Dead Ringers (19 page)

“You can't be here,” she said.

The double opened her hands, palms up, and gave a small shrug. “And yet I am.”

My hands,
Tess thought.
My shrug
.

And in the next room, her daughter.

“I'm not kidding,” she said, her voice lowering as she made her way around the end of the bed, heart thundering, still holding the clock by its cord. “I don't know what you people are or what you want with us, but you can't be
here
. You want to meet, tell me where and when and I'll sit down with—”

The woman sneered. It made her ugly.

She took a step forward. Tess took a step back.

That was all it took—that step back.

The double came at her in terrible silence. Tess tried to lift the alarm clock, to swing it at the woman's face, but the step back had set her off balance. As she whipped the clock around, the double lunged inside the arc of the swing. One hand on Tess's throat, she thrust backward and the two of them careened into the wall just inches from a window frame.

“Don't you fucking—”

“Don't I what?” the woman whispered, tightening her grip on Tess's throat. “Don't I
dare
?”

With her free hand, she smashed Tess in the face once, twice, a third time. Blood filled Tess's mouth and she struggled to get an arm up, blocking the next blow. One foot against the wall, she pistoned forward and hurled the woman across the room. The double smashed into the bureau, shattering the mirror attached to its back. She cried out in pain and Tess
relished
the sound, wanted to make her do it again.

My daughter, my baby, is in the other room. You think you can come in here …

Her thoughts trailed off. The double stood there, sneering again, and Tess saw that somehow she'd snagged the cord of the alarm clock. Tess looked down at her own hand, opened and closed it, finding it empty. For half a second, she wondered if it was possible that she was the double and the other woman was Tess. What could she truly say was impossible?

But no. Tess wore a faded Tufts University T-shirt. The bitch wore black.

“Mumma?” Maddie called from her room, woken by the shattering mirror, voice plaintive and afraid. “Mummy?”

The bedroom door stood open. The night-light in the hall cast a dim golden glow. Tess looked through that door and prayed that Maddie would not appear, that she would not see this. She glanced back at her double and froze, paralyzed by the sight of the woman's face … by the desiccated skin and the wisps of hair and the gaping pit where one eye had been. Tight gray skin like dry parchment stretched tautly across the skull and the lips had receded to reveal yellow, too-sharp teeth. Something moved and buzzed beneath the dry skin of the woman's throat and Tess blinked and took a step back when she
saw
. When she understood. A wasp crawled out of a split in that withered flesh—they had built a nest in there.

Shaking, Tess barely realized she had screamed.

Then Maddie called for her again.

“Stay there, baby,” the double called, the skin at the edges of her mouth ripping as she grinned. “Everything's all right. Mumma's coming.”

Tess could not breathe. But she could not let that happen. “Not a chance—”

Her double whipped the clock up and around on its cord. Tess dodged too late. The woman put ferocious strength into her swing and the clock struck Tess in the skull, shattering plastic and drawing blood. She went down hard on the floor, cut her hands on broken shards of mirror, and felt the hot trickle in her hair and on her scalp, blood spilling down her cheek. The world went sideways and blurred around her, flickering like some nightmare zoetrope vision of her bedroom, her safest place, her home.

The woman stepped in and kicked her in the gut and Tess twisted sideways and threw up on the carpet. Saw stylish boots, zipped on the side. One boot kicked her again, this time in the side, and she couldn't breathe or think.

Maddie cried out again, much more afraid.

“Mumma!”

Once again the image of Tess, as if that death face had never existed, turned toward the corridor with a thin smile on her lips. “Coming.”

She kicked Tess again.

Turned and left the room.

Tess closed her eyes on darkness. Opened them on darkness, save for the golden light from the hall. Smelled her own blood but didn't try to staunch it. Stood uneasily and propped herself with a hand against the wall, driving a shard of mirror glass deeper into her palm. Bright pain snapped her alert. The world blurred again as she stepped back but she shook her head, snarling in pain as she tugged the glass from her palm, then whipped her head around again, thinking of the hallway. The night-light.

