Davis sat in a big leather chair by the front window in the big house on Stone Avenue, reading a paperback called Time of Death. It was about a convicted murderer named Hughes whose appeals have been exhausted. His execution date is set. At midnight. He knows the precise second at which he is going to die and he finds the burden of that knowledge unbearable. Through another prisoner, Hughes hires a third con, one whose identity is unknown to him, to kill Hughes at some random date before his execution. This uncertainty makes Hughes happy – so happy he can no longer accept dying. So he tries to foil his own exercise-yard assassination.
It was a silly book and Davis was hypnotized by it, reading the first two hundred pages in just a few hours. Improbable novels like this – sci-fi, thrillers, mysteries – had been his weakness as a teenager, when he read two or three of them a week. He always kept a book with him back then and never let a minute of idle time pass without bending back the shiny cover and holding it with one hand in front of his face. He read at breakfast, on the bus, between periods, at lunch, during his breaks at the hardware store, and even while riding his bike.
He read less and less for pleasure as he got older and various obsessions held his dwindling free time hostage. In med school it was fly-fishing, although he did more practice casting in a park near his apartment than he did wading in Wisconsin streams. In his early thirties he took up track driving – with an inheritance check he paid off his student loans and purchased a BMW coupe – and he rented time on the raceway in Joliet. As AK grew older and Jackie grew sicker, he sold the Beamer and immersed himself in genealogy, trying to define himself with the sum of his ancestors, tunneling for hours through birth and death records in the windowless blue room. Genealogy was shunted in the search for AK’s killer, and the search for AK’s killer was abandoned for fear of going to prison.
The obsessions, one after another, had been a symptom of depression. He understood that now. A happy person looks forward to a few moments of boredom now and then, but for an unhappy person, idle time is intolerable. The unhappy mind is congested with regrets and guilt and situations out of its control and the unstoppable unfolding of worst-case scenarios. Fly rods and race cars and note cards covered with family history became occupying forces in his head, dispersing unpleasant thoughts, outlawing unwanted concerns.
Since he and Joan married, the old stresses had largely disappeared. Potential disasters and subconscious dreads were still players in the politics of his imagination, but only as disorganized, discredited third parties. The files in the blue room, both older ones relating to his family and the more recent boxes filled with leads in AK’s murder, hadn’t been opened in more than four years, and Joan talked about converting the space into a studio so they could take up painting together when she retired. With more free time to enjoy than at any other time in his life, idleness had now become its own reward. He treasured hours that passed with no deadlines or duties or responsibilities. Time to sit by the big window on Stone and read all the terrible and exciting books he’d missed in the last forty years. AK’s memory was with him at all times, but it no longer haunted him, and he felt so removed from his own shooting that some days he wondered if it hadn’t happened in a TV movie.
The doorbell rang and Davis thought about not answering it. It was likely a package delivery that could just as well be left on the porch, or a neighborhood petition he didn’t want to sign. It could be kids from the middle school selling candy or candles in support of some band trip. He wasn’t against band trips, but he wasn’t exactly in favor of answering the door right now either, of interrupting his idle time. He was sitting by an open window, however, and his head must have been visible from the walk. After living at the same address for nearly three decades, he didn’t want to be known as the crazy old man who never answers his door. He stood up, flattening the paperback on an end table.
The boy had grown in six years and was so unlike a boy now. He was less than a hand shorter than Davis, and his long, blond curls danced above his head like spiraling Chinese kites in the light breeze. Muscles had started to assert themselves on his arms under a layer of fine hair. There were a few pink scars on his hands. He wore a silver chain around his neck. Something that one day would have to be shaved loitered under his nostrils and lips. His face was breaking out around his eyes and hairline, and he had a prominent red-and-white pimple at the end of his nose. He wore a two-toned button-down short-sleeve shirt, loose khakis, and sandals, the uniform of teen indifference.
“Dr. Moore,” was all he said.
Davis fought the dryness in his mouth by working the glands under his tongue, and he wondered what sort of trick this could be. He wondered who could be trying to fool him like this and what they expected him to do. He needed to know so he could do the opposite. Davis looked past the boy for some sign of his mother, scanning up and down the street for the red car she used to drive.
“What do you want, Justin? You shouldn’t be here.” He said it loudly in case someone was nearby, or in case Justin’s broad pockets had been fitted with a microphone.
“I wanted to ask you some questions,” he said, then sensing Davis’s reluctance, added, “I’d be in big trouble too if my mom knew I was here. I ditched a couple periods from school. But this is important.”
Davis was certain he was making a mistake, but waved the boy inside for the same reason all people do the wrong thing: the wrong thing is irresistible.
