Murder in the Collective (18 page)

“Were you each other’s best friend?”

“I suppose, in some ways. There was this underlying loyalty. You didn’t gossip about your twin the way you would have about someone else. But otherwise, she had her friends, I had mine. After high school we each moved out and lived with different people. That was the most distant time…I missed her. But we were determined to separate ourselves. Actually, a lot of it came from other people—all the time, saying, ‘Isn’t it cute?’ “Twins, oh darling!’ It was debilitating enough to be raised as a little girl in the fifties and sixties, but there’s something about twins that really brings out the insipid worst in most people.”

“But now you don’t really look very much alike,” Hadley said, beginning to stroke my leg with her hand. Prickles followed in her wake.

“I know. It’s surprising sometimes. And a little sad. Because it was reassuring in the past to look over and know what you looked like.”

“Maybe this is too personal, but what will Penny say about you getting involved with me?”

I shook my head. “I used to know what she thought about everything, or at least be able to put myself in her position. Now, it’s harder, but we still don’t judge each other much. She’ll understand.”

Hadley was still rubbing my leg. She pretended to yawn. “We had a late night last night—aren’t you tired?”

I forgot that I’d meant to rush off; I forgot that I still had the clippings in my pocket, that I wanted to find out how Zee was and that I wanted to ask her some questions.

I yawned too. “I am, a little…Maybe we’d better lie down again.”

“Good idea.”

B
Y THE TIME I
got home it was after noon, and though I felt relaxed I didn’t feel particularly awake. Sam and Jude were still sitting over breakfast at the dining table, reading the paper and eating bran muffins and cheese. Or maybe they were having lunch.

“Just getting in,” Jude asked curiously.

“Mmmm. Where’s Penny?”

“Out back. Working in the garden.”

“Mind if I have one of these? Thanks.”

I went through the kitchen and out the back door. In the morning the garden was partially shaded by a big apple tree, but now it was brilliantly green and sunny. Penny was hoeing in the corner, around the tomatoes and green beans.

“Hi,” I said cheerfully. “Need some help?”

She gave me an unimpressed look. “So where have you been?”

I began to pull weeds by hand around the broccoli. “Give you two guesses.”

“I never would have thought…” she began.

“…that I’d turn out gay?”

“You’re not gay with one…encounter,” she contested. Her hair was sticking straight up and, what with her red bandanna, she looked like a disapproving Bantam. “What I mean is that you hardly know the woman. Besides, the atmosphere’s so hectic now…”

I hadn’t meant to argue; I would have preferred to bask in her approval and share my good fortune over having discovered Hadley, sexuality and feeling of a new kind. I said coolly, “As I recall, you and Doug were in each other’s pants about a minute after you were introduced. So how is this different?”

“But…” Penny said, then sighed and turned back to hoeing. “When it’s B. Violet that caused this whole mess and everything,” she muttered.

I felt like I’d been slapped. “What do you know about it?” I leapt over a row or two of cabbages to confront her. “Why B. Violet more than Best—because they’re lesbian? But you’ve been playing Miss Don’t Get Involved for days. A lot of things have happened this week and you don’t want to know any of them. You’re still part of the collective though; you’ve got to take some responsibility for the mess that Jeremy’s created. You can’t just shove it on to B. Violet. But no, you don’t even want to deal with Zee…”

“Not so loud,” Penny said. “She’ll hear you.”

“What I want to know,” I whispered violently, “is why we never suspected Jeremy of anything. How was it that he fooled us into thinking he was this laid-back, spacey type with no thought in his head except how to get tickets to the Rolling Stones?”

“Look, Pam,” Penny said. “Leave it to the cops. Don’t go around getting mixed up in things. It was one thing at the beginning, but it’s gotten more serious. Look, it’s not you getting involved with Hadley that I mind so much as the idea of the two of you running around playing amateur detective.”

A fleeting picture of myself clinging to Jeremy’s third story window early this morning passed through my mind. I was glad Penny hadn’t been a witness to that.

I said, “How can you—a progressive, a feminist, a leftist—be so certain that the cops will take care of everything? Especially if Jeremy was some kind of informer? For all we know he may have damaged the lives of a lot of people in some way. The cops aren’t going to expose him, Penny. Wake up!”

