table for a long time with my cold coffee and the sound of the tank filter running in an empty hallway.

I called my lawyer, Andrea. She had been my lawyer for eight years. She handled my contracts, my insurance, my house purchase, and now, apparently, my brother-in-law. I told her the facts in order. She listened the way lawyers listen, which is to say completely and without expression. When I finished, she said, "You want to file a report."

"I want to recover the fish. I want him to understand what he did. And I want him out of my house."

"Those are three different goals."

"I know."

"The report gets you the first one. Maybe. If the fish is alive. If it isn't, it gets you a felony charge and a family war. The second one is not something a police report accomplishes. The third one is a conversation with your wife."

"I've had the conversation."

"How did it go."

"Badly."

"Then here is what I would do," Andrea said. "File the report. Let the process do what it does. Do not talk to Miles. Do not talk to Miles's friends. Do not post anything, do not text anything, do not leave a voicemail. Everything you say from here on is evidence."

I filed the report that afternoon. Officer Reyes came to the house and took a statement and looked at the footage and asked me a series of questions about the fish that I answered carefully and incompletely. I did not mention the tetrodotoxin. I did not mention the case. I said it was a rare koi worth approximately forty-two thousand dollars, and that my brother-in-law had taken it without permission, and that I had reason to believe he intended to sell it.

Officer Reyes wrote it all down. When he left, he said, "We'll be in touch."

Miles called me that night. I did not answer. He called again. I did not answer. He texted.

Miles: Daniel pick up

Miles: elena says you called the cops

Miles: seriously? over a fish?

Miles: call me back before this gets stupid

I read the messages and put the phone face down on the table and went to bed. Elena was not in the bedroom. She was in the guest room, which she had not slept in since we bought the house. I lay awake for a while and then I slept, and in the morning there was a voicemail from Miles's girlfriend, a woman named Priya, who I had met twice and who I liked.

"Daniel, it's Priya. I don't know what's going on, but Miles came home last night with a fish in a bag and he put it in the bathtub, and now he's saying you're trying to destroy him, and I don't know what to do. Please call me back."

I saved the voicemail and did not call her back.

Then I went to work, because I had a case, and the case was the reason there was a fish in my house to begin with, and I was not going to let the fish take the case from me.