Deacon raised an eyebrow. “Jefferson?”
“I’m on it,” he answered reluctantly. “We should probably take these documents and start heading home before Anthony catches us and kills us. I can see this much money and the fact that he possibly knowingly covered up the truth like his dad and his grandpa being enough motive for him to be very unhappy with us.”
“So we’ll start heading back to Oregon,” I said, “but we still don’t know how to get these documents in the right hands.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Jefferson said, although he didn’t look too happy about it. “Just know Sadie, that you owe me big for calling in a favor with my awful cousin Alistair.”
“It’s true,” Deacon said. “If you thought the way he always talked about Golden Boy Hayden Temple was bad, just wait until you meet Alistair Temple. He might actually be Satan . . . but he’s a whopping good lawyer.”
Chapter 31
It had taken way more driving than I’d ever wanted to do to get us back to Portland in a decent amount of time, and with only one more day of driving ahead of us, I was starting to get a little sad.
Our trip had been miserable. We’d eaten the world’s worst food, stayed in the world’s worst hotels, and had nearly gotten ourselves killed by a lawyer and his murderous-ghost ancestor.
But part of me would also miss the trip. I’d miss being out on the road with my friends, doing what we loved to do. And if my calculations were right, our financial situation wasn’t about to change because we’d discovered the mystery of these four locations. My mom and her family would be happy. But my friends and I, for all of our efforts, would still be poor and stuck at dead end jobs.
Except the Parrish boys. They’d probably keep getting fired from their jobs.
Brighton and Deacon had left on a mission to find the cheapest food they could, and Jefferson had been on the phone with his cousin Alistair for hours, trying to get him to fly out and help us with our legal situation. It looked like his cousin was relenting a bit, but Jefferson didn’t exactly look happy by the time he hung up the phone.
He sat in a chair beside me and rubbed his temples. “That man is completely impossible to work with.”
“But he’s going to help?” I asked, trying to keep the hope out of my voice.
“He’s going to help,” Jefferson confirmed.
“Now if only you had a cousin who was an expert in figuring out where ghostly anonymous letters came from. Then we’d be set.” I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the wall.
I was exhausted.
We all were.
Being on the run from a crazy lawyer whose property you’d just stolen would wear a person out.
“I don’t need a cousin who’s an expert,” Jefferson said. “I have me.”
“The all-knowing Jefferson Parrish,” I said with a dramatic flair.
“I’m serious,” he went on. “But you might not like it.”
“You really think you know who sent us those letters?” I asked
He pulled a letter from his coat pocket and handed it to me. “Look at this.”
I turned it over in my hands a few times, trying to find whatever magical clue he seemed to think was hiding in it.
“Looks about the same as it always has,” I said.
“Now look at this.” He handed me a small ripped piece of paper with a series of numbers written on it.
The word “code” was written above the numbers.
In the same handwriting as the letters we’d received.
“Where did you get this?” I asked him.
“Sadie, this is the code you gave me,” he said, watching me to see if I’d freak out over his accusation.
“You think I wrote the letters?” I asked incredulously. “This isn’t even my handwriting. I think I would remember doing that. Do you think I’m lying about all of this?”
“I don’t think you knew you did it,” Jefferson said. His tone was heavy with practiced patience in an attempt to keep me calm.
He then handed me the note we’d found in the pool room on the Queen Mary. The note that had bothered me so much because it was an old letter, written on new paper.
The note was the same writing as the other two pieces of paper.
“Because it’s totally normal to go around writing letters and giving them to people without knowing you’re doing it.” I looked back and forth between all of the papers. Even I couldn’t deny that it was all the same writing.
Still, that didn’t mean it was my writing.
“The more you tell me about your past, the more I think it might be normal for you,” Jefferson said. “You say that your family always accused you of saying things you never said. Your sister would be mad at your for getting into arguments you don’t remember having. You don’t remember giving me this code to Anthony’s safe.”
“Jefferson, how would I have even known that code?” I asked. I was starting to think maybe he’d finally lost it, even though a small part of me was also wondering how all of this might just make sense.
“You dreamed about yourself. You sat and had a conversation with yourself,” he said. “Tell me, what were you wearing in the dream?”
“I don’t see why that’s important,” I mumbled, not liking this conversation anymore.
“What color were you wearing?” he asked again.
“I was wearing yellow. Like I always am.”
“And what color was your other self wearing? You said they looked just like you. So they must have been wearing yellow as well.”
This gave me pause.
I stopped and thought about the dream again for a moment and furrowed my brow.
“Well . . . no . . .”
“She was wearing purple, wasn’t she?” Jefferson asked.
I felt my stomach drop. How would he ever know that? I hadn’t told the group what my other half was wearing in the dream. And I highly doubted Jefferson was psychic, no matter how much he joked about it.
“She was wearing purple,” I confirmed in a quiet voice.
