Dead Ringers

by Christopher Golden

  Nick stood back while Kyrie slipped inside.

  “I take it we’re making brownie sundaes tonight.”

  She grinned. “I got hot fudge and everything.”

  “In that case, you’re forgiven for not telling me just how late you’d be,” he said, closing and locking the door behind her. “Perfect timing, actually. Dinner should be ready in a half hour.”

  Kyrie stood on her tiptoes, smiling with spritely mischief, and kissed him. “In that case, my dear,” she said with mock formality, “I shall pour the wine!”

  They went into the kitchen. The water had started to boil and the cast-iron frying pan had heated up nicely. He dumped the uncooked risotto into the pot and poured a bit of oil into the pan. It hissed and crackled and he felt a familiar satisfaction as he laid the first of the Parmesan-coated cutlets onto the cast-iron.

  Kyrie fetched a pair of long-stemmed crystal glasses from the cabinet and uncorked the dry, white Italian.

  “We didn’t have much chance to talk today,” she said, pouring the wine. “How was coffee?”

  “Odd,” he said without thinking.

  Kyrie arched an eyebrow as she handed him his wineglass. “Meaning?”

  “Tess and Lili ran into someone we all worked with at the Otis Harrison House project and he acted kind of freaky, I guess. They have another project that he might be involved in and they wanted to get feedback from me and Aaron Blaustein from the museum before they agreed to work with him.”

  Nick lied without even looking up. He wasn’t sure why.

  “Okay. Kind of weird that she couldn’t just call you, but at least it gave you an opportunity to tell her about England without Maddie around.”

  He turned the cutlets in the frying pan. Stirred the risotto. Checked to make sure the peas and mushrooms and grated Parmesan were ready to go into the pot once the water had boiled off.

  Really, he knew why he had lied. If he told Kyrie the truth about the bizarre story Tess and Lili had told that morning, he would end up defending his ex-wife to his girlfriend, and that was not a position he cared to put himself in. Tess and Lili might have been behaving strangely, but it was clear they had experienced something bizarre. He had seen the uncharacteristic fear in the eyes of these two usually sensible women, and though he had been trying to tell himself there must be a rational explanation behind these doppelgängers—if that was indeed what they were—he could not deny that he had been unsettled by their certainty.

  “Nick?”

  The first batch of cutlets sizzled in the pan, edges beginning to brown. He swore to himself and plucked one out with a fork, some of the Parmesan sticking to the pan. Earlier he had put some paper towel on top of a clean plate and now he laid the first cutlet down so the paper would soak up the oil.

  “Babe?” Kyrie said.

  He forked the other cutlet out of the oil and glanced at her. “Yeah?”

  “Did you tell Tess about England or not?” Her eyes burned with sparks of irritation. She already knew the answer.

  Nick started to put the next batch of cutlets into the oil. “There was just no good opportunity. Lili and Aaron were there the whole time. It would’ve been awkward.”

  He had his back to her as he stirred the pot and watched the frying cutlets. His stomach growled at the aromas coming from the stove, but he could not focus on the task in front of him. He felt Kyrie’s gaze on his back, felt the climate of the room change like an atmospheric pressure shift that preceded a storm. There would be no storm here—Kyrie wasn’t the kind of woman to shout or throw things—but the silence that came from her had a polar chill.

  When she appeared at his elbow, he only glanced at her.

  She sipped her wine, studying him closely. “You didn’t want to call her because you wanted to tell her in person. Now you’ve seen her, but you didn’t tell her.”

  “I told you—”

  “It’s not okay, Nick. I know it’s not an easy thing, telling Tess. I know it’s complicated with Maddie. But if you’re committed to us doing this together—”

  “I am.”

  “I love you,” she said, taking another sip of wine. “But this is not okay.”

  Nick turned the second batch of cutlets, then took her wineglass. He kissed the back of her hand, then her forehead, and then her mouth.

  “Other than the birth of my daughter, there isn’t anything I’ve ever looked forward to more than the adventure we’ve got coming. There was no opportunity to talk to Tess today, but I’ll see her Tuesday when I drop Maddie off. I will have the conversation with her then.”

