My breath left my chest. I grabbed her shoulders and hissed in her face, “How do you know all that?”
“How do you think? You told me.”
I stared at her face in the starlight and tried to make sense of this woman. She was a doctor and a psychiatrist, but she was something more, too. I didn’t know exactly what it was, but she had an enigmatic quality about her, as if she could seduce people with her mind. I felt the spell she cast pulling me into her orbit. She was beautiful, sensual, unforgettable. A magician. I could picture being with her in her office. I could hear my own voice telling her secrets about myself.
But it had never happened.
“This therapy,” I went on. “What did I experience?”
“You told me you saw other Dylans from other worlds. You interacted with them. You went into their lives.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“You believed it.”
“What did I see?”
“If you want to know that, you should go back inside your head. Try it and see for yourself.”
“No thanks.”
“Are you sure? You told me after one session that you wished you could stay in the world you found. You were tempted to take over that other Dylan’s life.”
“None of that is real,” I said.
“How do you know? Frankly, I wasn’t sure before we began, but your experience made me a believer. The Many Worlds theory is true. We really do take every road that’s open to us. In some other world, you and I never met. We’re passing each other by the lake right now like strangers. In another world, we’re having sex. In another, you’re holding me under the water and drowning me.”
I flinched at the violent image. “Drowning you? Why on earth would you say something like that?”
“Because that’s why you came to me, Dylan,” Eve said. “You said you were having visions of killing people, and yet these people were still alive. But you could give me details, dates, descriptions, methods of how you’d murdered them. You wanted my help. You were afraid you were on the verge of becoming a serial killer.”
Chapter 8
Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror — I mean, really looked at yourself — and wondered who you were?
What kind of person lives behind your eyes?
That was how I felt at that moment. I no longer had any idea what to believe about Dylan Moran. Eve had told me things about myself that seemed impossible, and yet they also made sense in a crazy way. If my personality had split apart, if another side of me was living a different life that I knew nothing about, then maybe my mind was projecting that second Dylan Moran into my hallucinations.
I was seeing myself. Talking to the other version of myself. Somehow, my brain was bringing my second personality to life, and what I knew about that personality scared me. When I was him, I didn’t know what I was capable of doing.
Why are you here?
To kill.
I needed something I could hold on to, some kind of driftwood in the sea that would keep me afloat. I needed Karly, or at least a reminder of her. So I took a cab north along the lakeshore toward the house where Karly’s parents lived. There were faster ways out of the city, but I asked the driver to take the slow route along Sheridan Road, and I told him I’d make it up to him in the tip. Karly and I had taken this road many times when we were visiting her parents. She liked to see the neighborhoods change, from the green fields of Lincoln Park to the academic neighborhoods of Loyola and Northwestern, and then to the lakeside mansions of Evanston, Kenilworth, and Winnetka.
Personally, I just thought she wasn’t in a hurry to see her mother.
Susannah Chance lived in a stone mansion that dated to the 1930s. It looked like a Tudor castle, with bay windows, tall austere chimneys, and sharp gables. Yes, Karly’s father lived here, too, but this was the House That Susannah Built. Karly’s father, Tom, was a published poet and high school English teacher who would have been just as happy living in a one-bedroom apartment near Wrigley Field. Susannah, however, was the force of nature behind Chance Properties, and her Wilmette estate was the ostentatious symbol of her success.
I had the cab let me off on Sheridan Road, and I walked the last hundred yards under the old-growth trees. I was white and wearing nice clothes, which probably protected me from someone calling the cops. The people in this neighborhood had itchy 911 fingers. When I got to the Chance house, the lights were off, which wasn’t surprising given the late hour. I didn’t want to talk to Susannah or Tom. Instead, I let myself into the fenced backyard and made my way through the gardens to Karly’s dollhouse.
You can call it a dollhouse, but at more than a thousand square feet, it was bigger than our Lincoln Square apartment. That tells you how far down in the world Karly came to live with me. When she turned twenty-two, she moved out of the main estate and into the dollhouse, which was all the independence that her mother would allow her. She was still living there when we met, so I’d spent a lot of time in this strange fairy-tale world. I’d had a key for years, and I knew the security code.
When I went inside, Karly may as well have been a ghost rattling chains at me, because her presence was so strong. Her school pictures were on the walls and her dance trophies and poetry books on the shelves. She hadn’t lived here in three years, but her mother still kept it like a shrine, decorated with furniture she’d picked out for Karly at age sixteen. Susannah probably hoped that her daughter would eventually come to her senses, dump me, and move back home where she belonged.
I sat down in a beat-up leather chair that overlooked the garden. The chair came from Karly’s father, and I think he gave it to Karly for the dollhouse rather than let his wife take it away to Goodwill. It was a man’s chair, ugly and incredibly comfortable, and it looked out of place amid pink wallpaper and sunflower quilts. I’d spent weeks in this chair after Roscoe was killed. With my arm and leg in casts, I was essentially immobile, and Karly did everything for me. We barely knew each other, but she was my caregiver. And soon after that, my lover.
The last time I’d been here was six months ago, in January. She’d called me from the office on a Tuesday morning and said she needed to get away, and could I meet her in the dollhouse? I said yes, but I got there late. I was always late. Work always came first. As I came in from outside, I brought cold wind and snow flurries with me. Karly had made a winter picnic for us, spreading out a blanket on the floor and opening wine and laying out a Mediterranean lunch of hummus, grape leaves, and pita.
She stood on the other side of the dollhouse, where a fire in the fireplace warmed her bare legs. The chill had pinked up her face. Her breasts swelled with each calm breath. She stared at me with a kind of forever seriousness, just the barest smile on her lips. I swear, she was like a painting that way, frozen in her beauty. A Manet. A Vermeer.
“What’s the occasion?” I asked.
“Nothing. I love you, that’s all.”
“I love you, too.”
It was hard to imagine a more perfect moment, but looking back, I knew that very day was when things had begun to fall apart for us. I could draw a line from our lunch in the dollhouse to her foolish affair with Scotty Ryan to the last speech she’d given me that weekend in the country.
If I’d been paying attention, I would have noticed that Karly was unusually quiet. She was off somewhere in her own world, and she never took time off in the middle of the day unless something was wrong. I should have looked behind her peaceful smile, but instead, I was blind. I poured wine, and we sat across from each other on the blanket, with the fire crackling beside us.