Joyce turned another page in the binder; a familiar face stared back at her. “Oh, my God … it’s … it’s Heather. Heather Blake! The woman who took my job.”
“She was a fifty-seven-year-old ad exec from Detroit,” he explained, “who got squeezed out and couldn’t land another job. We gave her a new name, new body, new credentials … a new life.”
“You mean my life, you bastard!” Joyce said, jumping up from the couch.
Jason put both hands up in a “hold on” manner. “Hey,” he said, “we had nothing to do with you losing your job—Heather didn’t ‘take’ your position, she filled it after your company made you vacate it. All we did was restock the empty shelf you left behind.”
Trembling, Joyce put both hands on her hips and glared down at him. “And I suppose I’ll be replacing some other poor woman down on her luck and out of a job….”
He shook his head. “Not in this instance, no. The woman you’re replacing was in the prime of life, I believe forty. She was a victim of a traffic accident.”
“Oh … I … I see.” Joyce flopped back down on the couch. She felt woozy, mentally pummeled; and yet a small, clear voice was saying, Well, then, that’s all right, isn’t it? You’d just be filling the space the poor woman left behind….
“Joyce … shall we go on?”
“There’s more?”
“I’m afraid so. If you have any further doubts, express them now.”
“No … no. Do go on.” After all, she’d been ready to leave this life behind; why shouldn’t she try another?
As if reading her mind, he said, “It’s that second chance everyone dreams of, but so few receive.”
She felt as if she were in a dream. “Yes … yes …”
“Let me explain how it is that you came to fit our ideal profile. In addition to your outstanding achievements in your chosen field, you have few ties, few strings. Your parents have passed on…. No close relatives, really….”
“Yes. Only my mother’s sister, my Aunt Beth … she lives in De Kalb. We’re not … terribly close. I see her at Christmas.”
“You’ll no longer be able to do that, Joyce. For your new life, you’ll need a new name—and you have to leave your own life behind.”
“I just … disappear?”
Larue shrugged. “We have clients who are able to use that option, yes. But you are much too well-known in Chicago, Joyce— you would be missed.”
“Considering the way my job interviews have been going, I find that hard to believe.”
“You will need to …” And he made quotation marks in the air, with his fingers. “… ‘die.’ ”
“Die? Jesus, what are—”
“You were at a point in your life, Joyce, when many people contemplate … forgive me … suicide.”
How did he know this?
“And so, Joyce, that’s what you will do. A body will be found with your identification, in apparel you own, of your general build and description….”
“Stop. No—I won’t be party to … to …”
“Let me continue. This will be a cadaver, purchased through confidential medical sources, an unknown, unnamed, unclaimed soul. By the time the body is found, it will have … excuse me for being indelicate … decayed past anything possible but a general identification.”
Suddenly she was breathing hard. “But … but what about dental charts, medical records….”
“You were referred to us by the clinic you frequent. All of your records are there—and they will be … adjusted.”
Her mind was reeling again. “This must be terribly illegal….”
“Oh, yes, it’s fraud. Fraud designed to ‘fool’ a corrupt, immoral system that has driven you from your life’s work. Who is hurt, here? No one. Who is helped? You are … and the employers lucky enough to receive your skills and services and talent and brains.”
“And X-Gen?”
“X-Gen benefits, too—financially, yes. But also in knowing that we are doing something positive for members of the most gifted generation this world has ever seen. That’s our mission statement.”
He folded his arms, sat back. As if in shock, she sat paging through the binder, as if it were a Sears catalogue—a wish book. Haggard middle-aged women transformed into fresh, pretty young girls … oh, how she would like to be thought of as a girl again, sexism be damned….
“Can I keep the same initials?” she asked, almost timidly. “My Vuitton luggage is monogrammed.” This absurdity was all she could think to say.
He patted her hand. “You would be surprised at how often we receive this simple request. Yes. Of course.”
“Thank you.”
