More Deaths Than One
By
Pat Bertram
Published by Second Wind Publishing at Smashwords
Second Wind Publishing, LLC
931-B South Main Street, Box 145
Kernersville, NC 27284
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, locations and events are either a product of the author’s imagination, fictitious or use fictitiously. Any resemblance to any event, locale or person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright 2008 by Pat Bertram
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or part in any format.
First Dagger Books edition published December, 2008.
Dagger Books, Running Angel, and all production design are trademarks of Second Wind Publishing, used under license.
For information regarding bulk purchases of this book, digital purchase and special discounts, please contact the publisher at www.secondwindpublishing.com
Cover design by Pat Bertram
Manufactured in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-935171-25-6
Chapter 1
“What do you think of a guy who embezzles from his own business?”
Bob Stark recognized the voice of the graveyard shift waitress, the attractive one with the black hair. He glanced up from his contemplation of the scars on the laminated plastic table and saw her standing by his booth, gazing at him, her eyebrows quirked. She seemed to expect a response, but he had no idea what to say. And why would she ask him such a question? Though he’d been coming to Rimrock Coffee Shop for four weeks now, she’d never deviated from her standard lines of “What’ll you have?” and “Here you go.”
He took a surreptitious look around. Except for the two drunks arguing in a corner booth and a cook cleaning the grill in the kitchen, he and the waitress were the only two people in the twenty-four-hour coffee shop.
Beneath the overly long bangs, her dark eyes gleamed, giving him the impression of laughter. “Yes, I am talking to you.”
“I’ll have hot chocolate,” he said, adhering to the unwritten script.
With a flip of her wrist, she brushed the hair off her face. Her skirt flounced as she whirled away from the table, and Bob noticed that she had nicely muscled thighs. Good calves, too. Not wanting her to catch him staring, he picked up a newspaper someone had left behind and leafed through it.
The waitress returned with his beverage. “What would you do if you were a girl who just found out her boyfriend is embezzling from himself?”
Bob stirred his hot chocolate, trying to think of the right response, but nothing came to mind.
“Men!” she said, hurrying off to answer the ringing telephone.
Later, after the drunks had stumbled out into the night, she came back to Bob’s table carrying a cup of coffee for her and another cup of hot chocolate for him.
He raised his palms. “I didn’t order this.”
She sat across from him. “Let’s not quibble over details.” She sipped her coffee, eyes laughing at him over the rim of the cup, then set the empty cup aside.
Folding her arms on the table, she leaned forward and stared into his face. “What do you have to say for yourself? And who are you? You’ve been coming in here every night, real late, and you never talk except to order hot chocolate.”
She leaned back. “I bet you can’t sleep. That’s why you come, isn’t it? What’s the problem? Bad dreams?”
Bob felt a shudder go through him. He came here to get away from the nightmares, not remember them. He took a gulp of chocolate, grateful for the warmth sliding down his throat.
“You’re a shy one,” she said. “And you never did answer my question.”
He lifted one shoulder in a disinterested shrug. “You asked a lot of questions.”
“The one about the girl finding out that her boyfriend is embezzling from himself.”
“Depends on their relationship. Is she involved in the business?”
“She helped him start it, works in the office during the day, and waits tables at night to pay the rent.”
“Then he’s embezzling from her, too.”
She flicked the hair out of her eyes. “You’re right. God, what a fool I’ve been. Ever since I found out he’s been cheating on his business, I’ve been wondering if he’s been cheating on me. That son of a rabid dog. He promised we’d get a house together as soon as the business did well enough, and it turns out we could have been living in our own place for several months now.”
“Even if he’s not cheating on you physically,” Bob said, “he’s cheating on you morally.”
“I want someone who’s honest and true to himself, someone who likes and respects himself so he can like and respect me. Is that too much to ask?”
The door opened. A young couple entered. Mouths locked together, they slid into a booth and groped beneath each other’s clothes.
The waitress stood. “I better go remind them this isn’t a motel.”
Grateful to be alone, Bob sipped his hot chocolate and read the newspaper.
The Broncos still reeled from their humiliation at the previous Super Bowl, having lost to the Redskins forty-two to ten.
Two youths found a man’s decomposing body in a culvert off the South Platte River. The man had been tortured; the work of a gang, the police surmised.
Silverado faced insolvency, having squandered one hundred million dollars on bad loans.
And Lydia Loretta Stark was dead. Again.
***
“I brought you another hot chocolate. It’s on the house.” The young woman sat and peered at Bob. “Is something wrong? You don’t look so good all of a sudden.”
He tried to ignore the ache inching up the back of his head. “What would you do if you were reading today’s paper and came across the obituary of your mother who’s been buried for twenty-two years?”
She laughed. “Go to the funeral, of course.” She must have realized Bob hadn’t meant to be funny, because the mirth faded from her eyes. “You’re serious?”
“Dead serious.” He showed her the notice.
She read it aloud. “‘Lydia Loretta Stark, sixty-six, of Denver, passed away August twenty-ninth, nineteen eighty-eight, at four p.m. Preceded in death by husband Edward Jackson. Survived by sons Edward Jackson, Jr. and Robert; six grandchildren. Services and interment Friday, ten a.m., at Mountain View Cemetery.’” She looked at him. “Are you Edward or Robert?”
“Robert. My brother is Edward, but he goes by the name of Jackson.”
“What name do you go by?”
“Bob.”
“I’m Kerry. Kerry Casillas.” She eyed the obituary. “How many of those children are yours?
Bob massaged the back of his neck. “None.”
“Jackson’s been a busy boy.”
“Seems like it.”
“You don’t know?”
“I haven’t seen him since my mother’s funeral—the first one, I mean. We never got along.”
She pushed back her hair. “So this is really your mother’s obituary?”
“Could be. She died in nineteen sixty-six at the age of forty-four and had no grandchildren at the time, but everything else matches.”
“If it’s not a coincidence, it must be a hoax.”
Bob shook his head, stopping abruptly when pain shot to the top of his skull. “Why would anyone go through all the trouble of putting a fake obituary in the paper? And who’s being hoaxed? It can’t be me. No one knows I’m in Denver.”
