A Double Life

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A Double Life Page 17

by Flynn Berry


  When the traffic clears, he drives out of the lot and onto a road that leads away from the coast. The jeep thuds as he changes gear. Soon after it disappears from view, its engine changes pitch, like it’s traveling uphill. It won’t be hard to find him. The roads in that direction end in the hills, they don’t cross the island’s interior.

  Exhaust hangs in the air around me. I listen until I can’t hear his car anymore, and the oil dripped on the tarmac has started to dry.

  He looks so similar. He’s inarguably the same man. But I still can’t put them together, my father and the man who came to our house that night. I’d thought that setting eyes on him again might help me believe that he did those things, but it hasn’t. He looked so ordinary. While he was walking from the hardware shop to his car, the flat of his shoe caught on the pavement, so he was brought up short. It only lasted a second before he adjusted his balance and continued walking, but I keep thinking about it, it was such a common, clumsy movement.

  • • •

  I find an open chemist’s and buy rubbing alcohol and a bandage. In my hotel room, I use the mirror on my compact to see if any of the sea urchin spike is still under the skin. The blood has already soaked into my sandal, and the water in the sink turns red and brown as I scrub at the cork. This seems to take a very long time, but walking across the square and hiring a scooter takes no time at all. A group of American students on the garage forecourt have also hired scooters. They’re driving to Milna to watch the sun set. Two of them are nervous, and the man at the garage laughs and says, “They don’t go very fast,” which is useful to know.

  I drive back towards Dolac Road. My sandal’s still wet, I can feel it loosening the glue on the bandage. The scooter is low and heavy, the students should have an easy time of it. All of the rentals are the same, which is good, I’ll look like any other tourist.

  It’s seven o’clock. Sunlight glows in the weeds growing around a low barbed-wire fence on the side of the road. As I drive up the hill, the houses become farther apart, and between them are stretches of wild land. The sun is at my back, casting my shadow long in front of me, and I watch it lengthen and slide across the tarmac when the road curves.

  There are a handful of houses up here, all built to face the view. One after the other, the houses rise ahead of me, solid, modern concrete blocks set on acres of limestone and shrubs, their windows opaque with the reflected sunset.

  Another house rises. When I’m level with it, I turn my head to look down the driveway. There is his jeep, parked under a trellis made of thin branches. His is one of the last houses on the road before it tapers off into scrub grasses at the highest point above the town. Past the end of the road, on the crest of the hill, is a generator in a cement hut. I walk the scooter off the road and sit on the gravel with my back against the generator.

  The ocean slowly blackens. Lights start to come on in the town. A dog barks somewhere down the hill, and the generator hums behind me. This is his view. It’s quite a nice one. In the winter, he’d be able to watch snow fall on the ocean. He has a deck, built out from the house on wooden stilts. He may have had it added to take advantage of the view. Or the sunshine, he looks like he’s spent a lot of time in the sun.

  That’s one part of what I gathered from his appearance. The other, more important one is that he seems healthy. He isn’t diminished, like James is diminished. He hasn’t started to hunch. His clothes fit well, too. He might have found a tailor here, he always bought hand-cut shirts and suits. He’s in his sixties now. There are some changes—the hatched forehead, the silver hair—but not many. He walked easily from the hardware shop, the plastic bag swinging from his hand. He looked happy.

  • • •

  At two in the morning, I walk down the hill to his house. A thunderstorm has begun far out at sea. Lightning flashes behind the clouds, so they glow like a smoked mirror.

  Some of the houses up here have decals for a security system. His doesn’t, though he might still have an alarm. I would, if I were him. A drystone wall separates his property from his neighbor’s. From the far side of the wall, I look between the olive trees at his house. I have to be quiet, I’m only about ten yards away from his open windows. I don’t know if I can go any closer. Already my heart is jolting, the hairs standing on my arms and the back of my neck. It’s late, though, and the lights have been off for hours. He must be asleep.