  Kyrie pursed her lips, trying not to smile, but it wasn’t in her nature to stay mad very long. She stole back her wineglass.

  “You’d better.”

  The topic did not come up again that night. The Parmesan-crusted chicken wasn’t perfect, but it tasted delicious in spite of that, and the risotto more than made up for any imperfections. Kyrie had specifically requested it and Nick was happy to oblige. The hint of garlic was the key to balancing the flavors.

  “I’ll mix the brownie batter,” she said when the last bite had been eaten. “And I’ll clean up while they’re baking. You said you had some calls to make tonight?”

  Nick glanced at the clock and saw that it was closing in on eight o’clock. “If you don’t mind.”

  He retreated to his office, closed the French doors, and fished through his files for the Otis Harrison House project. The need to do this had been weighing on him ever since he had returned from Davis Square earlier in the day, but he had been putting it off. The last thing he wanted to do was call Frank Lindbergh. But really, he didn’t want to call any of the people who had worked on the project if it meant one of them might say, Yes, Nick, so strange that you’d ask that question, I did see someone who looked exactly like someone from that project but turned out not to be.

  Once the file lay open on his desk, he hesitated.

  The psychomanteum convinced him. As persuasive as Tess and Lili’s demeanor had been, it troubled him that the Nepenthe Hotel had acquired and reconstructed the apparition box. At least one person had died inside it and half a dozen others nearby. If the psychomanteum was going to be rebuilt and displayed, it ought to have been at a museum and not as some Victorian-era curiosity for hotel guests to gawk at over brunch.

  His first call was to Bob Costello. He and his partner, Carlos Soares, had been indispensible when it came to the painstaking work of examining and photographing every inch of the cellar at the Harrison House, but more important they had been the ones to shore up the pit in the center of the floor and set up the lighting. Carlos and one of their grad students, Hilaria Guarino, had been the ones to plumb the depth of the pit and lower ladders. Hilaria had found the body of Cornell Berrige, but Nick remembered holding his breath the entire time, afraid that the floor they’d hit was only a blockage and that the pit really was a sinkhole that would cave in beneath them.

  Bob and Carlos were happy to hear from him, though he could hear the puzzlement in Bob’s voice. After more than a decade together as partners in business and life, the couple was finally getting married in the spring. Bob told Nick to expect a save-the-date card in the mail, and Nick was touched. He had worked with them on several projects but would not have expected an invitation to their wedding.

  “So, to what do we owe the pleasure?” Bob asked.

  Nick hesitated, momentarily stumped. He had planned to spin a line of vague bullshit, but now that he had Bob on the phone he felt he owed the man something more.

  “This is a weird question,” he said, glancing at the French doors, craning his neck to make sure Kyrie remained in the kitchen.

  “My favorite kind,” Bob said.

  “My ex, Tess—”

  “I know who Tess is, Nick.”

  He gave a polite chuckle. “I know. Anyway, Tess and Lili Pillai have run into some really odd things the past couple of days, including a guy who could basically be my twin. Also, there’s a hotel in
town whose designer apparently bought and reassembled the psychomanteum from the Harrison House for decorative display.”

  “That’s messed up.”

  “Agreed, though they may not have any idea of its background,” Nick said. “Anyway, I just wanted to know if you or Carlos had encountered anything strange yourselves lately.”

  “Huh,” Bob grunted.

  Nick’s pulse quickened. “Is that a ‘yes’?”

  “No, that’s a ‘you’re right, Nick, that’s a weird fucking question.’ I haven’t seen Tess or Lili in probably a year. Why would anything they’ve run across have anything to do with us?”

  Nick felt his cheeks flush. He muttered something about them wondering if the weirdness might be connected to the Otis Harrison House, but when he wouldn’t elaborate further, the tone of Bob’s voice went from amused to dubious and then to maybe-you-won’t-get-a-save-the-date-card-after-all. By the time Nick managed to extricate himself from the phone call, he never wanted to make another one.

