Mistaken Identity (63 page)

Bennie chugged inside the rank washroom, her pumps clattering over the black tile floor. She looked under each closed stall door but didn’t see any familiar gray pumps. She went back to the mirrors at the bathroom entrance. “Excuse me,” she said to a businesswoman applying blusher. “I’m looking for a woman, my twin. She looks exactly like me. Did she come in here?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Thanks,” Bennie said, and took off. Maybe Connolly was in one of the stores ringing the main concourse. She could be buying coffee, a snack, a magazine, gum even. With what money? Bennie hustled across the lobby, noticing that she’d picked up Mike after the ladies’ room.

The large bodyguard jogged to Bennie’s side, his jacket open and his tie flapping. “Are we having fun yet?” he asked.

“I’ll check McDonald’s, you check the bookstore.”

“Can’t do that. Have to stay with you. The contract.”

“Then put on the afterburners.” Bennie scooted into McDonald’s, but Connolly wasn’t there. She checked the bathroom, then hustled through a large bookstore, a video store, a food market area, even a flower shop, all with a barely winded Mike in tow. Connolly wasn’t in any of them. Bennie double-checked the gates that went to New York, Washington, and Boston. Even the suburban lines running west and north. No Connolly.

Bennie ended up, exhausted and panting, in the center of the concourse in front of a marble statue. Her suit was damp with sweat and she raked hair from her eyes. She whirled around one final time. The lobby was completely empty. Connolly wasn’t up, down, or around. Maybe she had simply run through the station and been picked up by someone. “I can’t believe it,” Bennie said, as Mike came jogging up on the other side.

“She’s gone,” he said, finally panting.

“She can’t be.”

“She is. We looked everywhere.”

“We’ll wait. She’ll show up. She has to.”

“No, she doesn’t.” Mike laid a heavy hand on Bennie’s shoulder. “Listen, I’ve been in security a long time. Before that I did private detective work. I can tell you, if somebody don’t want to be found, they won’t be.”

“We could wait.”

“She won’t show up.”

“Shouldn’t we wait?” Bennie’s eyes stung. Inside she felt a sort of panic. “Mike?”

“Time for you to go home,” the bodyguard said. He looped a strong arm around Bennie’s shoulder and guided her out of the train station.

B
ennie opened her front door and was greeted by an exuberant dog and the aroma of fresh coffee. “No jumping, no jumping,” she said to the golden clawing her suit, but her heart wasn’t in it. In her hand was the day’s mail, which she had retrieved from the slot when she unlocked the front door. There were the usual catalogs, bills, and a
People
magazine, but it was the last business letter that made her breath catch in her throat. The envelope was business white and it had the name of a lab printed in the upper left corner. The lab in Virginia. It was the DNA test results. They’d come in today’s mail.
After
Connolly had vanished.

“Bennie?” Grady’s voice came from the dining room, over the whine of an orbital sander losing power. He appeared after a minute in a gray T-shirt and jeans, with a coffee mug in hand. He set it down the moment he saw Bennie’s face. “Honey, you okay?”

Bennie faced him, uncertain. She hadn’t seen Grady in so long she’d almost forgotten what he looked like. Mostly he looked appealing. Curly fair hair, round gold glasses, an intelligent smile. A puzzled expression, but distant. “I think I’m okay,” she said, and he cocked his head.

“You won the case. Congratulations.” Grady’s arms flopped at his sides, but he didn’t move to kiss her. “I was thinking maybe we could go out. Celebrate. Get reacquainted.”

“Look.” Bennie held up the mail. It was hard to speak. The dog danced at her feet, then plopped his butt sloppily on the plywood floor, his tail thumping hard. “The DNA test.”

“You’re kidding.” Grady brushed his hand on his jeans, leaving sawdust handprints on his thighs. “You want me to open it for you?”

“No.”

“You sure you want to know?”

