More Deaths Than One (3 page)

He glanced at her, wondering if she were
setting him up for a joke. “I haven’t a clue.”

“I’d like to say it’s because you have hidden
depths, but your depths aren’t hidden, they’re obvious.” She
chuckled. “Maybe you have hidden shallows.”

The corners of his mouth twitched.

She drew back in mock surprise. “Is that a
smile I see?”

A few minutes later, she yawned. “Jeez, I’m
tired.”

“You should go home and get some sleep,” Bob
said, “but if you don’t mind, I’d like to make a call first.”

She swept her arm out in a magnanimous
gesture. “Go ahead. I’ll keep watch.”

He found a pay phone and called the computer
store. A woman answered.

“How late does Robert Stark work today?” he
asked.

“Six o’clock.”

“Thanks.”

When Bob returned to his post, he noted with
amusement that Kerry had situated herself so she could see both the
computer store and a dress shop.

She pointed to the window displaying new fall
fashions. “Which is my color, blue or red?”

“Deep rose,” he said without hesitation.

She wrinkled her nose. “Pink?”

“Not pink. Deep rose. Bold, direct,
courageous, but without the strident aggressiveness of red.”

Her eyes sparkled, but for once they were not
laughing as she regarded him.

Then the laughter returned. “It appears that
your hidden shallows have hidden shallows of their own.”

A tall, skinny man with a receding hairline
and a prominent Adam’s apple approached Bob. “Hey, Hank, how’ve you
been? I haven’t seen you for a long time. You living in Denver
now?”

Bob nodded.

The man moved away, walking backward. He shot
both index fingers at Bob. “Call me. I’m in the book. We’ll get
together.”

Bob glanced at Kerry. She stared back at him,
open-mouthed.

“That man called you Hank.” She whacked
herself on the forehead with the palm of her right hand. “God, I’m
so stupid when it comes to men. This whole thing has been one big
set-up, hasn’t it? You’ve been messing with me.”

“No, I haven’t,” Bob said quietly. “He
mistook me for someone else. That’s always happening to me, and
it’s easier to go along than to explain that I’m Robert Stark.”

The angry flush faded from her cheeks. “You
do have one of those faces. Even I thought you might be somebody I
knew when I first saw you.”

A huge yawn overtook her. Knuckling her eyes,
she said, “You’re right, I do need to get some sleep.”

“I’ll be here until six. Do you want to pick
me up, or should I call a cab?”

“I’ll come back.” She smiled happily, but Bob
could not tell if the tacit permission to leave pleased her, or the
invitation to return.

***

That evening when Bob saw Kerry stop in front
of the computer store and look around, he stepped out from behind a
group of people.

Her eyes widened. “Hey, cool. You’re good at
this stuff. I never even saw you.”

Bob continued to watch Robert. Kerry
chattered about everyone who passed by, seemingly unconcerned that
she carried on a one-sided conversation.

Promptly at six o’clock, Robert limped out of
the store.

“Why is he limping?” Kerry asked. “You don’t
limp.”

“Maybe he’s tired.”

They followed Robert back to his house. From
where they were parked a few car lengths back, Bob could hear
someone inside the house call out, “Daddy’s home.”

The front door burst open, and Robert’s
children came tumbling out to greet him. Beaming, Robert picked up
one small, giggling girl and planted a big kiss on her chubby
cheek. A shy little boy slipped a hand into his father’s and gazed
at him as if he were every super hero rolled into one. Even though
all the children talked at once, Robert seemed to have no trouble
keeping track of everything they said, and answered each in
turn.

“I thought of another explanation,” Kerry
announced. “You could be doppelgangers. A doppelganger is the ghost
of a living person.”

“If we are,” Bob said, watching the other
Robert Stark, “then which of us is the living person, and which of
us is the ghost?”

Chapter 3

The gingerbread-trimmed boardinghouse stood
second from the corner on a quiet side street off Seventeenth
Avenue. While waiting for a bus after a quick breakfast of granola
and orange juice prepared in the communal kitchen, Bob looked
across Seventeenth Avenue at City Park. The sun shone. The warm air
smelled of mowed grass. Perhaps he should walk to his childhood
home on Twenty-Second Avenue.