Justin paused in the foyer, polite and uncomfortable, weight on his right foot while his left sneaker dragged invisible half circles against the hardwood. Davis gestured toward the living room and followed him inside. The boy sat on the edge of the couch, knees pinned at angles to the coffee table as if black ink might ooze from the backs of his thighs if his legs came in contact with the cushions. Davis drew the front shade.
“Just a minute,” he told Justin. Davis picked up the cordless phone in the next room and dialed Joan. Her last appointment was at two-thirty and she had said something about stopping for groceries on the way home. She would flip if she knew Justin had been in the house.
“Hon,” he said, “could you pick me up some potting soil, and also some of that shampoo you bought last month? Yeah, that’s the one. Sorry, I should have put it on your list. Thanks. Love you.” That would add two stops to her route. He figured they had about forty-five minutes.
“It must be important for you to risk coming here,” Davis said, ignoring the minutes-long gap since Justin last spoke at the door. “What can I do for you?”
“Mom told me,” Justin said. He looked eager, and although he had trouble sitting still, Davis identified his jitters as a symptom of his age: a lack of comfort with his mutating body, fatigue from the pains that came to his growing legs and arms and spine at night. It wasn’t nervousness. Coming here was an act of confidence, in fact. Defiance. Justin’s eyes challenged Davis to be as daring. Though uninvited, Justin had risked something by showing himself here, and he expected Davis to risk something in return.
Not yet decided on what he could afford to wager, Davis decided to play it dumb. “What did she tell you?”
“She told me where I came from.”
“Uh-huh.”
“She told me I’m a clone.”
“Yes?”
“She told me I’m the clone of a kid from New York named Eric Lundquist.”
“Okay.”
“Is it true?”
Davis smiled. “I’m not allowed to say.”
“You’re not a practicing physician anymore,” Justin said, stumbling over the word “physician.” Davis winced, thinking suddenly of the fires and the lost pets and the fog of concerns and guilt Joan had raised eight years ago, which had long burned off in the sunny joy of the present. He was surprised to find himself frightened, not of what might happen if he was caught violating the restraining order, but frightened of Justin himself. He couldn’t pin down exactly why. “What can they do to you?” Justin asked.
“Lots,” Davis said without elaborating. “When did your mom tell you?”
“About six months ago.”
Davis subtracted in his head. “Let me guess. Your birthday?” Justin nodded. “They always do it on a birthday. That must be in one of the books or something. Okay, your mother explained things to you, but you still want to hear them from me. Why? Do you think she would lie to you?”
“No.”
“Well, then.”
“I don’t think she’s lying. I think she’s wrong. There’s a difference.”
Again, Davis considered that Martha Finn was putting him up to this. Or the cops. Maybe someone suspected. Maybe someone wanted him to do prison this time. “Why do you think she’s wrong?”
“Because I saw him,” Justin said. The boy leaned back now in a low slouch, his head on top of the cushions, staring at the light fixture in the ceiling, his arms crossed in front of him and his hands clasped the wrong way around, pinkies out, resting between his legs.
Arteries up and down Davis’s body pumped two parts adrenaline to one part plasma, the way they had when he’d received the last promising lead in Anna Kat’s murder via e-mail from Ricky Weiss. That had ended in the worst way he could have imagined. Davis tried to slow it all down, saying nothing for a long time. The boy seemed fine with that, even closing his eyes as though a nap were coming before a thought fired across a synapse in his brain and he blinked awake, eyes on the ceiling, waiting.
“Where?” Davis said finally. “Where did you see him?”
“Nuh-uh,” Justin said. He sat up straight, as if his waist were a hinge, and leaned until his head was closer to Davis’s chair than Davis’s own knees. “I tell you stuff. You tell me stuff.”
Christ, what did this kid know? How could he have seen AK’s killer? Forget that, how could he have identified him? Understood what he was looking at? Was it someone from Northwood? Had the monster been so close all along? He couldn’t let Justin out the door now, not without reaching some sort of understanding. Whatever the kid knows, it might be enough to put Davis in prison for ten years. Still, he had to know. After everything Davis had gambled, how could he not play this hand out? And if he had to trust anyone, why not Justin, who was as much his child as he was Martha and Terry Finn’s? If not for Davis, this particular arrangement of carbon and neurons and blond hair and curiosity would never have existed.
“Tell me what you want to know,” Davis said.
Justin stood up and walked around the coffee table, sprawling across the carpet at Davis’s feet. He twisted his torso, and his spine cracked like a roll of caps. He rested his head on an elbow. “You’re not supposed to make clones from living people.”
“That’s right.”
“But you did.”
“I did.”
“You could go to jail for that.”
“You’re right.”
“It must have been important.”
“It was.”
“So tell me.”
