Free Lie Still by Julia Heaberlin Page A

student hung himself in his bedroom after a girl broke up with him.”
    “Who found him? His mother?” My gut twisted into the complicated knot that it performed earlier in the day, with Tiffany breathing into my face.
    “I shouldn’t tell you any of this,” Mike said. “You should be thinking nice baby thoughts. Bunnies and flowers.”
    “Who was the other one? The other suicide?”
    “Really?”
    “Really.”
    “The wife of the First Presbyterian minister overdosed on a cocktail of prescription drugs. Helen Mayse. Three months ago. That’s all you’re getting out of me tonight.”
    “Helen?” I sat up. “I think Caroline was talking about her today. I think she’s the woman who died and left a spot open in that stupid club. Caroline didn’t give any hint of a suicide.”
    “You saw Caroline again today?” He gave me an odd look. “You didn’t mention it.”
    “It was just a quick glass of iced tea with a few women at her house.”
    Mike shrugged. “Suicide still carries a stigma. People won’t talk about it.” He banged me on the head with the folder. “Come on, honey. This is just your run-of-the-mill small-town stuff. Relax. I’m glad you’re getting to know people.”
    Caroline’s macabre performance this afternoon was stuck like a clot of bread in my throat. It was just as much a lie because I held it in, an excruciating lesson I had learned over time. This lie of omission was already casually walking over to the little nest inside I’d made for the others.
    The baby was operating the dimmer switch for my brain. My eyes drooped.
    “I hear you.” I fluffed up my pillow and laid down again. “Bunnies and flowers.”
    E leven hours later.
    My name, “Emily Page,” stood out in bold type on the printed label.
    The package was thin and brown, stamped crookedly several times in red ink with PRIVATE . No stamps. No return address.
    The package, propped up against the doorframe, had grazed my feet as soon as I stepped onto the side porch to water a dying pot of impatiens. A familiar flutter of fear, but I pushed it away. She’d never hand-delivered anything before. She was old. Far away.
    She could have hired someone. You don’t really think she’s going to kill you herself, do you?
    I headed back inside to the kitchen and snatched a paring knife out of the wood block on the counter.
    The package was thin enough to be empty, but I knew better. I slid the knife under the flap and reached my hand down deep, pulling out a sealed legal-sized envelope. Blank. White. No writing. I dropped the knife and slit the envelope open with my nail. I unfolded the single piece of paper inside. Surely it was a leftover form from our real estate agent we still needed to sign.
    It wasn’t anything nearly so simple.
    The type blurred in my shaking hands, but a cop’s wife instantly recognizes a police report. I caught a name, and a terrible verb.
    I could see Pierce’s face in my mind. Hear his voice.
Lie still
.
    I smoothed it out on the kitchen table. I’d never seen this—didn’t even know it existed—but Officer Marilyn Hinks got all the basic details right. Thirteen years ago, a sophomore female, Emily Waters, entered the Windsor University campus police office at 3:13 a.m. to report a rape.
    I quickly read the brief summary of the complaint:
    Emily Waters asserted that she’d been raped by another student, Pierce Martin, at the Theta Chi fraternity house two hours previously, about 1 a.m. The complainant was calm and composed, wearing black sweats and a clean white T-shirt with a Windsor logo. She admitted she had gone back to Martin’sroom of her own free will with the idea of spending a little time. However, she insisted she did not agree to sex. There were no visible bruises on her body and she refused to allow an officer to see or take any pictures of her back, chest, or legs. The complainant said she had taken an hour-long shower in her dorm before showing up to report the rape. She would not