by Theresa Weir
“I’m an ass.” He wasn’t sure where that had come from, but it was a good diversion for both of them.
“W-What?” She looked at him as if she couldn’t have heard right.
He strode past her, pushing her a little as he went, but not much.
“Dylan, you don’t have to leave. This isn’t a big deal.”
He made it through the living room, almost to the front door before he stopped. She was right behind him. Without looking back, he said, “No, it isn’t. No big deal at all.”
Did it matter? Did any of it really matter? He’d never been one to feel sorry for himself. Everybody had baggage. Hell, to not have baggage would be to have baggage.
“Where are you going?”
“I have to see somebody.”
“What about prison? You’re a wanted man. If they catch you, you’ll be in ten times the trouble. Why don’t you turn yourself in? I have a friend who knows a good lawyer.”
He swung around, his gaze only a little blurry. “Listen,” he said, his voice loud, angry, a calming contrast to the ache in his chest. It didn't matter. None of it mattered. Hadn't he already lived a thousand lifetimes? And weren't a thousand lifetimes too much for one person? “Why don't you just forget you ever met me? Why don't you just pretend I don’t exist?”
She bit her lip, and for the briefest of seconds, he thought she was going to cry, but it had to be a trick of the light.
“But you do exist,” she said, putting a nervous hand to her chest, pulling at one of the buttons there.
No, that's where she was wrong. He didn't exist. He hadn't existed for years and years and years. He'd just been a shadow, moving through the days, taking up time and space, wasting oxygen. Except for the brief days when Claire, his sweet, sweet Claire, had breathed life into him. It suddenly occurred to him that he was like a locust that remains underground in a suspended state for twenty years only to emerge for a few brief days. Uriah would have appreciated that analogy.
“Bye, Claire. It's been—” He was about to say fun, but that didn't quite convey the triteness he was after. “Interesting. It's been interesting.”
That finally got to her.
“Okay, go! Just go.”
She pointed toward the door, toward something out there in the distance, some other state, some other country. “I’ll forget about you in a second. In half a second. You were just a guy who kidnapped me.'"
He was sorry about that.
“Who held me at gunpoint.'"
Sorry about that, too.
She put a hand to her forehead. “What could I have been thinking?” she asked herself, her voice thick with disbelief. She sounded as if she’d completely forgotten how this had all started. “I get it now,” she said, again to herself, her voice growing stronger as her apparent ability to reason returned. “It’s like the Patty Hearst thing.” She plopped down on a chair at the table, her eyes distant, focusing on something in her thoughts, something that finally made sense.
“She was kidnapped, and abused, but then she actually ended up succumbing to her captors. She actually ended up joining them.” Elbows on the table, she dug her fingers through her hair. “And look what I’ve done. I’ve harbored a criminal! My God!” She pressed a hand to her mouth, staring straight ahead in horror. She looked up at him, then spoke slowly, painfully. “I had sex with you.”
“I never forced you. You know damn well I never forced you.” This was getting so ugly. He should leave, just walk away, but he couldn’t make himself. Not yet.
“No.” She let out a self-deprecatory sort of laugh. “I’ll take the blame for that. It was entirely my fault. That's what is so inexcusable about this whole thing. I seduced you. You really weren't interested in me at all.”
“That's not true.” Don't do this.
“No, you weren't.”
“I was.” I am.
She sat back in her chair, arms crossed. “I should call the cops.”
“What?”
“The cops. I should call the cops and tell them you're here. Tell them you're alive.”
“Don't do that.”
“No. I won't. I couldn't.”
“At least you don't hate me that much.” How had this happened? How did we get like this? He'd told her he might love her, and everything fell apart. How had a few innocent, honest words turned everything upside down?
She got to her feet. She came to stand in front of him. She took his hand. She lifted it to her face, to her cheek. A tear dampening his knuckle. “I'm sorry. It's not your fault.”
She dropped his hand and turned her back to him. “Have you ever noticed how people spend so much of their adult lives trying to recapture a little piece of their childhood? Maybe they move to a town that reminds them of the place where they grew up. Or maybe they see a house that reminds them of a special place where they used to play. Or a neighborhood. Or maybe a feeling.”
He heard her pull in a deep, shaky breath, then continued. “I had this storybook childhood. I mean, it’s almost embarrassing, it was so perfect. Then my mother died and my father remarried and they had kids. And life was okay. It wasn’t terrible, by any means. But for some reason, it made everything that had happened before my dad remarried kind of sham. Because his new wife, she was real. And his new kids, they were real. I was a part of the old life, a part of the past.”
“And what have you been looking for, Claire?” he asked quietly.
“Perfect love. The kind of love I felt when I was a child.”
But he wasn’t the one, obviously. And last night, his blunt confession had made her realize that.
She turned around. She attempted to smile at him through her tears. “Whenever I see a hand dryer with the words ‘Wipe Hands on Panties,’ I’ll think of you.”
“Anytime I see one of your cards, I’ll think of you.” Or a black winter sky full of brilliant stars. Or snow. Or pine trees. Or birds. Or frogs. Or grasshoppers. Or—
“Bye,” she said.
