Here She Lies

“It’s terrible.”
    “I still can’t believe it. That poor woman. Can you imagine?”
    “Who is she?”
    “Zara Moklas,” Julie said. “She’s a Hungarian immigrant — I mean, was. She worked as a part-time secretary in town and she also cleaned houses. I was thinking of hiring her myself. One of my neighbors told me she lived with her brother and he’s into all kinds of shady construction deals, maybe even tied to the Mob.”
    “Around here ?”
    “You’d be surprised.”
    “And the sister, Zara, she paid the price for that?”
    “Who knows?”
    “Well, it’s awful,” I said.
    And Julie echoed: “Awful.”
    We paused to watch the emergency workers place Zara’s body on a stretcher, cover her with a sheet and load her into the back of the ambulance. Julie reached over to smooth a finger along Lexy’s soft, soft cheek. And then she looked at me. “I guess you don’t know who found her.”
    “Was it you?”
    “Nope. Bobby.”
    “Bobby’s here ?”
    Julie nodded, pinching in one side of her mouth. I knew what that meant: unbelievable but true.
    “What’s he doing here?” I asked.
    “What do you think?”
    “But how did he get here so fast?”
    “He caught a flight right after yours,” she said. “He rented a car and drove straight here, got here half an hour ago. Why did it take you so long? Did you stop?”
    It was a rhetorical question and I didn’t answer. I always stopped on the road; she knew that.
    “Did he think I would just turn around and go back with him if he showed up?”
    “Would you?”
    My heart answered yes, my mind no. “Where is he?”
    “In the house. I poured him a drink. He’s in bad shape.”
    “So he found the woman? Was she—?”
    Julie nodded. “But only just. Listen, Annie, before you see him, you should know that he kind of freaked out on the lawn. That’s what got the neighbors out in the first place. Bobby just lost it, you know?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “He thought what you thought.”
    “He thought it was you?”
    “No, he thought it was you.”
    Half an hour ago, it would have been just starting to get dark. Twilight. The least visibility of any time of the day or night, that mysterious lilac moment of near blindness. Bobby must have arrived here just in time for the half-light to trick him when he saw the woman on the ground. I could feel him seeing me lying there, his inner freeze, just like when I saw Julie lying in that pool of blood.
    The ambulance drove off. Neighbors started to go home. The police ambled around finishing their work. The night air became sharply cold.
    Holding Lexy, I crossed the lawn to the house. Julie was right there with me and I knew what she was thinking, that I didn’t even know where the front door was (she was right), this being a renovated barn and not a traditional house. She led us around the corner to a two-step stoop and a screen door through which I caught a gauzy glimpse of just the kind of high-tech kitchen Julie would build. She went in first, holding the door open for us. We stepped into a large room of mahogany cabinets, granite counters and stainless-steel appliances, all shiny and new. A small flat-screen television, perched on the counter, was angled towarda wooden table beneath a window filled with darkness. That would be where Julie ate her lonely meals, with the TV for company. The sight of her fancy, underused kitchen troubled me. Moving here had been a leap of faith — buying the barn on impulse during a leaf-peeping weekend meant to distract a broken heart, gutting it, uprooting herself from a lifetime in Connecticut and installing herself, alone, in this large house. She had not been here long enough to make a new social life and I knew from our conversations that all she had these days was work, occasional contact with old friends, cyber-dating that had yet to go off-line — and me.
    Julie walked through a doorway leading out of the kitchen and I followed. Even in our haste I could see it was a lovely house. We passed through an antique dining room, then a small sitting room with a perfectly square curtainless window, and finally into a large comfortable living room with a cushy mocha-colored L-shaped sectional couch, a big square coffee table littered with newspapers, books and magazines, a fireplace and above it a large flat-screen television hanging on the wall. There were chairs and side tables and lamps. A big bouquet of spring flowers.
    Off in the corner, at a small round