Chapter #41The Face of a Doppelganger, Part 2 by: Seuzz   Becky doesn't say much on the drive out after she's been picked up. You wonder what she would say if she knew that you were the "Joe Durras" she was smooching with all last week, and that the guy driving the car is the Joe Durras she remembered smooching before that.
She directs Jonathan to a tidy little bungalow a block away from a major shopping center. It's made of brick, and the front door is hidden behind a high wall with a door in it. A neat little garden—now trimmed back for the approaching winter—is just inside.
Becky rings the doorbell. "Don't you have a key?" Jonathan asks.
"Sure, but it's politer this way," she says as she opens the door.
There's a tile foyer just inside, and a living room done up in earthy browns and mossy greens beyond that. The surfaces are covered with framed photographs showing a motley bunch of people of all ages: plainly, a family with a lot of siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. "Mother!" Becky calls. "Mother?"
Mother? You and Jonathan mouth the interrogative at each other simultaneously.
And from another room there enters a house occupant.
She must be eighty if she's a day. Her skin is so covered with liver spots that it's almost brown, and deeply wrinkled and lined. Her hair, which should be white, is dyed a fiery red. She's in a house-coat, and she limps behind a walker. But her eyes are bright, and she smiles. "Oh, look who's here," she says to Becky, then looks at you and Jonathan. "And who's this?"
"Some friends from school," Becky says in a clipped tone. "They want to talk to me here."
"Privately," Jonathan says.
"Well, I have a little parlor back there you can use," the old woman says in the tone of one desperate—maybe too desperate—to please. "You can just—" But Jonathan and Becky have already slipped past her.
The old woman smiles kindly at you. "I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name, dear."
"Monique."
"What a lovely name. And that's your brother?"
"My boyfriend, actually." You blush.
Color shows in her cheeks as he smiles. "That's so lovely. And so lucky, too. You are all so lucky, though I'm sure you don't realize just how lucky you are." Now her tone changes, becoming icy and metallic even as the smile remains unchanged. "Especially Becky. My, but she is the fortunate one."
"Is she your granddaughter?"
Before the woman can answer, Jonathan appears in the doorway behind, and frantically gestures to you. You murmur an excuse to your hostess and hurry over. He pulls you in and turns you around to face a small sofa.
The old woman's twin—wrinkled skin and dyed hair and all—is lying there, with her eyes closed. She is wearing Becky Torres's jeans cutoff and halter top.
You gasp hard, and Jonathan covers your mouth with his hand. "Suddenly I am having no fun at all," he mutters.
"Is that—? Oh my God, does that mean—?"
"That's got to be the real Becky in the living room. Now we see why our cheerleader couldn't get her replacement out of the house. And I don't know how we're going to get the old lady into the car."
"Is everything all right in there?" that old lady calls.
"Could we just leave her here?" you ask. "I mean, take that mask off Becky and—"
"I don't want to leave them together." He chews his lip. "Becky's house is only a few blocks from here," he mutters. "Open up the car and hang on to this." He thrusts a mask at you. "You're gonna have to wait here, but you can wait outside. Anyhow, Granny Weatherwax won't be able to reach you if she wakes up before I get back."
Nervously, you do as he directs. When Jonathan catches up to you at the car, he's got someone hoisted over his shoulders. He gently lays her into the passenger seat: It's Becky, though still dressed in old lady clothes. Jonathan closes the door and leaps around the driver's side. Inside of ten seconds, he's in the street and racing for Becky's house.
It's only five minutes before he's back, looking a little grim as you hop into the car. "It'll be a mystery for her and her folks, but this whole thing is gonna be a mystery."
"What did you do?"
"Pulled up by her yard and pushed her out. Then I spun out as fast as I could."
"But why was there an old person under her mask? There aren't any old people at Westside."
