Since then, Skyler had felt so many conflicting emotions toward her he didn't know what to feel. When she was in the same room, he hung on her every word and her every movement, and he was hard pressed to pay attention to anything else. When she was away, he thought of her all the time. There were moments when she did recall Julia to him, the way she turned her head or sat curled up on her legs in the chair or sharpened the inflection of her voice. Sometimes the gestures were so vividly familiar that she seemed to be Julia reincarnated, and during those moments, Skyler had to turn away to contain himself. He felt elated almost, as if he had been given a second chance — like the time Julia had walked out of the woods.
Then there were other times when her gestures and intonation and all the little actions of how she presented herself to the world would be off. During those times she seemed such a poor counterfeit that it only caused him to ache for the real Julia, and it actually made him mad. It made him angry at the Lab and all those who ran it, and even, for some reason, at Tizzie herself.
He didn't know which was worse. At either extreme — whether she seemed to be like Julia or not at all like her — she aroused a confusion of passions that overwhelmed him. And it was even harder to shuttle from one extreme to the other — traveling from hope to despair and back to hope again. It was an emotional roller coaster that left him dizzy and exhausted.
But on a practical level, the level of his survival, what did her existence mean? What did it tell him about the mystery of the Lab and those who ruled the island? How could it be that there were two sets of identical-looking people whose lives were so interwoven? And if there were two, were there others? He needed to know more and to find out more, and until he did, he would not reveal the little that he did know. For the safety of the woman and perhaps for his own safety, too, he resolved to keep her resemblance to Julia a secret, no matter what — even from Jude.
Lying on the rumpled bed, lost in his thoughts and perspiring madly, Skyler came down to earth with a jolt. He heard something, a sound outside his door. Footsteps! And not a normal tread, but rather something lighter, as if the person was trying to sneak up to the door.
He rose steathily and crept to the door between the bedroom and kitchen, and he listened. He thought he heard the footsteps stop on the landing outside his door, and he thought he could sense a person there, thinking, waiting. Was it real or not? He decided not to wait to find out.
He ran across the bedroom and flung open the window. Right outside was a peculiar metal casing attached to the building, a series of ladders that led down. He turned and listened: did he hear someone knocking on his door? He couldn't be sure. He stepped out onto the metal grating, uncertain if it would hold him, and now there was so much noise outside he couldn't hear the knocking anymore. He hesitated no longer, but bounded down the metal ladder, feeling it shake madly with his weight. He ran along a platform on the floor below and then down another ladder and then to another floor and another ladder.
He looked up. Was that a dark shadow above through the metal strips, a head sticking out his window? He could not tell. He ran across another platform and felt the metal structure shaking. He made it to the lowest ladder, but it did not reach the ground, and just as he started down, he heard a ripping noise and felt a vibration that shook so strongly, he fell. He landed on the ground and, looking up, he saw that the ladder had slipped down and was resting in the air only a few feet above his head. He leapt up and ran as fast as he could, and as he rounded the corner and came into an alley, he almost bumped into the super, who looked at him with his mouth open.
But Skyler did not stop. He dashed out into the main street, filled with passersby who looked inquisitively down the alley and at him. He kept running, all the way up Astor Place, one block, then two, then three and four, running blindly and as fast as he could through the streets of the city.
McNichol sounded pleased with himself. He had come up with an answer for Jude, and he sounded like the man Jude had met the first time around — the effusive medical examiner who had given a guided tour of a corpse, not the one whose DNA test had fingered a living judge as a murder victim. He had insisted upon giving the answer to what he called "your little riddle" in person, which was odd. Why couldn't he just do it over the phone? He said he was coming to New York on business and would meet Jude precisely at four o'clock that afternoon. He gave an address on Foley Square, which Jude jotted down. It sounded vaguely familiar.
Jude was still trying to dodge assignments at the office. He hadn't written a story in days, and he was afraid he was acquiring that guilty hangdog look reporters get when they're not in the paper. It was worth a detour to avoid the bulletin board where the city editor had tacked up his favorite slogan: "You're Only As Good As Your Last Story."
Just as he was about to down a cup of coffee, his sixth of the morning, he heard his name out over the loudspeaker — the city editor was summoning him to the Metro desk. He took his time getting there, and when he did, he found Bolevil in a foul mood.
"What're you working on?" he demanded, in his grating Australian accent.
"The New Paltz murder. There're a lot of loose ends to it, and I think it could turn into something big."
"New Paltz — Shit! I thought you were told to drop that."
"No, not at all."
"I don't get it. Why are you still following that piece of shit?"
"Nobody told me otherwise."
"But I thought you were off that. Orders from—"
"Who? Orders from who?"
"Never mind. As of right now, you don't go near that story — you hear me? Jesus. New Paltz. Fuck me."
Like many of his countrymen, when Bolevil said "Fuck me," he meant "Fuck you." If the direction of his aggression was uncertain, the depth of it was not, and a small crowd had gathered at the nearby rewrite bank, enjoying Jude's discomfort. He couldn't blame them. Watching Bolevil chew people out was a favorite newsroom pastime. But it wasn't really a blood sport, because the city editor carried little authority — only what he could muster by invoking Tibbett's name, which he did increasingly during times of stress.
"We'll find something for you to do." The city editor shouted over to a clerk. "You got anything?"
A young man held up a piece of wire copy. "Construction workers acting up again, some kind of demonstration."
"Too good for him," bellowed Bolevil. His face turned red as a tomato. "I want something in East New York. Bed-Sty. Brownsville."
The red phone rang — the hot line from Tibbett — and the editor lunged for it. His voice transformed itself into something dulcet, and he promptly forgot Jude, who beat a hasty retreat back to his cubicle.
Jude called a friend, Chuck Roberts, the Sunday editor. Some years back, Jude had helped Roberts through a messy divorce, thereby incurring a debt of gratitude that was being paid off on the installment plan.