Here She Lies (28 page)

“You were with an officer of the law—me. And there were extenuating circumstances.”

“So, come to Kentucky,” I said.

“It’s a secured bond, Annie. You could lose your house if you get on that plane. Are you sure it’s worth it?”

“Annie—” Bobby’s forehead was damp; a droplet traced an uneven path down his temple. “He’s right.” I
knew
he was right. They both were. Standing here, about to send our luggage to Kentucky and board the plane, it suddenly seemed like a very bad idea. Most impulsive acts could be overcome, but clearly this one would have serious consequences that would affect not just me but Bobby. Even Lexy’s future well-being would be affected if I took off and jeopardized our house. I felt like a greedy child caught with her hand in the candy dish. Greedy and stubborn. I would give it up, but not without a show of pride.

“
Why
do you need me here?” I asked. “I did the lineup and I gave blood. Can’t you call me if you need anything else? I’ll come back.”

“I’d like an explanation about that, too, Detective.” Bobby let go of the suitcase he’d been rolling along the line. “It isn’t really logical for us to stay if there’s any chance the bond can be modified again.” A couple came hurrying up behind Detective Lazare, passing in a rush to catch a plane, and he moved closer to us, speaking in a low, confidential tone.

“Okay, I’ll tell you why I need you to stay, Annie.” “Finally—”

“Just
listen
, please.” He paused a moment before saying, “Thomas Soiffer saw Julie kill Zara Moklas. It happened very fast, but Soiffer is adamant that he saw Julie do it.”

That was exactly what I had assumed. No real surprise there, and yet hearing it from the detective brought home with force the horrifying turn this could take if Soiffer’s blood test eliminated him from suspicion. If Julie had actually
killed
someone. Soiffer
had
to be guilty; it was the only explanation that made real, deep, true sense to me. The only explanation I would be able to live with.

“He says he saw Julie,” I said. “Not
me
.”

“Well, Annie, that’s just the problem,” Lazare said.

“How can he tell you two apart?”

“Obviously he can’t.”

“He picked you out of the lineup. He also picked Julie.”

“So the lineups were useless. That’s a no-brainer.

You still haven’t told me why I have to stay.”

“I want to investigate this carefully,” he said, “without wasting time chasing you down.”

“You know where I’ll be,” I said. “Right there at home.”

“There’s too much at stake for you to go. With a witness saying—”

“I don’t know why you even listen to Thomas Soiffer,” I interrupted. “
He
probably did it. There’s no reason to even discuss it, is there, until you get back his DNA? It’s
all about
the DNA, Detective. Am I right?”

“Exactly, Annie.” His expression stilled. He didn’t blink at all. “It’s all about the DNA. I’ll just tell you, then. Soiffer’s results came in this afternoon.”

“And?” Bobby asked. His face had now broken into a full sweat.

“Thomas Soiffer did not kill Zara Moklas,” Detective Lazare said.

“But the blood in his van?” Bobby asked.

“Of course he killed her!” I said.

“Stop, both of you. Listen carefully.” Lazare lowered his voice so it was barely audible, as if whispering would lessen the impropriety of revealing secrets in the middle of a busy airport. “He did kill someone, but not Zara. We matched the blood to a prostitute who was found murdered two weeks ago in Beartown State Park in Monterey.”

“So the other blood with Zara’s—” Bobby began.

“Was not Thomas Soiffer’s,” Lazare finished.

“Which increases his value as a witness.”

“A murderer?” The sharpness of my voice made Lexy cry. Bobby took her out of my arms, paced away a few steps and bounced her. I lowered my voice. “Are you telling me a judge and jury would actually listen to what one murderer says about another?”

“That remains to be seen,” Lazare answered.

“The sweater that guy took out of my rental car in Vermont,” I said, recalling the flashy sweater I’d worn the day I first arrived at Julie’s. “There was no blood on it—Zara’s or mine or Julie’s or anyone else’s. Am I right?”

He stared at me, keeping completely still. I felt the grip of frustration and plowed forward despite his unwillingness to respond.

