Genuine Fraud(31)

Killing Brooke had been self-protection.

People needed to protect themselves. It was human nature, and Jule had spent years training to make herself especially good at it. The events of today were proof that she was even more capable than she’d hoped. She was phenomenal, in fact—a fighting mutant, a supercreature. Fucking Wolverine didn’t stop to mourn the people his claws went through. He killed people all the time in self-defense, or for a worthy cause. Same with Bourne, Bond, and the rest of them. Heroes didn’t wish for gingerbread, presents, and peppermint. Jule would not, either. It wasn’t like she’d ever had them anyway. There was nothing to mope about.

“God rest ye merry, gentlemen, Let nothing you dismay…”



The drunk started up again.

“Shut up before I come over there and make you!” Jule yelled at him.

The singing stopped.

She tipped the last of the chocolate into her mouth. She wouldn’t think about going astray. She wouldn’t feel guilty. She would follow this action-hero path and power on.

—

Jule West Williams spent December 24 on a nineteen-hour bus ride and fell asleep early Christmas morning in a Portland, Oregon, airport hotel. At eleven a.m., she shuttled to the airport and checked her bags for the night flight to London, business class. She ate a burger in the food court. She bought books and sprayed herself with unfamiliar perfume in duty-free.





MID-DECEMBER, 2016

SAN FRANCISCO

The day before the hike, Jule had a call from Brooke. “Where are you?” Brooke barked, without saying hello. “Have you seen Immie?”

“No.” Jule had just finished a workout. She sat down on a bench outside Haight-Ashbury Fitness.

“I’ve sent her like a gazillion texts, but she doesn’t answer,” said Brooke. “She’s off Snapchat and Insta. I’m verging on hostile, so I thought I’d call and see what you know.”

“Immie doesn’t answer anyone,” said Jule.

“Where are you?”

Jule saw no reason to lie. “San Francisco.”

“You’re here?”

“Wait, you’re here?” La Jolla, where Brooke was supposed to be, was a good eight-hour drive away.

“I have high school friends who go to college in San Francisco, so I got a hotel and came up. But it turns out they all have jobs or exams up through today. I was supposed to meet Chip Lupton this morning, but he effing blew me off. He didn’t even text me till I was already waiting for him in, like, a hallway of dead snakes.”

“Dead snakes?”

“Ugh,” Brooke moaned. “I’m at the Academy of Sciences. Effing Lupton said he wanted to go see the herpetology exhibit. I want to get in his pants or I’d never have said yes. Is Immie in San Francisco with you?”

“No.”

“When the eff is Hanukkah? Is she going home for that?”

“It’s now. She wouldn’t go home for it. She went to Mumbai, maybe. I don’t know for sure.”

“Okay. So come down, since you’re in town.”

“To the snakes?”

“Yeah. God, I’m bored. Are you far away?”

“I have—”

“Don’t say you have stuff to do. We’ll keep texting Immie and force her to get back to us. Does she have phone service in Mumbai? We can email her if she doesn’t. Come find me in the herp exhibit,” said Brooke. “You have to make an appointment. I’ll text you the number.”





Jule wanted to see all the things. She hadn’t been to the Academy of Sciences yet. Plus she wanted to know what Brooke knew about Imogen’s life after the Vineyard. So she jumped in a cab.

The Academy was a natural history museum full of dinosaur bones and taxidermy. “I have a two o’clock appointment,” Jule told the man at the herp desk.

“ID, please.”

Jule showed him the Vassar ID and he let her pass.

“We have more than three hundred thousand specimens from one hundred and sixty-six countries,” he said. “Enjoy your day.”

The collection was housed in a series of rooms. The vibe was half library, half storage facility. On the shelves stood glass bottles filled with preserved animals: snakes, lizards, toads, and many creatures Jule could not identify. They were all carefully labeled.

Jule knew Brooke was waiting for her, but she didn’t text to say she’d arrived. Instead, she walked slowly along the aisles, keeping her feet silent.

She retained the names of most of the things she looked at. Xenopus laevis, African clawed frog. Crotalus cerastes, sidewinder. Crotalus ruber, red diamond rattlesnake. She logged the names of vipers, salamanders, rare frogs, tiny snakes native only to faraway islands.

The vipers were coiled upon themselves, suspended in dingy liquid. Jule touched her hand to their venomous mouths, feeling fear skim through her.

She turned a corner and found Brooke sitting on the floor in one aisle, staring at a robust yellow frog on a low shelf.

“Took you forever,” Brooke said.

“I got into the snakes,” said Jule. “They’re so powerful.”

“They’re not powerful. They’re dead,” said Brooke. “They’re, like, coiled up in bottles and nobody loves them. God, wouldn’t it be depressing if after you died your relatives, like, preserved you in formaldehyde and kept you in a giant jar?”