Dead Ringers (6 page)

Still studying her with the sort of unsettled fascination that might have greeted a revelation of Martian birth, the gallery's owner slipped a thin, gleaming, white smartphone from his pocket, tapped the screen a few times, and then turned it for them both to see. Lili heard Tess make a tiny gasping noise, but she herself could not even draw a breath. The woman in the photo on Peter's phone had shorter hair, courtesy of a doubtless expensive stylist, and her daring, glittering red dress would have made Lili blush, but she bore a shocking resemblance.

No. Not a resemblance at all,
Lili thought.
She's me
. Right down to the mischievous twinkle in her eyes.

“Holy shit,” Tess muttered.

The man lowered his hand, tapping his phone before returning it to his pocket. “Now you see why I—”

“Her phone number,” Lili said.

Peter frowned. “I'm sorry?”

“Can you give me her number? Or tell me where she lives?”

“Lili—” Tess began warily.

“I have to meet her.”

The gallery owner shook his head. “I can't do that. She has a right to her privacy. But we're having another little reception tomorrow night at seven o'clock, if you really want to meet her. I'm sure she'll be just as astonished as you are.”

Lili thought of the confident, stylish woman she'd seen in that photograph and wondered if such a woman could ever be astonished by anything.

Tess took her arm. “Thanks so much, and sorry about the mix-up,” she said. “We'll see you tomorrow night.”

Then they were turning together and striding back across the suffocatingly warm, sterile gallery. When Tess pushed open the door that bell chimed overhead and it seemed to snap Lili out of the trance she'd been in. They went down the few steps and the chilly ocean wind kicked up again, making her shiver as she turned to Tess.

“How much like Nick did he look, really?” she asked. “The guy you saw today?”

Tess kept her arm looped through Lili's and steered them both along the sidewalk.

“This isn't ordinary, right?” Tess said. “This is—”

“Surreal.”

“—creepy.”

They exchanged a glance as they hurried away from the gallery, neither of them wanting to look back.

When Lili shivered again, it wasn't from the cold.

 

FIVE

Nick Devlin lay in the huge, creaky, four-poster bed and listened to the sound of the shower running. On the nightstand on Kyrie's side of the bed, a single lamp glowed dimly. The antique glass globe had been hand-painted with roses, the whole thing tinted pink, and it was that pink hue that threw odd shadows into the corners of the otherwise darkened room. Nick had loved the Notchland Inn since his first visit all the way back in college, more than a dozen years before. Every time he came—first with his college girlfriend, then with Tess, and now with Kyrie—he stayed in the Franconia Room. Nick did not do well with change and he appreciated the fact that the room never changed, even when the current owners had taken over. When they repainted, they used the same shade. It was a comfort to him. Even so, no matter how many times he'd stayed here or how comfortable the familiarity of the place was, he could never get used to how completely black the nights were.

The Notchland sat between peaks in the midst of White Mountain National Forest, a beautiful, mid-nineteenth-century stone mansion with only a handful of rooms in the main building. Thousands of acres of woodland surrounded the place and the Saco River flowed nearby, offering some of the loveliest trails Nick had ever hiked. By daylight, the inn's setting seemed like it must have changed not at all since the house had been built, and by night it felt like civilization retreated entirely. Half the allure of the place was the complete absence of televisions and cell towers. The owners had bowed to modern demands and offered free Wi-Fi, but anyone wanting to reach a guest at the Notchland by something other than e-mail had to phone the inn's main desk. At ten
P.M.
the owners turned out the lights, locked the doors, and went to bed. Without the outdoor lighting, the entire valley went pitch-black, with only the moon and stars for light.

