Here She Lies (30 page)

“I don’t know.” He nodded, shook his head, cried harder. “I don’t want to leave you here.” And then we were quiet, leaving unresolved the possibility that Bobby and Lexy would go home without me.

A minute later, when the guard told us our time was up, Bobby kissed me and left; and I went back to my cell, where loneliness grew out of all proportion. Finally, in the late afternoon, with the outside sun throwing a vivid pattern against my cinder-block wall, I opened the Wharton novel. I hadn’t realized when I’d bought it that Ethan Frome’s story took place right here in the Berkshires: a turn-of-the-last-century farmer falls in love with someone not-his-wife and his conflict over fleeing his doleful marriage drives him, with his beloved, to near suicide. At the end of the story, the now-crippled farmer lives in poverty with both women: one a martyr, the other an invalid. Another triangle to contemplate. Or not. I closed my eyes, wishing I hadn’t read it, and tried and tried and tried to sleep.

Elias Stormier came the next day. He was tall and lanky, with short gray hair ringing a pale, domed head.

His forehead was unusually large and this comforted me, as if the size of his head was an indication of intelligence; if anyone needed a brilliant lawyer,
I
did. He wore small round glasses with a distinct bifocal line halving top and bottom. But what I liked most about this plain man was his Burl Ives voice: a medium-tenored tone that seemed to glide out of him.

“The reinstatement of the grand larceny charge is bad news,” he said, “and to be honest, it doesn’t help our case.”

Our
case; I liked that. We would be partners on a sinking ship.

“On the other hand,” he said, “that charge relates directly to the assumption that you are your own identity thief ”—his unblinking eyes, bluish and watery, smiled into mine—“which is a real mind-bender.”

“It’s ridiculous is what it is.”

“Yes, I agree: it’s absurd. Why would you have staged that kind of crime against yourself?”

“I
didn’t
,” I said. “Julie must have done something to my computer, rigged it somehow. Maybe when she visited me last winter.”

“The FBI recognizes that as a distinct possibility,” he said, “and they’re looking into it. Anyway, you weren’t charged with computer fraud, so they can’t hold you for that. All that does for us right now is muddy the waters.” He flipped the top sheet of his yellow pad to consult something on a previous page. “The real reason for my visit today is that I bring good news.”

“You have
good
news?”

He nodded, smiled.

“Shouldn’t you give the good news
first
?”

“Not if I want you thinking positively when I walk out of here.”

“Please, spare the drumroll,” I said. “What is it?”

“Your blood from the crime scene and your blood on the sweater?”

The blood that couldn’t be mine because I didn’t kill
her.

“It had been frozen,” he said.

“What?”

“Frozen.”

“So I really am a cold-blooded killer?” He laughed. “I’m glad you haven’t lost your sense of humor.”

“Actually, I have,” I said. “What does that
mean
, it was frozen?”

But even as I said it, and as he began to answer, it fell together in my mind. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? Last March, during Julie’s most recent visit, we had gone to the American Red Cross in Lexington to donate blood. It was something we had done all our adult lives. Bobby had stayed home with Lexy while Julie and I gave blood; first me, then her. Afterward, we went out to lunch.

My attention returned to Elias, in midsentence:

“… and Bobby directed me to the Red Cross and it didn’t take very long to find out that Julie had donated two vials of her own blood, while you had donated only one.”

“No,” I said. “I also gave two.”

He noted that, saying, “Which is what we suspected.”

Meaning Julie had stolen the second vial of my blood sample that day. And stashed it in the freezer at my house. And carried it home with her to the Berkshires, where presumably she then stored it in her own freezer (where all during May I had been freezing another bodily liquid, my milk, for Lexy to drink). Now I understood why I had been unable to find one of the three small freezer packs I used for cooling Lexy’s stored breast milk in transit: Julie had taken one of the packs to keep my blood cold during her flight home.

“She planned it for so long,” I said. Voice cracking.

Stomach quavering. Brain spinning. “Since March.”

“At least,” Elias said. “She planned every aspect of this quite carefully, it seems. Another development is that apparently she had made an appointment with Zara the night of her death. Zara mentioned in an e-mail to a friend that she planned to see about a new cleaning job on Division Street before running an errand at a store that closed at eight o’clock. The e-mails were in Hungarian and had to be translated. No specifics about the appointment—no name or address—but the implication is there.”

