Here She Lies (20 page)

and I waved back. As our silence endured, Bobby’s end of it began to agitate me. I
knew
he was holding back more layers of the onion-thoughts he had begun to unpeel back at the cybercafe in New York, that deep within him were stinging suspicions. The idea that Julie would try to seduce him was outrageous! I couldn’t even
think
about it; and yet … against my will the emotional details of Julie’s infertility floated to the surface of my mind.

Julie, a dozen years ago, walking across a vast lawn at the northern New England college we attended together. It was winter and the lawn was covered with mangy patches of ice left over from a big snow. I had just come out of the library when I saw my sister walking with Ian, whom I had a crush on at the time.

Ian was a big bear of a boy, nineteen, pale and funny.

Julie knew all about my hankering after him and yet there she was,
with
him, which in and of itself was fine (I guessed), but then she slipped on some ice, and he clutched her elbow, and she grabbed his shoulder, and he laughed—and they kissed. I stood there, paralyzed, holding a big art history tome that suddenly weighed three hundred pounds. They kissed again and he actually
licked
her cheek and they laughed with such familiarity I knew their intimacy was not brand-new. So … I gave up on my plans to seduce Ian. And Julie and I had it out that very night: she admitted they had slept together (twice!) and tearfully apologized for hurting (betraying! deceiving!) me and promised she would drop Ian immediately. Which she did. But the damage was done. The worst damage, it turned out (because my heart healed quickly and moved on to Rich, who was
much
nicer and better-looking than Ian), was that Ian had passed on to Julie more than his affections. Weeks later she discovered she had chlamydia, a sexually transmitted disease that can leave you infertile. Within a year Julie’s infertility was confirmed by our gynecologist and my bitter feelings about the Ian Incident were swallowed by a stronger feeling: sorrow over Julie’s inability to
ever
bear her own children. When you are an identical twin, your sibling’s fertility in a way is your own and so I felt her prospective losses acutely. By the time college was over and we no longer lived in the context of this misfortune, we put it behind us and it became a fact-of-life stepping-stone after which Julie created a successful adulthood. When Lexy was born we shared in the elation of
our
daughter’s birth; Julie was as overjoyed as Bobby and I. The earrings had been a gift to mark new motherhood: matching earrings, one pair for me, another for her.

“It’s time.” Bobby took both our mugs to the counter and we went back outside. Gentle cloud-dappled sunlight bathed the whole west side of the street and sidewalk as we returned to Simonoff Antique and Estate Jewelry.

A bell tinkled when Bobby opened the glass door.

I followed him into a small but gracious space lined with wood and glass jewelry cases. A delicate clear-glass chandelier was suspended from the ceiling and the walls were covered in dusty framed prints of midcentury abstract expressionist paintings by Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko—obvious ones that I recognized as readily as anyone—as well as some Calder and, surprise, a Basquiat. In the back of the store a window had been carved over the jeweler’s work area and we saw a gray-haired woman hunched over a table, squinting as her weathered hands manipulated the latch end of a necklace with the pointed tip of precision pliers. At the sound of the bell she looked up at us and I saw that her eyes, now relaxed, were bright, bright blue.

“Good morning.” Bobby walked toward the back of the shop, smiling.

“Morning,” the woman answered in a reedy voice.

“Glad to find you in,” Bobby said. “We came by before and saw the sign.”

“Yes,” she said, “I’m sorry about that. My husband, Gaston, usually opens and I come along later, but he’s under the weather today. How can I help you?”

“We were wondering if we could get some earrings appraised.”

She pushed back her chair and vanished for a moment, then reappeared through a door in the shop’s back corner. She was tiny, not even five feet tall, and I guessed in her seventies. She wore a long fringed denim skirt, battered Birkenstocks, a red long-sleeved turtleneck and not an iota of jewelry. Positioned now behind the counter, she introduced herself.

“I’m Ellery Simonoff. Do you have your appraisal item with you?”

“My wife’s earrings.”

I took them off and gave them to the woman. They looked like fallen stars in the earth of her craggy brownish palms. “They’re only zircons,” I said.

