“I knew better after some of what I was hearing. You don’t openly challenge someone like that. Instead I distanced myself while alerting key people that she’s trouble,” Mom explains, and I go ahead and tell her the truth about what happened in the tunnel on Christmas Eve three years ago.
“Just weeks after I moved back home,” I remind her. “I’ll never forget when we got the phone call. You remember what that was like for all of us. A nightmare. Pure chaos that’s never really ended, as you well know.”
“If she disrupts someone you care about, she disrupts you, and if something happens to you, it disrupts me. If I’m disrupted, that’s the end,” Mom continues to avoid saying Neva’s name.
“Why is it the end?”
“It just is.”
“Explain what you mean,” but I think I know.
It’s always been Mom holding everything and everyone together. Carme and me. Dick and Dad, possibly in that order, I have to wonder.
“What did Dad think of Neva in the early days when she was visiting the farm?”
“You know George, he’s nice to everyone. Only sees the good.”
“Well, I hope he knows what she is now.”
“He’s known for quite a while what she is, and I wish he wouldn’t take things so hard,” Mom says. “But he shouldn’t have told that kid a darn tooting thing, and I saw what was coming.”
“Lex isn’t so bad. It’s easy to resent someone like him when Dad plays favorites the way he does.”
“George feels terrible about it. But he should have known better,” she says what she always does when Dad’s too trusting, and I envision him shopping with Lex at the Hop-In, spending a small fortune.
“Your theory about what went down at Fort Monroe?” I want to hear from her what transpired when Neva showed up unannounced at Vera’s apartment door. “I have a feeling you have it on good authority exactly what happened.”
I want the whole truth, and I’m convinced Mom knows. She might not have been watching. But someone was, and what I’m really suggesting is that she and Carme are in communication.
“Well, what makes sense to me is her hitman was driving her in the early afternoon of December 3rd,” Mom’s talking about Neva. “And it’s also possible her intention was to drop in unannounced as she claims.”
But Neva didn’t show up to be friendly, to act like the caring sister who happened to be in the area. She intended to catch Vera off guard because she had something Neva wanted, Mom says. Things got out of hand, as I’ve suspected, ending violently, she suggests, and I think of what Vera was garroted with, a thin power cord.
It’s probably the same one used after the fact to rig her up from the closet door. The computer charger likely belonged to the conveniently password-less laptop displaying Vera’s alleged suicide note. The weapon, the note were indigenous to the scene, suggesting the killer used what was available, and that feels more like an impulse than a plan.
“I suspect she killed Vera in a rage,” Mom goes on. “And now, uh-oh, there’s a mess to clean up. So what do you do? You fake the scene to look like Vera hanged herself. Then you douse her body with chlorine bleach in hopes of destroying or at least damaging DNA and any other evidence that might point your way.”
“It makes no sense to think Vera did that to herself,” I agree. “Imagine bleach all over your face and in your eyes? How was she going to string herself up from the door, elaborately I might add, once she was covered with a caustic chemical? Also, if she did that to herself, then what happened to the container or bottle? Why wasn’t it at the scene?”
“That’s what ruins the staging,” Mom nods her head as we glide back and forth. “The glaring red flag.”
A deliberate one, that and the missing ID badge that later turned up in Vera’s apartment, and the motion sensor alarm that went off in the airlock, all of it was my sister’s doing. I envision the dried blood drops on the asbestos-covered pipe inside the steam tunnel, and the likely source of it, the glass tube of blood that mysteriously showed up inside the evidence refrigerator at protective services headquarters.
Probably it will turn out to be Vera’s postmortem blood, another gift from my sister. The ham sandwich with pico de gallo, the empty beer bottle found in Vera’s living room made me think of Carme as did any number of details that gave me the sense someone had spent time inside the apartment after Vera was dead. All of it was orchestrated by my other half, I now feel sure, based on what Mom says.
My twin was sending me mirror flashes, messages, really no different from what she did at the Point Comfort Inn, planting and removing evidence creatively, ruthlessly. I wonder where she was when Neva appeared, and I imagine my sister waiting in the wings until the coast was clear, then helping herself to the faked suicide scene. Further staging and unstaging, leaving hints and manipulations, and maybe she was looking for the same thing Neva was.
“A good example of the end justifying the means,” is all I can think to say about what Carme’s done. “Do we know if she’s okay?”
“I assume so,” Mom turns vague, reminding me of Ranger ghosting.
“Is that your way of saying ‘unauthorized’?” I ask, and she doesn’t answer. “You and Dick must have been planning your Gemini project for years,” and hearing the words come out of my mouth makes me feel heavy inside.
“For as long as we’ve known each other, really,” she finally says, quietly, softly, in rhythm to our rocking. “Before George and I were married, actually,” and this I didn’t imagine. “Your father didn’t leave the Air Force Academy simply because of family issues or because he was pining away for me. He was conscripted by NASA and the Department of Defense to do the very things he’s done.”
“I can see why they would have grabbed him,” I reply. “I’m not the genius he is, but it’s not so different from what happened to me. I leave the Air Force and return to the farm so I can serve a purpose I wasn’t quite planning on,” I don’t say it bitterly.
“I’m sorry if in any way this is against what you might have wished for your life, Calli.”
“I didn’t have to go to the Point Comfort Inn,” I don’t hesitate to answer. “And I didn’t have to say yes. Carme gave me every chance to go home as you no doubt are well aware.”