  The house is more modest than I would have expected. It has smooth, varnished concrete walls and a flat roof with a few vents and a chimney. I’d pictured a swimming pool, after seeing him. He looks like the sort of person who swims laps every morning.

  The yard hasn’t been cultivated, the land around the house is the same as on the open side of the hill. When I climb the wall and drop down onto his property, the dry grass reaches to my knees. If he’s awake, he might be able to hear it crackling from inside.

  He has a fire pit, and a grill across it with dark shapes where meat has charred to the metal. A plastic table and chairs are set on the deck. He’d be able to eat his meals outdoors most of the year.

  I walk around the side of the house and stumble. Someone is standing in front of me. I stop breathing. Heat flashes through me, and my legs weaken. He moves closer. Then I notice the laundry cord and choke in air. Not a man. A wet suit, hanging up to dry. It’s the long kind, with full arms and legs, and its damp fabric still smells of salt.

  I walk, unsteady on my feet, to the trellis and his car. Before leaving London, I visited the electronics department at Selfridges to buy a device. A few months ago, I’d bought one for Laila, since she often loses the key to her bike lock. It’s an ordinary key fob, except with a GPS chip. You download an application, type in the code, and the tracker appears on a map. I slide the fob into one of the cracks in the leather, then push until it’s wedged against the cushion. I run my hand over the seat. You’d never know it’s there.

  I hurry down his driveway to the road. When I look over my shoulder, I expect to see him standing at the window, but it’s still dark, with only the shapes of the white curtains shifting inside.

  • • •

  I’m not the last person home. Two girls are on the steps of the cathedral with a bottle of vodka at their feet. The square is quiet enough for me to hear the vodka swish in the bottle when one of them lifts it to her mouth.

  They wave at a girl walking towards them from the end of the square. The sound of drums comes from one of the bars on the beach. The girl moving towards me is in tight jeans and a black top, her long hair down around her back. They’re Italian, I heard the other girls talking. She’s wearing a black choker, which in this light makes it look as though her head has been separated from her body. She’s walking quickly, on the balls of her feet, and looks like she’s about to start laughing. I wonder what she left behind her, and she smiles at me as we pass each other.

  I turn off the square, down the narrow lane to my hotel. A few streetlamps shine on the ghostly sides of the buildings, showing the scratches in the white paint on the closed shutters, the dark shapes of the doorways. I normally walk out of reach of doorways if it’s late and I’m alone, but tonight I trail my hand against the sides of the buildings.

  34

  I FOUND HIM.”

  On the other end of the line, Nell says to someone, “Sorry, I need to take this.” There are muffled sounds, then she says, “Claire?”

  “He’s been living in Croatia.”

  “Oh god. He’s been arrested?”

  “No. I haven’t told the police yet.”

  “What?”

  “I want to watch him first.” There’s silence on the line. I can picture Nell, screwing her eyes shut. “It’s all right, he’s not going anywhere, this is where he lives.”

  “Has he seen you?”

  “No. He wouldn’t recognize me anyway.”

  “He might. Do you really look that different t
han when you were little?”

  I can’t tell her about the hair dye, the eyebrows, the weight. She’d be furious if she knew how long I spent planning this without telling her.

  “How did you find him?” she asks.

  “I blackmailed someone.”

  “Oh, Claire.”

  “I know.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Hvar Town.”

  “I’m going to call the police.”

  “You can’t, please.”

  “Why, what are you doing? Are you going to hurt him?”

  “No, of course not. I only want to watch him.” I need to know who he’s been pretending to be, how he spends his time, if he’s as happy as he seems. Though it’s more than that. I need to know who he is. A good man who did a bad thing. A bad man who’s done more bad things.

  For years, I’ve been tormented that the people around him wouldn’t know who he was, that they might be in danger. It seemed impossible that I had no way to warn them.