“Well, there are zircons and there are zircons and there are …” She squinted at the earrings and her voice trailed off as she set them on a worn velvet display board. We stood in front of her while her thickened fingers placed one earring in her opposite palm.

She studied it through a magnifying monocle squeezed over one eye. Using a pair of steel pincers, she lifted it up and turned it around, inspecting it from different angles.

“This is what we call a bezel-set cubic zirconia—a very nice one—six millimeters, almost one full carat, set in sterling silver. The stone is white. The cut is round brilliant. You see the silver setting, how it en-compasses the stone?”

Bobby and I both nodded, keen students. His expression was serious and a little disappointed (it seemed to me) at the detailed description of the zircon, whereas
I
could not have been happier at this news that my precious earrings were certifiable fakes. Winning a marital argument always felt like a reprieve, usually fleeting, but so much had hung on this one. The relief was so satisfying I could feel the tension melting out of me. So … my earrings were fakes; Julie was just plain Julie (no surprise there); she would have Lexy home by noon; and Bobby and I could put our ugly middle-of-the-night argument behind us and go in search of the
real
spendthrift thief who was pretending to be me.

Mrs. Simonoff continued. “It’s a knockoff of a pop-ular Tiffany earring designed by Elsa Peretti. I’d say that someone did a decent job with this one.” Bobby took the earring from her palm and held it up in the diminishing light from the window. Minute by minute, clouds were moving in. More rain was on the way. “It looks so real.”

“Well, it would, to the untrained eye.”

“What would it sell for?”

“Around thirty dollars for a pair.”

He put the earring on the velvet board beside its mate, which Mrs. Simonoff now carefully picked up. It sparkled for a moment before the natural light from the window darkened completely and outside the first trickle of rain began.

“This earring?” She switched on a bright lamp and moved the earring beneath it. “Look carefully.” We bent together over her palm, bronze and vivid in the small spotlight. The second earring seemed to flash and flicker, almost jump out of her hand.

“Another white round brilliant, but this one’s a full carat set in platinum. Color grade F, with an excellent clarity grade.”

Why was she describing this one differently? “That one’s set in silver and this one’s platinum?” I asked.

“Isn’t that a more valuable metal?”

“Oh, yes, much more valuable.” She picked up the first earring and paired it with the second in the deepest crevice of her palm. “Do you see the difference?” As Bobby leaned closer his face seemed to awaken with recognition. He touched the second earring with the tip of his forefinger. “This one’s a real diamond.”

“That’s right. It’s a
real
Tiffany Peretti, valued at …” Mrs. Simonoff pressed down both sides of her mouth in a thoughtful expression typical of the French, and I knew she had spent a lifetime with her French husband, Gaston, absorbing his mannerisms, just as I knew that at this very moment all my certainties were in reversal and life as I’d known it was
over
. “I’d say, about ten thousand dollars for a pair.” Bobby straightened to full height. “We paid eight thousand.”

“We?”
My voice was loud, unreal.

“My dear”—Mrs. Simonoff addressed me soothingly, but her attempt to calm me failed; my insides felt like an earthquake had hit—“you got an excellent price. It’s a stunning piece. But why did you pair it with a zircon?” I couldn’t help myself: I was sick. I ran out of the store and made it across the sidewalk to a public trash can on the corner, where I threw up. Rain was pouring now and I was soaking wet, which was just as well. It covered the stench and the mess and ensured that no one was around to see me. No one except Bobby. It was a minute before he got to me—Bobby being Bobby, he wouldn’t have left the store without first paying Mrs. Simonoff and attempting some kind of polite explanation—but finally he arrived at my side in the rain, holding a tiny envelope that must have contained the earrings. My ponytail had come loose, so he pried the wet hair off my face to free me as I heaved over the large metal can. Mrs. Simonoff, meanwhile, emerged under an umbrella, offered a handful of paper towels and then retreated to her store. I cleaned my face and my shirt and threw the soiled paper squares into the garbage. Then Bobby and I walked through the pouring rain to my sister’s car.

“You’re right,” I said.

“I wish I wasn’t.”

“But you
are
.”

“I’m really sorry, Annie.” He opened the passenger door to let me in, then hurried around to the driver’s side, but before starting the motor, he turned to face me. “Now what?”