***
On Friday, Bob made the trip to Mountain View Cemetery. He wandered around the lush expanse, skirting formal flower gardens and stepping over white gravestones lying flush with the ground. The place seemed deserted, but as he topped a small rise, he saw a funeral party spread out before him like a stage play.
He paused beside a large clump of lilac bushes and scanned the small crowd encircling the brass-trimmed casket.
Everyone wore black except one young woman, scarcely out of her teens, who had pasted on a skimpy red dress that left no part of her voluptuous figure to the imagination. A much older man had an arm draped around her, his hand cupping her buttocks.
Bob recognized the man: his brother. Jackson had been a good-looking boy, having inherited his father’s athletic build and his mother’s blond beauty. He still looked good, though Bob could see that too many years of hard living or hard drinking had left their mark.
Bob’s headache returned in full force. He closed his eyes and massaged his temples while breathing deeply. When the pain abated, he glanced at the crowd again and noticed two men with the tensed posture of police officers on duty standing off to one side. They seemed familiar, but he couldn’t place them. As if becoming aware of his scrutiny, they turned in his direction.
He stepped closer to the lilac bush, out of their line of vision.
Clustered with their backs to him stood a man, a woman, and six children ranging in age from about two years old to about sixteen. The obituary had mentioned six grandchildren, Bob recalled. Were these six his brother’s offspring, by an ex-wife, perhaps?
One of the children, a pudgy little boy, reached out and yanked the pigtails of the taller, skinnier girl slouching next to him. She slapped him. The next moment they were rolling around on the ground and pummeling each other.
The woman turned around. “Stop it, you two.”
Bob sucked in his breath. Lorena Jones, his college girlfriend? What was she doing here? How did she know these people? He certainly hadn’t introduced her to them.
Feeling dizzy, he studied her while she scolded the children. Deep lines and red splotches marred her once satiny smooth face, and her body appeared bloated, as if she had not bothered to lose the extra weight from her last pregnancy or two. Despite those changes, she looked remarkably like her college picture he still carried in his wallet along with the Dear John letter that had ended their relationship.
Lorena nudged the man next to her. “Robert Stark, don’t just stand there. Do something.”
The man she called Robert Stark turned around to admonish the children.
Bob stared. The other Robert Stark seemed to have aged a bit faster than he, seemed more used, but the resemblance could not be denied. He was looking at himself.
Head aching so much he could scarcely breathe, he stood like stone. Not even his eyes moved as he watched the rest of the ceremony.
When everyone left, he approached the casket. He gazed at it, then turned to walk away. A flash of white caught his attention—the headstone, lying discreetly off to the side, ready to be inset: Lydia Loretta Stark, cherished wife, beloved mother; adored grandmother; born March 10, 1922; died August 29, 1988.
“What the hell is going on?” he asked aloud.
The mild expletive hung in the air until a sudden breeze blew it away.
Chapter 2
Bob set his easel in the backyard and let his fingers decide what to paint. His brain seemed to have disconnected itself from the rest of him while it sorted out the preposterous information it had received that morning at the funeral. Synapses fired as the data hurtled around the neural network of his cerebrum, and he could almost see the sparks of electricity they generated, but he found no answer to the conundrum.
The sound of a gasp brought him out of his trance. He turned around, palette in one hand, brush in the other, and bumped into Ella Barnes, his landlady.
Twisting the skirt of her prim shirtwaist dress in knobby fingers, she stared at the painting, then at him. She disentangled her hands from her skirt, clutched her chest, and hobbled across the yard.
Watching her disappear into the house, he wondered why he frightened her. He shrugged and stepped back to inspect his painting. It looked exactly as he had dreamed it: impenetrable jungle, serene yet menacing, so real he could almost smell the decay and feel the suffocating heat. He shivered. Perhaps the painting radiated too much vileness, but at least he’d transferred the image from his head to the canvas where it could no longer torment him.
When the light faded, he packed his materials, took them inside, and set out for Rimrock Coffee Shop on Colfax Avenue. As he drifted along the street with the rest of the strays, feeling as if he were one more nonentity with only fading memories to show he had ever been real, he saw a man wearing a homemade aluminum foil helmet.
The man accosted one pedestrian after another, but they all dodged him and his shrill proclamation of doom. “Why won’t anyone listen to me? Sissy’s going to get you. No one is safe. They can get you like they got me.”
The man sidled up to Bob. “They’re going to get you, too.”
Bob nodded. “I think they already have.”
Slanting a wide-eyed glance at Bob, the man scuttled away.
At the coffee shop, Bob discovered that Kerry’s shift didn’t begin until eleven. He ducked out the door and crossed the street to the Golden Pagoda where he’d been taking most of his meals. Picking at his firecracker chicken, he tried to figure out what to tell her. He’d promised to let her know what happened at the funeral, but how could he explain what he didn’t understand?
***
“So?” she said, bringing him his hot chocolate. “Did you go? What did you find out?” She plopped down in the booth and gazed expectantly at him.
After all his careful deliberation, he heard himself blurting it out, like ripping off a bandage.
“I went. According to the headstone, they did bury my mother. My brother attended, and so did I.”
She brushed the hair out of her eyes with a quick, impatient gesture. “I know. You told me you went.”
He shook his head. “You don’t understand. I saw another me there. Another Robert Stark. He looked like me and he seemed to be married to my college girlfriend.”
Her eyes sparkled. “Another you? Wow, how did it feel talking to yourself?”
“We didn’t talk.”
“You didn’t talk? Why not? I would have charged up to him and demanded to know why he wore my face.”
Bob almost smiled. She probably would have, too. “I didn’t have time,” he said. He knew the excuse sounded lame, but he didn’t want to talk about the headache that had paralyzed him. Unable to think, unable to act, he had watched Robert herd his family away from the gravesite. Then the headache loosened its grip, allowing him to return home and find serenity the way he always did: by painting.
Kerry flicked the hair away from her face again.
“Why do you do that?” Bob asked. “If you don’t like your bangs in your eyes, why don’t you trim them?”
