Skewed Page 2

  CHAPTER 3

  My brother, Deputy Attorney General John B. Perkins, checked his Rolex for the fourth time, but I doubted he knew or cared what time it was. He just wanted out of this chat with me, his favorite twin. Using a pencil eraser, he slid the first photo across his ridiculous mahogany desk toward my propped-up foot. He let it come to rest next to some phallic statue that declared him an Outstanding Community Servant.

  “What’d you do to earn this?” I said, nudging the penile substitute with my boot. “Pick up people’s trash?”

  “The people can take out their own trash.”

  “It’s just people, Jack. No the.”

  “I do put away the human trash, though. For good.”

  The last two words made him sound like a high-paid announcer for an overproduced Mr. Clean ad.

  “Relax, bro. No reporters here.”

  He jotted the line down anyway with a self-satisfied grin on his handsome face and I knew I’d hear it as a sound bite after his next campaign stop. My brother was vying to be the youngest attorney general in Virginia history. He’d graduated law school at twenty-two, so he was a bit ahead of the game at twenty-nine, and he’d turn thirty just in time to serve. Through either good fortune or careful planning, the cases he’d worked on the past couple years had garnered him positive press and public recognition around the state—conditions that, unlike me, he considered advantageous.

  The photo he’d just dismissed was the more innocuous of the two that had arrived in the mail. It showed our childhood living room, the one my grandfather had found appropriate as a playroom for his grandchildren despite its previous incarnation as a crime scene. The photo was taken from the edge of the room, near the kitchen, where Jack used to play with his Tonka trucks and I would get in his way. Our grand floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace dominated the image. In front of the fireplace’s bluestone hearth, to the left, sat the green sofa with the huge, maroon rose appliqués. Across from the sofa stood the rectangular marble table with the iron base, its top laden with family photographs. I knew the table well, the scar on my ankle a souvenir from when I skidded into it during an epic fight with Jack. He’d never been violent with me, but our wrestling matches as seven-year-olds had taken definite turns toward the dark side.

  Two small bumps were visible across the bottom of the photo, though I doubted Jack had noticed. When I’d spotted them in Dizzy’s bathroom, they’d stood out like neon lights shining brightly in a foggy brain. I figured they were the photographer’s fingers on the lens, or possibly the shoulder and knee of someone on the floor. Despite my uncertainty, I knew one thing—they’d eat at me if I didn’t determine their source.

  The second photo had provided the answer. The smudges had indeed been parts of someone lying on the floor. I just hadn’t expected them to belong to my mother.

  The prenatal loss of a mother redefined the parent-child relationship. There could be no flaws, no bad memories. As surely as Jack and I were the perfect children-to-be in my mother’s eyes, Bridget Perkins would always remain inhuman, and therefore beyond human, in my eyes, because I’d never known her as a flesh-and-blood entity. I could assign her no faults and, obviously, no one was eager to share them with me postmortem. Our relationship was absent the conflicts of the teenage years, the outbursts ignited by emerging hormones, and the arguments over boys, drinking, and grades. The walls of my emerald-green room had become my sounding board—and the absorber of my moods—because when rages flared with no one to rise to their venting, I sulked within them. Left to my own devices, I crafted a mother much like the impossibly thin, gown-laden princesses I had drawn—sometimes dozens a day—with their flowing manes of hair and floor-length hoop skirts balanced by exquisite jewels and crowns. I never acknowledged, even to myself, that the figures were my mother, but I named them all Bridgina, Bridgetta, or Bella Brigitte. Hardly a coincidence. Hardly requiring a PhD to decipher. Lacking a relationship marred by reality, the entity of mom became the product of a lonely girl’s imagination, inspired by aged photos and stories from which Grandpa had smoothed the rough edges, polishing the bright spots to a brilliant shine. In his eyes, and mine, she became a goddess, an inspiration, and the heroine of every tragic fairy tale.

  Jack stared clinically at the second photo. When I’d seen it, I’d gaped disbelieving, unable to accept the shattering of my carefully constructed image.

