Lie Still (23 page)

Even the guys operating on my living room with drills and hammers stopped their noise long enough to watch Mike drag his hormonal wife into the kitchen.

Three men from the alarm company had arrived minutes after Mike screeched up to our curb with his siren wailing. They climbed out of their van and took note of the cop cars, apparently unruffled by an emergency in progress. From a distance, the trio appeared identical: soldier-cropped hair, pale skin, army boots, and dark green jumpsuits that showed off Y physiques. They had strolled into my house like a bunch of Timothy McVeighs, a marketing image likely dreamed up by a right-wing Texas entrepreneur. The company played on both patriotism and fear, claiming it used only experienced war veterans as employees.

Right now, for me, that was working fine.

God bless Texas, and come right in.

I sat at the kitchen table across from Mike, who was as uptight as I’d ever seen him. I was hungry but I felt like throwing up. My head already hurt like hell but I had a desire to bang it against those yellow daisies as hard as I could.

One of the blond clones had just finished attaching several high-tech warts, some kind of motion sensors, to the 98-year-old ceiling. The head clone briefly had explained all the perks of this new security system to me while I sat on the couch and nodded numbly, but the only thing I really remembered was, “A house fly won’t be able to get by it when we’re done,” which made me imagine laser beams shooting from the ceiling like a giant bug zapper.

Mike’s finger explored the nicked lip of his coffee cup. The cup was a memento from a night at
Wicked
on Broadway. The chip was courtesy of our movers. He stood up, moved to the sink, dumped the dregs, and tossed the cup in the trash under the sink. I’d decided two days ago when I unpacked the mug that it
was worth keeping because we’d had amazing, (almost) fully clothed sex against a tree in the park on the way home that night.

“I’m done in this room.” The clone nodded curtly to me as he carried the ladder out the back door.

Mike pulled a skillet from under the sink, tossed in a good chunk of butter from the refrigerator, and set the burner on low.

“What are you making?” It didn’t take more than the sight of melting butter to distract me. “Don’t you need to get back to work? To Caroline?”

“Grilled cheese.”

“I want two,” I said. “No, three. On whole wheat. No, white.”

“Plastic cheese or real?”

“The good stuff.”

“I repeat, plastic or real?”

“Well, maybe a little of each.”

I pushed myself away from the table to retrieve a few accoutrements: sweet pickle chips, a bag of Ruffles, and carrot sticks, today’s small concession to health.

“What’s happening to us, Mike?” I shut the refrigerator door with my foot. “There is an
alarm company
booby-trapping our bedroom right now. Who is doing this to me?
Why now?
” My voice was shaking, teetering in hysterical range.

“I think it’s tied up with Caroline’s case,” Mike answered bluntly. “I just don’t know how yet. Still, I’m pretty sure it’s not a person from your past, but someone in the present who’s using it against you. Or more likely, against me.” He avoided my eyes as he flipped a sandwich onto my plate. “Emily, have you ever thought that you
want
it to be someone connected to … your rapist? That the baby is a catalyst for all this emotion? That you are trying to finally confront it?”

“That’s ridiculous.” Inside, I wasn’t sure at all.

“Let’s go over this again. How many people knew about the rape?”

“Who really knows? My parents. Pierce. His roommate was there.” Mike lifted his eyebrows at this new piece of information but didn’t say anything. “None of those are possibilities. Three are dead. The roommate was a wimpy guy who had his own problems with Pierce. I don’t think he’d want to hurt me.”

“Who else?”

“Well,
my
roommate. But she was so good to me … afterward. She has no reason to scare me. I haven’t talked to her in years. She’s a marketing executive in Minnesota, I think. Then there’s the cop who took the report that night, obviously. The police never actually interrogated me and I was known only as ‘one of the ex-girlfriends’ in a couple of front-page stories in the Newark and New York newspapers. Rape was never mentioned as a possible motive for his murder. Only jealousy.”

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.”

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?