Dead Ringers (13 page)

“Shit,” he whispered.

Kyrie murmured something in her sleep, but his focus remained on his phone. Had word somehow gotten around the department that he had applied for a position at Oxford? If Lili had heard about it and told Tess already, things would get very ugly.

You're not going to tell me what this is about?
he texted.

Work. In a way,
she replied. And then,
Look, we just need to see you. I told you it's important. Are you going to make time or not?

A sour kernel of suspicion grew in the back of his mind.
You haven't talked to Derek, have you?

Would Tess have done it to him, even out of anger? Would she have had someone call his real estate agent, pretending to be him, and fire the guy? He had trouble imagining her capable of it, and yet Tess had changed. They both had, since the split. Maybe the new Tess was capable of all kinds of things the old Tess would never have done.

Who's Derek?

Kyrie shifted in her sleep, relaxed, and began to snore lightly again. Nick wanted to put the phone away, wished he had never looked at the text. The laugh track on the TV seemed to be aimed at him, mocking him for how easily a simple text from his ex-wife could have him chasing his tail.

Tess never asked him for anything that didn't have to do with Maddie. She hadn't been that kind of ex. It made him both grateful and a little sad to know that their daughter was the only connection with him she wanted to preserve.

Where and when?
he asked.

Eleven am at Diesel Cafe.

Nick hesitated, but only for a second.
See you there
.

He set the phone back on the nightstand and drew his arm from beneath Kyrie's head. Turning away from her, he stared at the wall. The TV would play old sitcoms all night. He often left it on while he slept, the flicker and the voices offering the comfort of familiarity as he traveled through dreams. Tonight he lay there, Kyrie drawing tight up behind him, cleaving to his warmth, and he listened to those voices. They gave him no comfort this time. He had never imagined being the kind of man who would neglect his family, never mind get divorced. He had grown up with an image of himself as a good man, a righteous man, his father would have said.

Now he wasn't sure.

Midnight came and went and Nick stared at the wall, wondering who he really was. Wondering if he would ever know.

 

TEN

Frank needed a drink. He'd fought the nausea and endured the chills and sweats that had come and gone.
Fucking alcoholic,
he scolded himself. How had it come to this? All those years promising himself he would never become his father, and here he was. Maybe not as far gone, but still, enough of an alcoholic that his body had decided to torture him until he gave it what it craved. The need had come on in fits and starts. He had been able to push it aside while dealing with the fear and fury of being imprisoned in his own cellar, and the impossible riddle of seeing this man who wore his face again and again. Now, though, the thirst had its hooks in him deep.

He sat slumped against the metal post, unable to sleep or even to pass out from exhaustion. His stomach knotted up with pain and his entire body ached. He would have screamed if he had any hope that someone besides his double might hear him. His mother always said that men were babies when they were sick and even her drunken asshole husband had never argued the point.

This is more than sick,
Frank thought.
I don't have the flu. I'm a prisoner
.

For a while he had told himself that eventually someone would come. He would be discovered. The sick knot in his gut, the craving that clawed at his eyes and made his skin prickle with an unscratchable itch … maybe it gave him clarity, because he knew nobody would be coming. As far as the outside world knew, Frank Lindbergh had started to turn his life around, gotten a new and better job, better clothes, and a brighter attitude. Down there in the basement with the knot in his gut, he had neither the time nor the inclination to lie to himself, which meant he accepted the truth—people would like the new Frank better. How could they not?

Nobody's coming.

If he didn't do something, he would lose his mind. He would scream.

The night before, he'd had a stupid idea. An idiot's idea. But he'd still been fooling himself then, even had a little fantasy in which his double would build this beautiful new life for him and then let him go, stepping back to let Frank take over, like some kind of sadistic guardian angel. Why keep him alive, otherwise? If you wanted to replace someone, wouldn't you erase them first? Nothing else made sense.

