Page 34 of The Likeness

  Naylor was average height, wiry, wearing jeans and a baggy, colorless sweater. He had a mop of tangled red-brown hair and a rough, bony face: high cheekbones, wide mouth, narrow green eyes under heavy eyebrows. I didn’t know what Lexie’s taste in men had been like, but there was no question, this guy was attractive.

  Then he saw me. His eyes widened and he gave me a stare that almost slammed me back in my seat. The intensity of it: this could have been hatred, love, fury, terror, all of them at once, but it wasn’t Bannon’s narky little sneer, nothing like it. There was passion there, bright and roaring like an alarm flare.

  “What do you think?” Sam asked, watching Naylor stride across the road towards a muddy ’89 Ford that was worth maybe fifty quid in scrap metal, on a good day.

  What I thought, mainly, was that I was pretty sure where that prickle at the back of my neck had been coming from. “Unless McArdle’s very good at faking on his feet,” I said, “I think you can move him to the bottom of the list. I’d bet money he didn’t have a clue who I was—and even if your vandal’s not our guy, he’s been paying a lot of attention to the house. He’d know my face.”

  “Like Bannon and Naylor did,” said Sam. “And they weren’t one bit pleased to see you.”

  “They’re from Glenskehy,” Byrne said gloomily, behind us. “They’re never pleased to see anyone, sure. And no one’s ever pleased to see them.”

  “I’m starving,” Sam said. “Come for lunch?”

  I shook my head. “I can’t. Rafe’s already texted me, wanting to know if everything’s OK. I told him I was still in the waiting room, but if I don’t get into college soon, they’re going to head down to Wicklow Hospital looking for me.”

  Sam took a breath, straightened his shoulders. “Right,” he said. “We’ve knocked one out of the running, anyway; only two to go. I’ll give you a lift into town.”

  * * *

  Nobody asked, when I got into the library; the others nodded at me like I’d been out on a smoke break. My snit fit at Justin, the night before, had made its point.

  He was still sulking at me. I ignored it all afternoon: the silent treatment makes me tense as hell, but Lexie’s stubbornness would never have cracked, just her attention span. I finally snapped over dinner—stew, so thick that it barely counted as a liquid; the whole house smelled wonderful, rich and warm. “Is there enough for seconds?” I asked Justin.

  He shrugged, not looking at me. “Drama queen,” Rafe said, under his breath.

  “Justin,” I said. “Are you still mad because I was a snotty cow last night?”

  Another shrug. Abby, who had been reaching to pass me the stew pot, put it down.

  “I was scared, Justin. I was worried I’d go in there today and the doctors would say there was something wrong and I’d need another operation or something.” I saw him glance up, a quick anxious flick, before he went back to turning his bread into little pellets. “I couldn’t handle you being scared as well. I’m really, really sorry. Forgive me?”

  “Well,” he said after a moment, with a tiny half smile. “I suppose so.” He leaned over to put the stew pot beside my plate. “Now. Finish that off.”

  “And what did the doctors say?” Daniel asked. “You don’t need more surgery, do you?”

  “Nah,” I said, ladling stew. “Just more antibiotics. It hasn’t healed up all the way; they’re scared I could still get an infection.” Saying it out loud sent a twist through me, somewhere under the mike.

  “Did they run tests? Do scans?”

  I had no idea what doctors would have done. “I’m fine,” I said. “Can we not talk about it?”

  “Good girl,” Justin said, nodding at my plate. “Does this mean we can use onions more than once a year, now?”

  I got a horrible dropping feeling in my stomach. I gave Justin a blank look.

  “Well, if you want more,” he said primly, “then they don’t make you gag after all, do they?”

  Fuckfuckfuck. I’ll eat just about anything; it hadn’t occurred to me that Lexie might have food quirks, and it wasn’t exactly something Frank could have found out in casual conversation. Daniel had lowered his spoon and was looking at me. “I didn’t even taste them,” I said. “I think the antibiotics are doing something weird to my mouth. Everything tastes the same.”

