Lie Still, page 17
Mike placed the rest of the grilled cheese sandwiches on a plate between us and dropped into a chair. I had deliberately pulled a newspaper clipping out of the file tucked in my purse and left it near the saltshaker. Before I left Caroline’s, I’d put every original file I’d stolen in its alphabetical place in the circle. Every file but my own.
“What’s this?” With his little finger, Mike slid the newspaper article over in front of his plate.
“It’s the campus newspaper article.” I didn’t say where I’d found it, and he didn’t ask. “We were told our names were removed at the last minute to protect our privacy because we weren’t official suspects. But our photographs ran on the front page. One of the girls’ fathers, some hotshot alumnus, protested to the chancellor after it hit the stands, and our photos never made the papers again. I heard that the student newspaper editor who made the decision to run them was fired and lost an internship at The Wall Street Journal. He thought he’d gotten the scoop of his life. Some sleazy cop slipped a reporter our names. The cop was fired, too.”
“Which one is you?” he asked, pointing to the row of headshots. “You look alike.”
“Pierce had a definite type. I’m the fourth one over.”
“Really?” My husband stared at my face like he’d never seen it before, and then back at the picture. “I’d never know it.”
“No one recognized me from that picture. Even girls on the wing of my dorm. It’s one of the outtakes of a campus ID pic that was too blurry to use. I’m not sure how the editor got it. Or any of the pictures.”
Mike’s eyes bored into mine, searching. “Emily, do you really think he raped all these girls? The few old police reports we’ve been able to retrieve from Ithaca are unclear on that point.”
The quiet in the kitchen was like a silent church prayer going on too long.
“Yes.” My voice was steely. I was back in time again, defending myself. Defending them.
“I know you think this could be the work of your rapist’s mother. Can you think a little harder about whether any other relatives, or a friend, stood out as especially angry? Someone who might decide to avenge his death? Maybe you aren’t the only one of these girls being threatened.”
“Why not Pierce’s mother? Why not her?” Even though I was reaching the same conclusion.
“She’s old, Emily. We tracked her down. She’s been on a tour of Africa with a church group for the last five months. Lots of God-fearing people confirm that.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I just found out this morning.”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” I pushed away my second sandwich, half-eaten. He’d waited an hour to tell me about Pierce’s mother. That should have been the first thing out of his mouth when we hit the kitchen.
“There is another reason I think this is connected to Caroline,” he said abruptly. “We found an office off Caroline’s closet in our last search of the house. You weren’t wrong about her. She’s a nut. Kept files on half the town. It has expanded my suspect list exponentially.”
“Really? Wow.” I hoped to sound believable. I hated the lie. But I didn’t want to fall backward again. And what difference could it make now?
“Your instincts were right about Caroline. Do you have a feeling about any of the women you’ve met so far? Whether they’d want to harm her? Or taunt you?”
I’d spent more than a few minutes thinking about this before I shut my eyes the last two nights. Letty was too eagerly loyal, a Saint Bernard trying to keep up with the greyhounds and poodles. Red Mercedes and Beach House, aka Mary Ann and Jenny, seemed the type to leave clues when they were dragging a body out of a window. A Xanax pill that fell out of a Chanel bag, a little spit-up from the fourth martini they ingested the night before, a fake fingernail resplendent with DNA.
Gretchen Liesel was The Saint, above the fray. Tiffany, Puppy Killer, was deep into Caroline’s game and loving it. She probably thought hazing was as necessary as water-boarding. Lucinda? Holly? Maria? Giant, swirly question marks.
“Emily?”
“What about Harry?” I asked finally. “Maria told me he tried to get a blow job out of her, and Caroline intervened. You said he was mixed up in illegal stuff. And he’d be strong enough to drag her out of the house. She had a file—” I caught myself. “I’m assuming there’s a file on him. It must be loaded with reasons.”
“One file among hundreds. It’s going to take forever to get through them,” he said. “Caroline is now officially a missing persons case. The FBI is all over it.”
“I know. I know.”
He reached across to cover my hand with his.
“Whoever is behind all of this … they’re going to be very sorry they decided to pick on my wife.”
It was a tone I’d never heard before.
I was seven years old the first time I realized that I was capable of a deliberate, immoral act.
It was a little thing, I suppose, but then it’s the little things that turn the dial of our character slowly, a notch at a time, one way, then the other, until we reach the point in young adulthood where the dial is firmly stuck in place and it takes a lot of torque to coax it along again.
My mother didn’t believe much in the value of Barbies as role models for little girls, so the only one I owned was an old Skipper doll that I’d bought for fifty cents at a garage sale. I’d painted her bald spot with a brown marker.
The lady behind the card table threw in a pitiful wardrobe of a pink-flowered bikini. One inch of fabric, maybe. And a strapless wedding dress with a ripped hem and most of the beads missing. All a girl needs if she’s planning to live out her days with her lover on a desert isle.
But my friend Robin across the street owned an elite collection, so many Barbies and Barbie cousins that twenty of them served as mere decorations on a high, unreachable shelf that her father had nailed around the room. The plastic women were trapped inside their boxes, fake-smiling behind the cellophane. More well-loved Barbies were tossed in a large plastic bin in her closet or forgotten under the bed, arms and legs in unnatural positions, in embarrassing stages of undress.
