by B. J Daniels
“I am. I just picked up this outfit and I wanted to show it off but you’re the only one here. What do you think?” Amanda did another turn in the cubicle. “It’s Greg’s favorite color. I’m going to wear it on the ski hill at Big Sky.”
“It’s purple,” Charlie said before she could catch herself.
“Is it too much?” Amanda asked, sounding suddenly worried.
The outfit consisted of a purple sweater, purple bibs with a lavender scarf and purple mittens and hat with a lavender pom-pom on top. The only thing that would make it more purple would be if Amanda was chewing grape gum.
“I think it’s perfect. It’s...you.”
Amanda gave her a side-eye for a moment before she laughed and broke into a huge smile. “It is me. I’m so excited. About the wedding. About marrying Greg. About everything.”
“As you should be,” Charlie said and started to turn back to her desk. She really wanted to take care of some things before the holiday. But Amanda didn’t take the hint.
“You know, since you’re here... There is something I have to ask you,” Amanda said, dragging her attention back. Charlie thought of her morning horoscope warning her to use good judgment in all things, especially those involving her job and the people she worked with. “I wouldn’t ask, but I’m desperate. I need you to be my maid of honor.”
Charlie felt her eyes go wide. All breath locked in her chest. For a moment she couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even blink. “Amanda, the wedding is in two days.”
“I know. I just found out that my friend from Colorado broke her leg and is in traction.”
“You must have another friend—”
“Pat is pregnant and due any day. She can’t fly. I already told Greg that I asked you a long time ago to be my backup maid of honor and you said yes.”
“What? Amanda! Why would you do that?”
“He thought it was a wonderful idea,” Amanda rushed on, making Charlie doubt that had been the case. “So you really can’t say no at this late date.”
“I’m the last person you should ask. I mean I’m sure you have a close friend in town that you—”
“Actually, I don’t,” Amanda said, dropping her voice to a whisper. “I don’t make female friends easily.”
Big surprise, Charlie thought.
“Please. Greg and I both want you to stand up with us.”
Groaning inwardly, Charlie tried to think of anything she might say to make this go away. Her cell phone rang. She snatched it up. “I have to take this,” she said to Amanda and hit Accept.
“I need to see you,” Shep said. “I’m at the apartment. Can you take a break? I could meet you at the coffee shop next door to your office if—”
“That’s quite all right. No, this isn’t a bad time. I’ll be right there.” Disconnecting, she reached for her coat. “I’m sorry, Amanda, a client needs me right now.”
“On Christmas Eve?” Amanda demanded. “Well, I can see why Greg is always speaking so highly of you. But what about—”
“Later. We can talk about this later,” Charlie said, shrugging on her coat and sidestepping past the woman as she headed for the door.
Behind her, Amanda said brightly, “I’ll call you with the details. You won’t regret this.”
The cold morning air was a welcome relief after the office. The last thing she wanted to do was stand up with Amanda knowing what she did about the woman’s deceit—not to mention Greg’s recent strange behavior. But for the life of her she couldn’t think of a way out of it. She’d already said she would attend the wedding. Unless she came down with a contagious disease right after Christmas Day...
She walked the few blocks to the apartment and hurried up the three flights of stairs. She was reaching for the door when it was flung open. Shep’s expression made her realize the wedding and Amanda were the least of her problems.
“What’s happened?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHARLIE LOOKED FLUSHED from the cold and so beautiful that it took Shep’s breath away for a moment. He knew he should have waited until she got off work to tell her the news. But he also knew that she would want to hear this—and right away.
Now that he had her back at the apartment though, he hesitated. He had wanted to tell her here, not sure how she was going to take the news.
“Maybe you should sit—”
“Just tell me,” she snapped.
So he did, repeating everything the judge had told him about the DNA report on the scarf.
“What?” Charlie demanded, looking stricken. “Lindy’s alive? She’s alive, just like I said.”
“No. All I’m saying is that the DNA on the scarf matches Lindy’s. You recognized the scarf. Somehow her DNA survived on the fabric.”
“Just as her fingerprints survived on my doll?” Charlie shook her head and began to pace. “I looked the woman in the eye. It was Lindy. The scarf proves what I’ve been saying all along. She’s alive.”
He argued the facts, and the facts were that Lindy’s body had been found behind their house. A positive ID had been made.
“I know all of that,” Charlie said. “But I also know what I saw. I looked into her eyes. She was startled to see me. She was upset enough that I had her scarf to apparently break into this apartment. If Lindy is alive, then there is only one person who knows the truth,” Charlie said and headed for the door.
“Wait, where are you going?”
She turned to face him. “Shep, don’t try to stop me. It is high time I faced my stepmother. I’ve spent years hiding from the past. Well, now it’s come back to haunt me. I’m not hiding anymore. I’m no longer pretending it will go away if I ignore it. Someone wants me to remember all of it and if anyone knows what is going on, you can bet it’s Kat.”
“Charlie, I already talked to her. She threatened to call the police if she ever saw me on her doorstep again, let alone you. This could be one of your worst ideas.”
