The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel (6 page)

MacLean sniffed, then pinched the bridge of his nose. “Sure. So if you’re just an old college friend, what’s in it for you?”

“I’m just doing a favor. I figured I was doing you a favor as well. You’ve got your money back.”

“
Some
of my fucking money back.”

“Right. And now you’ll call off Donnie.”

MacLean’s thin lips went up again in an involuntary startled smile. “Call off Donnie? Call off Donnie from who? You?”

“No. From Jane. He’s been threatening her.”

MacLean lowered his brow in confusion. “Who are you talking about? Are you talking about Donnie Jenks? DJ?”

George suddenly felt confused. “The guy you hired to get the money from Jane. I met him yesterday.”

“Well, you also met him today. He just patted you down. Donald Jenks. DJ. He’s an investigator in my employ. I don’t know who the fuck you’re talking about.”

Chapter 7

A
fter a moment, George said, “There’s someone else pretending to be Donnie Jenks. I met him yesterday.”

“What did he look like?”

George described him.

“He doesn’t sound like anyone I know. He’s probably just some friend of Jane’s, trying to scare you into doing her a favor.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. It’s because of him that she decided to return the money.”

MacLean pressed his lips together and squeezed the bridge of his nose again. “Is that what she told you?”

George told him what he knew, about the man’s threats to Liana, the way he’d been following her since she’d left Atlanta. “Clearly he knows enough about you to know you hired a man named Donnie Jenks to recover the money, and he’s using that name.”

MacLean flicked his fingers in a gesture of dismissal. “Either way, it’s not my problem. If some gun-for-hire wants to chase down Jane, I’m not going to lose any sleep. Something makes me think Jane’s behind it anyhow. I don’t know why, but I wouldn’t put it past her.”

“You got your money back,” George said and shifted in his seat. He was ready to go. It had suddenly occurred to him that the miniature assassin going by the name of Donnie Jenks was most likely an employee of MacLean’s, an employee MacLean had no intention of owning up to. Someone paid under the table. MacLean was the worst kind of dirty, someone who pretended he wasn’t.

MacLean, as though reading George’s mind, held up a hand and said, “Look, let me do you a little favor for no good reason. Let me tell you my story about Jane. It probably won’t change your mind about her, but I’ll feel better.” He looked at his watch, a chunky piece of metal that hung loosely on his thin wrist.

George shrugged.

MacLean slid a little farther back into the couch. “As you probably know, I have some money to my name. Not Walmart money, but I’ve done okay for myself. I’ve had two wives. The first one died from eclampsia giving birth to my only daughter. That was thirty-seven years ago. My first wife’s name was Rebecca, and she had black hair and blue eyes. Raven black hair and eyes that were the palest kind of blue you can imagine. She was like a poem, the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I met her on a golf course on a Saturday afternoon in Georgia. She was quite the golfer. Today she would have gone pro and been one of the best lady golfers in the country, but back then she was happy enough to be my wife.

“After she died, I didn’t think I would recover, but I did. I met Teresa fifteen years ago at a charity event up here in Boston. Like my first wife, she has very dark hair and very blue eyes. And like my first wife, she will die before me. She’s dying right now in this very house. It’s entirely possible that she will die in a matter of days, not weeks. What do you think the probability is that I would have two wives who looked so very much alike and who both met such cruel fates? Don’t answer. That’s a rhetorical question.

“The answer is that both of them dying young is just another piece of shitty luck, but any psychologist worth his hourly fee would tell you that they looked alike because I am attracted to women with black hair and blue eyes.”

He paused, staring at George, challenging him to interrupt his tale. George said nothing.

“Which brings us to Jane Byrne,” he continued, then coughed twice after saying her name. “The lady that
you’re
interested in. Jane’s not her real name of course, but it’s all that I have to go on. I met her at the Cockle Bay Resort in Barbados. I was down there on business, and she was working the reception desk. She checked me into my room, and like Rebecca and like Teresa, she had very dark hair, almost black, and very blue eyes. Not only that, but she shared the same haircut that my first wife had. Shoulder length and flipped under a little.”

