Here She Lies (5 page)

“Personal, I hope. Right? Someone killed
her
, specifically.”

Julie hesitated. “The thing is, A—”

I knew what she was going to say, that Zara Moklas looked like
us
.

“I know,” I said. “I keep thinking it, too.” She opened the door at the top of the staircase and suddenly we were in the huge open space that was her bedroom. It had a high ceiling shaped like the top half of an octagon (it was the old barn roof) with long beams crisscrossing in midair. Strips of lights illuminated the bottom part of the room and seemed to press back the darkness and shadows into the circumscribed space above. From the beams on down, everything was painted white, but the furniture, in stark contrast, was black. Instead of paintings or drawings or anything prettily decorative on Julie’s walls, there were mirrors of varying shapes. The bright lights bouncing off the mirrors gave the space a kind of sparkle.

Her loftlike room in the country sky had two more surprises: an enormous bathroom, the kind you could fit a couch into, and an office that was even higher-tech than the kitchen. It was spacious, with four large windows facing the back and side of the house, and I imagined that in the daytime it was bright. A long countertop desk against a red wall was covered with her characteristically neat piles of work along with a desktop computer whose 3-D ball-shaped screen saver pinged across the sleeping screen. A wide bookcase against the opposite wall was full of marketing books, collated industry magazines, the biographies she loved to read, and even a few professional awards. There was one I hadn’t seen before, a gold figure with raised arms holding aloft a clear glass triangle.

“Is this your Stevie?” I asked. But my question was answered when I saw her name etched in the small gold plaque on the base. The Stevie Award was one of the industry biggies, given annually to a woman who had excelled as a marketing entrepreneur.

“Congratulations, Jules.” I hugged her. “I’m so proud of you.”

“Thanks.” She tried to hold a poker face but soon unleashed a grin.

Across the room was a small desk that looked unused except for a laptop that was closed and un-plugged. Julie read my mind.

“That was for an assistant,” she said, “but I never got around to hiring one.”

“How do you manage?” In her old office in Connecticut, she had employed someone full-time.

“I don’t like distractions. And I’ve discovered Pete and Sue in India.”

“Pete and Sue? In
India
?”

“Those aren’t their real names; they take pseudo-nyms to make it easier for us. They’re called ‘outsourced online assistants.’ It’s the new thing. They do most of what a real assistant does but in about half the time, plus they’re cheaper and you don’t have to ask them how their weekend was.”

“Sounds ruthless.”

“It’s
efficient
. Did you know you can even hire an outsourced personal assistant for gift buying and stuff like that?”

“You’re joking. So, did you hire one?”

“What for? My whole personal life is pretty much you guys, and I enjoy choosing your gifts.”

“I know.” I took her arm and led her out of her of-fice, where the culprit
work
had consumed so much of her. I would make it my business, this visit, to distract her from work as much as possible, to fill her up emotionally. Lexy would definitely help with that.

I steered her to the corner of her bedroom next to a window where she had made a sitting area with two plush black armchairs and a small steel and glass table.

Up close, I saw it was a curio table with a removable top. Inside the display were Julie’s own glass cats along with some of her other memorabilia and miscel-lany: our mother’s wedding ring (I had Dad’s), a tiny enamel box containing our mingled baby teeth and identical locks of our baby hair, an opal ring whose provenance was a mystery to me, three antique miniature toy cars from an abandoned urge to collect, a few hair elastics, and a small glass dish of earrings, mingled among which I saw her pair of diamonds that matched my own. Zircons, actually,
fake
diamonds, but no less twinkly when we turned our heads in the light.

They had been a new-baby gift, from her to both of us, a few months after Lexy was born.

“Isn’t it inconvenient keeping your jewelry in there?” I asked.

“Sometimes at night I sit here and read and, you know …”

I
did
know. We had always shared a habit of removing our accessories, and sometimes elements of our clothing, when we wanted to relax.

Julie set my glass cats on top of the table so they seemed to hover in space above hers. “Want to mix them?” she asked. “Like when we were kids?” I smiled. “Good idea.”

