All the Beautiful Lies(53)

The son is CUTE. He’s an age-appropriate B, right down to his pure emotional blockage. When I saw him at the funeral my knees literally buckled and then I saw the way Alice was hovering over him and I wanted to swoop in and save him. I went to the bookstore because I thought Alice might be there and I could see her up close but he was there, and then I was telling him I was looking for a job. I could tell he was into me, or maybe it was just that he could tell that I was lying about why I was there at the store. He texted me, and asked me out for drinks, like a real date. He told me all about his life, and I made up a story about coming to maine to get away from it all, but he didn’t believe it (you know I’m a lousy liar) so he came here tonight, and I told him EVERYTHING. And then all I could see was how he was blaming me for what happened to his father, that I started it all, and then I didn’t know if I was just projecting my own guilt onto him.

I feel like my skin is on fire I’m so anxious. I just decided to go to the police in the morning and tell them EVERYTHING. Who knows if they’ll care, but then I’ll be done with it. I have nothing to hide and no one to protect. And as soon as I do that, then I am hightailing it away from maine, and, look, I buried the lead (lede?): Can I come stay with you? Not forever, but for a few days. I’m done with new york, and I can’t stay here, and I really don’t want to move back in with mom, at least not right now. I know you’ve told me in the past that I can come anytime but I still wanted to ask. I’ll be in boston tomorrow. You’re probably asleep but write me back as soon as you get this. xoxo g





Caitlin shut her laptop. She’d shared the e-mail with Detective Dixon, bringing it up on her phone at the station to show him earlier in the day. He’d read it, then asked Caitlin if she could forward it to him.

“What do you think about it?” she asked him.

“I wish she’d come to us earlier,” the detective said, and the words made Caitlin’s stomach hurt. It must have shown on her face, because he quickly continued, “But who knows if it would have made a difference? It’s not a smoking gun. Plenty of people have affairs and don’t end up being murdered.”

“But the fact that Grace got killed must mean that Bill Ackerson was as well, that it’s connected?”

“There’s no indication that Alice was even aware of your sister’s existence.”

“Why? Because she says she wasn’t?”

“Can I ask you some questions about Grace?” the detective said, hunching his shoulders forward like he had a kink in his back. Caitlin noticed that he had a scar above his right eye where his eyebrow didn’t grow.

“Sure,” Caitlin said, and settled back into the molded plastic chair. They were at a small conference table toward the back of the station, in a glass-encased room. There was a whiteboard that had been erased clean of all but a few random, smudged words: names, cell, separate. The detective had brought her here to show her photographs of Grace’s lifeless face for purposes of identification. Caitlin had received a frantic call from her mother early that morning, telling her that she’d just heard from the Kennewick Police Department, looking for identification of a body carrying a Michigan driver’s license in the name of Grace Ellen McGowan. Caitlin volunteered to drive up to Maine. During the hour-and-a-half drive, in a state of unreal shock, she’d alternated between bewildered grief and a desperate hope that it was all a misunderstanding. When the detective put the first photograph down in front of Caitlin, she had had a moment of pure relief wash over her. It wasn’t Grace. The face they were showing her was a young woman, but with fuller cheeks than Grace had, with puffier eyes.

Caitlin shook her head. “I don’t . . . I don’t think . . .”

The detective placed a second photograph next to the first one. It was of a tattoo, cursive script across a rib cage: Do you realize we’re floating in space? As quickly as the wave of relief had swept through Caitlin, a wave of icy recognition replaced it. Caitlin looked back at the face, photographed on a neutral background. Yes, it was her twin, her features reduced to their basic nature, a nose, two eyes, a mouth. She hadn’t recognized the face because there was nothing left of Grace in it. But the tattoo, that silly, impulsive tattoo, some line from a song Grace had loved in high school, meant that it was really her sister.

She nodded at the detective, and he produced a piece of paper, proof of identification, for her to sign. She quickly glanced over the sheet, not trusting herself to speak, then signed on the line. The detective put the sheet of paper in a manila folder, and thanked her, then asked if she wanted to be alone for a moment before they talked further. She nodded, and he left, shutting the door behind him. She cried, a hand across her eyes, for several minutes. She’d cried earlier, when she first got the call from her mother that Grace was dead, but this was different. She’d seen the pictures. Grace, unimaginably, was truly gone.

“She was your twin?” the detective asked, after he’d come back, after she’d shown him the e-mail, after she’d asked him repeatedly what had happened, and why.

“Yes.”

“Identical twins?”

“No. Fraternal. But some people thought we were identical because we looked alike. But really, we just looked alike because we were sisters.”

“Were you alike in other ways?”

“Personality, you mean? God, no. Not at all. I was the careful one, and she wasn’t careful at all. As you can tell . . . from the situation, and from the e-mail. She was kind of impulsive and didn’t really know what she wanted. No, that’s not entirely true. She was impulsive, but she always knew what she wanted. It just changed all the time.”