Robin was fanatic about the accessories, using a tall plastic fishing tackle box with tiny drawers to store sun hats and veils, necklaces and hosiery, and the tiny, tiny shoes. My favorites were a pair of white heels with a minuscule white feathery puff on top, held down by a rhinestone that I imagined was a piece of a star.
Those shoes were stored in the third row, fifth drawer across. My fingers itched to see how they’d look with Skipper’s pitiful wedding dress. I wanted them. And one day, when Robin slipped away to the bathroom, I opened the drawer. She wouldn’t even miss them, I reasoned. It wasn’t fair.
I did hesitate. For a few seconds, I stared at them in my small, sweaty palm, wondering if I could do this, thinking how disappointed my mother would be if she found out.
“Those are pretty, aren’t they?” The voice wasn’t angry but it was adult and knowing. Robin’s mother.
“Yes.” Heat rushed into my face.
“Are you ready to put them back?”
“Yes.” My heart knocked against my chest as she opened the drawer and I carefully dropped them in.
She never accused me of anything, never told my mother, or even Robin as far as I knew. She saved me from myself, giving me the benefit of the doubt even though she was certain of my guilt. I loved her for it.
At my parents’ wake, three days after the crash, I told Robin’s mother that I’d never forgotten that moment, an early lesson about kindness and trust as a powerful teacher.
While mourners circled like restless birds, she spoke the words that comforted me the most that wretched week. I was certain by then that my lies had killed my parents. That if it hadn’t been for me, they would have been taking care of the granddaughter I gave away, instead of driving back from the mountains that day.
“You’re a good girl, Emily,” she told me. “But you’ve always been too hard on yourself.”
20
A call from Mike’s office mercifully put a stop to our lunch conversation. I could hear the unmistakable chirp of the police records researcher on the other end of the line, a stout, fifty-three-year-old farmer’s wife named Billie Rhine. She often called Mike around midnight. He had told me that her mood for the day depended entirely on whether she had time to drive through for chicken biscuits before she got to work. Mike didn’t care. Even grumpy, she was dogged.
From the chattering I could hear, Billie sounded full of chicken and biscuits. I flipped on the TV in the corner of the kitchen for the first time since we’d moved in, keeping the sound mute. I flipped around the channels, stopping at the sight of a pretty brunette reporter perched in front of the Castlegate subdivision, gesturing animatedly to the seemingly impenetrable wall of stone. The news ticker underneath asked: POSSIBLE SERIAL KILLER?
Not the crew from WFAA. The local Fox News channel was now going at the story, too. Mike hung up the phone, and I slid over a little to hide the screen.
“Something popped,” he said. “You good?”
He was under crushing pressure, I knew. He wanted to insulate me, the pregnant me who’d lost all of our other babies. He scribbled out a check with way too many zeros for the clones, who’d just finished up; grabbed my uneaten half sandwich; and jogged out to his car.
I turned back to the TV. Caroline swallowed up the whole screen now, staring out at me from a flattering photograph of her I’d never seen. She looked like someone’s extra-pretty grandma. Like she wanted to please be found so she could go back to playing Scrabble and making chocolate scones. I clicked her off.
Mike’s exit left me with the cop outside, a fat primer on my new alarm system that I’d never read, a greasy skillet to wash, and blinking little red dots all over the house. I chose to tackle the skillet first and fix a hot cup of decaf before moving myself to the living room recliner. Every speck of fingerprint powder was gone, like it had never been there.
For a half-hour, I flipped the pages of a pulpy paperback thriller that a woman I met while roaming the book section at Walmart recommended, but it turned out to be less interesting and well written than Caroline’s files. My eyelids drooped a two-minute warning. I did love to sleep, so in that respect, pregnancy was a lovely drug. There had been countless nights in my life when I stared at the ceiling, my worries chasing their long cat tails.
I thought about Caroline’s files, just the few that I’d read. I should have lit the match.
I pulled the chair lever, propping up my feet, and stared at the yellow and pink polka dots on the fuzzy socks Mike gave me in the hospital after miscarriage No. 3. Unable to shake the sudden, certain feeling that we were both looking the wrong way.
My cell phone, resting on the arm of the chair, tinkled the cheerful notification of an email. Lucy, I hoped.
I stared at my inbox, scrolling slowly.
Lucinda Wells Beswetherick wants to be friends with you on Facebook.
Leticia Abigail Lee Dunn wants to be friends with you on Facebook.
Jennifer Foster Cartwright wants to friends with you on Facebook.
Mary Ann Pratt Kimmel wants to be friends with you on Facebook.
Twenty-three friend requests from Caroline’s subjects, one after the other, like they were sitting in the same room, deciding.
Like they had voted.
One by one, I killed them all.
The flap on the front porch mailbox clanked, startling me awake. The mail usually arrived closer to 10 a.m., not 5. I hesitantly padded over to the door and cracked it, relieved to see a man in a postal uniform retreating down our walk.