Jefferson nodded slowly. “You were wearing purple when you handed me this note,” he said. “I remember because I thought it was odd. With the exception of those pajamas you’ve got, I’ve never in my life seen you wear purple. Black, or grey, or yellow, or even green. But you never wear purple.”
“Which of course you know from your close observations of me,” I joked.
Well . . . half joked.
He definitely watched me a little too closely.
“If you watched me closely enough you’d know I don’t have purple pajamas,” I said.
“Makes sense,” he said. “Late night chats.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. He’d talked about my apparent late night chats with him in the past. I’d thought he was joking. Maybe the truth was even more bizarre. Some purple-wearing version of myself felt the need to talk to Jefferson in the middle of the night because I was, what? Schizophrenic?
“What are you even trying to say?” I asked, wishing any of this made sense. “You think a dream gave you that code and said all of those horrible things to my sister when I was little? You think a dream planted letters in our apartments and put a note in the pool room of the Queen Mary?
“I have to know how open-minded you’re going to be right now,” Jefferson said.
“Just say it.” I was tired of waiting for his big revelation.
“I think you’re a Doppelgänger.”
I paused for a moment. Long enough to give Jefferson a look that said he was totally off his rocker.
He and Deacon had harped on and on about the Doppelgänger versus mimic conversation for hours. That was probably why Jefferson had Doppelgängers on the brain, which had led him to this crazy conclusion.
When I didn’t say anything, he went on. “I think Deacon and I were both wrong about what they are. I think it’s like another part of you. But I don’t think it’
s you. I think it’s a completely separate entity from you. It can do things for you while you sleep. I think it may even take a separate physical form from you. It’s a part of you that does and says what you won’t or can’t in order to get things done.”
“Because yelling at my sister and ostracizing my family is getting something done?”
“Maybe it thought it was protecting you,” he said. “It may be misguided, but I think everything you’ve done without knowing you’re doing it, hasn’t been you at all. It’s been this Doppelgänger version of you. The version that gives us clues to help us right a wrong in your family’s past.”
“Pretending for two seconds that you aren’t completely crazy and this is true, how, pray tell, would my Doppelgänger self know about the mystery in the first place?”
“It may be tapped into the other side,” Jefferson said, as if this were a completely normal conversation we were having. “Which would explain how it knew the code to the safe. And if it really is a separate being from you that can manifest and dissipate at will, it could have gotten into the pool at the Queen Mary without anyone knowing about it.”
I shook my head and took a deep breath. Jefferson was known for having far-fetched theories on the paranormal. But the thing that was unsettling me the most was how much sense his theory made. How perfectly this idea fit into the years of fighting against my family over things they claimed I did. Things I had no memory of.
It explained Jefferson thinking I’d ever in a million years come over to his apartment for late-night chats.
It explained how we got the code to the safe. How we got the letters in the first place. How a letter from the 1930s could have shown up on the Queen Mary on a brand new piece of paper.
I’d written them out and placed them in our bags when no one was watching me. I’d put the letter in the pool room.
Or at least my Doppelgänger self had.
But as much sense as everything made, I still wasn’t sure I was ready to just accept that I was some sort of paranormal being. Or half of a paranormal being.
First off, it was just too creepy to even imagine. And second, it was so far-fetched that I had a hard time wrapping my mind around it.
“Listen,” Jefferson said. “I know it’s a lot to take in. And maybe I’m wrong on this. But I don’t think I am.”
“I don’t even know what to do with this.” I answered.
I could feel a knot growing in my stomach because, against my better judgment, I was actually believing this crazy theory.
“We’ll do more research when we get home.” He took my hand and gave it a squeeze. “I know it’s weird. And I know it’s not the ‘normal’ you’re looking for. But if you figure out a way to mend fences with your family, isn’t it worth it?”
I scoffed. “Because they’re going to think this is so normal. They’d have me committed.”
“Then maybe you don’t have to tell them the whole Doppelgänger thing if we decide that’s what it is. This just gives you a little of their perspective. Maybe it can facilitate you possibly talking to them again. You can pretend to be normal and say you were just a troubled youth or something. But knowing the truth for yourself has to help.”
“Since when is your idea ‘pretend to be normal?’” I asked
“This trip may have taught me that sometimes, under the right circumstances, it’s better to rein in the more eccentric parts of my personality in favor of getting a job done.” It looked like it physically pained him to say it.
We both sat in silence for a moment.
I wasn’t sure I bought the whole Doppelgänger theory, no matter how nicely it explained everything. It would probably take months of research and running our own version of paranormal tests before I’d even start to believe it.
But if it was true, somehow it would fix so much. It would fix the sister I thought was a pathological liar and the parents I thought disliked me for no reason. It would fix the eerie feeling that came with thinking a ghost had placed a letter in my purse to start us off on this crazy journey.
It would still be a new form of being broken, since I had no idea what a Doppelgänger entailed. But if we could figure this thing out, it would be worth it.
“You okay?” Jefferson asked, being more normal than he had been in a while.