Then he had remembered how weak he had been when new Frank had told him about the job, recalled the feeling of his vitality being leeched out of him and the way his thoughts had gone blank for a minute. Tonight, after his last piss in the bucket, his last visit from new Frank, he realized that he couldn't remember his mother's first name. For a little while he had chalked it up to stress or the pressure of trying to remember, the way that some words seemed to become nonsense if you thought too long about the way the letters fit together. But his mother's name had not come back to him, as if he had never known it, but that was impossible. He felt the hole in his memory where her name ought to have been and a kind of panic had set in.

New Frank had done something to him.

And Frank—
original recipe Frank,
he was starting to think of himself—couldn't let it happen again. He thought it would be very bad if he allowed new Frank to keep it up. Which meant he had to get the hell out of the basement. But nobody was coming for him, which meant his stupid idea, that idiot's idea, had started to seem more attractive.

Stupid or not, it was his
only
idea.

Taking a deep breath, fighting the nausea and the aching and the chill of the sweat trickling down his back, he pressed himself against the pole and slid upward. Rising to his feet, he moved around the pole so that now his back was to the stairs and he faced the opposite direction. Hands still cuffed behind him, he settled to the concrete, his bare ass shrinking from the cold floor. The blanket remained on the other side, in his usual spot.

Frank twisted his wrists and pressed down, getting the handcuff chain flush with the concrete. He dragged it toward his back and felt the metal lip at the bottom of the post. Pulling, sawing the cuffs from side to side, he forced the chain beneath the metal lip. It didn't slide very far under the lip, but it didn't have to—not at first.

He exhaled, refusing to hope.
Stupid. It'll never work
.

But he had nothing better to do, and at least his stupid idea would take his mind off the booze. Maybe the effort would help him fight the pain in his gut and the craving.

Slowly and deliberately, Frank pulled the handcuff chain toward his back and began to grind it left and right. The day before, when new Frank had set him loose to do his business in the bucket, he had noticed that the metal post had not been sunk into the concrete. It was bolted to the support beam overhead and to the concrete floor below. One bolt on either side of the metal lip, and the ones on the floor were rusty from the times water had seeped into the cellar.

He couldn't let new Frank see, which meant he had to work from this side of the pole. That way, he could use the blanket to cover that metal lip—if he'd made any progress at all, which didn't seem likely.

Still, he sawed right and left, scraped the chain against the rusty bolt under that metal lip. Would one bolt do? If he could grind it down, break through, could he use his body and smash the post off its mooring? Maybe, or maybe he'd have to do both bolts.

He wondered if the cuffs would break before the bolt gave way. Or if his wrists would bleed so badly he would have to stop. He wondered if new Frank would catch on before he could find out just how stupid his idea really was.

But he kept sawing.

If he could free himself, a little voice in his head whispered, there was whiskey waiting for him right upstairs.

He worked the cuffs a little harder against the rusty bolt.

It was thirsty work.

 

SATURDAY

 

ONE

On Saturday morning, Audrey Pang woke an hour before dawn. Years of insomnia issues had taught her that it was a very bad idea to look at the clock. The numbers would stress her out—she would start calculating how many hours she had slept and how many she might be able to sleep if she could just manage to drift off again. It never went well. Her wife, Julia, had taken to turning the clock toward the wall every night before bed.

Audrey forced herself to take a deep breath, inhaling the comforting aromas of the little nest they made of their bed at night, pillows all around them. She reached out and took Julia's hand, watched the rise and fall of her chest and the way her lips pouted in her sleep. Pale and freckled and innocent, her face had a kind of sweet joy in repose that made Audrey jealous and filled her with love all at once. With a sigh, she ran her hand gently over the curve of Julia's belly, thinking of the baby growing within. Only three months along, but soon to change their lives forever. She closed her eyes, drawing a certain peace from her wife's presence and thoughts of their future, but her mind had started to buzz.