No. Better to save his energy for exploring
the old neighborhood.

***

Two hours later Bob made the return trip on
foot, tired, breathless, feeling out of place and out of time.

Very little of what he had observed seemed
familiar. The wide empty streets where he had once played appeared
narrow and inhospitable. Like spectators at a parade, parked cars
lined both sides of the street while a steady stream of traffic
made its way between them. The red brick house where he grew up had
been painted white and looked smaller than he remembered. He did
have a vague recollection of the four large pillars supporting the
flat roof of the porch, but he did not remember the ornate carvings
encircling them. Nor could he recall which room had been his, which
window Jackson had broken and blamed on him, which tree he had
climbed to escape his father’s wrath.

How could he have forgotten so much? Maybe
because he hadn’t given a single thought to his childhood during
the past eighteen years?

He trudged through City Park, which he did
remember, and tried not to listen to the voice in the back of his
head suggesting that perhaps all parks bore a decided
similarity.

A flash of yellow on a bird’s wing caught his
gaze. Stopping to watch the bird until it flew out of sight, he
became aware of the day’s blinding brightness. The grass shimmered
in the sun like green fire. The sky reflected a blue so deep it
looked purple: the color of infinity, he thought.

All of a sudden, a sharp pain exploded behind
his eyes. The sky turned black. He stumbled, fell to his knees.
Cradling his head in his hands, he rocked back and forth. He tried
to suck in air, but his lungs seemed to have forgotten how to
work.

Over the sound of the blood throbbing against
his eardrums, he heard the voice of a little girl.

“Mommy, what’s wrong with that man?”

A loud sniff. “Probably drunk or stoned. Come
on, let’s get away from here.”

Gradually Bob’s vision cleared and his lungs
started to function again. He took several shallow breaths, then
deeper ones. The pain receded to the back of his head.

He struggled to his feet and dragged himself
back to the boarding house. Collapsing on his bed, he waited for
the oblivion of sleep.

But with sleep came the nightmares.

***

The next morning Bob took a cab to the
Veterans Administration Hospital in Aurora. After an enormous
amount of red tape and hours of waiting, he found himself in a room
containing both an examining table and a small metal desk with a
computer. Convenience? Bob wondered. Or a chronic shortage of
space?

The doctor, a gray-haired man in his late
fifties, marched in thirty minutes later.

“Dr. Albion,” he said with a curt nod.

Although Dr. Albion had the barking voice and
commanding presence of a general, he did not have the posture; his
shoulders sagged as if all the ineptitude throughout all his years
of service weighed them down.

Dr. Albion seated himself at the desk,
shuffled through some papers, then glanced at Bob. “Robert
Stark?”

“Yes.”

The doctor steepled his hands and tapped the
tips of his fingers together. “What seems to be the problem?”

“Headaches, nightmares, disorientation.”

“When did you first notice these
symptoms?”

“Vietnam. I had a mishap with a mine.” Bob
paused, remembering how he’d awakened in a hospital in the
Philippines, feeling much as he did now, and being told he’d been
unconscious for five days. That had been disorienting, but nowhere
near as disorienting as discovering a twice-dead mother and another
self. Realizing the doctor had impatiently cleared his throat, Bob
said, “The symptoms mostly disappeared until about three weeks
ago.”

“Did you experience any change in your
circumstances at that time?”

“I returned to the United States. I’ve been
gone for eighteen years, two in Vietnam, the other sixteen in
Thailand.”

“You never came home for a visit?”

“No.”

Dr. Albion consulted the form Bob had filled
out in the admitting room, punched up something on the computer
screen, and glanced at it.

He rose to his feet. “Let’s take a look at
you.”

He listened to Bob’s heart, then gestured
toward the scars crisscrossing his chest. “The mine?”

“A hunting accident when I was young.”

The doctor finished his cursory examination
and returned to the computer. After a moment, he looked from the
screen to Bob’s feet.

“This is strange. It says here you lost your
left foot and now use a prosthesis. I couldn’t have missed that,
could I?”

