“Huh?” Anne tugged out her silent earphones. Maybe she hadn’t heard right. “You put Kool-Aid, the drink, on your hair?”
“Sure.” Willa smiled. “Just add water.”
Anne wasn’t sure what to say, so she fake-jogged for a moment in silence. There were things she would never understand about her generation, and her experiments with haircolor tended to the more conventional. When she started practice, she dyed her hair Professional Brown, but it had proved futile. She’d remained Unprofessional, only with really boring hair, so she’d gone back to her natural Lucille Ball Red. She took another conversational stab. “I didn’t know you could put Kool-Aid in your hair.”
“Sure,” Willa answered, strolling along in her T-shirt and shorts. “I used to use Manic Panic, but Kool-Aid works just as well. The blue was Blueberry, and to get rid of it, I just put Cherry on top, and my hair turned black.”
“Blackberry?”
“I guess.” Willa didn’t get the joke. “Then I hennaed it, and it turned out kind of coppery.”
Anne fake-scaled another hill and kept going. The lighted display on the treadmill told her she had fake-jogged for only 2:28, which meant she had approximately 3 years and 23 hours left. She let her glance slip sideways and checked Willa’s display. Willa didn’t have any hills ahead, which meant she lacked sufficient stress in her diet.
“What are you doing for the Fourth, Anne?”
“I have to hole up in my house and work all weekend. I have a big trial on Tuesday.”
“Oh, that’s right, you’re a lawyer.”
Anne felt the urge to tell Willa about her big victory in court today, naked man and all, but it would be pathetic. She didn’t know Willa very well and they’d talked only a few times about their respective personal lives, or lack thereof. Like Anne, Willa lived alone and wasn’t from Philly. Anne sensed that she had a trust fund, which was where the similarities between the two girls came to the proverbial screeching halt. “Do you have plans for the holiday?”
“Not anymore. I was gonna dog-sit this weekend for this couple, but they broke up.”
“The couple?”
“The dogs.”
Anne didn’t ask. She was fake-puffing too hard anyway. “I didn’t know you dog-sat.”
“I do, sometimes, for fun. I love dogs. When I dog-sit, I use the time to sketch them.” Willa strolled along on her machine. “There’ll be a lot else to sketch this weekend, I guess. There’s something called the Party on the Parkway, and fireworks at the Art Museum on Monday night.”
“Oh, no. I live right off the Parkway.” This would be Anne’s first Independence Day in Philly, and she hadn’t thought of it. How would she get any work done? Damn. Kilimanjaro loomed on her Life Fitness display. Another example of random. “I have to work this weekend. How am I gonna do that?”
“Don’t you have an office?”
“Yeah, but—” Anne didn’t want to run into Mary and Judy. Or worse, Bennie. Work would be okay if it weren’t for coworkers.
“Offices suck, right?”
“Exactly.”
“So why don’t you take off?” Willa’s saunter slowed to a crawl. Soon she would be going in reverse, and the gym would have to pay her.
“Take off?”
“Aren’t you single?”
“Very.”
“So go to the Jersey shore. I was on North Cape May once, and there’s a national park there. Very quiet and peaceful. I got a lot of sketching done.”
“Down the shore?” It was code for the Jersey shore. Everybody in Philadelphia vacationed in South Jersey. Unlike L.A., Philly wasn’t a summer-in-Provence kind of town, thank God. “I suppose I could go.”
Willa resumed her slow walk, and Anne fell instantly in love with the idea of a weekend getaway. What a way to celebrate her big win! She didn’t own a car, but she always rented the same convertible, mainly to go food-shopping on the weekends. The manager at the Hertz in town usually saved it for her; it was a fire-engine red Mustang that would embarrass most pimps. She planned to buy it as soon as she got out of credit-card debt and hell froze over.
“Why not?” Anne said. “I could go away for the weekend!”
“Sure you could. Get crazy. Dye your hair purple.”
“Or not.” Anne giggled, her mood lifting. “But I could call a realtor. I’m lucky, maybe I’ll get a cancellation.”
“From some lawyer who had to stay in the hot city.” Willa laughed, and so did Anne.
“Sucker.”
“Totally.”
