ork from the sterling flatware, flowers, like the ice cream cake party on TV, but tried instead to imagine Edward Martin Bruer's eating of the cake, the last part of his last meal. What kind of dishes do they have in prison? She doubted they were like those metal plates she'd seen in old black and white prisoner movies, bar-clangers. Would Bruer, preoccupied, even notice what his cake tasted like and how it was served or would he be hyperfocused, thinking, I am eating for the last time, this is the last spoon I'll hold in my hand.

That was one thing about her sister, Lorraine thought. Observe and learn, Emily'd say. Catch the note and trick, she'd say, taking her beloved Henry James much too seriously.

Lorraine was certain that Emily would have laughed at first, finding Edward Martin Bruer in her kitchen that night, his doughy, sweaty face lit by the one bulb shining from inside the open refrigerator. Emily always laughed at horrible things. The thrill of the real, she called it. Like the purplish slick of dried blood they'd seen on their father's black leather wallet when they'd been called to the police station to claim his belongings after the suicide. Emily held the wallet toward the fluorescent ceiling lights and rocked it in her palm, making the blood shimmer. "Look at that," she said, laughing, "how could it be so pretty?"

Lorraine could picture Emily's eyes, intense and engaged, watching every blow to her own chest and abdomen, trying to feel the sound, the swoosh and splat into her flesh, watching her own arms rising then falling away, repulsed. Emily wasn't one to decompensate. Her own murder would not have been lost on her.

Lorraine spooned into the vanilla swirls of the ice cream cake. She examined the bite before she tasted it, the alternating layers of vanilla and shards of chocolate shell, a repackaged childhood treat. She and Emily, little girls on their first outings alone, would walk the four blocks from home to the Campus D

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