“You wake up,” she said, her hair fanning out like a halo of anger. “Just how do you think Best Printing is going to survive if you’re spending all your time playing Nancy Drew? We’ve hardly gotten anything done all week. June and Zee haven’t been in, Elena’s a mess, Jeremy’s dead and you’re pretending like you’re on a leave of absence or something. We were depending on that job from the city we had to turn down. I haven’t known what to tell people who’ve called for bids. Call back next week when things have calmed down? Or next month? Or never? We’ve got to pay our bills, Pam. We can’t afford to just stop. If it hadn’t been for Ray…”

I was about to light into her for her capitalistic attitude—didn’t she realize that one of our collective had been murdered and that meant that our entire political community might be threatened—how could she talk about work, about keeping going—but something in the way her voice had softened and her eyes had turned away slightly at the end of the sentence, gave me pause. A hideous suspicion formed in my mind.

“And where were you last night?” I said roughly, grabbing her shoulder.

Penny jerked away. “Leave me alone. You act like you have some right to him, and it’s been almost a year, Pam. I’ve…cared about Ray for a long time. Besides, what does it matter to you anyway if you’re a lesbian now?”

I was totally enraged, enraged and betrayed. My very own identical twin fucking the man who had broken my heart; it was too much. I didn’t feel one bit like a happy lesbian who has just seen the light. I felt like a scorned and lonely heterosexual woman who’s just about to hit her beloved sister with a hoe.

“I can’t believe it.” I finally found words. “After I told you what a creep he was to me. And what about Zee? She’s his lover. It’s incredibly disgusting to think that while she’s hiding up in our attic you’re messing with her boyfriend.”

“Would you keep your goddamn voice down!” Penny whispered at a screaming pitch. “I told you before, Zee and Ray aren’t lovers anymore.”

“Since when?” I snarled back. “Since last night?”

“Since about a month ago,” came the familiar accent of Zee herself from the attic window above us. She had shoved her head out and was peering down at us. I could see her smiling. “Besides, it wasn’t so serious between us. Do you know, he told me he likes you, Penny. I’m so happy for you.”

I was feeling more and more like a fool. I wanted to say something gallant and superior. Instead I began methodically to crush a small brussels sprout plant under my foot.

Penny was laughing up at the attic window. “Keep inside, Zee. Who knows who’s watching? Pam’s convinced this is all a dangerous plot.”

Too much. Too fucking much. I turned and walked back through the garden and into the kitchen, up the stairs and into my bedroom. Why had I forgotten to tell Hadley the bitter truth about being the twin of someone who knew how to get under your skin in every possible way, on every possible occasion? As I lay on my bed, wretched memories of past tricks Penny had played on me came vividly to mind. That time in junior high when I’d been so crazy about David What’s His Name and she’d pretended she was me and had gone up one day in front of a whole crowd of his friends and said, ‘Will you go steady with me?’

I should have killed her then. I shouldn’t let it have gotten to this point fifteen years later when she could make my life a living hell. The fact that Hadley had given me so much pleasure last night and this morning too, was immaterial now. Ray and Penny in bed together—it was incestuous, that’s what it was. We might not look alike but we had exactly the same body build…but what if she were a better lover than I? What if Ray thought so?

Yeah, and there had been that time in grade school when Penny and I had both been enamored of the same little girl, a charmer from Morocco or Algeria, with big brown eyes and curly black hair. We had both asked her separately if she wanted to be friends with us. And she had chosen Penny. She had said Penny was nicer!

I wept miserably into my pillow. Oh, no one knew what it was to be a twin, to have someone around all the time who knew your weaknesses and could exploit them. Who was so much like you but better. It was like being compared all the time to your better half. It was hideous. We should never have tried to live together, work together, anything. Most twins lived separate lives, moved to different cities, had families of their own. They didn’t keep jerking into each other like puppets controlled by the same hand.

I cried myself out and slept long and deeply. Once during the afternoon there was a knock at the door; Jude called out that there was a phone call for me.

I ignored it and buried my head deeper.

