by Mary Kubica
walked the dogs instead. You took the dogs for a walk while
he went up to the bedroom to wash up. You were gone quite
some time, your husband said.”
I feel something inside of me start to shift.
Someone is lying. But I don’t know who.
“Is that right?” I ask.
“That’s right,” he says.
“But that’s not true,” I argue. I don’t know why Will would
say this. There’s only one thing that I can think. That Will would
do anything to protect Otto and Imogen. Anything at all. Even
if it means throwing me to the wolves.
“He said you took the dogs for a walk, but as time went on
and you didn’t come home, he started to worry about you. Es-
pecially when he heard the dogs barking. He looked outside to
see what was the matter. When he did, he found the dogs out
there but not you. You left the dogs in the yard when you went
over to the Baines’s home that night, didn’t you?”
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My stomach drops. There’s the sensation of free-falling, of
plummeting down the first hill of a roller coaster, organs shift-
ing inside of me.
I say, enunciating each word at a time. “I didn’t go to the Ba-
ines’s home that night.”
But he ignores this. He goes on as if I didn’t even speak. He
starts speaking of Will on a first name basis. He is Will and I
am Dr. Foust.
Officer Berg has chosen sides. He isn’t on mine.
“Will tried you on your cell phone. You didn’t answer. He
started thinking that something terrible had happened to you.
He hurried to the bedroom to put his clothes on so he could go
searching for you. But just as he was about to panic, you came
home.”
Officer Berg pauses for breath. “I have to ask you again, Doc-
tor. Where were you between the hours of ten and two on the
night that Mrs. Baines was killed?”
I shake my head, saying nothing. There’s nothing to say. I’ve
told him where I was, but he no longer believes me.
Only now do I realize that Officer Berg has carried a large
envelope into the room with him. All the while it’s sat on the
table, just out of reach. He stands and reaches for it now. He
slips a finger beneath the flap to open it up. Berg begins to lay
photographs on the table for me to see. They’re truly heinous,
growing more ghastly with each image he draws out. The im-
ages have been enlarged, eight by ten inches at least. Even when
I avert my eyes I see them. There’s a photograph of an open
door—doorjamb and latch intact. Of sprays of blood trickling
down the walls. The room is strikingly tidy, which makes me
think there wasn’t much of a scuffle. The only things out of
place are an umbrella stand, which lies on its side, and a framed
photograph, hanging cockeyed as if it got elbowed in the fracas.
At the center of it all lies Morgan. She’s splayed in an uncom-
fortable position on an area rug, brown hair veiling her face,
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arms thrown up and over her head as if, in a last-ditch effort,
she tried to protect her face from the blade of the knife. A leg
looks broken from the fall, bent in a way it’s not meant to go.
Her pajamas are on, flannel pants and a thermal top, all of it red
so it’s impossible to see where the blood ends and the pajamas
begin. The left leg of her pants is hitched to the knee.
Small footprints are pressed into the puddles of blood. They
lessen in density as they drift away from the body. I envision an
officer’s hands luring the little girl away from the dead wom-
an’s body.
“What I see here, Doctor,” Officer Berg is telling me, “isn’t
a sign of a random crime. Whoever did this wanted Morgan to
suffer. This was an act of anger and aggression.”
I can’t tear my eyes away from the page. They drift over
Morgan’s body, the bloody footprints, back to the photograph
mounted on the wall, the one that hangs cockeyed. I grab the
photograph from the table and bring it to my eyes for a better
look at that mounted picture frame, because I’ve seen it before
and not so long ago. The way the trees line the street is familiar.
There is a family of four. A mother, father and two daughters,
roughly the ages of ten and twenty.
The woman, the mother, in a pretty green dress is set on a
bright yellow chair in the center of it, while her family stands
around her.
“Oh God,” I gasp, hand going to my mouth, because this pho-
tograph—framed and mounted to Morgan Baines’s wall—is the
same as the one in the newspaper article about Erin’s death. The
one on my computer. The older girl, nearly twenty years old, is
Will’s former fiancée, Erin. It was likely taken just months be-
fore she died. The younger girl is her little sister.
I choke on my own saliva. Officer Berg pats my back, asks if
I’m okay. I nod because I can’t speak.
“It’s not easy to look at, is it?” Officer Berg asks, thinking it’s the dead woman’s body that has me rattled like this.
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MARY KUBICA
I see it now, what I couldn’t see before. Because the woman
in the photograph—the mother perched on the chair—is older
now. Her brown hair is now gray, and she’s lost a significant
amount of weight. Too much weight, in fact, so that she’s gaunt.
