Just me and Little. Les deux.
The crack of the front door as it shuts.
“Am I okay to leave you alone?” he asks.
I nod, vacant.
“Is there someone you can talk to?”
I nod again.
“Here,” he says, thumbing a card from his breast pocket, pressing it into my hand. I examine it. Flimsy stock. detective conrad little, nypd. Two phone numbers. An email address.
“You need anything, you can call me. Hey.” I look up. “You can call me. Okay?”
I nod.
“Okay?”
The word barrels down my tongue, elbows other words aside. “Okay.”
“Good. Day or night.” He slings his phone from one hand to the other. “I got those kids. I don’t sleep.” To the first hand again. He catches me watching, goes still.
We look at each other.
“Be well, Dr. Fox.” Little moves to the hall door, opens it, gently draws it closed behind him.
Again the front door clacks open. Again it slams shut.
42
Sudden, intense quiet. The world has braked to a halt.
I’m alone, for the first time all day.
I survey the room. The wine bottles, radiant in the slanting sun. The chair angled beside the kitchen table. The cat, patrolling the sofa.
Flecks of dust amble through the light.
I drift to the hall door, lock it.
Turn to face the room again.
Did that just happen?
What just happened?
I wander to the kitchen, excavate a bottle of wine. Plunge the screw in, wedge the cork out. Glug the stuff into a glass. Bring it to my lips.
I think of Jane.
I drain the glass, then press the bottle to my mouth, tilt it hard. Drink, long and deep.
I think of that woman.
Weave my way to the living room now, gaining speed; rattle two pills into my palm. They dance down my throat.
I think of Alistair. And this is my wife.
Stand there, swigging, gulping, until I choke.
And when I set the bottle down again, I think of Ethan, and how he looked away from me, how he turned his head. How he swallowed before answering me. How he scratched at his fingernail. How he muttered.
How he lied.
Because he did lie. The averted gaze, the leftward glance, the delayed response, the fidgeting—all the tells of a liar. I knew it before he opened his mouth.
The clenched jaw, though: That’s a sign of something else.
That’s a sign of fear.
43
The phone is on the floor in the study, just where I dropped it. I tap at the screen as I return the pill bottles to the medicine cabinet in my bathroom. Dr. Fielding, I’m well aware, is the one equipped with an MD and a prescription pad, but he won’t be able to help me here.
“Can you come over?” I say as soon as she picks up.
A pause. “What?” She sounds bewildered.
“Can you come over?” I cross to my bed, climb in.
“Right now? I’m not—”
“Please, Bina?”
Another pause. “I can make it to you by . . . nine, nine thirty. I have dinner plans,” she adds.
I don’t care. “Fine.” I lie back, the pillow foaming in my ear. Beyond the window branches stir, shedding leaves like embers; they spark against the glass, fly away.
“Iz evitingaite?”
“What?” The temazepam is clogging my brain. I can feel the circuits shorting.
“Is everything all right, I said?”
“No. Yes. I’ll explain when you’re here.” My eyelids droop, drop.
“Okay. Seeyoutonight.”
But I’m already disintegrating into sleep.
It’s dark and dreamless, a little oblivion, and when the buzzer brays downstairs, I awake exhausted.
44
Bina stares at me, her mouth unhinged.
Finally she closes it, slowly but firmly, like a flytrap. Says nothing.
We’re in Ed’s library, me balled into the wingback, Bina draped along the club chair, the one where Dr. Fielding parks. Her drainpipe legs are folded beneath the seat, and Punch churns around her ankles like smoke.
In the grate, a low tide of fire.
Now she shifts her gaze, watches the little wave of flames.
“How much did you have to drink?” she asks, wincing, as though I might strike her.
“Not enough to hallucinate.”
She nods. “Okay. And the pills . . .”
I grip the blanket on my lap, wring it. “I met Jane. Two times. Different days.”
“Right.”
“I saw her with her family in their house. Repeatedly.”
“Right.”
“I saw Jane bleeding. With a knife in her chest.”
“It was definitely a knife?”
“Well, it wasn’t a fucking brooch.”
“I’m just— Okay, right.”
“I saw it through my camera. Very clearly.”
“But you didn’t take a photo.”
“No, I didn’t take a photo. I was trying to help her, not . . . document it.”
“Okay.” She idly strokes a strand of hair. “And now they’re saying that no one was stabbed.”
“And they’re trying to say that Jane is someone else. Or someone else is Jane.”
She coils her hair around one long finger.
“You’re sure . . .” she begins, and I tense, because I know what’s coming. “You’re definitely sure there’s no way this is all a misunderst—”
I lean forward. “I know what I saw.”
Bina drops her hand. “I don’t . . . know what to say.”
Speaking slowly, as though I’m picking my way through ground glass. “They’re not going to believe that anything happened to Jane,” I say, as much to her as to myself, “until they believe that the woman they think is Jane—isn’t.”
It’s a knot, but she nods.
“Only—wouldn’t the police just ask this person for, like, ID?”
“No. No. They’d just take her husband’s—they’d just take her ‘husband’s’ word. Wouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t they?” The cat trots across the carpet, slinks beneath my chair. “And no one’s seen her before. They’ve barely been here a week. She could be anyone. She could be a relative. She could be a mistress. She could be a mail-order bride.” I go for my drink, then remember I haven’t got one. “But I saw Jane with her family. I saw her locket with Ethan’s picture in it. I saw—she sent him over here with a candle, for Christ’s sake.”
Bina nods again.
“And her husband wasn’t acting—?”
“As though he’d just stabbed somebody? No.”
“It was definitely him who . . .”
“Who what?”
She twists. “Did it.”
“Who else could it be? Their kid is an angel. If he was—were going to stab anyone, it’d be his father.” I reach for my glass once more, swipe at air. “And I saw him at his computer right beforehand, so unless he just sprinted downstairs to cut up his mom, I think he’s in the clear.”
“Have you told anyone else about this?”
“Not yet.”
“Your doctor?”
“I will.” Ed, too. Talk to him later.
Now, quiet—just the ripple of flames in the hearth.
Watching her, watching her skin glow copper in the firelight, I wonder if she’s humoring me, if she doubts me. It’s an impossible story, isn’t it? My neighbor killed his wife and now an impostor is posing as her. And their son is too frightened to tell the truth.
“Where do you think Jane is?” Bina asks softly.
Quiet.
“I had no idea she was even a thing,” says Bina, leaning over my shoulder, her hair a curtain between me and the table lamp.
“Major pinup in the fifties,” I murmur. “Then a hard-core pro-lifer.”
“Ah.”
“Botched abortion.”
“Oh.”
We’re at my desk, scrolling through twenty-two pages of Jane Russell photographs—pendulous with jewels (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), dishabille in a haystack (The Outlaw), swirling a gypsy skirt (Hot Blood). We consulted Pinterest. We scraped the trenches of Instagram. We scoured Boston-based newspapers and websites. We visited Patrick McMullan’s photography gallery. Nothing.
“Isn’t it amazing,” Bina says, “how according to the Internet, some people might as well not exist?”
Alistair is easier. There he is, sausage-cased in a too-tight suit, from a Consulting Magazine article two years old; russell moves to atkinson, the headline explains. His LinkedIn profile features the same photograph. A portrait in a Dartmouth alumni newsletter, hoisting a glass at a fundraiser.