“How about Joy Lerner?”
She thought about that for a few moments, spoke the name silently, then out loud, several times—actually liking the sound of it, the way it tripped of her tongue.
Then she thumped the binder cover and asked, “Who pays for all this reconstruction, this … overhaul? I suppose you ‘advance’ me the expense of the surgery, too….”
“Absolutely not. The expense is entirely ours. Another part of our investment in you.”
“I’ve already had a complete physical,” she told him. “Even without cosmetic surgery, I have a much younger woman’s body.”
“We know,” he said, a tiny smile tickling the corners of his mouth.
“I forgot,” she said, with a smile of her own—a weary one. “X-Gen owns that health clinic. That’s where you got the referral….”
She stared at him, dazed; it was all so much to absorb. “What happens when I can’t work anymore?”
“Ten percent of our commission goes into an accelerated retirement plan. Should your health fail, and Kafer’s own bennies fail to cover you, we pledge to take care of you. It’s all in writing….”
Larue reached into his briefcase again, and withdrew another, much fatter contract, and handed it to her—it felt heavy.
He touched her hand again, the contract in her lap. “You can keep that overnight and give it a good thorough read. But no attorney, Joy.”
Joy—not Joyce.
She looked toward the fireplace for a moment, and in a strange instant thought she saw flames leaping there; then she gazed back at bronze-haired, bronze-skinned Jason Larue.
“Where do I sign?” she asked.
INTERIM
“GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD”
(James Darren, #3 Billboard , 1961)
Beth Peters had lived alone for many years. A handsome woman of seventy, with the same blond hair and apple-cheeked wholesome features that had served her late sister (and her niece Joyce) so well, Beth suffered few of the ailments that tended to beleaguer women her age. A little arthritis in her hands, and brittle bones (never a break, knock on wood), but otherwise Beth was fit as a fiddle, even if, truth be told, the blond hair was out of a bottle, now.
Since her husband Carl had died of cancer in ’78, she had lived a solitary but not really lonely life in the rather precious Tudor-style bungalow on a shade-tree-lined side street of De Kalb, Illinois. Active in a church Bible study group (Baptist), she played bridge twice a week—with the Lady Elks at the lodge (Carl had been an Exalted Ruler) and with a group that was the remnants of a club of couples, all of the husbands having passed away (once called the Sixteen Club, they now referred to themselves as the Crazy Eight).
For several years, up till last March, she had dated a man who had been married to her late best friend, and he was sweet, and took her to the movies and dancing at the Moose; but after his death—that damn cancer, again—she decided she really just preferred to see her girlfriends at bridge and watch her stories on TV and read her Danielle Steele.
It was a small life, but it was enough; her life with Carl— their beloved son Davy had died in an automobile crash, in high school—had been plenty big. Carl had been an electrical engineer and made good money. They’d been to Europe and on cruises and had really had a wonderful life.
If she had any regret, it was that her
sister’s girl, Joyce, had never let Beth in … emotionally in. Helen—Beth’s sister, Joyce’s mother—had died when the girl was in college, and Helen’s husband Dan died a few years later, of a heart attack (broken heart, more like it). Dan was a good man, a salesman who traveled, and something of a ladies’ man, but he never rubbed Helen’s nose in it, and he had really, really loved her.
Joyce was so pretty, and such a bright girl, and so successful. And Beth—who had never, in her heart of hearts, gotten over the loss of her boy—wanted so to be a replacement mom for Joyce. After all, Joyce was close to home—Chicago was just a hop, skip and jump from De Kalb—and the girl did come home at Christmas, and they were pleasant Christmases, too. Joyce had always given her aunt expensive gifts—half Beth’s Hummel collection was Joyce’s doing.
And Joyce was always friendly. Very friendly. Just not … warm. Rarely did the girl call her aunt, and if Beth called Joyce, it was that darn machine and Joyce never called back, not till it got nigh on to Christmas.
