“Wait. I can be up in two minutes.”
“They’re already here, waiting for me. I’ll see you this afternoon.” Allie strode through the door and into the front seat that Melissa had left vacant for her. Daniel was wearing the same clothes he’d worn last night. As he started to pull away, her mom came running out, barefoot, pulling on a robe over her nightgown.
“Ugh,” Allie muttered. She rolled down the window and said, “Mom. I’m fine.”
“All three of you are heading straight to Jake’s hotel room,” her mother said. “I can report this to the police. I can get them to stop the car. You’re still a minor. Daniel, if you’re eighteen, you can be guilty of transporting minors over the state line.”
“We’re not leaving the state,” Daniel said. “We’re going to school.”
“You have to trust me,” Allie stated. “I have to lead my own life as best I can. I’ll be back this afternoon if I possibly can. And if I can’t, I’ll keep you and Dad posted. This is the best I can do, Mom. I know it’s not good enough. I know you’re scared for me, and I wish I could do better, too. I just can’t. I’m asking...I’m begging you, don’t call the police. Let me do what I have to do, even though you think it’s wrong. Please.”
Her father, in slippers and a robe, had come out to join his wife halfway through Allie’s monologue. “Get out of the car, Alexis,” he said sternly.
Her mother held up her hand. “She knows what she’s doing. Even though we don’t.” She turned back to face Allie. “Be careful.”
She glared at Daniel, but then she took her husband’s arm and ushered him back toward the house. Allie nodded at Daniel, and they drove away. “Your poor mom,” he said.
“I know,” Allie replied.
“We’re heading to the Benton first. We’ll have a powwow and see how far along Jake is with his microchip design.”
Allie glanced back at Melissa. She looked miserable. “Are you okay?” Allie asked.
“The police are putting me in a lineup sometime today.”
“Will that eliminate you from their list of suspects?” Allie asked.
She shook her head. “All the officer would commit to was that it’d go a long way toward proving my innocence.”
“Is Jennifer...Suzanne Jones going to be in the lineup as well?” Allie asked.
“Jake asked them that last night. They said they couldn’t guarantee it.”
“Are you sure you should take this chance?” Allie asked.
“Yes. I’m innocent. A witness won’t identify me, because I wasn’t there.”
“Unless the shooter’s your Doppelganger,” Daniel said. “The way our luck’s going, I wouldn’t be too quick to count that out.”
They were quiet during the short drive. Melissa said she needed to get dressed and would see them in another ten minutes. She rushed off. Allie and Daniel lingered by the car.
“It sounded like things didn’t go that well with the police last night.”
“That’s an understatement. It could have been worse, though. At least they didn’t put us in handcuffs and haul us off to the slammer.”
“Always looking on the bright side. Good for you, Daniel.”
He chuckled and put his arm around her shoulders. Allie needed the reassurance and rested her head on his shoulder. They stayed like that, silently, leaning back against the car. Daniel gave her a quick peck on the top of her head, and she grinned.
Jake arrived in the parking lot just then, meeting their gazes with fiery eyes. “Leave you two alone for five minutes and you’re already looking like a longtime couple,” he grumbled.
Daniel straightened and said, “I’m going to run up to my room. Meet you in the cafe.”
Jake was pushing against his temples again. He was under so much pressure now. Allie realized that she and Jake hadn’t had much time alone. The way things were shaping up, they might not have another opportunity for one-on-ones anytime soon.
“Actually, Daniel,” Allie said, “would it be all right if Jake and I walk to the cafe, and you maybe drive Melissa to the State Street Grill?”
Daniel looked surprised, but said, “No problem. I’ll go tell Melissa you two needed some space.”
“Thanks, bro,” Jake said. “Sorry I’m so...crabby. See you back here after I give Allie a ride to school.”
Jake took her hand, and they went to the inn’s restaurant and helped themselves to cups of coffee. Only two of the cafe’s eight tables were occupied. “You didn’t ask for privacy because you’re about to drop a bombshell on me, are you?” Jake asked.
