“How flattering.”
“Well, that’s definitely what I’m going for, so.” Anna shook her head, and when she spoke again, her voice had softened. “No, I mean, I know you care about her. I can tell. You know there’s a site where you can donate? For my parents’ travel and stuff.” She opened her bag and produced a pen and paper—Sebastien was relieved he was not going to be summoned to locate these objects in his own house—and scribbled the address of the website. She was, he noticed with mildly senseless surprise, left-handed. “If you really do want to help. That’s how you could help.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Maybe you will.”
Anna turned to leave. In profile, she looked more like Lily than she had from the front.
“Tell her that I didn’t sleep with Katy,” said Sebastien. “Please.”
“I don’t know that that’s true.”
“Tell her that I said it, anyway. Put it in scare quotes. Do an impression, if you have to. Adopt a funny voice. Say it’s an unconfirmed report. But tell her I said it.”
“Okay,” said Anna. “I will.”
She was out the door, and Sebastien spent a moment walking aimlessly around the room. He stared at the ingots of light coming in from the windows; he stared at the bleached humps of his furniture and tried to see what Anna would have seen. Then he padded back into the kitchen and heard the strangely sickening crunch of wheels on gravel. He opened the door just in time to see Anna get into a car with Eduardo Campos and drive away.
Eduardo had driven out to Palermo on something like a whim. He’d been short-tempered all morning at the office, and had no meetings scheduled for the afternoon. When he walked outside at noon, he found that the sky above him was pearlescent, like the interior of a clamshell, and that he did not wish to head straight home. Maria might call him at the office, of course, and be surprised to find him gone—but it would not kill her, Eduardo decided, to have to wonder about his impetuousness for once. It would not destroy her to have to sit for a moment with the fact that she did not know where he was, and that there was nothing she could do about it. And in light of Ignacio Toledo’s confession, it was time—high time—that Eduardo paid Sebastien LeCompte another visit.
When he turned up the hill toward the mansion, Eduardo found himself involuntarily glancing over at the Carrizos’ house, then scolded himself for doing it. It was, after all, just a house. And this case was, after all, just a case—even if it had consumed the city, then the country, then decent chunks of the world; even if it had animated innumerable listless attention spans; even if it had brought teenagers out at night to honk and yell. Eduardo reached the top of the hill and killed the engine. At the Carrizos’, all the lights were out. What was the lurid appeal of this place, really? Murder was incomprehensible, yes—but when you got right down to it, so was almost everything people did. Eduardo got out of the car. He endured a brief, ghostly longing for a cigarette, like a twinge from a phantom limb. And then Sebastien LeCompte’s door opened and Lily Hayes walked out of the house.
Eduardo felt a surge of adrenaline. He looked again. But no, of course it was not Lily. Of course, it was the sister. He’d seen the girls’ resemblance in family photos—their matching quadrilateral faces, bracketing the redheaded mother and the mild-eyed father (who appeared, at least in pictures, to be constitutionally incapable of any sort of combativeness). But the sisters were, apparently, much more alike in real life. They were not exactly identical—this one was more compact and her skin looked better, though Eduardo couldn’t tell whether this was due to a bit less living or a lot more attention—but these differences seemed circumstantial, especially now. This girl—who had still not seen Eduardo—was just a Lily who exercised and wore sunscreen. And Eduardo was struck now by the unnerving sense that these girls were not different people at all, but just the same girl in different lives.
“Hello,” he called jovially, in English. “You’re Anna.”
The girl froze. Eduardo would have expected her to jump. “I know who you are,” she said, squinting at him. “And I’m not talking to you.”
This was just like Lily—to tell him something in the act of declaring that she would tell him nothing at all. “How was your conversation with the young gentleman?” Eduardo nodded his head toward the house. He was grateful for the extra layer of formality that speaking English granted his diction. “I was about to go in there, myself, but I find I need a moment to prepare myself mentally. He is a maddening person to speak with. As perhaps you have already found.”
Anna scoffed. “You’re not going to make friends with me by doing that,” she said. Her voice was exactly like Lily’s; Eduardo could have closed his eyes and heard the voice from the tapes. “In fact, you’re not going to make friends with me at all. I’m not an idiot.”
She probably thought that by putting her refusal up front, she was making it clear that she was savvy and severe, a person Eduardo would really have to contend with. Nonetheless, it was another revealing disclosure. Anna would not talk to him because Anna was not an idiot, and the corollary of this, obviously, was that Lily was an idiot: Lily had talked to Eduardo—unwisely, idiotically—and now they were all here dealing with her mess. There was judgment in this, and resentment. And Anna, Eduardo was realizing, might not know that yet.
“Look, I’ll be honest with you,” said Eduardo, running his hands through his hair. There was no use in playing on Anna’s resentment directly. No matter how she felt about Lily, surely her moral self-concept hinged on ignoring these feelings—surely, if she knew she might be letting those feelings reign now, when Lily was at her most vulnerable, she would never, ever forgive herself. “The truth,” said Eduardo, “is that I’m not at all sure about this.”