  “I thought it was the texture you didn’t like,” Daniel said.

  Fuck. “It’s the thought of them. Now that I know they’re in there—”

  “That happened to my granny,” Abby said. “She was on antibiotics and she lost her sense of smell. Never came back. You should talk to the doctor about that.”

  “God, no,” said Rafe. “If we’ve found something that makes her stop bitching about onions, I vote we let nature take its course. Are you having the rest of that, or can I?”

  “I don’t want to lose my sense of taste and eat onions,” I said. “I’d rather get an infection.”

  “Good. Then pass it over here.”

  Daniel had gone back to his food. I prodded dubiously at mine; Rafe rolled his eyes. My heart was going ninety. Sooner or later, I thought, I am going to make a mistake that I can’t talk my way out of.

  * * *

  “Nice save on the onions,” Frank said, that night. “And when it comes time to pull you out, you’ve got it all set up and ready to go: the antibiotics were messing with your sense of taste, you quit taking them, and hey presto, you got an infection. I wish I’d thought of it myself.”

  I was up my tree, bundled in the communal jacket—it was a cloudy night, fine drizzle spattering the leaves, threatening to turn into full-on rain any minute—and keeping a very sharp ear out for John Naylor. “You heard that? Don’t you ever go home?”

  “Not much, these days. Plenty of time to sleep once we’ve got our man. Speaking of which, my weekend with Holly’s coming up, so if we could start winding this up, I’d be a very happy camper.”

  “Me too,” I said, “believe me.”

  “Yeah? I got the feeling you were starting to settle in very nicely.”

  I couldn’t read his voice; no one does neutral like Frank. “It could be a lot worse, sure,” I said carefully. “But tonight was a wake-up call. I can’t keep this up forever. Anything useful on your end?”

  “No luck on what sent May-Ruth running. Chad and her buddies can’t remember anything unusual happening that week. But they might not anyway; it’s been four and a half years.”

  This came as no surprise. “Oh, well,” I said. “Worth a shot.”

  “Here’s something that came up, though,” Frank said. “Probably nothing to do with our case, but it’s odd, and anything odd is worth thinking about, at this stage. Just on the surface, what kind of person did Lexie come across as, to you?”

  I shrugged, even though he couldn’t see me. There was something squirmy about this, too intimate, like being asked to describe myself. “I don’t know. Bouncy, I guess. Cheerful. Confident. Lots of energy. A little childish, maybe.”

  “Yeah. Same here. That’s what we got off the video clips, and that’s what we got off all her mates. But that’s not what my FBI boy’s getting from May-Ruth’s pals.”

  Something cold rippled through my stomach. I tucked my feet up higher into the branches and started chewing my knuckle.

  “They’re describing a shy kid, very quiet. Chad thought that had to do with her being from some nowhere town in the Appalachians; he said Raleigh was a huge adventure to her, she loved it but she was a little overwhelmed by it all. She was gentle, a daydreamer, loved animals, was thinking of maybe becoming a vet’s assistant. Now tell me this: does that sound anything like our Lexie to you?”

  I ran my hand through my hair and wished I were on solid ground; I needed to move. “So you’re saying what? You think we’re dealing with two different girls who both happen to look like me? Because I have to tell you, Frank, I’ve pretty much hit my limit for coincidences on this case.” I had this insane vision of more and more doubles popping out of the woodwork, matching mes vanishing and reappearing all over the world like a huge Whack-a-Mole game, a me in every port. This is what I get for wanting a sister when I was little, I thought w
ildly, biting back a hysterical giggle, be careful what you wish for—

  Frank laughed. “Nah. You know I love you, babe, but two of you are enough for me. Plus our girl’s prints matched May-Ruth’s. I’m just saying it’s odd. I know people who’ve dealt with identity-swappers—protected witnesses, adult runaways like our girl—and they all say the same thing: these people were the same afterwards as they were before. It’s one thing getting a new name and a new life; it’s a whole other thing getting a new personality. Even for a trained undercover, it’s a constant strain. You know what it was like, having to be Lexie Madison twenty-four seven—what it’s like now, sure. It’s not easy.”