“No, Jake. Like Daniel surmised, I felt like we needed some space.”
“So there’s nothing going on between you and him?”
“I love him like a friend. Like he’s your brother. And he’d never do anything to hurt you. Neither would I.”
Other than thanking the waitress when she gave them their menus and two glasses of water, Jake was silent for a few minutes. Allie could tell from the occasional flicker of a frown at the corner of his lips that he was truly struggling with what he wanted to say. By the time they’d ordered—Jake wanted bacon and three eggs over easy and Allie asked for a yogurt and a bagel—she was on the verge of telling him to go ahead and admit that he had fallen for Melissa, yet she held her tongue.
“Here’s the thing, Allie,” he finally said. “Daniel’s the better man.”
“No, he isn’t! You’re the man I fell in love with. You’re my soul mate. We’d have been together in our original bodies if the McGavins had never done this to us. You know I’m right!”
“Yeah, you’re right about that. But...Eric’s a jackass. He uses his looks to skate by. He’s a total slacker. And he uses people. He’s part of me now.”
“You’re reforming him. Changing him.”
“But he’s also changing me. And not for the better. Daniel, though, he’s matured all on his own, since we formed our ill-fated business venture back in college. Much as it pains me to say this, he surpassed me. You deserve more than what I have to offer.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re planning to sacrifice yourself to wipe out Jennifer from Suzanne’s brain.”
“My motives don’t matter,” Jake said through a tight jaw. “I’m telling you the truth. You’re better off with Daniel, and the guy’s in love with you. You and I haven’t even slept together. You don’t owe me a thing. So quit acting like a moron and just go for it.”
The waitress arrived with their food. Allie’s stomach was churning now, and she was struggling even to sip her coffee, let alone to have any aspirations of eating her breakfast. She sat staring at Jake as their plump but attractive server set their plates in front of them. He was avoiding her gaze.
As soon as she’d left them to attend to another couple in the opposite corner, Allie asked, “Is this about you? Are you and Melissa getting close?”
He grimaced. “Not yet, but it’s just a matter of time. When I become Eric, and she becomes half you, half Melissa, she’ll have to decide for herself if she likes the guy or not.”
“If and when that ever happens, that’s going to be strictly her decision. Until then, you don’t get to act like a jackass to me. Ever. You don’t get to be gallant and try to push me away. Understood?”
“Understood.” He lifted his palms. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. We have too much crap to deal with now to worry about who we’re seeing. We walked into Jennifer’s trap once again.”
They fell into silence again as Jake began eating. Allie took all of two bites of her bagel and sat there, stirring her yogurt, trying to convince herself that she could force herself to eat. “That’s my fault. I didn’t think everything through,” Allie said. “My whole focus has been on stopping you from vaporizing yourself.”
“‘Vaporizing myself’ is our only alternative. I’m as confident that my design will work as I’m ever going to get. I need to show her my design, tell her I’m having it built for me to eradicate Eric from my
head, and let her take it from there.”
“And what happens when she takes it to an electrical engineer and ask him to decipher your circuitry’s true function?”
He shook his head. “We’ve already taken care of that.”
“We have?” Allie asked, mildly annoyed at Jake’s haughty tone of voice. Too much so to ask Jake upfront whom “we” was.
“She’s devious and knows her field of neurology as well as anybody. But she doesn’t know diddly squat about chip designs. Daniel’s been asking around in the hi-tech community. The word is that she already hired a consultant to analyze the design that she knows she’ll extract from me. The good news is: she hired the same engineer that I did to help me design the chip in the first place.”
“And he’s going to lie to her about how his own design functions?”
“Exactly.”
Puzzled, Allie furrowed her brow and watched Jake polish off his eggs and bacon. Jake never trusted strangers, and yet now he trusted this engineer to act against his own best interests. “How did you manage that?”
