On Borrowed Time (6 page)

I found myself reluctant to ask questions, even though I desperately wanted to hear the answer. I was afraid she would say something that would make me realize her sister was not Jen after all and this was all an incredible mistake.

She told me that they lived in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, a couple of hours from Milwaukee, and that she and Jen ran an Internet business, selling and shipping individually designed gift baskets.

“So who takes care of the business while you’re here?” I asked, glancing over at her. I was doing a lot of glancing; it was something I couldn’t control.

“Oh, that’s not a problem. We’ve got some employees who can handle it. The business is doing very well, and besides, there’s nothing more important than finding Julie.”

I nodded. “Do you have a place to stay while you’re here, Allison?”

She nodded. “Everybody calls me Allie. I’ve got a reservation at the Parker Meridien Hotel. I think it’s on Fifty-sixth Street.”

“I know where it is. I have a guest bedroom at my place. You’re welcome to stay there.”

“No, I don’t think so. This will be fine.”

“Okay,” I said. “How about if we drop your things off there, and then grab some lunch, so we can talk?”

She smiled Jen’s smile. “Sounds good.”

I parked at the hotel, and we walked over to the Capital Grille on Fifty-first. We got a booth, which would provide privacy when we talked. I sensed that she was at least as nervous as I was, and we waited until we ordered before getting down to it.

“Why don’t you tell me about Julie’s disappearance?” I asked.

She took a deep breath and nodded. “Julie was getting restless last spring. She had always taken acting classes, and had done some modeling, and she was afraid she was going to be stuck in small-town Wisconsin her whole life. She said her “occupational clock” was ticking. So in September she decided she was going to go out to L.A. and try her luck. She promised to be back within three months if she wasn’t making progress.”

“So when did she go?” I asked.

“May fourteenth.”

I took a deep breath of my own; the timing was right.

“When did you meet Jen?” she asked.

“June.”

She nodded her own relief. “Anyway, she promised to stay in touch, though the promise wasn’t necessary. I can’t remember a day when we didn’t talk, no matter where we might be. In fact, she called me a few hours after she left, just to say hello. That was the last time I heard from her.”

“So what did you do?”

“We, my parents and I, started to worry after the first day. We couldn’t reach her cell phone; it just immediately went to voice mail. By the third day we were going crazy, and we went to our local police chief, Tony Brus.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“That it was really too soon for police action, that an adult on the road who hasn’t checked in for that short a time was not worrisome or unusual enough. But we know him, and he’s a great guy, so he did some things to try and ease our minds.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“He ran traces on her credit cards and cell phone, to see whether she used them. She hadn’t made or received any calls except the one to me, and she only used her credit card once, at a gas station about six hours from home.”

“So did he pursue it further?”

She nodded. “Yes. He put her information into a national database, which notifies law enforcement agencies everywhere. After a few more days, when we still heard nothing, he notified the FBI.”

“So they’re on it?”

“Technically, yes. But I don’t think they’ve actively pursued it. I don’t think this is high-profile enough. And local police aren’t doing much, because no one has any idea where she disappeared.”

“What about your police chief?”

“He’s doing what he can. He interviewed all of Julie’s friends, but there was really nothing to learn. Nobody from Fort Atkinson hurt her; everybody there loves her,” she said, starting to choke up and dab at her eyes with her napkin.

“So nothing happened after that, in all this time?”

“Nothing until you,” she said.

“I wish me entering the picture was a positive for you,” I said. “But at this point I don’t see it. None of it fits.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m afraid it raises more questions than it answers. For instance, is Jen … Julie … the kind of person who would tell you she was going to California, but instead come to New York and never contact you?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“But let’s assume she did just that. When she got here, why would she completely take on a new identity?”

Allie didn’t answer; she obviously couldn’t explain it any better than I could.

“Was she afraid of anyone?” I asked. “Was anyone after her? Threatening her for some reason?”

