People could get stuck in love, Evon realized, and then never recover. The best love of Evon’s life had come almost a decade ago, with Doreen. They’d had six good months before Doreen was diagnosed, and another year and a half with Evon helping her die. She’d been devastated afterward, in part because the normal times hadn’t lasted long enough to find out what the relationship might have been. She wondered now, if, like Georgia, she had never found her way back from mourning that lost possibility. People didn’t generally think that love could ruin a life. But perhaps. Evon felt her entire body pressed down by the sheer unhappy magnitude of the idea.
“So let’s go back to the day of that picnic,” Tim said to Georgia. “Anything stand out in your memory about Paul that day?”
She snorted. “Well, I remember he bumped into Sofia Michalis. I could just see by the way he was talking to her something was going on. When he broke up with me, he blamed it on this whole thing with Cass being a suspect. He said he was too mixed up with all that happening. But he was married to Sofia within six months. He wasn’t so confused then.”
“Do you recall anything about him and Dita?” Tim asked.
She shook her full face. It wasn’t clear, though, if that was a lack of memory or if she was distracted by the thought of Paul and Sofia.
“One of the officers who talked to you,” Tim told her, “he said that you recalled that Paul seemed to have had words with Dita.”
“Did I?”
Tim reached into his tweed jacket and pulled out the report casually, as if it were just another piece of paper an old fellow would have in his pockets, like a grocery list, or a note about calling his daughter. Georgia spidered her hands on her forehead as she read the highlighted part. Eventually, she started to nod.
“I just saw them talking. Dita went stalking off and I remember the look on his face. But that was nothing new. Paul hated Dita.”
“Is that what he said that day? That he hated her?”
“I don’t remember what he said. Did I tell that to the cop?” She took the report back from Tim’s hand without asking and swung her head laterally as she read. “I really don’t recall even talking about her with Paul that day. Except maybe when he said he was going to the Overlook, and I’m not clear on that.”
“But you say he hated her?”
“There was a lot not to like. I don’t want to speak ill of the dead”-she made the sign of the cross over her chest with impressive speed-“but I have to tell you the truth. Dita was just a very spoiled girl with a very sharp tongue. She was like, ‘My dad is one of those guys, emperor of the universe, so I can say damn well what I please.’ She was gorgeous, so there were always boys after her, the whole damned cavalry, but except for Cass, she managed to drive every one of them away after a while.”
“Is that what Paul didn’t like about her? Her attitude?”
“You know. He said she was wild, leading his brother astray, said his mom hated her, too, and Dita knew it and just liked egging all of them on. I don’t know. You ask me?”
“That’s what we’re here for,” Tim said.
“I think he was jealous. That’s a hard row to hoe. With twins? Identical twins? He loved his brother. There isn’t even a word for it really. Lidia always told the same stories about when they were little, how they couldn’t stand being different. She sewed their names into their clothes and they tore off the tags. They ate off each other’s plates. At night they ended up in the same bed, sleeping in each other’s arms. The neighbors’ collie bit Cass, and everybody swore Paul cried first, before either of them knew the dog had drawn blood. It was like they were joined at the heart. And that never quite stopped. I mean, Paul wouldn’t really accept that Cass was guilty.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, even after Cass pled, Paul was saying he was innocent.”
“Did he?” said Tim, who allowed none of the surprise Evon felt rippling through her thorax to reach his expression. He maintained a purely conversational tone. “When was that?”
“That day. The day Cass was in court pleading guilty. I was there actually. Paul and I had been broken up for months by then, but I don’t know, I wanted to support the family or something. I don’t know,” she repeated. “Probably I was looking for an excuse to see Paul.” She winced, pained by the memory and the futility of her longing. With her eyes closed, Tim noticed that her face was turning blotchy with age. “Anyway, he thanked me for coming. We went over to Bishop’s, and had a beer, and he was just blown away. I mean, you can imagine, somebody’s been like another part of your body all your life and they’re about to lock him up for twenty-five years. He was really blue and he just said to me, ‘He’s innocent, you know.’”
Evon intervened. “And did you ask how he knew that?” She tried to evoke Tim’s mild tone, but again, Georgia’s response to her was sharp.
“Well, he was his twin brother for God’s sake,” she answered. Evon had Georgia’s number by now. She was one of those women who didn’t really like other females, while the men she’d loved-Paul who’d thrown her over, and Jimmy Cleon with his drugs, and her dad who’d kept her from college-had all done her wrong. Life had put her in quite a bind. “I suppose I figured Cass told him that. But I was trying to console him, not play detective. Paul was miserable and I was listening to him. I thought we could be friends. Does that ever work?” She kept touching the front of her short stiff hairdo to keep it in place, after every shake of her head. “And of course, right before I got up to leave, he told me he was going to marry Sofia in a couple of weeks, so Cass could be his best man before he went inside.”
Tim was quiet for a second while she dwelled with that memory, which, like much of what she’d said about Paul, struck her hard.
He asked a few more questions about what had happened on the day of the murder, whether anyone else had had a visible conflict with Dita. Finally, he looked to Evon to see if she had something else to cover, which she did. She flipped back to some notes she’d made that morning.
“Thinking back, do you remember Paul having any serious cuts around that time?”
Georgia considered the question for only a second before saying no.
“Would you have been aware of any deep cuts?” Tim asked. He was as easy as if he were asking the time, but Georgia fixed him with a knowing brown eye.
“I’d have known. We dated for nine years and I was sure I was going to marry the guy. I mean, the truth is I saw him less once Dita was murdered. He was finally going to move out of his parents’ after he started working, so he was looking for apartments, and then when Cass became a suspect he was completely focused on that, and we broke up.”
“So are you saying you might not have known?” Evon asked.
Georgia wheeled back, remaining cranky with her. “I’m saying I saw him less. But I saw him. And I would have noticed. Everybody knew there was blood all over that bedroom. Like I said. He hated Dita. I don’t think I’d have been that dense.”
Evon absorbed her answer without quarreling, but these kinds of retrospective would-haves were always baloney. If the man she loved had told her he’d cut himself fixing a fence in his parents’ yard, she wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But Georgia was touchy enough that Evon wasn’t going to argue. She looked down to her notepad.
“Is Paul right-handed?” Evon asked.
“Mostly.”
“‘Mostly’?”
“Cass is left-handed. Writes lefty, eats lefty. Paul is the opposite. I always wondered when I noticed that, years ago, if that meant they weren’t really identical, but apparently that happens a lot with identical twins. When Paul and Cass were little, though, like I said, they hated to do anything different from one another. So sometimes they’d both eat lefty and sometimes they’d both eat righty. They each ended up pretty much whatever the word is, both-handed.”