Anna cocked her head to one side and stared at Eduardo with an expression that she must have thought looked like disbelief.
“Your sister is a strange girl,” Eduardo continued. “As I’m sure you know. She’s said and done some pretty erratic, pretty incriminating, things. It’s very hard to know what to make of it all.” Eduardo looked at the ground and bit his lip. He wanted to seem as though he was struggling to decide whether to say what he really wanted to say. “But I’m not sure,” he said again, finally. “And I certainly don’t want to waste the state’s resources if I’m wrong.”
He looked back up at Anna, whose expression of feigned shock was already fading. The only way that she would speak to him would be if she felt she was helping—by being cool-headed and wise enough to explain her sister, who could no longer be trusted to safely explain herself. Even if somewhere deep down Anna knew that speaking to Eduardo must be a very, very dangerous prospect—even if somewhere even deeper down she knew that this was part of why she wanted to do it—she would need to believe, always and utterly, that she’d truly thought she was extending herself on Lily’s behalf.
“The charges can always be dropped,” said Eduardo. “But only if I can find another way to make sense of all of these things. I haven’t been able to, so far. Your perspective might be helpful.” Anna dipped her head. “I’d ask your parents,” Eduardo added, “but I’m not sure they’d be willing to talk to me.”
Anna snorted. She even snorted like her sister. “I doubt they’d be very helpful,” she said. “They don’t exactly know Lily very well.”
Eduardo nodded evenly. “Well, I guess that’s pretty common with parents.”
Anna—torn, Eduardo suspected, between wanting to withhold the acceptance that would come with agreement and avoid the engagement that would come with dispute—said nothing.
“Look,” said Eduardo. “How’s this? We go get a cup of coffee. I won’t ask you anything about that night.” He would not say “Katy.” He would not say “death.” He would certainly not say “murder.” “We’ll pretend it never happened. If I bring it up, you can go ahead and leave. But maybe you can tell me a few things about your sister. Maybe you can translate a couple of things for me. Or whatever else you wan
t to tell me. Whatever you think I should know. You talk, I listen. You’re in charge. You want to leave, you leave. Does that sound fair?”
It was worth trying, but, of course, Eduardo did not expect it to work. This meant that he had to be careful not to show his surprise when, as he turned back toward his car, Anna Hayes actually followed him.
“I talk, you listen,” she said, as she got into the passenger’s side.
Eduardo nodded and, to show Anna how literally he was taking the rule, said nothing.
At the café, Anna sat with her arms crossed and pointedly refused to look at her menu. “I hate what you do for a living,” she said.
Eduardo laughed. “Me, too, some days.”
They had driven to the café in silence. If Eduardo had asked her anything in the car, she could still have demanded that he take her back, which, of course, he would have. But now that they were at a café and had ordered coffee there was a trip wire of courtesy encircling their conversation—even if Anna became angry and wanted to leave, she would understand that Eduardo would need to get the check and pay before he could drive her home (this was, after all, just reality), and this would give him some extra time to work with. He was betting that Anna was afflicted with the same learned courtesy as Lily, and that—as he had with Lily—Eduardo could use it to his advantage. So he was surprised when Anna leaned back and looked him right in the eye and told him, in a mature and well-considered voice, that she thought he was a monster.
“Really,” she said again. “A monster.” So here, Eduardo saw, Anna’s similarities with her sister ended. Lily’s commitment to politeness had rarely wavered in their interviews, not really, no matter how angry and exhausted and terrified she was. She had tried to revoke it a few times—tried to walk back to the position she’d held before she’d been so faultlessly polite, as though he might forget—and occasionally she’d even attempted to insult him. But she was too awkward at this to ever seem truly venomous; she always reminded Eduardo of the infant pit viper he and Maria had come across once—it had been tiny, furious, hissing with such comic valiance that they’d stopped whatever fight they were having and laughed. But Anna, Eduardo was seeing, was different.
“A monster?” he said. “Really? How so?”
The waitress brought their coffees, and Anna waited for her to leave before she answered. “You’re a person with no empathy,” she said.
Eduardo took a sip of his coffee and leaned back. “For Lily, you mean.”
“For anyone.”
“Do you think you’re a person with empathy?”
“Yes.”
It was what anyone—anyone in the world—would say, but Anna’s response did not sound reflexive. It sounded like she had actually, at some point, considered the question—which, of course, meant that, at some point, she had actually wondered. “Do you have empathy for Katy?” said Eduardo.
“What would that mean at this point?” said Anna. Her voice was harsh. If this was a painful question, it did not show on her face. “I didn’t know her, and now she’s dead. I’m sorry for her family, but she never existed for me, so I don’t feel anything for her. You don’t, either.”
“I don’t?” Eduardo had expected Anna to say—emphatically, emotionally—that she did have empathy for Katy. He was glad that he never sounded surprised, even when he was.
“No,” said Anna. “You’re not really interested in Katy. That’s not what you’re in it for.”