  Though maybe I never needed to warn them, maybe I’ve been wrong about him, and so have the police, and Mum. Something is missing, has always been missing. He wouldn’t kill Emma. He had no reason to harm her. The official theory is that he mistook her for Mum at first, but then why wouldn’t he stop? There was a bruise on Emma’s mouth. He saw her face.

  And there’s another part that doesn’t make sense—he left Mum. He began to find her a bit dull. He’d moved on, according to his friends, according to everyone the police interviewed. I don’t understand why, after leaving, he would go back to kill her.

  “How long do you need?” asks Nell.

  “A week.”

  “I’m calling the police in four days,” she says.

  • • •

  There is a cove down the coast to the east of town, hidden behind thick cypresses and pines. I’d never have found it if I hadn’t been tracking the key fob. The pin on the map started and stopped as he drove here from his house. The fob is still in his car, transmitting its location from the dirt lot behind the cove.

  I spread a jute mat on the pebbles. There are a few other people here—a woman sunbathing on a yellow towel, a boy stacking pebbles, a couple reading on their stomachs—though my attention is on the man pushing a Zodiac into the water.

  My father steps carefully, looking down to check his footing. There are even more sea urchins here than at the other beach, I can see their black shapes under the green water.

  He steps into the boat and pulls a cord to start the outboard engine. A glossy plume of water rises behind the motor. The sea is so calm that instead of leaving a wake the boat scores two lines in the translucent surface. He steers towards the Pakleni islands, where some other boats are anchored, but then the engine stops, and his boat drifts. I have to squint to see him against the glare on the water.

  Nothing happens. I wonder if the engine died, but then, instead of trying to restart it, he’s feeding an anchor over the side of the boat. He tugs on the rope to check the mooring, then begins to assemble equipment. Soon the top half of his wet suit is fastened, and he has a harness on his back holding an aluminum tank. A tube in his mouth. A mask. He clips a weight belt around his waist, and then he is stepping off the boat into the water.

  He’s learned how to scuba dive. He must have a lot of practice, to be diving alone. A certificate requires hundreds of hours, but, then, he’s had plenty of time.

  I watch the flat surface of the water. He’s beneath it now, I wonder how far. It’s quite a dangerous hobby, scuba diving. So much can go wrong. Decompression sickness, aneurysm, nitrogen poisoning, faulty equipment. And he dives alone, no one would be there to help if something went wrong.

  I watch for a while longer, then lie back on the mat, rubbing the line of iridescent sweat in the crease of my elbow. I turn my face to the mat and breathe in its hot straw smell. I wonder if there are sharks in this water.

  • • •

  An hour later, the sunbather sits up on her towel, stretches her neck, and pulls the straps of her swimsuit onto her brown, freckled shoulders. She climbs onto a bicycle at the edge of the dirt lot, the towel draped around her neck. The boy has left too, the only people at the cove are me and the couple, who have gone for a swim and returned to lying on their stomachs. The woman is resting on her forearms, messing her hands in the pebbles, and I listen to their dry rattle.

  He still hasn’t surfaced. I sit with my arms on my knees and watch the flickering scales of light on the water. The Zodiac looks like it’s been floating there for a long time. I can see white rims of salt dried on the black rubber.

  I might be keeping him under the surface. The force of my presence on the beach, like a hand on his head in the water.

  Then the boat jerks. One violent movement. I shade my eyes against the sun, in case I imagined it, but it jolts again. Sharks under the water, the commotion of them feeding, their backs pressing against the bottom of the rubber boat. Or it’s only him, holding on to the anchor rope as he swims to the surface.

  His head breaks the water. He pulls himself into the Zodiac and begins to remove his equipment. I don’t stay to watch. I need to be by his house before he arrives.

