Here She Lies (22 page)

It would be crucial to know what Julie looked like.

There had to be thousands of blue cars on the road in which a woman might be driving a baby any number of places or just lulling her to sleep. It would be so easy for Julie to pass through the world as a mother, as
me
, raising Lexy. It could really happen: I could lose her forever.

Lazare followed Bobby and me inside the house and upstairs to the loft computer, where I opened the file of images I’d downloaded on Sunday night. He selected a picture of Julie alone, standing in front of a living room window behind which rain poured in an unfo-cused haze, facing me (facing the camera) with the blank expression of listening. A moment before the picture I’d asked her if she wanted chicken for dinner; a moment later she’d answered
yes
. In the end we went out to Rouge.

I typed my sister’s name and clicked
send as e-mail
.

Lazare put in an address, wrote a short note and zapped it away.

A car drove toward the house and my heart raced.

Was it them? Was this all a mistake?
The car passed.

Life without my daughter would be unbearable.

“This Julie’s computer?”

“No,” Bobby said. “She’s got an office upstairs.”

“Mind if I take a look?” Lazare asked me. More pre-warrant permission, I guessed.

“Go ahead,” I said.

Bobby led Lazare down the hall. When I didn’t follow, they both turned around.

“I’d like to shower,” I said. “I feel gross, and I need to pump.”

“Okay,” Lazare said. “I’m not going to touch anything. I’ll just eyeball things until I hear the warrant’s gone through.” He smiled kindly and I wished he wasn’t here. If only there had never been a reason for this wise, persistent man to have entered our lives.

They disappeared up to Julie’s lair and I to my beehive yellow room. The buzzing in my head wouldn’t stop. I was deliriously exhausted and an-guished beyond anything I had ever felt before. I sat on my bed for about fifteen minutes, crying and pumping milk, then sealed a fresh bottle for Lexy and went to the kitchen to put it in the freezer. Back upstairs in my bathroom, I stripped naked and stood under the streaming hot water, wishing it could melt away my sense of weakness because what I wanted now was to be the strongest mother who had ever lived.
I never
gave up hope
, I heard myself saying.
I always knew
we’d find her.
When I came out of the shower I was clean but otherwise untransformed. I dried myself.

Brushed my hair and my teeth. Rubbed cream into every inch of my skin. A look through my dresser drawers and closet offered nothing I wanted to put against my body; nothing from my old life, my life before yesterday, seemed credible. I wasn’t really
me
anymore. And who was Julie?

Wrapped in a towel, I went upstairs to my sister’s bedroom. The office door was ajar—I could see Bobby sitting at the computer, pointing and clicking, and Lazare standing behind him, watching—and I closed it. I slid open one side of Julie’s closet and ran my hand along the edges of her hanging clothes. Her taste was simple,
classic
, and all the fabrics were top quality.

Who had bought these clothes? Had she paid for them, or had I? A few still had their tags attached. I didn’t want to wear anything brand-new; I wanted something
she
had worn. When I saw a white-on-white gauzy outfit of baggy pants, loose Indian-style shirt and under-neath camisole, I lifted the hanger off the rod. This one had caught my eye immediately during this visit’s first closet inspection, but I hadn’t dared borrow something so pristine, not around a baby. I slid the pieces off the hanger and put them on.

Clad in Julie, I moved slowly around her room, imagining what it was like to be her. I’d always thought I knew, that we were essentially the same person, but the last two days had taught me otherwise. I was going to have to face the probability that Julie was not who I had thought she was, which therefore meant—
didn’t it?
—that neither was I.

I sat down on one of the black chairs and peered into the curio table at the merged families of glass cats.

Which were mine and which were hers? Then I noticed she had added a few objects and they startled me: Lexy’s red teething ring (her favorite!) and the other pair of earrings. Julie’s pair, the other mismatched set.

There they were.