Charlie made a dismissive sound. “I guess we’ll find out soon enough, won’t we?”
* * *
KAT OPENED THE door, her eyes widening to see Shep on her doorstep again. Her jaw dropped when she saw Charlie. She tried to slam the door in their faces but Shep got a boot between the door and the jamb before she could.
“Get off my property. I told you not to come back. I’m calling the police,” Kat yelled as they entered the house, driving her back into the living room.
“Call the police,” Shep said as she fumbled her phone from her pants pocket. “I think they’ll be interested in hearing how you’re involved in stalking Charlie.”
Kat hesitated in the midst of tapping out 911 on her phone to look at them. “I haven’t been stalking anyone, especially her. I told you that.”
“We have proof you’re involved,” Charlie said. “You gave Lindy’s winter scarf to the woman you have tormenting me.”
Kat froze, her finger hovering over the send button. “What are you talking about?”
“Lindy. I didn’t just see her this time,” Charlie said. “I literally ran into her. When we collided, I came away with her blue scarf, her favorite blue scarf that you bought her.”
“That’s not possible,” Kat said feebly. “I haven’t seen that scarf in years.”
“We had the DNA on the scarf run,” Shep said. “Charlie remembered it belonged to Lindy—and the DNA on it confirmed it. The blond hair was a perfect match. The DNA is Lindy’s.”
Charlie had known Kat would deny everything. But she hadn’t expected to see her this shaken or so much in denial.
“I saw her,” Charlie said, her voice breaking with her growing anger. “It was her. I don’t know how but it was Lindy. So if that wasn’t her body they found behind the house—”
“You’re mistaken,” Kat said, her voice barely audible. All the color had dr
ained from her face and Charlie could see she was trembling.
“If anyone knows why she’s stalking me in her favorite scarf that she knows I would recognize, it’s you. You’re her mother.”
“I can’t believe this is happening,” Kat said as she stumbled back and slumped into a chair. “I need you to leave.” Her voice came out in a hoarse whisper.
Charlie wasn’t leaving. Let her call the police. The woman owed her answers and damned if she wasn’t finally going to get them. “Not until you tell me the truth.”
Kat shook her head, her lips trembling as her eyes filled with tears. “You don’t understand.” Her gaze slowly rose to meet Charlie’s. “My daughter...” The woman’s voice cracked.
“You can no longer deny she’s alive,” Charlie said. “We have DNA proof. And I knew even before that. I had looked into her eyes. I knew her and she knew me. Lindy isn’t dead, is she? It’s the only explanation. But how is that possible?”
“You’re wrong. It’s not Lindy. Not my precious Lindy,” Kat said and began to sob like a woman still grieving the loss.
Charlie felt a chill race across her flesh, leaving a trail of goose bumps. “Lindy is either alive or...” Her heart began to pound as she thought of what Shep had learned about Lindy from her teachers.
She turned to him. “You said the DNA from the blond hair on the scarf was a perfect match? That can only mean that Lindy is alive or...” She looked over at Kat who had slumped into the chair, head down. “Or there are two of them.”
“Charlie?” Shep said.
“Either Lindy is alive or she has an identical twin,” Charlie said as she frowned down at Kat. “But if she’d had a sister...”
She looked to Shep. He was staring at her as if she’d lost her mind. “I never heard any mention of a sister, let alone an identical one. Kat,” he said when no one spoke over the woman’s sobbing. “Is there another daughter besides Lindy and Cara?”
The woman’s head came up with a jerk at a sound outside the house. Her sobbing stopped abruptly and she hastily began to wipe her eyes as she stumbled to her feet.
“Please, I can’t talk about this now,” she said, her voice hoarse as she rose and looked toward the front of the house. She wiped her tear-streaked face. “That will be my daughter Cara. She doesn’t know. She can’t know. Please, you have to leave. I’ll tell you everything, but you have to go now.”
The front door opened. “Mom?” Cara stepped in loaded down with shopping bags and stopped at the sight of Shep and Charlie—and her mother’s face. “Why is he here again? I’m going to call the police.”
“No,” Kat said, stepping toward her unsteadily. “They were just leaving.” She looked imploringly at Charlie. “I’ll walk you out.”
Once outside, she asked Charlie for her cell phone number. Charlie watched while Kat put it into her own phone with trembling fingers.
“If we don’t hear from you, we’re calling the police,” Charlie warned her.
“I’ll call you later. I promise.” Kat turned to see that Cara was watching them from the front step. “I’ll explain everything.” With that, she quickly climbed the steps and ushered her daughter back inside.
“How could Lindy have had an identical twin without you knowing about it,” Shep said the moment they were alone in his pickup. “There has to be another explanation.”
“It’s the only thing that makes any sense. I don’t know why I didn’t realize it sooner. It explains the DNA match. If Lindy really was murdered that night, then this woman I’ve seen has to be her identical twin.”
“But you would have known. Your father would have known. Did Lindy ever mention a sister?”
Charlie shook her head.
“If true, why keep it a secret? And where did this twin live?”
