by Zara Lisbon
“Justine?” Rayner brought me back to the room.
“I’m sorry, yes. Actually, I … I did touch the athame. Once.”
“But you just said you didn’t.”
“I had forgotten,” I explained. “That night was a blur.”
“That night? The night Eva-Kate was killed?”
“Oh, I can’t handle this.” My mom pulled a chair out from beneath the table and let herself collapse into it.
“No! Not that night. This was a different night. About a week or so ago.”
“So then the night Eva-Kate died … you didn’t hold the athame?”
“Definitely not.”
“Hm, well”—Sato smirked—“that’s not what Josie told us.”
“Josie?” I almost laughed; it was too absurd. “What did Josie say?”
I went over those final moments with Eva-Kate in my mind, but couldn’t spot Josie. We’d gotten back to her place, I’d heard my mom’s voice on the answering machine, I’d gone home, sneaking around the back so nobody would see me. Now that last part seemed a huge mistake. I hadn’t wanted to be seen, but now all I needed in the world was a witness.
“Says she saw you take the knife from a ledge in Eva-Kate’s hallway soon after you got home from, uh…” He glanced back at his notes. “San Luis Obispo.”
“But I didn’t. She lied to you.”
“Why would somebody lie about that?”
“I don’t know!”
“Do you want to tell us what you do know about what happened that night?”
“Eva-Kate and I got home, back to her place. Then I left to feed Princess Leia. Then I checked into the Ace Hotel.”
“Now, why would you do that? Seems rather … spontaneous, no? You had Eva-Kate’s home and your own to choose from, right? Or are you always checking into hotels in the middle of the night?”
“I was at the Ace,” I repeated in lieu of an answer. “I checked in around four or five in the morning. And before that I was at home. So whatever happened to Eva-Kate”—I could feel my blood sugar plummeting, a hot, urgent quaking in my veins and belly—“I had nothing to do with it. And I’d like to go home now.”
Rayner sighed. “We’ll have to corroborate that with the Ace,” he said, gesturing to the door with his pen. “Until then, you’re free to go.”
CHAPTER 2
JUSTINE CHILDS CONFRONTS MOTHER
I stayed numb and silent in the back seat of my mother’s 2013 forest-green Land Rover, but as soon as we got home I started to sob. I clutched Princess Leia to my chest and let her fur soak up my tears. Eva-Kate was dead and I couldn’t help but feel guilty. If I hadn’t left that night, maybe she’d still be alive. Or something like that. I had a way of being able to make anything my fault.
“Justine, sweetheart.” My mother went to hug me, a strain of pity in her voice, a collection of silver bracelets jangling on her wrist. “There’s not much in this life more painful than losing a friend. It doesn’t matter if you only knew them for a short time. I don’t know what to say.”
I pulled away. “I know you knew her,” I said. “I know everything.” Of course, I didn’t know everything. I only knew what I’d read in the papers from my mother’s office. I feared there was more.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Eva-Kate. I know she was your patient.”
She faltered, made an open oval shape with her mouth, then let it fall shut. Then opened it again. Then closed it and put one finger to her sealed lips. Finally, she spoke.
“I can’t confirm or deny that, Justine; you know about doctor-patient confidentiality.”
“I don’t need you to confirm or deny it,” I shot back. “I’m telling you that I know. I found your files on her. I read through them. You made the cabinet combination her birthday? I don’t even know where to begin on how fucked up this is.”
I didn’t know I’d say it until I said it.
“Excuse me?” Her eyes bulged. “You did what?”
“I had to.” I felt odd and off balance explaining myself as I accused her. “I was afraid.”
“Afraid of Eva-Kate?” She sat down next to me, suddenly sweet and shielding. She was like that. She could be crazed with outrage one minute—no, one second—then remorseful and atoning the next.
“Yes, of Eva-Kate. She was unwell and you knew it, but you—”
“What happened, angel? Will you tell me?”
I looked down at her feet. They were in silver Birkenstocks, toenails painted pale metallic blue. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her in vacation mode.