I lifted off the glass top of the table and set it carefully on the floor. The stickiness of Lexy’s teether soothed me a little, helped me to
feel
her, and I slipped it into a deep pocket of the white slacks. Then I picked up the earrings. They settled into the creased palm of my hand, innocent little chips of rock, identical except
not
, because one was real and the other wasn’t. I couldn’t tell which was which. Leaning back in the chair, I lifted my hand to the window to bathe the earrings in light. After the rain, the sun seemed so raw; but I couldn’t see what Mrs. Simonoff had recognized so easily. So I turned on Julie’s bedside lamp, crouched down and put my hand under its hot halogen bulb.

Here, one earring glittered magnificently, while the other stayed as dull and predictable as always. That one was
my
zircon.

I pressed the post into my pierced left ear and attached the backing. Then I put the real diamond back in the curio table—rejecting the fleeting, painful notion that I could be tampering with
evidence
—and removed eight little glass cats. If not for these souvenirs I would have thought that distant summer in Italy had been a mirage. How could my parents have ever been married? How could they have ever been
alive
? How could Julie and I have ever been so close? Had the four of us ever really been a family? I looked around Julie’s bright white room with its painted black rafter-spun ceiling hiding so much space. Were our love and trust of each other actually over? Until Lexy, our bond had been the most significant force in my life.

Setting the top back on the table, I thought of the other zircon. Apparently I hadn’t worn them both together since the first night of my stay here—the night of Zara’s murder—when Julie and I had mingled our glass cats, and removed our shoes and our earrings, and talked late into the night. I felt myself sinking deeper into a paralyzing quicksand of loneliness. As a twin, especially an identical twin, I had never felt
alone
before and I didn’t like it. No, I
hated
it.

I padded barefoot downstairs to the Yellow Room and my purse. I wanted to wear
my
earrings again. I wanted them together. I opened my coin purse, identified the real zircon under the bright bathroom light and slipped it into my naked ear. Here I was, all white and sparkling like a woman on a couch in a catalog:
page
fifty, a complete room for easy living
. On a slick page it might have been a comforting image (
Julie’s
area of expertise) saying
buy me, I will cure you of your
doubts
; but in reality all the white linen and glitter in the world could never conceal the ins and outs, ups and downs of a woman’s inner life.

My cell phone, still tucked into my purse, began to ring; and as it had every time it rang these past two days, my heart jumped.
Could
it be Julie, finally calling back to check in? To explain her absence? To assure me that Lexy was happy and fine? To promise they’d be back soon? (The rest of it, the money stuff, was such a complicated tangle,
not
a phone conversation.) I fished out my cell and at the sight of Clark Hazmat’s name on caller ID my thin hopes caved dramatically and completely. Why wouldn’t he stop calling me? That was it: I was going to finally tell him he’d have to leave me alone.

“Hello—” But before I could say anything, he jumped right in.

“Miss Milliken! It’s me, Clark!”

“Yes, Clark, I know, but—”

“I’ve been calling you since yesterday. Maybe you didn’t get my messages.”

“I got them, but, Clark, I’ve been really busy.”

“Yeah, I saw the papers this morning.”

“It’s in the
papers
?”

“Bad news travels fast. That’s why I’ve been calling you. After I read the paper I couldn’t help doing a little investigating, you know, since I’ve got my special computer skills.”

Special skills.
That was one way to put it. Clark had done seven years as a computer hacker. Maybe he was lucky to have sat out all that progress, when instead of reading potboilers in his cell he might have graduated from breaking into corporate networks to breaking apart individual lives. He himself might have become an identity thief.

“Clark”—I spoke carefully—“what are you saying?”

“I’m saying I dug pretty deep, hope you don’t mind.

You got some real problems, Miss M, but any schmo with half a hard drive can tell this one’s a setup. You’re just not the Jaguars-and-diamonds type and I never saw you once with a California tan.”

I cringed. He really
had
looked me up. “How do you know all that?”

“I’m telling you,” he said, “it’s a hacker’s paradise out there now. Good time to be new in the game,
bad
time to be an ex-con with no job, looking in the window. I wanted to give you a heads-up yesterday, but I guess by now you’ve figured out a thing or two.”