She glanced at the curtains and saw that the darkness outside had an indigo hue that signaled the approach of day. Even if she fell back to sleep, she would manage an hour and a half at best before she had to get up. Audrey turned her pillow over to the cool side and closed her eyes again. Breathing evenly, she tried to slow her thoughts. Four and a half hours. That was how long she reckoned she had been asleep. Audrey could make it through the day on that, but it wouldn't be fun.

Inhaling the warm scent of Julia's presence—her shampoo and her body lotion and the musky smell of her body—Audrey let herself slide into a meditative state. A song by Radiohead had been running through her mind the previous night and now it returned on a loop, even as snippets of her week's research floated through her mind like images in Dorothy Gale's tornado. A wizened old man named Paul Sorenson had set himself up in a little house in Quincy and word had spread that he was a genuine psychic medium.

Audrey had spent days gathering background on Sorenson, established that nearly everything he claimed about himself—his age, work history, supposed work with the police in his native Sweden—had been fabricated. Sorenson's latest mark was a woman named Farrah Myers, who firmly believed that the medium was allowing her to communicate with her son, who had taken his own life two years ago. Sorenson had been bleeding Farrah Myers dry, and the old woman's daughter, Elena, wanted to force her mother to see the truth. There would be people who insisted these lies did not negate his powers as a medium, so in the coming week, Audrey would attend a group session with Sorenson, set him up, and expose him.

She didn't mind the work—pulling back the curtain to reveal the truth about liars and thieves like Sorenson was its own reward—but she took the cases for other reasons as well. Museums, universities, authors, and police departments paid her good money as an expert in spiritualism and the occult, so it helped to maintain recent credentials.

Shifting in her bed, she finally admitted to herself that there would be no falling back to sleep if she did not empty her bladder. Reluctantly, she left the nest of her marital bed, pushing pillows out of the way. A glimpse at the window was enough to show her that the sky had become even lighter, though she still kept her gaze averted from the clock in case Julia had not turned it around.

When she hit the switch, the bathroom light flickered to life, accompanied by the buzz of the overhead fan. The white noise never disturbed Julia—Audrey had been awake often enough in the middle of the night to know—and somehow it soothed her nerves a bit. With a sigh, she relieved herself and then stood, dragging up her underpants. She turned on the tap, water hissing into the sink, and then a wave of nausea hit her. Her stomach cramped and she slumped against the wall, breathing in and out through her clenched teeth.

Gritted, not clenched. Audrey huffed loudly, gripped by a sudden animosity she could not explain. She looked at her reflection in the mirror, saw hatred in her own eyes, and wondered at its origin. Hunger began to claw at her, a deep yearning, an emptiness that made her want to scream every second she spent not filling it. Her entire body tensed, and then released.

She breathed as her eyes brimmed with tears.

“What the fuck was that?” she whispered, blinking as she wiped at her eyes, trying to puzzle out those crippling emotions.

Emotions that had not been her own.

Washing her hands, she stared again into her own eyes but then glanced away, afraid of what she might see. She turned off the tap and then the light, slipping out into the bedroom where she stood, and studied Julia's sleeping face. She loved the freckles across her wife's slightly pudgy cheeks and the bright orange hair that framed her features, loved the shape her voluptuous curves made beneath the covers … but the urge to strike out at Julia, to hurt her, throbbed inside Audrey like the ache of an old injury that never quite went away.

“Jesus,” she whispered, feeling sick again.

Never,
she thought. She'd never hurt her wife. Julia had been her life's greatest happiness, her greatest gift. Whatever had touched her with this malice, she needed to burn it out of her system.

Quietly, careful not to disturb Julia, she changed into her yoga pants and tugged a Tufts University sweatshirt over her head. She picked up her sneakers and padded downstairs to put them on. Her stomach still hurt and the memory of the hatred and the hunger she'd felt burned in her, made her feel flush as she went out the door, locked it behind her, and set off down the center of the pale, cracked pavement.