I had to see Lilly. I called again and told her assistant that I was going to take the kids to a beach in Malibu that I knew Lilly liked, and that I hoped she’d join me there. I bundled Ruby and Isaac into the car and packed a bag with sand toys, towels, and extra clothes. The fog lay in a thick mantle along the shore, wreathing the beach in icy tendrils and hiding the ocean almost entirely from view. I wrapped myself up in a sweater and a warm hat as I waited for Lilly to arrive, but Ruby and Isaac were impervious to the chill. They kicked off their shoes and socks, rolled up their jeans, and danced in and out of the surf, squealing whenever the water hit their ankles.
Just when I was about to give up on Lilly, Amber and Jade tore across the sand, screaming Ruby’s name and ululating like a couple of banshees. Lilly plopped down next to me on the ratty cotton bedspread I’d laid out on the sand. She was traveling incognito, a baseball cap pulled low over her forehead and huge, round sunglasses hiding her famous azure eyes.
“Hey, yourself.”
She pointed at a young man who had followed her twins down to the water. “I brought Patrick with me. He’ll watch the kids so we can talk.”
The nanny was crouched down next to Isaac, ruffling his hair. As we watched, he reached into the teal blue backpack slung over his shoulder and pulled out a frisbee. Within moments he had all four kids standing in a circle, flinging the disk in the vague direction of one another. I could get used to this kind of parenting. It was a lot easier to enjoy being with your kids if someone else was actually playing the games with them. I wondered, in Lilly’s position would I feel guilty? Would I feel like I should be the one running around on the sand with my children, instead of the cheerful young nanny? Perhaps. But perhaps not. After all, it wasn’t like I’d been doing a whole lot of playing before Lilly and her brood showed up. I’d been huddled on the sand, watching Ruby and Isaac entertain themselves, and not for a minute feeling like I was neglecting them. Anyway, chances were I was never going to have to debate the pros and cons of too much childcare. I couldn’t afford it, and even if Peter’s screenwriting career really took off and pushed us into a different economic bracket, chances were I’d be too disorganized and busy to get around to hiring my own team of nannies.
Lilly and I watched the kids in silence for a while. I kicked off my shoes and scooted down to the edge of the bedspread. I dug my toes into the cold sand. Lilly followed me and kicked sand over my feet, burying them.
“Oooh,” I said, wriggling my feet. “Popsicle toes.”
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Better.”
“That’s good.”
“And you?”
“Better,” she said, and smiled.
I smiled back. “Good. Hey, guess what? I’m having a girl.”
She smiled at me. “Congratulations. Girls are great.”
“Yeah, they are.” We sat in silence for a little while, watching our girls romp in the sand.
“Are you really okay, Lilly?”
She nodded, and then shook her head. “I don’t know. I mean, I guess so. Beverly says just to lie low and wait for it to blow over.”
“That’s probably all you can do. Did the prosecutor ask for an interview?”
She nodded. “My lawyers gave them a statement. You know, I didn’t do anything to Chloe, that kind of thing. I’ll let them figure out how much to tell the DA, and when. It’s not like there’s any evidence linking me to the crime, or anything.”
“Of course not,” I said. Although of course there was. The money paid to Chloe’s account. The request to Jupiter that he talk to Chloe. All that could be used as circumstantial evidence against Lilly.
“And your parents?” I asked. “Are they doing okay? I mean, I noticed some tension when I saw them.”
Lilly snorted. “‘Tension.’ That’s one word for it.”
I raised my eyebrows.
She shrugged. “The added pressure isn’t doing them any good, but things haven’t been great with them for quite a while. Ever since my dad was forced to retire after my mom was appointed Speaker. I think he just doesn’t know what to do with himself, and when my dad’s bored . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“What? What does he do when he’s bored?”
She shook her head. “He tries to find something to entertain himself. Something young, and pretty.”
“He’s having an affair?”
She laughed bitterly. “An affair? Probably more like ten. Or fifteen. My dad’s always been like that. I told you about the Topanga commune.”
“Have you always known about his affairs?”
“We both knew. Both me and my mom. I mean, Beverly. Although of course my real mother knew, too. It was even more out in the open back then. They’re children of the sixties, don’t forget. Free love and all that crap. I guess my dad figured that if he told us everything, then he wasn’t doing anything wrong.”
“Does Beverly have affairs?”