“You’re asking
me
?” Buckled forward in the seat, I wept into my hands.

My brain felt like an out-of-sync lightning storm, revelations flashing at once. If Julie had bought those diamond earrings it meant she had bought all that other stuff; it meant she had somehow engineered my arrest.

When I was out of town.
When she had Lexy.
It meant she had planned this for a long time; that she probably
had
tried to seduce my husband when I was pregnant and vulnerable; that she had organized the demise of my marriage. That she had lured me to her; weaned my baby with my help;
prepared
for today. And if I hadn’t inadvertently mixed our earrings the appraisal would have been for a pair of zircons; we would have relaxed a bit, gone home and waited for noon—giving her more time to run away.

Bobby rubbed his hand across my shoulders, warming me. His tone was gentle. “I think we should drive straight to the police station.”

“No, let’s go home first. Maybe they’re back.”

“Annie.”

He was right; they probably weren’t at the house.

No:
they weren’t
. But even knowing what I now knew, beginning to understand it and recognizing the truth of what Bobby had first suggested at Twelfth Night, I still harbored a little seed of hope. Just a tiny one, which I would keep to myself.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go see Detective Lazare.”

Gabe Lazare leaned back in his swivel chair and listened. His desk was angled into a corner of the low-ceilinged, white-painted Detectives Unit of the Great Barrington Police Department. Bobby and I sat opposite him, soaking wet from the rain, and took turns talking. I could hear but not see the half dozen other detectives at their desks behind us: the clatter of typing on a computer keyboard, chair wheels rolling across linoleum, a phone ringing just once before being answered, the hum of unruffled voices. Under the fluorescent lights, Detective Lazare’s pale skin contrasted ghostily with the dyed frazzle of his pitch-black hair.

The large rectangular window behind him showed the rain-beaten bright green leaves of a century-old maple tree.

“You’re convinced your sister bought the diamonds?” Lazare asked me. The identical-looking yet mismatched earrings lay on a clear space of his neat desk.

“I can’t say I’m sure, but it seems she might have.” Just saying those words aloud, voicing my tentative doubts, felt shattering. The translation was so stark: my sister
hated
me. I loved her and she hated me. And she had Lexy. I was starting to feel sick again.

“I hate to say it, but it doesn’t really surprise me.” Bobby glanced at me, deciding how much he could say before earning a dreaded reaction from me. “I think Julie was feeling rejected by me—”

“Because you rejected her.” Detective Lazare nodded.
Got it, move on.
Bobby smiled a little uneasily and agreed.

“Yes, I rejected her. I was really stunned when she came on to me. I mean, she’s Annie’s
sister
.”

“With identity theft,” Lazare said, “the wisdom is that it’s often someone who’s got access, someone who works in the home, a coworker, even a family member.”

“That’s right. I read that in the book I picked up.” Bobby hadn’t mentioned exactly that to me before, about it often being someone close to you, and I now wondered how much that notion had contributed to his thinking about Julie.

“Have you reported this yet?” Lazare asked.

“We put a fraud alert on our credit reports,” Bobby said.

“I mean to the FBI.”

“No,” Bobby said. “We just found out last night. We drove straight to the house this morning, then went to the appraiser.”

“You can reach the FBI twenty-four hours—” I had to interrupt the detective. “It was my fault.

When Bobby first said he thought Julie might have something to do with it, I wouldn’t listen. We decided to get the earrings appraised first. I couldn’t just accuse my sister of something like this.”

“The thing is,
you
don’t have to solve this, Annie.” Detective Lazare’s eyes smiled, seeming to forgive my hesitation. I had the sense that he comprehended my emotional plight, the delicacy of what was at stake for me. “The FBI has a Cyber Division—they’ve been bringing us up to Boston for conferences this past year to brief us on cyber crimes and offer help if we need it.

They’ll work with us. They know how to investigate exactly this kind of crime.”

He picked up his phone and crooked it between neck and ear while searching for something on his computer. A phone number, presumably, because then he dialed. Waited. Pushed a few buttons, obviously navigating a voice-mail system. Finally telling some stranger that we needed help from the federal government.