Here She Lies (31 page)

Judge Leonard Hersey seemed young, about forty, with thin blond hair, aviator glasses and a blond goatee. He towered over us behind his large, elevated desk. I heard the shuffle of his quick perusal of some papers—presumably my file—before he looked over and down at me with Aegean blue eyes.

“Anais Milliken-Goodman?” He pronounced my name correctly.

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Good morning, Mr. Stormier,” the judge said, addressing Elias.

It was already past noon
, I thought, willing myself to keep quiet by fixing my eyes on a jagged scratch that ran horizontally about six inches across the front of the judge’s wooden desk.

“Good morning, Judge Hersey,” Elias answered.

The judge glanced at his watch. “Proceed.” Elias laid out the facts one by one, then deftly connected them like pieces of a puzzle. He concluded by flicking on a proverbial light so you could see the puzzle’s picture: “Either one of the sisters could theoretically be guilty of the murder, and with nothing but circumstantial evidence, the charge against my client will not prove tenable before a jury. It will waste the court’s time and the state’s money. Therefore I request that Your Honor consider the immediate dismissal of this case.”

Judge Hersey looked from Elias to me to my file and back to me.

“What do you say, Ms. Milliken-Goodman?”

“I’m innocent,” I said, “of everything.”

“So you think your twin sister is guilty—of everything?”

My eyes found that safe, deep, comforting scratch—that burrow in the wood that was indis-putably
there
—and with all my strength I brought them back to the judge’s vivid eyes. I nodded.

“The transcript needs a spoken word,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Are you prepared to testify against your sister in a trial, if so called?”

And here, I admit, I lied: “Yes.” I knew that if a case against me wouldn’t hold up in court without tangible evidence, it wouldn’t hold up against Julie either. In truth, I didn’t know if I would be capable of bringing myself to testify against her. Though if it came to it,
if
I had to
, I supposed I would.

“All right, then,” Judge Hersey said. “Dismissed.

Next!”

The whole thing took about four minutes.
And I was
free.

Bobby greeted me with a hug and kept one arm around me as he shook Elias’s hand, saying, “Thank you.
Thank you
.”

“All I did was sort out the facts,” Elias said, but he was smiling, victorious, even a little proud. “And don’t thank me too much. I’ll be sending you a bill.” We all laughed. Elias said good-bye and left us alone in the wide hallway outside the courtroom. Well, not alone—Gabe Lazare was waiting for us near the elevator. I hadn’t noticed him in the courtroom; he must have slipped in and stood in the back by the door.

“Congratulations,” he said.

“Gee, thanks.” I disengaged my arm from Bobby’s and pushed the DOWN button.

“I’m sorry,” Lazare said.

I jabbed the button again and looked at him. He was just one man, standing there in a cheap blue suit with badly dyed hair. It was hard to blame him for getting so excited about doing his job.

“Because of the blood and the witness,” he said, “we had no choice.”

“Why didn’t your forensics people notice sooner that the blood had been frozen?” I asked. “That’s what I keep wondering.”

“I have the same question,” he said, “but you were a flight risk and so we arrested you as soon as we could.

This is a complicated case because you and Julie look so much—”

“Don’t say it.” I stepped closer to Lazare and kissed his cheek. It was the second time I’d kissed him, but now, instead of stiffening up, he gave me one of his half-cocked smiles. “Apology accepted,” I said.

“Good-bye.”

“We’ll find her,” he said.

I looked at him. “Does that mean she’s gone?” “You didn’t know?”

“I was locked up.” I turned to Bobby, who looked as surprised at this news as I was.

“When?” Bobby asked.

“This morning, apparently,” Lazare said. “She was seen at the prison, dropping off the box—you look very nice, by the way. Then she, well—”

“
Eluded
you, Detective?” I smiled.

