Cast of Shadows - v4 (10 page)

“No, I certainly didn’t,” she said.

Neither did Barwick. She was making it up. “Oh, we know what the battles were like, and what went on in the Senate. And we have their myths. And plays.” Were there Roman playwrights? There were Greek ones, for sure. She should have used the Greeks as an example. “But we don’t have the everyday stuff.”

“Well, what can I do for you?”

“If it’s not too big an imposition, I’d just like to have a chat. Ask a few questions. Have a conversation. Then I’ll go, and you’ll never see me again. Although you
will
get a fifty-dollar check from the university.” She wondered how she would get a University of Chicago check. “Or from our grant office, anyway.” That sounded easier to fake.

“Sounds lovely,” Mrs. Lundquist said, and it occurred to Barwick that this could be a case study of why old people made such easy marks for scam artists and grifters. She wasn’t here to con the lady, though. Not really. This was legitimate business.

Barwick burned the first disc discussing life in Watertown, New York. Mrs. Lundquist liked to walk when the weather was fair, so every evening she wrote a letter to a friend or a relative and the next morning she walked it to the post office. She’d sometimes stop by Great American and pick up groceries, just a bagful, but in six days or so, she’d accumulate two weeks’ worth. On Wednesdays, a man from the store named Harvey delivered bags too heavy for her to carry.

By disc two, they were on to family.

Her husband died last year of heart disease. She had three sons, one who had moved west to Buffalo, another who’d settled south in Atlanta, and the youngest was killed in a skiing accident about nine years ago. That was the one Barwick had come to hear about. But she was patient. There wasn’t any reason to rush her.

“What happened to Eric was a horrible thing,” Mrs. Lundquist said. “But it was an accident. Eric was a fantastic skier. Fantastic.”

“What did Eric do?”

“What did he do? When he died, he was still a student. A senior at Cornell. He was interested in social service. He was always trying to save people, involved in those campus protests, peaceful ones. He thought about the Peace Corps, or teaching in the inner city. Don and I thought he’d end up a guidance counselor. He was a very good listener. So smart.”

“Do you have any pictures of Eric?” Barwick asked. “Any of your kids, I mean. Just to put names to faces.”

Mrs. Lundquist’s face glowed like filament. “Of course.”

The Finns hadn’t asked for pictures. In fact, they’d specifically told Big Rob they didn’t want to see any photos of Eric Lundquist, and that was passed on when the assignment was handed off to Barwick. They didn’t want to know what Justin would look like as a teen, or as an adult. But Barwick wanted to see. She had never met a clone before. She wanted the thrill of looking into a photograph and seeing the grown-up face of this baby boy, photos of whom she had in the glove compartment of her rental car out front.

Mrs. Lundquist, still spry, was up the stairs and down in less than a minute. On her return, she had three faux-leather-bound three-ring albums in her hands. Barwick moved to the couch and they propped the albums open across their laps. The Lundquist boys were all handsome — tall, blond, broad-shouldered, thin-waisted, with beautiful hands and sculpted legs. She particularly noticed Eric’s softball-sized calves. Even from photos, she could see that Eric was special. Barwick tried to recall her high school days (not so long ago, she told herself), and yeah, she’d have had a crush on Eric. Her friends and she would have made him the stuff of phone gossip. They would have memorized his class schedule. They would have secretly hated his girlfriend.

“Did Eric have a girlfriend?”

Mrs. Lundquist smiled. “He was shy, but very popular with girls. Did you know he was a lifeguard at Lynde Lake? I’m sorry. Of course you didn’t. In high school, he dated the student council president. She was a lovely girl, Glynnis. I still have lunch with her mother once a week. Do you know that Glynnis is a broker on Wall Street now?”

“That’s unusual,” Barwick said.

“For a girl? It sure is. Eric saw one or two girls in college. No one serious enough to bring home. Don and I met a gal down in Ithaca once, when we picked him up. She was Indian — you know, from Asia. I can’t remember her name. It was hard to pronounce.”

“That’s okay.”

The photos preserved the boys’ lives in more or less equal amounts. For the older ones, however, there were recent pics with their current families, posed shots with the wife and kids in their living rooms and nearby parks. Eric’s gallery ended the summer before his senior year, when he was about twenty.