“What happened? Um, let’s see … Eva-Kate moved in and we became friends. I thought it was weird a girl like her would want to be friends with a girl like me, but I figured stranger things have happened. Then one night, I guess it was two nights ago, I heard you leave her a voice mail about scheduling a session. I confronted her about it, asked her why she never told me you were her therapist, and she brushed it off like it was no big deal. She said you knew she was buying that house and you were okay with it, which I knew couldn’t be true.”
She smiled lamely.
“Your instincts were on point,” she said. “Good for you.”
“So I left,” I went on. “I couldn’t be around her, it was all too surreal. I came back here looking for more information. And I found it. She was obsessed with me all along and you knew that.”
“But I didn’t have any reason to believe she would do something as drastic as this, for God’s sake.”
“But you let her into our house on a regular basis. For years.”
“I was the girl’s doctor, Justine. It was my job to help her.”
“At the expense of my safety?”
“Now you’re being a little dramatic.” She scratched at a patch of skin beneath her right eye. “She never said anything about wanting to hurt you or anybody else. She was never anything other than curious. Intensely curious, but still, that’s what I believed it was. A harmless fixation. That was my professional opinion. Was I wrong? She didn’t hurt you, did she?”
I thought about my answer. She had, only not in the way my mom meant.
“No,” I said. “She just … lied.”
“Okay then,” she sighed and stood up, wiping a tear off her cheek. “This is all an awful ordeal, but I’m not at liberty to discuss Eva-Kate any further. I’m going to make some tea. Chamomile?”
“Wait,” I said. “Tea? You can’t just move on like that. You were her therapist, you knew her better than anybody. Don’t you want to figure out who did this to her?”
“I didn’t know her better than anybody else.” She turned back, her face tight and controlled, a twitch above her eyebrow. “And it’s not our job to solve this, Justine. If the police need my help, they’ll ask for it. And if they do, I’ll tell them everything I know.”
“Will you tell them the ‘harmless’ fixation went both ways? Will you tell them the passcode to your file cabinet is her birth date?”
She stared, unblinking. She looked to the door, as if for a way out, then sat back down next to me. Her hands quivered as she spoke.
“It’s not what you think,” she said. “I set that combination years ago when Eva-Kate was still a kid. Her mom had forgotten her birthday and she was hysterical, okay? I was just trying to cheer her up.”
Her mom had forgotten her birthday? I wanted to believe my mother, but I didn’t know if I should. It didn’t quite feel right; if Debbie had forgotten Eva-Kate’s birthday, she would have had to forget Liza’s too. What kind of stage mom forgets her twin daughters’ birthday?
“Fine,” I sighed, wanting the conversation to be over, “whatever you say. I just want to be alone.”
“Hey, wait,” she said. “Why weren’t you at Aunt Jillian’s? You were staying at Aunt Jillian’s, weren’t you?”
“It’s not her fault,” I said. “I was determined.”
“Dammit, Justine. What has gotten into you? If I�
��d known you’d choose this summer to become so … so reckless, I wouldn’t have left.”
“Yeah, well,” I said, turning to go, “clearly you shouldn’t have.”
CHAPTER 3
FRENEMIES? JOSIE BISHOP AND JUSTINE CHILDS SEEN QUARRELING AT VENICE, CALIFORNIA, CRIME SCENE
The sky had darkened, bringing a slight chill to the air, one of those odd July nights sounding a false alarm of summer’s end. I grabbed a hoodie and went outside.
From the porch swing I could see the excitement fading across the canal. After the police and their yellow tape had come, the reporters showed up with their microphones and their insensitively excellent hair. The big networks—NBC, CNN, CBS, FOX—had set up trucks on her front lawn, their fat antennae reaching into the sky like overgrown bean stalks. Next the paparazzi had showed up, swarming in clusters, lighting the canal with their flashbulbs going off in vain. Eva-Kate’s body was long gone. There was nothing to photograph but the empty crime scene. Having gotten their shots, they were mostly all packed up and gone, at least for today.
