On Borrowed Time (5 page)

What I did not expect, but should have, were the number of cranks that came out of the woodwork. I got letters and e-mails from every nut in America, all of whom I probably shared a kinship with. They claimed to know Jen, claimed to be Jen, or claimed to be in contact with Jen on the “other side.”

The worst part was the phone calls. My phone was listed, and a good many cranks were resourceful enough to look it up. One such person was Lydia Teretzky. I had been pretty much hanging up on everybody, but she sounded older and somehow kindly. She said she could help with my problem, and I said something really dumb. I said, “How?”

It turned out that Lydia Teretzky was a self-described psychic genius, and that wasn’t all. By her own admission, she was the world’s leading folliclist, which meant she could tell the future by reading hair.

She asked if I had a strand of Jen’s hair, but didn’t seem overly deterred when I didn’t. She professed to understand Jen’s plight, babbling on about windows between life and death, and crossing from one side to another.

“There’s something else you should know,” she said.

“And what is that?” I asked, half expecting her to tell me that Jen was Princess Diana in a previous life.

“Your Jen was dead the entire time that you knew her.”

At that very moment I hung up on Lydia Teretzky, world’s leading folliclist, psychic to all but the baldest among us. But the calls kept coming, and I starting getting invited on weird local cable TV shows. I declined them all, as my humiliation quotient had already been reached and exceeded.

I’d been having the dream pretty much every night, which, despite how it sounds, felt like a good thing. Simply put, it continued to allow me to spend time with Jen, to reexperience her. It was no wonder that John and Willie kept telling me I needed to get a life.

One night as I was getting into bed my phone rang. It was almost eleven o’clock, and while I had until this point accepted the crank calls with resignation and tolerance, this time I was pissed.

I picked up the phone. “Hello?” It was more of a snarl than a greeting.

I heard a female voice, very tentative. “Mr. Kilmer?”

Something about her tone lessened my anger, but didn’t increase my willingness to be bothered at that hour.

“Look, I don’t want to be called at my home,” I said. “So—”

She interrupted, so I guess I overestimated her tentativeness. “It’s about your article, the one in
Manhattan
magazine.”

“I’m sure it is, but I don’t remember printing my phone number.”

“Please, I’m sorry, I know what you’re going through. I know everything about what you’re going through. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

“Thank you. Good night.”

I was about to hang up when she said, “Mr. Kilmer, please hear me out. I think I know who Jennifer is, and I believe I can prove it.”

Something about the way she said it, maybe even her lack of certainty, caused my arm to freeze in midair and not hang up. “I’m listening. Who is she?”

“My sister.”

“You said you could prove that.”

“Yes, I believe I can. Will you give me your e-mail address?”

I gave her the one that I use for readers to write to me to comment on my columns.

“I’ll send you an e-mail when we get off the phone,” she said. “Hopefully it will prove that I’m right about this. If not, I’m truly sorry to have bothered you.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll check it out in the morning.”

“Thank you. If it’s okay, I’ll call you back tomorrow.”

“Fine.”

We hung up, and I tried to fall asleep, with absolutely no success. After about a half hour, I got up and went to the computer. I opened my e-mail account, and saw that she had sent one. I clicked on it.

I have a cable modem, which is incredibly fast, so within a couple of seconds I was looking at the picture she’d sent.

It was Jen.

My Jen.

“The sister called him,” Juice said. That was a piece of information he wanted to convey immediately, which was why he was doing it by phone, rather than by written report.

The voice on the other end was calm and dispassionate, as always. In the little time he had known him, Juice had dubbed him “the Stone” because of his apparent total lack of emotion. “What was the nature of their conversation?”

“What the hell do you think it was? You think they chatted about the weather?”

The Stone was undeterred. “What was the nature of their conversation?”

“She said that her sister and Jen were the same person; she could tell from the sketch in the newspaper. And she sent him an e-mail to prove it; I would assume there was a photo attached. He said he’d look at it in the morning.”