Then Anne remembered Mel. “But I have a cat. I can’t leave him.”
“I guess I could sit for a cat. I like cats. I could sketch a cat.”
Anne hesitated at the thought of letting a stranger into her house, since what had happened with Kevin. But Willa was a woman, and she seemed honest and, most importantly, not a psycho. Anne, who had never given a thought to going down the shore, now could hardly wait to get there. She could work like crazy, and she’d never seen the Atlantic Ocean. She was pretty sure she could find it. “Please, would you cat-sit for me this weekend, Willa?” she asked.
“Okay, I’ll sketch the cat, and maybe even the fireworks. If you’re near the Parkway, your place’ll have a great view.” Willa’s walk slowed to a standstill. “You want to go now and beat the traffic? I’ll finish my run on the way to your house. I can clean up at your place.”
“Great!” Anne pressed the clear button. “To hell with this! I’ll run tomorrow morning on the beach, in the fresh ocean breeze! Or maybe I won’t! Ha!”
Anne had scored both Mustang and seashore rental by the time she made it home, hurrying in gym clothes to her Fairmount neighborhood, which lay just outside of Philly’s business district. It was a gentrified section of the city, characterized by art museums, the Free Library, and the family court, interspersed with blocks of colonial town houses with repointed brick facades and freshly painted shutters. Bennie Rosato owned a house in the area, and Fairmount was a quiet, safe neighborhood, which was all Anne cared about after her move east. Parking she could live without.
The house she rented stood three-stories high but was downright anorexic; only one-room wide, it was a cozy, two-bedroom trinity, which was what Philadelphians called houses with one room on each floor. Anne hit her front door running, ignoring the bills and catalogs spilling through the mail slot and onto the rug in the tiny entrance hall. She locked and latched the door, dropped her briefcase and purse on the living room floor, and tore upstairs with her gym bag.
“Mel! Mel! We won our motion!” Anne called to the cat, which confirmed for her she’d been living alone too long. She bounded into her bedroom and dropped the gym bag on the floor, startling into wakefulness the chubby brown tabby curled at the foot of her unmade bed. Mel flattened his ears in Attack Cat until he realized it was only her, then relaxed, blinking his large, green eyes slowly. Anne went to the bed, cupped his furry face in her palms, and kissed the hard, spongy pink of his nose.
“We won, handsome!” she said again, but Mel only yawned, his teeth bright white spikes. When he closed his mouth, the tips stayed on the outside, and he morphed into Halloween Cat. Mel was acting very scary today, and Anne wondered if he had his holidays mixed up.
“Mel, the good news is that we won. The bad news is that I’m going away, but you’re going to be fine. You’ll meet a very nice girl who wants to draw your picture, okay?” Anne gave him another quick kiss, but he didn’t purr, which told her he was worried about being left alone with a total stranger who dyed her hair blue. Mental note: People project all sorts of emotions onto their cats, and cats like it that way.
Anne gave Mel a final kiss, hurried to her messy bureau, and pulled out clean undies, two T-shirts, a denim skirt, and an extra pair of shorts. She plucked her leopard-print mules from the bottom of the closet, because they always made her feel festive and she was celebrating.
“Did I mention that we won our motion, Mel?” Anne asked, stuffing the cl
othes into her gym bag. She’d shower at her new apartment at the beach, though she hurried into the bathroom, fetched her Kiehl’s shampoo, conditioner, and grapefruit body lotion, as well as her makeup in its I Love Lucy tin, which bore a colorized scene of the road trip to California. She couldn’t leave without Lucy or grapefruit moisturizer. That would be camping.
“I’m outta here, Mel!” she sang out as she hustled back to the bedroom, but Mel had fallen asleep and didn’t wake up when she stuffed the toiletries into the bag and zipped it closed, or even when the doorbell rang. It had to be Willa, and Anne slung the bag over her shoulder and scooped up the slumbering cat, who draped his stripy front legs on either side of her forearms and permitted himself to be carted downstairs. Sedan Chair Cat.
“Coming!” Anne called out when she reached the first floor and went to the peephole, just to be sure. The action was automatic at this point, even though Kevin was in jail a zillion miles away. She dreaded the day he got out, but that was two years from now. Standing on the front stoop was Willa Hansen, huffing and puffing in her workout clothes.