  Then he remembered the look in Tess’s eyes at the Diesel Cafe and he picked up the phone again. Neither Hilaria nor Jalen answered their phones. When he got Marissa on the line, he kept it as vague as possible, mentioning the psychomanteum to see if that triggered a response and asking if anything peculiar had happened to her lately. Marissa became wary, asking if she ought to be worried that something peculiar would happen. He assured her that he had no reason to think so, and then undermined that assurance by asking her to call him if anything strange did transpire.

  The last call he made before rejoining Kyrie in the kitchen was to Frank Lindbergh. With the smell of baking brownies filling his apartment, he listened to the ringing on the other end of the line. He had never confronted Frank after Tess’s admission. The Harrison House project had been completed by then and Nick had figured the problems he had with Tess had very little to do with that kiss. But in the back of his mind, he had wondered what he would do if he ever ran into the guy again. They’d never heard anything more about Frank’s plans to write a book about Cornell Berrige and his posthumous acolytes, the Society of the Lesser Key, and Nick assumed he had abandoned the idea.

  “Hello?”

  Nick had been expecting an answering machine. “You’re home.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “It’s Nick Devlin. From the Otis Harrison House project?”

  The line went so silent that Nick thought he had lost the connection.

  “Frank?”

  “What can I do for you, Nick?”

  The question came out less than friendly, but that was no surprise. Nick would have been wary himself if he received a phone call from a man whose wife he had tried to seduce. He had no interest in small talk, so he forged ahead, being just as vague as he’d been with Marissa.

  “What do you mean ‘strange’?” Frank asked, laughing quietly. “That’s a pretty nonspecific word. I got a new job. My mother died. Also, I saw a dog jumping in the air today, trying to eat bubbles from a little kid’s bubble wand. When the bubbles stopped, the dog kept snapping at nothing. That was pretty weird.”

  Nick sighed. Had Frank always had such a dry sense of humor?

  Reluctantly, the memory of Bob Costello’s reaction fresh in his mind, he mentioned that Tess had twice run into a man who she and Lili said could be his identical twin. He expected Frank to ask what that had to do with him or with the psychomanteum, how the things could possibly be connected.

  Instead, the line went silent again. Nick wondered how Tess and Lili had convinced him that making these calls would be anything but an embarrassing waste of time.

  “Wow,” Frank said, “that is strange.”

  Nick frowned. “Are you making fun—”

  “No, man. No,” Frank said. “I mean it’s really weird, because the last couple of weeks I’ve seen this guy—I don’t know, twice at the T station and once on the street—and I swear to God he looks just like me. He wears a hat, a black ski hat thing, and usually has his collar up. Twice he had sunglasses on, but he looks so much like me that I thought it was some kind of prank.”

  Nick could barely summon words. Part of him wanted to laugh, but the icy dread spreading across the back of his neck and his shoulders wasn’t at all amusing. What was this all about?

  “Did you approach him?”

  “The first two times I saw him when I was getting on a train and he was on the platform. The other time he was across the street and then he got on a bus. Listen, Nick, what’s this about? How does this connect? I mean, it’s got to, right?”

  “I think it must, yeah, but I don’t have a clue how.”

  “Oh, shit, I didn’t realize the time,” Frank said. “I’m sorry, man, but I’ve got to head out. I have a date for drinks and I don’t know what tomorrow looks like. Maybe we should get together? You, me, and Tess. Monday after work, maybe?”

  Which was how Nick made plans to have dinner with the man wearing Frank Lindbergh’s face.

  SUNDAY

  ONE

  Sunday morning brought blue skies and seventy degrees. The forecast called for a radical temperature shift overnight, with a twenty-degree drop between today and tomorrow, but as Lili Pillai drove through Revere with the windows down and ’90s pop music on the radio, she felt clarity spreading like daybreak through her mind. Saturday had passed without any further weirdness, and now the conversation she’d had with Tess, Aaron, and Nick at coffee yesterday seemed awkward, embarrassing, and a little crazy. The memory of seeing Devani Kanda—the artist who was virtually her twin—through the window of the First Light Gallery still gave her a chill, as did Tess’s story about what she’d seen in that room with the psychomanteum. But today it seemed much more plausible to think there must be a rational explanation for all of it.