“I will,” Davis said. “But I just confessed a secret to you. Something serious. I’d like something in return now.”
“That’s fair.”
“Where did you see him?”
Justin paused, but didn’t seem reluctant. It was as if he had to play back a recording in his mind before he knew he could get it right. “He attacked my mother.”
“Shit!” Davis cursed with a reflexive gasp. “Is she all right?”
Justin nodded with a sneer that seemed inspired by equal amounts anger and guilt. “Yeah. She’s okay.”
“When did this happen?”
“Six years ago,” Justin said. “Right before she filed the lawsuit against you.” Davis considered that. “Just a coincidence, though. Now, who is he?”
“You don’t know?” The questioned betrayed disappointment, and that seemed to confuse the boy.
“I want to know what you know first.”
Davis nodded, asking himself if he needed more than an hour from Joan, if he should call with another errand before she returned from the office to find her husband and the Finn boy trading information like distrustful double agents. “He attacked my daughter.”
“Is she okay?” Justin asked.
“No,” Davis said. “She’s not.”
The story came out in a long exhale, and Justin seemed shocked by none of it. He listened and nodded and looked concerned. At other times he appeared relieved and even excited. He never interrupted. He allowed Davis to describe, to explain, to rationalize, to apologize. He seemed so sympathetic, so non-judgemental, Davis thought he could have cried in front of the boy, and almost did, twice.
“I feel bad,” Justin said when Davis was through and they had both thought silently on it for a few minutes. “I feel bad I don’t have more answers for you.” He sighed. “I can’t remember his name. It was like money or something. Mr. Cash, maybe? I think he lived in the city. I think he used to live in Northwood. Or his parents did.”
“His parents live here now?”
“They did six years ago. His mom introduced him to my mom. They talked but I wasn’t really paying attention. I remember everybody was saying he looked like me. When he was a kid, anyways.”
“What else?”
“He and my mom went to dinner one night. I thought I heard something after they came home and I went downstairs. I just saw the end of it. I think he tried to rape her, although she never said, exactly. My mom was crying. She kicked him out and he walked past me and I really looked at him this time, looked him in the face, in a way that I hadn’t done when we met in the store. It was like, you know how you look at an old picture of yourself and you don’t look like that anymore, and you don’t spend that much time looking at yourself in the first place, but still you just know the face in the picture is you? Right away. That’s what it felt like. Looking at him.”
“Do you think he saw the same thing you did? Do you think he saw himself in you?”
Justin picked at the carpet with his fingers. “I don’t know. I doubt it. He just wanted to get the hell out of there.”
“Does your mother have any idea?”
“Nuh-uh. Like I said, she thinks my donor was Eric Lundquist.”
Davis wanted to believe it. “Are you positive it was him? The guy who hurt your mom? He is your donor?”
Justin’s head bobbed with a barely perceptible motion, more like a vibration than a nod. “Oh, yeah, shit!” he said. “There’s another thing.” He pushed himself to his feet and lifted his shirt up over his head, turning his back to Davis. Davis stood up too and Justin turned his head, looking down over his shoulder, his shirt twisted around his forearms. “That.”
“What?” Davis leaned back and scouted the white plane of the boy’s backside. “What? The birthmark?” Davis put his hand very near it but never touched the boy’s skin. It was shaped like the top of a teakettle and disappeared under Justin’s belt. “He had this?”
“Exactly like it,” Justin said. “Right in that spot.”
“Jesus Christ,” Davis whispered.
Three rooms away, the back door opened and Joan shouted, “Hi, Dave!”
“Jesus Christ!” he said again. “You need to go now. But we need to keep talking. Saturday?”
“Yeah, I can do Saturday. Where?”
“I don’t know.” He heard Joan’s footsteps leaving the kitchen and pushed Justin toward the front door as the boy struggled to get his shirt back on. Davis took a card out of his wallet. “This is my cell phone. Call it tomorrow. I’ll figure it out.” Justin snatched the card and ducked out the door without saying good-bye.
“Who was that?” Joan had entered the foyer. He couldn’t tell what she’d seen.
“Hmm? A kid selling candles. For a band trip.”
“You ordered one?” Joan asked.
Davis realized he had his wallet in his hand. “Two,” he said. “They’re going to Saint Louis.” Christ, he hadn’t warned Justin, hadn’t told him not to tell anyone, hadn’t told him he might be in danger if this Cash fellow put together the same pieces Justin had. Now that he had run out the door, there was no way of telling him. Not without violating the restraining order or involving a third person.
Joan waved a bottle of shampoo and walked into the living room. She leaned over to shut out the draft coming through the window and picked up the open copy of Time of Death. “I’ve read that,” she said, handing it to Davis without a review. He took another card from his wallet and used it to mark his place before setting it down again.