He laughed, reaching beneath the sheet to stroke the side of her breast. “You’ve already done some pretty good things in my drawers,” he said, and it took her a minute to get it.
She gave him a little shove. “You study and I’ll straighten up,” she said.
He got out of bed and pulled on his jeans. She followed close behind him, feeling his eyes on her body as she got dressed. When she looked up he was smiling at her. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to just sit here while you’re slaving around in my room looking cute as a button.”
“You won’t be just sitting there, you’ll be working.” She flipped on the overhead light, took his arm and guided him to his desk. “And I love doing this kind of thing. Honestly. When I left one of the homes I was in, my foster mother told the social worker she’d miss how I always straightened up after everyone.”
“I’d miss a lot more than that,” Tim said, taking a seat at his desk.
She bent over to kiss the top of his head. It was hard to believe that twenty-four hours ago she’d thought this relationship was over. Now she felt at ease, as though they’d been together for years. She hoped that’s what was ahead of them: years of being together.
She started with his clothes, tossing the ones that were obviously soiled into the overstuffed hamper and hanging and folding the others. Then she worked on his bookshelf, where papers and notebooks were piled helter-skelter. Tim typed at his desk. He was a good typist, and she worked to the clacking sound of his fingers flying over the keys.
After an hour or so, he pushed back from his desk and looked down at her. She sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by piles of books and papers. She rested her hand on one of the stacks.
“These are things I don’t know what to do with,” she said. “And what’s this?” She held up a packet of papers she’d found stapled together. On the cover sheet was a line drawing of a man with his head over a block, an executioner standing next to him, ax raised and ready to fall. The picture gave her the creeps. Across the top of the paper, in large handwritten letters, was the word SCAPE. “What’s SCAPE?” she asked.
Tim looked at the sheaf of papers in her hand. He stared at it a long time as if trying to remember where he’d seen it before. Then his eyes met hers. “If I tell you something, can you keep it between us?”
“Tim,” she said, as if she couldn’t believe he’d ask such a question. “Of course,” she said. “Look at everything I’ve told you.”
He still looked dubious. Then he stood up and held out his hand for her. She got to her feet and walked with him from his room, down the hall and into a huge bedroom that she guessed had belonged to his parents. It was a relief to be in a room the brothers had yet to trash. The queen-size bed was a four-poster and the floor was covered by a red-and-beige Persian rug that stretched nearly wall to wall.
Tim sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up one of the framed photographs from the marble-topped night table. She sat next to him, and he put his arm around her as he held the picture on her knees. It was of three teenagers, two boys and a girl, grinning at the camera in a moment of simple joy. The boy on the left was Tim. His blond curls were longer and wilder, and his smile was different than it was now. More open. Less jaded by time and experience.
“That’s you,” CeeCee said.
“Right.” Tim pointed to the boy on the right. “And that’s Marty.”
The grinning young Marty bore the clean-cut, steel-jawed good looks of a soldier. “Wow, I wouldn’t have recognized him.”
“He’d just turned eighteen here,” Tim said. “Shipped out the next week. Andie—” Tim pointed to the girl standing between them “—and I were fifteen.”
“She’s your … this is your sister?” CeeCee asked.
For the first time since she’d asked him about SCAPE, Tim smiled. “My twin,” he said, his fingertips lightly touching the glass over Andie’s picture. His voice sounded swollen with love for his sister. “And that’s where SCAPE comes in.”
“I don’t get it,” she said.
Tim let out a long sigh. “A couple of years ago, Andie was arrested for murder.”
CeeCee caught her breath. “Murder?” she asked. “Did she do it?”
Tim didn’t answer the question. “When she finally got her day in court last summer, the jury came to the conclusion that she did.”
CeeCee suddenly understood Tim’s concerns about prison reform. “Why did they think she did it?”
“Because they didn’t really know her. Andie couldn’t hurt anyone. And the thing is … Marty screwed things up for her. I don’t blame him for what he did, but he still feels like crap about it.”
“What did he do?”
Tim stared at the picture. “See, what happened was, this photographer was supposed to come take pictures of our house to do a spread for Southern Living Classics. You know, the magazine?”
She nodded, although she didn’t know the magazine at all.
“My parents were in Europe,” Tim continued, “so the guy was just going to photograph the exterior and do the rest when they got back. Andie was home, but she was studying in her room. We were both finishing up our sophomore year at Carolina. She’d— we’d—just turned nineteen. Anyhow, she said she didn’t even know the guy was here taking pictures, and the next day, one of our neighbors saw him dead in the backyard. He’d been stabbed about a dozen times with a kitchen knife. The neighbor said she saw Andie outside talking to him the day before.” Tim set the photograph back on the night table and stood up, running his fingers through his hair. “So, then things got all screwed up,” he said.
CeeCee tried to mask her horror. A man had been murdered in the yard behind the house she was sitting in. Stabbed a dozen times. She shuddered at the thought.
“The cops interviewed Andie and Marty and me separately.” Tim idly touched objects on the long dresser. Another photograph. A hand mirror. A silver cigarette lighter. “And we all said different things. I told the truth. I said I was on campus around the time they figured the guy was murdered, which I was, and that I’d met Marty for lunch. He’d just gotten back from Vietnam and was kind of a mess.”
Tim opened one of the top dresser drawers and pulled out an unopened pack of Winstons. CeeCee sat quietly as he lit a cigarette and let out a stream of smoke. He held the pack toward her and she shook her head.
“Marty lied, though,” Tim said. “He said he was home with Andie all afternoon, that she never went outside. He said it to protect her, of course.” He laughed mirthlessly. “This is so screwed up,” he said.
“And what did Andie say?” she asked.
“That she was home alone and never saw the guy. Her prints were on the knife, and she said that was because it was from our kitchen and she used it all the time. So, Marty got a slap on the wrist for lying and Andie got put in jail for a year and a half while she waited for a trial. My parents came home right away and got her a decent lawyer, but Andie’s story was screwy and the jury knew