“Yeah, bye.”
She stood at the door and watched him go, watched until his car disappeared, watched until the sound of the engine faded into the distance.
Hallie made a whining sound, and sat down beside her, leaning against Claire’s leg, as if needing to feel the comfort of a human body.
He was just some guy who’d kidnapped her, she reminded herself, reaching to pet Hallie. He was just some guy who’d made love to her. He was just some guy who’d broken her heart.
It was easier for the person who was leaving. He could start over. But for the person left behind… Everything was a reminder.
In the bedroom, she opened the top drawer of her dresser and pulled out the voodoo doll. It was so tempting.
All she would have to do would be to stick a couple of pins there . . . and he would turn around. He. would come flying back.
“You surprised me," she told the doll. “I really didn’t believe in you. I really expected him to be in love with me." She held the doll in both hands, and for a brief moment she wanted to give it a shake. But then she remembered what she was dealing with, and just how much power it had.
Enough to make a man fall in love with a woman. Enough to make him desire her so much that he couldn’t think of anything else.
That was some voodoo. Some wonderful voodoo.
Chapter 26
Dylan didn't make it far. Five miles from Fallon, his generator light came on. By the time he got to Jim’s Garage, a short had burned out the car’s regulator and generator.
“It could take a week to ten days,” Jim said, as he wiped grease from his hands with a red rag, acting as if a week to ten days was a good thing.
What difference did it make? Dylan thought. He didn’t know where he was going, didn’t have any plans. Maybe this was one of those neon signs that showed up in his life from time to time. Maybe he was supposed to stay put.
He ended up checking into The Haven, a cheap motel on the edge of town. He liked it because it was set bac
k under a bunch of pine trees, and you couldn’t really see it from the road. Plus, it didn’t look like anybody else was staying there.
He checked in, tossed his black plastic bag on the bed, called Zeke, and asked him to find a phone number.
~0~
After making it big, Dylan could have taken his money and moved to some Mediterranean island off the coast of Spain. Instead, he moved to Pretty, a little town in the Arizona desert just off a stretch of abandoned highway ten miles from the Mexican border. There he became a pump jockey at a mom-and-pop gas station/grocery store. Pretty wasn’t really a town at all anymore, and Dylan just figured the word “abysmal" had fallen from the bottom of the welcome sign years
ago. . .
The only things left in Pretty—or Purty, as he later discovered it was pronounced—were tumbleweeds and fence after fence of hubcaps the owner and his wife had collected over the years. There wasn’t much business, just the occasional family on their way to or from California. Maybe their van broke down. Maybe they just stopped to take a gander at the dump. And it was a dump. Jimmy LaRoache collected things. Toilets—he must have had forty of them. Cars— maybe fifty. Gas pumps—a hundred? The LaRoaches, bless their hearts, weren’t advocates of feng shui.
Dylan lived in one of the half-dozen green, shingle-sided shanties that used to be part of a motel business. Twenty steps from his front door was a swimming pool that hadn’t seen water in fifteen years. The faded, mint-green bottom was covered with weeds and tires and trash that had blown in from hundreds of miles away. But in his room, Dylan had a television hooked up to a giant satellite dish.
What more did a guy need?
Dylan hadn’t gone to Pretty looking for a job. It was just another one of those neon signs that had a way of popping into his life. He’d been driving around, just driving, trying to find a place that could be termed “middle of nowhere,” feeling he was getting damn close, when he stopped for gas and nobody came out to wait on him. His tank was almost empty, and, according to the map, the next town was ninety miles away.
He found the owner watching TV in one of the little motel rooms, one bare foot propped on a pillow, nursing a case of the gout. His wife had gone to the nearest town to get some kind of salve, whatever salve was.
Jimmy—the owner’s name turned out to be Jimmy—handed Dylan the key to the gas pump, told him to fill his tank and come back with the money.
Dylan filled up, returned with the key and money, and offered to stay and help out for nothing.
“Have any experience?” Jimmy asked.
“I can take a tire off a rim in less than a minute.” His time with Uncle Hank hadn’t been entirely wasted.
“You’re hired.”
For a while, Dylan loved it. Nobody following him. Nobody shoving cameras in his face. Nobody acting as if they were best buddies when they weren’t. He had a satellite dish, and later the Internet.
He was one happy puppy.
On Sundays, the Missus—Jimmy called his wife “the Missus,” which Dylan thought was better than “the little woman.” Anyway, on Sunday she had card club and a bunch of her friends would come over and play pitch and rummy. Sometimes Dylan joined them, much to their delight. Occasionally, Dylan would drive to the nearest town some ninety miles away where he would drink beer, get laid, and fight.
But as the months wore on—turning into years, much to his numb surprise—a restlessness began to grow in him. He was ready to move on, but the LaRoaches were in bad health.
That was about the time their daughter got a divorce and moved back home. Dylan thought it was his chance to get away, but Harriet immediately made it clear to him that she wanted him in her bed, so he stayed on a while longer.
Sex with Harriet was okay. It broke up the monotony of the days, but then she began pressuring him to marry her. Sex with Harriet was one thing, holding a conversation quite another. And marrying her, well, that was out of the question.
