“Natural? To dress yourself up, to completely change your appearance, in order to look like some famous stranger?”
“One of my friends who’s the chauffeur for this really well-known shrink says that it is the continuing manifestation of my latent desire to reconcile the fairy-tale dreams of childhood with the dreary reality of adult life’s many disappointments.”
“It sounds like you memorized that.”
“I did, of course, what do you think? My friend said he’d asked the shrink about me, in general, you know, no names or anything, and that’s what the shrink said to him and that’s what my friend told me. I made him write it down so I wouldn’t forget it.”
“In other words, you’ve got a screw loose somewhere,” he shrugged impatiently, “but what are you doing here?”
“Hold your horses. I’m getting there.” She settled herself more comfortably. “In early May, I was coming home late from a party at a friend’s house a couple blocks away from my place. I wasn’t drunk but I sure was happy. So, I’m almost home and I’m walking along blowing my bangs up and waving my cape and humming a little tune. Well, I look and in the dark, I see myself – red hair, black cape – standing beside a gorgeous silver Jag.” Jen shook her head and laughed. “I thought I’d lost it for sure, then I realized that I was looking at Jennette Colson. The real Jennette Colson.
“I hurried over to ask for her autograph, but I saw right away that she wasn’t feeling well. Her face was dirty, and her clothes were a mess and then she swayed and leaned back against the car. I said, ‘Hey, are you all right?’ and she looked at me and said, ‘Why, you look just like me!’ And then she almost fainted in my arms. I shook her and said, ‘We’ve gotta get you some help. We’ve gotta call your family’. And she whispered, ‘No, no! Can’t trust anyone … don’t know what to do …’ She mumbled something I didn’t catch and then she said, clear as a bell, ‘Someone is trying to kill me.’”
“She said what? You’re crazy. You’re making this up!”
“I’m not. It’s exactly what she said. It scared me, that’s for sure, and I looked around to make certain that nobody was nearby with guns or something. She was in bad shape and if I hadn’t been half-drunk, I probably would have done something smarter but without thinking, I grabbed her around the waist and helped her up to my apartment.”
“She can’t still be in your apartment?”
“No. There’s a lot more to tell. Quit interrupting.” She fluffed up her pageboy.
“Don’t do that.”
“Sorry, I forgot. I’ve been doing it a long time.”
“Well, don’t.”
“Okay, okay. Where was I? Oh yes. I helped her onto the bed and washed the dirt off her face but before I could ask who was trying to kill her and why, she sat up and frantically dug her keys out of her pocket and pushed them into my hand. ‘You have to hide my car. Now, please, before someone sees it!’ so I said, ‘Okay, I’m going. Just lie still. I’ll drive it around behind the building and put it in the parking lot.’ By the time I got back, she was asleep.
“I tried to stay awake, but I kept nodding off in my chair. She tossed and turned until the sun started to come up, muttering about a cabin exploding and a falling light and a broken railing. I was thinking that I should call somebody, but she seemed to be sleeping easier as the sky got lighter and I fell asleep myself. I didn’t wake up until after noon and when I did, she was gone.”
“Where did she go?”
“Beats me,” she shrugged. “All I know is that when I looked, I still had the keys to the Jag, but she’d gone through my wallet and the cash was gone and so was my car.”
“How could she possibly have known which car was yours?”
“She took my keys. It was the only Volkswagen in the lot. She left a note under the wiper on the Jag saying I’d find my car at the train station.”
“You should have done something.”
“I did what I could.”
“You should have called the police.”
“And have every reporter in town screaming for the hottest story in Hollywood? She’d have loved that!” Jen shook her head. “I thought and thought for a long time and talked with my friend, Jake. I tried getting through to her family over the phone, but the answering service just laughed at me. I guess they get that all the time. I even tried SailingStar, but I never made it past some snippy receptionist so finally I got into the Jag and drove to Santa Barbara. The car was going to be my ticket into the estate. Since I was driving it, I knew they’d have to listen to me, but I never got there. I opened my eyes in the hospital with an ugly-awful headache and everyone was calling me Jennette.”
“And you decided to take what you could get.” The sneer in his voice was almost more than she could bear. She had to make him understand.
“I know that’s what it looks like. And I’ll admit that at first, I looked on it as an adventure – heck, I was going to get a nose like Jennette’s, something I’d always dreamed of – and three days had gone by when I finally woke up. As soon as I heard the nurse refer to me as Miss Colson, I knew that Jennette hadn’t returned. I decided that if she did come back, I’d either run like hell or ask for a job as her stand-in. But she didn’t come back.
“I seemed to be the only one who knew she’d been badly frightened, and I figured that she was hiding someplace, and I said to myself, ‘What about a little touch of amnesia?’ It was the only way I was going to get my nose fixed,” she felt him stiffen again and hurried on, “but also, I could buy her some time. And yes,” her chin came up defiantly, “have some fun doing it. It was too good to pass up, don’t you see? I could maybe help her a little, let her come back when she was ready, and I’d get to see Jennette Colson’s life from the inside. I was going have the chance to walk a while in her shoes which, by the way, are a half size smaller than my own.” She grinned as she rubbed the back of her heel.
