Lie Still by Julia Heaberlin

she hadn’t ever pulled them down.”
    “Maybe she made the bed and went on a late morning walk?” Why was this being treated as such a crisis when it had been less than twenty-four hours? And why was he calling me? Mike never included me in his investigations. Never.
    I aimed the ball of paper at the kitchen wastebasket ten feet away, playing a game with myself. If it went in, I didn’t have to tell Mike anything at all. If I missed, I would come clean.
    “Maria says Caroline tells people that she hasn’t made her own bed since she was six,” Mike said. “She’s fired three housekeepers who didn’t change the sheets by eight on the dot every morning.”
    “Maybe she took a late night drive? Got in an accident?”
    People like Caroline always came back. I arched my wrist and fired. The paper ball bounced off the wastebasket’s rim and under the kitchen table. Stupid game.
    “We’re checking the hospitals. But all of her cars are in the garage. Three Cadillacs.” Mike lowered his voice. “I don’t feel good about this.” At once, I understood. Mike’s well-trained gut was talking.
    “You think something has happened to her?”
    “There’s a little blood on the back of a pillow. An open window. A footprint in the flower bed. Ladder marks in the dirt. A gutter with a dent in it. It could be a week-old nosebleed, a desire for fresh night air, a diligent gardener picking weeds, and a little hail damage. It’s not like I have a crack CSI unit.”
    “There’s something else, I can tell.” Mike’s sarcasm had whipped up a new batch of paranoia in my head. Was Caroline’s bedtime reading a copy of my rape report? Was someone sweeping my past into an evidence bag? Mike couldn’t find out this way.
    “There are three empty prescription bottles on her nightstand. Prozac, Percocet, and Vicodin. Exactly the drug cocktail that killed her friend Helen. Prescribed by Dr. Gretchen Liesel. The painkillers are for migraines, so that’s consistent at least. But the Mayse suicide is extremely fresh in my mind.”
    “You think Caroline killed herself? She was definitely not suicidal when I saw her.” Anything but.
    “It’s not my top scenario. And there’s another odd thing. Maria says Caroline always kept her Bible on her dresser. Wouldn’t let her touch it, even to dust. Onionskin pages. A relic.There’s an inscription.
To our blessed daughter, on her tenth birthday
. Someone ripped a page out of it and underlined a passage. One of my guys found it on the floor by the window. Hold on, let me get it. It’s already been bagged.”
    Mike came back on the line.
    “Matthew 23:33.”
    “It’s not top of my mind at the moment,” I said.
    “You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?”
    Tearing a page out of someone’s Bible was like burning the flag in front of a soldier. Maybe worse.
    “What do you want me to do?” I asked.
He wants me to tell him the truth
, I thought.
Tell him that the five women who sat in a room with Caroline Warwick yesterday, including his pregnant wife, would make a nice little lineup of suspects
.
    “Stay home. I’m sending an officer over for your statement.”
    “Mike, I …”
    He’d already hung up.
    C ody Hill was a young, redheaded policeman who topped out at about 6’5″ and held a glass of ice water in sprawling hands that belonged to a former Clairmont High School All-State quarterback. It was a fact he mentioned about himself immediately after dropping onto my couch.
    I forced my fingers to stop twirling a strand of hair into a tight rope. The crumpled campus police report now resided in the pocket of my jeans, a ball of lead. When did paper become so heavy?
    “I don’t really know how I can help,” I told him. “I don’t know Caroline Warwick well. She invited me to a party at her house several days ago and then yesterday for a glass of iced tea with a few other women.”
    “How did she seem?”
    “Yesterday? Fine, I