“With a lot of help from Daniel. He’s the one who found Li Chen for me and swears he’s the best in the world. He lives in Washington, and Daniel and I paid him several visits and took him into our confidence. He believes us about the McGavins. And he’s a big fan of my design...for use as it was originally intended, of course...to help Alzheimer’s patients. In exchange for lying to Jennifer, Daniel agreed to work for Chen after he gets his double-E. For months now, Daniel has been manipulating the buzz in all the right circles so that Jennifer would know that Chen’s the right man for the job.”
“How is that possible? ‘Months ago—’” she said using air quotes— “you didn’t know Jennifer was going to do any of this.”
“No, but it was obvious way back that we were all regaining our host bodies’ memories. I wanted to keep all bases covered.”
“Once again, you left me in the dark, as recently as yesterday, when I thought we were speaking from the heart about your plans,” Allie said, struggling to keep her voice even. For the first time, she realized that Daniel had been right to conclude that Jake was behaving like Eric. She had to fight for Jake. He seemed to be losing his subconscious ability to fight for himself. “But there’s no sense in rehashing what’s already done. The point is: we need to agree on a solution that doesn’t erase you from Eric’s brain.”
“How? Hire a gunman to kill an innocent woman by shooting Suzanne in the head? If you think of a better solution that letting Eric Sterling have his own body back, I’d love to hear it.”
“Pull a switcheroo, like we discussed before. You can have this Li Chen produce two almost identical versions of the same design—one that temporarily revives the new brain mappings but then destroys them permanently, and one that works like what Jennifer wants—which permanently revives the new brain patterns.”
“And what if she pats me down to make sure that I don’t have a second device on my person? Or what happens if she kills me as soon as she’s satisfied with the test results? Then she’ll be left with no one who knows how to—” He froze and got that faraway look in his eyes that he got when he was lost in thought.
Allie picked up on the thread of his logic. “She’ll be left with no one who can perform the procedure on her,” she said, filling in the pieces of Jake’s narrative. “Mark Jones is dead, and John Deere, Jennifer’s trusted henchman, is in jail. There’s no one left that she can trust enough to perform the procedure on herself.”
“She must have resolved that problem. So that means you were right about her creating a mind clone of herself. And I bet I know who it is. There’s a reason that the police portrait of the shooter looked so much like Melissa, and like a young teenager.”
Allie’s heart began to race with fear as she studied Jake’s eyes. “Oh, no. Jake. Are you telling me Melissa has a twin sister?”
The waitress returned to their table just then, refilling their coffee and leaving the check when Jake said that, no, they didn’t want anything else. Allie was too anxious to say anything and merely sat there, twisting her paper napkin into a rope, contemplating calling Melissa to tell her to stay out of sight before she got nabbed for a murder that Jennifer—in her twin’s body—had committed.
“No, they’re not twins,” Jake said quietly after the waitress was out of earshot. “They look really similar, though. Kathleen’s older, by eighteen months. She’s heavier and taller than Melissa and less...attractive. She got married at sixteen and, the last I heard, still lives in Eric’s and Melissa’s home town.”
Allie mentally raced through various scenarios. After Mark Jones rescued Melissa, Jennifer could have returned to West Virginia for Melissa’s sister. Allie could imagine her telling the sister that she knew where Melissa was in order to lure her to the car, only to inject her with a sedative and drive her to Brooklyn, and download her own mind into Kathleen’s brain.
Allie shuddered. “Which means Jennifer’s mind clone looks a lot like Melissa, and she’s here in Albany. Maybe we can find her and get the police to arrest her.”
“She could be back in West Virginia by now. Awaiting Jennifer-Suzanne’s call that they’re ready for the next phase.”
“Or we could be wrong. Jennifer might have simply hired another John Deere to do her dirty work.”
Jake shook his head. “No, there’s no other way to explain the witness’s drawing. Melissa might not have told you this, but the killer was wearing cut-off jeans and a halter top, and was described as being in her teens or early twenties. That just doesn’t sound like Suzanne.”
