Denise sat behind the wheel of her car shaking. Not shaking. Twitching like a doll with its legs stuck in a garbage disposal. Tears—a luxury she seldom enjoyed—poured down her face. Before Paulette came and gave her permission to feel, one of the few times she’d cried was the day she heard Peter was engaged. Those tears had been turned to steam by white-hot anger before they’d reached the air. She’d almost missed the days when her tear ducts had been welded shut. Now great fat drops ran down the side of her nose to drip on the black linen of her trousers.
Ranger Pigeon was finally gone. She’d been in Denise’s bedroom—again—changing out of Denise’s clothes, then used Denise’s bathroom, no doubt rummaging through the medicine cabinet, and the towel cupboard, and under the sink, looking for anything that would trigger the memory of who Denise’s photo reminded her of. Her ferreting brain ticking like a bomb.
Denise had screwed up royally at the scene. She’d acted guilty as hell, searching the murder room for traces she might have left while the pigeon watched from the doorway, running back to the car and hiding, practically running the woman over to get her away from Paulette, going part postal over the old picture. Anna Pigeon was one of those people who saw, who looked and saw the person behind the eyes. Denise had run up about a dozen red flags.
“God damn me!” Denise cried and struck a fist against the steering wheel. “I didn’t think. I didn’t fucking think!” When she’d offered Anna a change of clothes, and the use of her car for the undercover stint, she hadn’t thought of Paulette, of the plan. She had a family now. She had to think of them first, before the job, before cyberstalkers, before endangered citizens, before herself. Family came before everything. Family was everything.
“Don’t screw this up,” she muttered fiercely, then turned the key in the ignition, bringing the Miata to life. She had to see Paulette. They needed to talk this through. Denise was still in her civvies, still in the Miata, her radio on the passenger seat monitoring the traffic. It would be a risk, but the sense of urgency driving her made it imperative. She looked at her watch. Seven fifteen. Paulette was a nurse. Three days a week she worked the two-to-midnight shift in the infants ward at Mount Desert Hospital. This was one of her nights. Pulling out of the NPS headquarters’ parking lot, Denise texted: mt me H pking lot. 10 min.
By the time she reached the hospital, the sun was going down. The long summer afternoons were golden, the light softening trees to a dark haze and turning the ocean to navy blue.
When she and her sister were ready, Denise decided, they would move somewhere there was no ocean, no winter, where the world wasn’t made of rock and snow and ice water. Georgia maybe. Georgia in the pines, a little cabin. That would be perfect. Maybe a lake. Too dangerous, she decided as she parked the Miata in the darkest corner behind the building. Kids drowned in lakes all the time. In Georgia there might be alligators. Alligators liked children and little fluffy dogs. She’d read that somewhere.
Turning off the ignition, Denise lay back in her seat and waited. Paulette might not be able to get away instantly, but she’d come. Denise knew she would. They were twins. They had the exact same blood and bone and brain. They didn’t have identical fingerprints. Had she ever Googled that in a hurry! What a drag it would have been if Paulette’s fingerprints at the murder scene lit up Denise’s own on IAFIS, the federal print identification base.
In everything that mattered, they were identical. Paulette would never let her down.
Ranger Pigeon and that damned picture. “Is this you? You remind me of somebody.” The memory bit Denise in the butt again. In a fit of paranoia, she leapt from the car to put the top up. Nobody would be looking; still, it was best if she and Paulette were not seen together.
With the lowering of the sun, clouds came scudding from the southwest, and fog began to tease in from its hiding places out to sea. Good, Denise thought as she clipped the top securely down. Once she had hated the fog, hated the clammy dead touch of mist, and the confusion of veils across her eyes. Now it made her feel safer. To be hidden was calming, centering, like the world beneath the sea.
As she settled behind the wheel in the tiny car, a slash of light cut the deep shadow in the back of the building; the fire stairs, that was where the nurses left the building. There were no reserved spaces; their cars had to be parked in the back lot, the dark lot, the lot where bad things could happen.
“Screw men,” Denise whispered. “Screw them all. Bastards.”
She thought to flash the headlights to identify herself, but there was no need. Paulette would know where she was. She would feel her in the gray cloak of encroaching fog the way one hand felt the other in a game of cat’s cradle. Such an old game. Denise couldn’t remember anyone teaching it to her. No cheery childhood memories of doting grandmamas or loving aunts.
Poor little Anna Pigeon and her poor little Elizabeth suffering from a surfeit of love. “Such a burden!” Denise mocked, her voice pitched low. “God, how does one bear it!” She should have gouged Pigeon’s eye out with a spork.
Nope, nobody had bothered teaching poor little Denise a nice game like cat’s cradle.
Maybe it was a memory of Paulette’s that had traveled into her head.
God damn Anna Pigeon. God damn Denise Castle for letting her into her apartment, leaving her alone in the bedroom, for not hiding the photograph.
Now she and Paulette were going to have to speed things up. The luxury of time was gone. It had drained away like water down a gopher hole during the time Anna Pigeon was with her. Beady eyes licking over everything, foxy ears perked, the pigeon watched and thought while Denise did everything but spray-paint GUILTY on the clean white walls of her apartment.
