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 Samjustpointed 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 bea lotof 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 thehell?
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 coworkersgave 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?”
