Twice

comes back?” said Lydia.

“Julian’s twin?”

She handed the photograph to Jeffrey. “More information not provided by our client,” he said, handing the photograph back to her.

“Sounds like it’s time to fire the old hag,” said Dax.

“I want to make one more stop before we do,” said Lydia.

“My thoughts exactly,” said Jeff, taking her arm. “The emergency room.”

***

At first glance, Dr. Franklin Wetterau had the look of a man who had swabbed a million throats, delivered a thousand babies, and listened to endless lists of symptoms and ailments ranging from the common cold to stomach cancer. He looked as though he’d offered countless words of comfort, advice, and reprimand with the same gentle smile and knowing eyes he now turned on Lydia as she sat bruised and tired on his examining table. Dr. Wetterau was an old-fashioned country doctor, with his small office in the back of his old Victorian home on Maple Street.

The nearest hospital was over thirty miles away, so Dr. Wetterau was apparently the man to call with minor emergencies day or night, or so they were told at the gas station where they stopped for directions, the very same gas station, in fact, where they’d stopped earlier. There was a different slack-jawed attendant now on shift. The young man-Hank, if the embroidered name on his striped uniform shirt was to be believed-gave them the good doctor’s number. Of course, the earlier attendant had also worn a shirt with the name Hank embroidered on it. Were they both named Hank or were they sharing a shirt? Lydia wondered pointlessly, as “Hank” stared into the Rover at her and Dax, whose bruised and bloody condition was definitely notable.

They’d walked a narrow path along the back of the house as per the instructions the doctor gave Jeffrey over the phone and the old man was waiting for them at the door. Lydia saw him look them each up and down, his expression betraying neither shock, wonder, nor judgment, just a mild curiosity. Inside, a woman in a neat red dressing gown, trimmed with white, looking like nothing so much as Mrs. Claus with a wide pink face framed by graying hair in a bun on the crown of her head, sat primly at a small reception desk and took their names and addresses, entering the information into some type of logbook. She offered them water or tea and, when they declined, retired through a door marked private that Lydia assumed led to their home.

Alone with the doctor now, Jeff and Dax sitting out in the waiting room, Dax’s cut newly cleaned and stitched, Jeff she assumed sinking into a foul mood and plotting ways to keep her locked up forever, Lydia sat stiffly as the doctor shone a light into each of her eyes.

“Mrs. Smith,” he said, “what kind of an accident did you say you, your husband, and your, uh, brother were involved in?”

“We didn’t, Doctor,” Lydia answered calmly.

The doctor nodded, reaching into a small refrigerator and offering her a gel icepack wrapped in an Ace bandage pouch. She pressed it to the side of her head, the cold and the pain causing her to feel light-headed again. She lay back, hearing the crinkle of the sanitary paper over the vinyl table. The sound reminded her of childhood visits to the doctor, her mother, and how nice it was to feel cared for when you were sick.

“You do appear to have a mild concussion, Mrs. Smith. Now, I don’t have the proper equipment here to check on the health of your baby. And I’m going to suggest that you get to your OB as soon as possible. But I will tell you that any type of trauma to the mother will put the fetus at risk. So my other suggestion is that you minimize your exposure to situations where you are vulnerable to, uh, accidents.”

She turned to look at him and even though things were a bit on the fuzzy side, his eyes, the clearest blue she’d ever seen, were intelligent and a bit stern. She felt like he knew her, though they were strangers to each other. In him she recognized her own ability to intuit the truth about people, about who they truly were, by noticing small details, the things they said and didn’t say. Everybody has a face they wear, the one they want people to see, to recognize as their true face. And for a few people, you get what you see. But usually there’s something more beneath the surface, something hidden. The furtive gesture, the shifting glance, the tapping foot offered so much, revealed facets of personality that people tried to hide. Lydia had always possessed the ability to see quickly through facades. Tonight she wondered what this doctor saw when he looked at her. Someone careless, someone reckless, someone more concerned with chasing investigations than she was for the life of her child. Someone scared that she was not up to the responsibility about to be bestowed upon her. Someone running from her own problems by burying herself in nightmares that belonged to someone else.

“That’s not always possible in my line of work,” she said, feeling a little defensive.

He placed a hand on her arm. “Then take a vacation,” he said gently.

His hand was big and warm, slightly callused. He looked like someone’s daddy, someone’s grandpa, the man who was always there for his family, the one everybody leaned on. She wondered what it would have been like to grow up with a man like that as your father. Life would be easier, she was sure. Decisions would be a lot less daunting. There would be fewer questions about what was right and wrong when you had someone like Dr. Wetterau to ask. Lydia fought the urge to cry; pregnancy was making her more emotional than she liked.

She managed a nod and sat up slowly. “You might be right,” she admitted.

He kept watching her with those eyes and she started to feel a twinge of discomfort. When she returned his glance, her vision sharper than it had been a moment earlier, she saw he had the eyes of a combat soldier. There was a look a man got on his face when people had died at his hands. It was as if a piece of cosmic truth had been revealed to him that others never even glimpse, and as if that knowledge had come to rest in the color of his eyes. It’s there even when he’s laughing or looking on you with eyes of love. Her grandfather had eyes like that, as if the slightest trigger could start a cavalcade of images too awful to share with anyone who hadn’t been there, who didn’t know. But Lydia thought maybe if she looked deeply enough into the abyss of his pupils, she would see it all there playing like a movie on a screen, as if his eyes had a memory of their own. She saw it in Dr. Wetterau, clear as day.

“Did you know the Ross children?” Shot in the dark.

He rubbed the side of his face thoughtfully and looked at her as if deciding whether it was in either of their best interests to answer her question.

“I did,” he answered, letting the sentence dangle.

“Julian and…,” she said, hoping he’d finish the sentence for her.

“Is that why you and your friends are here? Are you looking for him?”

Lydia didn’t answer, but cast her eyes down as if her clever ruse had been uncovered. “Do you know where he is?” she asked after a moment.

“James? I know where he belongs,” he answered. “But he hasn’t been there for over ten years.”

“Where’s that?”

“On my recommendation, his family committed him to Fishkill Facility, a psychiatric hospital not far from here.”

“What for?”

“He tried to burn down his family home, his mother and sister along with it,” said the doctor with a sad shake of his head. “A very disturbed young man.”

“Did he say why he did it?”

“He claimed that his mother and sister had put a curse on him and that the only way to save himself was to burn them both and the house. The house, he believed, held all their negative energy.”

“He thought they were witches?”

“Sometimes,” said the doctor with a shrug. “There was that, and his bizarre obsession with Julian. He believed that her body housed the spirit of his true love from another life and that her soul could only be free if Julian died. He was later diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. At first he was largely unresponsive to medication. But after many years of treatment, he graduated to a work release program. One night, after his shift at a library was over, he didn’t return to the facility. That was ten years ago.” The memory seemed to sadden the doctor. “He was the first person I thought of when I heard the news about Julian’s husband.”

“Which one?”