“I don’t know,” she said, looking over at him. He made good points. “I just know it’s got to be true. For whatever reason, it was a secret. Kat didn’t want anyone to know. But Lindy knew, something that Kat apparently is just now realizing.”
He shot her a look of disbelief. “Are you sure you aren’t jumping to conclusions? Kat didn’t admit that Lindy had a twin.”
She gave him a pitying look. “But she also didn’t deny it, did she? Shep, I looked into the young woman’s eyes. Eyes I had looked in before. In that moment, she knew I recognized her. That’s why she needed that scarf back. It was one thing to pretend to be Lindy to scare me, torture me, whatever her motive. It was another for me to know the truth. That she and Lindy shared the same DNA.
“So maybe Lindy isn’t dead—but her sister is.”
* * *
SHEP WATCHED AS Charlie hung up her coat and kicked off her boots before heading for the couch. His head swam. If Charlie was right...
On the way back the two of them had tried to make sense of all this. He knew he wouldn’t be able to come to an adequate conclusion without more facts. But that didn’t stop Charlie.
“Don’t you see? It all makes sense,” she argued. “You told me that when you talked to Lindy’s teachers about her senior year in high school, they said they noticed she was different from day to day. Mr. Jones thought it was a mental imbalance, but what if the reason Lindy was different was because the girl in the classroom wasn’t Lindy at all? It was her identical twin pretending to be her?”
Shep rubbed his temples. “Let’s say it’s true and that Kat had some reason to keep her second daughter a secret. Where did this twin live? And eat? How is it that someone wouldn’t have noticed? And if they both were around those couple of months you lived in that house, Kat had to have known and yet you saw her reaction to our questions.”
“Maybe Kat did notice. Maybe she knew,” Charlie said with a shrug. “But what could she do? Expose the truth? Not if she was hell-bent on keeping the other daughter a secret. Anyway, we lived in that huge old Victorian house with all these floors and rooms we didn’t use, including a really spooky basement none of us ever went down into. The twin could have lived right under our noses.”
He couldn’t help being skeptical. “So if they did switch at school, where did the other one go all day then?”
She shook her head. “Dad was at work. Kat was always out shopping or having lunch with friends. And remember what the man down the street told you? Someone had hidden a key under a flowerpot in the back. It had to be Lindy so her sister could come and go at will.”
He shook his head, amazed at the way Charlie’s mind worked.
“The question though, is where has the twin been since Lindy’s murder? And why show up now?” she said.
“I believe the question is why Kat would lie about this daughter—if said daughter even exists.”
“I have no idea,” Charlie admitted. “Sometimes Lindy wasn’t as awful as other times. If I’m right, then I was dealing with two different teenage girls with their own motives for what they did.”
Shep had to admit the identical twin angle was making sense—if true. But just how dangerous was this other sister? More dangerous than even Charlie thought?
“Do you really think Kat is going to tell us the truth after all these years?” he asked.
Charlie checked her phone. Still nothing from Kat, he thought. “You don’t think she’ll try to skip the country, do you?”
It had crossed his mind. “I don’t think she’d do that to Cara, but I guess it will come down to how desperate she is to keep all of this a secret. If you’re right about an identical twin, then Kat is first class at keeping secrets. She’s also not above lying to us,” he pointed out. He wouldn’t put anything past her—and, he hated to point out, Kat hadn’t actually admitted there was a twin.
“We’ll see when she calls.”
When her phone rang, they both jumped. She checked the screen. “It’s Amanda.” He could see she didn’t want to take it.
“What’s up?”
>
She told him what had happened at work. The ringing stopped—and started again.
“Amanda,” Charlie barked into the phone. Earlier, she’d put her phone on speaker anticipating Kat’s call.
“I have to know. Greg will be so upset if you aren’t my maid of honor.”
Shep saw her roll her eyes. “Fine.”
“Tara will be so glad.”
“Wait, why will Tara be so glad?” Charlie asked.
“Because she is going to be one of my bridesmaids.”
“I thought this was a small wedding.”
“It is, but the best man has a friend who’s coming so I thought why not?”
“So Tara agreed to this?”
“Of course. It’s a wedding! Who doesn’t want to be in a wedding?” Amanda hung up.
“You’re going to be her maid of honor,” Shep said as he watched Charlie pocket her phone again.
“I had no choice,” she said with a groan.
He couldn’t help being worried. That couple was involving Charlie way too much in their romantic intrigue. Now the wedding?
Nervously, she pulled out her phone again. Like her, he was getting anxious. If Kat didn’t call soon... He got up from the couch and plugged in the Christmas tree.
“Is that a present under the tree?” Charlie asked and shot him a look. “You bought me a present?” She sounded both surprised and excited.
“The tree just needed something under it.”
She shook her head, but he could tell that it pleased her. He was betting she would shake that poor box half to death before Christmas, if he knew this woman, which he did.
Her cell phone rang, making them both jump again.
“Tell me it’s not Amanda,” he said.
“It’s Kat,” she said before she accepted the call. “You’re in town? Why don’t you come to my apartment?” He listened to her give the woman the address before disconnecting. “She’s on her way.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO