Here She Lies

instead of stiffening up, he gave me one of his half-cocked smiles. “Apology accepted,” I said. “Good-bye.”
    “We’ll find her,” he said.
    I looked at him. “Does that mean she’s gone?”
    “You didn’t know?”
    “I was locked up.” I turned to Bobby, who looked as surprised at this news as I was.
    “When?” Bobby asked.
    “This morning, apparently,” Lazare said. “She was seen at the prison, dropping off the box — you look very nice, by the way. Then she, well—”
    “Eluded you, Detective?” I smiled.
    “Not me, exactly. One of my men.”
    So Julie was gone. She must have heard about the frozen blood. She must not have done her research well enough; otherwise she would have taken that into account. She really had no choice but to run if she didn’t want to be charged with murder on top of identity theft. Once she crossed the state’s boundary, she would have jumped bail. I wondered if she had put her house on the line for her bond, or used some other collateral, or just come up with cash. My guess was that she put up her house; she wasn’t coming back anyway, and knowing what I now knew about Julie, I realized she probably had bank accounts all around the world in other people’s names. Well, to be honest, if I were her that’s exactly what I would do at this point: run. She was all alone now and in my heart I believed she understood her mistake. She would carry her prison with her.
    “She won’t get away with any of it, Annie,” Detective Lazare said. “We’ll find her, and when we find the knife—”
    “If you find it, Detective,” I interrupted, realizing that he finally believed I had not killed Zara Moklas.“I’m sorry, but you haven’t found it yet and it’s not like you haven’t looked under every stone.”
    “We’ll find it.”
    “I hope you do,” I said. “I’d like this to be really over.” Another lie: if it’s being over meant the end of Julie, I could never want that.
    The elevator dinged and the doors parted. I nodded at Lazare, looked at Bobby, smiled. “Let’s go home.”

Chapter 14
    Home was as exquisitely there, plainly and solidly real, as when I’d left it one month ago. The house itself was a little dustier on its surfaces and grimier around its edges, but that was nothing. The differences, the real changes, were between Bobby and me. No matter how erroneous or misleading the reasons, you can’t leave your spouse without breaking something. It’s far too easy to shatter trust and confidence in a marriage, but what we’d been through went beyond those emotional delicacies. Personally I felt lost and rudderless in a brand-new way, and I think Bobby did, too. Without the drama, the challenges, the quests to peel back so many accusations to find the truth, having found the truth we were faced with a strange emptiness. We had to locate each other again in that vast space, to build anew, and we immediately started working on it.
    We arrived home at the beginning of June in unseasonable heat, turned on the central air-conditioning, got Lexy to sleep in her very own crib in her very own room,and crawled naked and exhausted into our marital bed. Bobby put out the light and we turned to each other.
    Kissing me, he said, “Let’s make another baby.”
    I immediately knew it was a good idea, for us and for me. I wanted nothing more than to build a family with this man, to surround myself with the love and purposefulness of children. We made love that night, free and clear, and afterward Bobby wept in my arms. “It’s over,” I whispered to him. “Over, over, over.” But he kept crying and I understood: he was still releasing emotional poisons. So was I. Our healing would take time.
    The other rebuilding we had to do involved my name: my trampled credit history had turned it to mud. Clearing up that mess became a full-time job — phone calls through mazes that often landed me back at the starting point, letters, endless follow-ups. I became a vigilant bureaucrat on my own behalf. The discipline was good for me, though, as a tool to train my mind away from the deep ravines of personal loss that had reshaped my inner life. I couldn’t let myself sink into those pits; I had to move on.
    Bobby went back to work the second week of June in the lingering heat wave while I hunkered down in the cool indoors with Lexy. Lexy at almost seven months was crawling like a demon and struggling to cruise any handleable surface. Since she was my first