by Kate Aeon
“What a pity,” Phoebe muttered.
Agent Toeller either didn’t hear her or pretended not to. He said, “However, the agent did take fingerprints, which matched those which we have on file for your ex-husband. He reviewed the patient’s record, and the blood type on the charts matched the known blood type for your ex-husband. The agent also took a hair sample and epithelial cell scrapings from the inside of the cheek, and sent these off to the lab for DNA matching. I won’t have final results on the DNA samples for several days — maybe more, depending on how backed up the lab is. But I can tell you that the fingerprints were a match. I’d be willing to suggest that when the tests come back, they’re going to match, too. The man in the nursing home is Michael Schaeffer.”
Phoebe flopped back on her pillow and realized that Alan was watching her, puzzled. “F-B-I,” she mouthed.
He shrugged a silent question. She raised her index finger and said into the phone, “Well, I see. Agent Toeller. I’d appreciate a call from you with the DNA results if you could — whenever they come in — but thank you for your help on this and for looking into it for me.”
When she hung up, she turned to Alan and said, “The FBI says the fingerprints of the man in the coma in Ohio match Michael’s. They say he’s Michael.”
“Then he’s Michael.”
“The DNA results won’t be back for a few days.”
“Sweetheart, if the fingerprints match, the DNA results are just a formality. They probably won’t even bother to process them — why should they? No two people have the same fingerprints.”
“I know. But...” She knew in her mind that if the FBI said the man in the coma was really Michael, he had to be Michael. But her gut said Michael — not some impostor — was calling her on the phone.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” she told Alan. “To get a drink. My mouth is kind of dry. And then I’ll come back to bed.”
They’d only been asleep for a couple of hours. She was so exhausted, she felt like she should be able to sleep for a week. And having Alan beside her felt better. Safer. She hadn’t let herself think before about how tired she was of being alone.
She didn’t want to think about how tired she was going to be of being alone once Alan was gone again.
“Don’t be long,” he said, and smiled at her, and she thought that she could happily look at that smile every day for the rest of her life.
Stupid. Stupid. She needed to remind herself that this was temporary. That the good things never lasted. Or weren’t what they seemed.
Alan lay back when she was gone, bothered not by what the FBI agent had told her but by her reaction. They’d actually gone in and checked the bastard’s fingerprints, and the prints matched. He was surprised the FBI had gone to the trouble, but he supposed they would double-check in situations where people like Michael might be pulling a fast one. So, fine. They checked, the prints matched.
And Phoebe was not convinced. She wanted the DNA results, too. She was hanging on to her theory that her dying ex-husband was coming after her even though she’d had it proven to her that her theory was wrong.
He was trying to see her situation from her point of view, from the fact that the man she feared so much had tracked her down once before and had killed two kids on his way to her. That was big. And she was getting threatening phone calls. That was big, too.
He remembered a line from a mystery he’d read long ago: Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
So. The impossible was that the man after Phoebe was her comatose ex-husband.
What were the improbable options, then?
That some other man was stalking her, and that he sounded enough like her ex to fool her, and knew enough private details of their life together to convince her utterly that he was her ex.
Pretty fucking improbable, that one. But it wasn’t Alan’s only option.
Option two was that she could be a lot crazy, and imagining the phone calls. That wasn’t particularly probable, either. He’d had plenty of dealings with the genuinely crazy, and he was having a hard time fitting Phoebe into that group.
She could just be a little crazy — she might be getting calls from someone who sounded nothing like her ex, but because she was already primed to be terrified of him, she thought the second man sounded like her ex.
Alan didn’t give that option particularly good odds, either.
That left the possibility that she might be scamming him. He didn’t want to consider that as his best option, because for reasons he couldn’t explain, as well as a handful of fairly obvious ones, he was hugely attracted to her.
But look at the supporting evidence for the scam theory. It was all circumstantial so far, but there was a lot of it. He’d done a pretty thorough inventory of the contents of her townhouse. She had nothing. She lived in an adequate neighborhood, but he would bet that the little townhouse took just about everything she made and that every month was an adventure that ended with her wondering if she’d still have a place to live or food to eat the next. She owned a Salvation-Army-reject rabbit-eared television from the seventies, no computer, and so far as he could tell, no radio. She had a handful of dog-eared books stacked in one furniture-less corner; she didn’t have any friends; she didn’t have a real job. That knee of hers constituted a significant medical problem, one that was going to require ongoing — and expensive — care. And sooner or later, whatever coverage she’d had through the school (if she’d ever worked as a teacher at all) was going to run out.
Alan supposed a single doctor might look pretty good to Phoebe. He imagined that living as she did, she would be vastly relieved to have someone provide for her, watch out for her, take care of things for her.
Running counter to the scam theory was Chick’s presence and involvement with Phoebe. Alan still couldn’t quite figure out Chick’s place in all of this. He couldn’t put together the connection between Phoebe and Chick. But whatever was going on there, it didn’t completely rule out the fact that Phoebe might be playing a few angles of her own.