She lifted a hand as though to touch her hair, then let it drop. “I’d like to, but I can’t.”
“Do what I do. Get a pair of scissors and whack them off.”
“You don’t get it. My boss wants me to cut my bangs or wear them pulled back with a barrette. He nags at me all the time about it, so I can’t. Don’t you see? And anyway, we’re supposed to be talking about you and your other self.” Her eyes gleamed. “Maybe it’s like a story I once read where this guy kept winding up in alternate universes and seeing different versions of himself. Or maybe you’re twins separated at birth and adopted out to people with the same last name.”
Bob gave her a sour look. “These are not answers.”
She folded her arms across her chest. “If you don’t like my explanations, what are yours? What do you think is going on?”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
“Then we better find out.”
He drew back. “We?”
“Sure. I get off at seven, but sometimes I don’t finish my side-work until seven-thirty. How about if I come get you a little before eight?”
“I thought you worked for your boyfriend during the day.”
“Not on Saturdays. Where do you live?”
He shook his head, not wanting her help, then decided the idea had merit. Although she wore him out, she had a car and he didn’t. If worse came to worst, he could pretend she was another annoying cab driver.
After giving her the address, he said, “Come in through the gate off the alley, and knock on the French doors. The old woman who owns the boardinghouse is nosy, and it’s best to try to avoid her.”
Her eyes laughed at him. “No one lives in a boardinghouse anymore.”
“Well, I do. I’m not going to be in Denver long enough to get an apartment, and I hate hotels.”
Yawning, he stood and tossed a couple of dollars on the table. “I’ve had a rough day. Maybe tonight I can actually sleep for a change.”
***
Bob stepped inside the door and froze. Someone waited for him in the darkness. He couldn’t hear a sound, but he had the skin-crawling sensation of being watched.
Thinking Ella was poking among his things again, he sniffed but caught no lingering odor of the cheap perfume she doused herself with.
“Who’s there?” he called out.
Getting no response, he flipped on the light. He didn’t see anyone, but he could still feel the eyes on him. He looked under the bed, behind the chair, in the closet. No one.
He stood in the center of the room and pivoted slowly.
His gaze fell on the still-drying painting propped on a chair. He sucked in his breath and stared. Someone or something hidden in the fetid jungle looked out at him. He shifted position, thinking it a trick of the light, but the eyes still followed him. Unable to bear the feeling of those eyes on him, he thrust the painting behind the chair with all the others, and crawled into bed.
But not to sleep.
***
At seven-fifteen in the morning, Bob heard a knock. He hurriedly rinsed off the shaving cream he’d lathered on his face, pulled on a shirt, and went to answer the door.
Kerry smiled at him, looking as bright-eyed as if she’d spent the night sleeping instead of working. She’d changed out of her pink uniform into a white oxford-style shirt over blue jeans.
“You’re early,” Bob said.
“I know. I got my side-work done before my shift ended, so I came to look around. I’ve never seen a boardinghouse before. Can I come in? Of course I can.”
Bob waited a beat, then stepped aside.
Kerry prowled around his spacious room, stopping to test the easy chair and hassock upholstered in a blue and yellow floral fabric that matched the drapes and bedspread.
She nodded her head. “Nice. Too feminine for my taste, but nice. I especially like the way the French doors lead right out to that big yard.”
Bob glanced outside. The tree-shaded yard, with its manicured lawn, pruned rosebushes, neatly trimmed hedges, and tubs overflowing with pink and purple petunias, contrasted sharply with the untamed exuberance of his garden in Bangkok, but it had a sedate serenity he found appealing.
“I like it, too,” he said. “It’s the main reason I took this place.”
Jiggling her keys, she moved toward the door. “I’ve seen enough. Ready to go?”
“I haven’t finished getting cleaned up.”
She made shooing motions with her hands. “Go on. Hurry.”
When Bob came out of the bathroom, face tingling from his after-shave lotion, he found Kerry sorting through the paintings he had stashed behind the chair.
“What are you doing?”
She glanced up with a saucy smile, apparently not at all put off by his curt tone. “Looking at these paintings. They’re very good. Why aren’t they hanging on the walls where you can enjoy them?” She pulled out a two-by-three-foot canvas and propped it on the chair where last night the jungle scene had lurked.
Bob peeked at the canvas. The painting depicted a pond with no ripples, surrounded by forest.
“This is lovely.” Kerry swayed as she focused on the picture. “Very serene.”
All of a sudden, she stiffened and stepped back. She blinked rapidly, then bent forward and peered at the painting. A visible shudder went through her.
“Jeez,” she said. “Whoever painted this is either an artistic genius or a very disturbed individual.” She reached out as if to touch the painting, but jerked her hand away before it made contact. “You can almost see the monstrous thing that lives in the slime deep at the bottom of the pool.”
Bob studied the forest scene. Feeling disquiet creep over him, he averted his gaze.
“Who painted it?” Kerry asked.
He hesitated. “I did.”
She whipped her head around and stared at him. “Jeez, Bob. What the hell were you thinking?”
Stealing a look at his creation, Bob shivered.
“I tried to paint what’s in here,” he said, tapping his chest with a fist. He gestured to the picture. “I don’t know how that happened.”
“Are you a famous artist or something? I think I’ve seen a picture like this before. In a magazine, maybe.”
Bob shrugged.
“Well, are you?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
Putting her hands on her hips, she narrowed her eyes at him.
“It’s the truth.” He strode to the bedside table, retrieved a letter he had received before he left Thailand, and read aloud. “‘Dear Mr. Stark: Mr. Ling Hsiang-li has informed us he will no longer be acting as your agent and that we must now deal directly with you. There is a growing regard for your work. We are interested in enough paintings for a showing, which would include an evening with the artist. Please contact us at your earliest convenience.’”
Bob set aside the letter. “It’s from a New York art gallery. Now you know as much as I do.”
“So what’s the deal?” she asked. “Who’s Ling Hsiang-li?”
“My mentor. A man who was more than a father to me.”
“But you didn’t know he sold your paintings?”
