“I’m sorry,” I said. “I only rarely pick up when I don’t recognize the number.”
“No worries. I understand completely,” said Prager. “Many people are that way.”
We were still standing in the doorway.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Please come in and sit down.”
“Thank you,” said Prager. “I’ll try not to take up too much of your time. This is just a formality.”
A formality! I took that as a good sign. Surely, if he’d come here to suggest that my wife and I had cooked up a scheme to defraud his company, the conversation would take quite some time and be more than a formality.
I willed Stephanie not to appear, to keep on doing whatever Captain Mom activities she was doing in the kitchen. But minding her own business was way beyond Stephanie’s capabilities. She appeared in the doorway wearing jeans and an old sweatshirt and fat socks that made an unattractive swish-swish sound as she walked into the living room. I wished I could have said, “Mr. Prager, this is Stephanie, our babysitter.” God knows what would have happened then.
Instead I said the next worst thing.
“Mr. Prager, this is Stephanie. A friend of my late wife’s.”
“I see.” Prager looked her up and down. “Pleased to meet you.” They shook hands.
“Mr. Prager works for the insurance company.”
“What insurance company?” said Stephanie. Brilliantly, I thought. Maybe Stephanie was a few IQ points smarter than I’d given her credit for.
“Emily and I had a policy,” I said.
“Really?” said Stephanie. “I had no idea.”
“A two-million-dollar policy, to be exact,” said Mr. Prager.
“Oh, wait, that’s right,” said Stephanie. “I blogged about it.” She was covering for herself, just in case Mr. Prager read her blog. As I should have, all along.
Stephanie plopped herself down on the couch, and I sat next to her, not too close. The couch was enormous. There was plenty of room. Prager sat on the edge of the club chair.
Stephanie offered him coffee, water, tea. Mr. Prager politely declined.
He said, “As I’m sure you folks realize, everyone is different. People have different ways of doing things, different reasons for doing them. Only rarely do we understand what anyone does or why they do it. Though you could say that’s my job. To understand people. So there we have it.”
“Mr. Prager . . .” I said.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Your late wife, Emily. I have been trying to think how I could phrase this in the least upsetting way. But there’s really nothing to be done but say this as simply as I can.”
“Say what?” I couldn’t mute my impatience.
“Right,” said Mr. Prager. “We have begun to think that your wife may still be alive.”
It took all my strength of will not to flinch. “Why in the world would you think that?”
From the corner of my eye, I caught Stephanie giving me an “I told you so” look. Stephanie was an idiot. She had no idea how catastrophic this was.
Prager shook his head. It was hard to tell if he was mournful or amused.
I said, “But I saw the autopsy report.”
Prager said, “Of course you did . . . Well, then . . . I’m afraid there are some very unpleasant parts to this that you might not wish to hear. Some people prefer not to have certain images lodged forever in their minds. That would be your choice. As I said, everyone is different.”
“I don’t know,” Stephanie said. “I might be one of those people who doesn’t want certain images stuck in her head.”
“Then you can leave the room,” I said.
Prager shrank back, almost involuntarily, as some well-behaved people do in the presence of domestic tension.
“I’ll go check on the boys. Then I’ll be back,” she said. Warningly, it seemed to me.
When she left the room, Mr. Prager said, “Let me say what I mean. I’m talking about the autopsy report.”
“I read it,” I said.
“Once again . . . everyone will read something like that a different way. When I read it, for example, I was struck by certain things that might not have occurred to someone else. Someone not in my line of work. For example, there was the fact that the dead woman had been missing a front tooth for quite a long time. Long enough for there to have been bone growth over the gap. Mr. Townsend, I assume you would have known if your wife was missing a front tooth.”
“I think I would have known something like that,” I said.
I was frightened now, really frightened. If the dead woman wasn’t Emily, who was it? Obviously, this was a question I should have asked myself as soon as I saw Emily at the restaurant in Manhattan. But somehow I’d managed to put it out of my mind. It was as if I’d persuaded myself that the dead woman—the body with my wife’s DNA—wasn’t merely dead but had never existed.
“I agree,” said Prager. “You would likely have known that. And being that your wife worked in the fashion industry, we assume that, if she were missing a tooth, a dental implant would have been part, one might say, of her culture.”
“I would assume so.” My head felt suddenly heavy.
“Well, the woman in the lake had never had an implant. Just the missing tooth.”
“Then it wasn’t my wife,” I said. “Except that it was. The DNA was a match.”
“We think it might have been her sister,” said Mr. Prager.
“Sister? Emily was an only child. What sister?”
Mr. Prager massaged his balding head and looked at me with what was clearly amazement.
“Mr. Townsend,” he said, “Did you really not know that your wife was a twin?”
“Are you making this up? Are you sure you have the right woman?”
“Mr. Townsend, how is this even possible? Do you mind my asking how a person can live with someone, be married to someone, and not know that she has a sibling? Not just a sibling, but a twin.”
“I don’t know. I can’t explain. She always said that she was an only child. I didn’t think she—I didn’t think anyone—would lie about something like that.” Prager could tell I was telling the truth, at least about this. Knowing when someone was lying was what he did for a living.
Prager said, “May I say that your wife sounds like a very unusual woman.”
Stephanie said, “What’s going on?”
I hadn’t heard her come in.
I said, “Stephanie, did you know that Emily was a twin?”
“Are you joking? You’re joking.” Stephanie was a terrible liar. She’d known. How could she not have told me? How could this not have come up? I suppose there was a lot that Stephanie and I didn’t say to each other. I’d seen no reason to mention the fact that Miles was her brother’s son. Maybe Stephanie and I got along better that way. Maybe the only way to get along with another person is to tell huge lies of omission. Emily had certainly told some gigantic lies. When did Stephanie find out that Emily was a twin? Had she always known? Was that information on her blog too?
I wondered, as Mr. Prager had said, how could I not have known? It made me question everything, and my entire past suddenly seemed foggy and unclear. In what way had my marriage been a marriage?
Stephanie and Mr. Prager and I stared at the Diane Arbus photo above the mantel. It was as if we all noticed it at the same time. No one spoke for a while.
“Well, there you are,” said Mr. Prager. “There are some outstanding questions, and of course the larger question about when and what we plan to tell the legal authorities, who will doubtless turn it into another sort of investigation. Or maybe they won’t. Maybe they will do less than I am doing now, which is what’s happened so far. But the matter will have to be cleared up, of course, before there’s any question of payment.”
“Of course. When do you think that will happen? By when?” I tried unsuccessfully to keep the pleading note from strangling my voice.
“Soon enough,” said Mr. Prager. “Meanwhile, though it’s not in my legal authority, I would like to ask you both, as a courtesy, not to travel very far from here for any length of time.”
“Absolutely not!” I said because I thought it sounded as if I was innocent.