“Everyone from the Lexington airport to the Albany airport to the pit stops I made along the highway that night
saw
me wearing that sweater, and you say Soiffer saw Zara get killed. He couldn’t have missed that sweater, Detective. Did he describe it, too?” Before Lazare could answer, if he was going to, Bobby returned with a now-quieted Lexy. He had wiped his face and his skin was dry. In the pause of calming Lexy, he had also calmed himself. “If you mishandle this case,” he told the detective in a new, flinty tone, “we’ll sue you, personally. Do you understand me?”

Lazare nodded.

“Did he?” I asked again about the sweater.

“You were very right before, Annie,” he said. “DNA is the
only
way we’ll know who was there that night with Zara. Now that Thomas Soiffer is eliminated as a suspect, that leaves us with your blood tests—yours and Julie’s. And both of you claim innocence.”

“And you believe her over me, after everything else?”

“The identity theft is a separate matter at this point,” Lazare said.

“But it’s not separate,” I said. “How can it be?”

“We’re going to piece everything together, Annie, and find out. In the meantime, we
all
have to wait.”

“What if our blood’s identical?” I asked. “
Then
what?”

Lazare gave me one of his half-baked smiles, which infuriated me because I expected, or
wanted
, so much more from him. And he said, “We’ll see.” We re-rented a car and Detective Lazare followed us all the way back to the Weathervane Inn. Thankfully Lexy fell asleep in her car seat. I was so glad she wouldn’t remember any of this when she grew up and I wondered what, in the future, we would tell her. It was so strange to think that we could simply leave it out of her life story—and that she would never know Julie.

The silence in the car was stifling, so I rolled down a window a few inches to let in some air. When we left the highway for the smaller roads, the wayside displays of bright azaleas, forsythia, roses, marigolds, lilacs, daisies, the regiments of newly planted impatiens—

reds, pinks, oranges and whites—made me think about the sweater with its vivid colors, announcing
I am
here
. It was what I had originally liked about the sweater and what I now detested: you couldn’t fail to see it. My mind kept replaying the memory reel of the rubber-gloved technician taking it out of my trunk and dropping it into a paper bag. What had Julie done to the sweater she’d stuck in the car on purpose for the police to find?
Did
it have blood on it? And if our blood turned out to be as identical as our faces, how was I going to prove that the blood found on the sweater, if it
was
ours, wasn’t
mine
?

It was late afternoon when we pulled into the parking lot of the inn, first Detective Lazare, then us. He didn’t get out. He just sat in his car and watched us carry our baby and our luggage up the curving path bounded by bushes of blue pompoms. Watched us skulk back into the inn. I paused just inside the door, listening to the detective’s engine drive away, leaving the road empty and quiet. Apparently he trusted us enough to stay put. At that thought I looked at Bobby, who was standing at the dining room entrance calling out for one of the innkeepers. I felt like a fly stuck in a sticky web and, seeing a way out, I blurted, “Bobby, wait—let’s just go.”

He seemed to droop. “Oh, Annie.”

Mrs. Boardman just then came through the dining room from the adjoining kitchen. “Welcome back! I saved your room, just in case.” I wondered now if he had suggested to her that we might be back, if he had thought all along we would never get on that plane.

She handed him the key and I marched past them, up the stairs, struggling through an unexpected sensation that I was standing in the middle of a live firing range and couldn’t tell who was shooting blanks. That was isolation: when you wondered if
anyone
trusted you. I thought of my blood, the DNA that was my body, and I realized that it would have to speak for me now as Thomas Soiffer’s had spoken for him.

In our room, which had been cleaned and neatened, I tossed my purse on the chenille bedspread, kissed Lexy’s cheek and set her in the borrowed crib with the yellow bunny Julie had given her and to which she had become attached.
Bunbun
, we had named it. The lace curtains had been drawn open and sunlight blazed into the room. After a few minutes Bobby came up and unpacked for all of us while I sat in the wingback chair, remembering, with inchoate longing, a winter trip Julie and I had taken with our parents to Florida: Mom unpacking in our large hotel room, Dad brushing his teeth in the bathroom, while Julie and I improvised hide-and-seek by sealing ourselves into the cigarette-smoke-smelly closet. We sat beside each other on the scratchy carpet, holding our breath and clasping hands, thrilled by the possibility that our parents didn’t know where we were.