“Not really. I once mentioned that I painted one picture over another because nothing I did was any good, and he said, ‘You’re just an artist. How would you know what’s good? Bring them to me and let me be the judge.’ When I protested that they all had a terrible flaw, a hidden evil, he responded, ‘That flaw, as you call it, is what makes you an artist.’”
“He’s right,” Kerry said.
Bob hunched his shoulders. “Maybe so, but I don’t have to like it.” He forced himself to relax. “Occasionally, Hsiang-li would hand me a wad of cash and announce he had sold another painting, but until I got that letter, I never knew if in fact he’d sold a painting or if the money was his way of encouraging me.”
Seeing more questions forming in Kerry’s eyes and on her lips, Bob said quickly, “We should go.”
“Go? Oh, right. I can’t believe I forgot about the other you.”
***
“It looks like a park,” Kerry said, pulling up to the gates of Mountain View Cemetery. She got out of her blue Toyota Corolla. “Where’s your mother buried?”
Bob led the way to the newly sodded gravesite. The headstone read the same today as it had yesterday.
Kerry bent and traced the grooves of the date. “Don’t you think it’s strange that the headstone is in place? When my grandmother died, we didn’t get the stone for months.”
“Knowing my mother, she probably picked it out herself years ago and had all the engraving done except for the date. She always prided herself on her foresight and preparations. Like buying side-by-side plots for her and my father.”
Kerry stepped over to the next stone and gazed at it. “It must be terrible losing both parents.”
“I’ve had plenty of time to come to terms with their deaths.” Twenty-four years before, he had stood in this very spot with his mother, his brother, and a whole phalanx of cops, attending his father’s funeral. His mother hadn’t abandoned her grief when she had died of cancer and been buried next to her husband. Whether that death had occurred twenty-two years ago or recently, she was definitely dead now.
Bob turned away and made for the car. Kerry hurried after him.
***
They found Robert Stark’s address in the phone book. Kerry drove to the house on Ironton Street off Eleventh Avenue in Aurora and parked across from the faded yellow bungalow.
“Now what?” she asked.
“You tell me,” Bob said. “This was your idea.”
She fixed her laughing eyes on him, apparently amused by his touch of asperity. “We go talk to him.”
“And say what? That he stole my life?” A shaft of pain stabbed Bob behind the eyes. He stifled a gasp. “Maybe another time. Let’s keep watch for now. See what we can learn.” The headache diminished. He opened his window and listened to the sounds emanating from Robert’s house. Doors slamming. Feet thudding. The television squawking. Children shouting, laughing, whining, sobbing. Lorena yelling.
“My God,” Kerry said. “It is you.”
Then Bob saw him—an unimpressive man dressed in a dingy white short-sleeved shirt, a mud-colored tie, and gray gabardine pants, trudging down his toy-strewn driveway to the ancient, wood-sided station wagon parked in front of the house.
The man, Robert, climbed into the vehicle and took off. With a screech of tires, Kerry made a U-turn and hurtled after him, braking abruptly when she caught up to the slow-moving station wagon.
They followed the station wagon along Havana Street to a shopping mall called Buckingham Square where Robert entered a computer store. He went through a door at the back, came out a minute later and half-heartedly cleaned the counter and straightened merchandise on the shelves.
A young, expensively dressed woman, who looked about Kerry’s age—twenty-six or twenty-seven—marched into the store.
Bob, standing outside the door, pretending to chat with Kerry, heard Robert ask diffidently, “May I help you?”
The woman moved away from him. “Just looking.”
Robert made no effort to follow her.
A young man immediately approached the woman. He was dressed like Robert, but his shirt was snowy white, his pants sharply creased, his tie bright. Seemingly unconcerned by the woman’s lack of interest in his patter, the young man continued to pursue her.
An older couple hesitantly entered the store, and Robert went to wait on them.
Bob drifted away from the door.
Kerry trailed him. “I thought this would be fun.”
“It never is.”
She blinked. “You’ve done this before?”
“Yes.”
A brief silence, then, “You feel no need to explain that remark?”
“No.”
As Bob continued to watch his other self, he could feel Kerry’s eyes on him.
“Do you know why you interest me?” she said at last.
He glanced at her, wondering if she were setting him up for a joke. “I haven’t a clue.”
“I’d like to say it’s because you have hidden depths, but your depths aren’t hidden, they’re obvious.” She chuckled. “Maybe you have hidden shallows.”
The corners of his mouth twitched.
She drew back in mock surprise. “Is that a smile I see?”
A few minutes later, she yawned. “Jeez, I’m tired.”
“You should go home and get some sleep,” Bob said, “but if you don’t mind, I’d like to make a call first.”
She swept her arm out in a magnanimous gesture. “Go ahead. I’ll keep watch.”
He found a pay phone and called the computer store. A woman answered.
“How late does Robert Stark work today?” he asked.
“Six o’clock.”
“Thanks.”
When Bob returned to his post, he noted with amusement that Kerry had situated herself so she could see both the computer store and a dress shop.
She pointed to the window displaying new fall fashions. “Which is my color, blue or red?”
“Deep rose,” he said without hesitation.
She wrinkled her nose. “Pink?”
“Not pink. Deep rose. Bold, direct, courageous, but without the strident aggressiveness of red.”
Her eyes sparkled, but for once they were not laughing as she regarded him.
Then the laughter returned. “It appears that your hidden shallows have hidden shallows of their own.”
A tall, skinny man with a receding hairline and a prominent Adam’s apple approached Bob. “Hey, Hank, how’ve you been? I haven’t seen you for a long time. You living in Denver now?”
Bob nodded.
The man moved away, walking backward. He shot both index fingers at Bob. “Call me. I’m in the book. We’ll get together.”
Bob glanced at Kerry. She stared back at him, open-mouthed.
“That man called you Hank.” She whacked herself on the forehead with the palm of her right hand. “God, I’m so stupid when it comes to men. This whole thing has been one big set-up, hasn’t it? You’ve been messing with me.”
“No, I haven’t,” Bob said quietly. “He mistook me for someone else. That’s always happening to me, and it’s easier to go along than to explain that I’m Robert Stark.”