The marriage issue became a turning point in Dylan's career of self-imposed exile. He had to take a step back and reevaluate his life, ask himself where the hell this was going.
He had things to do. Places to go.
Snow. He wanted to see snow. He wanted to touch snow. He was sick of the desert. He wanted to experience a change of seasons. He was thirty years old, and he couldn't imagine weather so cold it could actually kill a person.
“You ever seen snow, Harriet?”
“Snow?” She lit a cigarette and blew out the match. “Sure, I seen snow,” she said, her nasal twang annoying him more than usual. “I hate it.”
“What's it like?”
“Like? Well, it's cold, sugar. Real cold. Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.” She giggled, getting as much of a kick out of the joke as if she'd come up with it herself.
I've got to get out of here, Dylan thought.
The opportunity presented itself the very next day. He was checking out the Internet and decided to type in his own name to see if the buzz about him had died down. Daniel French. Dylan was his middle name, the name his parents had called him, and Olivia had called him, and Uriah. Dylan was a name from his past.
There were Daniel French websites out the ying-yang, a lot of them with huge, full-screen photographs. And as he looked at the photos, he noticed something. In nine years, a person's looks could really change. He’d hardly been more than a kid when he’d decided to drop out of sight. In those last pictures, he’d been gangly and pale, with hardly enough facial hair to shave. Nowadays, after a few hours, he needed to shave again. Hair that used to be light brown was now dark. Eyes that used to be brown were hazel, faded by the intense desert sun. No longer skinny and gangly, Dylan’s chest had broadened, his arms had doubled in size.
If he returned to civilization, would people put it together? Would they see any similarity between the boy he used to be, and the man he’d become?
Dylan went back to the search engine screen and typed in the word CHESS. He spent about three hours going to different websites before stumbling across a buried site containing a couple of obscure lines about a guy named Trevor Davis, who had learned to play chess while doing time in prison. Even though it was an abandoned site, there was a photo of the guy.
The weird thing was, Trevor Davis looked like an older version of the young Dylan. His hair was light brown, his eyes dark. He was a little on the thin side.
That night, Dylan couldn’t sleep. More than anything, he craved anonymity. He wanted to be able to go to a baseball game without being hounded. He wanted to be able to go to a movie, go out to eat. He wanted to see things, go places. This wasn’t living. He was just as much a prisoner in his own house as Trevor Davis had been in prison.
He had to find this guy, this Davis. And when he found him, he would ask him if he wanted to be famous for fifteen minutes.
The big neon sign was pointing again, telling him to find Davis, that the guy could be the solution he was seeking.
And when he found him, if Davis agreed to help, he would let the press know that Daniel French was coming out of retirement. Then Davis would take Dylan’s place. He would come forward and play a big chess game. Davis’s photo would be splashed on every newspaper and every tabloid, every screen in the world. And then Davis would lose the game, and disappear. And Dylan would be a free man.
It had seemed so simple, so straightforward, so perfect. Dylan, whose working life had been a series of strategies, hadn’t taken into account the possibility of unknown factors.
Like a plane crash.
And Davis himself.
And Claire. Claire had come out of nowhere, blindsiding him.
~0~
In his room at The Haven, Dylan tucked the receiver under his chin and dialed the number he’d gotten from Zeke, almost expecting to hear himself answer.
He heard a click, followed by a guy’s voice. “Is Mr. French there?” Dylan asked.
“Speaking.”
“Daniel Dylan French?”
“This is just weird as hell.”
“Who is this?”
“You and I have the exact same name. Now what are the odds against that? I could see if my name was Mr. Smith, and your name was Mr. Smith. But Daniel Dylan French. That’s odd. That's just odd as hell, don’t you think?”
At the other end, there was silence. Then, finally, “Daniel?”
“I prefer Dylan, but you wouldn't know that.”
“My God. I thought you were dead!”
Dylan could almost visualize Davis’s mouth hanging open, visualize the poor guy trying to figure out how to get out of this one.
“Tell me, Davis. Did you have this whole thing planned from the beginning? Were you going to kill me, dump my body somewhere, then become me?”
“No. Shit, no. Do you think I planned the crash? That would have been suicidal. But then, when we did crash— At first I thought you were dead. I really thought you were dead and I was the only survivor. And we already had everything set up. The identity switch. How could I not go through with it? It was too perfect.”
“There was just one thing wrong,” Dylan pointed out. “Two, actually. I wasn’t dead, and you forgot to mention that you still had a couple years’ hard time hanging over your head.”
“I’m glad you’re not dead. I never wanted you to be dead. I’ve always been a big fan of yours.”
“Don’t bullshit me.”
“I’m not.”
“You’ve been busy being me.”
“I did what I was supposed to do, which was pretend to be you. That was the deal.”
“The deal was, you were supposed to play one game of chess, and lose.”
Davis laughed, apparently over the initial shock of hearing Dylan’s voice. “I told you I was good, but you didn’t believe me. I have to admit that pissed me off. Do you think you’re the only person in the world who can play chess?”