for the first time, over a filthy counter in a no-contact interview room. Alice had on an orange jumpsuit, and her hair was short then, scissored into crude layers and dyed a brassy red. Still, Bennie had taken one look at her and had seen a mirror image. She’d been struck dumb, but Alice had spoken with confidence, words that marked a turning point in Bennie’s life.
Bennie had proved that Alice wasn’t guilty in court, but it had been harder to prove that Alice was really her twin. Her mother, Carmela Rosato, was the only parent Bennie had ever known, but by the time Alice surfaced, her mother’s depression had worsened to the point that she’d been hospitalized, comatose and unable to speak. Bennie never met her father, one William Winslow, who hadn’t stayed around long enough to marry her mother, and she’d had to track him down to verify Alice’s story. It had turned out to be true. Their mother had given birth to two babies but kept only one, because she was broke and battling depression, so she’d kept Bennie and put Alice up for adoption. So to Bennie, Alice was a complete and total stranger, who just happened to be family.
Bennie had felt so strange when she learned she had a twin; like being found when she didn’t know she was lost. She didn’t remember even meeting her father, and her whole life, it had been just her and her mother, alone against the world. In the beginning, her mother worked as a secretary, but in time, her mental illness overcame her, inching over her like a shadow growing longer toward day’s end. She’d gotten professional help while she was still well enough to ask for it, and Bennie remembered going with her, and eventually taking her, to a series of doctors and hospitals who experimented with drugs, dosages, and finally, electroshock.
All the time her mother had grown less and less capable, and Bennie had taken care of her, instead of the other way around, even from middle school. The news that there had been two children, twins, helped Bennie understand her mother’s downward slide, because such a devoted mother would be wracked with guilt over giving up her own child. Bennie had plenty of guilt herself, when the fact of Alice came to light. She’d tried to compensate for being the one chosen, but Alice had come in and out of her life only to make trouble. Their relationship was tumultuous, but after one big blow-up, Alice finally had redeemed herself. They’d made peace, and Bennie had gotten her sister the job at PLG.
Bennie still couldn’t understand why this was happening, now. She’d had no warning, could fathom no reasons except ancient jealousy. Payback. Resentment. Her thoughts wandered, and she couldn’t understand how in God’s name she’d let this happen. She should’ve been on her guard. She should’ve known better. There was a time, early on in their relationship, when she hadn’t trusted Alice at all, even before she’d glimpsed how dark her soul could be. Like a test in school, it turned out that the first answer was the correct one.
In those early days, Bennie had viewed Alice as the typical prisoner who would say or do anything to get a lawyer, and her story about who had really committed the murder was almost a stereotype. The murder victim was a cop who was also her live-in boyfriend, and Alice claimed she was framed for the murder by a conspiracy of corrupt cops. Bennie thought back to how Alice had sucked her into the representation.
At their first meeting, Alice had given her a photo that she said was their father, William Winslow, holding the two of them as babies. She claimed he’d given her the picture during one of his visits to the prison. Bennie had never seen a picture of her father, much less talked with him in the flesh, and even though the man in the photo had light hair and blue eyes, she immediately suspected that Alice was trying to reel her in using the photo, like bait wriggling on a barbed hook.
Alice had followed it up with a second photo, one of her mother. The photo was also allegedly from her father, and on the back it read
The picture came as a revelation because Bennie had seen her mother only in heartbreaking decline, but even so, she’d wondered if the photo was a fake and the handwriting on its back a forgery. She hadn’t credited Alice’s version of its origin, guessing that it had come from one of the other girls on the stools.
She tried to remember at which point she’d lost her objectivity about Alice. Even though Alice’s story about the cop’s death turned out to be true, and she hadn’t killed him, it didn’t mean that she wasn’t a con artist. And later, something happened that made Bennie wonder if Alice really had murdered someone, at least once in her life. Before now.
Bennie inhaled once, then again. Her lungs didn’t fill. She opened her mouth but still couldn’t get a good breath. Her heart fluttered, arrhythmic and panicky. Reality came back into terrifying focus. How long until she ran out of oxygen? How long could she live without food? How long without water? She had no sense of time. Her watch was gone.
Panic washed over her, drowning any power of reason. She started panting. She couldn’t get her breath and she couldn’t control herself anymore. She couldn’t think of anything but being sealed in a box until she suffocated. Tears of fright sprang to her eyes, and she began pounding on the lid again, then kicking up with her feet and knees. She screamed and hollered and prayed that somebody would hear her or Alice would come back.
She pounded on and on, fighting for her life against the darkness, unyielding.
Chapter Six
Alice backed up against the front door of Bennie’s house, edging away from the growling dog. She dropped her bags, shaking as the dog sniffed her sneakers, pressing his nose against the droplets of blood. He growled louder, and when his black lips curled so his teeth showed, she forgot her fear and kicked him. He yelped and sprawled backwards, his back legs slipping out from under him, then her instincts took over.
She went after him, kicking him again and again, connecting twice with his chest, but he ran yelping from the living room. She chased him to the back of the house, where there was a dark kitchen. She flicked on the light, and in the corner was an open door to a basement. She could hear him falling down the stairs, whimpering, so she slammed the door closed behind him. She leaned on the doorjamb, panting and listening. If the dog knew what was good for him, he’d bleed to death. She didn’t need a complication like that right now.
She’d never been in Bennie’s house and looked around. The kitchen was modern and clean, with white enamel cabinets and shiny black-and-red granite counters. Dog photos lined the windowsill, and a framed rowing poster hung above a rectangular cherry table, set aglow by a glass pendant lamp shaped like a red teardrop. She returned to the living room and checked it out; tan couch with dark end tables, a matching coffee table, an entertainment center that held books, a TV, and a stereo. Bottom line, it was a nice room, but it wasn’t her taste at all.
She would have gone for a leather sectional sofa, maybe in black, and cool glass tables with chrome edges. She would have had a much bigger TV and a larger house, for parties. The two of them couldn’t be more different, and if they hadn’t gotten the blood test, Alice never would have believed they were related, much less twins. She had hardly believed it when she found she had a twin, especially one as useful as a lawyer, supposedly brilliant.
Their father appeared out of the woodwork, when she was in jail, to tell her about Bennie. It turned out that he’d been following both his daughters’ lives, even though he never showed himself. He was trying to save her life, and it came at just the right time, before her trial. She went online and read everything she could about the famous Bennie Rosato, and when they sat face-to-matching-face, she claimed to love hazelnut coffee, sports, and big dogs, just like Bennie.
Alice had even pretended to care about their mother, because any idiot could see that Bennie was all about old Carmela. Just like she could hear in Bennie’s questions that she wanted to know about the father who left them alone with a mentally ill mother. So she fed Bennie what little information she had about him, filling in the blanks with fantasy. She leaned on the twin thing, which put Bennie on the defensive from day one. She made Bennie feel guilty because she hadn’t been abandoned, even though Bennie had the worse childhood of the two, taking care of that crazy mom and flat broke. She’d even tried to convince Bennie that she’d been born underweight as the result of something called “twin transfusion syndrome,” where twins share the placenta in the womb, so one twin’s blood goes to nourish the other. So it was fate that she would end up standing in Bennie’s house, about to take over her life. It was Bennie’s own fault, for being such a sucker.
Alice went to the front door, picked up the messenger bag, took out Bennie’s wallet and checkbook, then