“No. She would have told me if that were the case. I was with her every day. I was with her when she left. Julie was not running away. She was going towards something.”

“So all we have is a resemblance,” I said, then corrected myself. “No, it’s even more than a resemblance. It’s uncanny.”

“We have more than that,” she said. “Both of the people we’re talking about, Julie and Jen, they disappeared without a trace. And around the same time Julie left, Jen appeared. That’s way more than a coincidence.”

“That’s true, but it doesn’t explain nearly enough.” I found that I was forcing myself to be negative, because negative in this case was the same as realistic, and Allie deserved the truth. “There’s so much more to this. I lived with her; we were going to be married. She was part of my life. But nobody remembers her; everybody I know and trust tells me that she never existed, that I imagined everything. There can’t be a conspiracy this wide.”

Again she had nothing to say to this, no way to refute it, so she stayed silent.

“So absolutely none of this makes sense,” I said.

“Tell me about it.”

I looked up suddenly, surprising her. “What is it?” she asked.

“What you just said … ‘tell me about it.’ Jen said that all the time.”

Allie took a deep breath. “Julie and I have been saying that since we were kids. It was a running joke in our family because it drove my mother crazy. She would say something to us, and we would say, ‘Tell me about it,’ and my mother would say, ‘I just did!’ ”

“So here we have another coincidence,” I said.

She smiled. “Tell me about it.”

“We have to figure out what to do with this,” I said.

“Yes, we do.”

“How long are you going to be in town?”

“As long as it takes.”

“You’re so much like Jen,” I said. “Not just how you look, but how you talk. Your mannerisms.”

“I’m also just like my sister.”

I walked Allie back to her hotel.

Even saying good-bye to her was awkward; she looked so much like Jen that it would have seemed natural to kiss her. I knew I needed to get that under control. She was not Jen, and in all likelihood her sister wasn’t either. In all likelihood there was no Jen.

Allie said that she was going to stay in New York for a while, that she had her computer and could do her work from anywhere. We agreed we would talk the next day and try to plan out our actions. I feared it was going to be a short talk, since I couldn’t think of any more actions to take. I had already tried everything I could think of, and had gotten nowhere. If Allie’s arrival on the scene presented me with new avenues to pursue, I couldn’t quite see them yet.

I also needed to get back to work. I had some money put away, some of it from an inheritance when my father died last year, but if nothing was coming in, it would disappear fast. It was just so hard to focus; all I had thought about for weeks was Jen.

I got the mail before going upstairs, and when I entered my apartment I added it to the mail I hadn’t opened the day before. I made myself a frozen pizza, even though I wasn’t hungry, basically because I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

I tried to plan my next step, some concerted effort that Allie and I could take to find the person missing from our lives, though we didn’t really know if her sister and my Jen were the same person. That lasted about a half hour, during which time I came up with absolutely nothing.

I wasn’t too disappointed; coming up with nothing was something I was getting used to.

I finally decided that if I couldn’t concentrate, I might as well not concentrate while going through the mail, so I sat down to do so. There were at least sixty pieces, maybe forty of which were more responses from readers to my piece about Jen.

I had become proficient at judging the quality of a letter just by looking at the handwriting on the address. The percentage of nutcases was about twenty, down from a high of maybe forty when the piece was first published. The others were well-intentioned letters of sympathy or understanding, or tips to Jenny’s whereabouts. I read at least part of all of them, on the theory that you never know.

The remainder were bills, junk mail, and the like. I’m pretty good about paying my bills, always have been, so I was surprised to see one from my cell phone company. You can always tell the notices that are notifying you of an overdue bill, they’re ominously thin. It’s as if they don’t want to waste a lot of paper on a deadbeat.

This notice said that I owed a hundred and forty-nine dollars, and that my account was fifteen days overdue. I checked my records, which were not in the best shape since Jenny’s disappearance, and I had no record of having made a payment. But I also didn’t remember seeing a bill.

