Here She Lies (4 page)

Lexy’s nursing became more relaxed, she sighed and her body grew supple and sleepy in my arms. As she relaxed so did I, at least a little. In the turmoil of arriving everything had seemed to blend into the darkness, but now details came into focus. I noticed that Julie had on her typical outfit of designer jeans and fitted T-shirt, along with brown cowboy boots that looked weathered but must have been new; I had never seen them before. Next to my trim sister I felt big and sloppy and realized in one bad flash of a moment how out of shape I’d become since Lexy’s birth. I was a fish out of water, a Kentucky mama in a posh living room on a fashionable mountain with a sexy woman who used to be me. But then I thought of Zara,
poor Zara
, who was dead, and sitting here with my family I felt acutely alive, even lucky. With a shiver of revulsion I recalled the sight of Zara’s body: heavily inert, violently disordered.
Had
she been murdered? Or had it been arbitrary—the dumb luck of
wrong place, wrong
time
? (What if I had arrived earlier or Julie had gone outside? It could have been
our
blood that now stained the road.) I ran my hand along Lexy’s soft skin and just as I thought she felt cold, Julie picked up the sweater and draped it over her.

“Nice sweater. Very colorful,” Detective Lazare said, but my sense was that he didn’t like it so much as notice it because it was so bright. “I don’t imagine any of you knew the victim very well.”

“We didn’t know her at all.” Julie angled forward, legs pressed together, hands clasped on knees. “I mean, not really. I talked to her on the phone once; she sounded nice. I wanted to hire her to clean my house.

She was supposed to call me to set a time to come over so I could show her the job.”

“Did she?”

“No.”

“Any chance she was dropping by tonight?” “I don’t think so. I mean, that would have been kind of strange; she was supposed to call first. Maybe she worked at one of the neighbors’ today and was on her way home. I don’t think she drives.”

“You see her pass by?”

“No,” Julie said. “I was upstairs working. I didn’t come out until I heard Bobby screaming.”

“Notice anything unusual today, before that?”

“Nothing. I was at my computer most of the day. I didn’t go out at all.”

“Shame—you missed a nice spring day.”

“I know.” Julie sighed. Missing spring days and other niceties had long been a cost of her success. “I’d really like to know who could do such a thing. I haven’t lived here very long, but I had the impression things like this don’t happen here.”

“They usually don’t,” Lazare said.

“I really am sorry I wasn’t more alert today. I
wish
I could help.”

The detective revealed crooked teeth when he smiled, saying, “No worries.”

I thought it was a funny thing to say given the circumstances, but still, it was kind of him to let Julie off the hook for being too plugged in to notice what was happening around her. She had always been a bit of a computer geek, long before it was cool. It was part of the reason she didn’t meet more people off-line, in the flesh.

Lazare walked around the room, handing each of us his business card. “You can always call me if something comes to mind.” He stopped in front of Bobby, who finally stood still, fastened in the detective’s gaze.

“How about you come with me? We can finish our talk right now.” It wasn’t a question and he wasn’t inviting Bobby to sit back down at the table in the cozy corner of the room. He was
telling
him to come to the police station,
tonight
.

As soon as Julie and I were left alone in the house, we burst into talk.

“It all happened so fast,” Julie said. “It was so quiet, like it always is, and then all of a sudden Bobby was outside screaming.”

I could
hear
his harrowing cries, thinking he had found me dead. And the thought of him now, taken to some strange police station in a town where he’d never been, being questioned by a detective, was appalling.

“Why couldn’t Detective Lazare talk to Bobby tomorrow?” I asked. “He’s exhausted, he’s
upset
, and it’s so late.”

“I guess because he found the …”

“Right, he found the …”

Body.
We couldn’t bring ourselves to say it.

“I just can’t believe this is happening,” Julie said. “I wish I’d looked out the window, or gone outside, or
something.
Maybe if the guy had seen someone watching he wouldn’t have done it.”

