Chapter 4
I toss the magazine on the coffee table. Sam keeps playing, and I’m about to go in the kitchen and see if Jess needs some help when my phone vibrates in my back pocket. I pull it out and see a text from one of my friends, Fiona.
OMG. The resemblance! Call me.
I text her back.
***
I wonder what she’s on about, but the message sets my nerves tingling. Was there some video on TikTok of a woman resembling me doing something embarrassing at a bar or a party? That’s all I need now.
Then from the kitchen, something shatters. Concern immediately snaps Sam out of his play. He rockets to standing, his brown eyes wide, a dino dangling in one hand.
“Don’t worry, hon,” I say. “Your mom just dropped something. You stay and play. I’ll check.” But my heart races. I resist the urge to dash into the kitchen in front of him. The last thing I want is to drum up more drama in his life.
When I enter, Jess is standing still beside a broken glass shattered across the counter and the floor. She’s looking down at her phone.
“Cros.” She looks up. Her face is white. “Have you seen this?”
Jess holds out her phone, steps my way.
“Stop, Jess,” I say. Fortunately, it doesn’t look like she’d filled the glass with anything yet when she dropped it because I see no liquid. “What?” I step over the mess and take her phone. “What is it?”
I look down at Jess’s screen and see . . .
Me.
For a long moment, I freeze, staring down at me, with me looking back at me.
Below the sketch, a message stands in yellow: Same Drill. Six Days. Cocky now, like the guy is self-satisfied he’s grabbed the attention of the entire nation. Most of the world, too, thanks to social media.
“It’s you,” she says, breathy and dramatic, like she’s starring in a horror flick. She puts a hand to her mouth.
For one tiny second, I agree. My heart hammers ridiculously in my chest.
The woman in the sketch has medium-length, dark, wavy hair tucked behind her ears, a thin nose, slightly upward-slanting eyes, and small brackets that frame her mouth even when not smiling. Like mine.
But no, I tell myself, reaching for some common sense. Okay, the sketch does look like me, but she could just as easily be the woman from the catalog Sam just pointed out seconds ago. “No,” I say, still studying the screen. “It’s not.”
Jess’s eyes are quarters, gawking at me like I’m an apparition.
“Jess, come on. No.”
“Yes. Look at her. It looks just like you.”
I do not need this right now. At all. Not on the anniversary of her rape. As surreal as this moment feels, calming my sister down is all I can think about. A high-pitched static plays in my head. Make this better, Crosbie. Fix this. Make this better right now.
“I mean,” I say, “it’s just a sketch. Sketches are vague. You draw. You should know.”
She comes over, her shoe crunching on glass. She grabs her phone back to study it again.
“Where’s the broom?”
She absently points to the kitchen door that goes to the garage while she continues to stare at her screen, now nervously swiping through articles to see what else is being reported.
On my way into the garage, I pull my own phone back out to open the news piece when a call comes in.
It’s Wallace, my ex-boyfriend and the brother of my college roommate. Wallace and I have remained friends even after the breakup.
“Crosbie.” He’s a little breathless. “Where are you?”
“At Jess’s.” I grab the broom and walk back in.
“Have you seen it?” he asks.
“Yes. Was just about to read the article. Rest assured. It’s not me.”
“Rest assured?”
“I was just telling Jess,” I say loudly so she can hear every word as I reenter the kitchen.
Her head pops up from her phone.
“These traits are so common,” I tell Wallace. “Ask any detective looking for a suspect using only a composite. This is too generic. This could be a lot of women.”
“It’s . . . well . . .” he says. “It’s the earrings.”
The earrings?
“Hold on,” I tell him. I no longer want Jess to hear any of this.
“I forgot the dustpan,” I say to my sister.
I hand her the broom and go back into the garage, tap on the photo, and pinch to enlarge it to see one of the earrings.
It’s in the shape of a feather with a round stone in the center of the feather, halfway down.
What the hell?
A jagged tip of a small iceberg juts above cold waters in the center of my belly.
They were a gift from Wallace when we were dating.
He thought it would be nice to give me a little something when I hung out my shingle a few months after I quit the force, like I deserved a reward for refusing to stay in a job where I felt like a venomous snake that all my coworkers gave a wide berth to in the hallways.
What he didn’t understand was that quitting was never going to make me stop feeling poisonous, but at least it helped seem like I was repenting on some level.
But here they are, dangling from the lobes of a woman in a sketch that looks very much like me, and it’s been put out there by some sicko who’s been terrorizing the nation. A fine sheen of heat prickles the back of my neck.
The earrings aren’t entirely uncommon, though.
“Wall,” I say, summoning levelheadedness. “A lot of people could have earrings like that.” It’s more of a question than a statement. I want reassurance so I can march back in there and tell Jess she can totally forget this whole ridiculous notion. “Where’d you get them again?”
“I told you when I gave them to you.” He sounds miffed.
“No, I know. I’m sorry.” God, I do know. He bought them from a friend from college, a guy who sells jewelry at farmers’ markets, art walks, and festivals. He even sells them in gift shops, too, especially around Glacier and Yellowstone. They have a Native American, Western flair.
It was a nice gesture on Wallace’s part, and I don’t know why I asked.
My quizzing him about where he bought them was about as callous and insensitive as when I abruptly parachuted out of the relationship.
No notice and, I realized later, no care or concern for his feelings.
I acted like we were teenagers instead of in our late twenties.
Back then, I chalked it up to all the baggage surrounding his sister, Sophie.
Now? Well, I chalk it up to the strangeness of the conversation, of me trying to ignore the cold pit pooling in my stomach and the vertiginous sensation that things have suddenly tilted off-kilter.
And Jess. I need to get back into the kitchen.
“I got them from Kerry,” he says. “They’re not from a department store. They’re not mass-produced.”
“But they’re sold in gift shops near the national parks, where millions of tourists come through?”
“True.”
“And I’m guessing no one has a patent on feather-shaped jewelry.”
“I guess.” He sighs loudly.
“Plus, this sketch, it’s black and white. You can’t tell if those circles in the center are beads or gems or—”
“Yeah, but Crosbie, it’s weird, okay?”
“I’ll admit that. But really, it’s not me. And I need to go.” I tell Wallace I’ll get back to him later and grab the dustpan.
Jess sweeps up glass.
“Here, I’ll do that.” I grab the broom from her and start funneling the shards into the pan.
She sits down at the table and locks onto her phone again.
“Jess,” I say. “Put that away. It’s not me, okay?”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I’m a nobody from Montana.”
But am I sure?
Yes. I may have stuff—big, ugly stuff—shoved deep into a dark closet, but that doesn’t mean it’s me.
My “things”—the bruised, ugly truths I take to bed with me each night and wake up with every morning—are vague and amorphous, like messy Etch A Sketches with wayward lines.
And even though one of those truths could land me in jail, there’s only one person who knows about it, and there’s no way he’d say anything to anyone. Ever.
“And I’m not even in the public eye like you,” I add.
Her lower lip pouts.
“Look, Jess, I promise. It’s not me. It’s coincidence. Let’s just have a nice dinner with Sam. We’ll deal with this later. Okay?”
When I get a nod from her, I ask her to grab me a trash bag and a vacuum so we can get any remaining minuscule fragments.
But when I turn back to sweeping, I do it slowly, methodically, as if something tells me I should hold on to this mundane chore for a moment longer, as if my subconscious already knows that I should fight for this last normal instant before my life suddenly changes.