The angry flush faded from her cheeks. “You do have one of those faces. Even I thought you might be somebody I knew when I first saw you.”
A huge yawn overtook her. Knuckling her eyes, she said, “You’re right, I do need to get some sleep.”
“I’ll be here until six. Do you want to pick me up, or should I call a cab?”
“I’ll come back.” She smiled happily, but Bob could not tell if the tacit permission to leave pleased her, or the invitation to return.
***
That evening when Bob saw Kerry stop in front of the computer store and look around, he stepped out from behind a group of people.
Her eyes widened. “Hey, cool. You’re good at this stuff. I never even saw you.”
Bob continued to watch Robert. Kerry chattered about everyone who passed by, seemingly unconcerned that she carried on a one-sided conversation.
Promptly at six o’clock, Robert limped out of the store.
“Why is he limping?” Kerry asked. “You don’t limp.”
“Maybe he’s tired.”
They followed Robert back to his house. From where they were parked a few car lengths back, Bob could hear someone inside the house call out, “Daddy’s home.”
The front door burst open, and Robert’s children came tumbling out to greet him. Beaming, Robert picked up one small, giggling girl and planted a big kiss on her chubby cheek. A shy little boy slipped a hand into his father’s and gazed at him as if he were every super hero rolled into one. Even though all the children talked at once, Robert seemed to have no trouble keeping track of everything they said, and answered each in turn.
“I thought of another explanation,” Kerry announced. “You could be doppelgangers. A doppelganger is the ghost of a living person.”
“If we are,” Bob said, watching the other Robert Stark, “then which of us is the living person, and which of us is the ghost?”
Chapter 3
The gingerbread-trimmed boardinghouse stood second from the corner on a quiet side street off Seventeenth Avenue. While waiting for a bus after a quick breakfast of granola and orange juice prepared in the communal kitchen, Bob looked across Seventeenth Avenue at City Park. The sun shone. The warm air smelled of mowed grass. Perhaps he should walk to his childhood home on Twenty-Second Avenue.
No. Better to save his energy for exploring the old neighborhood.
***
Two hours later Bob made the return trip on foot, tired, breathless, feeling out of place and out of time.
Very little of what he had observed seemed familiar. The wide empty streets where he had once played appeared narrow and inhospitable. Like spectators at a parade, parked cars lined both sides of the street while a steady stream of traffic made its way between them. The red brick house where he grew up had been painted white and looked smaller than he remembered. He did have a vague recollection of the four large pillars supporting the flat roof of the porch, but he did not remember the ornate carvings encircling them. Nor could he recall which room had been his, which window Jackson had broken and blamed on him, which tree he had climbed to escape his father’s wrath.
How could he have forgotten so much? Maybe because he hadn’t given a single thought to his childhood during the past eighteen years?
He trudged through City Park, which he did remember, and tried not to listen to the voice in the back of his head suggesting that perhaps all parks bore a decided similarity.
A flash of yellow on a bird’s wing caught his gaze. Stopping to watch the bird until it flew out of sight, he became aware of the day’s blinding brightness. The grass shimmered in the sun like green fire. The sky reflected a blue so deep it looked purple: the color of infinity, he thought.
All of a sudden, a sharp pain exploded behind his eyes. The sky turned black. He stumbled, fell to his knees. Cradling his head in his hands, he rocked back and forth. He tried to suck in air, but his lungs seemed to have forgotten how to work.
Over the sound of the blood throbbing against his eardrums, he heard the voice of a little girl.
“Mommy, what’s wrong with that man?”
A loud sniff. “Probably drunk or stoned. Come on, let’s get away from here.”
Gradually Bob’s vision cleared and his lungs started to function again. He took several shallow breaths, then deeper ones. The pain receded to the back of his head.
He struggled to his feet and dragged himself back to the boarding house. Collapsing on his bed, he waited for the oblivion of sleep.
But with sleep came the nightmares.
***
The next morning Bob took a cab to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Aurora. After an enormous amount of red tape and hours of waiting, he found himself in a room containing both an examining table and a small metal desk with a computer. Convenience? Bob wondered. Or a chronic shortage of space?
The doctor, a gray-haired man in his late fifties, marched in thirty minutes later.
“Dr. Albion,” he said with a curt nod.
Although Dr. Albion had the barking voice and commanding presence of a general, he did not have the posture; his shoulders sagged as if all the ineptitude throughout all his years of service weighed them down.
Dr. Albion seated himself at the desk, shuffled through some papers, then glanced at Bob. “Robert Stark?”
“Yes.”
The doctor steepled his hands and tapped the tips of his fingers together. “What seems to be the problem?”
“Headaches, nightmares, disorientation.”
“When did you first notice these symptoms?”
“Vietnam. I had a mishap with a mine.” Bob paused, remembering how he’d awakened in a hospital in the Philippines, feeling much as he did now, and being told he’d been unconscious for five days. That had been disorienting, but nowhere near as disorienting as discovering a twice-dead mother and another self. Realizing the doctor had impatiently cleared his throat, Bob said, “The symptoms mostly disappeared until about three weeks ago.”
“Did you experience any change in your circumstances at that time?”
“I returned to the United States. I’ve been gone for eighteen years, two in Vietnam, the other sixteen in Thailand.”
“You never came home for a visit?”
“No.”
Dr. Albion consulted the form Bob had filled out in the admitting room, punched up something on the computer screen, and glanced at it.
He rose to his feet. “Let’s take a look at you.”
He listened to Bob’s heart, then gestured toward the scars crisscrossing his chest. “The mine?”
“A hunting accident when I was young.”
The doctor finished his cursory examination and returned to the computer. After a moment, he looked from the screen to Bob’s feet.
“This is strange. It says here you lost your left foot and now use a prosthesis. I couldn’t have missed that, could I?”
“No,” Bob said absently, his mind on the other Robert Stark who limped when he got tired. Could Kerry’s preposterous notion about alternate universes be correct? Could the explosion have created a diver-gence, causing him to travel two different but simul-taneous paths of probability? The thought made his headache flare.
