Life Sentences (4 page)

Lily's bedroom was a shrine to
her ordinariness, her sense of comfort and thrift. Nothing had been altered
in years-same lumpy mahogany four-poster bed, same painted bureau
with its mismatched knobs, same worn Persian rug that the girls used to
pretend was a flying carpet. And making up for all the drabness was the view.
Through the French slider doors, you could see the changing seasons and
catch spectacular leaf transformations and outrageous neon sunsets.
Today the fields were blanketed in a whiteness so bright you'd have thought
you were in Death Valley.

Lily sat on the edge of the bed and
patted the mattress. "Come sit," she said, then reached into
the top drawer of her bedside table and took out an old photo album.

Daisy sat next to her mother and
ran her hands over the nubby white bedspread. She liked the marbled mirror
with its cherry frame, the old Windsor chair that Mr. Barsum had painted
apple green, the floor lamp with its fringed pink lampshade. It comforted
her to know that everything would always remain the same. That everything
inside this house was forever.

"Look," Lily said, opening
the photo album and showing Daisy a succession of color snapshots-Daisy
and Anna as babies, Daisy and Anna as little girls, Daisy and Anna as
snotty teenagers. She could see the gradual transformation in her sister's
demeanor over the years-that caged look in her eyes at thirteen, the
growing pessimism of her high school years, the creeping mania of her
early twenties. These pictures also captured the chronology of their
little brother's illness-Louis in his stroller, Louis in his hospital
bed, Louis in his wheelchair. In a typical shot, Louis's parenthetical
sisters, Daisy and Anna, would be seated on either side of him, angling
their heads sharply to fit inside the frame. It struck Daisy that in almost
every picture, Louis had his head shaved. He'd died of
Stier-Zellar's
disease at the age of six, and the girls
had no idea who his father was. To this day, Lily had kept it a deep, dark
secret. In the final photograph they had of him, Louis's eyes were wide
with awe and tension, as if he could see death hurtling toward him like
a tidal wave.

Stier-Zellar's
was inherited in an
autosomal
recessive pattern,
which meant that two copies of the gene had to be altered in order for a
child to be born with the disease. That meant that both of his parents had
to be carriers. Lily was a carrier, and because of that, Anna and Daisy
were potential carriers. Genetic testing was available, but Daisy
had yet to determine whether or not she was at risk for passing the disease
on to her children. She figured there was still plenty of time to get the
bad news.

The girls had spent half their childhoods
trying to figure out who Louis's biological father was. Whenever they
asked their mother, Lily would put up barriers around herself, thick
and impenetrable. Eventually, they stopped asking and instead resorted
to hushed speculation and marathon conjecture sessions late at
night in their shared bedroom. It couldn't be Mr. Barsum, since he'd come
into the picture a whole year after Louis was born. They had a list of
suspects, including the mailman and their mother's boss, Mr. Grady down
at the CPA's office. The only certainty about Louis's father was that
he carried the other recessive gene that had sealed their brother's
fate at the moment of conception.

Now Lily turned the page, and Daisy
smiled down at the faded images of her father, an aesthetically pleasing
stranger. She couldn't remember anything about him, except for his
hands. She remembered how strong and clean they were, the nails pared
down to the quick. That was the main memory she had of her biological father-of a bright summer afternoon when he'd tossed her up in the air and then
caught her in his strong, clean-smelling hands.

Gregory Hubbard and Lily Eggleston
were childhood sweethearts who'd lived next door to one another since
birth. They'd gotten "married" in the third grade, swearing allegiance
over plastic Cracker Jack rings. Many years later, Gregory was drafted
and did a tour of duty in Vietnam. When he came home from that contentious
war, all he wanted was to settle down with Lily Eggleston, for real this
time. A successful real estate agent with a bright future ahead of
him, Gregory was killed in a car crash two months before Lily gave birth
to their second daughter.