  Jack grimaced, but only slightly. Really? That was the whole of his reaction?

  The image showed the prettiest girl in the county, maybe even the state, in her diner uniform, her apron stained and crooked. She lay on a cold, hardwood floor, her face tilted toward the camera, a frozen stream of viscous blood oozing down her otherwise gorgeous face. Her knees pointed the opposite direction from her face, as if she’d been in the midst of a skyward pirouette when the gods struck her down, jealous of her beauty and grace.

  The photo had to be someone’s twisted rendition of a still life. Still life, but barely.

  I’d been lucky, inheriting many of my mother’s better features—full lips, dark lashes, rectangular jawline, and those slightly exotic green eyes that hinted at Swedish ancestry—but I’d missed out on her luminescence. Even in a dying state, Bridget Perkins had possessed an unspeakable glow. As I had in Dizzy’s bathroom, I fought the impulse to grab a pencil from Jack’s desk and erase the blood distorting her face, to make her perfect . . . to revive her. If there was one crime scene I wanted to alter, this was it.

  Jack glanced a final time at the photo before putting it down. “About these,” he said, pointing to the images with a detachment normally reserved for smelly vagrants, “I have no idea. You know how many nuts I deal with on a daily basis?”

  “As usual, Jack, this isn’t about you, but thanks for your consistency.”

  I pursed my lips into a pissed-off pucker and plopped my other foot on his desk.

  “You mind?” he said, stacking the flecks of dried clay from my boots next to a marble paperweight that abutted the award on his desk. They formed some sort of ancient barrier wall, maybe to keep the people away from the mighty Jack Perkins. I watched him with disdain as he fussed with his useless bric-a-brac. Was his office particularly windy, with heavy papers flying about, in need of an Outstanding Community Servant to tame them?

  “Jack, Jack, over here.” I snapped my fingers so he’d look at me. “Is it possible these photos are some publicity stunt related to your book?”

  “What? No! I wouldn’t do that.”

  “You would if it would help you get elected. So, did you?”

  Jack sighed in the strange way he had since we were kids, with a little glitch at the end. Sort of a ha-hmp. I’d never heard anyone else do it. “No,” he said, “I didn’t send them. I’ve never seen them before, although they’re similar to stuff in my book.” His face took a turn for the upbeat. “By the way, an autographed copy is on its way to you.”

  I feigned delight with a jazz wave of my hands. The promise of more pictures of my dying mother failed to elicit my enthusiasm for Jack’s debut as an author. “Thanks. You’re sure these particular photos aren’t in your book?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. You think I actually wrote the thing?”

  “It’s a sappy retrospective on your mother’s murder and your life. Forgive me for thinking you were involved.”

  “It’s called a ghostwriter, Janie. Not exactly a new concept. Half the morons in public service can’t put together a coherent sentence without a teleprompter. You think they write their own stuff?”

  I pulled my feet from his desk, hoping to scratch it, and grabbed my photos back. Unlike my emotionally stunted twin, I couldn’t stop staring at the last moment the Haiku Twins had a mom who wasn’t yet brain-dead. In the split second of life captured by this image, my mom’s last thoughts must have been racing through her head. Were they of shock and disbelief? Of the twins in her womb? Had she expe
rienced flashbacks in reverse, where our imagined futures rushed through her brain like a convoluted film teaser—a film she wouldn’t live to see? Or was she just thinking Shit.

  From what I’d heard about her, most likely the latter.

  Suddenly, my stomach turned sour as something in the second photo jumped out at me. I should have seen it earlier.

  “Hey, did you take a good look at this picture? Notice anything disturbing?”

  “Let’s see, Janie. I guess our dying mother on the floor was enough for me. But with your job, it probably takes a little more to get your hackles up.” He leaned forward. “Tell me, Sis, what did it for you?”

  I leaned forward, putting our similar faces as close together as they’d been for some time. “Mom’s eyes are still open in this photo. Her head is still tilted and there’s no shirt near her head.”