Who could have done this?
My stupid heart ached. It gnawed at itself, pulled and clawed at itself. All at once I missed her and feared her. I wanted her here with me, and I wanted to have never met her. I felt she could come for me at any minute, and I had to remember over and over again that somebody had already come for her.
She was gone. But was I safe? Not knowing what she’d wanted from me made it worse, not knowing what her feelings really were. Over and over I came back to the first night on her roof when she’d fastened that gemstone necklace around my neck and let her lips rest against mine for just a second, like an accident waiting to happen. I wanted that back. I needed to kiss her again, even just one more time, to prove it had all been real.
I wanted to believe that Eva-Kate loved me, that she thought of me as special. When a person is gone, how can you know for sure that what you had with them was real? I listened to “All Too Well” by Taylor Swift on repeat, finding comfort in her attempt to make sense of the time she spent romantically entangled with Jake Gyllenhaal.
The song tells the story of a romance that is quaint yet epic, charm-filled and “rare,” yet doomed by the man’s immaturity and unwillingness to grow up. The way she repeats this over and over ends up sounding as though she’s trying to convince herself of these facts, which exposes her raw insecurity, her lack of faith in the experience as it happened. So, my question, even though it is for sure none of my business, is: Was it rare or is that just what Taylor needed to believe?
Because we don’t know the answer, the song is disorienting. In some moments we are left wondering what is real and what is Taylor’s imagination. Is this how it really went down? Or is it the sparkling, swiftified version of what happened?
I hated myself. How could I obsess over a Taylor Swift song when Eva-Kate had been stabbed to death? I should have been wondering who could have done this; I should have been thinking about her killer.
Her killer. It sounded so intimate, like a thing that belonged to her. Her name, her birthday, her killer. The person who killed her would be hers forever, same as the person who gave her life. I needed a cigarette, or better yet a whiskey on ice, to slow my racing thoughts.
Just then I saw Josie across the canal, walking up to Eva-Kate’s house with a giant Louis Vuitton suitcase in hand. She stood out from the growing darkness in red striped Gucci jogging pants and tortoiseshell sunglasses so big it looked like she had two baby turtles for eyes. I shot up and power walked across the bridge. The asphalt scraped my bare soles but I didn’t mind.
Eva-Kate’s front door was barred by sticky yellow police tape, but Josie didn’t let that deter her. She slung her bag over her shoulder and walked around to the side of the house, looking for a way in.
“Hey!” I called out, catching up with her in the backyard. “What are you doing?”
Josie jumped, startled, then saw it was me and sighed so deeply it was almost a groan, both relieved and irritated. Beneath the sunglasses her cheeks were red and mottled and wet. Her lips looked stung and raw.
“Hey,” I said again, “I wouldn’t go in there. It’s a crime scene, you’re not allowed to—”
“I don’t give a fuck what you would do,” she snarled, her voice gravelly and hoarse. “I have a lot of stuff in there that I need, so, if you’ll excuse me.”
She turned back around and kept walking.
“No.” I grabbed her wrist. “We have to talk. I know you spoke to the police.”
“So?” She spun to face me, little more than two inches of space between us. Her breath smelled like liquor and I was jealous.
“So why the hell would you tell them you saw me take the athame from the hallway?”
“Fuck, Justine, do we have to have this conversation right now? I just want to get my things and leave before someone interrogates me again about the death of my lifelong best friend, if you don’t mind.”
“I do mind! Josie, you threw me under the bus. If it weren’t for the fact that I was at the Ace that night, they’d think it was me who did this.”
“You were at the Ace?” Her face slackened. The sour bite in her voice dissolved into milky bewilderment. “Why? When did you go there?”
“Well, first I went to my mom’s around ten and stayed there till four-ish. Then I went to the Ace. So, I guess I got there sometime around four thirty. I’m not totally sure,” I said. “But I know I wasn’t here.”
