Authors: Nevada Barr
Having shipped the oars, Denise fired up the engine and, at slightly better than idle, motored slowly down the sound. Air and water temperatures had reached sufficient equilibrium that the fog was shredding into thin feathers along the coast, eerie fingers given life by the light of a waning moon.
Boat firm beneath her, cool, fresh sea air in her lungs, Denise felt the iron band that Paulette’s hand-delivered note had locked around her lungs loosen sufficiently to let her breathe deeply.
Please come tonight. We have to
… Then the tangle of ink lines crossing out whatever it was Paulette decided they had to do. What could she have thought of that Denise hadn’t? A few days before, Denise would have answered, “Nothing.” The note and a few other things Paulette had done lately led her to believe identical twins weren’t identical, as in
exactly
the same.
Denise shoved that thought aside. She and her twin were two sides of the same coin, peas in a pod, identical DNA. In everything that mattered there wasn’t a particle of difference between them. She patted the front pocket of her black jeans where she had the list she’d made. Tonight they should be able to check off the meds and maybe the house. Paulette had had time to contact a Realtor, as well as two entire shifts to pinch the drugs.
Calmed by the eternal strength of the Atlantic surrounding her, Denise decided she wouldn’t say anything about the hand-delivered note. Too many years in law enforcement had made her hypervigilant. That was all. Paulette, an infant-care nurse, couldn’t be expected to see threats lurking behind every set of eyes. Denise loved that about her sister. Or she would, once there weren’t threats lurking behind every set of eyes.
Denise expertly docked the runabout out of sight between two rocks, then followed the narrow beam of her tiny flashlight over the familiar ground between Otter and the old shed that Paulette had made into a nursery and was now their sanctuary from the world.
No light showed under the door. Clicking off her flashlight, Denise stepped beneath the roof overhang and put her ear against the wood of the door. Not a sound. Tapping softly, she whispered, “Paulette?” No answer.
Turning, Denise stared toward dead Kurt’s shack. The back porch light was a blazing beacon through the trees. Paulette got off work at three
A.M.
She should have beat Denise to the nursery. Why was she in that rotting tomb of a house instead of in their secret place?
Paulette had been arrested for stealing drugs.
She’d collapsed of a heart attack.
Been run down by an SUV full of drunken tourists.
Panic drowning caution, Denise sprinted to where the porch hung precariously on the rear of the house. She leapt up the two steps, then stopped. The police might be inside, rangers, the sheriff, anybody. Denise stepped softly to the door. The knob turned easily. With three fingers, she pushed the door open a crack so she could see inside.
Paulette was sitting in a straight-backed chair at the small, beat-up kitchen table. Overprocessed blond hair was caught back in a purple scrunchie. She’d chewed off all of her lipstick. In pink scrubs, figured with Pooh-bears and daisies, she looked very young and helpless. A cup of coffee was between her hands. She was gazing into it as if the dregs would foretell her future.
“Hey,” Denise said.
With a shriek, Paulette jumped to her feet. The mug toppled. Coffee poured over the edge of the table, dripping onto the dirty linoleum floor.
“God, but you scared me half to death,” Paulette said with a shaky laugh. Before Denise had time to do more than blink, her sister had thrown herself into her arms and was hugging her with such force Denise could hardly move.
A rush of sensation overwhelmed her. Since Peter, three and more years ago, no one had touched her except strangers shaking her hand, or drunks bumping into her on their way to the men’s room at the Acadian.
Babies needed to be touched. She’d read that. If they weren’t touched they could fail to thrive, outright die.
Maybe adults were no different. Touch was life.
“Sorry I scared you,” Denise apologized, all thought of the ill-considered note gone from her mind.
Paulette stepped away to grab a roll of paper towels off the counter. Ripping off half a dozen, she let them flutter to the floor, then used her foot to push them around, sopping up the coffee. The towels didn’t get it all. What was left mingled with the yuck on the floor.
Perhaps not all the squalor had been Kurt’s doing, Denise thought uneasily.
Didn’t matter. They weren’t going to be here much longer.
“Why didn’t you wait in the nursery?” Denise asked as Paulette dropped the towels on top of a bunch of other trash in an open-topped can near the refrigerator.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Paulette said vaguely. “I wanted a cup of coffee. I thought this would be more comfortable.”