“Well,” said Eduardo. “I suppose if I was really interested in Katy, instead of the law, then I’d be a much bigger monster than even you think I am.” He put his hands faceup on the table and stared at the radial symmetry of his palms. He was always struck by the recurrences of shapes in nature—by the clean economical indifference of recycling the same structure for a feather, and a leaf, and a heart. “If Lily had committed this crime,” he said without looking up, “what do you think would be the most empathetic way to treat her?”
“She didn’t do it.”
“I understand you think that.”
“She didn’t.”
Eduardo looked up. “We’re speaking abstractly. I’m just shifting your premise to ask you if it changes your conclusion about my sense of empathy.”
“I am not shifting my premise.” Anna sounded disgusted. Perhaps she was starting to believe that this was all Lily would have had to do. “My sister is a good person. She is a wonderful person. She didn’t do it, and you don’t understand a thing about her.”
Eduardo nodded quickly. “I think that’s true. I think I don’t understand her very well at all.” He trilled his fingers lightly on the table.
“I’m not saying she’s, like, beyond comprehension. She’s not even that unusual. It’s just that you, personally, don’t understand her.”
“I certainly don’t understand why she did what she did.”
“She didn’t do what she did. I mean, she didn’t do it at all.”
“Can I ask you a hypothetical question?”
“No.”
“What do you think would have made Lily act like she wasn’t herself?”
“You’re just going to ask me the question anyway? Doesn’t that mean your first question was hypothetical?”
“I think it means it was rhetorical.”
“You want me to tell you what imaginary circumstances could have made Lily commit a crime that she did not commit in real life. For our imaginations.”
“We can speak more broadly than that.”
“You’re unreal. Are you actually any good at this job?”
“Maybe not.” Eduardo traced his coffee’s meniscus with his spoon. “But that’s why we’re here, isn’t it? Because I’m doing my job badly and you are going to help me do it better by telling me where I’m going wrong? So, I’m listening. What would you like me to know?”
Anna was silent. She’d spread her fingers out on the table, stretching them slightly beyond their natural extension, in a gesture Eduardo recognized from Lily. He wondered if this was a shared long-standing habit, or something new that Anna had unconsciously adopted only after seeing her sister in captivity.
“Because I certainly have plenty of questions I could ask you, if you don’t feel like you have any,” said Eduardo. “Really, it’s your decision.”
“She didn’t do it.”
“Yes. You’ve expressed that opinion.” Eduardo put down his spoon and flipped open his notepad, landing on a grocery list written in Maria’s loopy script. He squinted, pretending to study it. “Okay. Here’s one. Was Lily much of a gymnast?”
“What?”
Eduardo put down the list. “She did a cartwheel when she was first interviewed. Did you know that?” Of course Anna knew this. Everyone knew this. If a random consumer of news anywhere in the world knew two things about Lily Hayes, the first was that she had murdered Katy Kellers, and the second was that she had done a cartwheel the very next day.
Anna glared. “You’d probably want to move around, too, if you’d been cooped up for hours and hours.”
“It was a pretty good one, actually,” said Eduardo. “Was she a very talented gymnast, growing up?”
“A lot of girls can do cartwheels.”
“You look like you’re both pretty athletic.” They weren’t. Anna was the only athlete in the family. Eduardo tapped his spoon against his cup. “But still. You’d think she’d realize that it looked a little odd. A little heartless. Given the circumstances. I mean, she’s a very smart girl, right? This is what I’m discerning from her academic history, at any rate—good grades, a 2300 on the SAT.” It had been a 2280, and he took a sip of coffee to give Anna a chance to correct him. To her credit, she did not.
“She’s just naïve,” said Anna. “She just had no idea that anyone was going to hold any of this stuff against her.”
“And why was that, do you think?” said Eduardo. “Was she not accustomed to people holding anything she did against her?”
Anna slammed her eyes to the
ground. Eduardo took another sip of his coffee, letting the silence between them sit. “I understand Lily’s nickname used to be ‘Lil the Pill,’ ” he said at last.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Am I right that, in English, ‘pill’ is slang for a ‘tiresomely disagreeable person’?” It had been her nickname as a child, a fact that the press had decided to willfully misinterpret—suggesting that the word “pill” might connote trouble of a particularly sexual variety, or be a reference to a drug habit of some kind. Eduardo had uncovered no evidence to support either of these conclusions.
“It was from when she was a kid,” said Anna. “You cannot possibly be serious.”
“Did she earn the nickname by being a tiresomely disagreeable person?”
“What are you talking about? She was a kid. This is ridiculous.”
“You find this irrelevant?”
“I don’t find it irrelevant. It is irrelevant.”
“Okay,” said Eduardo, closing his notepad with a thump. “Maybe you’re right. Here’s a question that you may find more relevant. I understand your sister had a history of killing animals?”
Anna blanched and looked down at the table, but seemed quickly to realize that she’d need to look Eduardo in the eye in order to answer. She raised her head and locked eyes with him. He could feel how uncomfortable this was for her, and not just because of who he was and what they were discussing. In her gaze was a bone-deep, lifelong discomfort with eye contact in general—Eduardo should know—and yet she did it anyway. “That’s not true,” she said.
“No?” said Eduardo. “She never killed an animal?”
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