MacLean demonstrated the curve of the hair with his own hand. It was a curiously feminine gesture coming from such a masculine man.

“Now, I know that everything old is new again and old styles come back, but it did remind me of my first wife. Not that I was suspicious at the time. I wasn’t of course—why would I be? But I remember thinking that I had just seen the spitting image of my first wife, and no offense to Teresa”—MacLean looked at the ceiling as he said her name—“but I had met the second most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

“That night I was having a drink in one of the resort’s bars with an employee, and Jane came in and sat at the bar and got herself a glass of wine. I assumed it was the end of her shift and she wasn’t ready to go home yet. She never looked in my direction, but—and I am to blame for this—I went over and introduced myself. I told myself I just wanted to let her know that she reminded me of my departed wife and that the very sight of her had warmed an old man’s heart. I was going to get it off my chest, and then I was going to go back to my table and leave her alone. But she was talkative, asked me questions about my life, about my work. She’d been in Barbados a year and was sick of it, but she loved the weather and she loved the people. We talked till about two or three in the morning. She lived in an apartment building about a quarter mile down the beach, and I walked her home. She was not flirtatious exactly, but she was clearly interested in me. To tell the truth, I thought that she wanted a job in my company, that she saw me as a way out of Barbados.

“I stayed at the resort for about three more days and had a drink with Jane every night. On the last night, I walked her back, I gave her one of my business cards and told her that if she was interested in a position, there might be something for her at my corporate headquarters. I remember she laughed at me, said, ‘You think I’ve been having drinks with you because I thought you could get me a job?’ I told her it had crossed my mind and asked her why in fact she was interested in me. Well, she kissed me, and God forgive me, I kissed her back. You won’t believe me, but I’ve had two wives, plus a serious girlfriend in high school and a serious girlfriend in college, and I had never cheated on
any
of them. That’s the honest truth.”

He stared across at George as though daring him to say otherwise. George scratched an elbow.

“Well, you don’t need to hear details about the next part, but I started going down to Barbados every chance I could get, and pretty soon I told Jane that I needed her a lot closer to me than a four-hour flight away, and she agreed to come to Atlanta and work as my personal assistant. This was a couple of years ago. Teresa was seeing a different specialist every week, and each one told us something different, and all the while that was going on I was setting up an apartment for Jane in Atlanta. I felt pretty sordid about it back then, but not as bad as I feel now. I won’t say Jane used witchcraft on me, but it was pretty near. I couldn’t get enough of her. I’d never felt that way before.”

MacLean rubbed the back of his neck, and for a second George thought he might get up and leave the room, but he continued. “It was pretty clear that Teresa was going to die, and there was no doubt in my mind that after a decent period I would ask Jane to become my wife. It seemed like the natural progression of things. Then two things happened.” MacLean held up two fingers as though he were giving a presentation. “First, one of the higher-ups at my company came to me and said that he’d been working late one night, and that when he came to see if I was in my office he found Jane going through my file cabinets. He said that he wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but that she had one of the drawers completely pulled out and was running her hand along the insides of the cabinet, as though she was looking for something hidden, maybe an envelope, or something stuck to the inside of the cabinet. Here’s the rub. I actually did have my office safe’s number stuck inside one of my cabinets. I didn’t generally use it because I have the numbers up here pretty good”—MacLean tapped his right temple—“but just to be on the safe side, I’d written them out on an envelope label and stuck them inside one of the cabinets. I had no recollection of ever telling Jane anything about hiding away secret stuff like that, but I might have. I didn’t know what to make of it. The thing was, if Jane had really wanted the safe combination, I would have gladly given it to her.

“Then came the second part. One night I was staying over at Jane’s apartment, and she had to step out for a few things. I won’t pretend I wasn’t snooping, but I happened to be sitting at her desk, looking at her computer, and I started going through her desk drawer. There wasn’t much in it, but there were a few photographs, including a couple of snapshots from Barbados. I knew they were from Barbados because she was right in front of the Cockle Bay. I thought they must be pretty old photographs because (A) they were actual photographs, not something from a computer, and (B) in them Jane had long hair that was kind of a streaky blond. It totally changed her appearance. I flipped the picture over, and it had one of those time stamps on it, with the date, that tells you when the photograph was taken. The picture was from just one month before I’d come down to Barbados, just one month before I’d met Jane.