  “Brilliant. Maybe you can get a promotion for that detective work.”

  I slammed my finger down on my mother’s body, no longer worried about damaging the photo, because these were copies. I’d left the originals with a friend in the lab, who promised to verify their authenticity and check for fingerprints. “This picture had to be taken within moments of Grady McLemore shooting her.”

  “Oh? You’ve come around to saying his name now? Surprised your tongue didn’t disintegrate.”

  I ignored him. “This isn’t a police photo, Jack. This was taken before Grandpa Barton arrived at the scene, before the police arrived—and they got there fast.”

  Jack took a second look and furrowed his forehead, distorting his trimmed and plucked brows. “That’s impossible. Grandpa Barton got there right after she was shot. Grady was still passed out on the floor, for God’s sake.”

  “Yes, and Grandpa always said he rushed over and Mom’s eyes were already closed. When he cupped her head and tilted it upward to face him, that’s when she opened her eyes. Then he ripped his shirt off to rest her head on it and help stop the bleeding.”

  “Jesus, Janie, what’d you do, record him?”

  “I made him tell the story a lot.”

  “Ever hopeful,” Jack mumbled.

  I scowled at him. “In this photo, no one’s touched Mom yet. There’s no smeared blood. Everything’s pristine.”

  “So?”

  “So it proves Grady McLemore was lying. According to him, he shot her just as he was passing out. Wouldn’t have left him much time to set up this touching photo op. But if he didn’t pass out right away, or if his self-injected drugs hadn’t kicked in yet, then he was busy taking this photo.”

  Jack’s handsome, camera-ready face glistened with a gotcha expression, making me feel like a hunter who’d stepped into her own trap, with a limb-crushing snap. Jack could barely speak through his wide grin. “Janie, you may have just guaranteed my book will be a bestseller. This is going to catapult me in the polls.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because if you’re right, this photo is evidence of the mysterious third party.”

  “Bull. Effing. Shit,” I said. “No way.”

  “You said it yourself. It was taken before anyone else got there.”

  “Yeah, by Grady McLemore.”

  “No.” Jack leaned forward even farther, making his smile blur into a smear of glowing white. “By the third party that Grady swore was there.”

  “Oh come on!” I said. “The Haiku Killer? The guy who materialized out of thin air, who the police found no evidence of?”

  “And now they have it. If Grady was passed out, which the police report supports, and the cops hadn’t arrived yet, then someone else took this photo. Besides, if Grady had taken the photo, they would have found a camera near his body, not to mention the alleged needle that he injected himself with.” He sneered like a rat conquering a stubborn piece of gristle as he delivered his closing line. “They found neither.”

  “He could have had an accomplice.”

  “So now you’re introducing a mysterious third party. That’s rich.” He tapped the photo and leaned back in the deluxe leather chair that loomed eight inches over his head. “This has fascinating possibilities.”

  I wanted to kick myself—and my brother. I show him a picture of my mother with a fresh bullet in her skull and he views it as an opportunity.

  “You know what else is a possibility?” I said. “That these are the Photoshopped work of some psycho geek toiling away in his parents’ basement, hiding from the government and messing with us on the anniversary of the Haiku Twins’ birth.”

  I put the last part in finger quotes. Our mutual birthday had always been labeled that way. Some source material that reporters kept referencing must have phrased it like that on our first birthday and it had stuck like a hated nickname. Every year, our birthday elicited new crazies, and this thirtieth anniversary, coming up soon, was bound to unleash a few more. The case had riveted the public’s attention for the better part of a year. By the time Jack and I were born, a month after our mother was put into an induced coma, people had virtually adopted us as their own. Gifts had poured in. My mother’s beauty and Grady’s popularity, along with the drama of the trial and the mention of the infamous Haiku Killer, had kept the story alive far longer than my mother. And who didn’t like a matched set of unlikely heroes? Jack and I were two adorable innocents who forged through dire circumstances to an improbable victory. The people of Virginia, so emotionally invested in our early welfare, had never let go of their Haiku Twins.

