Read Online Cartwheel by Jennifer Dubois - Free Book Online

on the link, which took him to what looked to be a mostly abandoned blog—
Reveries
, it was called, and underneath it were the words “feminist,” “artist,” “dreamer,” and “explorer”—and the top post was her imagined crime, creatively written, apparently, for a college course. The piece seemed to revolve around a jilted lover who goes back into the house of the woman who has betrayed him to steal an expensive necklace he has given her. Eduardo read with keen attention, feeling that he was watching a thing in the distance assume its shape. Underneath the florid writing, the girlish overreliance on adverbs, there was something troubling and emotionally askew—the same thing, he was almost sure, that he’d detected in the transcript from her interview. He read the piece’s ending. Then he read it again.
    In my ire and haste, I have tripped the alarm. I must move with alacrity now. I grab the necklace swiftly. It is so beautiful. Its varicolored hues glitter dazzlingly in the light. I look at her sleeping peacefully there. I admire her swanlike neck of ivory. It is so innocent, so unsuspecting. I raise my knife in murderous wrath, but do not strike
.
    Eduardo printed out the story with the benumbed feeling of encountering astonishing good luck. It was significantly less than a written confession, of course, though it was hard to think of anything much closer.
    But still, he was not sure.
    Thursday was the judicial interrogation, to which Lily Hayes had submitted without a lawyer. Her father would be coming, apparently, and a U.S. consultant to the Argentine defense team and various private defense attorneys were being hired; these people, it was clear, had some money. Eduardo did not know why Lily had rejected the offers of a state-appointed lawyer. Perhaps it was due to a low opinion of thequality of Argentine state defenders, or a foolish calculation that this would make her look innocent, or an unusual though by no means unheard-of indifference to her own fate. Eduardo felt some sympathy for her. But he wasn’t going to talk her out of making her own strategic mistakes, if she wanted to make them.
    In the interrogation room, Lily Hayes looked even paler than the day Eduardo first saw her; her fingers were spread out on the table in a gesture of bald terror, and her hair did not appear to be entirely clean. She did seem very young—but Katy Kellers had been young, too, and Eduardo’s empathy for her was not contingent on age. Neither was it contingent on her guilt or innocence. He was going to be as clear and kind as the situation allowed. This was only humane. He sat down.
    “Quien es usted?” she said.
    “Eduardo Campos,”
he said. He did not extend his hand, because he didn’t want to be patronizing. For the same reason, he did not switch to English. “I’m the fiscal de cámara, a representative of the investigative magistrate. My job is to help decide whether there’s enough evidence against you to bring you to a criminal trial. I have ten days to make that determination, starting from today. I’ll make my assessment and issue a recommendation to the instructor judge as to whether we should continue our case against you. In the eventuality that your case is brought before the criminal court, I’ll argue the state’s case alongside the instructor judge. It will be heard by a panel of three judges, who will determine your guilt or innocence. Has all of this been explained to you?”
    He saw her pause, unsure whether to admit she had no idea what was going on.
    “Yes,” she said carefully.
    “This is your judicial interrogation. You understand that you don’t have to talk to me?”
    “Yes,” she said, more confidently. Eduardo flashed to an image of the unthinkable cartwheel this girl had done during her initial questioning; he saw her starfishing her way across the interrogation roomunder the cold light of the camera. “Why can’t my dad bail me out?” she said.
    “Bail has to do