I am often asked if I felt anything. If I could somehow have seen my brother in my mind, could have used the sixth sense that twins sometimes have to find Henry out in the ether during the time he was missing. I always lie, say that I felt a current of pain, that at night a cold sweat overtook me and I awoke saying his name. But really I felt nothing. I never have. Henry and I are absolutely identical on the outside. Inside, we might as well be strangers.
He was gone for seven days—what the media began to call his “lost week.” During those endless days, two schools of thought emerged. There were those who believed Henry had slipped away to elude his inevitable arrest. During the investigation he had remained a fixture at the grieving college, even though his course load had been lightened. And it was at Oldham that he disappeared. Henry was seen walking across campus one moment by a literature professor and then, just like that, he vanished into thin air.
There were also those few allies of my brother, most of them pernicious academics who appeared shocked and disheveled on MSNBC asking, “Where are the forensics? If Professor Malcolm is a murderer, where is the evidence to prove it?”
The search for Henry Malcolm began. It was unlike anything New York State had ever seen. An unmarked car sat outside my front door that week; they thought I had harbored him, I suppose. But I had only seen Henry a few times since Laura died. In the media I was the Identical Twin, the brother who was a constant in Henry’s life, but the reality was that I didn’t care about Henry. I couldn’t. He had done too much, burned too many bridges, for me to come to his defense now. If I thought of him I thought of poor, sweet Laura, who didn’t deserve any of this, who once told me she loved Henry despite his problems, and when I pushed her, asking, “Laura, what problems? What do you—” she slipped away into a crowded party.
I grieved for her, not Henry. Henry would come out of this unscathed. He always did.
* * *
A hiker found him four miles from campus. He was lashed to an oak tree, drenched in his own blood, beaten and bruised. Henry was alive, barely, and mumbling incoherently when they brought him back to St. Mark’s Hospital in Oldham Town.
Police urged him to tell them what happened, but he gave them nothing. He was in shock, and for a month he has remained in the trauma ward, silently recovering, unable to remember—or, perhaps, unwilling to remember—what happened to him in those woods.
When he finally gave his statement, he talked about being taken to a cabin. Being held in a drab, empty room with only a stained mattress and a slot for food. He spoke of a solitary man holding him prisoner. Did he see this man’s face? No, he did not. Did he hear a voice? No. Henry had been drugged; toxicology proved this. He had been out of it. Nearly comatose. The only thing that woke him was the man torturing him, the hot prick of a knife digging into his arms, his chest. The copper smell of welling blood.
That was all. Everything else was lost in the fog.
Only one thing about Henry’s ordeal was indisputable: his wounds were real. On NBC, he lifted his shirt for Brian Williams to see the twisted, serrated mouth of a gash running from his clavicle to his ribs. His face was bruise-black, his arms dotted with cigarette burns, his ankles and wrists red as flame where he had writhed against the ropes. Even his eyes were different, somehow not-Henry: dimmed, hollow, lacking their previous fury.
Just like that, my brother went from suspect to victim. The suggestion of foul play, the missing murder weapon, the faceless man Laura was seen with on her last day—all of it suggested something too horrible to contemplate. The headlines changed, morphed almost overnight: IS THERE A KILLER LOOSE AT OLDHAM COLLEGE?
Henry Malcolm, it seemed, had been exonerated.