Superposition (23 page)

The food had arrived by the time Alessandra found the right viewfeeds in Sheila's library. I still had my lenses, so I synched to Alessandra's phone, and we watched together.

We saw the Feynman Center's atrium from a view behind the desk, and there, as Sheila had described, were Elena, Claire, Alessandra, and Sean, looking lost and upset. I heard Alessandra—the Alessandra next to me in the seat—gasp as she saw herself. It was one thing to know you had a double; it was another to see it with your own eyes. I just watched Elena. At the same time that I had been finding her dead on the living room floor, she'd been out there, alive, and looking for me.

Elena met my eyes—Sheila's eyes, really—and said, “I'm looking for my husband, Jacob Kelley. Do you know where he is?”

Sheila checked her screen. “I'm sorry, I don't know who that is,” she said. “Kelley? Does he work here, or is he a guest?”

“He used to work here, a few years ago,” Elena said.

“I'm sorry,” Sheila said. “I don't know where he would be. Do you want me to get my manager?”

“No,” Elena said. “He was here to see Brian Vanderhall. Can you tell me where his office is?”

“Oh, yes. We know who he is.” The view shifted, and Sheila traded looks with the other receptionist—the young Asian woman I had just spoken to at the NJSC. I realized I hadn't thought to get her name. “His office is in the Dirac building. Go out these doors and take a right . . .”

“I'll take her there,” the Asian receptionist said.

“Are you sure? I thought you never wanted to see him again,” Sheila said.

“I'll just show them where the building is. It'll give me an excuse to cut out of here a few minutes early.”

“Oh, so you'll leave me to close up,” Sheila said.

“That's the basic idea,” the other one said. She winked. “Come on,” she said to Elena, “I'll take you.”

As they walked out, Elena dialed a number on her phone and listened. Now it was my turn to gasp. She was calling
me
. That call, the one that had come just in time to distract the policeman before I hit him—it hadn't been Alessandra calling with Elena's phone. It had been
Elena
, calling to see where I was. If she had called five minutes earlier or five minutes later, I would have answered the phone. I would have
talked
to her. I would have known she was alive right from the beginning.

Sheila watched long enough that we saw them head out the door in a little train, Claire following the Asian woman in the front, and Elena taking the rear. When it was clear there was nothing more to see, I blinked furiously to shut off the viewfeed.

The chicken sandwich was growing cold on my plate. It took me a moment to remember where I was.

“She lied,” I said. “They both lied. Sheila didn't mention the Asian woman at all in her testimony, and they both said it was Sheila who told them where to find Brian. Neither of them said anything about actually leading them to Brian's office.” I pounded the steering wheel. “I didn't even get her name.”

“That's not much of a lie,” Alessandra said. “What does it matter?”

“Sheila referred to the other woman never wanting to see Brian again. That implies a past relationship, and given Brian's reputation, probably a romantic one.”

“So? From what you've said, there are probably a lot of young women there with a former romantic relationship with him.”

“The question is, why are they lying at all? What are they hiding?”

On the drive back to the NJSC facility, Alessandra eyejacked again to track down the name of the woman who had lied to us. It didn't take her long.

“Lily Lin,” she said. “Right off of Sheila's friend list.”

“Lin?”

“That's what it says. She works at the Center, lives nearby. Looks like a lot of her family's in law enforcement.”

“Wasn't there a Lin who was a police investigator, who testified at the trial?”

“Brittany Lin. Looks like it's her sister.”

“You're kidding me. So Brittany could have doctored the evidence to protect her sister. An actual police cover-up?”

“I guess.”

“Great job, Alessandra.”

She smiled, a genuine smile of pleasure. “Alex,” she said.

“What?”

“I know you and Mom like to use my full name, but call me Alex. That's what my friends call me.”

My first thought was to say that I didn't realize she had any friends, but I managed to swallow that thought before it came out. I knew she was talking about friends online. “Alex,” I said. I rolled it around in my mouth. I didn't like it. It completely lost the old Italian beauty of her given name. But it meant she was including me in her list of friends. I decided not to complain. “Alex it is. Do you think you can find Lily's viewfeed of that day?”

“Looking. We got pretty lucky with Sheila. Not everybody's a Lifer, you know. “

“I can't imagine why anyone would be,” I said. “What's the point of recording your whole life? Most of it's pretty dull. Special occasions, okay, I get it, but—”

“Some Lifers are extremely popular,” Alessandra said. “They have thousands of people watching them, all the time.”

“So people with no life of their own spend their time immersed in someone else's? That's a pretty sad—”

“I've had mine recording for over a year.” Her tone was belligerent, challenging me to object.

I closed my mouth. A year? Everything that she saw in our home, available online? I almost made a sharp comment, something to the effect of airing our family's dirty laundry in public, but I stopped myself in time. She was talking to me. She had just volunteered information about herself. I would be a fool to shut her down.

Instead, I just said, “Why?”

She rolled her eyes. “Welcome to the twenty-first century, Dad.”

