She laughed quietly. “Yeah, provisional certainty. The times we live in, right?”
“Right.” They walked maybe ten paces before Lee said, “So there was this guy who looked, I mean, he looked exactly like me?”
“Oh, yes,” she said quietly, a little shudder in her voice. “There is this guy, and he looks exactly like you.”
“You said is. You said there is this guy.”
“That’s right. I did. Guys like him, they don’t die young. They last, and they keep on doing what they do.”
“What does this guy do?”
“He hurt me. That’s what he did to me, and he liked it. It started when we were in high school, and it just kept happening even though I loved him and he loved me and I tried every way I could to make him stop.”
“Wait a minute. Let’s go back.” But Lee wasn’t sure what to go back to, or how far, or where this might take them. He knew now that he looked exactly like a guy who liked to hurt people. And he knew, he thought he knew, that he was not that kind of guy. So the resemblance was exact only as it pertained to the outsides of two men. Lee had been stupid, for sure, but he had never been a hurter, and especially not of women, unless usually being less than they expected him to be, hoped he was, was hurting them, and come to think of it now, here on this beach, he supposed it was.
“So,” he said, “you’re saying I let you down because I didn’t realize when we were eighteen years old that You promised me you wouldn’t come meant this guy was hurting you?”
“I didn’t say it was fair, I just said it was true.”
“Jesus,” Lee whispered.
“He didn’t help me either. I prayed to him a lot in those days. What I said to you, I said it because he was there, he was watching us. He wasn’t a student. He kept that part of his promise. He never went to school anywhere after we graduated from Leesburg High. And he stayed home and worked on his dad’s farm for a few weeks after I left, but then he followed me. When I said those things to you, I was speaking... to a symbol. I saw you the very first day in chemistry, and of course I thought you were him. Then I realized you weren’t, and I thought I could use you to get him away from me. I thought maybe when he knew he had a double, he might take it as, I don’t know, some kind of message.”
“A message?”
“You know, like God or fate or something telling him to get out of my life. Showing him that there was another one of him, a good boy, a boy who wouldn’t hurt me, right there in the same class with me. There by the grace of some power that was bigger than his hurting.”
It had been a long time since anybody had called Lee Taylor a good boy. It hurt him now to realize this. “So you thought I’d do what, say what? I’d somehow... decode this message, know I was a symbol, and come after you, find you, and help you?”
“I guess I did. I thought if God had made two of you, He had the power to send you to me. I was desperate. You probably don’t know what that’s like.”
Lee didn’t know. Not really. His life had been a series of jobs he did pretty well but cared little about, a lot of time in bars, a few friends but no one he could depend on in a pinch, and those disappointed women who always saw enough in him to stay for a while, and always saw too little to make it last.
“No,” he said, “I guess I don’t know about that, not really.”
Up ahead Lee could see where two sets of footprints came from the low dunes to their left, went to the waterline, and then headed south the way he and Helen Trenam were going. When they caught up with the footprints, he saw that one set belonged to a man who wore shoes. The other feet were bare and small, a woman’s or a child’s.
“So how did you finally get away from this guy?”
She said it so quietly that he asked her to repeat it: “I didn’t.”
“You mean...?”
“I mean I’ve been with him ever since, and he’s hurt me one way or another every day of my life. Every day since I appealed to you in chemistry class.”
In spite of his sympathy for this woman, Lee felt that he had to defend himself. “Look, is that really fair? I mean, how could I know what you were saying? What you wanted me to do? And anyway, what did you want me to do? What could I have done back then? I was just a kid. I didn’t know up from down.”
Afraid to look over at her, he saw only the tips of her fingers in his peripheral vision. She was pointing ahead of them at the thin strip of beach by the old jetty.
“Look at that,” she said. “Isn’t that something lying on the beach?”
Lying? “Yeah, I see it. What is it?”
“I don’t know. We’ll see, I guess.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t—”
“We have to, now. Now that we’ve seen it. We can’t just turn back.”
“I guess you’re right.”
They walked on, Lee looking down from time to time at the footprints they followed, a man’s and a woman’s, barefooted. When they got close enough to see that it was a man lying on the beach near the surf, his head below his feet, Lee looked back at the four sets of footprints behind him. The two sets of barefooted prints were identical. It’s been awhile since I’ve had sand between my toes.
“Hey,” he said, “I think maybe we ought to—”
Two men stepped out of the shadows at the base of the jetty and walked toward them.
The big one was Frank Dross. The other one was Lee’s double. The man at their feet was obviously dead. Even in the sparse light from a streetlamp on Gulf Way, Lee could see that the man’s face was black from the blood that had run to it because his feet were elevated. Blood leaked from a wound in his chest. Frank Dross drew a gun from the pocket of his brown polyester suit coat. “Hey there, my buddy Lee.”
But Lee was staring at the man who looked exactly like him. It was more than extraordinary. Even in the face of Dross’s gun and with a dead man at his feet, Lee stared, searched for any difference that the years since that chemistry class might have made between himself and this man whose name he didn’t know.
Helen Trenam said, “I brought him.” Her voice sounded tired, not even the smallest revelation of sorrow or guilt or triumph in it. Nothing but the sound of years of hurt.
“We see that,” Lee’s double said. “And we appreciate it.”
Helen Trenam took four steps to the side, as though to get out of the way of something.
Frank Dross pointed the gun at Lee. Lee’s heart shrank to a dead black dot in his chest. It was all he could do to keep from falling to his knees. Somehow, to keep standing was a small victory.
“Well,” Lee’s double said, “we have to hurry. This beach isn’t big enough for four people and a dead man.” Even his voice sounded like Lee’s.
“Tell him, Barry,” Frank Dross said. “He deserves an explanation.”
“I was about to, Frank.” Lee’s double pulled a gun from his back pocket and pointed it at Lee’s chest. “Maybe you’ve already figured this out, Lee. You look exactly like me, and for reasons that don’t really matter to you right now, I had to kill this man here, and a very good way for me to get away with this crime is for you to stay here with him.”
“Stay here?” Lee heard his own voice quaver.
“Yeah, I’m afraid so,” his double said. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? The cops find you here with this guy, and they find two guns, and they figure the obvious.”
Lee’s mind flailed. “But what about those footprints.”
“What footprints?”
“Those, them. All of them.” Lee pointed to the beach behind them, then at the sand along the edge of the jetty where footprints came from Gulf Way. “They’ll know you were here.”