“I didn’t get to Julie’s house until eight, but she expected me sooner. I told her seven …”

“Which would have placed you at the scene of the crime,” Elias said. “Or close enough.”

“But why Zara? Why hurt this innocent person?”

“I suspect, in Julie’s mind, that Zara’s resemblance to you both played into it somehow. Look-alikes are often stand-ins for the real target of enmity. But that’s just one guess.”

Enmity.
That word was a deep, cold, echoing well.

And the way he’d said it—like a fact, not a riddle. I could not understand how Julie could feel
enmity
toward
me
.

“Did I tell you,” he broke my silence, “that she voluntarily submitted to a psychiatric examination?”

“No,” I said. “
I
wasn’t asked.”

“A sign, my dear, that her lawyer doesn’t think an examination of you would yield any benefit.”

“Little does he know!”

Elias smiled. “Most psychological diagnoses are relative. Julie’s—
sociopathic, narcissistic
—could well be applied to half the people I know. But her so-called conditions are
why
she agreed to the exam at all. She was convinced her powers of deception were that good.”

“But even that’s circumstantial, isn’t it? Psychology isn’t exactly a tangible science.”

“No, it’s not. And you’re right: it’s circumstantial, at best. But the diagnosis still weakens your sister’s claim of innocence when it comes to Zara’s murder. If—let’s hope
when
—the FBI concludes that she tampered with your computer last March, well, that together with the frozen blood, the missing vial, the psychiatric diagnosis and Zara’s appointment on Division Street, and the spotlight shifts decisively from you to Julie.”

“None of this makes sense to me,” I said.
“None
of it.”

“No crime is truly logical, despite how well it’s planned. Criminals typically hurt themselves as much as they hurt anyone else, if not more.”

“If they get caught,” I added.

“Precisely.”

“Julie’s going to get away with this,” I said, feeling it,
believing
it. She had gotten this far and
I
was the one sitting in jail.

“No, dear, she’s not.” Elias’s slender, wrinkled fingers drummed the yellow pad as he spoke. “I’ve been down to Lexington and I’ve got a deposition from the technician who took your samples that day. She cor-roborates that she drew two vials of blood from both of you. She was embarrassed that she hadn’t noticed one of yours was missing when she delivered them for stor-age along with the samples of five other donors. But the donation records show that only one was received.

So that’s our first smoking gun.”

“Is there another?”

“Not yet,” he said, “but chances are there will be, sooner or later, when the murder weapon surfaces. If Julie left fingerprints on the knife, it will place her at the scene. So this, the frozen blood, will get you out of jail. And that, the knife, may just put her here in your place.”

“But it’s still missing,” I said, “and they looked everywhere for it. It might never be found, Elias.”

“Possibly not. But I hope it is. It will strengthen the case against her in court.”

“Has she been charged?” I asked.

“The police are weighing the evidence. The problem is, it’s all circumstantial. No one saw
who
took the blood sample from the Red Cross. No one saw
who
froze it. Or
who
sprinkled it at the scene. We have
no
murder weapon with fingerprints or fibers or any other telling evidence. We have
no
vial that held the blood sample. And of course the only witness to the crime was Mr. Soiffer, who can’t say exactly
who
he saw, and even if he could, frankly, the jury probably wouldn’t trust him enough to carry a case of this gravity. So there we are: if the police charge Julie with what we’ve got now, it wouldn’t hold up in court. Remember, Annie, the benchmarks the state has to meet for a first-degree-murder conviction are not taken lightly: pre-meditated malice and extreme cruelty.”
Premeditated malice and extreme cruelty.
Well. Regardless of whether or not she would ever face a judge,
I knew
she had met those appalling tests. I knew and I would always know. Everyone could punish her endlessly and it wouldn’t change a thing; and it wouldn’t change the fact that already, in one significant way, we had already shared a punishment: we had lost each other. And yet … I had to admit that, in my heart, I felt no craving for her to spend the rest of her life in jail. Even if she deserved it. Even if she was dangerous. Even if she hated me.
Even if she had killed someone.
Julie was my twin;
love
didn’t even cover it. Our entwinement was unassailable and indefensible, as fixed as history; and my mind couldn’t bend that, because it was simply true. As Detective Lazare and I had agreed, it was all about the DNA.

