Page 42 of The Lies I Told
Maybe the girls had learned from their mother to tell the “truth” that suited them best.
“Can I see my daughter?” Mr.Stockton asked.
“The medical examiner is on the scene now.” I scrawled the ME’s number on the back of my business card. “Call this contact at the medical examiner’s office, and they’ll arrange for a meeting.”
The body would need to be formally identified. The task would have to fall to Mr.Stockton, but Brit was over eighteen and could see her as well. Marisa, at sixteen, wouldn’t be allowed. Maybe later, at the funeral home, her father would permit a viewing. The funeral home would find a way to make the girl’s blackened skin more natural with makeup. Maybe she’d even look peaceful, at rest, like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty. But the body I’d see forever was frozen in terror.
I wondered what it was like to see yourself lying in a coffin.
18
MARISA
Monday, March 14, 2022
9:00 p.m.
Richards’s notes were not the kind of thing I should’ve read alone in the dark. And for all the resentment I’d harbored toward Richards thirteen years ago, I realized the guy’s observations had been spot-on. He’d seen a lot when he’d stepped into our house. A career of summing up people showed.
I hadn’t realized he’d worked on my mother’s case. In those days, I’d been so blurred by pain that I barely noticed the people coming and going from our house: the cops, a minister who was a friend of a friend, and the neighbors bearing casserole dishes, flowers, and offers to cut the grass.
Richards had not included any pictures with his notes. There was also no autopsy report. He had them but chose not to share. He either was being kind or still didn’t trust me. Either way, I gave him props.
He included his own hand-drawn sketches of the crime scene, a general description of the body, and how it had been found.It.I had already segregated Clare into two versions of herself: the living girl andthe inanimate object. Easier to read, think about all this, if I thought of the body as a thing, not a person. Not Clare.
There were the witness statements from me, Brit, Dad, the jogger who had found Clare (Seth Morgan—I didn’t recognize his name), the kids at Jo-Jo’s party, including Kurt and even Jack. But he’d not been to the party.
Richards must have logged a hundred hours on the initial investigation. The extensive notes explained the dark circles under the detective’s eyes when he attended my sister’s funeral a week later. Richards had kept to himself, standing to the side of the packed memorial hall.
As the family filed out, I’d walked out behind Brit and Dad, so numb I could’ve sworn my feet didn’t touch the ground but floated a few inches above the polished wood floors. As my morning pill wore off, my thoughts zeroed in on Richards, and I snapped out of my funk. It was so much easier to be angry than sad, so I tore through the last of the numbness and allowed oxygen to fan the flames of my anger.
It took another half hour for me to get free of the funeral receiving line. I’d stayed as long as I had only because Brit held my hand as Richards prowled around the edges of the crowded room, moving between the groups, comfortable handing out his card and asking questions.
Finally, when I saw him duck out a side door, I couldn’t let him escape. He deserved to be punished for intruding on our family’s grief.
I pulled my hand from Brit’s, said something about needing a bathroom, and left the receiving line. People watched me pass, many doing a double take as if they’d seen the dead come back to life.
I pushed out the side door and jogged toward Richards, who now stood by a tree, smoking a cigarette. I moved up to him, folding my arms to protect myself against the cold and so much more.
“What’re you doing here?” I asked.
He inhaled and blew the smoke out slowly. He sniffed, regarded me through the trailing haze. “Paying respects.”
“How can you pay respect? You didn’t know her.”
The end of the cigarette glowed red as he inhaled again. “I might’ve known her better than anyone in that room right now.”
“How could you?”
As he regarded me, I sensed he weighed his words carefully. “Attending a woman’s autopsy is pretty damn intimate.”
My threaded arms tightened. I had no words to rebut his statement. I’d known my sister since before we were born. We could finish each other’s sentences, looked so much alike we could fool our friends and parents, and were privy to dark family secrets. But I’d not been there at that terrible end. None of the details that had defined Clare—the smart one, the sensitive one, and the nice one—mattered now. All anyone cared about was gathering details of her death: Had she known her killer? Was she sexually assaulted? Was she really strangled? I’d seen all these thoughts reflected back in the stares following me since Clare had died.
But I knew nothing about the crime scene or the real, intimate details of her death. Richards did, and in death he was closer to my twin than I was.
“I’ve had a week to ask around about you,” he said.
“Why would you ask about me? What do I have to do with any of this?”