“You’re right. I have. Listen, Clark, I can’t stay on the phone. Things are worse than what you can see on a computer. You have no idea.”

“Actually,” he said, “I think I do. The article? It talked about a murder—”

That word, coming from Clark, sent a chill through me—Clark, with his topiary hairdo and skull tattoo.

“And it talked about”—a rustle of papers, a pause—

“Thomas Soiffer, the guy with the APB on his head. So I looked him up, too. And guess what.”

“Did you
find
him?”

“Nah, Miss M. I found out
about
him. Guy got hacked, just like you.”

It took me a moment to decipher that, and then I asked, “Are you saying that Thomas Soiffer is also a victim of identity theft?”

“Bingo.”

“Who stole his identity?”

“Dunno. Wish I did. I always liked you, Miss Milliken. I’d really like to help you out with that one, but I climbed a few fences while I’m on the leash, if you know what I mean. I just wanted to give you a heads-up on the Soiffer thing in case the cops didn’t figure it out yet. They’re not the swiftest sometimes.”

“Thank you, Clark,” I said. “Thank you very much for calling me.”

“You got it, Miss M,” he said. “Listen, good luck with all that, okay?”

“Thanks.”

“Maybe when things settle down, I’ll give you another buzz. Freedom, well, I guess you know it can get lonely out here.”

“Yes, call me,” I said, and meant it. “I’d be happy to hear from you again.”

I went straight upstairs and found Bobby still clicking away with Julie’s wireless mouse. Lazare had pulled up a chair beside him.

“Detective Lazare,” I said. He turned to look at me.

“Do you remember Clark Hazmat? I told you about him yesterday morning after I ran into him in Manhattan.”

It took a second for the detective to register my meaning. “The convict,” he said.

“
Former
convict. He just called me, and I have to tell you what he said.” I described Clark’s claim about Thomas Soiffer being an identity theft victim.

“Interesting,” Lazare said. Just:
interesting.
But for the first time since I’d met him I thought I saw his cool demeanor falter. If Clark was right, if it was true, it implied that Zara’s murder and my identity theft might share a common denominator in Thomas Soiffer. I pictured him on Julie’s road at night, stalking her, killing Zara instead. It made awful, perfect sense.

Lazare straightened a leg and leaned back so he could reach into his pocket for his cell phone. While he made some calls—checking into the whereabouts of the FBI cyber specialist, the status of the search warrant, the progress of the Amber Alert—I stood behind Bobby. He had managed to open multiple Web sites, leaving their names lined up along the bottom of the screen.

“You looked up her Stevie Award?” I asked.

He swiveled to face me, his expression clouding.

“She never won one.”

“You’re sure?”

“According to everything I checked.”

“But her marketing career—”

“It was real,” he said, “and it looks like she really
was
successful, or
is
successful. It’s hard to follow.

There’s a lot of information on her, but it’s kind of random and the dates start petering out about a year ago.” A year ago: after Paul had left her and she’d dated a little bit, with miserable results. A year ago: when I married Bobby.
A year ago.
Was that when she stopped being
my
Julie?

Behind Bobby, the screen saver popped on and there they were, Julie and Lexy smiling together, recognizably themselves. Nothing was different on the surface.

And yet everything had changed.

A little while later the doorbell chimed. Bobby and Lazare went downstairs together to answer it while I stayed in Julie’s office. Through the window I saw an official-looking black sedan with a fat antenna parked just over the spot where Zara had left her vanished mark. Lazare had already told us that the FBI fraud investigator wasn’t expected to arrive at the precinct for another two hours and would call first. So who was this? Could the Amber Alert have worked that fast?

Three squad cars pulled up in quick succession behind the black car. And I stood there, and I waited, understanding the tidal pull in the hearts of military mothers who remain at the window, frozen in a private dread.

When they came in person, wasn’t it always with the worst possible news?

Bobby appeared with a blond man whose weathered face appeared years older than his lean body. He wore black slacks, a crisply ironed white shirt and penny loafers, each with a shiny new coin. His voice was a melodious baritone. “Special Agent Rusty Smith, FBI.