“Sure.” Bennie looked at the envelope in her hands. “I didn’t go through all this not to know. Right?”

Grady nodded. “Sit down, then.”

Bennie looked around. The room was a dark shell of lath and plaster. Tile for the new kitchen was stacked in boxes in the center of the plywood floor. “We don’t have a chair.”

“An excellent point.” Grady pulled over a box of tile, and Bennie sat down. “Okay?”

“Okay.” Bennie tore open the envelope. A single sheet of paper was inside, reminding her of the verdict sheet earlier in the day. In court she had known what she wanted the verdict to be. This time she was less certain. Bennie extracted it from the envelope and opened it up.

“Well?” Grady asked, standing apart from her, his hands resting on his hips.

“I can’t tell.” Bennie squinted at the paper, which contained a large table.
Twin Analysis,
said the title. There were five entries of what looked to Bennie like gobbledygook, in columns on the left. CRI-pS194, CRI-pL427-4, CRI-pL159-2, CRI-pR365-1, CRI-pL355-8, p144-D6. The numbers swam before her eyes. At the bottom of the page was a doctor’s hasty signature, over a line that read
MOLECULAR DIAGNOSTICS LABORATORY.
“Christ! I can’t understand it.”

“Let me see.” Grady stood behind her and scrutinized the paper over her shoulder. “It isn’t very clear, is it?”

“You’d think they could make it easier.” Bennie read across the columns of four-digit numbers, under Sample A and Sample B, and noticed something striking. The numbers matched. She read them again, her heart pounding.

Grady looked up from the paper. “You’re twins. Lord, you’re really twins.”

Bennie swallowed hard. She had known it inside, but confirming it boggled the mind. “I couldn’t get this yesterday?” she said, her voice almost a cry. “Why didn’t I tell them to fax it? She’s gone now. Connolly’s gone.”

“What?” Grady asked, and Bennie told him the whole story, while he settled onto the plywood floor, Indian style, and listened quietly. He fetched coffee for her, and Grady interrupted with only a few questions, managing to learn more than she wanted and even more than she understood. By the end of the conversation, Bennie felt better, but restless. “So, do you think I should try to find her?”

“Connolly? No.”

“But she’s my twin. I know it now, for sure. She should know that, too.”

“It doesn’t sound like she cares, hon. She treated you terribly. You almost got killed because of her, and she dumped you at the station. Why would you want to seek her out?”

“Because she’s my sister.”

“And what of it?” Grady asked softly.

“She’s my family, my
blood,
and right now, she’s the sum total of it.” She gulped her coffee, not wanting to cry.

“You know what I think, Ben? I’m not like you, with this blood thing and all. Maybe it’s because I’m not Italian, I don’t know.” Grady pulled his legs up to his chest, looping long arms around his knees. Bear slept soundly next to him, curled into a cinnamon-colored doughnut on the plywood. “I have a different view of family than you do.”

“What do you mean?”

“My brother is a jerk, you know that. A materialistic, mean-spirited jerk. He’s not family to me, even though he’s my only brother.”

“That’s not good.”

“It’s the way it is.” Grady shrugged, his fingers still interlaced. “I don’t feel tied to him just because he’s my blood and shares my genes. Who’s your family? Family is who you feel close to, who you love, and who loves you in return. Gives to you. You aren’t stuck with the family you’re born with. At some point, you grow up and choose your family, Bennie. You make it.”

Bennie fell quiet, considering it briefly. The only sound in the room was the dog’s snoring. “I don’t buy it. I like that bright-line test. Either you’re blood or you ain’t.”

“I know you do, but it doesn’t work, does it? It gets you into trouble I needn’t detail.”

“Is that a fancy way of saying ‘I told you so’?” she asked, and Grady laughed, which reminded her of how much fun it was to make him laugh. But you had to talk first to do that, and be around each other. Could they be, again? “So who’s my family, under the new improved definition?”