Dr. Albion turned back to the computer. “There’s no mention here of a head trauma, or of the cicatrices on your chest.” Heaving a sigh, he pushed away from the computer and leaned back. “These records have your name, serial number, and social security number on them, but apparently they’re mixed with someone else’s. Unfortunately, that does happen. We’ll be doing tests—blood, urine, and so on—and the results should be here in a week, but you never know. As usual, we’re short-staffed and overworked. Hopefully, your medical record situation will be straightened out by then.” His expression clearly said he doubted it.
“I can prescribe a moderate painkiller for your headaches, but I need to find out more about your head trauma before I decide on a course of treatment. Meantime, you might want to check in with some of the Vietnam vet support groups in the area.” He reached into a drawer, pulled out a list, and handed it to Bob. “It’s entirely possible your symptoms are due to something called Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. You’ve heard of that?”
“Yes,” Bob said. “But it’s been sixteen years since I got out of the army. Why would I get it now?”
“I’m thinking it could have something to do with your belated return home, combined with culture shock, possibly complicated by the high altitude.”
Scanning the list, Bob noticed he had a choice of groups on any given day. He felt too tired to go to one tonight, but perhaps tomorrow evening he might drop in on the group that met in the basement of a church not far from the boardinghouse.
***
Bob stood in the open doorway, surprised to see so few men in the group: not quite a dozen. They all seemed to be in their late thirties to early forties, and most of them looked prosperous.
“My wife’s an archeologist,” a large man with a thin mustache said. “She’s never forgiven me for blowing up the Mi Son tower.”
A man with deep crinkles around his eyes spoke in what sounded like an Australian accent. “Didn’t you explain to her that the NVA used it as an arms dump and a radio tower?”
“Of course I did, many times, but she refuses to see reason. She says that except for some minor damage at Angkor in Cambodia, no other archeological monument ever sustained war damage. She thinks blowing up the tower was the worst atrocity of Vietnam.”
“Doesn’t even rank in the top ten,” exclaimed a dark-skinned man who looked like an athlete past his prime. “The massacre at Hue was by far the . . .”
Bob turned to leave. The painkillers didn’t seem to be working, and it felt as if a ball bearing caromed around in his head. Before he could escape, a pleasant-faced man with thinning auburn hair approached him. Like Bob, he wore chinos and a white shirt.
He smiled at Bob as if they were old friends, and extended a hand. His grasp felt firm but without challenge.
“I’m Scott Mulligan.”
Bob hesitated. When he realized Scott had not mistaken him for someone else, but simply acted open and friendly, he introduced himself.
“Nice to meet you,” Scott said, sounding as if he meant it. “This group can seem a bit intimidating at first. Over the years it’s evolved into something of a little boys club for history buffs.” He cocked his head and raised his eyebrows. “What do you say, Bob? Since you’re already here, why don’t you come in for a few minutes? Have a cup of coffee. It’s good coffee. I promise. I made it myself.”
Bob let himself be drawn forward. To his relief, Scott did not make an issue of his presence, but poured him a thick white mug of coffee and ushered him to a chair slightly behind the haphazardly formed circle.
Hands wrapped around the mug, soaking in the warmth, Bob shot covert glances at the group. Combat veterans like these had begun making pilgrimages to Thailand where many had gone for R&R. Although strangers, the veterans always seemed to recognize one another, as if their sojourn in country had left a readily identifiable brand on each of their foreheads. They drank together and often discussed experiences they had never been able to talk about before.
Bob had mostly avoided those discussions. Despite his injury, he had not seen combat. He had been stationed in relatively safe Saigon until he received orders to accompany a convoy of supply trucks headed for Qui Nhon. En route, his truck hit a mine.
Listening to the discussion lapping against him, Bob felt a sudden twinge of unbelonging. Only Scott’s encouraging smile kept him in his seat.
A high voice rose even higher in anger. “My kid came home from school the other day and told me we lost the war in Vietnam because the American military did not know jungle warfare.”
“Horseshit,” the archeologist’s husband said. “We didn’t lose. We left. And it wasn’t a war. We were supposed to be there, a presence, until the people who make those kinds of decisions got what they wanted. Like in Korea.”
The man with the high voice made balloons of his cheeks, then blew out the air. “I tried telling that to my kid, but he wouldn’t believe me. I hate to think what other crap they’re teaching him.”
Bob set his still full cup of coffee on the chair and left the building. He stood in the shadow of the old stone church, breathing deeply. The cooling air had an earthy smell, like mushrooms.
Scott joined him. “Are you all right? You look green around the gills.”
“I’m fine.”
Scott gave him a dubious glance, then gestured toward the door they’d exited. “I guess you didn’t expect that. If you want, I can put you in touch with other groups that are more into healing than history, ones that will actually let you air your problems.”
Bob watched a single brown leaf falling from a nearby oak tree. “I’m not much of a joiner.”
“Well, if you ever need anyone to talk to, I’d be willing to listen. I’m in the phone book, or you can check here at the church.”
“Are you a minister?”
Scott laughed. “No. I help when I can—mow the grass, supervise various activities, whatever needs doing. I believe belonging to a church extends beyond Sunday attendance.” He peered at Bob. “You don’t look very good. Maybe you should come back inside.”
Bob felt himself warming to this genial man, but he didn’t want to hear any more talk of the war. As he tried to pluck polite words of refusal out of his aching head, he heard the sound of voices coming nearer and the clump of many pairs of shoes.
“The meeting must be ending early,” Scott said. “My family will be pleased. They’re waiting for me. This is Monopoly night. What about you? Do you have family?”
Bob shook his head. He hadn’t considered Jackson family for a long time now, and he doubted the other Robert Stark qualified.
“Friends?” Scott queried.
“Not here in Denver.”
“Are you new to the area?”
“Yes and no.” To his surprise, Bob found himself explaining he’d grown up in Denver, but had spent the past eighteen years in Southeast Asia.
“Welcome home, Bob,” Scott said with a smile. “Tell you what. Why don’t you come to my house for dinner tomorrow evening. Say, six o’clock? You’ll like my family. They’re nice people.”
