“So are you sure that it’s the same guy? Todd isn’t the most uncommon name in the world. Think about it, Jake. You see a picture six years later, your mind plays a few tricks with you, and voila, you think it’s your archenemy.”
“He isn’t my archenemy.”
“
I had, of course, already considered this. I had even considered Benedict’s conning bigamist explanation. Both made more sense than . . . than what? What else was there, really? What other possible—obvious, logical, far-fetched—explanation was there?
“Well?” Benedict said.
“It makes sense.”
“See?”
“This Todd—Todd Sanderson, MD—looked different from Natalie’s Todd. His hair is shorter. His face is freshly shaven.”
“So there you go.”
I glanced away.
“What?”
“I’m not sure I buy it.”
“Why not?”
“For one thing, the man was murdered.”
“So? If anything, that backs my polygamist theory. He crossed the wrong gal and kapow.”
“Come on, you don’t really think that’s the answer.”
Benedict sat back. He started plucking at his lower lip with two fingers. “She left you for another man.”
I waited for him to say more. When he didn’t, I said, “Uh, yeah, Captain Obvious, I know.”
“That was hard for you.” He sounded sad now, wistful. “I get it. I get it more than you know.” I thought now about the photograph, about the love he lost, about how many of us go around with some kind of heartache and never show it. “You two were in love. So you can’t accept it—how could she dump you for another man?”
I frowned again, but I could feel the twang in my chest. “Are you sure you’re not a psychology professor?”
“You want this so badly—this second chance, this chance at real redemption—that you can’t see the truth.”
“What truth is that, Benedict?”
“She’s gone,” he said, simple as that. “She dumped you. None of this changes that.”
I swallowed, tried to swim through that crystal-clear reality. “I think there is more to it.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
Benedict considered that for a moment. “But you won’t stop trying to find out, will you?”
“I will,” I said. “But not today. And probably not tomorrow.”
Benedict shrugged, rose, grabbed another beer. “So let’s have it. What’s our next step?”
Chapter 5
I had no answer to that one, and it was getting late. Benedict suggested a bar and some late-night carousing. I thought that it might be an excellent distraction but I had essays to grade, so I begged off. I managed to get through about three of them before realizing that my mind wasn’t there and grading papers now wouldn’t be fair to my students.
I made a sandwich and tried looking up Natalie’s name again, this time doing an “image” search. I saw an old bio picture of her. The image struck me hard in the chest so I clicked it off. I found some of her old paintings. Several of them were of my hands and torso. Painful memories didn’t just ease back in—they shoved the door open hard, all of them and all at once. The way she tilted her head, the way the sunlight burst through the skylight of her studio, that look of concentration on her face, the playful smile when she took a break. The memories almost made me double over in pain. I missed her that much. I missed her with an ache that was physical and something beyond. I had blocked it on and off for six years, but suddenly the longing had flooded back, as strong as the day we last made love in that cabin at the retreat.
Screw it.
I wanted to see her and be damned the consequences. If Natalie could look me in the eye a second time and dismiss me, well, I would deal with it then. But not now. Not tonight. Right now, I simply needed to find her.
Okay, slow down. Let me think this through. What do I need to do here? First, I have to figure out if Todd Sanderson is Natalie’s Todd. There was plenty of evidence to suggest, as Benedict had clearly explained, that this was simply a case of mistaken identity.
How should I go about proving it one way or the other?
I needed to know more about him. For example, what would Dr. Todd Sanderson, happily married father of two living in Savannah, be doing at an artist retreat in Vermont six years earlier? I needed to see more pictures of him. I needed to do more background, starting . . .
Starting here. At Lanford.
That was it. The school still maintains every student file, though they can only be viewed by the student or with the student’s permission. I looked at my own a few years back. For the most part, there was nothing remarkable, but my professor in freshman year Spanish, a class I ended up dropping, suspected that I had “adjustment” problems and perhaps could benefit from seeing the school psychologist. That was crap, of course. I was terrible at Spanish—foreign languages are my academic Achilles’ heel—and you’re allowed a freshman drop to maintain your GPA. The note had been in the professor’s own handwriting, and that somehow made it worse.
The point?
There could be something in Todd’s file, if I could figure a way to finagle it, that would tell me something about him. You might ask, “Like what?” I might reply, “I have no friggin’ idea.” It still felt like a place to start.
So what else?
The obvious: Check in on Natalie. If I found her still happily married to her Todd, I would be able to drop this immediately. That was the most direct route here, wasn’t it? The question was, how?
I continued an online search, hoping to stumble across an address or a clue, but there was absolutely nothing. I know that we supposedly live our entire lives online nowadays, but I have found this not to be the case. If a person wanted to stay in the shadows, they could. It took effort, but you really could remain off the grid.
The question might be, why would you expend the effort?
I debated calling her sister, if I could find the number, but what exactly would I say? “Hi, uh, this is Jake Fisher, your sister’s old, uh, fling. Um, did Natalie’s husband die?”
That might be a tough approach.
I remembered listening to a phone conversation between the two sisters where Natalie gushingly told Julie, “Oh man, wait till you meet my wonderful boyfriend . . .” And, yep, we did eventually meet. Sort of. At Natalie’s wedding to another man.
Her father was dead. Her mom, well, that would be the same problem as with the sister. Friends of Natalie’s . . . that was an issue too. Natalie and I had spent our time together in retreats in Kraftboro, Vermont. I was at one to write my political science dissertation, Natalie was doing her art at the neighboring farm-cum- retreat. I was supposed to stay six weeks. I stayed double that because, one, I met Natalie, and two, I lost focus on my writing after I met Natalie. I had never visited her hometown in northern New Jersey, and she had only come to campus for one brief visit. Our relationship had stayed in that Vermont bubble.
I can almost see the head nods now. Ah, you think, that explains it. It was a summer romance, built in an unreal world of no responsibilities or reality. Under those conditions, it is easy for love and obsession to bloom without taking root, only to wither and die when the cold of September rolled around. Natalie, being the more