Their father had passed on more
than just these faded images in a photo album-he'd passed on the internal
programming that would determine everything from the girls' eye color
to their susceptibility to heart disease. DNA was a four-letter language.
A single strand of DNA was made up of endless combinations of just four
letters-A, T, G, C. These letters made up words, and these words made up
sentences. The sentences were called genes. The DNA alphabet produced
various genes the way the English alphabet produced words. Each human
being had a unique genetic "book"-a life story written in the
genes. It was the study of these books that had absorbed percent of Daisy's
waking moments for the past fifteen years.

"So how's your job going?"
Lily asked as she closed the album on the past.

"Fine."

"Tell me about the rats."

Daisy stared out the window at the
falling snow and tried to single out one individual whirling snowflake
to the exclusion of all others. "Mice, you mean," she said.
"I work with mice, Mom. Not rats."

"How are your mice, darling?"

"Thriving."

"Good. That's good. How many
Louis are you up to now?"

"Fourteen."

Lily turned to her. "What happens
when you hit nineteen?'

"Nothing will happen. We'll keep
on going."

"But there were only eighteen
King Louis."

"I know, Ma."

"So there'll be a Louis
XIX?"

"I named the mice after my
brother, not the French king."

"Oh."

"I'm going to cure
Stier-Zellar's
in his honor."

Lily nodded, her eyes glazing
over. "I think Anna's in real trouble this time," she said.
"Did I ever tell you she thought there was electrical wiring in her
chest once?"

Daisy felt a spike of alarm.
"Recently?"

"No. When she was thirteen.
Right after she came back from the hospital that time."

She relaxed a little, then became
irritated.

"Anna skulked around the house
with her hands over her heart and grew more and more secretive, but I
kept after her. 'What's wrong? What is it?' Finally, she told me there was
electrical wiring in her chest that connected her to heaven. Sort of like
a telephone. She said it pulled questions out of her heart."

Daisy hadn't heard that one before.
"What kind of questions?"

"The deep, painful
kind." Lily glanced at her. "What do you remember? About Anna
getting sick, I mean."

Daisy remembered chaos and heartbreak,
her sister's hateful words and those interminable crying jags; she recalled
the hospital visits and faceless doctors and the ongoing battles to get
Anna to keep taking her meds. "I remember being trapped in the kitchen
once," she said, "while Anna did these crazy martial arts exercises.
She almost kicked you in the head. I was so angry." With this memory,
something broke like the skin of a blister. How could her sister put their
mother through this time and again?

"Poor Daisy. You're like your
father, same worry wrinkle between the eyes." Lily reached for Daisy's
forehead and tried to rub it out.

They both fell silent for a moment.

"So," Lily said,
"what should we do now?"

Dr. Susan Averill was so soft-spoken
Daisy had to strain to hear her. "How is Anna?" the doctor said.

Daisy clutched the receiver.
"Excuse me?"

"Is everything okay?"
Dr. Averill operated out of an office in Beverly Hills, and although
they had never met, Daisy couldn't help picturing a petite, well-groomed
woman sitting in a sunny designer office full of glass-and-teak furniture.

"I was just going to ask you
the same thing."

"About Anna?"

"Yes," Daisy said.
"We seem to have lost contact, and I was wondering if you could ask
her to call us."

"But… I haven't seen your
sister in months."

Daisy focused on the faded buttercups
on the wallpaper. "When was the last time?"

"Hold on. Let me check."

"What is it?" Lily hissed,
but Daisy shushed her.

"Let's see… yes, that's
right." The doctor fumbled with the phone. "We decided to end
her sessions last October."

"So… six months ago?"

"That's right."

"Six months ago what?"
Lily whispered.

"She seemed to be adjusting
very well to her new environment," Dr. Averill said, "so I let
the decision rest with her."

"Okay. Thanks."

"Is something wrong?"

"No, it's okay. Please don't
worry about it." Daisy hung up.

"Well?" Lily said anxiously.

"Anna stopped seeing Dr. Averill
about six months ago."

"You're kidding me!"