Her daughter.

“No.” The word came out a whisper that did not reflect the roar building inside of her.

Breath coming hard, she stumbled for the door and into the hall. Into that golden night-light glow where dreams and nightmares had always seemed possible to her. Tess braced herself on the wall, streaked her bloody palm along the paint, but froze just outside Maddie's room. From within came a soft maternal shushing.

“It's all right, baby. I just made a mess,” the double said softly. “Sorry if I scared you. Just go back to sleep and everything will be all right in the morning.”

Tess leaned on the doorframe and turned to look inside the room. The other one—her other self—sat on the edge of the bed, hugging Maddie to her. The two of them, not-mother and daughter, had their faces buried in each other's hair the way Tess and Maddie always did when they hugged good-night.

“I was scared,” Maddie said quietly, the hitching remnants of a sob still in her voice. “It was
loud
.”

“It was,” the other mother agreed.

No. The other
me,
but Maddie only has one mother.

It tore her heart out just to look at them. Not-Tess had perfect hair, even in the middle of the night. In the starlight streaming through the windows, her skin seemed impossibly smooth and pale and perfect. Fit and stylish and in control, all things that Tess wanted to be but never quite achieved.

“Mumma,” Maddie said quietly, content and snuggling against a stranger. “You smell really good.”

The double glanced up at the doorway, at Tess. Her smile had sharp edges.

Something fled her then. Not just strength—what remained of it—but spirit. Tess staggered backward, clutching at her nightshirt and staring down at her chest as some invisible hand sank into the core of her and pulled, ripping loose a fragment of her everything. Love, passion, fear, self-image, motherhood. It all leeched from her and made her less, drained far more from her than blood loss ever could, and she felt it go.

Whimpering, she collapsed to the floor, wanting nothing more than to lie there. To recover some of what she had lost. But in the bedroom Maddie was still cuddling with something wrong, something that shouldn't exist. Her daughter couldn't see that it wasn't her mother who comforted her. If the woman who was not Tess wanted to lift her up and carry her away, Maddie would not balk. She wouldn't know any better.

Hate fueled Tess now as she turned and dragged herself along the hardwood, slipping once on her bloody palm but then plodding ahead, more determined. At her bedroom door, she managed to prop herself up into a crawl. Always wary of power outages, she maintained one phone in the apartment that plugged into the wall instead of being portable and battery-powered. The ugly yellow phone sat on her nightstand, and it was this that kept her moving.

She dialed 911, telling herself that this was the only way—that going into the room and confronting the woman who had beaten her heightened the risk that her double would harm Maddie. She told herself Maddie would be all right, that she could keep the trauma of this night to a minimum, even as she tried to imagine explaining any of it to her daughter.

“My name is Tess Devlin,” she said into the phone. “There's an intruder in my apartment. She attacked me and I'm afraid she'll hurt my daughter.…”

Tess answered questions, but vaguely. Her mind could summon little else, and she knew that was good—that details would hurt her later. How could she accurately describe the woman in Maddie's room without them thinking she must be some kind of lunatic? If they thought she'd done this all herself, they might think her a danger to Maddie, and she couldn't live with that.

“Please, ma'am, just wait there until you hear the police arrive. They're on the way,” the 911 dispatcher said.

Tess scowled, face numb and heart hollow. “I can't do that. My daughter—”

“Ma'am, please.”

She dropped the phone, leaving it off the hook in case they still needed to trace the call or something.
No, she said the police are on the way
. But the phone stayed off the hook, and that was okay. It didn't matter. She had made the call and now she had to get back, to distract the woman somehow, to make sure Maddie was safe.

Her head swam with black motes as she forced herself to stand, clutching the bedpost. Taking deep breaths, she felt slivers of herself returning, just enough to reel out of the room, somehow avoiding the shards of broken mirror on the floor. Still cloaked in the smell of her own blood, she sailed down the hall in a lurch and turned into Maddie's room.