She lifted the top of the table and together we arranged my cats with hers. Then she sat back in one of the black chairs, kicking off one of her cowboy boots and then the other, revealing hot pink socks. I sat in the matching chair and pried off my shoes, peeled off my socks, and splayed my toes to feel the cool air on my skin. Reaching into the open table, I picked up a blue elastic and put my hair into a high ponytail; then I took off my zircons and impulsively placed them in Julie’s earring dish. She seemed to stiffen a little when I did that.

“What?” I said. “They’re exactly the same, like the cats.”

“I had an infection in one of my ears recently.

Didn’t I tell you?”

“No.”

“I never got around to sterilizing my earrings.”

“Well, then, I’ll sterilize them all tomorrow. How’s that?” I smiled, coaxing her agreement.

“Fine.” She leaned back and sighed. “But next time, ask first.”

I let her have that last word. Why not? We weren’t little girls anymore; we were grown-ups and she had a point: boundaries mattered. Which made me regret mixing the glass cats, having earmarked
mine
for Lexy.

“Do you remember our old game?” I asked her.
“I
wish on you flood—”

“Witch’s Wishes. I haven’t thought of that in years.” It was a game we’d invented during our mother’s losing fight against cancer. “I wish on you fire!” “I wish on you starvation!” “I wish on you plague!” We wished every horrible possible thing on each other, and the more we played it, the stronger and braver we grew. “I wish on you destruction!” “I wish on you decay!” But never death; death was what we were steeling ourselves against. Even at ten, watching our mother waste away, we knew death was our mortal enemy. When she finally died, we began to wish death on each other, too, to strengthen ourselves against it.

“It never worked, Jules, did it? To ward off anything.”

“No, but it got us through some tough days.” She was right; it
had
provided a kind of shield, even if imaginary. I was so glad to be here with Julie. She was the only person with whom I could discuss our past in shorthand without our parents’ deaths throwing a vast, tragic shadow over everything. Their deaths
were
tragic, but before that we had been a family with somewhat regular problems; and before the divorce, long before, if I remembered correctly, we may have even been happy. Our parents had certainly loved us, even doted on us. They read to us every night, greeted us with cocoa after building snow forts in our Connecticut yard, applauded at all our school plays, took us to museums and restaurants in New York. When we were little our mother had dressed us identically, but later, around the age of nine, we began to assert some individuality and in our final year with her she not only let us be ourselves but encouraged it, allowing separate traits and even insisting on them. Julie was calm, I was easily agitated. Julie was steady, I was impulsive. Julie dressed practically, I wore costumes (or what our mother perceived as costumes; to me they were gor-geous outfits someone ought to have photographed).

Julie was the smart one, I was the pretty one.

That was the distinction that affected us most—

smart/pretty—before we matured enough to understand that as identical twins we were more or less exactly the same. Our mother was offering us the possibility of individuality. I understood that now, but since she died before she had a chance to explain herself we spent a good amount of our growing-up energy trying to negate our presumed deficiencies. Before Julie went to graduate school in marketing, she spent a year living (with me) in the New York apartment we had inherited from our father, wearing flowing skirts and writing bad poetry, trying hard to be pretty inside and out. Broke and bored, she finally packed it in, got her advanced degree with honors, bought some nice suits and began her quick professional ascent.

And me? I had aspired to be a photographer. But instead of following my heart and photographing people on the street wearing their own concocted fashions, which was what really intrigued me, I turned to buildings, proving that I was serious and
smart
, and slowly and painfully failed over six lean years to establish myself as a freelance architectural photographer before enrolling in graduate school to become a physical therapist. I had realized I needed to work with people in a way that had some impact; as a PT, I could literally touch them and
see
the effect of my work. The job at the prison had been my entry-level launch pad to a new career.

Once Julie and I grew up, the
idea
of a smart/pretty discrepancy lost its poignancy. We both came to real-ize that we were about as smart and as pretty as each other—we were identical twins, after all. Our differences were cultivated. External trappings and diver-gent choices might have differentiated us, but they had never defined us and they never would. Julie’s eyes were my eyes and mine were hers. When I found her looking at me now, I knew what she was thinking.

“If Mom and Dad were here tonight,” I said, “they’d be giving us milk and cookies and telling us everything would be all right. They would have liked Bobby, don’t you think?
They
would have known he had nothing to do with that woman’s murder.”