  Jack shrugged away my idea. Reality didn’t matter to him as long as he got a sound bite out of it. “You ever read the letters he sends you?”

  I squeezed my face into something that probably resembled a rotted peach pit. “Was it you who gave him my email address?”

  “Your own father can’t email you?”

  “Grady McLemore is not my father.”

  Jack started to protest, but I nearly lunged across the desk. “Don’t you dare,” I said, giving each word its own breath. “You’ve broken a lot of promises over the years, Jackie Boy, but do not break this one.”

  Years ago, Jack had undergone a DNA test to determine if Grady McLemore really was our father. I swore that if he ever told me the results, I’d make sure his DNA ended up in a police lab, labeled victim.

  Jack lowered his head in a facsimile of shame. “All right.” His voice came out in a chastened tone that would not play well to a voting public. He undoubtedly made a mental note to eliminate it from his stash of public personae. “Sit down,” he said.

  I let the anger go quickly, a skill I’d mastered early in life, when I’d flare up at the slightest mention of how my alleged father was in jail for killing my whore of a mother—that from so-called friends who’d internalized the dark whispers of judgmental parents. Even at a young age, I knew my mother was a saint and that I had no father, incarcerated or otherwise. The fact that my brother now worshipped that phony murderer-cum-jail hero was the sharpest edge of the wedge driven between us. It hadn’t always been this way, but at age nineteen, my brother had adopted the spineless, lying Grady McLemore as a surrogate father figure and created a wide, dark chasm between us, one I wasn’t sure we could ever bridge. All our lives, we’d been like two opposing magnets forced to exist in a tight, confined space. Left alone, we clashed, but when defending our mutual territory against enemies, we became an unbeatable duo. Back to back, we’d spin on our shared axis, peering out into the world, protecting each other and thinking as one. We’d progressed through the natural stages, from high-strung toddlers to overactive youngsters to moody teens, but nothing had broken our bond. To this day, our conduit remained tenuous but intact.

  “He asks about you,” Jack said. “All the time. He can’t get over how much you look like Mom.”

  “His victim?”

  “The love of his life.”

  “Loves of lives acknowledge each other in public, Jack.
They don’t sneak around to fancy hotels under assumed names.”

  “It was Mom who wanted to keep their relationship secret until after the election.”

  “According to the guy who benefitted from her keeping it quiet.”

  Jack shook his head at my apparent naïveté. “Mom was savvy. She knew it wouldn’t play well with the voting public if Grady had knocked up a lowly waitress out of wedlock.”

  That did it. I whipped my hand across his pretentious desk and took out his Community Servant award. As it crashed to the floor, a piece broke off and nicked a nice chunk of wood from his floor, giving me a warped satisfaction I knew I’d regret later.

  Jack sat open-mouthed, disgusted, and perhaps a little afraid. He used to be the coolest big brother, but now he wallowed in that quagmire of narcissism that eventually consumed all political types.

  I shoved the photos back in their envelope and turned to go. “I trust you won’t refer to our mother as a lowly waitress again. She was a beloved art teacher and sculptor-in-training.”

  “You need help, Janie,” he said, growing bored with me and rediscovering his balls. “You get so defensive over this woman who was barely more than a fairy tale to us. You treat her like some princess in a kids’ story we were forced to hear way too many times.”

  “If she was the princess, Jack, where was her prince? Oh, that’s right. Rotting in an eight-by-ten jail cell, pining away for the woman he hid from the world.”

  “Rapunzel got hidden away,” Jack said, seeming to regret the lame retort the moment it exited his mouth. We always did bring out the eight-year-olds in each other. I strode toward the door, but Jack’s final words found my back.

  “Love you, Sis,” he said.

  I sighed, sans glitch. “Love you, too.”

  As I exited the building, I smiled at the thought of the mighty Jack Perkins crawling around his floor, gathering the broken pieces of his precious award, like Humpty Dumpty trying to put the pieces together again. Then something tapped at my brain. What if he had put the pieces together better than me?