The sordid kitchen in the murder house more comfortable? More comfortable than the nursery, with its art and painted furniture and promise of things to come?
Denise let it go, just like she’d let the leaving of the note in her box go. “Why did you need to see me?” she asked.
Paulette pinched up a packet of Nescafé, shook it, ripped off the top, and dumped the contents into a plastic mug. Taking the kettle from the stove, she offered, “Coffee?”
Instant.
“I’m good,” Denise said, and waited. Her nerves weren’t in shape for waiting, not in the wee hours of the morning in a trailer-trash kitchen. Her knee began bouncing, her heel never quite hitting the floor.
Paulette sat down across from her and repeated her gazing-into-the-cup routine. The spill on the scarred vinyl tabletop wasn’t quite dry. Denise watched a tiny finger of it being absorbed into the cuff of the pink long-sleeved T-shirt Paulette wore under her scrubs.
“Did you have trouble getting the triazolam?” Denise asked, forcing an end to what was becoming an awkward silence.
Paulette hung her head. “I didn’t get it,” she murmured.
“Why the hell not?” Denise demanded, shocking herself with the outburst.
Paulette reached into the pocket of her scrubs and pulled out a handful of hypodermics with capped needles, each in its sanitary packet. “I got the needles,” she offered pitifully.
Afraid to speak lest she batter her twin with abuse a second time, Denise stared at the empty hypodermic needles and nodded slowly. When she felt she could speak normally, she asked, more gently, “Did you put the house on the market?”
Paulette shook her head.
Gentleness vaporized.
Paulette hadn’t done anything. Nothing. Anger geysered up Denise’s throat, hot and sulfurous as the fumes of hell. Given that Denise had shot Paulette’s husband up close and personal three times, pilfering a few pills didn’t seem like a big deal. Denise tried to force the bile down, calm herself. Pilfering a few pills, no big deal; Paulette would see it that way after Denise explained it.
The problem was Denise shouldn’t have to explain it.
How could Paulette be sitting like a lump of raw dough in this filthy kitchen and not see how important this stuff was? Crucial.
Paulette, Denise reminded herself, was the gentle aspect of them. Of course she wasn’t as capable of stealing or killing as Denise was. But not to put the property on the market? How much nerve did it take to call a Realtor?
Probably Paulette was afraid it wouldn’t sell, afraid of being disappointed. Denise understood that. Better to pretend you don’t hope than be made to look a fool when you don’t get.
Denise decided that was all there was to it. She knew Paulette’s lack of faith in their
themness
would have annoyed her, had it been possible for her to be annoyed with Paulette, genuinely annoyed, not just bitchy because her nerves were bad.
“I started on our legacy thing,” Paulette said with a brightness Denise knew was false, and a smile that had been perfected to ward off the blows of her ham-handed hubby. Almost as if Paulette were afraid of Denise’s displeasure.
Would that be bad? Denise wondered. Or good? Good, Denise decided. It showed Paulette cared, loved her.
“I used those old newspaper ads and sent postcards to the two PO boxes, the one listed in the original ad and the one listed four years later in that ad I showed you. Of course, even that was nearly a year old, but it could be something. It could be our mother,” Paulette said, looking hopeful.
“Whoever put the ads in asking for twin girls separated at birth might have died or moved on,” Denise said repressively. “More likely, good old Mom has decided nothing has changed, and she doesn’t want us any more now than when she decided to chuck us out like so much garbage.” Denise didn’t think of the person who’d given them birth as “their” mother, just “the” mother.
Paulette twitched as if Denise had struck her. Unaccountably it made Denise angry. Guilt should have been what she felt, but she didn’t. The cringing made her mad. “Please don’t tell me you put this house as your return address,” she growled.
“I put General Delivery like you told me,” Paulette said softly, not looking up from her coffee. “Tomorrow I’ll check. We could have got replies by then.”
It was possible, Denise thought. Not probable, but possible. The legacy thing was just gravy, at any rate. They had enough. Counting on anybody or anything one couldn’t control oneself was never a wise thing. Denise sighed, reined in her fraying nerves. Folding hands sticky with cold coffee from the tabletop one inside the other on her lap where they wouldn’t betray her emotional turmoil, she said, “That’s good. That’s real good, Paulette. I’m sorry I got … Things are hard right now. Why did you drop the note by my apartment? What did you need to see me about?”