Her daughter lay alone in the starlight, buried under her covers, only her head poking out, a fan of hair on her pillow. Tess whipped around, breath coming too fast, staring along the hallway toward the steps. Only then did she feel the cold wind sweeping through the apartment. Taking deep breaths, she mustered her strength and went back into the hall. In the foyer at the front of the house, the door stood open to the autumn night, leaves blowing in over the threshold. In the distance, she could hear sirens.

“Mumma?” Maddie called to her.

Relief washed over her as she understood—the woman had gone and her daughter was still here. Safe in bed. Emotion welled up and overflowed, tears sliding down her cheeks as she made her way back along the hall.

“I'm here, baby,” she said, and a ripple of nausea went through her as she realized how much she sounded like the other woman. The other Tess.

“Who were you talking to in the other room?” Maddie asked.

Tess hesitated. The sirens were growing louder. The police would want to talk to Maddie, too, and the girl would see her mother's blood and bruises and the broken mirror and she would never understand. An intruder, that was all she had to know. It didn't need to make sense to her and the police would not expect it to. She was only six years old, after all. Only one thing mattered.

“You're safe, my love,” Tess said, standing in the golden glow of the night-light, that place where—in the small hours—all of the best and worst imaginings had always seemed possible. “You're safe.”

But she knew that she couldn't
keep
Maddie safe.

And that was going to have to change.

 

TWO

Frank jerked awake. His shoulders hurt the worst, an ache that went to the bone. His lower back muscles were knotted so badly that the nerves around them were like tiny bombs, ready to go off if he shifted his weight or tried to rise. The groan that slipped from deep within him seemed too loud in the dark and he moved almost without thinking, exhaustion and malnutrition clouding his mind.

And something else,
he thought.
Something else
.

His consciousness ebbed and flowed, but he knew there was more to the tide that shifted inside him than just the lack of proper rest and food. More than just the oppression of being a captive. Something else had been drained from him, and the hollow it left behind kept getting deeper.
I'm fading,
he thought, and far from the first time.
Fading fast
. He felt like a shadow of himself. For now the shadow seemed dark enough to have some texture, some substance, but as the hours crawled by he held a picture in his mind of the sun rising higher in the sky and the shadows growing thinner, until eventually the sun would be right overhead and the shadows would vanish altogether.

But he could feel his shadow burning away.

Frank could smell the stink of his own body, rank after so much time down here with the concrete and the damp, and he feared that soon that stink would be all that remained of him. With a deeper groan, he shifted himself against the post and all the little bombs in his lower back and shoulders exploded with bright, lancing pain. Muscles and nerves. The movement made his eyes brim with moisture but he cherished every little agony. Better that than the numbness spreading inside him, the chasm of nothing within.

Grunting, he dragged the chain of his handcuffs under the metal lip between the bottom of the post and the concrete. By now he could force the metal snug against the first of the bolts that anchored the post. One more breath, shoulders on fire, and then he started to saw back and forth again.

Fucker,
he thought, imagining his own face. He wanted to smash it in.

You're gonna die.

Frank couldn't quite be sure which of him he was talking to. The one he wanted to save or the one he wanted to kill.

 

THREE

The dashboard clock in Nick's car read 8:03 when he rolled up to the curb in front of Tess's place. In his mind he could still see the tightness around Kyrie's mouth when she had told him to go.
Just go. Your daughter needs you
. But in those same words—beneath them—had been others.
Your ex-wife doesn't, and don't forget it
.

The dynamic would not go away. For a while he had imagined that his new relationship could exist in harmony with the complications of the old one, that the two women occupied separate space in his life. He'd been an idiot. Whatever equation he had thought he could fit them into, whatever Venn diagram he'd hoped for, it had been a fantasy. Maddie threw off all calculations, because when he took her into consideration, nothing else mattered.