Here She Lies

felt cold, Julie picked up the sweater and draped it over her.
    “Nice sweater. Very colorful,” Detective Lazare said, but my sense was that he didn’t like it so much as notice it because it was so bright. “I don’t imagine any of you knew the victim very well.”
    “We didn’t know her at all.” Julie angled forward, legs pressed together, hands clasped on knees. “I mean, not really. I talked to her on the phone once; she sounded nice. I wanted to hire her to clean my house. She was supposed to call me to set a time to come over so I could show her the job.”
    “Did she?”
    “No.”
    “Any chance she was dropping by tonight?”
    “I don’t think so. I mean, that would have been kind of strange; she was supposed to call first. Maybe she worked at one of the neighbors’ today and was on her way home. I don’t think she drives.”
    “You see her pass by?”
    “No,” Julie said. “I was upstairs working. I didn’t come out until I heard Bobby screaming.”
    “Notice anything unusual today, before that?”
    “Nothing. I was at my computer most of the day. I didn’t go out at all.”
    “Shame — you missed a nice spring day.”
    “I know.” Julie sighed. Missing spring days and other niceties had long been a cost of her success. “I’d really like to know who could do such a thing. I haven’t lived here very long, but I had the impression things like this don’t happen here.”
    “They usually don’t,” Lazare said.
    “I really am sorry I wasn’t more alert today. I wish I could help.”
    The detective revealed crooked teeth when he smiled, saying, “No worries.”
    I thought it was a funny thing to say given the circumstances, but still, it was kind of him to let Julie off the hook for being too plugged in to notice what was happening around her. She had always been a bit of a computer geek, long before it was cool. It was part of the reason she didn’t meet more people off-line, in the flesh.
    Lazare walked around the room, handing each of us his business card. “You can always call me if something comes to mind.” He stopped in front of Bobby, who finally stood still, fastened in the detective’s gaze.“How about you come with me? We can finish our talk right now.” It wasn’t a question and he wasn’t inviting Bobby to sit back down at the table in the cozy corner of the room. He was telling him to come to the police station, tonight.
    As soon as Julie and I were left alone in the house, we burst into talk.
    “It all happened so fast,” Julie said. “It was so quiet, like it always is, and then all of a sudden Bobby was outside screaming.”
    I could hear his harrowing cries, thinking he had found me dead. And the thought of him now, taken to some strange police station in a town where he’d never been, being questioned by a detective, was appalling.
    “Why couldn’t Detective Lazare talk to Bobby tomorrow?” I asked. “He’s exhausted, he’s upset, and it’s so late.”
    “I guess because he found the...”
    “Right, he found the...”
    Body. We couldn’t bring ourselves to say it.
    “I just can’t believe this is happening,” Julie said. “I wish I’d looked out the window, or gone outside, or something. Maybe if the guy had seen someone watching he wouldn’t have done it.”
    A shadow of distress seemed to darken her pale oval face, our face, and in the strange way you notice irrelevant details during times of stress, I saw that she had plucked her left eyebrow too thin, that her auburn hair ( our hair: it was wavy and thick and on good days, depending on an alchemy of weather, shampoo and possibly even mood, it had a striking red-gold polish) hadfallen half out of its ponytail, and that her bare arms were rough with goose pimples. All these elements conspired in my heart to make me want to fix her the way she had always fixed me when we were kids and I tumbled first and deepest into vulnerability. Tonight, trouble had visited her house and it was my turn to be strong for her. I wanted so badly to reach over and rub my hands on her skin to warm her, but Lexy was heavy in my arms.
    “Jules, it’s not your fault,” I said. “It was just a fluke that it happened right here. And maybe it’s just as well you didn’t see him — then he might have seen you.” I recalled, and pushed away, that awful moment when I was sure it was Julie lying there, bleeding on the road. And now, my mind conflating two separate events, Bobby’s cries echoed