“My mom? No. Never. She’s not like that. She loves my dad, and that’s it. Or that was it.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s finally getting sick of it, I guess. I mean, now that it’s becoming a political embarrassment for her. She’s humiliated, and I’m worried that she’s going to decide she’s not willing to put up with him anymore.”
“Do you think they might get divorced?”
Lilly heaved a sigh. “God, I hope not. But I don’t know. After his most recent fling, she told him he had one last chance. We’ll see what happens. He’ll probably screw it up. He always does.” She twisted her mouth into a rueful frown. “I can’t talk about this anymore. It makes me too depressed. Tell me what’s happening with the case. That ought to cheer me right up.”
I kicked my feet loose and said, “The case. Yeah. Well, you’ll probably understand why we can’t continue to work for Jupiter.”
She nodded. “I figured as much.”
“But there is something I want to talk to you about. I’ve been doing a little research on repressed memory.”
Her smile faded. “Really?”
I nodded. “Have you ever heard of False Memory Syndrome?”
She didn’t answer. I waited. Finally, after a few moments she said, “I talked to Dr. Blackmore about that a few years ago. I read an article about it in the L.A. Times. You can imagine how I felt. I called him right away, and we had an emergency session. A few sessions.”
“What did he say?”
“He told me that the research on false memories is really spotty. Nobody’s proved that they even exist.”
I refrained from pointing out to her that the same was essentially true for the theory of recovered memory.
“He’s very sure that my memories are accurate,” she continued.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
“Lilly, are you sure that you killed your mother?”
Her shoulders began to shake. I thought for a moment that she must be crying, but her eyes were dry. She was trembling, as if the cool sea breeze had grown to a frigid gale. I reached an arm around her and hugged her close. Her shoulder blades were as sharp as a bird’s, and I felt them poking into the skin of my inner arm.
“Lilly?”
“I’ve been sure. I’ve known that I did this for so long. My entire life. I’m the girl who shot her mother, and who managed with years of therapy to salvage a life for herself. It’s who I am. Little Girl Q. That’s what Dr. Blackmore called me, did you know that? He wrote about my case in psychology journals.”
“I know. I read some of the articles.”
“When I read about false memories, I panicked. I know it sounds crazy, but I was reassured when Dr. Blackmore told me that it really had happened. That I really had killed her. Everything I’ve done in my life, everything I am, is to make up for this horrible thing that I did when I was five years old. What would it mean if it weren’t true? Who would I be?”
I clasped her bony frame closer. I understood that it was terrifying for Lilly to imagine that the truth on which she’d based her life, the trauma from which she’d always tried to recover, had never really happened. But was that really worse than living forever with the guilt? Wouldn’t bringing an end to the guilt also liberate her from the trauma?
Except, of course, that if the memories were wrong, if she hadn’t done it, there would be a whole other kind of horror to imagine. Lilly had been silent after her mother’s death. She had not assumed responsibility for the terrible crime. Another person had implicated her, had blamed her: Polaris Jones. The man who sat at her bedside, hovered over her, cared for her. Had he struggled to end her catatonia, or had he been responsible for it? The chilling image of a stepfather whispering lies of her guilt into the ear of a devastated and silent girl filled me with a cold, sick horror.
There was, of course, only one reason why Polaris would have blamed Lilly for Trudy-Ann’s death: to deflect suspicion away from himself.
Lilly straightened up and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. I smoothed the short, tangled curls away from her forehead. “As terrifying as it is to imagine that you’ve spent your life living this lie, isn’t it worse to continue to believe it if it isn’t true?” I said gently.
She inhaled deeply and then, with a movement so small as to be almost unnoticeable, she nodded.
“I think we need to find out what really happened in Mexico,” I said.
“But how?”
Suddenly, I knew what I had to do. “What if I went down there? I could check the police records, track down anyone who might have information. I could talk to the detectives who investigated the death, to anybody who might have worked in the house. You know, maids, gardeners, whatever.”
She looked at me, her eyes wet with tears. “You’d do that for me?”
“Of course,” I said.
“And you don’t have any suspicions . . .” Her voice trailed off.
I kicked sand over her feet. “No, I don’t.”
“You don’t think I killed Chloe?”
I shook my head. “No. I know you didn’t.” I was naïve, and I was loyal, and I didn’t believe my friend was a murderer.