He gives you a quizzical glance whose meaning you don't understand, and takes out his phone. "Yo, how are you guys doing?" he asks when the other side picks up. "Nicely done, bro, I thought I'd be at least two ahead of you, given my wheels. But listen, we just got through with Becky Torres, and you'll never guess what we found under her face. An old woman, I'd estimate between seventy-five and ninety. Or forty, if she's lived a really exciting life. You guys seen anything like that? You're shitting me. No fucking way! No, this was the first one we found like that. We've been hitting the girls, and only found middle-aged women under masks of Darcy and Leslie and Jenny."
Middle-aged women? you wonder to yourself. This is even crazier than that student you didn't recognize.
"Oh, and, you'll love this," Jonathan continues. "A twenty-something man under Nikki Cave's face. Yeah, talk about Super-Jorgensen. Though I shouldn't talk, since I'm sitting next to one like that now."
You punch him in the arm; he hardly seems to notice.
"Okay, we're on our way to Dunholm's place, after I call him. Call me if anything weird, uh, weirder turns up."
"What did Frank say?"
"He says they've been running across nobody but old people. Four old guys and one old woman, Frank says they're all old enough to have been in the Korean War. No cross-dressers, though. The old dudes were inside Chris Smith, Brad McHenry, Sammy Orson and Cooper Black, the old lady was inside Elizabeth Pruit."
Chris Smith: He's a wrestler, but that's all you know. Brad McHenry plays football. Sammy Orson hangs around with "the Rumorati" girl squad. Cooper Black plays baseball but also has a brain. And Elizabeth Pruit is a swimmer. You feel very cold, suddenly. "Do I have to go with you?" you ask after he's finished setting up a meeting with Geoff Dunholm.
"Feeling sick? I'd prefer the moral support, but you don't have to go in with me."
"Thanks."
So you stay in the car when Geoff takes Jonathan into a stucco house. The latter looks grim when he comes out. "An old man this time," he says, and tosses the mask into the accumulating pile in the back.
"Joe, do you really think what they were doing was that bad?" you ask.
"You mean old people stealing young lives? Are you thinking maybe that's not bad?"
You start to say "I overheard them say something about it only being for a year", but then you remember you overheard them by using Bredon's "recon", and maybe you don't want to mention that to Joe, so you can only stammer out something lame: "I just mean, these old people, they're getting a chance for some fun again. Like, Becky—" You shudder to think of what you were actually kissing under Becky's face, and then feel guilty for shuddering. "You know, I was pretending to be you for a week, because those guys stuck me under a mask of you."
"And how much of a meal did you make of it?"
"That's just it. I really did take advantage of it, the way I never could when I was—" You take a deep breath, and try to put out of your mind your memory of catching fake-Will on a date with Lisa Yarborough at the river. "The way I never could when I was myself. I spent a lot of time with Becky. With that old woman who I thought was Becky. We were both pretending. I mean, she was one of them, and she knew— I mean, she must have known that I was a fake too. But we got to have fun neither of us could have had as ourselves."
"Hmm. Well, this isn't the place for a philosophical debate. Let's just say that every kiss that old lady stole is a kiss that Becky couldn't."
"You'd have to say the same thing about me and you."
"No. Because my kisses are so awesome you were only stealing counterfeits."
* * * * *
"Another cross-dresser," Jonathan says as he gets back in the car. "And this one was in his mid-fifties. Had to leave him in a pair of fishnet stockings. Still, if you're going to do that kind of thing, you can do worse than cross-dress as Chris Yves." He hands you the mask, but you quickly toss it into the back seat.
The sun is going down by now, and you're exhausted. True, you've not done any real work since hooking up with Joe, but the stress has been bad. You must show it, for without asking, he takes you back to Monique's house. "Take the night off," he says. "I'll finish up with Zametti and Karter, maybe pick you up later." Habit asserts itself, and you kiss.
You watch his tail lights vanish, then turn toward the gate leading into your yard. But a shadow detaches itself from the corner, and you suck in a sharp breath as Adam Karter steps forward.
"Don't bother pretending you're Helen," he says. "I know what's been going on tonight. Just tell me who you are. Really."   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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