When You and I Collide

by Kate Norris

  It was Winnie’s first time in a cop car. Looking through the metal grating that separated the back seat from the front reminded her of being in the Faraday cage. She wondered if they would still be free to stage their experiment the next evening, and her chest went tight.

  You are not trapped, Winnie told herself, and tried to take a full breath. You aren’t in trouble, and you are not a prisoner. You aren’t a prisoner because you haven’t done anything wrong.

  But she knew that doing something wrong wasn’t the only way people wound up behind bars.

  All those people in the internment camps—immigrants, like her. They hadn’t done anything wrong. They were prisoners all the same. Young. Old. Citizen or not. Being at war made people eager to pigeonhole enemies, then lock them up so they could feel safe.

  Muldoon was in the passenger seat. She could see him watching her in the rearview mirror. Was he suspicious of her because she was acting suspicious?

  Or was it because of her German last name?

  * * *

  • • •

  The morgue was an unassuming brick building in midtown Manhattan—it wasn’t very large, so Winnie assumed the city must have several.

  “Was the body found near here?” Winnie asked.

  “No,” McPherson said, shaking his head. “Somebody at Riverside Park saw it floating in the Hudson. Lucky we even found him, with these weird tides.”

  “Weird tides?” Winnie asked, although she dreaded the answer. Tides were caused by the gravitational pull of the moon. If her being there was interrupting normal gravitational forces somehow, that could affect the tides too.

  “High tide has been real high lately—and totally off schedule. Don’t you read the paper?”

  Winnie felt queasy. What had happened in the park had lasted only a few moments, and it had affected only the small area around her. Did this mean the effects of her being there were getting worse?

  Muldoon shot his partner a look.

  “Come on—it’s not like she’s a reporter,” McPherson said. “The kid was her friend. And the tides—well, that’s sure not a secret.”

  Riverside Park was a block from Columbia’s campus. If James had died in the lab there, it would be an easy place to dispose of a body—although not the easiest.

  Professor Hawthorn was the head of the physics department, a brilliant man with access to a whole campus of resources and—if his lavish home was any indication—near-limitless funds. If Hawthorn really was the one responsible for James’s death, the only reason his body had been found was because Hawthorn wanted it found. A body, Winnie thought, might raise fewer questions than a missing person.

  “Don’t worry,” McPherson added, giving Scott a sympathetic look. “He wasn’t in the water long.”

  It took Scott a few seconds to respond. It seemed like it was taking longer than usual for words to reach him, like he was underwater himself.

  “Is that where he died?” Scott asked. “In the river?”

  Muldoon raised an eyebrow. “What—was he a swimmer?”

  “People don’t die in the Hudson—unless they jump,” his partner explained. “It’s just where they’re found.”

  “So then how did he die?” Scott pressed.

  “We aren’t sure yet,” McPherson said. “But we don’t think he jumped.”

  They showed Winnie to a row of stiff chairs against the wall of the small lobby.

  “Wait here.”

  Winnie wanted to give Scott some last look of encouragement to lend him strength for the awful task to come, but he didn’t even glance at her before Muldoon and McPherson walked him past the receptionist, through a door, where Winnie couldn’t follow.

  * * *

  • • •

  Winnie didn’t want to think about what Scott was doing on the other side of that door, or what a body might look like after it was pulled out of a river.

  The hard wooden back of the waiting room chair bit into her own. It was an ugly room. Off-white walls, minty-green linoleum floor that evoked anything but freshness. It seemed like a poor choice to accompany death, but when she tried to think of a better color, she couldn’t. The building would be ugly no matter what. Death was an ugly thing.

  Winnie didn’t know how to support Scott through this. Beta was the one who should be there, not her. Knowing Scott was suffering made her feel so helpless, and even though James had already been involved with Hawthorn before her trespass into this world, she felt a sick, guilty feeling surrounding his death, like it was another ripple of wrongness caused by her being there.

