Infinite

by Brian Freeman

  “Yeah, I’m a little out of it. Sorry.”

  I shut up at that point. My experiment in opening up to Edgar hadn’t exactly gone smoothly, and I didn’t need to argue with my grandfather on top of everything else that was going wrong in my life. I let him go back to Nighthawks.

  That was when I felt my phone buzzing in my pocket. A text had come in. I checked it and saw that there was no caller ID associated with the number. Whoever was reaching out to me was anonymous.

  I read the message and didn’t like it.

  Meet me at the Horner Park house. We need to talk.

  CHAPTER 15

  The house across from Horner Park, where the police thought I’d killed Scotty Ryan, looked deserted. I stayed in the back of the park’s baseball field, which gave me a view of the entire street. No one watched the house from any of the parked cars, and I saw no one who resembled an undercover cop. If this was a trap, they’d done a good job of concealing it.

  There was no police tape around the house, which surprised me. Then again, a week had passed since the murder, and no doubt the owners wanted to get back inside their house. They’d also taken down the FOR SALE sign; there was no large poster for Chance Properties outside. Crime scenes didn’t exactly fly on the Chicago real estate market.

  I waited to make sure I was right about the lack of surveillance. Then I made my way across the street, still on the lookout for police, still ready to run. As I approached the house, I cursed silently, because of all the people I could meet, I spotted the same elderly woman walking her Westie who’d seen me after the fight. I doubted that she’d forgotten me or the blood on my hands. There was nothing I could do, so I gave her my friendliest I-am-not-a-serial-killer smile. We both stood outside the house’s white picket fence.

  She smiled at me with no obvious recognition. “Hello.”

  “Hi,” I replied. “That’s a sweet dog you’ve got there.”

  “Thank you, yes, he’s a doll. Did you buy this house? Are you the new owner?”

  “Me? No.”

  “Oh, well, we all heard it was a young man. I wanted to welcome him to the neighborhood.”

  “No, sorry, it wasn’t me.”

  “All right. Well, you have a nice day.”

  “You too.”

  That was that. She waited while her dog lifted his leg at the boulevard tree, and then she continued down the street. I watched to see if she would look over her shoulder at me, but she didn’t.

  New owner? The house had already sold?

  I didn’t know what to make of that.

  I let myself in through the gate. On the walkway, I studied the windows, but no one looked out at me. I checked the street again and then went up to the front door and rang the bell. There was no answer, even when I rang twice more and pounded on the door. With my apprehension growing, I turned the knob. The door was open.

  “Is anyone home?” I called. “Hello?”

  I got no reply.

  The house still smelled as it had when I was last here, of sweet cut wood. A fine layer of sawdust coated everything. I went into the living room, where Scotty and I had argued. Somehow I expected to see a chalk outline marking the location of a body, with bloodstains dried on the plastic sheeting, but there was nothing like that. I saw no evidence that a crime had been committed here.

  “Hello?” I called again. “It’s Dylan Moran. I got a note to meet someone here.”

  Still no response. The house was empty.

  I ventured deeper inside. There was no furniture. Everything had been removed. With each step, I listened for a noise to suggest that someone was hiding, but I heard nothing. I checked every room on the ground level, and then, with only the slightest hesitation, I went upstairs to the second floor.

  The door to the master bedroom was closed.

  I approached it with soft footfalls and knocked. “Is anyone there?”

  I tensed, then opened the door. For some reason, I had visions of finding a body inside, but I was wrong. No one was here. However, the bedroom, unlike the rest of the house, showed signs of life. Someone was living and sleeping here. There were open moving boxes strewed across the floor, and a mattress with a rumpled blanket lay below the windows. When I glanced in the bathroom, I saw a towel bunched over the shower rod and a lineup of male toiletries on the sink.

  It was time to go. I’d stayed here long enough.

