Here She Lies (19 page)

The buzz of a lawn mower I couldn’t see floated in the limpid morning air.

Bobby pulled open the outer screen door and waited for me. I dug into my purse for my key ring, a jangly amalgamation of keys from Lexington and Great Barrington that I had never taken the time to separate despite the growing bulk. When I reached the door I found him reading a note Julie had taped to the interior glass:
Mica, I’ll be out all morning, so when you get
here please get right to work on the lawn and the
flower beds. If I’m not back by noon, I’ll pay you next
week. Thanks, Julie.

I opened the door with my key. Immediately the alarm started its series of warning bleeps, the one-minute grace period before it went off. Ever since the malarm, the escalating bleeps had triggered anxiety and now, as I input the code Julie had taught me, my pulse hammered in my ears, the machine feeling again, turning me on for action. Then the red light turned green and my pulse slowed to normal. I pushed open the door and walked into the kitchen.

“Julie? I’m home!”

Bobby followed me in and disappeared up the back staircase. I could hear his footsteps upstairs as I walked through the dining room, sitting room and into the living room. The quiet—I could
feel
it. It was no surprise when Bobby came down the living room stairs alone.

“They’re not upstairs,” he said.

“I guess they went out somewhere.”

“This early in the morning? Where?”

“Anywhere—errands, playground, both. Who knows?”

“I wonder if she saw the gardener before she left.” And with that, he was out the door. In a moment he appeared in the backyard, framed in the living room window. Bobby must have called Mica’s name, because he too entered the frame and they stood together, talking.

Mica was a small, stocky Mexican man with a purple bandanna tied around his head. Julie had told me he came every other week, her only concession to hired help until her thwarted intention of asking Zara Moklas to take on the heavy housecleaning. Bobby was doing most of the talking while Mica listened and spoke just a little. Behind them a squad car drove past on Division Street, slowing as it reached Julie’s, then picking up speed and moving on—the last phase of our security detail, I guessed. It reminded me that I was supposed to call the Great Barrington police to check in when I arrived. I called from the living room phone but didn’t ask for Detective Lazare. I simply told the receptionist to please put it on record that I was officially here. Then I went outside to join Bobby and Mica.

I found Bobby on the stone patio, watching Mica push away a wheelbarrow full of pulled weeds.

“So?” I asked.

“He didn’t see her.”

“What were you talking about?”

“I asked him how long he’s worked for her and what it’s been like.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“Oh,
Bobby
!”

“There was no harm in asking.”

I couldn’t argue with
that
old saw, but still I didn’t like it. “You’re being paranoid about Julie. Do you realize that?”

He didn’t answer and I was too tired to pursue it. I plunked myself down in one of the canvas patio chairs and he sat down next to me. We were
both
ex-hausted. I didn’t agree with him about Julie and the earrings, but in truth I understood why he had jumped to that conclusion. Diamond studs, though, were common, and so were white diamonds, which was probably why the crook had ordered them specifically: they’d be easy to sell. Bobby was as eager as I was to get answers about the felony warrant and the slow drain of my credit, but blaming Julie was way out of line. She was an intense person and yes,
yes
, she could be inappropriately flirtatious at times—I’d seen her in action, but
I’d
always understood the blurred boundaries even if others hadn’t. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Bobby had probably misinterpreted something Julie had said or done. It had never occurred to me before this moment to wonder what feelings Julie, my look-alike, stirred in him. Feelings he couldn’t help, feelings that simply resided in him because of our own sexual relationship. I knew he could tell Julie and me apart, but when he looked at her what did he
see
? What did he
feel
? What involuntary sensations bubbled under his skin? I had always thought of Bobby as my very own and felt confident that Julie honored that, but I had not considered Bobby’s side of things, not really. I would now. And I had to open my mind to the probability that he
had
been faithful to me all along, that the Lovyluv e-mails were somehow (but
how
?) part of the identity theft, my arrest, the whole rotten she-bang. I rested my ankle on his knee, and in a return of my gesture he laid his warm hand on my bare skin.

And then he breathed. We both did.