“Not
me
, exactly. One of my men.” So Julie was gone. She must have heard about the frozen blood. She must not have done her research well enough; otherwise she would have taken that into account. She really had no choice but to run if she didn’t want to be charged with murder on top of identity theft. Once she crossed the state’s boundary, she would have jumped bail. I wondered if she had put her house on the line for her bond, or used some other col-lateral, or just come up with cash. My guess was that she put up her house; she wasn’t coming back anyway, and knowing what I now knew about Julie, I realized she probably had bank accounts all around the world in other people’s names. Well, to be honest, if
I
were her that’s exactly what I would do at this point: run. She was all alone now and in my heart I believed she understood her mistake. She would carry her prison with her.

“She won’t get away with any of it, Annie,” Detective Lazare said. “We’ll find her, and when we find the knife—”

“
If
you find it, Detective,” I interrupted, realizing that he finally believed
I
had not killed Zara Moklas.

“I’m sorry, but you haven’t found it yet and it’s not like you haven’t looked under every stone.”

“We’ll find it.”

“I hope you do,” I said. “I’d like this to be really over.” Another lie: if it’s being
over
meant the end of Julie, I could never want that.

The elevator dinged and the doors parted. I nodded at Lazare, looked at Bobby, smiled. “Let’s go home.”

Home was as exquisitely
there
, plainly and solidly
real
, as when I’d left it one month ago. The house itself was a little dustier on its surfaces and grimier around its edges, but that was nothing. The differences, the real changes, were between Bobby and me. No matter how erroneous or misleading the reasons, you can’t leave your spouse without breaking something.

It’s far too easy to shatter trust and confidence in a marriage, but what we’d been through went beyond those emotional delicacies. Personally I felt lost and rudderless in a brand-new way, and I think Bobby did, too. Without the drama, the challenges, the quests to peel back so many accusations to find the truth, having
found
the truth we were faced with a strange emptiness. We had to locate each other again in that vast space, to build anew, and we immediately started working on it.

We arrived home at the beginning of June in unsea-sonable heat, turned on the central air-conditioning, got Lexy to sleep in her very own crib in her very own room, and crawled naked and exhausted into our marital bed.

Bobby put out the light and we turned to each other.

Kissing me, he said, “Let’s make another baby.” I immediately knew it was a good idea, for us
and
for me. I wanted nothing more than to build a family with this man, to surround myself with the love and purpose-fulness of children. We made love that night, free and clear, and afterward Bobby wept in my arms. “It’s over,” I whispered to him. “Over, over, over.” But he kept crying and I understood: he was still releasing emotional poisons. So was I. Our healing would take time.

The other rebuilding we had to do involved my name: my trampled credit history had turned it to mud.

Clearing up
that
mess became a full-time job—phone calls through mazes that often landed me back at the starting point, letters, endless follow-ups. I became a vigilant bureaucrat on my own behalf. The discipline was good for me, though, as a tool to train my mind away from the deep ravines of personal loss that had reshaped my inner life. I
couldn’t
let myself sink into those pits; I
had
to move on.

Bobby went back to work the second week of June in the lingering heat wave while I hunkered down in the cool indoors with Lexy. Lexy at almost seven months was crawling like a demon and struggling to cruise any handleable surface. Since she was my first baby, I had no one to compare her with, but everything I could find in books or on the Internet about developmental stages said she was too young to start walking and then, as likely as not, contradicted itself with examples of babies walking as early as nine months.
Early walker, late
talker
, they said, and vice versa. Lexy exulted in her physical competence and I was proud of her, proud and tired, as I followed her in and out of rooms.

In early September, Julie was arrested in Rome, Italy, and extradition proceedings were begun. I experienced her downfall from a passionate distance. I couldn’t quite purge her from my system and even now, after everything, her capture pained me, though I told no one of my deepest feelings, not even Bobby. I thought of her (and
felt
her and
saw
her) sitting in a jail cell in Italy.
Italy.
Of course. It was where our parents had taken us for the most memorable summer of our lives, when our family was still whole.