It’s utterly impossible. It’s too hard to digest. This can’t be.
The woman in this photograph is Morgan’s mother. The
woman I met at the memorial service. The woman who lost
another child years ago and has never been the same since, ac-
cording to her friends Karen and Susan.
But I don’t understand it. If this is true, it means that Mor-
gan was Erin’s sister. That Morgan is the little girl in the pho-
tograph, the one who’s about ten years old.
Why didn’t Will tell me about this?
I think I know why. Because of my own insecurities. What
would I have done if I’d learned Erin’s sister was living in such
close proximity to us? I realize Will and Morgan’s friendship,
their chumminess, it was real. It existed. Because of their shared
affinity for the one woman Will loved more than me. Erin.
The room drifts in and out of focus. I blink hard, trying to
get it to stop. Officer Berg teeters on the chair beside me. He
doesn’t move; it’s my perception of him that makes him move.
It’s all in my head. The edges of his face begin to soften. The
room suddenly expands in size, walls widen, moving out. When
the officer speaks, his words are nearly extinguished by what-
ever is going on in my head. I see his lips move. His words are
harder to make out.
The first time he says it, it’s unintelligible.
“Pardon me?” I ask, speaking loudly.
“Will told us that you have a tendency toward being jealous
and insecure.”
“He did, did he?”
“Yes, Dr. Foust, he did. He said he never expected you to
act on those feelings. But he also said that you’ve been having a
hard time lately. That you’re not quite yourself. He mentioned
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a panic attack, a forced resignation. You’re not the violent type,
not according to Will. But,” he says, repeating his own words,
“he says you haven’t been yourself lately.”
He asks, “Do you have anything to say to that?”
I say nothing. A headache begins just then, inching up the
nape of my neck, stabbing me between the eyes. I clench my
eyes shut tight, pressing my fingertips to my temples to dull
the pain. I must experience a drop in blood pressure because all
at once, it’s hard to hear. Officer Berg is talking, asking if I’m
okay. But the words are more muffled than they were before.
I’m underwater.
A door opens and then closes. Officer Berg is speaking to
someone else. They found nothing. But they’re conducting a
search of my home because Will has given them permission to
do so.
“Dr. Foust? Dr. Foust?”
A hand shakes my shoulder.
When my eyes open up, some old guy’s looking at me. He’s
practically drooling. I glance at the clock. I look down at my
shirt. A blue button-down pajama shirt buttoned all the way
up, making me gag. I can barely breathe. She can be such a prig
sometimes. I unbutton the top three buttons, let in a little air.
“It’s fucking hot in here,” I say, fanning myself, seeing the way
he looks at my clavicle.
“Everything alright?” he asks. He’s got one of those looks on
his face, like he’s confused about what he sees. His eyebrows
are all scrunched up. He digs the heels of his hands into his eye
sockets, makes sure he isn’t seeing things. He asks again if I’m
alright. I think I should ask if he’s alright—he seems to be in
far more distress than me—but I don’t so much care if he is. So
I don’t ask.
Instead I ask, “Why wouldn’t everything be alright?”
“You seem, I don’t know, disoriented somehow. You’re feeling
okay? I can fetch you some water, if you don’t want your coffee.”
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I look at the cup before me. It’s not mine.
He just looks at me, saying nothing, staring. I say “Sure,”
about the water. I twirl a strand of hair around my finger, taking
in the room around me. Cold, bland, a table, four walls. There’s
not much to it, nothing to look at, nothing to tell me where I
am. Nothing except for this guy before me, fully decked out in
a uniform. Clearly a cop.
And then I see the pictures on the table beside me.
“Go on,” I tell him. “Fetch me some water.”
He goes and comes back again. He gives me the water, sets it
on the table in front of me. “So tell me,” he says. “Tell me what
happened when you took the dogs for a walk.”
“What dogs?” I ask. I’ve always liked dogs. People I hate, but
I’m quite fond of dogs.
“Your dogs, Dr. Foust.”
I get a great big belly laugh out of that. It’s preposterous, lu-
dicrous, him mistaking me for Sadie. It’s insulting more than
anything. We look nothing alike. Different color hair, eyes, a
heck of an age gap. Sadie is old. I’m not. Is he so blind he can’t
see that?
“Please,” I say, tucking a strand of hair behind an ear. “Don’t insult me.”
He does a double take, asks, “Pardon me?”
“I said don’t insult me.”
