Lie Still (24 page)

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.

T
he 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.

M
ore 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.

M
ike 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.

“He came alone, without that
rojo
cop. But he threatened. He said to stay out of Caroline’s house and to keep my mouth shut about anything I knew about Caroline’s business. That I probably had nothing to worry about from the courts if I didn’t talk.” Maria’s English was pretty darn slick and shiny today.

Mike was never one to massage his message. Maria didn’t know it, but I was certain that his real purpose was like mine: to quiz the person who knew Caroline best and make sure the cameras didn’t follow.

“That doesn’t sound like a threat. More like good advice. I suggest you take it.” I said this while thinking that Mike and I were living separate lives again, omitting key parts of our day. He would say it was to protect me. I would say the same thing.

“You people, you
white
people, have no idea how the world works for brown people like me.”

“Mike is a good guy, Maria. He lives by his word. He will keep your family out of this if he can. This is a
good
sign.”

“I like you, Miz Emily, but you are a fool. Men never live by their words, especially ones who carry guns.”

I refrained from telling her that Mike’s best friends in the ATF were every shade of brown on the color wheel, figuring that would sound patronizing. Like Sarah Palin hauling out her invisible gay friend.

Instead, I asked pointedly, “Why are you at Caroline’s house when the chief of police specifically told you to stay away?”

“Why are you being so nasty when I could tell your husband about the files you stole? About that man you killed?”

I heard a clatter, like she’d dropped the phone. Muffled voices. A man and a woman speaking urgently. Intimately.

More clatter. Maria was back on the line.

“See,” she said. “You can’t trust men. I told him not to say a word. Goodbye, Miz Emily. I don’t think we need to talk anymore.”

And then, with a touch of sarcasm, “Say hi to Belmont.”

It took me a second.

The cat.

Caroline had named her cat after a horse race.

And Maria thought I killed a man.

How many other people did?

M
y nerves were buzzing like angry little bees when I opened my door to Misty Rich an hour later. She was garbed in white jeans, gold sequined thong sandals, a black T-shirt with white letters that read
REMEMBER THE MISSING
, and a small white flower pinned to one side of her head, a look that could work on maybe one out of a million people.

She was the one.

“I heard about the break-in,” she said. “Are you OK?”

Several things occurred to me in the space of a few seconds.

First, how did she hear about the break-in? Second, she seemed genuinely concerned about me, despite our last, awkward parting at Joe Bob’s. Third, she had opted for fake nails to hide her habit of chewing them. Fourth, and certainly not least, who the hell was missing? Surely, the T-shirt didn’t refer to Caroline. It had a well-worn look about it.

“I’m OK. I think.” I waved reassuringly at the cop car and
opened the door wider to let Misty through. She stepped over the doorframe with purpose, surveying the small living room lined with unpacked boxes. The clones had stacked them neatly aside, making them even less tempting to open. Her eyes lingered on the spanking-new security keypad by the door. I waited until she turned away before resetting the alarm.

One good thing about the pregnant me was that I didn’t hang on to grievances for long. Misty showed up. That was enough of an overture for me. I couldn’t discount the instant connection I’d felt when I first met her. It had been like that only a couple of times in my life. Lucy, my best friend. Mike, my husband. For right now, I was going to trust it. I
needed
to trust it. Because I wondered whether I was about to lose my mind.

I moved aside the magazines on the couch to offer a place to sit. Misty remained standing, hands on her hips like a tiny Superwoman, all bridled energy, surveying the room as if she’d already emptied the boxes and was contemplating paint colors. It was a normal, practical side of her I hadn’t seen.