And Beth would have loved to have just a little of that kind of warmth, family warmth, back in her life. Oh, she was happy with her life, her small life … but there was that tiny but very empty place inside her that she wasn’t happy with. The family place. And Joyce could have filled it, but for some unknown reason chose not to.
Beth wondered if Joyce—so successful in business, and in such a tough town!—wasn’t secretly lonely. There was never talk of a man in her life, and once at Christmas—after girding herself for what might be an embarrassing confrontation, with a few extra glasses of rum-spiked egg nog—Beth had boldly asked Joyce if she (Joyce, that is) was … and she didn’t mean to judge … a lesbian.
Joyce had found that very amusing, and in fact it was one of the few times Joyce had hugged her aunt, really hugged her.
This Christmas—last week—there had been no call from Joyce, and Beth had worried; for the first time Beth could remember, her niece did not spend the holiday with her. Beth had put the tree up, and a gift for Joyce had been tucked beneath.
But Joyce had never come, and the tree was down, and the gift snugged away on the high shelf in the front closet.
So when Joyce had showed up this afternoon—unbidden, no phone call—on an unseasonably sunny late December afternoon—Beth was both shocked and pleased.
“Dear, what a wonderful surprise!” she had said, and ushered the girl in (it never occurred to Beth that her sister’s “girl” was in her mid-fifties).
Joyce had seemed … strange. She was underdressed for a change—a Bulls sweatshirt, jeans, tennies—and wore no makeup at all; she looked very, very young.
And Joyce seemed … conflicted. One moment happy, one sad, the next apprehensive, followed by hopeful. Fidgety. Relaxed. Every which way.
It took a long time for the girl to get around to dropping what she kept referring to as a “bombshell.” They sat at the kitchen table, the walls brimming with Hummel plates, and drank coffee with cream and spoke of family memories. Silly little anecdotes. The time her cousin Davy had fallen out of the backyard maple onto the refrigerator-box cardboard house Joyce had made, when he wouldn’t let her into his tree house, breaking his fall, and her house. The Christmas the dog ate Davy Crockett out of the Alamo playset Davy got, and Joyce had found that terribly amusing, until Davy hid her Barbie. How Joyce’s parents had paid her twenty-five cents per eaten brussels sprout, and the time the two cousins had worried everybody to death by not telling anybody they were going to Son of Flubber and sitting through it three times.
Beth and Joyce sat and laughed and talked and Joyce even touched her aunt’s hand a few times.
“Aunt Beth,” Joyce said finally, “I came here today to tell you something very important.”
The afternoon had long since turned to night, and Beth was cooking them up some V-8 spaghetti, a favorite family recipe.
“What is it, dear?”
“This is the last time you’ll ever see me.”
And then Joyce had done the darnedest thing: She began to cry.
Beth sat beside her niece and put an arm around her, cradled the girl’s face in her shoulder, and the girl cried and cried.
Then she told her aunt the details of the long, strange story— how her career was at an end, how she’d almost ended her life, and how this company was offering her another chance, a new life.
In the living room, they held hands as Joyce explained the darker aspects of the deal she’d made: that her death would be faked, that she would assume a new identity, and undergo plastic surgery and retraining, to become a convincing “young person” again.
Beth tried. She really did. She tried to talk her out of it, but there was no stopping the girl.
So finally Beth accepted it, and held the girl, and hugged her, and for the first time, there was real warmth between them.
“If it’s what you want, dear,” Beth said.
“Oh, Aunt Beth—I want it so badly.”
“Then you should have it…. Let me look at you. I want to see your mother in your eyes.”
Then Beth had gone to the closet and given Joyce her Christmas gift—a lovely silver art-deco frame—and Joyce had thanked her and hugged her aunt again, apologizing for not bringing a gift, herself.
“Oh but you’ve given me so much with this visit, darling,” Beth said. “So very much.”