Possibly because he knew I’d just received news that may or may not cause me to come unhinged.
“I’m compartmentalizing,” I said. “Putting this information away for now until I have the energy to really think about it.”
Jefferson nodded, his hand still in mine, before he leaned over as if he might kiss me.
Of course, Deacon and Brighton, with their eternally perfect timing, opened the door to the last hotel room of the trip, and I instantly dropped Jefferson’s hand and went back to leaning my head against the wall.
My mind was swimming with so many possibilities, but right now, we had a job to do. And we had very little time to do it before Anthony figured out where his files went.
Chapter 32
“It only ends up being $2,500 for each of us,” I said with a monumental sigh.
I was lounging on our ratty old couch back in our apartment in Portland.
“How much was the inheritance again?” Brighton asked.
She and Deacon were sitting beside each other on the couch, but very carefully not touching. I could barely hear them over the torrential downpour that was beating our window in a constant relentless stream. Jefferson had fallen into one of his moods and was nowhere to be found. It was just as well, since I didn’t really want to tell him how little money we were getting out of this investigation.
“A lot more than $2,500,” I answered. “That stupid letter writer was a liar. I thought he was supposed to make our financial burdens go away.”
I neglected to mention the fact that Jefferson was now 100% convinced that I was the letter writer in question. I didn’t really want to tell Deacon and Brighton that I may or may not have a Doppelgänger version of myself running around doing things. Because until I could confirm the theory, it sounded like a good excuse for Deacon to “borrow” money out of my wallet and say it must have been my Doppelgänger who gave it to him.
“Should I bring Alistair back?” Deacon asked. “Maybe he can sue your mum.”
“I don’t see why Jefferson hates his cousin so much,” I said with a shrug. “I thought he was nice.”
“That’s because he was hitting on you to make Jefferson mad,” Deacon said. “Trust me, Alistair is not someone you want to fall in with. This is one of the rare moments where Jefferson isn’t exaggerating. In fact, he’s a little blinded to Alistair’s true evil.”
“You Parrish boys are so dramatic,” Brighton said.
“No matter how ‘evil’ Alistair is, he did an amazing job of sorting things out.” I divvied up the cash that unfortunately wouldn’t fill up a briefcase like one of those crime shows. That would have been a nice touch. “I’m not too thrilled about the fact that Anthony managed to weasel his way out of a jail sentence though.”
“Yeah, that guy is definitely going to kill us all one day,” Deacon said with a laugh, sounding much too cavalier about our impending doom.
“He is a lawyer, Sade,” Brighton pointed out. “I would have been surprised if Anthony hadn’t prepared for the day someone found out about his family’s secret. Although I’d hope he wouldn’t actually try to kill us over it. It’s not like we were in the wrong.”
“Somehow I don’t think he’d care about following a moral compass in this situation,” I said. “But it’s not like he’s not still rich. Even with the law firm and the inheritance going where it should, he’s still loaded.”
“But he lost his license, so he’s probably pretty pissed about that,” Deacon said.
Unfortunately, he was right. I couldn’t imagine that we’d heard the end of Anthony Meyer. It wasn’t every day that a group of twenty-somethings stole your money
and job from you . . . although in our defense, it wasn’t his money or his law firm to begin with. It was hard to steal what was already yours.
The only thing that helped me to sleep at night was the fact that if anything ever happened to me or my friends, Anthony Meyer would be the first person the cops would question, and no matter how well he covered his tracks, he would always look guilty. He had way too much motive now.
“And here’s your amazing financial reward,” I said sarcastically. “Two months worth of rent. I hope it’s worth looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life.”
“Even if we ended up not getting that much money, it was still pretty amazing that we were able to solve a murder from the 1900s using paranormal evidence, right?” Brighton asked.
“True,” I admitted. “But more money still would have been nice.”
The inheritance from the Livingston fortune had been placed with its proper family after some fancy lawyer shenanigans from Alistair that I couldn’t begin to understand. Somehow, we hadn’t gotten arrested for breaking into Anthony’s house and stealing his private documents. But he also hadn’t gone to jail for concealing a murder and basically stealing an inheritance that wasn’t his.
Still, the large fortune that had been divided up amongst the Vasquez family was a nice consolation prize for having their fortune stolen in the first place. After it had been divided between my aunts and uncles, great-aunts and uncles, and my mom, there wasn’t really a “fortune” to be had, but it left each of them with more than enough money to keep them happy and comfortable for the rest of their lives. Of course, being two generations removed from the oldest living Vasquez family member, I wasn’t entitled to get anything, but my mom, in her infinite generosity, gave her daughters a (very) small portion of the money, saying that it was a “living inheritance.”
I got $10,000 for the trouble I went through to discover the fortune for our family, and Michigan also got $10,000 for being the favorite daughter. Had I known I didn’t actually have to do any work to get some of the money, I might have skipped the whole “almost getting caught by a psychotic lawyer” part of the trip.
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