  The breeze through the open windows brought the scent of the ocean and Lili smiled broadly, tapping the steering wheel along to the music. She felt a bit guilty to be enjoying herself, but she forced that aside, shoving off the heavy shroud of fear and dread. There were things that required explanation and maybe the fear that had been suffocating her was entirely reasonable, but just for these moments she refused to let the unknown destroy the beauty of the day.

  The GPS guided her to Audrey Pang’s driveway and she turned in, surveying the location. The blue-collar North Shore neighborhood was not at all where she would have expected to find an adorable lesbian couple, but the country had been changing, and maybe this neighborhood was no more or less welcoming to them than many others would have been. During the Otis Harrison House project, Lili and Audrey had gotten to know each other enough to share personal details of their lives, and Lili had been envious of the love Audrey had for her wife, Julia. When the starry-eyed belief in a lover’s perfection passed and the ravenous lust of a relationship’s early days began to abate, it was adoration that people really wanted. When just being together was enough to make two people happy, that was the real deal.

  Lili shut off her Prius and climbed out of the car, eyes slitted against the sun’s glare. She chuckled quietly at her musing. These are the places your brain goes when you’re single, she thought.

  As she strode up the flagstone path, the front door opened. In black yoga pants and an Arsenal soccer sweatshirt, Audrey leaned against the doorjamb and sipped from a mug of coffee.

  “Good morning, Lili. I’m glad you found us all right.”

  Lili smiled as she approached the door. “Last time we saw each other you had scarlet hair.”

  “I’m going for a more professional look these days,” Audrey said. “Listen, a day like this … what do you say we go for a walk on the beach while we talk?”

  Lili saw her gaze flicker toward the inside of the house for a fraction of a second and wondered if Julia had objected to this Sunday-morning visit.

  “I hope I’m not intruding,” she said.

  Audrey smiled. “You’re fine. The house is a disaster and Julia wanted to pick up before you came, but we overslept.”<
br />
  “A walk would be perfect,” Lili agreed. “We’re not going to have many more days like this before winter. I don’t want to squander it.”

  “There’s a place with wicked good coffee a couple of doors down from Kelly’s now,” Audrey said. “Let me just put this down.”

  She left the door halfway open as she retreated into the shadows of her home. Lili imagined her giving Julia a farewell kiss-and-nuzzle and felt another twinge of envy. Then Audrey returned, now empty-handed, and pulled the door closed behind her as they started down the driveway.

  “It’s a hard life,” Lili said, “living two blocks from the beach.”

  They kept the conversation light all the way to the ocean. On a summer weekend, Revere Beach would have been packed, and even today the sun had brought out many of the locals. People biked along the road that ran parallel to the sand. Old men sunned themselves as if they’d never heard of skin cancer, their hides brown and rough as leather. Sixtysomething women in tracksuits walked in clutches of three or four, pumping their elbows enthusiastically as they engaged in savage gossip. Lili preferred her beaches a little more picturesque, but Revere Beach had a sense of preserved history whose appeal she could not deny. Once upon a time there had been a roller coaster here. As they crossed the street and started north along the sand, she fancied that the joyful cries of the coaster’s passengers could still be heard on the occasional gust of wind.

  Here you go with ghosts again, she thought. And that put a stop to the small talk. She couldn’t pretend that she had only come here to chat with an old friend.

  “There’s something freaky going on,” she said.

  Audrey smiled as they moved across soft sand to the darker hardpack near the surf. “So you implied. And as much as I like you, Lili, we’re not the kind of friends who go for Sunday morning walks on the beach for no reason. People who call me usually have something freaky to talk about.”

  “You don’t believe in any of this stuff, though.”

  Audrey hesitated. Lili glanced at her and saw a kind of skittishness in her expression, in her eyes, as if she wanted the conversation to be over already, even though it had really just begun.