Dead Sleep (19 page)

I smile to myself. “Who does the sheriff want to send?”

Baxter's hand covers the mouthpiece, but despite his effort I hear him say, “She just called you ‘the sheriff.' ” When the ISU chief removes his hand, he says, “The sheriff doesn't want to send anybody. He wants to go himself.”

“You should let him go, then.”

“Is that who you want?”

“Absolutely. I feel safer already.”

“Okay. You'll probably leave tomorrow afternoon. I'll call you in the morning to give you the travel details.”

“I'll talk to you then. And Wendy's taking good care of me.”

“Good. See you tomorrow.”

“What's happening?” Wendy asks after I hang up.

“I'm going to the Cayman Islands.”

“Oh.” She shifts in her seat. “What was that about a sheriff ?”

“A joke. I was talking about Kaiser.”

She guessed as much. “He's going with you?”

“It looks that way. For security.”

She looks out her window. “Lucky you,” she says finally.

The eternal plight of women. A minute ago we were fast friends. Now she'd like to revoke her offer to share her apartment. But her manners are far too good for that. I'd like to reassure Agent Wendy that she has nothing to worry about, but I don't want to insult her intelligence. I start the engine and pull into St. Charles Avenue.

“Give me some directions. It's time to get some sleep.”

“Straight,” she says. “I'll tell you where to turn.”

I start down the tree-lined avenue, the streetcar tracks gleaming silver under the lights as the Mustang swallows them. The leaves on the trees look gray, but only a small part of my brain registers this. The rest is rerunning Marc Lacour's remark again and again:
It wouldn't be the first time you pretended to be her, would it?
And then Dr. Lenz's voice, out of the dark:
What's the worst thing you've ever done?

If only you could plead the fifth with your conscience.

9

MOST FLIGHTS TO the Cayman Islands stage out of Houston or Miami, but with the FBI Lear, things are simpler. It's Kaiser, me, and two pilots up front for the two-hour run from New Orleans to Grand Cayman, largest of the three islands that make up the British colony. The last time I made this flight, my knuckles were white for half the journey. I was covering the air convoy that American pilots take to the Caymans for the annual air show there, one “highlight” of which is the provocative overflight of communist Cuba. Fifteen years ago, this was no joke, and I'm happy to be cruising along with nothing more to worry about than a seventy-year-old Frenchman who for some unknown reason has requested my presence.

We've been in the air for an hour, and Kaiser is un-characteristically quiet. I don't suppose there's much to say. Or perhaps I'm radiating enough hostility to discourage conversation. I can still feel my brother-in-law's lips against my neck, and the emotional fallout is hard to shake. Most difficult of all is the remark Marc made as I rebuffed him:
It wouldn't be the first time you pretended to be her, would it?
I'd hoped that particular chapter of my life was shared only by my sister, but apparently I hoped for too much. The fact that Jane told her husband about it reveals a piercing truth: she never really believed my side of the story.

What's the worst thing you've ever done?
Dr. Lenz used to ask his patients. A simple but devastating question. And the other one—what was it?
What's the worst thing that ever happened to you?
Several terrible things have happened to me, none of which I want to dwell on now, but in making choices about my behavior, I haven't often gone against the dictates of my conscience. On the most painful occasion when I did, I was eighteen years old. It's almost embarrassing that twenty-two years of post-high school living haven't given me some greater claim to infamy, but the journey through adolescence is one of the hardest we ever make, and the wounds sustained along the way last a lifetime.

Years of simmering tension between my sister and me came to a boiling point during our senior year, just weeks before my affair with David Gresham became the sensation of the school. Jane was riding her high horse, chattering endlessly about how she was going to be a Chi Omega the next year and asking why I didn't get my act together, “fix up” a little, and try to be “halfway normal,” whatever that meant to her. When I wasn't worrying about how I was going to pay her expenses at Ole Miss, I was shooting portraits in my tiny studio or sneaking through the woods to my history teacher's house. Looking back on it, I was like a ghost. Silent during classes, vanishing after school, skipping pep rallies and ball games, never going to high school hangouts.