One of the pictures showed Eric sitting high in his white painted chair at Lynde Lake. His head was turned over his right shoulder, toward the camera, and he was making a saluting gesture with his hand. Barwick guessed he was about eighteen here. Happy. Invincible.

“Hunh,” Barwick said, accidentally out loud.

“What’s that?” Mrs. Lundquist asked.

“Oh. Well. Hmm. Did Eric ever have any surgery?”

“You mean was he hurt? No. Never before his accident. Not a day in the hospital.”

“Not even elective work?”

“You mean plastic surgery?” Mrs. Lundquist looked amused. “Gosh, no.”

“Hunh,” Barwick said again.

“Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” she said. “He was a beautiful son.”

“You’re a dear,” Mrs. Lundquist said, and after eating a single M&M, she started to tell Barwick about the time in sixth grade when Eric slept all night in a closet to hide from 7 a.m. clarinet lessons.

Years ago, Davis had tried to get Jackie interested in her own family history, but even talking about it bored her. “I’m much more interested in my family
present,
” she said, one of thousands of unsubtle jabs she had leveled over the years at his eighty-hour office schedule.

Working from some old photographs and letters Jackie inherited from her mother, Davis constructed an incomplete chart of her clan going back five generations, and presented it to her in a frame one Mother’s Day. Jackie said she liked it and hung it in a spare bedroom where she kept her treadmill and her sewing and craft supplies. When Anna Kat assembled a seventh-grade project on her ancestors (basically cribbing years of her father’s work inside a slim decorative binder), she used her mother’s chart as a demonstration piece to explain the terms and techniques of genealogy and received an A from her teacher. Shortly after AK died, perhaps as soon as the day after, Jackie took the chart down and Davis hadn’t seen or asked about it since. He understood why looking at it was so difficult; he felt pain as well as pleasure these days when he sorted through his own family files. Those manila folders and index cards represented real lives to him, just as the files in his office, with the names of cloned boys and girls, represented children who were now loving and being loved. The difference with the files at home was that many of his relatives no longer existed outside of his little blue room. When he pulled a card on his great-great-uncle Vic and updated his date of birth or his social security number, he was certain to be the only living person who thought about long-dead Vic that day. There was sadness to that — bitter-sweetness — but such simple and melancholy tributes to the dead were also satisfying. He didn’t look forward to the day when he could think about Anna Kat and not be hurt by her memory.

“Did you ever consider it?” she asked him. It was late and they had been drinking wine and reading to themselves. Jackie had started a conversation and Davis had faked his way through it but now realized he didn’t know what they were talking about.

“Consider what?”

“Cloning her.”

“AK?”

“Of course, AK.”

Davis gave her a crazed look. “No. Absolutely not. It’s illegal, for one thing.” That was an absurd comment, a
cruel
thing to say, given the secret he kept from her, and he knew that, now that he had made such an excuse, she would never forgive him if she discovered the truth.

“Not seriously, I guess,” Jackie said. “It’s just, I wonder what it would be like to have her back. Even as a baby. To give her another shot at life. To give us another shot at keeping her safe.”

“It wouldn’t be her,” Davis said.

“Would that matter?”

“Yes,” Davis said.

Jackie closed her book, and her voice became softer, which it did when she was angry or sad or nervous. “You act like a cloned child isn’t real. That would surprise a lot of people if they heard you say it.”

“She’s real to the new family. To people who knew the original, she wouldn’t be real at all. To them, she’s a doppelgänger. A smudged copy. A ghost with no memory. Would AK be AK without that scar across her knuckles? The one she got learning to ride a bike? If she had fillings in different teeth? If she were a swimmer instead of a setter? Afraid of heights instead of spiders? If she liked English better than math?” Jackie turned flush and Davis held out his arm, but he couldn’t reach her chair and so he suspended his hand, palm up, in the air between them. “I know what you’re thinking. That all these years later there’s still this… this absence, and the desire to fill it with something can be overwhelming. But to certain people clones can be like projections of the originals — abstract figures, actors on film, a cast of shadows. If we had another little girl walking around this house inside a shell that looked like AK, wouldn’t that only make the void blacker?”