"It wouldn't be the first time
she's lied to us, Mom."

"So that's it, then," Lily
said resignedly. "She's gone off her meds."

"Do you have any idea what could've
triggered this?"

"I told you." Lily plucked
at the embroidered sleeve of her blouse, her soft features folding in
on themselves. "We were getting along fine."

"Did you notice any tension
in your last phone call?"

"Daisy, honestly. If I had a
clue, I'd tell you."

"So you really have no
idea?"

Lily frowned. "You were such
a quiet baby. Not a peep. I nursed you, but not Anna. Maybe that had something
to do with it."

"Mom, stop it."

"Stop what?"

"Blaming yourself." She
sat for a moment, then said, "I'm calling the police."

The blistering heat was expected
to last throughout the weekend, with temperatures hovering in the
high nineties. Jack drove past tacky-looking restaurants and motels toward
a cluster of gray apartment buildings on
Godschalk
Road. The car's A/C was cranked, but his hands burned on the hot steering
wheel. He kept changing the radio station, since certain songs made
him cry. He'd never told anyone about it before, but he couldn't listen
to "Pretty Woman" by Roy Orbison without shedding a tear or
two, and his reaction to "Stand Inside Your Love" by Smashing
Pumpkins was downright embarrassing.

Jack took a left on
Godschalk
and found a parking space between two
dusty construction trucks, then got out and was instantly overwhelmed
by the oppressive heat. Even the flies were lethargic.

The Sea Breeze may have been appealing
once, but it'd long since fallen into disrepair. The peach-colored
stucco was soot-stained and crumbling around the windows, the swimming
pool filter was clogged with jacaranda leaves, and the swimming pool itself
was a vivid, astonishing green due to some strange species of algae
growing on the bottom. The three-story structure was surrounded by other
multistory buildings of similar styles and differing sizes, and next
door was a weed-choked vacant lot where drug deals took place late at
night. Jack knew this, because he used to work vice. Not the greatest place
in the world for an emotionally unstable young woman from Vermont to
end up in.

Twenty-eight-year-old Anna Hubbard
had been missing for five weeks now, according to her sister. Jack
didn't hold out much hope as he climbed the front steps, then paused to inspect
the cheap hardware. You could break into this building fairly easily.
All you needed was a metal slot cover from a computer. Insert it into
the doorjamb, jiggle it around a little and presto. Some security.

He rang the doorbell. "It's
Detective Makowski."

"I'm in unit twelve. Take a
right after the mailboxes," the building super said before buzzing
him in.

The interior of the building
was sweltering, and Jack felt himself melting faster than a pat of butter
on a baked potato as he proceeded down the fake-oak-paneled hallway
and took a right after the metal mailboxes. The door was open. He passed
through an arched entryway into a dimly lit foyer that smelled of
curry and chickpeas, then entered an L-shaped living room, where he
confronted a long-dead Christmas tree. "What's with the tree?"
he asked, circling around it, the rust-red needles Uttering the carpet.

Seated behind a wooden desk nicked
and scratched from years of abuse was a man of possibly Eastern European
descent, his soft cow eyes skittering back and forth as he struggled to
open a potato chip bag. "Sorry, chief," he said. "Haven't
gotten around to it yet."

"It's April already. It's almost
Passover, my friend. Get rid of it or I'll cite you."

"Absolutely." He tossed
Jack the keys. "It's a mess up there, just to warn you."

"When was the last time you
saw her?" "I haven't seen her in months," the super said.
"Not since Christmas."

"What'd you two talk about?"
"Nothing much. She was a little strange." "Strange
how?"

"She kept to herself, mostly.
Came and went at odd hours. Very unfriendly. Only said hello if you said
it first, that sort of thing. But she paid her rent on time. Until last month,
that is."

Jack could feel the sweat collecting
underneath his arms and soaking into his pin-striped shirt. There was
something embryonic about this apartment. Something womblike. He
felt like an egg inside an incubator. "When she stopped paying the
rent, you didn't try to contact her?"