Jane suspected I was involved with someone, but I had no idea of the shape of her suspicions. One day, during an argument over something stupid, I realized she thought I was gay. That I was slipping off at all hours to meet a woman. It was funny, really, but when I treated it as such, she started screaming about how strange I was, how I was ruining her chance to become a Chi O and have a normal life. I told her that her idea of a normal life wasn't anything to aspire to. I also told her I wasn't gay, and that I knew more about men than she ever would. She smirked in a superior way that dismissed me completely. I said if circumstances had been slightly different, it could be me dating Bobby Evans, her wealthy boyfriend of three years, and her doing the work that paid the light bill. She looked at me incredulously and said, “Bobby and
you
? Together? You've got to be kidding.” And then she laughed. For some reason, that really cut me to the quick. “Why not?” I asked. “Because you're so
weird,
” she said, looking at me with pity. I understood then that she saw me exactly as others did, as some sort of self-exiled outcast. All I'd done to keep our family together, she simply took as her due.

Two days later, I got home from school and found a note taped to Jane's window. It was from her boyfriend, and it said to meet him that afternoon in the woods behind the coliseum. I threw away the note, put my hair up in a ponytail, slipped on a pair of Jane's earrings and one of her precious Lacoste sweaters, and rode her bike down to the woods. Bobby Evans was waiting there in his letter jacket. He looked like a young Robert Redford standing there, though his IQ left a bit to be desired.

I played Jane to perfection. We'd been impersonating each other since we were babies; it was easy. Why did I do it? I wanted to know what lay behind that smirk she'd given me. And I suppose I was jealous of her in my own way. The road of the nonconformist is a lonely one, and I'd been walking it for a long time. Bobby Evans was one of the rewards for being a “good girl,” which meant following every hypocritical southern folkway and more with the rigidity of a Victorian virgin. As we talked, Bobby steered us over into the trees, and I realized this was a ritual of theirs. He kissed me in the shadows, first delicately, then with passion. It was typical high school stuff—or what I imagined that to be, anyway—all rushed and breathless and intense, him crushing my breasts from outside my sweater and pressing his pelvis against mine. Very different from my experiences with David Gresham. When I let him put his hand inside her sweater, I could tell that was as far as they ever went. The way he slowly lowered his hand toward my waistband told me that. He was waiting for a “No,” a “Not yet,” or an “I want to, but we just can't.”

I didn't say any of those things.

A few minutes of touching me there was more than he could handle. Afterward, he sat down at my feet, too embarrassed to look at me, and stared down at the ground. It was like someone had finally given him the keys to paradise. He asked why I had let him do that, and I said I'd just decided that today was the day. It was getting dark by then. He looked up like a puppy and said, “Do you have to go back now?” I said the only person who would notice I was late was Jordan, and who cared about her? He laughed.

This time when he touched me, I touched back. I'm not sure why. I'd already gotten whatever petty revenge I wanted against Jane. It was a hormonal thing by that point, I think. I was eighteen and experienced, he was eighteen and good-looking, and things took their natural course. When we were half undressed, I almost stopped pretending. There didn't seem much point anymore, and I didn't want him thinking he had deflowered Jane. But I couldn't bring myself to tell him the truth. I kept my blouse on to hide the arm where Jane had her scars, and kept my mouth over his to keep from talking.

Once he was inside me, he did the opposite of what I expected. He didn't close his eyes and flail away. He went very slowly and looked right into my eyes, pure rapture on his face. Part of that, I realized, was his belief that the girl he had put on a pedestal for three years was finally giving herself totally to him. I wanted to stop then, but there was no graceful way to do it. Instead, I tried to make it end faster. As I did, he looked down with a strange light in his eyes and said, “You're not Jane, are you?”