  She had known James was missing back home, and it felt like carrying that knowledge with her had infected their world somehow. This was probably just the same ill ease and blame-seeking that accompanied any tragedy, but it was indisputable that Winnie’s presence here made any bad thing worse. Her being there was another worry that got piled on top of any other.

  She really wanted to go home.

  She wondered if she would ever get to.

  * * *

  • • •

  It was late, but Winnie supposed the morgue never fully closed. A body might turn up at any hour.

  Winnie was the only person in the waiting area besides the receptionist. She was a steely-haired, whippet-thin older woman whose stern face gave Winnie the impression that she had the necessary nerve to spend her nights alone in a building full of bodies.

  “How long does it usually take?” Winnie asked. The receptionist looked up from her book and met the question with a blank stare. “Identifying a body, I mean,” she clarified.

  It had been maybe forty-five minutes.

  “It takes as long as it takes,” the receptionist answered with a shrug, but not unkindly. “There’s paperwork. And questions, sometimes. Depending on the situation.”

  Winnie was pretty confident that this was a situation that demanded questions.

  There was a creak and then the shush of the building’s revolving door being pushed open as someone entered the building. Winnie glanced over out of idle curiosity and saw Professor Hawthorn striding toward the reception desk. The heels of his dress shoes clicked sharply against the waxed floor. To Winnie, they sounded like certain doom.

  “I’m here to identify a body,” he said.

  Hawthorn was so confident—and dressed with such class—that Winnie could swear the receptionist actually sat up straighter.

  “Certainly, sir, but usually—”

  “I was told the officers in charge of the case are already here. Detective McPherson and Lieutenant Muldoon. Page them, please.”

  The receptionist nodded and picked up the phone. “I have a—”

  “Professor Seymour Hawthorn.”

  “—Professor Seymour Hawthorn here. Could you send McPherson and Muldoon up for him when they’re finished?”

  Hawthorn hadn’t noticed Winnie sitting there. She supposed some girl sitting in a morgue’s waiting room was beneath his notice. But it would seem suspicious if he noticed her there later and she hadn’t said anything, Winnie thought with resignation. Which meant that she would have to approach him. At least she didn’t have to worry about trying to act “normal.” There could be no normal under circumstances so awful.

  Winnie stood and took a few steps toward the reception desk. “Hello, Professor Hawthorn,” she said quietly.

  He turned to look at her, a flicker of irritation at being approached was there and then gone like a bird ruffling its feathers. “Hello, Miss—?”

  Shit.

  Hawthorn didn’t know her.

  It hadn’t occurred to Winnie that in this world, they might not have met—she had never even bothered to ask.

  Winnie felt a flash of terror and immediately tried to mask it. She had been so sure, with Beta’s father and Scott both working for Nightingale, that Hawthorn would h
ave been introduced to Beta at some point, or at least seen her. Now she was stuck.

  Winnie had put herself in the exact scenario she feared.

  “Winnie Schulde,” she said. It seemed too risky to lie about that now—the police could come out and call her “Miss Schulde” at any moment. “Heinrich Schulde’s daughter.”

  “Ah,” he said, and shook her hand. “I’m so sorry, but have we met?”

  On second thought, Winnie didn’t know enough about her double’s life to flesh out an honest response, so there was no choice but to try to bluff her way through it.

  “Um, not exactly.” Winnie tried to think of believable circumstances for why she would recognize him, but he wouldn’t recognize her. “I—Scott took me to a lecture once,” Winnie said. She knew the department hosted a monthly lecture series. It seemed at least conceivable that Beta would join Scott for one. “He pointed you out to me.”

  Hawthorn frowned, and Winnie could see that there was something about her story that didn’t add up for him, but she couldn’t imagine what—she couldn’t have been vaguer.

  “Well, it’s nice to meet you,” Hawthorn said, shaking her hand. “Although I wish it were under better circumstances.”