I called the company and, after at least ten computer prompts, got through to a human being. I explained that I had received the notice but had not gotten a bill.

“Can I put you on hold?” she asked.

It didn’t seem like I had a choice, so I consented, while wondering if anyone had ever successfully refused. She surprised me by coming back on the line within twenty seconds.

“Mr. Kilmer?”

“Yes?”

“You can disregard the notice; that bill has been paid. Perhaps the notice and payment got crossed in the mail.”

“When did you receive it?”

She told me a date, which was just ten days previous, meaning it was since I had gotten home from Ardmore. “Are you sure about this?” I asked. “I have no record of sending it.”

“I’m quite certain, sir. Your account shows a zero balance.”

This was confusing; there was no way I had paid that bill in the last couple of weeks. “Can you send me a copy of the check?” I asked.

“I’m afraid I don’t have access to that. Perhaps the billing department can help you with that.”

“What about the bill that was paid? Can you send me a copy of that?”

“I can certainly do that, sir. But you can also access it online if you’d prefer. It would be faster.”

Accessing things online is not my strong point, though I have become better at it over time. She told me exactly what to do, and I dutifully wrote the directions down. It involved creating an online ID and password, not my favorite thing to do, but it seemed worth it to avoid having to wait for the copy of the bill in the mail.

Once I had navigated the Web site, I printed out a copy of the bill that they said I had paid. It listed 171 calls I had made the previous month. I recognized many of the numbers, but there were also a lot that were unfamiliar to me. This was not surprising, since I always made so many calls for work, researching stories, etc.

The positive to all this was that I now had something to do, which was check into the unfamiliar numbers. Craig wouldn’t have lied about my Pulitzer story comment, which meant I’d said it to him. And I would not have said it if I hadn’t believed it to be true. Hopefully these numbers could reconnect me to that story, or even to something having to do with Jen.

Since it was seven o’clock and businesses would be closed, I resolved to get going on the list of phone numbers the next day. Tonight I would watch televised basketball and attempt to use it as an escape from thinking about the train wreck that had become my life.

The phone rang and it was Willie, telling me that he and John were at Legends preparing to watch the game. It was a call that one of them had made pretty much every day since I’d been home, and I had declined every time.

“If I come down there, are all you guys going to do is drink beer, watch sports, leer at women, and act stupid?” I asked.

“That pretty much sums it up,” he said. “Except we’re also going to suck down some burgers and wings.”

“Okay. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” I’m not sure why I decided to go that time; maybe it was a glimmer of mental health.

“Really?” he asked, obviously surprised. “I was sure you’d say no, so I only got a table for two.”

“Good,” I said. “Then it can be just me and John.”

“I’ll get a bigger table.”

He did, and by the time I got down there it was covered with plates and beer bottles. The Knicks game had already started, so we didn’t do much talking until halftime, such was and is sports bar etiquette. It felt good to be there, doing what for me felt normal.

Conversations I’d had with John and Willie since I got back had been awkward; they obviously didn’t know whether or not to ask me about Jen, and didn’t know whether I had recovered from my obvious lunacy. So they basically limited our talks to sports, which actually wasn’t that different from “pre-Jen” days.

At the half, ESPN cut to a brief SportsCenter segment, and included in it was a piece about the upcoming Super Bowl. I had been so preoccupied with my chaotic life that I was completely out of touch, and wasn’t even aware that the game was between the Colts and the Packers. But, of course, I couldn’t come out and say that; it would expose me to ridicule. I’d had my fill of that.

Willie had come to the firm conclusion that the Packers would win the game, which meant that John was positive the Colts would blow them out.

“If they could handle the Redskins as easy as they did, they’ll shut the Colts down. Colts are too one-dimensional,” Willie said.

“How can you be ‘too one-dimensional’?” John countered. “You’re either one-dimensional or you’re not.”

“Bullshit. There are varying degrees of one-dimensional.” The argument had reached a typical intellectual valley. “But either way they’ll shut them down.”