“I’m sorry Dr. Foust, I—” but I stop him there because I can’t stand the way he keeps referring to me as Sadie, as Dr. Foust.
Sadie would be lucky to be me. But Sadie is not me.
“Stop cal ing me that,” I snap.
“You don’t want me to call you Dr. Foust?”
“No,” I tell him.
“Wel , what should I call you then?” he asks. “Would you prefer that I call you Sadie?”
“No!” I shake my head, insistent, indignant. I tell him, “You should call me by my name.”
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His eyes narrow, honing in on me. “I thought Sadie was your
name. Sadie Foust.”
“You thought wrong then, didn’t you?”
He looks at me, words slack as he asks, “If not Sadie, then who
are you?”
I stick a hand out to him, tell him my name is Camille. His
hand is cold when he shakes it, limp. He looks around the room
as he does, asks where Sadie went.
I tell him, “Sadie isn’t here right now. She had to go.”
“But she was just here,” he says.
“Yeah,” I tell him, “but now she’s not. Now it’s just me.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not following,” he says, asking again if I’m feeling okay, if I’m alright, encourages me to drink up the water.
“I’m feeling fine,” I say, drinking the water in one big swig.
I’m thirsty and hot.
“Dr. Foust—”
“Camil e,” I remind him, searching the room for a clock, to see what time it is, how much time I’ve missed.
He says, “Okay. Camil e then.” He shows me one of the pic-
tures from the tabletop, the one where she’s covered in her own
blood, eyes open, dead. “Do you know anything about this?”
I leave him hanging. Can’t let the cat out of the bag just yet.
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Sadie
I’m alone in a room, sitting in a chair that backs up to a wall.
There isn’t much to the room, just walls, two chairs, a door
that’s locked. I know because I’ve already tried leaving. I tried
turning the knob but it didn’t turn. I wound up knocking on
the door, pounding on the door, calling out for help. But it was
all in vain. Because no one came.
Now, the door easily opens. A woman walks in, carrying a
teacup in her hand. She comes to me. She sets a briefcase on
the floor and helps herself to the other chair, sitting opposite
me. She doesn’t introduce herself but begins speaking as if we
already know one another, as if we’ve already met.
She asks me questions. They’re personal and invasive. I bristle
in the chair, drawing away from them, wondering why she is
asking about my mother, my father, my childhood, some woman
named Camille who I don’t know. In my whole life, I’ve never
known anyone named Camille. But she looks at me, disbeliev-
ing. She seems to think I do.
She tells me things that aren’t true, about myself and my life.
I get agitated, upset when she says them.
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I ask how she can claim to know these things about me, when
I don’t even know them for myself. Officer Berg is responsible
for this, for sending her to speak to me, because one minute he
was interrogating me in his tiny room, and the next minute,
I’m here, though I have no idea what time it is, what day it is,
and I can’t remember anything that happened in between. How
did I get here, into this chair, into this room? Did I walk here
myself or did they drug and bring me here?
This woman tells me that she has reason to believe I suffer
from dissociative identity disorder, that alternate personalities—
alters she calls them—control my thoughts, my behavior from
time to time. She says that they control me.
I take a deep breath, gather myself. “That’s impossible,” I
breathe out, “not to mention utterly ridiculous,” I say, throw-
ing my arms up in the air. “Did Officer Berg tell you that?” I
ask, getting angry, losing my composure. Is there nothing Berg
won’t do to pin Morgan Baines’s murder on me? “This is unpro-
fessional, unethical, il egal even,” I snap, asking who is in charge so that I can demand to speak to him or her.
She answers none of my questions, but instead asks, “Are you
prone to periods of blackouts, Dr. Foust? Thirty minutes, an
hour pass that you can’t remember?”
I can’t deny this, though I try. I tell her that’s never happened.
But at the same time, I don’t remember getting here.
There are no windows in this room. There’s no way to get
a sense of the time of day. But I see the face of the woman’s
watch. It’s upside down, but I see it, the hands in the realm of
two fifty, but whether that’s a.m. or p.m. I don’t know. Either
way, it doesn’t matter, because I know good and well it was ten,
maybe eleven o’clock in the morning when I walked to the pub-
lic safety building. Which conceivably means that four—or six-
teen—hours have passed that I can’t account for.
“Do you remember speaking to me earlier today?” she asks.
The answer is no. I don’t remember speaking to her. But I tell
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MARY KUBICA
her I do anyway, I claim I remember that conversation quite
well. But I’ve never been a good liar.
“This isn’t the first time we’ve spoken,” she tells me. I gath-