By mid-October, as the first brushstrokes of autumn touched our yard with a golden-hued palette of im-pending changes, Lexy was walking like a champ, I was spending less and less time chasing paperwork—

and I discovered I was pregnant. Everything started coming into focus as we made our plans: Bobby would retire in the spring with a full pension and we would move to Northern California, where our new baby would be born. Eventually I would go back to work, preferably starting a private practice, and he would stay home with the children.

But then, as October blended into the nauseated days of early winter (whoever called it
morning sick-ness
had never been pregnant—it lasted all day!), things changed.
Life is what happens when you’re
making other plans
, or so the saying goes, omitting the equally true:
and so are unexpected endings.

It was a Saturday morning. We had finished breakfast and I was lying on the couch, staving off the latest urge to vomit, with Lexy playing on the living room floor and Bobby upstairs fixing a gimpy hinge on the bathroom door. I could hear the squeaky push-and-pull of the door as he tested it and I could hear Lexy’s sweet babble as she played. And then, suddenly—or it seemed sudden to me—the house was terribly quiet. I had closed my eyes for just a minute. When I opened them, Lexy was gone and I realized with horror that I had actually fallen asleep. I got up and started looking, calling her name:

“Lexy! Baby! Where are you?”

The quiet persisted, that
awful
quiet when you know something’s wrong. I started to run through the house.

“Bobby! Where’s Lexy? Did you see her?” There was no answer, no sound, just the expanding sensation of a quiet that was
wrong
.

Through the living room window I saw Bobby standing on the front lawn, talking with our next-door neighbor. The front door was closed and I could see that Lexy wasn’t with him.

“Lexy?” I called. “Lexy!”

Then,
then
, I noticed that the basement door was open. We always kept this door locked—it was a dank cave of a basement, completely unfinished, where Bobby had set up his makeshift carpentry workshop.

Just half an hour ago he had gone down for a screw-driver. He must have forgotten to lock the door behind him. I raced down the rickety wooden steps into the dark.

“Lexy?”

There was a sound of truncated movement, a quick scramble like a frightened mouse.

“Honey? Mommy’s here!”

Two high, shallow windows that had probably never been washed let in a bit of murky light, and as my eyes adjusted, I was able to see her. She was sitting on the floor, in a corner, under a porcelain utility sink. The whites of her eyes shone at me, and she blinked.

“Baby! What are you
doing
down here?” On my way to her, I pulled the chain of an overhead lightbulb and the grungy basement came into better focus. It really
was
a pit in here. And the smell! The sour, lifeless smell of old dust and settled-in grime.

I crouched down to kiss Lexy and she tightened her lips. When I realized she was holding something in her mouth, the panic instantly returned. What nasty, treacherous basement thing had she been about to swallow?

“Give it to Mommy, Lexy.
Let go
.” I pried a finger between her lips to release her jaw and get out whatever she was trying to hide. Sweeping my finger over her tongue, I felt it: cold, round, flat, metal. A coin.

She struggled against me as if she wanted to swallow it. When I managed to pry it free, I saw that it was a gunked-up dime.

I balanced her on my hip and slipped the dime into my pants pocket. Then my eyes settled on the sink: for an old sink that no one but Bobby used, it was surpris-ingly, freshly clean. I cranked open one of the faucets and held my fingers under the cold running water, then leaned Lexy in and repeatedly splashed water into her mouth, saying, “Let’s get that yucky dirt out of there, sweetie pie.”

Lexy laughed and opened her mouth wide. As I cupped a handful of water and dribbled it into her mouth, the sink began to fill. A clogged drain. It was old and hardly used, so it was no surprise, but then the drain burped up a chunk of red. Crimson rivulets bled through the rising pool of water. Smaller flecks of dark red continued to pump up from the clogged drain.

It had to be paint. Red paint. But what in this house was painted red? My mind cataloged the rooms: whites, cantaloupes, yellows, greens—but nowhere
red
. I turned off the faucet before the sink overflowed.

Had Bobby painted one of his carpentry projects red?

I glanced around the dim basement and saw the upended chair he had been constructing for over a year now: raw, unpainted wood. And then, as my eyes swept from the shop floor to the neatly organized workbench, I saw it.