“What now?” I asked Elias.

“Tomorrow we go before the judge. We present the new evidence. And we request that the charges be dropped in light of the new evidence.” He gathered his papers, stood up. “The judge will see how weak the state’s evidence is now, considering you have an identical twin.”

“Why tomorrow? Why not today?” My plaintive tone seemed to echo through this room of cold, hard surfaces, uselessly, joining the ghosts of all the other voices that had asked the same question right here, every day, over the years.

“Scheduling,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

And he was gone.

For all the minutes of all the hours of the rest of that day and night, I paced my room or lay on my cot, letting the inertness of my body calm my racing mind.

Julie: a murderer. I recalled my photos of Zara’s fading outline on the street in front of Julie’s house—
here she
lies
, the last shadow of a woman’s life—and wondered what
her
final thoughts had been. She was the one person who knew everything about her death and the only person who could not be asked.

In the morning, a guard brought me a breakfast of watery gray oatmeal, which I nibbled at, and half a plastic cup of canned pineapply-tasting orange juice, which I sipped at. I was hungry. When the guard returned an hour later to pick up my tray, she told me that my lawyer would be by for me at eleven o’clock and left behind a bag containing the clothes I’d arrived in: jeans, sneakers and a black T-shirt that smelled as if they had been stored in a damp cave. I could only imagine what the judge would think of me in these smelly, wrinkly clothes, but I had nothing else to wear.

(I’d never thought I would wish for my beige suit, still hanging in the Manhattan studio, but I
did
.) Then, just before eleven as I waited impatiently for Elias to come and
spring
me, the guard reappeared with a box.

It was from a women’s clothing catalog, it was addressed to Julie’s house and it had been opened. When I peeled back the tissue paper I found a crisp envelope with a card showing a long-limbed woman at a cafe table. Inside, the card read
I’m sorry
in Julie’s writing.

She was sorry.
I knew she was. Tears formed in my eyes as I read and reread those two words, her terse apology that was like the Dutchman’s finger in the dike.
I’m sorry.
So much was packed into those two little words: guilt, sorrow, regret, loss … it was a defini-tion without end.

I was sorry, too.

Inside the box I found chocolate brown linen pants and a pale pink blouse. Beneath the clothes was a slender box with hammered-silver button earrings and a matching necklace. At the bottom of the box were Julie’s own cowboy boots, wrapped in tissue paper.

She had even included a bra, underpants and a pair of socks.
Sundance catalog: everything on page seven,
please.
It was pirate’s loot, was what it was. If I wore the outfit, wouldn’t I be consorting with the enemy?

But it was clean and mostly new and better than what I had on. And it was more than just clothes:
Julie
had sent it over; she was saying good-bye.

I stuffed my old sweaty clothes into the box and put on my new duds. Elias arrived promptly on time and escorted me to the judge.

The courtroom was cavernous and austere, with no wooden paneling or scrolled details to comfort you or make you feel connected to history or even the idea of justice. It was all
here and now
, a place of business.

Broad linoleum floors, gated windows, rows of fluorescent lights—all the bright, chilly atmosphere of a megastore.

Bobby was waiting at the aisle end of the spectator benches, beside a slender woman with a pitch-black chignon and a bald man in a pressed denim shirt buttoned to his Adam’s apple. When Bobby saw me, he smiled so eagerly it made me a little nervous. (Lexy, I assumed, was with Mrs. Boardman again at the inn.) I waited with Elias in a group of cordoned-off seats toward the front of the courtroom. The edges of my metal chair were sticky with spilled soda and the air smelled, inexplicably, like roses. I watched the judge dispense justice with razor-sharp efficiency to man after man, woman after woman. Nine defendants pre-ceded me and all but one were sent back to prison ac-companied by a guard. When a teenage boy with white-boy dreadlocks and a snake tattoo rising out of his shirt collar was turned back to his cell, the tidy couple beside Bobby left the courtroom in tears. After forty minutes my name was called and I took my place at Elias’s side before the bench.