“So you have not seen the e-mail?”

“No.”

“Why is that?” The Stone’s voice was measured, not showing any significant feeling at all.

“I told you,” Juice said. “He left his computer in Hick-land. This is a borrowed computer that we haven’t penetrated.”

“Perhaps you should.”

“I will, but it takes time. What do you want me to do?”

“Continue monitoring and recording his actions and communications, and report the results to me. As always.”

“You want me to deal with the sister?” He was asking if the Stone wanted her dead, but he wasn’t the kind of guy you used the words “kill” or “murder” with. You had to beat around the bush.

“I want you to continue monitoring and recording his actions and communications, and report the results to me. As always.”

“Will do.”

Click.

The e-mailed picture looked so much like Jen that it had to be her. Every feature was exactly the same, down to the minutest detail. In the photograph she was smiling, and it completely captured her personality, the gleam in her eye. It left me stunned, because it meant that there was a Jen. She existed outside of my mind. She was real.

Once I gained control of my emotions, I mentally berated myself for not getting the caller’s phone number, or even her name. The call had come through on the caller ID as “Private,” so there was no way for me to contact her.

So for now I had nothing but the e-mail. The sender’s e-mail address was [email protected]. At some point, if I had to, I could probably do some tracing using that, but at midnight, sitting at home, it did me little good.

I replied to the e-mail, asking her to call me back immediately, at any hour. I said that it was important, but did not say that the photograph was an exact duplicate of Jen. I wanted to say that to her when I could hear her reaction; it was probably a reflection that I was not feeling very trustful of anyone.

I didn’t get an answer. Hopefully all that meant was that she was asleep, and that she would contact me in the morning.

I hoped it would be early in the morning, because I wouldn’t be doing much sleeping.

No matter how intently I stared at it, my phone didn’t ring until a quarter to ten, and it wasn’t Jen’s sister. It was Craig Langel, a private investigator I’ve used a number of times to help me research stories, mostly about big business.

Whatever publication I happened to be writing for at the time usually picked up the tab, which was just as well, since Craig can be expensive. But he’s worth the money; he can find out anything there is to find out about anything or anyone, especially in the corporate world.

I don’t think Craig ever wasted a word in his life; he came right to the point and always let you know exactly where he stood. He had what I consider a healthy disregard for everything and everyone, and CEOs were singled out for special scorn.

“You okay?” he asked. We hadn’t talked since Jen’s disappearance.

“I’m getting there. Things haven’t gone quite as well as I would have liked lately.”

“Yeah,” he said, meaning that he had heard about my situation. Everybody on the planet was aware of my situation. “Can I help?”

“I don’t think so, but thanks.”

“Anything new on your story?” he asked.

I was immediately put off by his referring to my life upheaval as my “story.” “What story is that?”

“You don’t remember?” he asked, sounding more than a little surprised.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You called me about three weeks ago, said you were working on something major, and that you’d be needing me.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. “Craig, I’m sorry, I just don’t remember that conversation. Did I get any more specific?”

“You said you couldn’t talk more about it yet, but that it had the potential to be Pulitzer territory.”

Craig was not prone to hyperbole or inaccuracy. We must have had the conversation exactly as he was describing it, yet as momentous as it sounded, I had no recollection of it at all.

“Shit. I just don’t remember.”

“Richard, I’m here if you need me. For anything. No charge; not for you personally.” The concern was evident in his voice.

“Thanks, I appreciate that. Craig, you can track an e-mail address, right? You can find out whose it is, and where they live?”

“Sure. You got it now?”

I debated with myself for a moment, but then decided to wait. “Maybe tomorrow,” I said, and got off the phone, even more worried than I had been before. I was remembering things that everyone else said had never happened, and I was completely forgetting that which clearly did happen. For me to fail to recall something that I thought could win me a Pulitzer was incomprehensible, yet I obviously had.

Was I losing my mind?

I watched and listened to the phone not ring until three
P.M
.