Alan heard the toilet flush, heard water run in the sink, heard Phoebe rattling the towel rack. The door on the other side of the bathroom, the one that led directly into the kitchen, opened with a click and a little creak.
He didn’t want all this to be a scam. He wanted to believe in Phoebe; he wanted her to be as real as she’d felt up in his office and on the floor of his loft.
But he had to admit that the case for the situation being anything but a scam wasn’t looking too good.
Out in the kitchen, Phoebe screamed.
That scream cut straight through thought to nerves and muscles, and Alan launched himself out of bed and through the door and across the main room to her before he could even think. He was ready to kill something or someone, or ready to pull her to safety.
But he couldn’t see anything wrong. Phoebe was standing in the kitchen, her skin ashen and her hands over her mouth, looking like she was going to faint and staring at her sink.
Alan couldn’t see anything wrong with the sink. It had a dirty glass mug on the side of it and a couple of clean dishes in the dish drainer to the left, but it wasn’t full of cobras or tigers or the sawed-off head of a horse or anything. It was just a sink.
“What happened?” he asked her.
And her phone rang.
He went around the counter to her table and looked at the display. No caller ID. He shook his head and picked it up. “Yeah?”
“She’s coming back to me. Of her own free will. Because she’s mine.” Alan recognized a bit of a Midwestern accent in the cold, deep voice. “And when she does, the two of us are going to watch you die.”
“Don’t count on it,” Alan said and depressed the switch hook. He stood there for an instant, as blindly enraged as if a stranger had walked up to him and punched him in the nose. And scared, too. He walked into Phoebe’s bedroom without another word, picked up his wallet, and went back out t
o the kitchen and dining room.
“That was Michael, wasn’t it?” Phoebe said. She looked like hell. Terrified. Sick.
“It was a man. I don’t know which man, but he threatened to kill me.” Alan wasn’t in the mood to be particularly comforting. The scream had been convincing, but the timing had been awfully good — he ran out, saw her all shaken up, and the phone rang, only she was too distraught to answer it, so he picked up. And got the putative dying husband, who made sure to stake his claim to Phoebe while threatening to kill Alan.
It was a bit too pat.
Alan found the card he’d been looking for in his wallet, picked up the phone, and dialed the number.
“Detective Hafferty, Homicide.”
“Brig. This is Alan MacKerrie. I just took a phone call in which someone threatened to kill me.”
“Why?”
Alan looked at Phoebe, who still looked scared. “It’s complicated. Very complicated. Any chance you could come over here? I need your professional opinion on something.”
“Can’t talk about it right now?”
“No.”
“Not even yes-or-no type answers?”
Alan considered the phone and the possibility that if this were a complicated scam, Phoebe and an ally might have bugged it, and said, “No.”
“Do you think you’re in immediate danger?”
“I honest-to-God don’t know.”
“You at home?”
“I’m next door to home.”
A pause. Then, “Reeeeallly? I’ll be right there.”
Phoebe waited until he hung up and then asked him, “Who did you call?”
“Friend of mine on the local police force. A detective.”
“Named Brig?”
“Brig Hafferty. I suspect Brig isn’t his full name, but even when he came in through the ER after being attacked, it was the only one he used.”
“So you met him as a patient?”
“I sewed him back together after a pretty nasty knifing. He thought he was going to die, and for a bit I was afraid he might be right.” Alan shrugged. “It all worked out.”
He walked back into the kitchen. “The phone call distracted me. You were going to tell me why you screamed.”
Phoebe’s face flushed red, and she shook her head. “It wasn’t anything important. You told your friend that Michael had threatened to kill you.”
“No, I didn’t.”
She looked puzzled.
”I told him that someone had threatened to kill me. The FBI agent told you that Michael is the guy in the nursing home bed, and you said that he was near death. In a coma. So whoever the man on the phone was, he wasn’t Michael.” Alan paused, looking at her, feeling like he was being played. ”I really want to know why you screamed.”
She swallowed, looked away, and then turned to stare fixedly at the dirty glass mug on her counter. “I broke that mug last night,” she said. “But it’s back on the counter. Unbroken.”
He studied the mug. “You broke it?”
“On purpose. I put it in a heavy paper grocery bag, and then I slammed it against the floor until it shattered. Last night.”
Alan was going to ask her why, but “why” could lead him off-track. “Why” around Phoebe was looking like a pretty wobbly thing. He was better off sticking to the strictly physical. “After you broke it did you take the pieces out to the dumpster?”
She shook her head. “I dropped the bag into my trash can.”
“This one?” Alan pointed to the one that sat beside the counter.
Phoebe nodded.
“And you haven’t emptied this since you did that?”
“No.”
He opened the trash can lid with his foot and leaned over to look closely at the contents of her trash.
Fruit peels, some paper. No crumpled grocery bag, either empty or full.
“It isn’t there?” she asked. He shook his head.
And she leaned against the counter, trembling visibly.