Outside, standing on the lawn with the forest behind and below, Nick could always find a peace and solitude available nowhere else he had ever been. In the bed in the Franconia Room, he could lie still and listen to the creak and moan of the old building. Though Kyrie had decided it was a bit too early in the season to build a fire, Nick had been tempted. It would have completed the evening for him, this return to settings and experiences that he had always found so comforting. They'd gone down to North Conway to wander the shops and admire the old train station, then had dinner at May Kelly's Cottage and listened to the two old men playing Irish music in the bar. Now they were here, in the peaceful darkness, with just that old rose lamp casting the same light that had no doubt illuminated the nights of a thousand lovers over the years, not to mention the pages of a thousand books.

A perfect day and a perfect night.

So why are you so out of sorts?
he thought.

Kyrie had noticed how unsettled he had become after the phone call from Tess. She had naturally assumed he felt guilty for bringing her here, for sharing with “the new girlfriend” some of the things that he and Tess had cherished together. Nick had firmly denied this, and truthfully. He had loved this place since before Tess had come into his life, had cherished it all for himself, and so he did not feel it any sort of betrayal to share it with Kyrie now. But Tess—and Maddie—were very much on his mind, and he struggled to banish them, at least for the night. It seemed horribly unfair to Kyrie to be too distracted by thoughts of his ex-wife and their daughter to be able to give her the attention she deserved.

All his life, all he had ever wanted to be was a better version of himself.

With a squeal of old water pipes, the shower turned off.

Nick took a deep breath and let it out. He picked up his phone from the nightstand, tapped the screen, and saw that he'd received five new e-mails. Half wishing for the days before the Notchland had Wi-Fi, he put the phone aside. Whatever those e-mails were, they would have to wait.

The bathroom door opened, the old, heavy wood sticking for a second before being dragged wide. A halo of steam surrounded Kyrie as she stepped over the threshold with a thick white towel wrapped around her; she dried her hair with another.

“Brrrr,” she said, smiling. “I'm starting to think a fire would have been a good idea.”

“I can turn the heat up,” Nick told her. He whipped back the covers on her side of the bed. “Or you can just come here.”

Kyrie wrapped the towel around her head, rubbing her wild red hair dry so fiercely that when she lowered her arms she looked like a beautiful Medusa. Twenty-four years old to his thirty-three and formidable despite her petite, almost spritelike appearance, her presence in his life had invited a barrage of comments about professor-student relationships from friends and colleagues on both sides. But Kyrie was working toward her master's in medieval literature and Nick had never been her professor.

To hell with them,
she'd said over and over.

In the seven months since they'd begun dating, they'd made it their mantra.

Now she laughed and raced for the bed, slipped off the towel, and dove in beside him, burrowing immediately under the covers as she snuggled against him.

Nick kissed her head. “Don't worry. I'll keep you warm.”

But she knew him too well. His tone gave him away and she looked at him with those piercing eyes whose intelligence was like a laser, searching his face.

“Hey,” Kyrie whispered. “I'm naked here. Skin still warm from the shower. Slightly drunk on whiskey and high on the music from tonight. It's quiet and dark and it's just you and me—”

“I know. I'm sorry I—”

“—but I love you,” she said, putting her hand on his chest. “A romantic night doesn't have to mean a room full of antiques in a mountain inn. There's more to us than soft skin and pretty pictures.”

Nick smiled. “I love the way you talk.”

She smacked him. “Hush. I agree I'm pretty excellent. Now what's on your mind? Still thinking about Tess?”

“Not Tess,” he said quietly. “Maddie.”

“She can come with us,” Kyrie said, eyes bright in the darkness, skin luminous in the rose hue of the bedside lamp. Her smile turned shy. “With you, I mean…”

“With us. I'm going with you.”

“Maddie can come, too—”

“Tess will never go along with it. Letting her daughter spend two years in London? Even if I brought her home in the summer and at Christmastime … she'll never go for it.”

Kyrie twined her fingers in his. “It's not too late to change your mind.”

Nick wondered if she meant it. The plan had come together almost accidentally. Just two months after they'd started seeing each other, Kyrie had told him that she intended to do her Ph.D. at Oxford and he had mentioned that he had always dreamed of living in England for at least part of his life. She had kissed him and invited him along, flirty and half kidding. He'd also been half kidding when he had agreed, but it had niggled at him until he had started putting feelers out and learned there might be an adjunct faculty position there for him if he wanted it.