  “I’m doing OK,” I said. I had that wild urge to laugh again. This girl, whoever the hell she was, would have made a fantastic undercover. Maybe we should have swapped lives earlier.

  “You are, of course,” Frank said smoothly. “But so was our girl, and that’s worth looking into. Maybe she was just naturally gifted, but maybe she had training, somewhere—as an undercover, or as an actor. I’m putting out feelers; you have a little think and see if you’ve noticed any indicators that point in one direction or another. That sound like a plan?”

  “Yeah,” I said, slowly leaning back against the tree trunk. “Good thinking.”

  I didn’t feel like laughing any more. That first afternoon in Frank’s office had just flashed across my mind, so vivid that for an instant I smelled dust and leather and whiskeyed coffee, and for the first time I wondered if I had completely missed what was happening in that little sunlit room; if I had bounced blithely, unconsciously, past the most crucial moment of all. Here I had always believed the test had come in the first few minutes, with that couple on the street or when Frank asked me if I was afraid. It had never occurred to me that those were only the outer gates and that the real challenge had come much later, when I thought I was already safe inside; that the secret handshake I had given, without even realizing it, might have been the ease with which I helped come up with Lexie Madison.

  “Does Chad know?” I asked suddenly, when Frank was about to hang up. “About May-Ruth not being May-Ruth?”

  “Yep,” Frank said cheerfully. “He does. I left him his illusions as long as I could, but this week I had my boy tell him. I needed to know if he was holding something back, out of loyalty or whatever. Apparently he wasn’t.”

  The poor bastard. “How’d he take it?”

  “He’ll survive,” Frank said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” And he hung up. I sat in my tree, making patterns in the bark with my fingernail, for a long time.

  I was starting to wonder if I’d been underestimating, not the killer, but the victim. I didn’t want to think this, I’d been flinching off it, but I knew: there had been something wrong with Lexie, way deep down. The flint of her, the way she had left Chad behind without a word and laughed while she got ready to leave Whitethorn House, like an animal biting off its own trapped paw with one snap and no whimper; that could have been just desperation. I understood that, all the way. But this, the seamlessness of that switch from sweet shy May-Ruth to bubbly clown Lexie: that had been something else, something wrong. No kind of fear or desperation could have demanded that. She had done it because she wanted to. A girl with that much hidden and that much dark could have sparked a very high caliber of anger in someone.

  It’s not easy, Frank had said. But that was the thing: for me, it always had been. Both times, being Lexie Madison had come as natural to me as breathing. I had slid into her like sliding into comfy old jeans, and this was what had scared me, all along.

  * * *

  It wasn’t until I was getting into bed, that night, that I remembered: that day on the grass, when something had clicked into place and I had seen the five of them as a family, Lexie as the cheeky late-baby sister. Lexie’s mind had gone along the same track as mine had, only a million times faster. She had taken one look and seen what they were and what they were missing, and fast as a blink she had made herself into that.

  13

  I had known, from the moment Sam said he was planning chats with his three potential vandals, that there would be consequences. If Mr. Baby-killers was in there, he wouldn’t be one bit happy about being questioned by the cops, he would blame the whole thing on us, and there wasn’t a chance in hell he would let it lie. What I missed was how fast the strike would come, and how straight. I felt so safe in that house, I had forgotten that that in itself should have been my warning.

  It took him just one day. We were in the sitting room, Saturday night, not long before midnight. Abby and I had been doing our nails with Lexie’s silver nail polish, sitting on the hearth rug, and were waving them around to dry them; Rafe and Daniel were balancing out the estrogen surge by cleaning Uncle Simon’s Webley. It had been soaking in a casserole dish of solvent for two days, out on the patio, and Rafe had decided it was good to go. He and Daniel had turned the table into their armory zone—tool kit, kitchen towels, rags—and were happily cleaning the gun with old toothbrushes: Daniel was going at the crust of dirt on the grips, while Rafe tackled the actual gun. Justin was stretched out on the sofa, muttering at his thesis notes and eating cold popcorn out of a bowl beside him. Someone had put Purcell on the record player, a peaceful overture in a minor key. The room smelled of solvent and rust, a tough, reassuring, familiar smell.

  “You know,” Rafe said, putting down his toothbrush and examining the gun, “I think it’s actually in pretty good shape, under all the crap. There’s a decent chance it’ll work.” He reached across the table for the ammo box, slid a couple of bullets into place and clicked the cylinder home. “Russian roulette, anyone?”

  “Don’t,” said Justin, with a shudder. “That’s horrible.”

  “Here,” Daniel said, holding his hand out for the gun. “Don’t play with it.”

  “I’m joking, for God’s sake,” Rafe said, passing it across. “I’m just checking that everything works. Tomorrow morning I’ll take it out on the patio and get us a rabbit for dinner.”

  “No,” I said, snapping upright and glaring at him. “I like the rabbits. Leave them alone.”

  “Why? All they do is make more rabbits and shite all over the lawn. The little bastards would be a lot more use in a lovely fricassee, or a nice tasty stew—”

  “You’re disgusting. Didn’t you ever see Watership Down?”

  “You can’t stick your fingers in your ears or you’ll ruin your manicure. I could cook you a bunny au vin that would—”

  “You’re going to hell, you know that?”

  “Oh, chill out, Lex, it’s not like he’ll do it,” said Abby, blowing on a thumbnail. “The rabbits come out around dawn. At dawn, Rafe doesn’t even count as alive.”

  “I don’t see anything disgusting about shooting animals,” Daniel said, carefully breaking the gun open, “provided you eat what you kill. We’re predators, after all. In an ideal world, I’d love us to be completely self-sufficient—living off what we could grow and hunt, dependent on no one. In reality, of course, that’s unlikely to happen, and in any case I wouldn’t want to start with the rabbits. I’ve become fond of them. They go with the house.”

  “See?” I said to Rafe.

  “See what? Stop being such a baby. How many times have I seen you stuff your face with steak, or—”

  I was on my feet and into a shooter’s brace, my hand grabbing at where my gun should have been, before I understood that I had heard a crash. There was a big jagged rock sitting on the hearth rug beside me and Abby, as if it had been there all along, surrounded by bright flecks of glass like ice crystals. Abby’s mouth was open in a startled little O and a wide cold wind swept in through the broken window, swelling the curtains.

  Then Rafe sprang out of his chair and threw himself towards the kitchen. I was half a pace behind him, with Justin’s panicky wail—“Lexie, your stitches!”—in my ears. Somewhere Daniel was calling something, but I swung through the French doors after Rafe and as he leaped off the patio, hair flying, I heard the gate clang at the bottom of the garden.

  The gate was still swinging crazily when we flun
g ourselves through it. In the lane Rafe froze, head up, one hand going back to clamp around my wrist: “Shhh.”

  We listened, not breathing. I felt something loom up behind me and spun round, but it was Daniel, swift and silent as a big cat on the grass.

  Wind in leaves; then off to our right, towards Glenskehy and not far away, the tiny crack of a twig.

  The last of the light from the house vanished behind us and we were flying down the lane in darkness, leaves whipping under my fingers as I reached out a hand to the hedge to guide myself, a sudden burst of running feet up ahead and a harsh triumphant shout from Rafe beside me. They were fast, Rafe and Daniel, faster than I would have believed. Our breathing savage as a hunting pack’s in my ears, the hard beat of our feet and my pulse like war drums speeding me on; the moon waxed and waned as clouds skimmed past and I caught a glimpse of something black, only twenty or thirty yards ahead of us, hunched and grotesque in the strange white light and running hard. For a flash I saw Frank leaning over his desk, hands pressing his headphones on tighter, and I thought at him hard as a punch Don’t you dare, don’t you dare send in your goons, this is ours.