Julie dropped her foot from her knee to the floor and shifted forward in her seat. “
I
know he didn’t, A.”

“That detective. He seems okay, basically. But I really think he’s wasting his time on Bobby. Don’t you?”

“Totally.”

“I mean, infidelity is one thing, Jules. But murder?

No way.” I shuddered at the recollection of Zara’s opened neck. “How much do you know about her?”

“Nothing, really. She was around our age, I think, maybe a little younger. All my neighbors who used her liked her. She worked hard. Everyone said she was honest. I’d never heard about the shady brother until tonight.”

“Wouldn’t it be crazy if—no, that’s a ridiculous thought.”

“If what?” she asked.

My eyes landed on one of Julie’s empty boots, where at the ankle a brass ring united straps of leather.

Then I looked at her: “I was going to say, if
she
was the woman Bobby was sleeping with.”

“You’re right. That
is
ridiculous.”

“I don’t know why I thought that.”

“Because you’re upset,” she said. “It’s been a really bad day.”

“I wonder how a brother and sister from Hungary ended up in Great Barrington.”

“I guess they liked the country. Maybe they had a friend around here.”

“The detective will find out, I suppose.”

“The more I learn about people,” Julie said, “the more I think they’re incredibly unpredictable, you know?” Her forehead gathered, producing a slight crease. A sign of age. Were we getting older without having figured everything out? But maybe that was the trick: maybe you
didn’t.

“I know I left him, but Bobby was never unpredictable. He isn’t most people.”

“Not Bobby,” Julie corrected me. “I meant Zara.” But for me, Zara Moklas was completely predictable. She would always exist in my mind the only way I had ever seen her: splayed on a dark country road in mottled hues of arcing lights and her own red blood. My only expectation for Zara, ever, could be death.

“All the neighbors said she was such a nice person,” Julie said. “Maybe she was. But maybe she
wasn’t
.

That’s all I’m saying.”

“Because we don’t really know. I do get your point.”

“Exactly. We don’t know. Maybe under her nice-nice facade she was a drug dealer and she got it for a bad debt or something.”

“I hope so,” I said, “because that would mean the killer was specifically after
her
. But honestly, why would she work as a secretary and clean houses if she was making money selling drugs?”

Julie smiled wickedly. “Good point. Okay. Then maybe cleaning houses was a front and she was a madame and one of her girls went postal.” I pictured a cartoon-sleazy hooker with a knife on the bucolic road in front of Julie’s house. We laughed.

And then suddenly I was crying.

Julie crossed over to my chair and we held each other and soon she was crying, too. Her hands found my face and began to smear away tears.

“It isn’t funny.” Julie.

“It’s horrible.” Me.

“We
shouldn’t
, should we?” She didn’t ask it as a question because it wasn’t a question. We were making light of something dark. Laughing at someone else’s catastrophe. Digging a moat around the
us
that had always offered protection. As children we had practiced this art of separation without remorse, but as adults we had learned better. Now, when we slipped into defensive isolation against the world at large, we felt guilty and stopped. At least we tried to stop. But we both knew that I had come to Julie to escape to her, into her, with her. It was a deep and irresistible impulse of our twinhood.

“Can we bring up my suitcases now?” I asked.

“Come on. We’ll get you settled and put you to bed.”

“I think I’ll check on Bobby first.”

I called the police station and was put on hold for five minutes, only to be told that the detective said not to bother waiting up. I wondered if those were his exact words: “Don’t bother waiting up.” Even from our brief contact it didn’t seem like something Detective Lazare would say. He seemed subtler than that. “Get some sleep and he’ll be back with you soon,” seemed more like it. And then I wondered where Bobby would sleep when he did return. Would he find me in the Yellow Room? Slip between my yellow sheets? Find my body? Would our mile of distance reduce itself to the plain fact that we loved each other? Would he finally either tell me the truth or find a convincing way to un-braid my suspicions? Or would he default to my decision to leave him and find his way to a guest room? I didn’t even know where I wanted him to sleep. It would be a comfort to feel him next to me in the dark but a source of confusion if I woke to him in the morning. I had never known how perplexing it could be to deeply love someone not-Julie yet find it necessary to leave, but of the many things my parents’ deaths had taught me, one was that severing the artery of love was ultimately survivable.