Jule opened Immie’s package, delivered yesterday. Inside were clothes FedExed from an online retailer. Four dresses, two shirts, a pair of jeans, a silk sweater. Each item was so expensive Jule put her hand over her mouth involuntarily when she looked at the packing sheet.
Immie’s room was next door. Jule had the key card now. The room was clean. In the bathroom, a grubby makeup bag sat on the counter. In it, Jule found Imogen’s passport, plus a surprising number of tubes and compacts, all disorganized. On the towel rack hung an ugly beige bra. There was a razor with a few stray hairs in it.
Jule took Immie’s passport and looked at the photograph next to her own face in the glass. The height difference was only an inch. The eye color was listed as green. Immie’s hair was lighter. Jule’s weight was significantly higher, but most of that was muscle and didn’t show under certain clothes.
She pulled the Vassar IDs from Immie’s wallet and looked at those. The meal card photo clearly showed Immie’s long neck and her triple-pierced ear. The student ID was smaller and blurrier. It didn’t show the ear. Jule could easily use that one.
She cut the meal card into tiny pieces with nail scissors and flushed the pieces down the toilet.
Then she plucked her eyebrows—thin, like Immie’s. She cut her bangs shorter with nail scissors. She found Immie’s collection of vintage engraved rings: the amethyst fox, the silhouette, the wooden carving of the duck, a sapphire one with a bumblebee, a silver elephant, a silver leaping rabbit, and a green jade frog. They wouldn’t fit on her swollenhands.
The next couple of days were spent going through Immie’s computer files. Jule used both rooms. They were air-conditioned. Sometimes she opened a terrace door to let the thick heat pour in over her. She ate chocolate chip pancakes and drank mango juice from room service.
Immie’s bank and investment accounts had a total of eight million dollars in them. Jule memorized numbers and passwords. Phone numbers and email addresses, too.
She learned Imogen’s looping signature from the passport and the inside flaps of Immie’s books. She copied other handwriting from a notepad Immie had, which was covered with doodles and shopping lists. After creating an electronic signature, she found the name of Immie’s family lawyer. She told him she (Immie) would be traveling a lot in the next year, going around the world. She wanted to make a will. The money would be left to a friend who didn’t have much, a friend who was an orphan and had lost her college scholarship: Julietta West Williams. She also left money to the North Shore Animal League and to the National Kidney Foundation.
It took a few days for the lawyer to take action, but he promised to arrange everything. No problem. Imogen Sokoloff was a legal adult.
She looked over Immie’s writing style in emails and on Instagram: the way she signed off, the way she wrote paragraphs, the expressions she used. She closed all Immie’s social media accounts. They were dormant anyhow. She untagged Immie from as many photographs as possible. She made sure all of Immie’s credit cards auto-paid from Immie’s bank accounts. She reset passwords using Immie’s email.
She read the local Culebra paper for news, but there was nothing.
Jule bought hair color in a grocery store and streaked it on carefully with a toothbrush. She practiced smiling without showing her teeth. She had a bitter pain up one side of her neck that wouldn’t leave.
Finally, the lawyer emailed a template will. Jule printed it out at the business office of the hotel. She put the papers in her suitcase and decided she’d waited long enough. She bought a ticket to San Francisco under Imogen’s name. She checked out of the hotel for the two of them.
SECOND WEEK OF SEPTEMBER, 2016
CULEBRA, PUERTO RICO
Two and a half weeks before she left for San Francisco, Jule sat next to Imogen in the back of a jeep taxi, bumping over the road from the Culebra airport. Immie had booked the resort.
“I came here with my friend Bitsy Cohan’s family when we were twelve,” Immie said, gesturing at the island around them. “Bitsy had her jaw wired shut after a bike accident. I remember she just drank virgin daiquiris all day. No food. One morning we got a boat over to this tiny island called Culebrita. It had black volcanic rock like nothing I ever saw before. And we snorkeled, but Bitsy’s jaw caused snorkel problems, so she was very cranky.”
“I had my jaw wired shut once,” said Jule. It was true, but as soon as she said it, she wished she hadn’t. It wasn’t a funny story.
“What happened? Did you fall off a motorbike belonging to one of your Stanford boyfriends? Or did the evil coach of your track team put a hit out on you?”
“It was a locker room fight,” Jule lied.
“Another one?” Immie looked ever so slightly disappointed.
“Well, wewerenaked,” Jule said, to amuse her.
“Get out.”
“After track practice, senior year of high school. Full-on naked battle, in the showers, three against one.”
“Like a prison porno movie.”
“Not as sexy. They broke my bloody jaw.”
“Horses,” said the driver, pointing, and sure enough there were. A group of three wild horses with sweetly shaggy coats stood in the middle of the road. The driver honked.
“Don’t honk at them!” said Imogen.
“They’re not scared,” said the driver. “Look.” He honked again and the horses moved slowly out of the way, only mildly annoyed.