Paulette had to move faster on the land sale, and Denise on tracking down the legacy advertised in the papers. If there was a legacy. She also had to give the NPS notice and get her pension papers filed. Everything had to be in place so they could tie up the loose ends and be gone before anybody knew there was any reason to think there were two of them, that they had anything to do with Duffy’s demise.
“I don’t have long,” Paulette said as she slid in the passenger door. “I said I was going out for a cigarette. The head nurse is cool with that. She smokes a pack and a half a day.”
“We’ll have to quit when the family is complete,” Denise said, though she’d never smoked a cigarette in her life.
“Complete?” Paulette questioned.
That Paulette didn’t inherently understand annoyed Denise. She pressed the sensation down hard. Paulette was her sister, her other self; she could never be annoyed with her. Not ever. “We’re going be a family,” Denise explained patiently. “Like we wanted. Like we are supposed to be. It’s the last thing we have to do before we go. We got rid of Kurt. Now, as soon as we are complete, we can go. Have to go, and sooner rather than later.”
Paulette looked confused. Or maybe Denise just felt her confusion. The little shards of streetlights and security lights refracting in the rearview mirrors weren’t sufficient to read a face.
“A family. More than just you and me?” Paulette asked.
Again the stab of irritation; again Denise shoved it down. “Families have children,” Denise said too sharply.
“You said Peter had murdered your babies,” Paulette said in a gentle voice. “Tell me how it was.”
The irritation Denise was suffering wasn’t for her sister, her twin. It was like the twitches, a case of nerves. She took hold of Paulette’s hand and leaned back in the seat. The memory didn’t come; it was always there, sharper and more detailed each time she revisited it.
“Four years ago I got pregnant,” Denise said. “It was Peter’s, of course. I loved my baby. I knew I wasn’t getting any younger, and I loved my baby so much.”
“Did Peter beat you?” Paulette asked. That was how her babies had been murdered.
“He said he didn’t want our baby. He said he never wanted children. He said he couldn’t face it. He made me get an abortion.” He’d said he’d leave her if she didn’t get an abortion, that’s what he had said, but it was the same thing.
“Something went wrong,” Denise said. “Something got ripped. I was told I couldn’t have any more children. Then Peter left.”
“And married Lily and had a baby,” Paulette finished softly.
“My baby,” Denise said.
Paulette squeezed her hand. “Is that why you came? To tell me about the baby?”
Denise opened her eyes, suddenly back from the ugly trip down Memory Lane. Peter had turned what should have been a sentimental journey into a nightmare on Elm Street. “No. I came to tell you we have to move faster. It’s that ranger, Anna Pigeon. I caught her looking at a photo of us. Then she peers into me. Icepick eyes. I got that shivery feeling you get when something bad is about to happen.”
“Who took the photo of us?” Alarmed, Paulette jerked her hand out of Denise’s. Hot snaps of anger cracked up Denise’s spine.
Not for Paulette. Nerves.
“It wasn’t us exactly,” Denise said. “It was me, before I got my teeth capped. My hair was blond then, and wild.” For a moment she believed that, but it wasn’t right. Her teeth hadn’t been capped yet, true, but in the picture her hair wasn’t like Paulette’s. It was the same boring brown as it always was. For a moment, in her mind, she’d seen it blond and big like her sister’s. Rubbing her face, she mumbled through her fingers, “Anna Pigeon knows. She stares at the picture, then gives me this smirky look and says, ‘Is this you? You remind me of somebody.’ She spent a lot of time with you at the house. She knows. Why would she say ‘you remind me of somebody’ unless she wanted me to know she knew I had a twin?”
There was a wrongness to her logic, Denise knew that; still and all, she felt it to be the truth. Knew it to be the truth. “Anna Pigeon will ruin everything.”
Paulette sat quiet for a long time. Denise could feel twitches building in her hands, her feet. The sparks of anger flared in her esophagus until she thought she might breathe fire.
“Anna Pigeon, she’s the ranger who came with you when the police were at my house?” Paulette asked, her words coming slowly, as if her mind were working hard between each utterance.
“That was her,” Denise said. “Shit!” She slammed the heel of her hand against the steering wheel. “I never should have let the bitch out of the car. She’s got a nose as long as a dachshund’s, sticking it where it doesn’t belong.”
“I think maybe she knew I was me,” Paulette admitted. “She looked at me like you said she looked at the picture, like she knew I was inside, there behind my eyes, and she was going to scrape me out like an oyster out of its shell.”
Denise became still, no twitches, no angry motions. Staring at her sister, she let the awe that had been building since they’d found each other fill her whole being. Paulette knew everything that happened in Denise’s head just as Denise knew everything that happened in Paulette’s head. “Exactly like that. An oyster from its shell,” Denise whispered.
“Oh God,” Paulette moaned. “Maybe she looks at everybody like that. She’s probably just the kind of person who really looks at things.”
That wasn’t it. Denise knew. Paulette knew, too; she just didn’t want to admit it.
For a long time neither one of them spoke. Denise didn’t feel alone in the silence. She felt together in the silence. Mostly.
“What do we do?” Paulette asked at last.
“I’ll think of something. It’s us against the world.” Denise laughed because she knew it was true, the only truth.