“Don’t joke about it. Didn’t it occur to you that since everyone thinks you’re Jennette, someone may try to kill you?”
“Someone already has tried. And they may be trying to kill Anna, too.”
“Anna? Good God, this just keeps getting worse!”
“I told you it was complicated.” She waited.
“The boating accident,” he said with certainty.
“Got it in one,” she replied, “but it was no accident. I know how to sail. Over the years I’ve taught myself to do just about everything I’ve read in the magazines that Jennette can do. And I didn’t do anything wrong in that boat. It was all by the book, like I’ve done it twenty other times. The boat just suddenly went sluggish and heavy in the water. That isn’t supposed to happen. The bow dipped into a wave, the tiller wouldn’t answer, the boom swung across and the whole thing went over. If I hadn’t grabbed Anna and jumped, we might have been trapped under the sail when the damned thing sank.”
“You’re saying the accident was rigged and you barely escaped with your life. Why didn’t you tell us then who you really are? At least, you’d have been safe.”
“For a smart guy who can think fast, you sure are slow sometimes. After it happened, I couldn’t cut and run. If you all had found out who I am, David would have thrown me out or had me arrested. Then, I might have been out of danger, but what about Anna? She’s begun to like me, to open up. When I first came back from the hospital, she was so quiet and proper. She wasn’t quite five years old and she talked to me like I was some friend of her mother’s come to tea. I mean, Mom always said that kids should be polite and not sass their parents, but that child was the limit!”
“I think she’s always been a little afraid of you … I mean of Jennette.”
“Then Jennette has a few things to answer for,” she said with a definite edge to her voice. “Anyway, in the time before the accident, Anna and I became closer. She’s a sweet little girl and I found myself growing very fond of her. Even while you and David were fishing us out of the water, I knew I had to see it through. I wasn
’t about to run away to save myself and leave her unprotected. We’re even better friends now. I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to her.”
He was silent for minutes, staring at the ground, and she was beginning to think she’d failed to convince him. Then his head came up slowly. “You make a good argument. Now we’ve got to get back to the house. We’ve been gone too long.” He helped her up and she dusted off her slacks.
Rick took the lead as they started up the path. “What do we know?” He ticked the items off on his fingers one by one. “We know that someone tried to kill Jennette and we guess that she knows you’re impersonating her and has gone into hiding. We know that the explosion at the cabin probably has something to do with it and that there’s an unexplained falling light and a broken railing somewhere in the mix. We know that something happened to make that boat sink, that you were definitely a target, and possibly Anna was, as well.” He looked at his watch as he walked. “There’s no time now. We’ll talk again tomorrow. Somewhere away from the house.”
“We?” Jen’s heart warmed a little as her hopes rose. “Does this mean that you’ll agree to go along with this charade of mine?”
“I must be insane to even be considering it, but … yes. For the time being, it’s a truce.”
“Thank you, Rick. I really do need your help.” She smiled. “Let’s take Anna and the puppy for a picnic. We can talk while they’re running around.”
“Jen,” he started, then stopped abruptly. “Jen, Jenet, Janet – what the hell do I call you?”
“I always think of myself as Jen.”
“Then I’ll call you Jen.” His anger wasn’t completely gone. “I can’t and won’t call you Jennette.”
It was enough. She was satisfied.
* * *
The next morning, Jen went down to the kitchen to fix lunch for the picnic. As she made sandwiches, she thought over what had happened on the cliff. Rick and she had walked over the hill and back through the woods in almost complete silence. She was relieved when he left her on the terrace saying that he was going for a drive to think things through and that he wouldn’t be home for dinner. As she watched him stride across the pavement to his car, she knew that he was still angry at being deceived and confused by much of what she’d told him.
Perhaps he wasn’t sure that he could see her with the others without breaking their truce, and she knew that she would certainly have had a difficult time during the evening being Jennette knowing that he was watching her every move. They would both have some hours to recover from the scene at the bench. That was good.
And she did feel better. They would enjoy the picnic and maybe get back a little of that easy friendship they had felt with each other before. They also needed to decide what could be done to discover why someone wanted Jennette dead. As long as Anna was with them, she would be safe. Jen could relax a little and try to think clearly.
She turned to the cook. “I appreciate your letting me mess up your counters, Mrs. Brown.”
“It’s a pleasure, Miss Colson. We’ve enjoyed seeing you back here in the kitchen these last few days. Just leave that bread and everything. I’ll put it all away for you.”
“These sandwiches and drinks look a little lonely in this big basket. Perhaps, you could find a few more things to add to the lunch? Some sort of salad and cookies, maybe a few apples?”
“Certainly, ma’am,” she smiled.
“Thanks. I’ll return to collect it as soon as I’ve changed my clothes.”
They walked along the back terrace and through the garden past the pool. Then Rick led her behind the court, across the little stream, and into the woods beyond the pond. Anna and Mugsy had already run ahead of them and Jen could hear her laughing. Rick had given her a tennis ball suggesting that she teach the puppy how to fetch.