“You tell me. It’s your family.”

Bennie thought a minute. “I guess Hattie, my mother, and you. Not Connolly? Not my father?”

“Neither, not in my definition.”

Bennie swallowed, hard. “At least he kept clippings about me and came to my mother’s funeral. And we know he didn’t leave her, she left him. We don’t know much about him to judge him so harshly.”

“Maybe you should find out.”

“Maybe I should.” Bennie set her coffee mug on the floor and stood up. “Can I borrow your car?”

Grady laughed in disbelief. “
Now
?”

“Can you think of a better time than now?” she asked, and Grady knew any response was futile.

I
t was dusk when Judge Harrison Guthrie set sail in his sixteen-footer, the
Jurist Prudent.
Other sailboats and motorboats were coming in as he set out. To a man, their skippers were burnt from a full day of sun. “Don’t stay out too long, buddy,” someone shouted to him, boozy, from a motorboat. The judge waved back dismissively. He didn’t know the man’s name. He hadn’t made any friends at the marina, or on the bay, for that matter. He liked his solitude when he sailed and the only friend he needed was his wife, Maudie.

The judge tacked the
Jurist Prudent
into the breeze, a mild gust puffing eastward across the bay. The mainsail luffed as he turned, then snapped as it filled with wind. His wrinkled hand gripped the heavy line with the strength of a much younger man. He’d left the city after the Connolly verdict, stopped home only to change into his clothes and kiss Maudie good-bye. One solid peck on the cheek, like a rubber stamp. He’d been tempted to kiss her on the mouth, but it had been so long since he’d done that she would have found it odd. Then he’d driven down for a quick sail, as was his habit on the weekend. Maudie didn’t suspect anything.

The judge looked at the sky, his hand on the tiller and the boat parting the water with ease. The western half of the sky, where the weather came from, was darkening quickly. Nimbus clouds gathered, a deepening gray tinged with soft black at the fringe. The judge could smell the water hanging in the air and feel its dampness on his cheek. A storm was coming, but he anticipated it with a kind of hope.

Maybe there would be lightning. The judge knew a fair amount about lightning, had even studied its history. In early times it was believed to be evil spirits, and villages had rung church bells to ward it off. Later, lightning was assumed to be fire; finally Ben Franklin proved otherwise. Its anatomy was remarkable, too. A ribbon of pure electric energy, three to four miles long, but only an inch in diameter.

The judge’s watery eyes searched the sky, growing darker. The storm clouds collected, milling together like old friends. The wind picked up, filling the sails and testing their thick cloth. Judge Guthrie wasn’t afraid. He would leave Maudie well provided for, and the children and grandchildren. He had done good work as a lawyer, filed papers to be proud of. Then he had become a judge, the capstone of his legal career. Any of the opinions, concurrences, or dissents that bore his name would stand forever. Making law for all time; making legal history. Judge Guthrie had always written with that in mind, deciding cases under the law, with fairness, decency, and justice. There had been only one exception.

The Connolly case. The judge had been indebted to Henry Burden and it would have been dishonorable to turn him down once the inevitable request had been made. The judge knew that the prosecutor, Dorsey Hilliard, owed a debt to Henry Burden as well, but at least the prosecutor had been acting in faith with his sworn duty as he fulfilled Burden’s bidding. The judge had not. For the first and only time, Harrison Guthrie had opposed the law.

The judge’s hand held fast to the tiller and didn’t waver, even as his thoughts darkened like the clouds. He had made rulings contrary to law, for the purpose of achieving the wrong result. He had violated his oath and he had disgraced the bench. Even if his misdeeds never came to light, Judge Guthrie knew what he had done. He had acted in combination with murderers, causing death and mayhem. He had profaned the name of justice and transgressed as surely as the robbers, murderers, and miscreants who stood before him day after day. Even Judge Guthrie conceded he should pay for what he had done. No one was above the law, and especially not a judge.