When Joyce had gone—promising to secretly, anonymously call each Christmas, no matter what the X-Gen company said— Beth sat in the kitchen again, drinking more coffee, staring at the many plates Joyce had given her over the years.
You can never tell anyone what I told you, Aunt Beth, Joyce had said, again and again. It would ruin everything.
But with Joyce gone, out of the house, the warm family memories and feelings exiting with her, Beth began to think. She didn’t like the sound of it. Not at all. The more she thought, the less she liked it. Joyce was getting involved in a criminal enterprise … there was no other way to look at it.
Beth tried to watch the Lawrence Welk rerun on PBS, but couldn’t concentrate. She tried to watch a Matlock rerun, but even that wouldn’t take. When she finally went to bed, she lay on the soft mattress and thought about the hard decision she knew she must make. Staring at the ceiling in the darkness—wishing she could sleep, wishing she hadn’t had all that coffee—Joyce’s aunt knew she must go to Joyce, tomorrow, and stop this.
And, if Joyce wouldn’t listen to reason, perhaps the police would.
That was when she sensed the figure in her room.
“Joyce, honey?” the woman said, sitting up. “Is that you?”
Some moonlight was filtering in through the sheer lacy curtains. She could make the figure out better, now: a man. A man in black. All in black. Even his face—in a ski mask.
He had something in one hand … what?
Was that … a wrench?
Heart in her throat, she threw the covers off and scrambled off the bed as the man came after her, the wrench swishing through the air, just missing her, thumping into the mattress. She had a Hummel music box, on the bedstand next to her, and she snatched it up and hurled it at the black shape, and must have caught him on the head, or face, or something, because he yelped and swore.
She whisked nimbly around him and out the door and was heading down the stairs. Frightened but exhilarated, she knew she could get out the front door before he caught up with her, she just knew it, and Mr. Benson next door was a deputy and she knew where the key was….
Almost giddy with fright and fight and flight, the spunky seventy-year-old woman lost her grip on the banister, her arthritis betraying her, and her ankle gave way and halfway down the steps she took a tumble, and bounced off the wall and into the banister, toppling hard on the wooden steps, brittle bones breaking with each new collision, snapping like twigs.
And when she landed, hard, just a helpless sack of human fresh stuffed with broken bones and bruised organs, she wondered if she was going to die from the fall.
The man in the black ski mask was looking down at her, and then that wrench, that metal wrench (was that Carl’s wrench that he fixed the faucet with?), came sweeping down, caving in her face, ending her small life and her big life and the subsequent batterings of the blunt instrument, splashing blood and brains and bone fragments everywhere, were simply not needed, just completely gratuitous, though of course she didn’t feel a thing, not after the terrible blow that had killed her.
Nor was she aware of the final indignity—that every Hummel in her house was flung carelessly into a big garbage bag, plates, music boxes, figurines, chipping, shattering, tiny precious figures colliding with each other much as Beth had coming down those stairs. They would be tossed in a garbage dump, far away, merely to provide a reason for this death, a motive, the old lady who was murdered for her collectibles.
As if death required a reason.
And when the De Kalb police discovered the name of the old lady’s only living relative, a Joyce Lackey of Chicago, they received only a prerecorded message from the telephone company that the number was no longer in service.
PART II
In Between
“Be True To Your School”
(Beach Boys, #6 Billboard, 1963)
Seventeen miles south of Des Moines, Indianola (pop. 10,000) sat on the crest of a hill, a quaint hamlet in its typically Midwestern, Norman-Rockwell-comes-to-Iowa way: clean and tidy and friendly.
Predictably arranged around a small-town square, many of the shops, whose turn-of-the-century storefronts had been carefully preserved, were owned and operated by families whose roots in the little community went back generations. And while time had not exactly stood still for the town—fast-food restaurants and a super-discount store had sprouted like plastic toadstools on its periphery—to Joyce returning to Indianola was like riding a time machine to a past she was more than happy to return to. No rose-colored glasses required.
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