The short path through the trees opened into a large clearing with four tall trees at the center. As Jen looked around, she realized that it was a rustic sort of playground with a swing, a sandbox and two different slides, one straight, the other curved. At one edge of the clearing, under the overhanging leaves, was a worn stretch of ground with two iron stakes for horseshoes, and the open area beyond the center trees was large enough for an abbreviated game of softball. Beneath the trees was a miniature house.
“It used to be our tree house up in the branches but when Anna was little, David had it moved down so that you, uh, so that Jennette wouldn’t have to worry about her trying to climb up to it.”
“Let’s put the blankets off to one side in that shade over there so that she can take Mugsy in or just play in the sandbox without being close enough to hear us.”
When they had everything spread out, Jen sat cross-legged on one blanket and Rick stretched out on the other to reach for the basket. “Do you want anything to eat?”
“Not yet. I’ll just have a soda.”
He lifted the small cooler from the basket, and she could hear the sound of wet ice sloshing as he slid the cans around. “There isn’t anything diet here.”
“Oh, what a shame. I guess I’ll just have to survive with the ordinary stuff.”
“But I thought you chose the drinks?”
“I did,” she grinned as she held out her hand. “Give it here.”
He popped two cans, handed her one, then leaned back on an elbow. “So, Jen, drink your non-diet soda and tell me what you were talking about so earnestly with your friend up at the trail. And why there?”
“I had to have him come up to the estate. There simply hasn’t been any time for me to go down to see him since the sailboat sank, and I needed to give him something.” One of his eyebrows went up in a questioning look as he drank. “You’re going to laugh at me.”
“That depends on what it is. I’ll try to keep an open mind.” He laughed shortly. “It can’t be any crazier than what you’ve told me already.”
“Well for days, or rather weeks, people have been shoving papers at me saying they need my signature here, my initials there, approvals for this, rejections of that. In Santa Barbara when I knew I was going to have to stick around to watch over Anna, I realized that I couldn’t continue making up excuses not to sign important documents. All I could think of to do was write out a complete account, and sign it and date it, of everything that’s happened to me and the reasons why I’m doing this: that I have to stay to protect Anna and that I refuse, in advance, to benefit from anything I might have to sign Jennette’s name to.” She grinned. “Except my nose. I’m not giving it back. Tomorrow, Jake’s going to take the papers to a lawyer to put away for safekeeping.”
“It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing, I guess.” His voice was skeptical but at least he didn’t laugh.
“I’m trying to make decisions the way I think Jennette would make them, and if it’s something really big, then I’m not going to sign at all, unless I’m forced to.”
“You mean the land.”
She nodded looking down at her hands. “I’ll put it off as long as I can. There’s got to be some way out of it for me.” Without thinking, she ran her thumb down the bridge of her nose, then glanced up to find him staring at her.
“Hey, wait a minute! Fixing a broken nose isn’t the same thing as having your nose fixed.”
“Heck, I was hoping you wouldn’t pick up on that.”
“Well I have, and that doctor would have, too. He should have blown your game sky high.” When she didn’t answer, he said sharply. “Okay, I’m a big boy. I can take it. How did you get around him?”
She was puzzled for a moment, then suddenly her cheeks were hot as it hit her. “No, I didn’t … I … what an awful …” she stammered, “… I wasn’t going to tell you the truth, but if you’re going to think that …
“Tell me what truth?”
“You can’t go haring off on any wild goose chase because I don’t know where to start.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s the reason that I haven’t bee
n too worried. I know she’s out there somewhere kind of keeping an eye on things.”
“Do you mean Jennette?”
“Of course.” She took two slow sips from her can and reached for a napkin.
His voice rose. “Would you just tell me and be done with it?!”
“Okay, okay, keep your pants on … Oh!” Her cheeks burned again, and she mumbled, “Forget I said that.”
“Mommy, Uncle Rick,” Anna called. “Are you mad about something?”
“No, sweetheart, we’re fine,” Jen called back in a bright voice. “Throw the ball for Mugsy again. I think he’s getting the idea.” Then she frowned at Rick. “Now look what you did.”
“Me? You’re the one –” He scowled at her, opened his mouth to say something, then started to chuckle. “All right. Would you tell me … please?”
She nodded. “One day before I got out of the hospital, a young man dressed as a janitor came to my room. He had a letter for me marked Confidential and Private. It was from Jennette and she knew all about me. She’d had me checked out, practically back to the day I was born. The letter even said that she had my picture. She said she’d square it with the doctor to fix my nose if I’d take her place for a while, but that I didn’t have to if I didn’t want to because it might be very dangerous. She said in the letter that she’d been really sick and still wasn’t strong enough to protect herself if she had to come back too soon. Somehow, she’d found out who the surgeon was, and there was a letter inside my letter addressed to him that explained what she wanted him to do. It was notarized and everything. She said she’d know from the newspapers if I decided to take her up on her offer, and in case I decided yes, she enclosed her wedding rings.”
“Where’s the letter?”
“I gave it to Dr. Smith, naturally. He had to have it.”
“Not that letter, her letter.”
“She said to burn it, so I did.”
“Burned it, she says.” Rick ran his fingers through his hair with an exasperated sigh. “Was there –?”
A Dizzying Balance Page 16