“I mean it,” I said. “I don't get it. Why share video feed of every second of your life with complete strangers?”

My sincerity must have come through, because she answered seriously. “It makes me feel connected. People comment on my life, people across the world sometimes. They understand what I feel, cheer me on, give me advice sometimes. Not a lot. I don't have a big following.”

“But . . . what about privacy?”

She shrugged, a barely discernible twitch of one shoulder. “Not a big deal, Dad. To your generation, maybe. Not to me.”

“Do you watch other people's?”

“Sure. My friends, a little. Mostly strangers. I find people I like and follow them for a while.”

“But . . . why? Isn't it boring just watching somebody else's life? I mean, it's not like a movie. Nothing much happens to people most of the time.”

She sighed, as if forced to explain something obvious to an idiot. “There are apps that cut through the chatter. They key off of statistically uncommon visual patterns, raised voices, rapid eye movement—stuff like that. If you just want to see the highlights, you can. Sometimes it's pretty interesting just to watch the raw feed, though.”

“Really? People tune in and just watch you do your homework or eat dinner?”

Alessandra—Alex—threw up her hands. “Haven't you ever read a blog?”

“Sure, I just—” A little pop of understanding stopped me. I actually got it, a little bit. “You're saying the appeal is similar to a personal blog. Someone talks about the ups and downs of his or her life; others tune in to the drama.”

“Exactly like. Viewers leave comments, get worked up, have little flame wars sometimes. The most popular personalities become super-celebrities. They live their whole lives in front of millions of people.”

I was silent for a bit, digesting this. The pine trees kept coming. When I was young, my mother had been suspicious of my Facebook account and had no clue how widespread or popular a phenomenon it was. I was starting to realize that the tide had turned and what I dismissed as a teenage game was, in fact, a serious cultural force.

I stole a sideways glance at her. “Is that what you want to be? A super-celebrity?”

Another minimalist shrug. She looked out her side window and didn't answer. I took this to mean that yes, at least at some level, she did want that, but she didn't want to open herself up to mockery or admit to longing for unlikely stardom. I could think of a dozen reasons why living your whole life in front of millions of people was a terrible idea, destructive to relationships, certain to cause an identity crisis, but I knew a turning point in our relationship when I heard one. Either I could tell Alex my mind, and she would never tell me hers again, or I could show myself willing to listen without judgment—something I wasn't sure I'd actually done with Alex, ever.

“That would be pretty cool,” I said. “To have a celebrity in the family.”

She shot me a look, afraid that I was making fun of her. Then she smirked. “Pretty cool?”

“What, people don't say ‘cool' anymore?”

“Not in this decade.”

Alex was able to discover that Lily Lin did indeed have a viewfeed covering the time when she had walked Elena and the kids to Brian's office, but the file was locked and not open to the public. With a little stretching of the speed limit, Alex and I arrived back at the Feynman Center before closing time. Lily Lin was no longer behind the desk. Instead, a thick-set man with an even thicker mustache stood in her place and scowled.

“Excuse me,” I said. “We're looking for Lily Lin.”

“I am looking for her, too,” the man said, his irritation plain in his accented voice. He sounded a bit like Marek, so I guessed an Eastern European country. “She has been gone forty-five minutes and no notice.”

“Oh no,” Alex said. “She ran. You told her you were part of an investigation. She must have panicked.”

“Has she ever gone home early without telling you?” I asked the man.

The man shook his head and bared his teeth, like a dog with a scrap of meat. “No, she is never running away like this before.” The word
running
came out like
runnink
. Russian?

“She's the killer!” Alex said.

“Killer? What killer?” the possibly Russian manager asked.

I sighed. “I'm investigating the murder that happened here last December.”

“And you think . . . Lily?”

“I just want to find her.”

“She took purse,” the manager said. “Left computer logged on.”

“She left in a hurry, then. Do you have security cameras?” I asked.

“Certainly. We can . . . Lily!”

I followed the manager's gaze to see Lily Lin walking toward us, clutching her purse. Her eyes and nose were red, and her makeup was smeared.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Egorov,” she said.

“You have been gone forty-five minutes!”

“I know. I'm sorry.”

“Where have you been?”

“In the bathroom.”

“For forty-five minutes?”

“She's been crying,” Alex said.

“You know something, don't you,” I said. “Either you didn't tell the police everything, or else your sister is covering for you.”

Lily wiped at her eyes. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Yes, you do,” I said. “The day that woman and her children came, it wasn't Sheila who brought them to Brian Vanderhall's office. It was you.”

“Who are you?” she asked.

“I'm investigating Vanderhall's death. We know you took a viewfeed of the incident. We'd like to see it.”

She took a step backward. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “No, I can't do that.”

“You won't have to testify,” I said. “We just need to know the truth.”

“Go away. I don't know anything.”

“You shot him, didn't you?” I said. “Your sister is law enforcement; she must be protecting you. We know you were dating Brian. When he left you, well . . .”

“He wanted me to shoot him,” she said, her expression panicked now. “He made me do it. He said it wouldn't hurt him.”