“And it suddenly all clicked. Jane knew that I had a lot of money and that I was booked to come to the Cockle Bay, and she must have researched me, or Googled me or whatever, and found out I’d had two wives. I’m sure she saw pictures of them, and she changed her hair so that she’d look like my first wife. I could prove none of this, of course, in a court of law, nor did I want to. But I felt like a fool. I didn’t say anything to Jane right away, but I did have her checked out. I hired . . . this person to look into her background, and he found absolutely nothing. And not nothing as in nothing bad, but nothing as in nothing at all. There
was
no Jane Byrne. There were people with that name, of course, but none of them were the woman I knew. There was no past history, nothing to make it seem like she had actually ever existed.”

He paused again, and George asked, “What did you do?”

“I didn’t go to her with everything I suspected because . . . because I don’t know . . . but I did tell her that spending time with Teresa . . . with Teresa dying . . . had changed my mind about my relationship with her and that I needed it to stop. But she knew that I knew, and I saw something go out of her eyes, like she didn’t need to pretend anymore. She told me she’d remove herself from my life, and I foolishly decided to not have her escorted from the office that very minute. I told her she could stick around till she figured out what to do next.

“Well, you know the rest. She stole a half million dollars from me and disappeared. I could almost have forgiven her and just let it go—it wasn’t that much money—but I kept remembering that black hair and those blue eyes and how much she reminded me of my wife when I first laid eyes on her.”

MacLean sucked a rattling breath in through his nose. “Long story short, the cunt played me from the very beginning.” A tiny spray of spit flew from his mouth when he swore.

“And that’s why you hired Jenks.”

MacLean looked up, his slitted eyes bright. “Yes, I asked DJ to look into it, but no, I did not send that little thug after her. I know that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I don’t know what to think,” George said. “Let’s just agree that my returning the money concludes the deal. You’ll call off whoever you need to call off and let Jane go on with her life.”

MacLean made that rattling sucking sound again, as though he was trying to stop his nose from running. George suddenly wondered if this seemingly confident man was coming apart at the seams. The lean frame and steely eyes suddenly seemed like grief, not health. “I’ll tell DJ to stop looking for her, but I want to see Jane herself, just once, face-to-face. She took my money, and now she sends
you
to return
some
of it, and it’s just not good enough. I don’t want to hurt her, but I do want to see her. Will you tell her that?”

“I’ll tell her, but I don’t know if she’ll do it. I won’t make promises for her. She did tell me to tell you she’s sorry. I don’t know if that helps.”

“Just tell her I want to see her, and I want to hear that apology face-to-face. She can’t hide forever. I have resources to find out who she really is. She knows that. Now I need for you to leave. I’ve spent enough time away from my wife today.” MacLean stood.

George rose as well and looked across at MacLean. Standing, he seemed smaller, and diminished somehow. George had to stop himself from saying or doing the natural things one says or does with a new acquaintance. He didn’t reach across to offer his hand, or tell MacLean he felt bad about his wife. It was an omission that George would think about later, but only because of what would happen to MacLean shortly after he left.

“I can show myself out,” George said and walked to the door, letting himself back into the dazzling white of the foyer. Donald Jenks, or DJ, leaned against a wall, looking at his phone. He glanced briefly in George’s direction, and George nodded but kept walking, the sound of his shoes echoing as he walked toward the door and pushed his way into the afternoon. His head swam in the sudden harsh light of day, and little blue specks floated in front of his eyes. He felt as if he had just woken from a too-deep afternoon nap.

George stood for a moment before walking to his car, noticing that the landscaping van was no longer parked in front of the house. They must have finished their job, packed up, and left. With the landscapers gone, the world outside of MacLean’s house seemed eerily silent. There were no other properties visible through the thick stands of trees. The only sound was the incessant crickety whine of a sweltering August afternoon.