"We have a procedure we're
supposed to follow. First you give the tenant a written warning, then a
notice.

Then you start eviction proceedings.
I left a bunch of messages on her machine, but she never called me
back."

"Which apartment?"

"Two oh six. Stairs are faster."
The stairwell held a mingling of smells-exhaust fumes from the underground
garage, cat piss, faint traces of booze from an impressive array of
empty liquor bottles. The cement walls were painted nicotine yellow.
He found the apartment down the second-story hallway, inserted the key
in the lock and, bracing himself for the nightmare which would surely
flare before his eyes, opened the door.

A terrible odor hit him, and he
drew back. "Christ." The garbage hadn't been taken out in weeks.
The shades were drawn, and the place was dark and stifling. Slipping on a
pair of latex gloves, Jack entered the apartment, swept aside the living
room drapes and cracked a few windows. He saw steel-blue carpeting, cream-colored
walls and plenty of trash strewn about. A rancid odor pervaded everything.
It would follow him home tonight, back to his apartment in Santa Monica,
where he'd take a tepid shower, crack an ice-cold beer and watch the game
on ESPN. His social life consisted of a wing chair and a
Wega
flatscreen
, since very
few women wanted to date a guy who'd just gone through the pockets of a
dead man.

A faucet was dripping somewhere
inside the cluttered apartment. Jack broke the filter tips off two cigarettes,
shoved them up his nostrils and breathed through his open mouth. The dead
plants on the windowsills resembled prehistoric lizards, their bony
arms reaching for the sky. Several old movie posters (Jaws, Alien, Rosemary's
Baby) had been ripped off the walls, and mysterious stains bloomed on
the carpet-brown stuff that sort of made you wonder. The ceiling was leaking
in places, swelling the wood and depositing lacy cloud formations
with rusty borders. The haphazard sofas and armchairs were so saddle-backed
you could probably suffocate in them. There was a stereo system in fairly
poor condition and a working computer, a large glass ashtray overflowing
with the same brand of cigarette, a bunch of candy wrappers and banana
peels strewn about. He picked up a travel book from Idaho. Who went to
Idaho for whatever reason? He upended a paper bag full of receipts and
phone bills, and out spilled dozens of snapshots.

Fingerprint evidence was fragile;
one touch could destroy it. Jack held each snapshot gingerly by its edges
and examined various
candids
of the missing woman-inside her apartment, out on the balcony, down by the beach. Her poses
were silly and provocative. She matched the description her sister
had given him over the phone-dark blue eyes, long red hair, scattered
freckles across the bridge of her upturned nose. He couldn't help falling
in love with her. There was nothing unusual in that, since Jack fell in
love with crime victims the way most people fell in love with babies.
His heart went out to them. He wanted to protect them, to defend them, to
speak for them when they could no longer speak for themselves. Somebody
must've taken these pictures. If only he could find the camera, they
just might be able to pull a print off the release button.

Next he turned his attention to
the telephone, a robin's-egg-blue handset and base unit. There were
twenty-five unanswered messages on the digital display. He picked
up a pink phone pad that somebody had doodled all over. The handwriting
was girlish and naive, little circles over the
i's
and happy faces after each exclamation point.

"Try to have a positive
self-image, even though this is hard for you!"

Jack found rolling papers and a
razor blade on the coffee table, along with a white substance that looked
like cocaine residue. He found a few marijuana seeds inside a
fish-shaped ashtray.

Dead bodies didn't shock him anymore,
but the dead rats did. Three dead rats laid out on the kitchen table,
each one dissected down the middle and mounted on a piece of cardboard.
Their hides had been pinned back, their body cavities exposed. Their
innards had begun to rot. Flies buzzed listlessly overhead. Several
different kinds of knives were lined up with precision on the table,
like surgical tools. There was a box of straight pins and more flies-dead
this time-sealed inside an empty mayonnaise jar.