For a long moment Paulette said nothing. Denise could hear the wind soughing through the pines and imagined she could hear the surf breaking. Peaceful sounds, sounds she’d gone to sleep to for many years. This night they rasped over her eardrums like sandpaper over a sunburn.
“We have to stop,” Paulette finally said, in such a tiny voice Denise had to lean halfway across the table to hear it, then couldn’t believe it. A total non sequitur. Nausea washed through her. The overhead light, in its inverted bowl of dead flies, dimmed, then grew bright again.
Too weird.
Not a sudden onset of the flu or a brownout. Nerves. Putting both palms on the table to steady herself, Denise managed to say, “Stop what?”
“Oh, honey, everything. Everything!” Tears welled up in Paulette’s eyes and spilled over her lids, rolling fat and oily down her cheeks. In their wake were gray trails of mascara.
Desperately, Denise reached across the little table and took both her sister’s hands. “No!” she cried, not knowing what she was saying no to precisely, but aware that she needed to stop whatever tide was washing her sister away from her. Though the tide was not of water, not of physical stuff, she held just as tightly as if Paulette were caught in an undertow. Almost, Denise could see her growing smaller and smaller as the distance swallowed her. “No!” Denise gasped.
“I love working with the babies. I can’t do anything else,” Paulette sobbed, her tears so copious they dripped from her jaw, plopping onto Denise’s forearms. “If anybody at the hospital thought I was even thinking about stealing drugs I would lose my job.”
“What difference does that make?” Denise nearly shouted. The room was spinning around them. She had to hold tight lest she and her sister be flung away from the table by the centrifugal force. “We’re leaving. We’re going to get another house in another town and you can get another job. We’ve been over it and over it, Paulette. We’re going to have a life, be a family.”
“If we leave Acadia—you quit your job and I quit mine—and we sell and we move, they will know!” Paulette said brokenly. “That woman, that ranger lady—I was out shopping this morning and I came home and she was here! Right here at this house. She was coming out from the back where the nursery is. First she sees that picture where you look like me, then she comes here and sees the nursery and God knows what else. Why would she be snooping around here unless she thinks I killed Kurt or she thinks we are related? This isn’t even her job. She’s a park ranger. She knows we are doing things. We have to stop, just stop everything, don’t do anything, just be quiet and normal and do our work and not be noticed. Maybe later…”
“Maybe the pigeon knows something, but that doesn’t mean we stop. We stop her. That’s all. I have a plan. We just distract her for a couple of days. No big deal. We just give her something else to think about, then we get our ducks in a row quick as anything, and we’re done. No muss, no fuss,” Denise pleaded.
Denise wanted to shake Paulette until her teeth rattled. How could she not realize there wouldn’t be a later? They couldn’t afford a maybe. This was their one shot; this was the brass ring, the lottery, the planets in alignment. It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. And it had to be accomplished before Anna Pigeon could put two and two together and get twins.
How could Paulette be so stupid that she didn’t get that?
All at once Denise understood why Kurt Duffy slapped his wife around.
Anna sat with Wily, Gwen, and Heath on the stone apron overlooking the sea. The sky was scattered with a herd of ephemeral sheep, as small and puffy and regular as if a child had drawn them. The sea was impossibly blue, navy in the shallow troughs and teal where the water thinned at the crests of the waves. This far north, the afternoons slipped into evening with exquisite slowness, the sunlight, rich as wild honey, striking diamonds from both the ocean and the granite.
Anna found it hard to believe that people bothered to torment and injure one another when there were so many better ways of spending one’s time. Given the choice of a moment such as this or trolling the Internet, or shooting a hairy naked man, why would anyone choose the troll or the hairy man?
“Have you recovered from E’s going AWOL?” Anna asked.
Heath sipped her bourbon. “Like it never happened,” she said.
“She’s lying,” Gwen said mildly. Gwen was fortified with a glass of white wine, her feet resting on the rounded footrest of a classic Adirondack deck chair. “After much consultation, she has decided to pretend it is okay. I have not. In my day—and I very much think today is still my day, thank you very much—boys come to the door and meet the family.”