“So where do you think they went?” he asked.

“Maybe to the playground. Lexy discovered the baby swings recently and she
loves
to swing. Or maybe to the store. Or even both.”

“She wakes up too early, doesn’t she?”

“The minute the sun’s up, so is Lexy.”

“So you think Julie took her out on errands and stuff?”

“Of course,” I said. “The note to Mica said she’d be back at noon—so they’ll be back at noon.”

“Actually, it said if she’s
not
back by noon she’d pay him next week.”

“Meaning she expects to be back but she might not make it in time. Same difference, Bobby, don’t you think?”

He nodded, yawned. “Are you hungry?”

“Starving.”

In the kitchen I brewed coffee and raided the fridge for eggs, bread, butter and jam while Bobby searched the phone book. This time he wasn’t looking for a cybercafe; there were plenty of computers right here in this house. I
knew
what he was looking for: a jeweler.

Before he said anything, I had a chance to think it through. What would be the harm of having an appraisal of my zircons? If that was what it would take to get him off the subject of Julie, then why not? We could go right after breakfast and get it done before Julie and Lexy got back at noon. By the time we sat down to breakfast, I had made up my mind.

“We can go for an appraisal,” I told Bobby.

He smiled, put down his coffee, consulted his notes.

“There’s a jeweler on Railroad Street that opens at ten.”

It was almost nine when we finished eating and piled our dishes into the sink. While Bobby showered, I went upstairs to the Yellow Room. Everything was exactly as I had left it except for the yawning absence of Lexy, her empty crib, the unusual quiet. I tried Julie’s cell phone again and left another message (where
was
she?). There was a new voice mail, which I saw was from Clark Hazmat. I hadn’t heard my phone ring and I wondered if his latest call had come in during the beeping as I’d turned off the alarm system; preoccupied by the mind-static of dread at another possible malarm, I wouldn’t have registered anything. Why was Clark calling me, anyway? I had neither time nor energy for him, especially now, and so I ignored his second message as well. I then called Liz.

She wanted to see our credit reports and I promised to fax them right over. I brushed my teeth, washed my face, gathered my hair into a ponytail and took the voluminous reports upstairs to the fax machine in Julie’s office.

Ten minutes later, Bobby found me standing in front of Julie’s desk watching the fax feed through. I had to stand guard over it, occasionally adjusting the pages so they wouldn’t get stuck. Waiting with me, he glanced around her large high-tech office and I realized he had never been up here before.

“She
has
been successful,” he said, looking at her Stevie and the other awards arranged on the shelf.

“Where do you think she gets all this money?” He cocked an eyebrow, avoiding my rhetorical question, and crossed back over to the desk, where he watched my credit report (a work of fiction) thread through the fax machine. Picking up the pages that had finished, he neatened them into a stack and acciden-tally jostled the wireless mouse. The sleeping monitor popped to life and I was startled to see that Julie had changed her screen saver to a photo of herself and Lexy, one of the portraits I took last week and downloaded right before leaving for Manhattan. Bobby and I both stared at it. I wondered what he saw. Could he recognize Julie in two dimensions as readily as I could? What
I
saw was myself but curiously the self part was reflected in Lexy’s image, not Julie’s, and it struck me how much my center had shifted in having a child. The emotional negotiation of being with Lexy and Julie, the three of us together, had blunted that awareness before now, but suddenly it was clear. If I had to choose between them I would choose my daughter, not my twin—an impulsive thought I could never speak aloud.

“Why is the computer on?” Bobby sat down in Julie’s chair.

“She never turns it off,” I said. “She works really crazy hours and she likes to check her e-mail a lot.” I stood behind him, looking at the computer’s desktop. The entire left side was covered with neatly arranged icons. It was impossible not to study them, given our argument last night. She had a zillion programs and Web links at her fingertips and even though I was no computer whiz I recognized them all: Excel, PowerPoint, Lexus Nexus, Money, and so on and so forth through the standard inventory of professional tools.

“What is all this?” Bobby’s hand was cupped over the mouse, but he didn’t dare click anything with me watching.