Bob shifted his weight to one foot, preparing to leave. “I wouldn’t want to impose.”
“No imposition. We’d love to have you. My wife enjoys fussing over company. Besides, you’d be doing me a favor. My children have never met anyone who’s lived in Thailand. It would be good to broaden their horizons.”
Bob finally agreed. Tucking Scott’s address into his pocket, he headed for the car he had purchased earlier that day, and drove to the Golden Pagoda for dinner.
***
Bob dreamed he wandered in the jungle. A numb, helpless feeling permeated his body as he pushed against foliage too dense to allow passage. He could feel menace all around him, but it was nebulous, without form or reason. He let out a wordless cry. No one heard.
When he awoke, his heart pounded, his lungs heaved, his head throbbed. He stared wildly about him.
Wide-awake now, he remembered who he was, where he was. He sat up and buried his face in his hands until his heartbeat slowed and his breathing returned to normal.
He rose from the bed, pulled on his clothes, and slipped out into the predawn world.
***
“Do I know you?”
Bob glanced at Kerry, wondering what game she played now. “I’m the hot chocolate.”
Her eyes brightened. “That’s what I thought, but I didn’t know for sure if you were you or your other self.”
She hurried off in answer to the imperial summons of a business-suited woman with a pinched face, but returned a few minutes later with Bob’s drink.
Setting the cup in front of him, she asked, “What have I missed?”
“Nothing. I’ve been busy and haven’t been able to check on the other Robert Stark, and anyway, it’s hard to tail someone if your transportation is buses and cabs. But I bought a car, so we’ll see.”
“What color?”
“Originally? Blue. Now it’s so faded it looks gray.”
Laughter sparked in her eyes. “You bought a junker. Why am I not surprised? What kind?”
“A 1969 Volkswagen bug. It runs well and cost three hundred dollars.” Since he hadn’t driven for many years, he’d had a hard time finding his rhythm, but he saw no reason to mention that.
She flicked back her hair. “You’re not big on commitment, are you? You won’t even commit to an apartment or a real car.”
A ragged old man smelling of whiskey and urine entered the restaurant, sat on a stool, and carefully laid a few coins on the counter. Kerry poured him a cup of coffee, refilled the woman’s cup, then paused by Bob’s table, still clutching the pot.
“What about you and the cheat?” he asked.
She smoothed her apron with her free hand. “I have some more thinking to do on that, so for now I’m still peddling porches.”
He gave her a quizzical glance.
“Didn’t I tell you? I guess not. He owns a construction company that builds porches and decks. Calls it Pete’s Porches.”
She left, refilled the cups of the three or four other customers, made a new pot of coffee, then stopped at Bob’s table once more.
The pressure in his head started to build. He rubbed his throbbing temples with two fingers of each hand.
“Headache?” she asked sympathetically. “Do you want an aspirin?”
“No, that’s all right. It comes and goes.”
She chewed on her lower lip, watching him with narrow-eyed concentration. “A couple of times I’ve seen you leaving the Chinese restaurant across the street. Do you eat over there a lot?”
“Most days.”
“Well, no wonder you have a headache. All that MSG.”
Bob blinked. “I’d forgotten about that. A long time ago, Robert Dunbar told me he loved Chinese food but could never eat it stateside because of all the additives, which gave him a headache. He said that since we made the food at The Lotus Room from scratch, using fresh and natural ingredients, he could indulge himself. I guess I need to cook my own meals. Where can I find Chinatown?”
She shot him a perplexed look. “You mean like in San Francisco?”
“I mean here in Denver. Don’t all major cities have a Chinatown?”
“Not us. The Asians here have been mostly assimilated into the community, but there is a shopping center over on Alameda where you can find all sorts of special Chinese products. Why the insistence on Chinese food?”
“It’s what I’m used to.”
She laughed. “Why, are you from China?”
“Close. Thailand. I’ve been living in Bangkok awhile.”
She gaped at him, then broke out into a smile, her eyes dancing. “Your shallows seem to be growing ever deeper. What’s it like living in a foreign country? What’s The Lotus Room? Is that where you worked? And who’s Robert Dunbar?”
Bob deliberated a moment and answered the last question first. “Dunbar is an electronics engineer who works for Data Management Systems, a corporation based here in Colorado. He has the same fake chummy manner as the salesman at Lemons R Us where I bought my car, and he makes much of the fact that we share the same first name.”
“As if that means anything,” Kerry said. “There must be millions of Bobs in the world. Where did you meet him?”
“At The Lotus Room shortly after I started working there. He always tried to get me to go golfing with him at Bangphra on the Gulf of Siam. According to him, it has one of the longest, most beautiful, and most challenging golf courses in the world. You’d think he owned stock in the place the way he rhapsodized about it.”
“Did you ever go?”
“No. I’m not fond of golfing.” Nor of Dunbar, he almost added, but caught himself in time. He’d have to be careful around this young woman; she had a way of disarming him so that he imparted more than he intended.
“I don’t like golf either. Not enough action. But I don’t think I’d mind it so much if I could play somewhere exotic like Thailand.” She flipped her hair out of her eyes. “I never associated Thailand with golf. I’ve only heard about it in relation to sex and sin.”
“For the most part, Bangkok is a city of devout Buddhists. Patpong Road, the infamous red light district, is two and a half blocks long, but more than eight hundred ornate wats—temple/monastery com-pounds dedicated to Buddha and the study of his teachings—dominate the city. I used to go running early during the cool time, and sometimes it seemed as if no one but the saffron-robed monks with their shaved heads and bare feet shared the dawn with me.”
She gazed at him, a rapt expression on her face. “I always wanted to travel. I come from Chalcedony, a small town on the western slope. It’s a decent place, and I had a happy childhood, but I need more than Chalcedony can provide.” She smiled ruefully. “I wanted the world, the whole broad picture, and I got Denver and Pete’s Porches.”
She fell silent. For a moment she left her face unguarded, and Bob could see how her problems with Pete ate at her. Then the eagerness returned to her eyes.
“What did you do at The Lotus Room?”