The kitchenette emitted a fetid
aroma due to the rotting groceries on the countertop and the dirty dishes
in the sink. Cockroaches infested the garbage can, scrambling in and
out of scummy soda cans. Jack rapped his knuckles on a hard-as-rock layer
cake that'd been left out for a millennium or two, and more roaches
skittered across the Formica. They'd have to dunk the whole place in boric
acid. An old-fashioned clock ticked on the wall above the stove, and the
refrigerator hummed noisily. He paused at the
stoppered
sink full of dirty dishes and noticed that one of the eight-ounce water
glasses wasn't fully submerged in the milky water. He leaned forward,
then bobbed back, trying to catch the light. Looking for lip prints. Fingerprints.

Some of the dishwater had flooded
over the aluminum basin and trailed across the countertop, leaving a
visible residue. The trail of water had spilled over the edge and dripped
down onto the floor. Jack got on his hands and knees and examined the linoleum,
where he discovered a sneaker impression-size or, probably female,
relatively worn down at the heel.

He tagged and photographed the
shoe impression and the water glass, then swept through the rest of the
apartment, looking for
latents
and tagging all
points of entry and exit. When he first entered the premises, he'd noticed
that the doors and windows were locked. He didn't see any signs of forced
entry. Those scratch marks around the keyhole were old. The drapes were
drawn shut. The air-, conditioning unit was off, and the only light on was
the kitchen overhead. Anna Hubbard had most likely left her apartment
of her own volition one night, date to be determined. Now he called the
tech team and headed for the bedroom.

The boxy bedroom was a virtual
shrine to the Virgin Mary. The walls were covered floor-to-ceiling with
pictures of the Blessed Mother torn from art books or magazines and photocopied
over and over. A hundred pairs of beatific eyes gazed down at him from
the walls. The sturdy mahogany
bureautop
held
melted candles and plaster statuettes of biblical figures, along
with a papier-mâché parrot with curling yellow wings. The morning sun illuminated
the drifting dust. There was a Virgin Mary alarm clock, a Mother and Child
pen, an Our Lady night-light, and dozens of Blessed Mary T-shirts inside
the bureau drawers. The unmade bed had striped pillows and pastel-green-and-pink
linens, and strewn across it were articles cut out of newspapers: Mouse
Helps Man, Gene Therapy Results Promising, Congress to Debate Stem
Cell Research, Boy Finds Father After Yearlong Search.

He glanced up at the popcorn ceiling.
Spray-painted in huge Day-
Glo
-orange letters was
a cryptic message. Each letter and numeral was at least three feet tall.

END

END. What was that supposed to mean?
He found the same thing written in pencil on the back of the bedroom door,
over and over again. End, End, End… from top to bottom in tiny, precise
script.

In the adjoining bathroom, he
found the toilet lid up, the seat down. The scum in the porcelain tub was
grotesque. A kinetic little cactus struggled to grow on the painted
windowsill. Jack found a purple tie-dyed scarf draped over the medicine
cabinet mirror and removed it. He fingered the purple silk, then caught
sight of his lined, unshaven face in the mirror. Hell. Who was he to judge?
He ate his dinner in front of the TV with a paper plate balanced on one
knee. He staggered home at three in the morning and threw up Chinese takeout.
He got so drunk sometimes, he fell off the stage on karaoke night. It
wasn't like everybody wanted his DNA. His first marriage had been real,
but the other two weren't. They were disasters, like this apartment.
When it came to his marriages, Jack had gotten worse with practice.

Back in the bedroom, he found the
victim's camera on the
bureautop
hidden behind
a two-foot-tall statuette of the Virgin Mary. She wore a sky-blue gown
and a serene smile, and draped across her outstretched arms were necklaces
of beaded glass-mandarin orange, ruby red, avocado green. The Blessed
Virgin seemed to take great pity on him, her kind eyes forgiving him his
many transgressions. Jack sealed the Instamatic inside an evidence
bag and continued preserving and protecting the scene.