A shadow of distress seemed to darken her pale oval face,
our
face, and in the strange way you notice irrel-evant details during times of stress, I saw that she had plucked her left eyebrow too thin, that her auburn hair (
our
hair: it was wavy and thick and on good days, depending on an alchemy of weather, shampoo and possibly even mood, it had a striking red-gold polish) had fallen half out of its ponytail, and that her bare arms were rough with goose pimples. All these elements conspired in my heart to make me want to fix her the way she had always fixed me when we were kids and I tumbled first and deepest into vulnerability. Tonight, trouble had visited
her
house and it was
my
turn to be strong for her. I wanted so badly to reach over and rub my hands on her skin to warm her, but Lexy was heavy in my arms.

“Jules, it’s not your fault,” I said. “It was just a fluke that it happened right here. And maybe it’s just as well you didn’t see him—then he might have seen
you.
” I recalled, and pushed away, that awful moment when I was sure it was Julie lying there, bleeding on the road.

And now, my mind conflating two separate events, Bobby’s cries echoed through that memory.

“I guess you’re right,” she said. “It was blind chance that he caught up with her in front of my house. Five minutes later, it would have been someone else’s house.” Her attempt at a stoic smile failed to distill the unease from her dark brown eyes. I looked back with my own set of those same eyes and drank in her remorse, sharing it.

“What I keep thinking, Jules, if you want to know the truth, is that if only I hadn’t left Bobby this morning, he never would have been the one to find her. He could have lived his life without that image burned into his mind.”

“That poor woman,” Julie said. “I can’t stop
seeing
her.”

I rested my weight against her shoulder and we sank into a few minutes of quiet. Then she reached over to gently touch Lexy’s forehead and whispered, “She’s sleeping.”

“Let’s put her to bed.”

Julie lifted the sweater off Lexy and put it on herself. Carefully and quietly we crossed the room.

The house had two staircases. Julie took me up the closer one, right off the living room. It led directly into a loft with a low double mattress covered by a Mexican blanket, a small desk with a computer and a bare window. It was the kind of space a teenager would be happy living in, the kind of space an adult could tolerate for maybe one night. From the loft, a short hallway took us into a pretty bedroom, fawn and white with dashes of pale blue and matching furniture that looked like it had been bought as a set out of a Pottery Barn catalog. I had always wanted to do that, call the toll-free number and order “everything on page four,” but I’d never had that kind of money. As Julie led me through this section of her big new house I felt a vicar-ious satisfaction in her independence.
My
sister, who was
single
, had accomplished all this.

“This is the guest bedroom.” She saw me looking for the crib. “Annie,
you’re
not a guest. You have your own room. Come.”

As we passed into another hall, Julie pointed out some of the doors. “Bathroom, linen closet, storage, another guest room.”

The second guest room door was partly open, so I paused to peek inside. Even in the relative darkness I could see it was a smallish room, painted pale green, with twin brass beds covered in quilts. Two windows were framed by darker green curtains hanging off rods with wrought-iron leaf finials. Between the windows was a gold-framed poster of a giant pinecone, between the beds was an oval hooked rug, and across from them was a single tall dresser in dark wood. I was struck by how symmetrical the room was, and then it hit me that it looked like a room for twins, but twin boys.

“Your room’s at the end,” she said. “I assumed you’d rather share with Lexy.”

The Yellow Room. It was lovely! A double bed with a heavy white jacquard bedspread was pressed into the far corner of the room and there were five windows, two on the east wall and three on the south wall. In each window hung a gossamer curtain of the palest yellow behind which pull-cord tassels dangled off the ends of heavy shades that were all half raised. Yellow wallpaper was covered in a tangle of tiny red rosebuds.

The buffed honey-wood floor was bare except for a chenille rug at the side of the bed. The headboard, end table, reading lamp, dresser and even the straight-backed chair against the wall were all of a set (page seven, please). All yellows, off-whites, brasses and bronzes. Even the white crib and changing table matched each other. Free-floating in the middle of the room, the crib was positioned so you could reach it from any direction, while the changing table was in the corner, almost behind the door. Julie had stocked it with the perfect brand and size of diapers, wipes, lo-tions, powders—all the right accessories. I decided against changing Lexy’s diaper to avoid the chance of waking her.