“I'll understand,” Kyrie said, nestling into the crook of his arm. “This has been fast, you and me and England. Even if you travel to see Maddie, even if Tess lets her come out and stay with us for the holidays and part of the summer, it's not even close to the same as seeing her as often as you do now. It's a big decision—”

“It was,” he said, a calm coming over him. “But I've made it. We're talking about two years, with lots of visits in between. I'll make it work.”

“
We'll
make it work,” Kyrie promised.

It was the right thing—Nick was certain of that—he just hoped that somehow Maddie would understand when he explained it all to her on Tuesday. He had always had difficulty reading other people's emotions, but never with interpreting his own. Tonight he felt sadness and regret mixed with the excitement of anticipation and the contentment of being with Kyrie. Normal, ordinary emotions. But as always he wished he could understand the emotions of others as easily.

It had been the loose string in his marriage, the thing that had begun the unraveling. Tess had claimed to understand the hints of Asperger's in his personality and to accept them, but she never had. Not really. Nick himself had never really understood, had met people much more deeply afflicted with the altered perceptions of human behavior that came with this particular brand of autism. From his perspective, relying on it as an excuse was tantamount to a person who needed reading glasses claiming to be blind.

Still, it had been enough to create a hairline fracture in his marriage. When Tess had been recovering from her accident, Nick had tried to be attentive and sympathetic, but knew his efforts came off as stiff and awkward. The rift between them had grown wider, resentment breeding in the newly opened space. Then Tess had kissed another man. Nick had assumed it had been to get his attention. Furious, he'd told her she'd gotten what she'd wanted, but he'd been wrong about her motivations. Too much wine had been part of it, but it all circled around the fallout from the accident, her pain and her scars and the fact that she couldn't get past the assumption that he would be repulsed by the damage done to her body.

That was when he'd fully understood that neither of them had ever really understood the other. A marriage couldn't survive that sort of epiphany, and theirs had been over just a few weeks later.

“Hey,” Kyrie whispered, leaning in and kissing his neck, cleaving her body to his in a soft, stark reminder of her nakedness. “There's nothing you can do about London and Maddie tonight. Come back to now.”

Nick exhaled, released her hand, and reached over to trace his fingers along the curve of her hip.

“I'm here,” he said in a quiet rasp.

She kissed him and all of his concerns fled. Kyrie seemed to understand him, worked at it, and he did the same for her. Made a conscious effort. In the peaceful, rose-hued isolation of that room, they made love without sparing a single thought for the noise of the squeaky antique bed or their own exhortations. The rest of the world retreated and nothing mattered but that chilly room and the heat that passed between them.

Later, Nick would remember the hours they had spent in that room and wish they had never left.

 

FRIDAY

 

ONE

Early Friday morning, under gray skies threatening rain, Nick and Kyrie drove south. She sat in the passenger seat, wrapped in the green knit sweater she'd bought the day before, and searched satellite radio stations for the silliest, frothiest pop songs she could find. On blue-sky days she liked to listen to stark folk music and bands like The National, which Nick thought of as mourning rock, but when the clouds rolled in and the rain began to fall, Kyrie always wanted something bouncy and fun. She found an all-'70s channel and started singing along to a one-hit wonder Nick himself was too young to know the words to. How Kyrie knew the song so well, he had no idea, but he couldn't stop himself from grinning.

When his cell phone buzzed, it took him a couple of seconds to recognize the sound. His first instinct was to peer out through the windshield and then into the rearview mirror. They'd only come a mile and a half or so from the Notchland, but apparently just far enough to move in range of a cell tower.

“Check that for me, would you, love?”

Kyrie picked up his phone from the cup holder where he'd placed it. “Voice mail from Derek Wheeler. Isn't that—”