Here She Lies by Katia Lief Read Free Book Online Page A

cartoon-sleazy hooker with a knife on the bucolic road in front of Julie’s house. We laughed.
    And then suddenly I was crying.
    Julie crossed over to my chair and we held each other and soon she was crying, too. Her hands found my face and began to smear away tears.
    “It isn’t funny.” Julie.
    “It’s horrible.” Me.
    “We shouldn’t , should we?” She didn’t ask it as a question because it wasn’t a question. We were making light of something dark. Laughing at someone else’s catastrophe. Digging a moat around the us that had always offered protection. As children we had practiced this art of separation without remorse, but as adults we had learned better. Now, when we slipped into defensive isolation against the world at large, we felt guilty and stopped. At least we tried to stop. But we both knew that I had come to Julie to escape to her, into her, with her. It was a deep and irresistible impulse of our twinhood.
    “Can we bring up my suitcases now?” I asked.
    “Come on. We’ll get you settled and put you to bed.”
    “I think I’ll check on Bobby first.”
    I called the police station and was put on hold for five minutes, only to be told that the detective said not to bother waiting up. I wondered if those were his exact words: “Don’t bother waiting up.” Even from our brief contact it didn’t seem like something Detective Lazare would say. He seemed subtler than that. “Get some sleep and he’ll be back with you soon,” seemed more like it. And then I wondered where Bobby would sleep when he did return. Would he find me in the Yellow Room? Slip between my yellow sheets? Find my body? Would our mile of distance reduce itself to the plain fact that we loved each other? Would he finally either tell me the truth or find a convincing way to un-braid my suspicions? Or would he default to my decision to leave him and find his way to a guest room? I didn’t even know where I wanted him to sleep. It would be a comfort to feel him next to me in the dark but a source of confusion if I woke to him in the morning. I had never known how perplexing it could be to deeply love someone not-Julie yet find it necessary to leave, but of the many things my parents’ deaths had taught me, one was that severing the artery of love was ultimately survivable.
    Once Julie and I had lugged in all my stuff, we stood together in the silvery darkness of my quiet room and watched Lexy sleep.
    “She’s beautiful,” Julie whispered.
    And I reminded her: “She’s ours , Jules.” I one-arm-hugged her against me as we stood there staring at my beloved daughter.
    After a while she went upstairs and I went to bed, sure I wouldn’t sleep—but within minutes, I did. I slept a solid six hours, until the ringing phone interrupted a dream I lost as soon as I opened my eyes.
    Through the diaphanous yellow curtains I saw the gentle hues of early dawn. The phone rang again and, afraid it would wake Lexy, I picked up my extension. I heard Julie’s scratchy morning voice talking to a woman; we must have answered the phone simultaneously.
    “Slow down, Carla. What van?” Carla, I remembered from last night, was one of Julie’s nearest neighbors.
    She was at least in her seventies and obviously a very early riser.
    “A white van, parked down the street from your house. I saw it twice yesterday, oh, about two hours apart.”
    “I didn’t notice it. I was in my house all day, in my office, working.”
    “It was a white van, just sitting there, with a man inside. It gave me the willies—when I got home I wrote down what I recalled of the license plate. It’s crazy, I know, but I didn’t think of it until just now. I was making my tea and, well, that’s how it goes at my age sometimes. I remembered.”
    “Did you call the detective?”
    “Yes, I did. He thanked me. I just can’t believe it, Julie. Right here, on this street, a murder .”

Chapter 3
    Seated in our circle of canvas folding chairs in Julie’s backyard,