It was the most chilling moment of my life. He
knew.
If he hadn't, he wouldn't have risked saying that.

“No,” I said, terrified that he would jump up and start screaming to the trees that I was a slut. I should have known better. I learned a lesson about men that day. There was hardly a hitch in his rhythm. His eyes got bigger, he groaned in ecstasy, and enjoyed it twice as much. It was the biggest ego trip of his young life, and I was a fool to think for an instant that he would be able to keep quiet about it. He didn't tell his friends, which would have been bad enough. He did something infinitely worse.

The next time he was with Jane, he acted as though she had made love with him the last time they were together, and insisted that she do it again. She flew into a rage and demanded an explanation, and he let her figure it out for herself. She didn't speak more than ten words a month to me for three years afterward. I tried to explain why I'd done it, and what had really happened, but it was useless. For Jane to accept the truth about Bobby's actions would have made the betrayal complete, and thus unbearable. Two months later, my relationship with David Gresham went public, and I left for New Orleans.

The obvious rancor slowly faded. Bobby Evans was consigned to the past with the other trappings of high school. (He now sells residential real estate in Oxford.) I continued to help Jane financially until her junior year of college, when she found some other source of money. I next saw her at her wedding, though I was not invited to be maid of honor (that office went to Marc Lacour's sister). But in the twenty years since, we slowly but surely made overtures that bridged the chasm that once divided us. In the three years before she disappeared, we were closer than at any time in our lives, thanks to Jane's efforts more than mine, and I came to believe that the bond we shared—formed in the face of paternal abandonment and maternal incapacity—was stronger than a break over any man. And perhaps it was. Perhaps she revealed my betrayal in the early days of her marriage to Marc.

Looking back now, it's easy to see Jane's entire life as a flight from the family fate had handed her. All her efforts to reach out, to join, to belong—to the cheerleaders, school clubs, church groups, sororities—all seemed part of a desperate attempt to find a surrogate family, to become part of the Brady Bunch perfection so prevalent on the television of our youth, which our home environment resembled not at all. In that context, my one-day fling with Bobby Evans was no simple sexual betrayal; it was an arrow in the heart of Jane's illusions of progress. And since our illusions are always our most precious possessions, how could she ever forgive me?

But the final, terrible irony of her life was worse. Having succeeded in her impossible quest, having attained a rich and handsome husband, a mansion, and two beautiful children—all the hallmarks of gentility and security—she was plucked from the heart of her fantasy by some tortured soul undoubtedly born into a family even more dysfunctional than ours. If Jane is dead, I cannot imagine what her last thoughts must have been. If she's alive—

“Are you sleeping?”

I blink from my trance and look across the narrow aisle at John Kaiser, who is studying me with a worried gaze. He's wearing navy slacks, a polo shirt, and a tan suede jacket that perfectly fits his shoulders. I dressed for this trip myself, in tailored black silk pants and a matching jacket, with a linen blouse cut low enough to reveal a swell of cleavage. A kinky old Frenchman might just respond to some tasteful décolletage.

“Hey,” he says. “You in a trance?”

“No. Just thinking.”

“What about?”

“We don't know each other well enough for you to ask that question.”

He gives me a tight smile. “You're right. Sorry.”

I straighten up in my seat. “You probably have some grand plan for this meeting, right? A strategy?”

“Nope. Doctor Lenz would have one. But I go on instinct a lot of the time. We're going to play it by ear.”

“You must have some idea about what de Becque wants with me.”

“Either de Becque's been behind this whole thing from day one—every disappearance—or it's some sort of diversion for him. A rich man's game. If it's a game, I figure he knows you're a double for one of the Sleeping Women. Maybe he saw Jane's portrait when Wingate put it up for sale. Then when he heard about what happened in Hong Kong—a twin of one of the Sleeping Women showing up—he put two and two together.”

“But how? Unless he had prior knowledge, how could he make the leap from one of the faces on the paintings in Hong Kong to me? To knowing my name?”