“I acted as manager, but I never had a title. I did everything from purchasing supplies to waiting tables and tending bar. Sometimes I cooked, if you could call it that. My awkward attempts at stir-frying afforded Wu Shih-kai great amusement.”
“Was Wu Shih-kai the owner?”
“Hsiang-li owned the place. Wu Shih-kai was the cook, a wrinkled and withered ancient who appeared frail and unsteady until he went into the kitchen, and then he became a wizard, moving from pot to pot, refining his magic potions.”
“It sounds like you loved Thailand,” Kerry said wistfully.
“I did. Beneath the veneer of congested traffic and commerce is a city of great splendor. I felt at peace there.”
“Why did you leave?”
Bob pressed his lips together and turned away. After a moment he said, “I lost my work visa.”
“I’m sorry you had to leave Thailand, but I’m glad I got to meet you. You’re different.”
“So I’ve been told.”
She laughed. “You have to admit, not many people have another self running around. I read something yesterday that made me think of you. It’s from a poem by Oscar Wilde. ‘And the wild regrets and the bloody sweats,/ None knew so well as I:/ For he who lives more lives than one/ More deaths than one must die.’”
Bob felt a shiver creep up his spine, but he tried to keep his tone light. “Dying more than once seems to run in my family.”
Chapter 4
Kerry left to seat a party of boisterous drunks. Bob huddled in the booth with the Oscar Wilde poem hanging over him like his own personal storm cloud. When she turned and tossed him a sunny smile, the cloud dissipated, but he regarded her warily. What was she up to now? It seemed as if every time she went off to serve someone else, she got another of her notions.
Finished waiting on the drunks, she plopped down opposite Bob. “I get off work at eight. Meet me here.”
“Why?”
“So we can go check on your other self. On your own, you don’t seem to be able to get anything done. You’re like a compass without a pointer. You lack direction.”
“And you’re going to be the pointer?”
She beamed at him. “Exactly.”
***
At eight-thirty, they parked across the street from Robert Stark’s house. Kerry sat behind the wheel of Bob’s ancient VW, though he had no clear idea how that happened.
“Your talents are certainly being wasted in the diner,” he said. “You should be in a boardroom somewhere keeping the other board members in line.”
Her eyes lit up but darkened immediately. “We missed him. The station wagon’s not here. Now what?”
“We wait.”
“I don’t believe in waiting.”
He didn’t remind her that she had invited herself, but merely said, “Waiting and patience are a big part of surveillance.”
“So how long do we have to wait?”
“I don’t know. We just got here.
“Look, there it is.”
Bob turned to follow her finger. The station wagon raced down the street to the Stark house. It pulled into the driveway without any discernable lessening of speed, and stopped abruptly. Lorena jumped out. She wore a shapeless sweat suit and bunny slippers, and her hair looked uncombed.
“Is that Lorena?” Kerry asked, craning her neck.
“Yes. Probably took the kids to school.”
He saw nothing else of interest until Robert came out an hour and a half later, climbed into the vehicle, and drove to Buckingham Square.
After watching him work for an hour, Kerry sighed. “He’s not going anywhere. Since we’re at the mall, I’d like to do some shopping. Coming?”
Bob glanced once more at Robert, who fiddled with a computer by himself, then followed her to a drugstore.
“Look!” she exclaimed, grabbing a paperback off a display by the counter. “A new novel by William Henry Harrison. Are you familiar with him?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve read all his books. I didn’t think there would ever be another one. This is great.” She thrust the book into his hands, then darted down a nearby aisle and grabbed two boxes of hair dye.
When he caught up to her, she said, “I need a change.” She raised first one box to her face, then the other, and looked at him expectantly. “Would you like me better as a redhead or a blond?”
It seemed a strangely intimate moment, as if they were husband and wife, or at least friends of long standing, and he found himself unable to speak.
“Well?” she said.
“It’s never been established I like you at all.”
“Of course you do.” She laughed. “You find me annoying, but you still like me.”
“If you say so.” And he did like her. Somehow she made his bizarre plight seem normal, as if having a duplicate self were simply an interesting personality quirk.
“Ouch. I bet that hurt.”
He wondered what she meant, then realized he was smiling.
“So which?” she asked. “Blonde or red?”
“Neither.” He reached out to touch her hair. Remembering that she had a boyfriend, he let his hand drop. “I like your natural color. Sometimes it’s a true black, but other times you have red highlights, as if your banked inner fires are glowing through.”
She stared at him for a second, then slowly replaced the boxes.
***
“Do you mind if we go?” Kerry asked at four o’clock. “We aren’t learning anything, and Pete and I have plans for this evening.”
Not yet ready to leave, Bob decided to call a cab for her but changed his mind when he remembered Scott’s invitation to dinner. It would be rude to cancel now, especially if the man’s wife had gone to a lot of trouble. Besides, Kerry spoke the truth; they weren’t learning anything.
“Okay, let’s go.” As they walked to the car, laden with Kerry’s purchases, he said, “You did a good job today.”
She rewarded him with a pleased but tired smile.
***
Scott Mulligan welcomed Bob warmly and ushered him into a homey living room filled with well-worn furniture and floor to ceiling bookshelves, where a woman, a boy, and a girl waited. Like Scott, they were nice looking with open faces and they dressed modestly.
Scott gestured to the woman. “This is my beautiful wife, Rose.”
Rose blushed becomingly, and for a second she did look beautiful. Her best feature was her shiny dark brown hair.
Scott gestured to the girl. About eleven years old, she looked like a younger version of her mother. “This is my gorgeous daughter, Beth.”
Beth giggled. “Oh, Daddy.”
“And that’s Jimmy.” Scott pointed to the sturdy, bright-eyed boy, who appeared to be about two years older than his sister. Both father and son had square, blunt-nosed faces, and unruly auburn cowlicks.
Rose held out a hand. “Please sit.”
Bob perched on the edge of a dark green upholstered chair.
“We’re glad you came,” Rose said. “Scott mentioned you’ve recently returned home. I don’t imagine there’s a lot you remember. Denver’s changed so much in the past eighteen years.”
Bob shifted his weight. “I’ve noticed.”