I opened the door another foot. He appeared to be wearing a skunk on his head. Our postman was a semi-reliable night school student named Harold who was fighting off his name with a rhinestone stud in his left nostril and two white stripes that ran through jet-black hair. Harold had introduced himself by dropping his mailbag to help me dump a large bag of compost in the front flower bed.
He was now crossing the yard to make better time, about to hurdle the low iron fence that squared off our small front yard. Another police car crawling down the block paused a few houses down.
“Hey, dude,” Harold called out.
Apparently, the sight of a punk mailman wasn’t cause for alarm, and the two carried on a genial conversation in low volume before Harold plugged his iPod into his ears and strolled off. The cop car curved around the cul-de-sac and slowed to a stop, pulling up even with the cruiser already glued to my curb. The two policemen rolled down their windows and spoke, before the second car moseyed back down the street.
A little lazy cop chatter. I wondered what my neighbors thought of all this action.
My stationary cop waved to me. I waved back.
I turned my attention to the lumpy manila envelope protruding out of the old-fashioned metal mailbox. Apparently, the cop had not thought, as I did, that this package appeared mailbomb size. With one finger, I nudged the envelope over a little to see the return address … and read: 143 East 57th St., New York, New York.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
The concert violinist who occupied the apartment next to us in New York had offered to mail anything that sneaked through despite our change-of-address form. Shutting the door and plopping back in the chair, I slit the envelope open with a screwdriver the clones had left behind. I shook the contents into my lap.
I wasn’t going to catch a break. Right on top, in priority position, was an envelope that wavered in my hands when I picked it up, not because I didn’t know the sender but because I did.
The return address was loud, clear, and official.
The New York State Board of Parole.
I didn’t have to open it to know what it was.
More than a decade ago, Luke Cummings was a twenty-year-old Syracuse University sophomore, almost exactly my age, asleep at the wheel, when he slammed into the back of my parents’ Chevy sedan on the outskirts of the Finger Lakes. He flung their car into the kind of action-movie spiral where only Matt Damon gets to walk out alive.
My flesh-and-blood parents flipped over at least four times, the coroner ruled. For years afterward, I saw my parents’ surprised faces in my dreams. In real life, the impact had startled Luke Cummings awake. He screeched on his brakes only seconds before a minivan plowed into him from behind. A little red-haired girl named Zooey was in that van. She died three days later in the hospital, pulled off life support.
I saw a picture of her once. Well, a picture of her shoe. A white tennis shoe with pink sparkly laces tied in a perky bow. It sat upright in the middle of the highway, all alone. Three hundred feet from Zooey’s body.
My parents were returning to Rochester from a day of nature hiking with friends while Luke sped home from Syracuse University after his first-semester finals. Luke was coming off three beers, a tequila shot, and two all-nighters in the library.
During Luke’s sentencing, I stared at the back of his grandmother’s shaking blue-green cardigan while Zooey’s twelve-year-old sister hiccuped her sobs in the row behind me.
The judge hammered Luke with the maximum for intoxication manslaughter in the first degree. Fifteen years. Luke’s first letter, a ten-page apology, arrived five months after his trial. I didn’t write back. I was angry that he ripped open every wound.
A year later, near the anniversary of the accident, he wrote again, telling me how he’d been promoted to food service for good behavior and that he was finishing his degree in business from behind bars. He didn’t mention the accident.
I sent one sentence back. I told him he could write me once a year.
At Sunday Mass, I prayed for the life of the man who killed my parents while I prayed that the man who raped me was burning in hell.
Luke worked on his degree, slopped tasteless mac and cheese onto prisoners’ trays, and earned day passes to speak at colleges and high schools about drinking and driving.
I painted. I fell in love with Mike. I sold art. I lost babies.
When Luke first came up for parole, the parents of little Zooey offered gut-wrenching personal testimony to the parole board. I had marked the day on my calendar like my dead aunt’s birthday, something to note and do nothing about.
I glanced at the postmark on the envelope and ripped it open. It was a little late in getting to me. Luke Cummings was up for parole for the second time in the intoxication manslaughter deaths of my parents and three-year-old Zooey Marshall. He was scheduled to appear very soon at the rehabilitative unit outside of New York City, where he was serving the rest of his sentence.
I wrote furiously at the kitchen table until my hand cramped up.
Four pages, five pages, six pages.
My plea to the parole board.
I read it, and instantly tore it up.
I drew out a fresh sheet of stationery, wrote one sentence, and signed my name.
Please set him free.
It’s funny, how one sentence is often all you need.
Mike arrived home late, about ten, in a bad mood and tight-lipped about anything that “popped.”
I made an attempt at conversation while he stripped to his boxers, then gave up, turned off the lamp on my side of the bed, and fell asleep. When I woke about 9 a.m., he was gone. Ten minutes later, the phone rang. I stared at the caller ID.
WARWICK, CAROLINE. A week since she had vanished.
I picked up.
“Why did you tell your husband where my house was?” I had to pull the phone away from my ear. The decibel of Maria’s voice was at least two octaves above middle C.
“Maria, I didn’t.”
“Really?” For a second, she seemed to want to believe me.