She was either crazy or a very talented scam artist. Or maybe there was something seriously wrong in her life — something in which she had no hand and for which she had no explanation — but Alan was having a harder time believing that every minute. It simply wasn’t what was most probable.
She walked past him without a word, looking haunted and tiny and fragile and terribly vulnerable, and in spite of his doubts, he wanted to pull her into his arms and hold her close until the fear he saw in her eyes melted away. But before he leapt all the way into the frying pan this time, he thought it would be a good idea to hear what Brig had to say.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Bedroom. To get dressed. For the detective,” she said. She sounded like she was about to cry. Alan couldn’t understand her reaction — unless she was afraid she and a scamming buddy were going to get caught.
Alan turned away. He wanted to believe her. He wanted to believe in her, because she held the key to Chick, and he wanted to—
He paused, staring at nothing in the middle of Phoebe’s front room. What did he think he wanted to do where Chick was concerned? He’d been about to think that he wanted to get Chick back. But Chick wasn’t coming back.
That was what he wanted, though, wasn’t it? He was hoping that he’d get another chance to go through that window in his office, that he was going to be able to reach Chick, wherever she was.
Because she couldn’t come to him.
Phoebe had told Alan not to go through any supernatural windows. But if one opened, he was going to go through it. He knew that. Because he couldn’t get Chick back in this world, but if he got the chance he was going to try his best to reach her in the next one.
He walked over and settled on Phoebe’s couch, trying to decide if that made him obsessed. Or crazy. Or just a father. Even if Phoebe was on the level, though, it didn’t make him a good bet for any long-term commitments, did it?
Phoebe still looked shaky when she came out a few minutes later; she was wearing a plain white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of jeans. She’d pulled her hair back in a ponytail and had put on a pair of those plain white tennis shoes that women had been wearing since the fifties. She looked sweet, and young, and very scared.
Alan swallowed hard, suddenly seeing her beneath him on the floor of his loft, feeling her responding to his touches, hearing her excitement as he teased and caressed her toward climax, and suddenly he was grateful to be sitting down.
He took a long, slow breath, wondering if he’d been born to fall for women who wanted to use him. But he didn’t know that Phoebe was trying to use him. He might suspect it, but that didn’t change the fact that her knee injuries were real. He wasn’t an idiot for being sympathetic about that. He wasn’t foolish for being attracted to her, she was pretty and kind and her first kiss had turned his knees to jelly, and there might be some other explanation for everything that was going on with her in which she was completely innocent and in real trouble and in which he could protect her.
He wanted to be the one to protect her. But he couldn’t understand why she wasn’t doing a better job of protecting herself.
“Why didn’t you call the police when you got the first call?” he asked her.
“I don’t like the local police.”
He raised an eyebrow and waited.
She sighed. “The detective working on my case after Michael shot me blamed me for the whole thing. I wasn’t blamed officially, of course. Officially, everyone said he was a murderous freak and that he got what he deserved. Unofficially, however, the detective assigned to my case told me that if I had been a good wife and a decent human being I would have stayed with my husband and those two children would still have been alive.” She looked away from Alan and added, “It doesn’t help a bit knowing that he was right.”
Alan leaned back on the armrest and stared at her. “A shitbag who would say that to a woman who had just been through what you had been through was right?”<
br />
Phoebe looked grim. “If I had stayed with Michael, those two children wouldn’t be dead.”
“But you would be.”
She stared fixedly at something on the far wall, and he saw her swallow hard. “That’s right.”
“You ran from that bastard to save your own life. You couldn’t know what your lunatic ex-husband was going to do.”
“I couldn’t know, but I should have been able to guess. If I had it to do over again, if I knew those two children were going to die because of me, I wouldn’t leave him.” She made a little brushing gesture with her hands and pressed her lips together. “It doesn’t matter now. The past can’t be fixed. I’m not even sure the present can be.”
“Those two lads didn’t die because of you,” Alan said. “They died because of your ex-husband. It wasn’t your fault.” Hearing himself saying that to her, Alan faced again his own guilt about Chick’s death — that he hadn’t seen what Janet was before it was too late, that he hadn’t given up on his marriage and just fought to keep his kid.
No one had managed to convince him that Chick’s death hadn’t been his fault.
He wasn’t going to be able to convince Phoebe of anything just by saying words at her, either.
“The heart knows what it knows,” his mother had told him more than once. When she’d said it, he, being young and stupid, thought she was conceding that he knew better than she did what was right for his life — not, as he later discovered, that she saw a train wreck coming but had discovered that nothing she could do would stop it.
The heart knows what it knows. She’d meant, “If you used your brain, you’d see the huge mistake you’re making, but you disconnected your brain where Janet is concerned back when you were nine.” But she stepped out of his way to let him make the mistakes he was going to make without becoming his enemy. And she was there to pick up the pieces as best she could when the disaster she could not avert happened.
Now he and Phoebe were both making decisions based on what their hearts knew — Phoebe’s about her ex-husband, and Alan’s about Chick. Which was a recipe for disaster that probably made both of them fools.