  I headed to the stairs, but before I got there, I heard the front door open below me. Seconds later, footsteps crinkled on the plastic sheeting in the living room. I tried to decide what to do. Announce myself, or slip downstairs and get away. I put a foot on the top step, but when I shifted my weight, a loose nail squealed, sounding loud in the quiet house. Immediately, I heard more footsteps heading my way.

  The foyer below me was in shadow. A man emerged from the downstairs hallway, and I couldn’t identify him at first, but when he got to the bottom of the stairs, he turned around. Seeing who it was shocked me into silence.

  Standing at the base of the stairs was a dead man.

  Scotty Ryan.

  He didn’t look at all surprised to see me, and his face broke into an easy smile. “Hey, buddy, you got my message? What do you think of the place?”

  “Scotty,” I managed to choke out from my chest. I thought about saying something stupid: You’re alive. But I held my tongue even as my mind whirled.

  “Come on down, I’ll get you a beer,” he said.

  Whistling some kind of country song, Scotty disappeared toward the kitchen. I steadied myself and continued downstairs. I went back into the living room and examined it all over again. There comes a time in most dreams when you realize you’re dreaming, but that wasn’t how this felt. I almost said the word out loud to see what would happen.

  Infinite.

  But I didn’t. I needed to see what came next.

  Scotty returned with two bottles of Goose Island in his hand. He gave me one and clinked the neck of his bottle against mine. “Cheers. Good to see you, man. So where were you last night? I kept texting you from the bar. Hell of a game, huh? Ten to one. Suck it, Phillies.”

  I looked into Scotty’s eyes to see why he was pretending that we were friends. Pretending that nothing had happened between us. Pretending he hadn’t slept with my wife. I glanced at my hand and saw the raw bruises and scrapes on my knuckles where I’d swung my fist into his face. Then I realized: His face had no damage at all. His lips should be cut and swollen. He’d lost a tooth. I was sure I’d broken his nose. But there was no evidence of a fight.

  Scotty swigged his beer and gestured around the house. “Can’t believe it’s all mine. Never thought I’d be able to afford a place in the city. I mean, it needs work, but it’s nice to be able to remodel my own house for a change.”

  “It’s great,” I said, because I had no idea what to say.

  “Isn’t it? Total fluke that I found it. I was redoing a kitchen down the street, and I noticed the FOR SALE sign over here. Went in and looked around, and I thought, perfect. Love the location, love the park. With the money my uncle left me, I had enough for the down payment. So now we’re neighbors, sort of. What is it, half an hour’s walk to your place?”

  “Yeah.”

  Scotty’s face scrunched with puzzlement, as if he was noticing my condition for the first time. “Everything okay? You seem kind of out of it today.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Why’d you miss the game last night?”

  “I was pretty tired.”

  Scotty drank his beer and eyed me thoughtfully. “That all it is?”

  “What else would it be?”

  “I don’t know, there’s something different about you today. I can’t put my finger on it. You’re not acting like yourself. You and I have been friends a long time, Dylan. If something’s going on, you can tell me about it.”

  “There’s nothing to tell,” I replied.

  But I wanted to say: No, we haven’t been friends for a long time. I barel
y knew Scotty Ryan. We’d met a handful of times when I was visiting Karly at one of her listings and Scotty was doing construction work for her. He and she went back for years, but he and I didn’t. I didn’t watch Cubs games with him at the bar. I didn’t even particularly like him. In fact, at the moment, I had every reason to hate him.

  There’s something different about you today.

  I thought about Edgar telling me that I’d spent my whole life with my emotions shut off, when in reality, the opposite was true.

  I thought about the old woman with her dog on the street, who didn’t remember me, even after telling the police that I’d killed a man.

  Most of all, I thought about Scotty and the fact that he was supposed to be dead. But he wasn’t. There had been no knife plunged into his heart. There hadn’t even been a fight between us. I hadn’t changed, but everything else had. I’d been slow to realize it, but the world around me was different. I wasn’t in the Chicago I’d left behind. I was somewhere new.

