All the Beautiful Lies(45)

“No. It was just what I thought.”

“Okay. So what was she acting like when she came here?”

“I couldn’t really understand her. She was slurring her words, and she asked me to go swimming with her, and I said that it was too late, and it was too cold, and that was it.”

The officer turned and looked at Jake for the first time. “Did you see Gina when she came here to the house?” he asked.

“Oh, no. That was long after my bedtime.” He said it with a kind of faux heartiness that Alice had never heard before. He sounds like he’s lying, she thought.

But Officer Wilson didn’t follow up. He turned back to Alice. “Did you think it was unusual that Gina wanted to go swimming?” he asked.

“Um . . . I guess so. It was late at night.”

“Besides it being late at night, did it surprise you in other ways? Is this something she liked to do?”

“Swimming?”

“Yes.”

“I guess so. I don’t really know.”

The officer was writing something. When he didn’t immediately ask another question, Alice said, “We’d gone swimming before, Gina and I. The last time that we spent together. It was nice. I think she wanted to repeat the experience as a way to . . . to get back that feeling. She said that swimming together would be like a fresh start.”

“She said that here, the night she came over.”

“Something like that.”

“Why did you need a fresh start?”

“Just like I said, we’d been close before, and now we weren’t so close. We’d drifted apart.”

“Okay.” The officer nodded fractionally and was quiet again for a moment. Alice didn’t say anything, either, this time.

“One more thing,” he said. “Had Gina ever said anything to you that made you think she might be suicidal?”

“No. Like I said, I barely even—”

“Not just recently, Alice, but when you knew her in high school. Or anytime really.”

“Oh.” Alice pretended to think. “There was this one time, our senior year, when we were talking about our futures, you know. Where we might be in a few years. And she said something like: ‘Alice, you’ll still be here in Kennewick. You’ll probably be married to some perfect man, and have a baby boy and a baby girl, and I’ll still be in New York, and I’ll be a rich model with a major drug habit, and about sixteen boyfriends, and I’ll be so unhappy that I’ll probably kill myself.’ I mean, I didn’t think anything of it at the time.”

“When did she say this?”

“Our senior year. I thought she was just joking.”

“You’ve been really helpful, Alice,” the officer said as he stood. Jake stood as well and walked him to the door. Alice stayed seated, but the officer turned back and thanked her before he left the condo. She felt a sudden emptiness, like she hadn’t been ready for him to leave, that there was more she could have said.

“What do you think that was all about?” Jake asked after shutting the door and turning back into the living room.

“What do you mean?”

“It felt like they were putting you through the third degree.”

“I guess so,” Alice said.

“If it didn’t bother you, it didn’t bother me. I was worried you might be upset.”

“I’m not upset. I’m just tired. I haven’t been sleeping.”

“I’m sure. Go take a nap,” he said, just as Alice knew he would.

She went upstairs and into her old bedroom, and shut the door. It was an unspoken code that was used between her and Jake. When she went to take a nap in the bedroom they shared together, it meant that Jake would join her. When she went into her old bedroom, he wouldn’t. They’d only ever had sex in that room once, right after he’d taken the pictures.

In her bedroom with the door closed, Alice took out the folder that contained all the magazine photos of Gina, the clippings she’d saved from the past few years. She spread them out on the nubby bedspread, finally arranging them in a way she liked, with her favorite picture of Gina in the middle. It was from one of her last published photo shoots, one in which she’d gotten to travel down to Miami. In the picture, she was wearing a yellow one-piece bathing suit and holding a lit cigarette. In the background was a ramshackle beach house, painted in neon colors, and a sexy man asleep in a hammock. Gina was looking directly at the camera, her face almost in a frown. Look at all I have, that face was saying, and look at how miserable I am. Alice ran her finger down the picture, as though she could feel Gina through it. The paper felt cheap. The shot was published in one of the lesser fashion magazines, a magazine that she’d had to pick up in Portland, since Blethen’s didn’t even carry it.

She looked at the other pictures, then gathered them up and put them back in the folder. She stretched out on the bed and looked at the ceiling. She listened to Jake coming quietly up the stairs, then heard him turn around and go back down. He’d seen the shut door of her bedroom. Why had he been so concerned about the policeman’s visit? She hadn’t been bothered by it. They were just trying to decide if it had been a suicide or an accidental death. And it was going to be easy to confirm. Gina was unhappy and on drugs. Why else would she swim out into the cold ocean water? It was so sad, really, when she thought about it. All that youth being swallowed up by all that water. Poor Gina so alone in those final moments. Alice really was a little bit sleepy, and she closed her eyes, then gently massaged her temples, hoping she wouldn’t get one of her headaches.