love affair complete with a storybook ending. Samara was getting her inheritance after all, and Jaywalker his longanticipated sabbatical. In a word, they were both free.
But evidently it wasn't meant to be.
When it unraveled, it unraveled in a hurry. They were sitting in front of the fireplace one night, the same fireplace they'd first made love in front of. But it was July, and the only fire this time was at the far end of a generous joint Samara had expertly rolled for the two of them. They were talking about the trial. They did that infrequently, but they did it. It had been Jaywalker's last trial, after all, and Samara's first and last. A watershed event for both of them.
'How did you figure out there had to be another knife in the dishwasher?' she asked him, her eyes watery from the smoke but as arresting as ever.
'It had to be there somewhere,' said Jaywalker. 'The dishwasher seemed a logical enough place. The refrigera tor or the freezer would have destroyed any fingerprints, but the blood would have been preserved. So I figured the dishwasher was a good bet.' For some reason, he realized, he'd shied away from telling her about the dream he'd had. That would remain his secret, his and his wife's.
'Pretty clever of us, huh?'
'Us?'
'Yeah,' said Samara, with a mischievous grin. 'You deserve credit for figuring it out.'
'And you?'
'Is my case really over?'
'Yup.'
'They can never try me again, no matter what?'
'No matter what. It'd be double jeopardy.'
'And we're both adults?'
'I certainly am.'
She smiled, and for a moment Jaywalker thought she was reacting to his clever reply. But her smile was just a bit too smug and stayed on her face just a moment too long for it to be simply that. It was a smile of satisfaction, a smile of triumph over having pulled something off despite over whelming odds. But Jaywalker had absolutely no clue what it really meant.
So he asked her. 'What?' he said.
'Nothing.'
'C'mon,' he said. 'You can trust me.'
She smiled again and took a long hit from the joint. 'You don't really think it was Barry who put that knife in the dishwasher, do you?'
Jaywalker said nothing. He probably couldn't have if he'd wanted to. All he was aware of was a rushing noise in his ears, so deafening as to drown out everything else. Her words, his thoughts, everything.
And that was it, the end of the conversation. What was more, she would never, ever go there again, no matter how hard he pushed her. It was as though smoking the joint had loosened her tongue for a moment, but only for a moment.
So it was never as though he really knew one way or the other. But that was the problem, right there. It would have been okay if he'd known she was guilty. Hell, he'd repre sented enough guilty people in his day, and had gotten his share of them off and then some. He could have lived with knowing she was guilty.
It was the not knowing that proved to be intolerable, the notion that she might have been playing him all along. And every time he would confront her and ask her, she would deflect his questions and dodge his accusations. She'd say something meant to sound funny, like, 'You always said it didn't matter to you one way or the other,' or 'You're not my lawyer anymore, so our conversations aren't privi leged, are they?' Only her comments never sounded funny to Jaywalker.
So he was left to wonder.
He would fall asleep wondering, and he'd wake up won dering. He'd wonder while they were making love. Was the woman in his arms the innocent victim of a sinister frameup that had come perilously close to working? Or was she a serial stabber who emerged, locustlike, every twelve or fourteen years to strike again? And when he caught himself the third time-or perhaps it was even the fourth or fifth- counting the steak knives left in Samara's kitchen drawer before going upstairs and climbing into bed with her, just to make sure they were all present and accounted for, he decided it was just too much.
Tom Burke had begun his summation by saying, 'Sometimes things aren't what they seem to be. But some times they are.' When you came right down to it, maybe the reason why Samara had seemed so guilty for so long was because she was.
Years and years ago, when Jaywalker's daughter had been a toddler of two, she'd picked up an expression, latched on to it, and used it whenever she was asked a yesor-no question. 'Yes, no, maybe so,' she would chant in a lilting, singsong voice. As cute as it was, it meant abso lutely nothing, of course. All it did was list the possibili ties. But in her two-year-old wisdom, his daughter had been smarter than Tom Burke, smarter than Anthony Bon figlio, smarter by far than Jaywalker. Truth could be a slip pery thing, far more elusive and hard to get your hands around than a simple black-or-white, up-or-down concept like guilty or not guilty.
Sometimes things aren't what they seem to be.
Sometimes they are.
And sometimes, you just don't know.
