Here She Lies

guard told us our time was up, Bobby kissed me and left; and I went back to my cell, where loneliness grew out of all proportion. Finally, in the late afternoon, with the outside sun throwing a vivid pattern against my cinder-block wall, I opened the Wharton novel. I hadn’t realized when I’d bought it that Ethan Frome’s story took place right here in the Berkshires: a turn-of-the-last-century farmer falls in love with someone not-his-wife and his conflict over fleeing his doleful marriage drives him, with his beloved, to near suicide. At the end of the story, the now-crippled farmer lives in poverty with both women: one a martyr, the other an invalid. Another triangle to contemplate. Or not. I closed my eyes, wishing I hadn’t read it, and tried and tried and tried to sleep.
    Elias Stormier came the next day. He was tall and lanky, with short gray hair ringing a pale, domed head. His forehead was unusually large and this comforted me, as if the size of his head was an indication of intelligence; if anyone needed a brilliant lawyer, I did. He wore small round glasses with a distinct bifocal line halving top and bottom. But what I liked most about this plain man was his Burl Ives voice: a mediumtenored tone that seemed to glide out of him.
    “The reinstatement of the grand larceny charge is bad news,” he said, “and to be honest, it doesn’t help our case.”
    Our case; I liked that. We would be partners on a sinking ship.
    “On the other hand,” he said, “that charge relates directly to the assumption that you are your own identity thief” — his unblinking eyes, bluish and watery, smiled into mine — “which is a real mind-bender.”
    “It’s ridiculous is what it is.”
    “Yes, I agree: it’s absurd. Why would you have staged that kind of crime against yourself?”
    “I didn’t ,” I said. “Julie must have done something to my computer, rigged it somehow. Maybe when she visited me last winter.”
    “The FBI recognizes that as a distinct possibility,” he said, “and they’re looking into it. Anyway, you weren’t charged with computer fraud, so they can’t hold you for that. All that does for us right now is muddy the waters.” He flipped the top sheet of his yellow pad to consult something on a previous page. “The real reason for my visit today is that I bring good news.”
    “You have good news?”
    He nodded, smiled.
    “Shouldn’t you give the good news first ?”
    “Not if I want you thinking positively when I walk out of here.”
    “Please, spare the drumroll,” I said. “What is it?”
    “Your blood from the crime scene and your blood on the sweater?”
    The blood that couldn’t be mine because I didn’t kill her.
    “It had been frozen,” he said.
    “What?”
    “Frozen.”
    “So I really am a cold-blooded killer?”
    He laughed. “I’m glad you haven’t lost your sense of humor.”
    “Actually, I have,” I said. “What does that mean, it was frozen?”
    But even as I said it, and as he began to answer, it fell together in my mind. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? Last March, during Julie’s most recent visit, we had gone to the American Red Cross in Lexington to donate blood. It was something we had done all our adult lives. Bobby had stayed home with Lexy while Julie and I gave blood; first me, then her. Afterward, we went out to lunch.
    My attention returned to Elias, in midsentence: “... and Bobby directed me to the Red Cross and it didn’t take very long to find out that Julie had donated two vials of her own blood, while you had donated only one.”
    “No,” I said. “I also gave two.”
    He noted that, saying, “Which is what we suspected.”
    Meaning Julie had stolen the second vial of my blood sample that day. And stashed it in the freezer at my house. And carried it home with her to the Berkshires, where presumably she then stored it in her own freezer (where all during May I had been freezing another bodily liquid, my milk, for Lexy to drink). Now I understood why I had been unable to find one of the three small freezer packs I used for cooling Lexy’s stored breast milk in transit: Julie had taken one of the packs to keep my blood cold during her flight home.
    “She planned it for so long,” I said. Voice cracking. Stomach quavering. Brain spinning. “Since March.”
    “At least,” Elias said. “She planned every aspect of this quite carefully, it seems. Another development is that apparently she had made an appointment