  I’d gone through the door at the Art Institute into the life of an entirely different Dylan Moran. A man the police were looking for. A man who had been missing for two days.

  Where was he?

  “What did you want to talk to me about?” I asked Scotty, remembering his message.

  He put down his beer bottle in midswallow. “Oh, yeah. I finished up the drawings for the remodel on your bathroom. You’re going to love it. Travertine tiles, body sprays in the shower, recessed lighting. All I need are some decisions on the cabinetry, and I’ll be ready to get started.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “I pulled pages from the catalog to give you an idea of your options. Doors, knobs, roll-out trays, that kind of thing. I can do all the drawers with a soft close, too.”

  “Sure.”

  “Take it home and talk to the missus, and then let me know what you guys want to do.”

  I almost stopped breathing. “My wife.”

  “Right. I can start next week if you want. My job in Oak Park finished early.”

  I heard it in my head again: My wife.

  “Dylan?” Scotty said, his voice sounding far away.

  My wife, my wife, my wife . . .

  “Jesus, buddy, you’re white as a sheet,” he went on.

  “Scotty, I have to go.”

  “Sure. Okay. Let me gather up the plans and catalog, and you can take everything with you.”

  I pushed the bottle of beer into his hand and backed away. “No, I have to go now,” I said again. “Right now.”

  “Dylan? Hey, what’s up?”

  But I was already out the door.

  My head throbbed. I felt a tightness in my chest, and my breath came in sharp, ragged bursts. I kept repeating a mantra to myself that this was real, that this wasn’t a dream, but I didn’t dare allow myself to believe it. I didn’t even want to blink, because I was afraid that closing my eyes would take me back to my old life.

  I wanted it to be true.

  I wanted that more than anything else I’d ever prayed for in my life.

  I started walking, but the pace of walking felt glacial. I pushed past people who were going too slowly, ignoring their comments when I bumped into them. Soon I was running. I sprinted north past the park and then into the quiet, leafy streets of Ravenswood Manor. I ran full out all the way until Lawrence Avenue, where I finally had to stop and bend over, gasping for air. When I could breathe again, I crossed the river.

  I was only a few blocks from home. This time, I didn’t run. I measured out each step, because I wasn’t sure what I would find when I got to my door. I didn’t want to face the reality of being wrong.

  My wife.

  I walked through a neighborhood I’d known my entire life. Nothing looked different. The buildings were all the same. I could tell you the names of most of the people behind those doors, and I wondered if they’d led identical lives to what I remembered or whether they’d taken different paths in this world.

  Ahead of me, I saw the green lawn of River Park, half a block from my apartment. Our apartment. Only one dark cloud passed quickly through my mind. I remembered the headline in the newspaper about a young blond woman on the trails there two nights ago, the last night of her life. Someone had put a knife in her heart and murdered her.

  The Killer Dylan I was chasing was already here. My doppelgänger in the leather jacket had struck again. He’d killed a woman who looked just like Karly.

  I thought: Or was it me?

  I didn’t remember this woman, but I remembered nothing from those missing days.

  There was our building. I stopped, cupping my hands in front of my face, breathing hard. I walked up the sidewalk the way I had thousands of times, since I was a teenager. I wondered if I could simply use my key and let myself inside. Would the locks be the same? My phone still worked, so it seemed as if some of the little details followed me across worlds.

  But I rang the doorbell anyway. I wanted her to come to the door.

  I wanted to see her face.

  Seconds passed. Interminable seconds. Then I saw a shadow on the other side of the glass.

  The door opened, and there was my wife.

  It wasn’t Karly. It was Tai.

  CHAPTER 16

  “Oh, thank God!” Tai exclaimed, throwing her arms around me. “Dylan, I was so worried. Where have you been?”

  I tried to hide my crushing disappointment. My body was stiff as I hugged her back. She went to kiss me, and instinctively I turned my face, making her kiss my cheek instead of my lips. I saw confusion in her eyes, but she let it go, took my hand tightly, and pulled me into our apartment.