“Come on in!” Anne unlatched and opened the door, and Willa cooed the moment she saw Mel.
“Oooooh! Isn’t he just so pretty!”
And Anne and Mel knew everything was going to be just fine.
Cars, minivans, and pickup trucks stretched in three lanes as far as the eye could see, with brake lights that formed dotted red lines. It was just another example of random, and Anne resigned herself to not getting to the shore until way after dark. She put the Mustang convertible in park and leaned her head against the black headrest. The night air blew cool and blessedly free of humidity. The sky was deepening to a rich sapphire, the stars brightening slowly, diamonds in relief.
A blue Voyager minivan next to her had two kid’s bicycles strapped to a rack on the back, their spokes laced with red, white, and blue crepe paper, and the rear compartment of the van had been packed with Acme grocery bags, folded sheets, and a Big Bird doll, his beak smashed against the smoked glass. Anne could barely make out the family inside, but here was evidence of them—kids bouncing on the seats, and a mother and a father in front.
She looked away and flicked on the radio, suddenly restless. She scanned but there was nothing on but oldies older than her and sports scores, which reminded her of exercise. She turned it off. The night fell silent except for the idling of three thousand minivans bearing happy families to the shore, undoubtedly poisoning the air of women refusing to be lonely in their Mustang convertibles. Anne plucked a can of Diet Coke from the cupholder and raised it in a toast. “To carbon monoxide, and to me,” she said. She took a sip of warm, flat soda, then got an idea:
She had won, and there was one person she could tell. She didn’t stop to wonder why—for once didn’t pause to observe herself observing herself—or to make even a single mental note. She was just going to do it. Just do it!
She set down the soda can and rummaged in her purse for her cell phone and little red address book, and opened both. She had to hold the address book up in the headlights of the car behind her to read it, and she thumbed to the M listings and found the phone number. There were five old numbers before it, all crossed out, and she didn’t know if the most recent number would work. It hadn’t for a few months, but it was all she had.
She pushed in the area code for L.A., then the phone number. It would be dinnertime there. The tinny rings started, one, two, three rings, with faint crackling on the signal. She waited for the call to be picked up, and despite the fact that she just had a slug of soda, her throat went suddenly dry. After a moment, the rings stopped and a mechanical voice came on:
“The number you have dialed is no longer in service. Please check your records . . .”
Anne felt her heart sink, a reaction she hated as soon as she had it, and gritted her teeth. She was determined not to be a victim, a wimp, or a total loser. So she let the mechanical voice drone away in a continuous loop and delivered her message anyway:
“Hi, how are you? I thought you might like to know that I won a very important motion today in court. I thought it up by myself, and it was a little crazy, but it worked. Other than that, I’m fine, really, and don’t worry about me.” She paused. “I love you, too, Mom.”
Then she pressed End and flipped the cell phone closed.
3
Seagulls squawked over a greasy brown bag in a trash can, and dappled pigeons waddled along the weathered boardwalk, their scaly pink-red feet churning like so many wind-up toys. Saturday morning had dawned clear, hot, and sunny at the Jersey shore, and Anne had learned that the Atlantic Ocean looked exactly like the Pacific. Wet, big, blue, and moving a lot. Her idea of natural beauty remained the King of Prussia Mall.
She was finishing her morning run, having hated every step of three miles down the windy boardwalk, at fourteen minutes per. Okay, it wasn’t the fastest pace, but Anne was sweating respectably through her big T-shirt and bike shorts. She was panting, too, but that was because her sports bra was cutting off her oxygen supply. Mental note: Satan exists and he works for Champion.
While Anne waited for her breathing to return to normal, she wiped her eyes behind black Oakley sunglasses and smoothed her hair back into its damp ponytail. A generous dollop of zinc oxide concealed her top lip. Other runners jogged by in smugly oversized triathlon watches and brand-new Sauconys, their cushioned footsteps thundering on the old gray boards. There were so many more people on the boardwalk than when Anne had started her run. The Fourth of July weekend had evidently begun, and a family pedaled past in a rental surrey with a red-and-white striped awning. A few male runners broke stride to check her out on the fly, which was when Anne decided to go home to her little apartment and get to work.
She started to walk back, but the breeze was too warm to cool anything and she stopped at a newsstand on the corner for a bottle of water and a Philly newspaper. She bought both with soggy bills, stepped away from the newsstand, and was about to crack the white plastic cap to the Evian when she unfolded the newspaper, saw the headline, and froze.
LAWYER FOUND MURDERED, it screamed, and plastered underneath it was Anne’s own law-school graduation picture. Cheap inks colored her eyes the candy-coated green of M&Ms, and her hair was an orange-red seen only on hunting gear. A black band framed her photo, but the caption read simply, Anne Murphy.
She laughed, nervously. The lead story was evidently about her death, but she wasn’t dead. Tired, yes, and retaining water. But not dead. It was obviously a mistake, a huge mistake. She opened the newspaper, but a gust of wind pungent with she-crab and diesel fuel whipped off the ocean, catching the pages like a sail. She defeated the unruly paper and read the lead paragraphs:
Anne Murphy, 28, an attorney representing Internet company Chipster.com, was found slain at her home last night. Police have ruled the death a homicide resulting from gunshots fired at close range. Murphy was pronounced dead at Temple University Hospital at approximately 11:48 p.m. Friday night.
Police were called to Murphy’s home at 2257 Waltin Street when a neighbor reported hearing shots. There was no sign of forced entry, and police have no suspects in the slaying at the present time.
Anne took off her sunglasses and read the paragraph again. Her sense of humor vanished. She had to be seeing things. It didn’t make sense. Maybe the address was wrong? She double-checked it. 2257 Waltin Street. It was her house, but she wasn’t dead. She wasn’t even there.
Oh, my God. Suddenly her throat caught. She realized with a horrifying jolt what must have happened. It must have been Willa’s body the police found.
Could this be? Could this really be? Was Willa dead? Anne’s heart stalled in her chest. Her eyes welled up suddenly, blurring the busy boardwalk. She slipped her Oakleys back on with a trembling hand.
Kevin did this, whispered a voice in her head, a voice she’d thought she’d finally banished. You know Kevin did this.
She struggled against the voice and the conclus
ion, but she couldn’t help it. Willa, dead? No! Anne needed to know everything, all the details. She reread the article, but it was only a summary of her legal career, with a group photo of the Rosato lawyers under the subhead a woman’s touch. It told her nothing more about the murder.
She couldn’t wrap her mind around it. She held off panic vainly, like a hand raised against the ocean tide. What had happened? How could this be? She blinked tears from her eyes and ripped through the rest of the paper, but it was all Independence Day highlights: red, white, and blue sidebars about parade schedules and fireworks at the Art Museum. A cyclist with sculpted thighs eyed her as he sped past, followed by a trio of lanky runners, turning toward her as one. She tore back to the main story and read it over and over, trying to comprehend what had happened.
Kevin got out, but how? Why didn’t they tell me?
Anne couldn’t stop the voice, or the questions. Had the cops mistaken Willa for her? How? They didn’t look anything alike. Willa had brown eyes, her nose was different, and she had no scars. Who had identified the body? Then Anne thought again. She and Willa were roughly the same height—both five foot five—and the same size, a six. Willa’s hair was as long as Anne’s, and her new haircolor was so similar.
Anne felt her heart wrench. Then she remembered that before she’d left, she had lent Willa her T-shirt from the office, the one with ROSATO & ASSOCIATES printed across the front. But so what? Anne didn’t understand anything all of a sudden. The cops didn’t rely on clothes, hair, or dress size to identify bodies. They used DNA, dental records, scientific methods, stuff like that, didn’t they?
Kevin would know it wasn’t me.
It didn’t make sense. Or maybe he’d hired somebody? No. Never, not even from prison. He’d want to do it himself. She felt stricken. Who was killed in her house? Why did they think it was her? Her head throbbed. The newspaper itched in her hand. She didn’t want to hold it a minute longer. She whirled around, dropped her water bottle, and collided with another runner, a middle-aged man who looked delighted to catch her in his arms.
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