When I finally got up it was almost six and I was the only one in the house. Jude had left a message:
Hadley called. We’ve gone for a swim. See you at dinner?

I made myself some iced tea and called Hadley. Earlier we’d talked about taking a picnic dinner to Lake Washington. No answer. Well, she wouldn’t want to waste a nice day by waiting around for me to call. I had a headache and still felt out of sorts. I wandered into the living room, looked at magazines, did a few stretching exercises.

I was just getting ready to go up and visit Zee when Penny walked in the front door.

“Hi,” she said, and looked uncertain. Then she came into the living room and sat across from me.

“Still mad at me?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Remember that David in junior high? That was really a rotten thing to do, asking him to go steady.”

Penny nodded. “I know. You got back at me though, remember. You told that slimy Roger that you, ‘Penny’, had had a crush on him for a long time. I had a hard time getting rid of him.” She paused, laughed, and then when I didn’t laugh back, said, “Are you planning to get back at me for this?”

Then I did laugh. “Like put a slug in your bed? God, Pen, we don’t even look alike anymore—I wouldn’t even know how to play a trick on you—not the same kind of trick anyway.”

“If you cut your hair I bet you could.”

“Actually I’ve been thinking of it…for other reasons.”

“Do it,” she said.

All of a sudden we were friends again.

“You don’t really mind,” she said. “About Ray and me? I mean,
really
mind? It’s making me happy right now.”

“I’ll get used to it. Besides, he’s about a thousand times better than Doug.”

“You’re not kidding. And Pam, I’m sorry if I was weird about you and Hadley…well, all I want you to know is that I like her, she’s nice.”

“Don’t get any ideas,” I said, then added, “It doesn’t upset you, that I might become a lesbian?”

Penny shook her punk head. “I might even envy you. It’s often seemed a far more sensible course.”

“In that case, what do you think about dinner?”

“Anything but fresh vegetables,” she said. “I’m getting sick of them. Can’t we go out and get Chinese food, take it up to Zee? We could have a little party before Sam and Jude get home. I persuaded them not to come back for dinner, said you were in a bad mood…”

“Sounds good. Is that the door?”

“I’ll get it.”

I was close behind her when she opened it. On our porch stood two uniformed Seattle policemen, one of whom was holding a piece of paper.

“I have a warrant here, for the arrest of Zenaida Oberon Plaice,” he said, self-importantly.

“What?” said Penny and I in shocked unison. “Who?”

“Mrs. Jeremy Plaice, wanted on the charge of murdering her husband.” And when Penny and I still didn’t respond, the cop added in a slightly more human voice that they knew she was here because they’d seen her just a few hours ago.

Hanging out the attic window.

T
HE MURDER OF JEREMY
Plaice had merited one short paragraph on an inside page of the newspaper the day after it happened: “Man, 25, found dead of a gunshot wound at 9 p.m. in Seattle print shop. No immediate suspects.” We’d wondered a little then how June had escaped a publicity blitz, but laid it all to the speed with which Marta Evans had acted.

This time there was no such luck. The main headline in the Sunday paper the next morning was something to do with unemployment, but the second headline announced in bold:
FILIPINO WIFE SUSPECT IN MURDER CASE
. And below it “Secret Marriage Revealed.” The article went on to inform us of all sorts of new things. Jeremy Plaice had spent three years in the Navy at Subic Bay. His parents in California suspected his wife, Zenaida Plaice, née Oberon, of using their son to stay in the United States. There was mention of Zee’s prominent “opposition” family, of her nursing studies and of her involvement in a local anti-Marcos group. No mention of forging and no mention of what the cops actually had on Zee, but plenty of insinuation. And there were our names too: “Penny and Pamela Nilsen, owners of Best Printing where the two were employed, were hiding the murder suspect in their attic.”

“I wonder why we’re not being charged as accomplices,” I said.

“Employees!” said Penny. “Can’t they ever get it straight?”

“I’m sure we’ll have lots of opportunities to explain to the press just what a collective is,” I said, glancing out the window. A man with a camera and notebook was walking up to the porch. “But I’d rather not bother.”

We didn’t answer the doorbell.

“In your attic?” Marta had said last night. “Pam, you haven’t been playing fair.”