At that point I had to get out of the apartment, even for a couple of minutes, so I went down and got the mail.

When I first got back from the nightmare in Ardmore, checking the mail was something I looked forward to, in the vain hope that I would receive something that would yield some clue about Jen, some proof of her existence.

Once the magazine article ran, getting the mail became a form of torture, as I received literally thousands of letters either wishing me well, mocking me, or providing some form of unproductive tip or piece of information about Jen’s whereabouts. I forced myself to read each one, though most of them I discarded before finishing the first couple of sentences.

The number of such letters had started to trail off, but this time there were still at least thirty, intermingled with bills and catalogs. It would give me something to do while praying for Jen’s sister to call.

As I opened the door to my apartment, I heard the phone. I dropped the mail on the floor and ran to answer it. I got it on the third ring, or at least the third ring that I heard. I don’t know how many rings there were before I entered the apartment, but I was in a state of panic that I might be too late.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Kilmer, my name is Allison Tynes. I called you last night, and sent you the e-mail, and…”

“Yes … Allison … thank you for calling. The photograph is Jen; I’m sure of it.”

I could hear the relief in her voice. “Oh, that’s wonderful. I was so afraid I was wrong. I was hoping that’s what your e-mail meant, but I put off calling you today because I was scared of what you might say.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s missing. She moved out to California, but disappeared on the way. The police have it as a missing persons case, but haven’t come up with anything.”

“I have so many questions; can we meet and talk?”

“Of course. When?” she asked.

“When? Soon. Now. Right now.”

“That won’t be possible,” she said. “I’m in Wisconsin. That’s where I live. That’s where Julie was from.”

“Julie?”

“Yes. That’s her real name. That’s your Jennifer’s real name.”

It took a moment for me to digest this, before I told her I would fly out to see her the next morning.

“No,” she said. “I’ll come to New York. I already have my ticket. I was hoping to have a reason to use it.”

I told her I would pick her up at the airport, and she agreed, and gave me her flight number.

“Mr. Kilmer…,” she said hesitantly, nervously.

“Call me Richard, please.”

“Richard, I just wanted to tell you something, for when you see me. Just so you won’t be surprised.”

“What is it?”

“Julie and I … we’re twins. Identical twins.”

I thanked her for alerting me to this, and when we got off the phone I started mentally bracing myself for the moment when I’d see her. In the back of my mind, actually in the front of my mind, was the very obvious possibility that this might be much ado about nothing, that this woman and her sister might only look very much like Jen, or at least my mental image of her.

Making the situation more interesting, though, was the fact that her sister was missing. If this was not somehow connected to Jen, then it increased the amount of coincidence involved, and I am not a big believer in coincidences.

I picked the mail up off the floor and dumped it on my desk. I couldn’t focus on it then; I couldn’t focus on anything except meeting Allison Tynes at the airport, and hearing what she had to say.

And seeing what she looked like.

I waited for her at baggage claim.

I got to JFK an hour early, and the plane was an hour late, so altogether it felt like I stood there for two weeks. I didn’t think to hold a sign with her name on it; if she was an identical twin to Jen, I wouldn’t need it.

The moment I saw her coming down on the escalator is something I will never forget. It was Jen, gliding down toward me, eyes scanning the room for me. I’m sure that I would have cried, if I were able to breathe. It turns out that breathing is crucial to crying, so I involuntarily was able to fake composure.

She recognized me, I guess from my picture in the magazine, and she waved, a little tentatively. When she got off the escalator, she came over to me and shook my hand. “Richard, it’s so nice to meet you. Thank you for picking me up.”

I didn’t say a word, I couldn’t say a word. I just stood there and stared like an idiot.

“Your Jen looked like me?” she asked.

“My Jen is you,” I said.

This seemed to make her uncomfortable, as it certainly should have, and she reminded me that she needed to go to the carousel and wait for her bag. Amazingly, it came off quickly, and before long we were in my car heading back to the city.