“You’re like two peas in a pod?”
Camille nodded. “Same hair, same eyes. Same curls. Same everything. People get us confused.”
“Do you really look that much alike?” he said doubtfully, as if he knew they didn’t.
“We used to, before—you know—puberty.” She closed her eyes against the long dress and the Tampax. It’s for the blood. Don’t tell or I’ll wring your chicken neck.
“In what way did people confuse you, Camille? Did you have the same personality, act the same?”
Camille shook her head, sucking her lips into her mouth, making herself toothless. In her lap, Puppy woke up. “I can’t explain,” she murmured.
“Were you together all the time? Were you good friends?”
“We had the same birthday,” she said quickly, pulling a safer thought from the air.
“You were both born on the same day?” he asked.
Camille laughed at his look of surprise. “No, but we only had one birthday anyway. It was easier that way. One cake, the same party dress. The same present.”
“Hmmm. How did that work out?”
“I thought it was twice as good. I had company to share the celebration.” Camille squeezed her face into a frown. She could feel her heart beating too fast for itself. She shook her head and her hair stung her eyes and skin as it whipped across her face. Milicia broke her own present. Then she took Camille’s, and said Camille broke them both.
Puppy stood on her lap and pawed at her swinging hair, wanting to play. Camille ignored her.
“She called me the she-devil for taking her birthday and her birthday present. I got punished,” she said softly.
“How did that make you feel?”
“Every time something happened, I got punished. I had to get used to it.”
“Did you get punished often?”
“I had to get used to it, or go straight to hell.” Take a hint. Camille cocked her head. She decided to study the cracks in the plaster on the wall. “We looked alike. We dressed alike. People thought it was me stealing things. Hurting the dolls. Teasing the ugly girls and getting into fights at school. The mothers used to call home and complain.”
“But it wasn’t you.”
Take a hint.
“No.” Camille studied the cracks. One of them looked like the California earthquake. The big one, coming up any day now that would drown the whole state. “I wanted to be kind like Doctor Dolittle and talk to the animals.”
“When there were these incidents, didn’t your mother ever ask for your side of the story?”
“She was deaf and blind,” Camille said flatly.
“Really? She couldn’t hear or see?”
“She said I took her best pearls, the ones Daddy bought her from Japan, and drank her vodka. She—hit me. Once she bit my cheek …” Camille’s voice trailed off.
“Did you ever tell anyone what was going on?”
“No.” Whom could she tell? And now she was in a police station. She could get stuck here; she could catch the cancer.
“Camille, do you know you’re in trouble?”
Camille looked at the doctor. She tried to look into him, but couldn’t see anything in there. He could be filled with ants and worms, for all she knew. She didn’t want to think about it. But he was forcing her. The dead girls, Bouck’s blood on the floor. Everything was making her remember.
“Yes,” she said. Bouck was dead, and she knew she was in trouble.
The doctor’s face changed. “I’m going to borrow Puppy for a few minutes,” he told her. “She needs to go out. We’ll bring her right back, I promise.” He stood and reached for the dog. Camille was too upset to protest.
71
This better be good.”
On her second visit to the precinct in one day, Assistant District Attorney Penelope Dunham looked less fresh and more than a little irritated. She took a seat beside Mike and dragged her glasses out of her purse. When she got them on, she nodded at April and Sergeant Joyce.
“You wanted to see your prime suspect,” Joyce said. “Well, here she is. Camille Honiger-Stanton. That’s Jason Frank with her. You know who he is?”
“Yes, the shrink from the Chapman case. I had some research done on him.”
Penelope peered through the one-way glass at the scene in the questioning room. Jason Frank was an attractive man in a well-tailored gray suit, white shirt, navy tie with tiny white dots on it. Everything about the psychiatrist was conservative—his short brown hair, white shirt, clean-shaven face. He didn’t look as if he’d been out much that summer. There was hardly any color in his face.
He sat at the table, writing occasionally in the notebook on his lap. His body was relaxed and his features did not register the bizarre behavior of the redheaded woman sitting across from him. At the moment she was making mewing noises; her hands picked at the air. Her left shoulder jerked up, up, up, three times before the right shoulder took over. Her huge mane of red hair was like a hay field, in and out of which her face bobbed and ducked. Across her lap lay a very small orange-colored poodle, its little butt in the air and its muzzle dangling toward the floor. In contrast to the movements of its owner, it was motionless.
“Is that alive?”
At the question, the dog’s head flopped over. It looked drugged. On the floor a small plastic box thumped with the movement above.
Penelope pointed at it. “What’s that?”
“A leash,” Sergeant Joyce said sarcastically.
April glanced at Mike. He winked.
“It’s like a reel. The dog has freedom to run around, but you can press a button and stop it from going any farther,” he offered.
Penelope Dunham squinted at the leash intently. “Is that the murder weapon?”
Sergeant Joyce glared at her detectives. Neither said anything.
Jason Frank finished writing and looked up. He spoke in a precise, neutral voice. “Camille, do you have any idea why you’re in so much trouble?”
After a moment the mewing stopped, and the woman parted her curtain of hair. Her hands clutched the poodle. “People … think I did a bad thing.”
“What kind of bad thing?”
“They think I did a murder.”
“Did you do a murder?”
She shook her hair back in front of her face. “No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“What about when you get really upset and have one of your fits? Do you hurt other people?”
“Only myself.”
“Why do you hurt yourself?”
Camille looked straight into the mirror on her side of the wall, through which the people in the viewing room could see her, but she couldn’t see them. She seemed to study herself for quite a while. “I’m bad,” she said at last.
“Camille, do any associations come to your mind about what’s happening now with these crimes?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know what. You have to tell me.”
“Like when I was a kid,” she said hesitantly.
He nodded.
“When people thought I did things and punished me and it was really Milicia?”
“Yes. Why didn’t you tell anybody, Camille?”
Suddenly Camille’s body became very still. “I thought … if she wanted me to be punished that much, she must have a good reason.”
In the viewing room, Penny Dunham leaned forward.
“What was the reason?” Jason asked Camille.
Camille twisted a clump of hair around her fist. It was all tangled, looked like it hadn’t been combed in some time.
“Do you know the reason?”
Camille pulled a clump of hair out by way of an answer.
“Don’t do that,” Jason said sharply, then more gently, “You pulled your hair out. Is there something you’re worried about telling me?”