  There seemed to an unspoken question to this—What are you doing here? Winnie was thankful that this, at least, she had an answer for.

  “I was with Scott when the police came. I guess they weren’t able to reach you? They came to get him to—to see if it’s James.”

  “Scott’s in there with them now?” Hawthorn seemed agitated by this news, although he quickly tried to conceal it. “He shouldn’t have to see his friend like that,” Hawthorn explained hastily. “I would have saved him that if I could.”

  Winnie wondered what it was about James’s body that Hawthorn didn’t want Scott to see.

  She wanted to hiss “You did this!” She wanted to shove him against the wall. She wanted him to be afraid of her like she was afraid of him.

  “It’s good you came,” Winnie said. “The police will have questions for you, I imagine. Considering the experiments.”

  It wasn’t all she wanted to say, but still, Winnie felt immense satisfaction in the implication—I know you did it, and the police will too.

  Hawthorn reached a hand toward her face and—too quick for her to process what was happening and move away—tucked a piece of Winnie’s hair back behind her ear, letting his thumb brush across her cheekbone. Winnie shivered in revulsion.

  “You’re a child,” he said. “You don’t understand anything.”

  Just then the door swung open, and Muldoon and McPherson escorted a pale Scott out to the lobby. If Scott was alarmed to see Winnie out there chatting with the head of Project Nightingale, he didn’t show it. His expression didn’t show much, in fact, but this didn’t surprise her. That was grief. It blunted everything.

  “Professor Hawthorn?” McPherson asked.

  Hawthorn nodded, and the two shook hands.

  “Mr. Hamilton here has already given us a positive ID on James Oswald. We tried to get in touch earlier—”

  “Yes, yes,” Hawthorn said impatiently. “I was at a trustee meeting for the Metropolitan Opera. I called the station as soon as I got home.”

  Winnie caught Muldoon rolling his eyes at the receptionist—a look that said we get it, you’re rich—and was glad that she wasn’t the only person the detective seemed to take an immediate dislike to.

  “We appreciate that,” McPherson said. “There’s nothing more for us to do here, but if you don’t mind accompanying us back to the station, we do have some questions.”

  Annoyance flashed across Hawthorn’s face, and Winnie once again had the sense that Scott identifying James’s body was interfering with Hawthorn’s plans somehow, but he said, “Of course.”

  “You’ll be all right getting home?” McPherson asked.

  Scott didn’t seem to even hear the question, so Winnie nodded hastily and said, “Yes. We’ll be okay.”

  Okay?

  That wasn’t remotely the word for their situation.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  As soon as the police detectives and Hawthorn left, Scott collapsed into one of the waiting room chairs.

  “I just need a minute,” he said. “It was James—it was definitely James—but also, it didn’t look anything like him.”

  Winnie remembered that particular dissonance from her mother’s death, seeing the corpse that both was and was not Mama. She could only imagine what James might look like now, and tried to shut the gruesome image out of her mind. She should have tried harder to make James understand the danger. She should have done more. Done something.

  “I’m so sorry,” Winnie said. It wasn’t enough. It was never enough.

  The silence stretched, and Winnie felt a growing itch to fill it even though she knew that wasn’t a helpful thing to do.

  “I saw Dora and Winnie on the street earlier.”

  This seemed to snap Scott back into himself. “What? Where?”

  “Outside your apartment. They saw us getting into the detectives’ car.”

  He nodded, then stood and walked over to the receptionist’s desk.

  “Pardon me—would it be possible to make a call? Local, of course. I wouldn’t ask, but I don’t have a telephone at home and there’s somebody who’s been worrying. I’d like to let them know.”

  The receptionist regarded him stonily for a moment, but something in his expression—perhaps the sad slump of his shoulders, which was breaking Winnie’s heart—softened her. She nodded and handed Scott the receiver.

  “What’s the telephone number?”