“No,” Bob said absently, his mind on the
other Robert Stark who limped when he got tired. Could Kerry’s
preposterous notion about alternate universes be correct? Could the
explosion have created a diver-gence, causing him to travel two
different but simul-taneous paths of probability? The thought made
his headache flare.

Dr. Albion turned back to the computer.
“There’s no mention here of a head trauma, or of the cicatrices on
your chest.” Heaving a sigh, he pushed away from the computer and
leaned back. “These records have your name, serial number, and
social security number on them, but apparently they’re mixed with
someone else’s. Unfortunately, that does happen. We’ll be doing
tests—blood, urine, and so on—and the results should be here in a
week, but you never know. As usual, we’re short-staffed and
overworked. Hopefully, your medical record situation will be
straightened out by then.” His expression clearly said he doubted
it.

“I can prescribe a moderate painkiller for
your headaches, but I need to find out more about your head trauma
before I decide on a course of treatment. Meantime, you might want
to check in with some of the Vietnam vet support groups in the
area.” He reached into a drawer, pulled out a list, and handed it
to Bob. “It’s entirely possible your symptoms are due to something
called Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. You’ve heard of that?”

“Yes,” Bob said. “But it’s been sixteen years
since I got out of the army. Why would I get it now?”

“I’m thinking it could have something to do
with your belated return home, combined with culture shock,
possibly complicated by the high altitude.”

Scanning the list, Bob noticed he had a
choice of groups on any given day. He felt too tired to go to one
tonight, but perhaps tomorrow evening he might drop in on the group
that met in the basement of a church not far from the
boardinghouse.

***

Bob stood in the open doorway, surprised to
see so few men in the group: not quite a dozen. They all seemed to
be in their late thirties to early forties, and most of them looked
prosperous.

“My wife’s an archeologist,” a large man with
a thin mustache said. “She’s never forgiven me for blowing up the
Mi Son tower.”

A man with deep crinkles around his eyes
spoke in what sounded like an Australian accent. “Didn’t you
explain to her that the NVA used it as an arms dump and a radio
tower?”

“Of course I did, many times, but she refuses
to see reason. She says that except for some minor damage at Angkor
in Cambodia, no other archeological monument ever sustained war
damage. She thinks blowing up the tower was the worst atrocity of
Vietnam.”

“Doesn’t even rank in the top ten,” exclaimed
a dark-skinned man who looked like an athlete past his prime. “The
massacre at Hue was by far the . . .”

Bob turned to leave. The painkillers didn’t
seem to be working, and it felt as if a ball bearing caromed around
in his head. Before he could escape, a pleasant-faced man with
thinning auburn hair approached him. Like Bob, he wore chinos and a
white shirt.

He smiled at Bob as if they were old friends,
and extended a hand. His grasp felt firm but without challenge.

“I’m Scott Mulligan.”

Bob hesitated. When he realized Scott had not
mistaken him for someone else, but simply acted open and friendly,
he introduced himself.

“Nice to meet you,” Scott said, sounding as
if he meant it. “This group can seem a bit intimidating at first.
Over the years it’s evolved into something of a little boys club
for history buffs.” He cocked his head and raised his eyebrows.
“What do you say, Bob? Since you’re already here, why don’t you
come in for a few minutes? Have a cup of coffee. It’s good coffee.
I promise. I made it myself.”

Bob let himself be drawn forward. To his
relief, Scott did not make an issue of his presence, but poured him
a thick white mug of coffee and ushered him to a chair slightly
behind the haphazardly formed circle.

Hands wrapped around the mug, soaking in the
warmth, Bob shot covert glances at the group. Combat veterans like
these had begun making pilgrimages to Thailand where many had gone
for R&R. Although strangers, the veterans always seemed to
recognize one another, as if their sojourn in country had left a
readily identifiable brand on each of their foreheads. They drank
together and often discussed experiences they had never been able
to talk about before.

Bob had mostly avoided those discussions.
Despite his injury, he had not seen combat. He had been stationed
in relatively safe Saigon until he received orders to accompany a
convoy of supply trucks headed for Qui Nhon. En route, his truck
hit a mine.