The side of the crib was already lowered and the blanket was pulled down. I laid her gently on the sheets, soft pink with scribbles of creamy prancing sheep. The side slid up easily and clicked into place. I picked up a stuffed animal, a cute yellow bunny Julie had set in the corner of the crib, and leaned it against the crook of Lexy’s chubby elbow. She rolled over onto it and sighed.

I turned to give my sister a hug. “It’s a beautiful room. Thank you.”

“You can change things to the way you want them.”

“No. It’s perfect.”

“What’s in this pocket?”

She pulled away and patted her sweater pocket, where I had stashed the glass cats hours ago. Reaching in, I extracted the folded tissue and unwrapped it. One by one I laid the cats and kittens in Julie’s palm.

She smiled. “I still have mine.”

“I’m saving these for Lexy,” I said.

“I’ll probably give her mine, too, since I won’t be having my own kids.”

“You can
adopt
.” I had reminded her of this a thousand times since her engagement had broken up, but her response was always the same:

“Alone?”

“You can afford it easily, Jules. And really, you
don’t
have to wait for a man. Not anymore.” But the truth was, it was more complicated than that. Julie couldn’t have children of her own, a single bout of chlamydia in college having left her infertile.

She had basically been told by the school doctor
Tough
luck, kid. There’s nothing you can do about it now
with an insensitivity that showed he’d
had it
with promiscu-ous kids. She accepted it stoically and we re-dealt the cards between us, agreeing that I would provide our genetic children. Because presumably our DNA was as identical as our faces, Julie counted as Lexy’s genetic mother. She would never have to suffer the anxiety of being unable to procreate because I could do that for both of us. As for raising her own children, she could adopt. It would be okay. Then a couple of years ago, during her engagement to Paul, just before the printed invitations were to be sent out, he broke down and told her how much he wanted his “own” children and how it was eating away at him to think that in marrying her he would never have the chance. So she released him and he left. Last year he got a woman pregnant, married her and now they were expecting their second.

“Well”—she glanced again at Lexy—“we’ll see. So, are you hungry? Or do you want to go right to bed?”

“I ate on the road and I’m exhausted, but to be honest I don’t think I could sleep.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Let’s wait up for Bobby.”

She closed her hand (those long fingers of ours) over the heap of glass cats and said, “Then come see my room.”

I left the door open (I would plug in the baby monitor as soon as I got the suitcases up) and followed Julie back into the hall. She opened a door I hadn’t noticed near the Pinecone Room. Off a small landing hinged two narrow staircases, one up and one down.

“Down goes directly into the kitchen,” Julie said.

“Up goes to me.”

The stairs to her room bent twice to reach their destination and I was reminded again of Italy (maybe it was the handblown cats), climbing behind my parents up a coil of ancient stone stairs with a pole of empty space running from top to bottom. I hadn’t liked being able to see all the way down, the transparency of height frightened me, and walking up I had to resist an urge to freeze in place. But I didn’t; I was a good girl and I soldiered on. Then, at the top of that twisted ribbon of stairs was … nothing. That was the strangest thing: the stairs just ended, as if the architect had run out of ideas. We went back down and that was that. The memory made me think of Zara Moklas and how tonight, outside this very house, her life had ended as abruptly as the stone stairs in an ancient Italian ruin that was never identified (or not that I could remember).

“Jules? Who
do
you think killed her?” Julie was a few steps ahead of me and she turned around. It was dark in the staircase and I could hardly see her face, but her hand on the thin wooden banister was lit up. I couldn’t see where the light was coming from.

“I was just thinking the same thing,” she said. “I can’t
stop
thinking about it.”

“I wonder if it was personal, something against her brother, or something else.”

“There are some nasty old rednecks around here. Or maybe it was someone just passing through. Random.

Do you think?”

Random murders scared me more than anything.