The person, Gary believed, inside all of us.
Only a small group of these were aware of coming back. To keep the rest of us sane, secure in our identities, we were happy to have the second soul fenced off, gagged and occluded from our conscious minds. When something leaked through the wall in our head—a piece of déjà vu, a dream about somewhere we’d never been, a confused body image, a facility for a foreign language or a musical instrument, the simple feeling that we should be somewhere else and having some other life—we shrugged it away as being merely the human condition: fucked up, fractured, never masters of our own minds.
Gary even had a scientific rationale. It was an adaptation, he said—and the real reason humans ruled the world. At some point on the flat, grassy plains of Africa or in the cold mountains of Europe, our species derived evolutionary advantage from being able to support two souls within a single body. The modern soul didn’t realize but was able to make intuitive decisions—lifesaving and thus naturally selecting calls—on the basis of experience gained in the intruding soul’s previous lives. But there was a cost. When the souls cooperated, the person worked. When they didn’t, the person was damaged. Broken, dysfunctional, violent, alcoholic. This was why some of us are mentally ill, or bipolar, or just can’t get our shit together, and seem to enter the world like that.
The soul goes somewhere for a while, but then it comes back, forcing its way into children, into our babies. Then it waits, consolidating, growing in power, until the time is right. Why do we hear nothing about Jesus until he was in his mid-thirties, Gary asked? Because that was when the intruder was mature, ready to assume control. Any internal threat to the security of the system was dealt with swiftly, as he claimed Salieri had done with Mozart, when the latter grew disenchanted and worn out and started dropping hints in his work, disguising them as hidden references to Freemasonry. And why had Jesus himself never returned, as he promised? He got lost on the other side, was just another shadow among those who Bill Anderson’s machine would have enabled us to glimpse, had it not been destroyed.
And so on.
There was more of it. Too much to read or believe, far too much evidence for it to be true. I didn’t know what to think about the person who’d been my wife, about what had caused her to change. But I couldn’t help wondering if I’d helped caused Gary’s obsession, through something I’d said by the side of a running track long ago, if my dumb comment had lain festering at the back of his mind all these years, as Donna’s death had, gradually taking over his mind. I closed the document.
The final file on the disk was another picture. When it came up onto the screen, I caught my breath. It was a photograph of Gary, with Bethany. A badge on her dress said she was two years old that day, which meant that the picture must have been taken only a few weeks before she died. She had a big old slab of cake in one hand and whipped cream all over her face and in her hair—and was grinning up at her father, her eyes bright with the shine of someone gazing upon one of the two glowing souls who make up her entire world.
The picture had been taken indoors, with flash, and was very sharp. I magnified it and scrolled to the area at the side of Bethany’s right eye, then sat there looking at it for a long time.
She did have a scar there. Small, crescent-shaped.
When I closed my eyes, I knew, as Gary had, where I’d seen that scar before.
I walked into town. It took a long time. Pushing through six inches of snow caused a sharp pull in my shoulder and neck with every step. By then I had accepted the pain. There was no escape from it.
Birch Crossing was almost empty of cars, but Sam’s Market was open. I walked alone along the aisles, staring without comprehension at all the things you could buy. My hand hovered over a can of sauerkraut for some time, but then I realized I didn’t know why I liked it and left it where it was.
When I got to the checkout, Sam himself was standing there. He bagged my few purchases without saying a word, but as I shuffled toward the exit, he spoke.
“Could get the boy to bring things up to you at the house,” he said. “If you wanted.”
I stopped, turned. I remembered the last time I’d seen him, at the gathering at Bobbi Zimmerman’s house. I thought it was unlikely I would be buying anything in Birch Crossing again, but I nodded.
“Thank you.”
“Need to look after that shoulder,” he said.
I hadn’t managed to make much sense of this by the time I struggled back to the road that led to the house. And by then I’d noticed that the gate had been pushed wide open and there were tire tracks leading up our drive.
A car I’d never seen before was sitting next to the SUV. I let myself into the house and went to the top of the stairs to look down.
A man was sitting on my sofa.
I went back to the kitchen. Poured a cup of coffee from the pot. I had gotten badly chilled on the walk back. I took the coffee down the stairs and sat in the chair opposite the sofa. The man had a cup on the table in front of him.
“Make yourself at home,” I said.
“The keys,” Shepherd said, nodding toward the table. “Rose doesn’t need them anymore.”
“Why are you here?”
He reached into his coat, pulled out my gun and my cell phone. Put these on the coffee table, too. Then finally the clip from the gun. “How’s the shoulder?”
“How do you think?”
“It was nothing personal. You just looked like the kind of man who would get in the way.”
“You killed a friend of mine.”
“Like I said. Nothing personal.”
“You’re the second person who’s shown concern for my shoulder this afternoon.”
“I assume you’ve figured out that this town is one of their places? A headquarters?”
“I was getting there. I chanced upon a pre-meeting celebration, I think, at my neighbors’. Are there a lot of towns like this?”
“Only two in this country. There aren’t many of these people, all told.”
“And who are they, exactly?”
“I assume Rose gave you the wacky version. She likes to kid around sometimes. They’re just a club, Mr. Whalen. Like the Masons. The Rotarians. The Bohemian Grove. Successful people who scratch one anothers’ backs. Some of them have this mythology thing going. Doesn’t mean anything. It’s like having Santa Claus as an excuse to give presents at Christmas. Nothing more.”
I looked at the stuff on the table. “How come I’m getting these back?”
“They’re yours, and the big meeting is over. Evidently you were discussed.”
He reached into his coat once more, brought out a small box, which he put on the table next to the other objects. “If you decide to accept, walk up the hill and talk to Mr. Zimmerman. He’ll explain the deal.”
“Whatever it is, I’m not doing it.”
He rose. “That’s up to you.”
I watched as he ascended the stairs. At the front door, he stopped, turned.
“Let me just make one thing clear,” he said. “These people only take yes-or-no answers. If it’s no, someone will come to call on you. That won’t be personal either.”
He left.
I picked up the cell phone first. Amy’s number had been removed, along with Rose’s, and the call log had been erased. I could look up Amy’s number easily, of course, but I knew that there would be no point. If I hoped ever to see her again, it would not come about through a phone call. At the moment I had no idea what an alternative course of action might be.
I put the phone back and moved the small box toward me. Inside were business cards, printed on pure white stock. There was nothing on them but a name, or perhaps it was a job title.