  It looked nothing like I remembered. None of the furniture that Karly and I had bought was here. No more sleek grays and blues on the walls, no more gliders where we’d drink wine and coffee, no more plush rug by the fireplace to make love. The style now reflected Tai’s taste, with enough ferns and hanging planters to turn the apartment into a rain forest. A handwoven mat with a geometric pattern lay in front of the hearth, looking hard and uninviting. The chairs were made of wood and wicker. If I hated anything when it came to furniture, it was wicker.

  This was not my home. And yet it was. Photographs crowded the mantel, all of them showing me and Tai in places I couldn’t imagine being. The two of us side by side in front of Cinderella’s castle in the Magic Kingdom. The two of us wearing leis near the firepit of a Hawaiian luau. Me in a tux, her in a wedding dress. Husband and wife. Instinctively, I shook my head at the idea of any of this happening. Tai was smart and sweet, and she was a friend, and I wanted her to be happy. But I couldn’t imagine a world where I’d fallen in love with her and married her.

  Except I was in that world right now.

  When I didn’t say anything, Tai put both hands on my face. “Dylan, are you okay? Do you have any idea how terrified I’ve been? You’ve been gone almost two days.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Not a call, not a text, nothing. You didn’t show up at work. Your phone was off. I’ve been trying to reach you. I had visions of you being dead somewhere.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Do you need a doctor? You look terrible.”

  “No, I’ll be all right.”

  “Dylan, what happened to you? Where have you been?”

  I didn’t have time to formulate a lie. A knock on the door interrupted us. Tai kissed me quickly, on the lips this time, and then she hurried to the outside door. I heard voices, and when Tai returned, she was with a man I recognized immediately. I couldn’t let on that I knew who he was, because in this world, we were strangers.

  The tall skeletal man was Detective Harvey Bushing. He didn’t seem to have changed. When he looked at me with those sunken eyes, I thought he could see right through me and guess everything that I was hiding. I felt like running, the way I had when we first met, when he accused me of multiple murders. I had to remind myself: He doesn’t know about any of that. For him, in this place, none of that had actu
ally happened.

  Except for a murder a hundred yards away in River Park.

  I was no fool. I’d been missing for two days, and a woman named Betsy Kern had been killed near my house two nights ago. Detective Bushing wasn’t going to consider that a coincidence.

  He introduced himself, and we shook hands again, his grip as dry and limp as it had been the first time.

  “It’s good to see you home safe and sound, Mr. Moran,” Bushing told me. “I was just coming over to see if your wife had heard from you, and here you are.”

  “Good timing, Detective. Yes, here I am.”

  “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that your wife was pretty panicked.”

  “Of course she was.”

  He smiled at both of us, showing yellowed teeth that could have used a good orthodontist when he was a kid. “How about we all sit down? I’m very curious to know where you’ve been.”

  “I’m actually pretty tired, Detective, and I could use a shower. Could we do this tomorrow?”

  “This won’t take long, Mr. Moran. Please.” He said it in a way that didn’t give me any room to say no.

  The detective took a seat on one of the wicker chairs. I sat uncomfortably on a sofa near the window, and Tai sat beside me and put her hand over mine. As she caressed me, her fingers rolled over Roscoe’s ring on my hand, and I saw her glance at it with surprise.

  “Since when do you wear that?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “I found it in a drawer. It’s from high school.”

  An unsettled look passed across Tai’s face. She was the kind of woman who noticed things like jewelry and clothes; her eye for detail was what made her a good events manager. I’m sure she was thinking that she would have spotted that ring on my finger long before now.

  “So Mr. Moran,” Detective Bushing said. “Fill us in. Where have you been for the past couple of days?”

  I needed to sound convincing as I made up a story, so I used a story that was at least partly true.

  “To be honest, Detective, I don’t know. I woke up a few hours ago on Navy Pier, and I have no idea how I got there. I was shocked to discover that I’d been gone for so long. I have no recollection of what happened in between.”