  Scott looked at Winnie. “What’s Dora’s number?”

  Winnie gave the receptionist the digits that she hoped would connect to Dora in this world, and watched as the woman dialed.

  “Hello, this is Scott Hamilton. Could I speak to Dora, please?”

  Not five seconds later, Dora was on the line; she must have been desperately waiting for the call.

  “Hi, Dora, it’s Scott. Yes. I know you’ve been worried. No—Winnie and I are fine. But I’m at the morgue,” he said, speaking that last word with a hint of question, as if he couldn’t quite believe it was a word he had to say, or a place he had to be. “It’s James. They pulled his body from the Hudson . . . No. They aren’t sure yet how. They don’t know if it was an accident, or . . .” Scott trailed off.

  She knew—James’s death was no accident. Hawthorn was to blame.

  Scott passed Winnie the receiver. “She wants to talk to you.”

  “Hello?”

  “What’s going on?” It was Beta on the line now, not Dora.

  “We really don’t know yet. Just that James is dead.”

  Her double was silent a few moments, then she said, “Well, I guess you were right,” in a tight voice. “About Nightingale. About the danger.”

  “I didn’t want to be right.”

  “I know,” Beta said. She sighed. “Poor James. And poor Scott—James was his best friend.”

  “He seemed like a really wonderful person,” Winnie said, and although she meant it, the sentiment felt trite and completely inadequate.

  It was strange to witness people she knew intimately grieving for someone she had only just met. She felt the horror of James’s death keenly, but knew her own feelings couldn’t possibly compare to their own—just another way in which she was an outsider in that world.

  “I’m staying at Dora’s tonight,” Beta said. “You’ll have to stay at Scott’s.”

  “Oh.”

  Winnie hadn’t thought that far ahead. She’d been so jealous that Beta would be spending the night with Scott before, but she hadn’t wanted to take that from her. Or at least, not like this.

  “Put him on the line, please.”

  Winnie passed the ph
one to Scott. She didn’t know what her double had to say to him, but apparently there was a lot—Scott was mostly quiet except for an “mmh hmm” here and there.

  “I think you’re right,” he said finally. “I’ll let her know. We’ll see you tomorrow night.” He sighed. “I love you.” A pause. “Yeah. Me too.”

  * * *

  • • •

  When they walked out the revolving lobby door the first thing Scott did, much to Winnie’s confusion, was take out his wallet and count the bills inside.

  “You don’t have any money, do you?”

  Winnie shook her head.

  “Of course not,” he said with a bone-weary sigh. “Well, I think this will be enough for a cab. Assuming we can catch one.”

  “Scott, I’m so sorry,” Winnie said. “James—”

  “Not at sorry as I am,” he interrupted fiercely, startling her. “You warned us! Not even about Nightingale or Hawthorn generally—you warned us that James was missing, and said it was Hawthorn’s fault! I didn’t take it as seriously as I should have.”

  It hurt her heart to listen to Scott blame himself. “There are enough differences between this world and mine,” Winnie said. “We couldn’t have known something would happen to him here too.”

  Winnie probably didn’t sound very convincing, because she didn’t really believe this herself. Even if they weren’t exactly to blame, it still felt like they should have been able to prevent this.

  Scott opened his mouth as if to argue but then his face crumpled. He took a shaky breath. “We saw him yesterday. The cops, they showed me these marks on his arms. Needle marks, from the serum injections, I guess. New, old. They think he was a dope fiend! It’s just—how could it have been going on for so long, and I didn’t even know? What kind of friend am I?”

  Maybe that was why Hawthorn was upset that Scott was the one to identify the body. Hawthorn would want the police to think James was a drug user. There were all sorts of reasons an addict might wind up in the river, and none of them involved Hawthorn. But Scott must have sworn up and down that James wasn’t involved with drugs at all, and Hawthorn would have realized that claim could blow his cover—if the police investigated further of course.