Bobby zipped the empty suitcase and stashed it in the closet.

A whole week went by.

A week of sleeping, meals, minor errands, books, phone calls, conversations. A week in which Liz engineered the acquittal of the embezzlement charges against me and the repayment of the bail bond, which freed our house and my future. A week when no sooner was I officially a free woman than I met my new criminal defense lawyer. Elias Stormier was a wiry man with a halo of gray hair, who listened gravely to my story and believed me when I told him I had nothing to do with Zara Moklas’s death, and who asserted nonetheless that a good defense was a good of-fense, and who joined the wisdom-chorus advising me to stay put and wait out the blood test results to avoid
an appearance of flight
. It was a week of squeezing my eyes shut at the peaks and valleys of a roller-coaster ride of worries and relief and sorrow—I missed Julie.

I
missed
her. A week of facing grim realities.

But it was also, miraculously, the week Lexy started crawling, first tentatively, then daringly over every floor. She was young to crawl and her relative independence surprised us as much as it empowered her. Her determination to master her new mobility was thrilling, and it helped take our minds off
the wait
. The blood test results loomed, casting shadows everywhere, and Lexy dodged and darted them. I began to understand that regardless of what happened to me, to
us
, Lexy would forge ahead. She was unstoppable. This inkling of hope offered its own form of happiness that no new piece of information could completely destroy.

When Lexy wasn’t wearing us out chasing her around the inn, we were reluctant tourists. We haunted the Mount, the house where nearly a hundred years ago Edith Wharton had written some of her most famous novels (in the gift shop I bought
Ethan Frome
; I’d finished
The Talented Mr. Ripley
and needed a new book); traipsed the gardens and climbed the famous blue steps at Naumkeag; visited the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge (
not
stopping in town at the creepy caterpillar playground even though Lexy let out a cry of desire when we passed the dangling baby swings). Then on Monday, a full week into
the wait
and after a drizzly morning in the car (because we’d
had
to get out of the so-called house), Gabe Lazare phoned to say the blood test results were in.

We’d just walked into the red-velvety back room of the Helsinki Cafe and were settling in at a table. It was already late for lunch and Lexy was getting cranky, but I wanted her to eat her jar of mush before breast milk and back-into-the-car and back-to-the-inn for a nap.

“I’d like to speak with you,” Lazare said.

“You
are
speaking with me.”

“No, Annie. I want to
see
you, to speak with you in person.”

The waitress came over, holding a pad and pencil, ready to take our order. As Lazare spoke, I heard Bobby ordering for both of us; he knew I loved the falafel platter they made here.

“I was right. It was her, wasn’t it?” I didn’t ask it as a question.

“Where are you right now? I could come to you.”

“We’re in town, eating lunch.” The truth was, Helsinki was so close to the police station we could walk there in five minutes.

“When you’re done with your lunch, I’ll see you here.” He hung up before telling me exactly where he was, assuming I would just know, which of course I did. He was at work,
on the case
as usual. No one could fault this man for not trying his hardest.

“It was Lazare,” I told Bobby. “He has the blood test results.”

Water from his glass sloshed out on the way to his mouth. He set the glass down without drinking.

“And?”

“After lunch, we’ll go see him.”

“Don’t you want to go right now? Don’t you want to
know
?”

“Of course I do, but I’m hungry and we have to feed Lexy before we do anything else.”

So I fed her. And we ate. But nothing tasted good; adrenaline killed my appetite and I think Bobby’s, too.

We finished and he paid while I struggled to change Lexy’s diaper in the bathroom. On our way back to the car I saw that the cloudy, drizzly day had brightened.

Yes.
The news would be good. The blood would tell the story. It would be neither my blood nor Julie’s. Zara’s killer would be someone else entirely and Lazare would have to broaden his search. I would send Liz flowers (and a check) and give Elias a bottle of good wine (and a check) and Bobby, Lexy and I would be on our way home to Kentucky. Then, on the drive over, the clouds returned and with the disappearance of that brief spate of sunshine went my optimism.