“All the usual office stuff. You’d know half of it from the clinic, Bobby, if you ever used the computer.”

“Please don’t start that now, Annie. I never needed a computer in my life.” He didn’t finish the sentence:
until now.

Just to satisfy him I double-clicked on some of the icons. Programs and sites filled the screen, with Julie’s sign-on data loading automatically. Because we weren’t marketers nothing looked more intriguing than anything else.

“Satisfied?” I asked.

“I didn’t say a word.”

My lips clamped and by his sigh I knew he caught my meaning.
You didn’t have to.
The final page of the credit report exited the fax machine. Bobby clipped the pages together and left the report on my dresser in the Yellow Room.

We headed into town.

Five minutes along, turning off Division Street, I realized how close we were to the nursery school playground, the closest place to the house with baby swings.

“Take a right, just for a minute,” I said.

“It’s almost ten. Shouldn’t we go directly to the appraiser?”

“Just drive past the playground.”

When he understood my motivation he didn’t question me again: maybe, just maybe, we would find Lexy and Julie here. The little schoolyard was busy with a dozen or so preschoolers laughing and running and climbing and jumping and chasing each other on the wood-chipped ground. A teacher in a blue skirt turned to watch us as we drove slowly past and with a pang of shame I realized how it must have looked, two strangers eyeing the children. I waved, but she just stared at me as we drove away. I realized what a dumb idea it was to look for Lexy here—Julie and I had never brought her during school hours, when the older children used the playground. I glanced at Bobby, staring ahead at the road, and knew he was feeling what I felt: shame, helplessness, an unnam-able unease. No parents felt right, separated from their child; even without a solid reason to fear for her safety, we wouldn’t relax until we saw her with our own eyes.

“Maybe she’s at the public playground in Stockbridge,” I ventured.

“We don’t have time now, Annie.” Translation: he didn’t think they were whiling away the time at any playground. It wasn’t hard to guess what he
was
thinking—
your sister took your identity and now she
has our child and you’re not even worried
—another impulsive thought that I willfully banished. There were more and more things I could not dare to think about right now, like why I had been arrested, really
why
, and what the charge against me could blossom into. My goal this morning was to reach noon with Bobby’s suspicions dispelled and just stay balanced on what was feeling like a tightrope walk: one wrong move and I’d be in free fall. I
needed
to convince myself that they could turn up unexpectedly, anywhere, and so all the way to Main Street, in the thick spring-time air that was beginning to feel like rain, I looked for them—on the library lawn, on the sidewalks of town, through the shadow-glazed shop windows on Railroad Street.

We parked at a meter and found the storefront jeweler. A small oval sign swinging on a bracket over the sidewalk read SIMONOFF ANTIQUE AND ESTATE JEWELRY.

As soon as we crossed the sidewalk we saw that the shop was dark, and a handwritten note posted on the door told us that today’s opening time would be half an hour later. So we walked down the street to Martin’s restaurant, where the breakfast rush had lulled and no one minded if we sat over cappuccinos.

Our table, in the window, overlooked the quiet sidewalk. I spoon-sipped some of the fluffy cinna-moned milk from the coffee but couldn’t drink much of it. I felt a little sick to my stomach from the mix of adrenaline and exhaustion that had been fueling me for a solid twenty-four hours now, ever since I saw the smile melt off the face of Emily Leary, director of human resources, at the hospital where I would very much
not
be working. The sharp memory of yesterday morning’s encounter with the police made me cringe. Staring into my cup, I stirred the frothed milk all the way in to what was now a tepid café au lait.

Bobby wasn’t drinking his, either. What we needed, really, was a bitter cup o’ joe, pure caffeine with no apologies.

There wasn’t much left to say and so we said nothing, just stirred our coffees and glanced at our watches and waited for the time to pass. I kept expecting to see Julie whiz past with Lexy in her stroller, its handles festooned with shopping bags, but I didn’t. Weekday mornings in this town were sleepy, with just a few people running errands, some stopping to chat in the street. A woman I didn’t recognize saw me in the window and waved—she must have thought I was Julie—