Jackie started to cry and Davis joined her, but he didn’t go to her and she didn’t come to him.

Big Rob’s office was so tiny he couldn’t clear the space between either side of his desk and the wall without sliding through hip-first. Sally Barwick sat in a foam-padded aluminum chair with torn vinyl upholstery. If she stretched a muscled leg out in front of her, her red shoe would have hit Big Rob’s metal desk before it straightened. She could tilt her head back on her long brown neck and knock on the wall behind her, and Big Rob, from his chair, could do the same to the opposite wall. Phil Canella’s lanky body was wedged between a filing cabinet and the wall, the only other human-sized space in the room. Philly, like Big Rob a former cop turned private investigator, had driven down from the northern suburbs on a case.
Just dropped in to say hi.

Barwick held up a three-sided section of sandwich from the Ogden Avenue Deli, one flight down. The thick, striated layers of meat and lettuce and tomato and toast made it difficult to bite no matter how many angles she tried.

“It’s not him,” she said after managing a mouthful of bread with some mayo and turkey.

“How do you know?” Big Rob asked.

“The Finn kid has a birthmark. Eric Lundquist did not.”

“So what does that prove?”

“They’re clones, Biggie. Genetic duplicates.”

“What do you know about clones, Barwick? I mean really. You some kind of expert all of a sudden?”

“It’s common knowledge. Read
Time
magazine. Go hire a doctor, an expert or whatever, and ask him if you want.”

“I’m not hiring a doctor, Barwick. The Finns are already paid up. I’m not going back to them to get money for an opinion, and I’m not paying some doc out of my pocket.”

“Take my word for it, then.”

His cheeks filled with corned beef, Big Rob waved an inch-thick red folder over his head. “I don’t need your word for it. I got eight months of diligence here that says Lundquist’s the guy, and I’m not going back to the Finns and telling them that it’s suddenly a whodunit.”

“Okay. So what do you want?”

“I want you to give me the discs and sign off on your interview with the old lady. Based on the work we’ve done just following the paper (solid detective work, by the way — congratulations), the Finns already think Eric Lundquist’s their guy, and if we hand over the interview they’ll get exactly what they want: a biography of their son’s cell donor.”

“Except Eric Lundquist’s
not
their son’s cell donor.”

“Says you. These people are chasing a phantom, anyway. This Lundquist fellow, the clone donor or whatever, no matter what, he ain’t the same person as their kid. You got your nature, and then you got your nurture, and so forth. So what if you’re right? Whatever curiosity they got, you’ve got the stuff that can satisfy them.”

Sally said, “If Lundquist’s not the donor, don’t you want to know who is? Something stinks here, Biggie. We might be on to a huge scandal here. Woodward and Bernstein shit. Don’t you want to know why all the paperwork, all the medical records, point to Lundquist as the cell donor, but the two kids don’t look alike? Why the Finn kid has a birthmark that Eric Lundquist never had?”

“I want to know everything my customer wants to know. No more. Right, Philly?” His friend nodded. “The customer wants to know about Eric Lundquist.”

Barwick took a pair of audio discs from her bag and slid them across Big Rob’s immaculate desk. “I’ve already transcribed the relevant sections.”

Big Rob tagged Canella with a frustrated look. “Let me tell you something, Sals,” Philly said. “We’re in the business of providing answers, not truth. When a woman hires us to follow her no-good husband, we follow him and take pictures. If her man’s got a good reason for being with his personal assistant at a Lincoln Avenue motel, that’s not our say-so.”

Biggie added, “In the Finn case, we followed the evidence and we did good work. The client will be happy.
We
should be happy.”

Barwick stuffed the check in the pocket of her denim shirt. “You’ll call me with the next job?”

“Yeah, Sally. Next week. I got a rich geezer on the Gold Coast maybe messing with his grandson’s babysitter. Evening surveillance. Real sick stuff. You’ll like it.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t get down on yourself. You’re just starting out, but you did terrific work here. That ‘oral history’ thing is classic. And crap, how many times do we get a chance to make a client happy? Most of our jobs end in divorce or a lawsuit.”

“You’re a wide man, Biggie.”