Here She Lies

little glass cats. If not for these souvenirs I would have thought that distant summer in Italy had been a mirage. How could my parents have ever been married? How could they have ever been alive? How could Julie and I have ever been so close? Had the four of us ever really been a family? I looked around Julie’s bright white room with its painted black rafter-spun ceiling hiding so much space. Were our love and trust of each other actually over? Until Lexy, our bond had been the most significant force in my life.
    Setting the top back on the table, I thought of the other zircon. Apparently I hadn’t worn them both together since the first night of my stay here — the night of Zara’s murder — when Julie and I had mingled our glass cats, and removed our shoes and our earrings, and talked late into the night. I felt myself sinking deeper into a paralyzing quicksand of loneliness. As a twin, especially an identical twin, I had never felt alone before and I didn’t like it. No, I hated it.
    I padded barefoot downstairs to the Yellow Roomand my purse. I wanted to wear my earrings again. I wanted them together. I opened my coin purse, identified the real zircon under the bright bathroom light and slipped it into my naked ear. Here I was, all white and sparkling like a woman on a couch in a catalog: page fifty, a complete room for easy living. On a slick page it might have been a comforting image (Julie’s area of expertise) saying buy me, I will cure you of your doubts; but in reality all the white linen and glitter in the world could never conceal the ins and outs, ups and downs of a woman’s inner life.
    My cell phone, still tucked into my purse, began to ring; and as it had every time it rang these past two days, my heart jumped. Could it be Julie, finally calling back to check in? To explain her absence? To assure me that Lexy was happy and fine? To promise they’d be back soon? (The rest of it, the money stuff, was such a complicated tangle, not a phone conversation.) I fished out my cell and at the sight of Clark Hazmat’s name on caller ID my thin hopes caved dramatically and completely. Why wouldn’t he stop calling me? That was it: I was going to finally tell him he’d have to leave me alone.
    “Hello—” But before I could say anything, he jumped right in.
    “Miss Milliken! It’s me, Clark!”
    “Yes, Clark, I know, but—”
    “I’ve been calling you since yesterday. Maybe you didn’t get my messages.”
    “I got them, but, Clark, I’ve been really busy.”
    “Yeah, I saw the papers this morning.”
    “It’s in the papers ?”
    “Bad news travels fast. That’s why I’ve been calling you. After I read the paper I couldn’t help doing a little investigating, you know, since I’ve got my special computer skills.”
    Special skills. That was one way to put it. Clark had done seven years as a computer hacker. Maybe he was lucky to have sat out all that progress, when instead of reading potboilers in his cell he might have graduated from breaking into corporate networks to breaking apart individual lives. He himself might have become an identity thief.
    “Clark” — I spoke carefully — “what are you saying?”
    “I’m saying I dug pretty deep, hope you don’t mind. You got some real problems, Miss M, but any schmo with half a hard drive can tell this one’s a setup. You’re just not the Jaguars-and-diamonds type and I never saw you once with a California tan.”
    I cringed. He really had looked me up. “How do you know all that?”
    “I’m telling you,” he said, “it’s a hacker’s paradise out there now. Good time to be new in the game, bad time to be an ex-con with no job, looking in the window. I wanted to give you a heads-up yesterday, but I guess by now you’ve figured out a thing or two.”
    “You’re right. I have. Listen, Clark, I can’t stay on the phone. Things are worse than what you can see on a computer. You have no idea.”
    “Actually,” he said, “I think I do. The article? It talked about a murder—”
    That word, coming from Clark, sent a chill through me — Clark, with his topiary hairdo and skull tattoo.
    “And it talked about” — a rustle of papers, a pause — “Thomas Soiffer, the guy with the APB on his head. So I looked him up, too. And guess what.”
    “Did you find him?”
    “Nah, Miss M. I found out about him. Guy got hacked, just like you.”
    It took me a moment to decipher that, and then I asked, “Are you saying that