“I could have sworn you were…”
“I wasn’t. But you were. Is that why you told them you saw me take the knife? As a way to get the attention off yourself?”
“Excuse me?”
“Whoever points the finger,” I said as if reciting a universally accepted truism, “is almost always responsible.”
“Yeah right,” she said, hoisting the emblem-dappled bag up so that it rested on her jutting hip bone. “That’s not a thing. Everyone knows it’s the boyfriend that’s almost always responsible. Ex-boyfriend, in this case.”
“You think this could be Rob? Then why would you tell them it was me?”
“I didn’t tell them it was you. I told them I saw you take the knife.”
“Why?”
“Because I did.”
“No you didn’t! I don’t know what you thought you saw, but—”
SNAP SNAP … SNAP SNAP SNAP!
The cameras snuck up behind us, shooting painful bursts of silvery-yellow light into the air, breaking my vision up into haloed white spots.
Josie, who killed Eva-Kate? FLASH What were you two just fighting about? FLASH Justine, how are you holding up? FLASH Where were you the night she died? FLASH Who was the last to see her alive? FLASH FLASH FLASH!
They didn’t want answers, just visual reactions, expressions to steal right off our faces. I hid mine.
“LEAVE US ALONE!” Josie shrieked at them. “Go back to your moms’ basements, you fat fucks!”
With their attention on her, I slipped away, pulling the hoodie up over my head and the top half of my face so that only my mouth showed. I had to keep my eyes angled down so I could see where I was going. My heart pounded along with my feet as they smacked the pavement. They looked so starkly white against the asphalt, white and dew-wet and flecked with dirt. I saw their exposed vulnerability, felt it deep in my gut, and I was ashamed.
* * *
Again I dreamed feverishly and woke to the sound of a fist against my door.
“Justine?” My mom’s voice was strained on the other side of the wood. “Justine, are you up?”
“I am now,” I grumbled. There were no locks on my door—my mom had never allowed them—and so she pushed it open and let herself in. She held her laptop, screen open, so that it made an L shape in the crook of her elbow. She fluttered to my bed, cheeks flushed, mouth curled into a sour crescent.
“You haven’t seen this yet,” she said, thrusting the computer at me. “It’s from this morning. I don’t know what you w
ere thinking, Justine, I really don’t.”
I sat up so I could see. The article was from the Daily Mail, if you could call it an article at all. A grainy gallery of photographs beneath the headline: Frenemies? Josie Bishop and Justine Childs Seen Quarreling at Venice, California, Crime Scene.
I groaned, slammed the screen down against the keyboard. I’d been expecting this, but seeing the words in print, seeing myself from an intruder’s perspective, made me sick.
“I don’t know what you were thinking,” my mom said again. “What were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t,” I said, falling back onto my pillow and putting one hand over my eyes. It was too bright. Fuck the sun, I thought. Fuck the Daily Mail.
“Well, that much is clear,” she huffed. “Justine, this is serious. Do you have any idea what a big deal traipsing into a crime scene like that is? Any idea how bad it makes you look?”
“I just want to find out who could have done this to her,” I said. “Don’t you?”
“I want to let the detectives do their jobs,” she said. “I do not want my daughter getting any more tangled up in this … this tragedy than she already is. Do you understand me? I mean, my God, I guess I can’t take my eyes off you for one second, can I? I’ve been so naive.”
“So have I,” I said, thinking again of combination locks.
“From now on you’re not leaving this house without my permission. I’m your mother.” She said it as if trying to convince herself. “It’s my job to look out for you.”
“Fine.” I pulled the blankets up to my chin, needing to feel the soft comfort of weight on my body. “But I’m going to the funeral tomorrow.”
“Ha!” She let out a cynically amused quacking sound. “That’s rich, Justine.”
“It’s rich to go to my best friend’s funeral?” I sat back up for effect.
“She wasn’t your best friend, sweetheart, you knew her for a week.”
“It was more than a week,” I said through gritted teeth. “And I’m going.”