  • • •

  The house across the road from his is a vacation rental. I found its listing online, it’s empty this month. It also has a raised deck, with exterior steps and a view onto my father’s property. The top of the stairs is partly hidden by a pine tree, and it’s just far enough that he’s unlikely to see me unless he’s deliberately looking. If he does happen to look over, he’ll see a tourist, sitting on the steps of her deck, reading. I’ve brought a book, a lighter, a pack of cigarettes.

  When he returns, he’s dressed in swim trunks and a damp linen shirt. I watch him hose down the wet suit. He goes to the car and returns with a chunk of bread, which he tears into while rinsing the rest of the equipment. He must be hungry from the dive.

  Bright beads of water drip from the wet suit. He climbs the stairs to his deck. I think he might look over then, but instead he slides open the door and steps into the house. It wasn’t locked. And he’s left it open behind him.

  Inside might be wall-to-wall with guns, but I doubt it. He doesn’t seem to think anyone’s coming for him, after all these years. He doesn’t have an alarm, or if he does he never sets it. The whole property is open. And he moves freely in and out, judging by the shirt hanging over the edge of the deck, the book on a chair, the wooden tongs with leather cords left by the fire pit. The fern that he’s taken onto the deck to water, leaving a damp circle on the boards. That he owns a fern is another surprise. It looks quite healthy, too, like he’s taken good care of it.

  • • •

  The shirt on the edge of the deck lifts and flattens in the wind. The wet suit begins to dry, matte patches blooming across it, and the entire scene starts to seem artificial, planted. He may have noticed me. He may be inside the house, watching from behind the curtains. I can’t figure out the distances. I don’t know, if he came towards me, if I’d be able to get down the deck stairs and away in time.

  No sounds come from inside his house. Then there’s a cascade, and I startle, knocking my elbow against the rail, but it’s only him taking a shower, the sound coming through the open bathroom window.

  Soon after, he steps onto his deck in navy trousers and a white collared shirt, and sits at the table with a book. I don’t think he’s seen me. He doesn’t look over, but it’s not practiced, he doesn’t seem to be avoiding it on purpose. In the distance, the white light of an airplane glows against the banked blue clouds, like a beacon on top of a mountain.

  A car is coming up the road. I watch it appear and disappear around the curves until it swings into my father’s drive. A man gets out and my father comes down the deck stairs to greet him, shaking his hand, holding him by the shoulder.

  He’s in his
fifties, I’d guess. Tanned, with cropped white hair and white teeth. They climb onto the deck, waving when a second car arrives and another man steps out. He’s brought a freezer bag of steaks. I can see brown liquid pooling in the corners of the plastic.

  The three of them pull chairs around the deck table. They drink bottles of Karlovačko beer and talk in Croat. My father’s fluent, apparently, speaking quickly to the others, laughing.

  One of the men goes inside and returns with the steaks on a glass tray. They must be good friends to be so familiar with his house. My father arranges charcoal in the fire pit, then pours kerosene over it. Soon smoke lifts from the fire in a tall, twisting column. After the steaks cook, he scrapes the tongs clean on a stone, leaving behind black scorch marks.

  They pass salt, pepper, a bowl of roasted potatoes. My father eats briskly, with precise, deft movements. While he swallows, he holds the knife and fork upright on the table. He wipes his hands on the napkin on his lap. The steak is rare, I can see the blood pooling on his plate.

  I look at his guests and wonder what these men did during the war. Bubbles form in the bloody grease in the steak pan. I watch one of the guests wash down a mouthful of meat with his beer.

  It grows dark, but the men around the deck table are spotlit by a bare bulb fixed under the roof. When my father pushes his chair back from the table, the white napkin on his lap is streaked brown and red.

  He returns with a bottle of rakija, the plum brandy I’ve seen in every restaurant here. The men push away their plates, resting their forearms on the table. I wish I could understand what they’re saying. The conversation has grown serious. At one point, my father pulls his hand down his face. One of the other men is shaking his head.

  When they finally stand from the table, it’s late. Their cars switch on, each headlight illuminating a colorless circle of grass and dirt.

 

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