I lie back, the pillow foaming in my ear. Beyond the window branches stir, shedding leaves like embers; they spark against the glass, fly away.
“Iz evitingaite?”
“What?” The temazepam is clogging my brain. I can feel the circuits shorting.
“Is everything all right, I said?”
“No. Yes. I’ll explain when you’re here.” My eyelids droop, drop.
“Okay. Seeyoutonight.”
But I’m already disintegrating into sleep.
It’s dark and dreamless, a little oblivion, and when the buzzer brays downstairs, I awake exhausted.
44
Bina stares at me, her mouth unhinged.
Finally she closes it, slowly but firmly, like a flytrap. Says nothing.
We’re in Ed’s library, me balled into the wingback, Bina draped along the club chair, the one where Dr. Fielding parks. Her drainpipe legs are folded beneath the seat, and Punch churns around her ankles like smoke.
In the grate, a low tide of fire.
Now she shifts her gaze, watches the little wave of flames.
“How much did you have to drink?” she asks, wincing, as though I might strike her.
“Not enough to hallucinate.”
She nods. “Okay. And the pills . . .”
I grip the blanket on my lap, wring it. “I met Jane. Two times. Different days.”
“Right.”
“I saw her with her family in their house. Repeatedly.”
“Right.”
“I saw Jane bleeding. With a knife in her chest.”
“It was definitely a knife?”
“Well, it wasn’t a fucking brooch.”
“I’m just— Okay, right.”
“I saw it through my camera. Very clearly.”
“But you didn’t take a photo.”
“No, I didn’t take a photo. I was trying to help her, not . . . document it.”
“Okay.” She idly strokes a strand of hair. “And now they’re saying that no one was stabbed.”
“And they’re trying to say that Jane is someone else. Or someone else is Jane.”
She coils her hair around one long finger.
“You’re sure . . .” she begins, and I tense, because I know what’s coming. “You’re definitely sure there’s no way this is all a misunderst—”
I lean forward. “I know what I saw.”
Bina drops her hand. “I don’t . . . know what to say.”
Speaking slowly, as though I’m picking my way through ground glass. “They’re not going to believe that anything happened to Jane,” I say, as much to her as to myself, “until they believe that the woman they think is Jane—isn’t.”
It’s a knot, but she nods.
“Only—wouldn’t the police just ask this person for, like, ID?”
“No. No. They’d just take her husband’s—they’d just take her ‘husband’s’ word. Wouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t they?” The cat trots across the carpet, slinks beneath my chair. “And no one’s seen her before. They’ve barely been here a week. She could be anyone. She could be a relative. She could be a mistress. She could be a mail-order bride.” I go for my drink, then remember I haven’t got one. “But I saw Jane with her family. I saw her locket with Ethan’s picture in it. I saw—she sent him over here with a candle, for Christ’s sake.”
Bina nods again.
“And her husband wasn’t acting—?”
“As though he’d just stabbed somebody? No.”
“It was definitely him who . . .”
“Who what?”
She twists. “Did it.”
“Who else could it be? Their kid is an angel. If he was—were going to stab anyone, it’d be his father.” I reach for my glass once more, swipe at air. “And I saw him at his computer right beforehand, so unless he just sprinted downstairs to cut up his mom, I think he’s in the clear.”
“Have you told anyone else about this?”
“Not yet.”
“Your doctor?”
“I will.” Ed, too. Talk to him later.
Now, quiet—just the ripple of flames in the hearth.
Watching her, watching her skin glow copper in the firelight, I wonder if she’s humoring me, if she doubts me. It’s an impossible story, isn’t it? My neighbor killed his wife and now an impostor is posing as her. And their son is too frightened to tell the truth.
“Where do you think Jane is?” Bina asks softly.
Quiet.
“I had no idea she was even a thing,” says Bina, leaning over my shoulder, her hair a curtain between me and the table lamp.
“Major pinup in the fifties,” I murmur. “Then a hard-core pro-lifer.”
“Ah.”
“Botched abortion.”
“Oh.”
We’re at my desk, scrolling through twenty-two pages of Jane Russell photographs—pendulous with jewels (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), dishabille in a haystack (The Outlaw), swirling a gypsy skirt (Hot Blood). We consulted Pinterest. We scraped the trenches of Instagram. We scoured Boston-based newspapers and websites. We visited Patrick McMullan’s photography gallery. Nothing.
“Isn’t it amazing,” Bina says, “how according to the Internet, some people might as well not exist?”
Alistair is easier. There he is, sausage-cased in a too-tight suit, from a Consulting Magazine article two