Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

“Nobody’s trying to trick you, Lily,” said Eduardo. Saying “nobody” rendered specific accusations vague while making the accuser sound slightly schizophrenic. “It really is a very simple question.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Lily snapped. “If I’d done it, I would have had the sense to flush the fucking toilet.”

Eduardo raised his eyebrows and opened his notebook. If I’d done it , she’d said. And even though Eduardo would have no trouble remembering it, this was one thing that he actually did write down.

“Okay, Lily,” he said. “You’re right. Enough speculation. I’m going to ask you a very frank question now. Forget why someone might have done this. Can you imagine who might have?”

She shook her head, her dirty ponytail swaying thickly. What insouciance that might have communicated in better times! “No,” she said.

“No, really? No, you can’t imagine a single other person who might have possibly done it? In the whole city? In the entire time you’ve been here?”

“No.”

“What about Carlos? I understand he has a drinking problem.”

“No.”

“No, he doesn’t have a drinking problem?”

“No, he couldn’t have done it.”

“What about Beatriz?”

Lily laughed joylessly. “No.”

“Sebastien?”

She glared at him. “No.”

“Why are you so sure?”

Lily Hayes was not alone in her sureness: The police had not arrested Sebastien LeCompte after his initial interrogation, and in his gut, Eduardo did not believe that Sebastien had been present at the murder. Nevertheless, it seemed to Eduardo that Sebastien LeCompte was somehow the crime’s original mover, standing off in the shadows, beyond the particulars of the evening; the ultimate cause behind all of the proximate ones. Since Lily’s arrest, Eduardo had gone three times to Sebastien LeCompte’s mansion to try to speak with him. Each time, Sebastien LeCompte had seemed not to be at home—though this was unlikely, since every report about the kid suggested that he had neither friends nor gainful employment nor romantic involvements beyond Lily and possibly Katy, who were now respectively imprisoned and dead. It was much likelier that Sebastien LeCompte was hiding. But he could not hide forever.

“I know Sebastien,” said Lily.

“Do you? How well?”

“Well enough.”

“Not well enough to love him, though. So maybe well enough to know not to?”

Lily glowered.

“How do you think your friend Sebastien felt about Katy Kellers?” said Eduardo.

“I don’t know.”

“But if you had to guess.”

“I guess he probably liked her.”

“You said they were sleeping together.”

Lily looked at him witheringly. “ You said that.”

“You mentioned in your initial conversation with the police that Katy had learned about the lawsuit against Carlos Carrizo from Sebastien.”

“She said she had.”

“Do you know why the two of them might have had occasion to see each other?”

“He did live next door.”

“Do you think they saw much of each other?”

“I have no idea.”

“But if you had to guess.”

Lily sat back in her chair. “This conversation is getting a little boring, you know?” She cocked her head to one side. This was not, in fact, an original pose for a young person in custody. Defendants might not always be so direct, but Eduardo had seen the rest of it often enough—the attitude, the facial expression, the body language, all of it designed to say: I’ve got bigger problems than you . But they didn’t. Lily Hayes certainly didn’t. Lily Hayes had never had a bigger problem than this one. It was quite possible that, before this, she’d never had any real problems at all.

“Boring?” said Eduardo. “This conversation that is trying to establish your guilt or innocence in the question of the murder of your roommate? These questions that are designed to get us closer to knowing who killed her? They bore you?”

Lily drooped her head and said nothing. Her ponytail looked deflated. “Can I have some water?” she said.

“No.”

“I have a right to water.”

“I have some emails I’d like to read you first.”

Lily paled. “No,” she said.

Eduardo did not like doing this. Lily Hayes was young and she was lost and she’d done the most horrific thing imaginable, for reasons that were probably inscrutable even to her. She was in a strange country and she was probably never going home. Eduardo had not planned on reading her the emails today. But if she was already going to be combative, then he would have to be, too. He would have had to do it sooner or later, anyway, and one could even argue that it was better to get it over with. Fulfilling the inevitable early was often—although, of course, not always—a kind of mercy.

Eduardo cleared his throat and flipped to the most important email: a missive Lily had written to her father her first week in Buenos Aires. It was something of an introduction to Lily’s world; as such, it would serve as a natural introduction to the state’s case, and Eduardo would likely quote it during his opening remarks.

“ ‘The roommate,’ ” Eduardo read aloud in English, “ ‘is Katy. She spends a lot of time reading her economics textbooks. She’s brokenhearted from the recent departure of her boyfriend—right in time for junior-year study abroad, and she’s surprised!’ ” Eduardo delivered all of this deadpan. In another context, he thought, this might be hilarious—his ponderous voice with its notable accent reading the words of a simpering, self-righteous young girl. “ ‘You’d think she never watched a CW teen soap growing up,’ ” he continued. “ ‘Then again, neither did I—you wouldn’t let me!—but I turned out reasonably savvy, I like to think.’ ”

Eduardo glanced up at Lily. Her face was stony. If anything was breaking anywhere within her, he could not see it. He hadn’t been sure he was going to continue, but now he decided he would, because he could see that Lily did not remember what was coming next.

“ ‘She’s probably the most typical person I’ve ever met,’ ” he went on. “ ‘Her life has been really easy. You can just tell. She is from California, after all.’ ” Eduardo put down the paper. Lily’s face was implacable and still. Perhaps there was the faintest suggestion of something unearthing itself, but whether this was fear or anger or self-pity or true and genuine remorse, it was very hard to say. “You thought Katy’s life was easy?” he said.

Lily nodded shakily.

“Do you still think Katy’s life was easy?”

At this, Lily began to cry. Eduardo did not like to do it, but he pressed on.

“Should I read to you from the autopsy report? And then we can talk about whether Katy’s life was easy?”

“No. Stop. Please stop.” Lily’s face was flushed and patchy. In spite of everything, Eduardo did not like to make her cry. This wrenching and diabolical thing that she had done would be with her forever; it would cast itself backward into her past; she would have to understand—and everyone else would have to understand—that it had actually been with her all along. Her parents would remember her as the addled, orthodontiaed teenager she had once been, and it would be there. They’d remember her as a quick-witted preadolescent and a chubby-limbed toddler and a squalling, wrinkled infant, and it would be there; her mother would remember her pregnancy—the minor lightning of the child quickening, gathering itself into its life—and would find that it had been there, too. What Lily had done to Katy would blacken Lily’s whole life—its singular irreducibility would stain every soccer game and family outing and first kiss—just as it would elevate Katy’s whole life, transforming every moment, no matter how small-minded or mundane, into something fated and futile and grand. Everything for both of them had been straining toward this dreadful black horizon; it had been everywhere, it had been everything, even if neither of them had known it.