Free Lie Still by Julia Heaberlin Page B

agree to a Breathalyzer test to determine her alcohol level.
    I felt faint. The paper was going gray around the edges. Warned me that I should put my head down between my legs. But I couldn’t stop reading.
    Based on her demeanor and a lack of evidence, I suggested Ms. Waters drop the complaint and be more careful in the future. I cautioned her to stay away from fraternity boys. She appeared to be a standard case of a girl exacting revenge on a guy after a bad breakup. I suggested several times that she think about her role in the events of the night before filing a formal charge, and Ms. Waters got up and left without doing so.
    This level of fury had coursed inside me before, and the outcome wasn’t pretty. But to see the policewoman’s sloppy work in black and white, to feel her derision and judgment jumping off the page—everything I’d wondered if she’d thought that night—was waking an angry demon from his nap.
    It’s not like I don’t blame myself, but intellectually, I knew this ill-trained campus officer shouldn’t have dared to. Rape lite. It came unbidden to mind, the derogatory term I’d heard used for date rape.
    It occurred to me suddenly, belatedly, that I needed to be more focused and distressed about
why
this piece of paper rose from its grave in a file cabinet far, far away and landed on my doorstep.
    There were no clues, no note was attached. I dug my fingersinto the bottom corners of the envelope again and came up empty. Caroline? It seemed too soon. I’d been sitting in her house less than twenty-four hours ago. And, yes, maybe she was faking, but she appeared to be genuinely ill.
    I pictured Caroline trotting up to the door in her pearls and running away in a senior citizen version of Ding Dong Ditch. It wasn’t a genteel lady move.
    The scarier possibility, of course, was that my faithful, hateful mail stalker had gathered momentum. Something had taken her rage to a more intimate level.
    The phone—a red, old-fashioned dial-up still attached to the wall—shrilled two feet from my head, and I let out a short scream.
    Calm down. You aren’t a nineteen-year-old girl anymore
.
    I picked up the receiver, ready to give the caller everything she had coming to her. To let her know that I wasn’t a person who could be blackmailed, although another part of me tried to speak up, saying I was exactly that kind of person.
    “Emily?”
    Not a female voice. Mike.
    “Yes.” I battled a wave of nausea.
    “You aren’t answering your cell phone.”
    “It’s … on the bed. I think.”
    “Hold on a second,” he said. The phone chilled my burning cheek. I could hear a small commotion on the other end. Several voices.
    Could I tell Mike about the rape now? After all these years?
    He’d be angry, hurt, that through all of our shouting matches, hours of marriage counseling, the ups and downs of our marathon sex life, I had never trusted him enough. Keeping the rape from him was one more dent in our marital armor. It would erase all the progress we’d made in the last six months. I’d thought about this thousands of times, relentless waves lapping at the shore.
    I closed my eyes, hating myself. For the rape. For the things that followed.
    But Mike’s curt words quickly erased any thoughts of telling him anything. “I’m over at Caroline Warwick’s house. She’s missing. Em, you were one of the last people to see her.”
    My fingers involuntarily crumpled the police report until it was a wad in my fist, the size of a small grenade.

8

    W as I imagining the soft sound of crying in the background? Maria?
    “Oh, Mike.” I cleared my throat. “When?”
    “Caroline complained of a migraine all afternoon, then went to bed around seven-thirty last night. Maria claims she stayed on her shift longer than usual before going home, to make sure Caroline was OK. This morning, when she didn’t show up for breakfast, Maria found her bedroom empty, the bed rumpled, but the covers still in place, like