“Everyone knows that nice hotels have surveillance cameras in their hallways. She might have been deliberately trying to trick witnesses into thinking she was a high-schooler.”
“But that’s just it, Allie. She does know about surveillance cameras. Jennifer doesn’t make mistakes like getting seen knocking on Mark’s hotel door, immediately before shooting him. Plus, think of how easy it would have been for Melissa’s look-alike sister to grab something out of Daniel’s car in the hotel parking lot, when the staff sees her here all the time.”
“Jennifer’s duplicated herself in the body of Melissa’s sister. Which makes it all the more critical that you don’t erase yourself. The prototype hasn’t been built yet, right?”
“Daniel’s been helping me. We’re finalizing the design and sending it today. I have to pretend like I never saw this coming, and allow Jennifer to send the design to Chen to be built of her own volition.”
“The device is attached to the individual’s memory chip, which is still going to be pushed into the base of the scalp, right?”
“Yeah, it’s going to be a piggy-back design. The pins on the original circular chip fit right into this new device.”
“So have Li Chen design it with a pressure switch so that the first time it’s attached to a chip, the circuitry works differently—it erases the host’s memories and then supplants them with memories from the original chip. But the second time it has a memory chip inserted onto it—when Jennifer’s chip is pushed into place—it erases the memories from the initial download.”
Jake was silent for several seconds. “If Jennifer installs my chip and then removes and reseats it, the switch would be activated, and the gig would be up.”
“You could tell her that the prototype’s connections are super-fragile, and she risks breaking the circuitry the more often she handles it.”
“Huh.” Jake studied her features, and started to chuckle.
“What’s funny?”
He gave Allie a huge smile that warmed her heart. “ Me. This idea could actually work, Allie. My before-and-after MEG scans would be identical. Eric’s personality would be eradicated. And, so would Jennifer’s! I can’t even tell you how relieved I am!”
“Me, too.” She was surprised, actually, by Jake’s reaction. She’d been worried that Jake hadn’t tested a design that could erase Eric’s memories because he’d already disco
vered the concept wasn’t feasible. After all, from the onset of his work on memory downloading, his focus had never been on erasing the patient’s memory banks. He’d sought to restore Alzheimer’s patients’ memory banks.
“I can’t believe I didn’t think of this myself!” Jake continued happily. “I was just so focused on the original design, and on figuring how to make it appear to work, and subsequently reverse itself. The unstable, transitory nature of the chemical reactions in the brain made it all but inconceivable. Whereas a simple switch that needs to be pressed twice before it operates is such child’s play.” He placed a twenty on the check and rose, still grinning ear to ear.
They left the restaurant arm in arm, Jake’s step now feeling lighter. Much as Allie hated to be a worrywart, even if the redesign worked to perfection, they wouldn’t be out of the woods.
“It’s hardly a perfect solution, you realize,” Allie said. “Like you said, when she refreshes your memory, you’ll be like Melissa...you won’t remember anything that’s happened in the last eight months. You won’t remember falling in love with me, or that you and Daniel mended fences. Or any of our joint experiences with the McGavins. That Ethan’s dead. That Jennifer’s in a new body. We’ll be complete strangers to you.”
“I’ll always remember our first meeting. When we were both in our real bodies. I had already realized we were meant to be together right away. So this just means that you’ll tell me the whole story of our past six months together, once Jennifer’s gone for good.”
They crossed the parking lot toward Jake’s car. “It won’t be the same, though, Jake. Hearing about something isn’t the same as experiencing it for yourself. Especially when you’re talking about falling in love.” Allie realized she was only making herself more upset by talking about the subject, but she couldn’t stop. “And you’ll be a different person. Melissa is not really me, because she didn’t live through the six months that you and I did.”
He stepped directly in front of her, and gently lifted her chin until their eyes met. “You’re never going to mean anything less to me than the love of my life, Allie. It was love at first sight for me. Even when you looked completely differently. You’re my soul mate. Not Melissa. You.”
Mind Echoes (Book 2 in the Body Shifters Trilogy) Page 12