sound like a throwback to the Renaissance—Mark da Vinci, maybe, or possibly Mark Borgia.”
“It was an interesting time, that’s for sure. Isn’t that an old Chinese curse? ‘May you live in interesting times’?”
“I seem to have heard that.”
“I was just dabbling, James,” I explained. “I wasn’t even working toward a degree—I took courses in anything that sounded interesting. What got you into philosophy?”
He shrugged. “The usual stuff—’The meaning of life,’ or the lack thereof.” He seemed to hesitate a moment. “It’s none of my business, but how is it that a young fellow who works for a living came to own a house? That usually doesn’t come along until quite a bit later.”
“It’s an inheritance,” I told him. “My folks were killed in a car accident, and there was some mortgage insurance involved in the estate.”
“Ah,” he said and let the matter drop.
We reached my house in north Everett, and I backed the truck up to the front porch. Then we hauled out my furniture and box after box of my books. Books aren’t quite as heavy as salt, but they come close. James and I were both sweating heavily by the time we finished up. “Now I see why you needed so much shelf space,” he observed.
“Tools of the trade,” I said. “I guess I’m one of the last precomputer scholars, so my books take up lots of room—which is fine with me. When I read something, it’s on a real page, not a monitor. No hysteria about rolling blackouts.”
I had to shift my emotions into neutral as I made a quick survey of the now-empty house—I didn’t want to start blubbering.
“Tough, isn’t it?” James said sympathetically.
“More than a little. I grew up here, so there are all sorts of memories lurking in the corners. There’s a big cherry tree in the backyard, and the Twinkie Twins used to spend hours up in that tree eating cherries and squirting the pits at me.”
“Squirting?”
“You put a fresh cherry pit between your thumb and forefinger and squeeze. If you do it right, the pit zips right out. The twins thought that was lots of fun. It was a summer version of throwing snowballs.”
“You have twin sisters?”
“Not exactly. They were the daughters of my dad’s best buddy.”
“Were?”
I hesitated for a moment. The story was almost certain to come out eventually anyway, so there wasn’t much point in trying to hide it. “One of them was murdered a few years ago. The other one went a little crazy after that and spent some time in a private sanitarium. Now she’s starting to come out of it—sort of. She’s staying with her aunt down in Wallingford—about five blocks from our place. Her headshrinker thinks that going to college might help her.”
“I’m not sure that U.W.’s the best place to go looking for mental stability,” James noted, as I locked the front door.
“Her aunt and I will be keeping a fairly tight grip on her,” I told him. Then we closed and latched the back door of the U-Haul van and climbed into the cab.
“You seem to be quite involved with this surviving twin,” James said rather carefully.
“There’s none of that kind of thing going on, James,” I told him, starting the engine. “The Twinkie twins were like baby sisters to me, and once you’ve seen a girl in messy diapers, you’re not likely to have romantic thoughts about her. I’ve just always looked out for them.”
“Twinkie Twins?”
“In-house joke.” I admitted. “Nobody could tell them apart, so I got everybody started indiscriminately calling them both ‘Twink.’ They pretty much stopped being Regina and Renata and started being Twink and Twink.”
“I’ll bet you could send Sylvia straight up the wall with that one,” James said, chuckling. “The concept of group awareness might damage her soul just a bit.”
“Bees do it, and so do ants. In a different sort of way, so do horses and wolves—and lions and elephants, if you get right down to it. If animals do it, why not people?” I carefully drove the truck off the front lawn and pulled out into the street.
“Did the cops ever catch the murderer?”
“No, and even if they do, I’m not sure they could convict him.”
“I don’t quite follow you.”
“Nobody can be positive which twin was murdered.”
“What?” He sounded incredulous.
“Well, nobody could ever tell them apart, and the hospital lost the footprints they took as newborns.”
“Why not just ask the surviving twin?”
“She doesn’t know who she is. She doesn’t remember anything.”
“Amnesia?”
“Almost total.”
“What about DNA?”
“Identical twins have the same DNA. So if they ever catch the guy, they might be able to prove that he killed somebody, but I don’t think they’ll ever be able to prove who. A good lawyer might get him off scot-free—which’d be OK with me.”
“What? You lost me again.”
“Hunting season opens up along about then. If Twink’s aunt doesn’t bag the sumbitch, I might take a crack at him myself. I’m sure I could come up with something interesting to do to send him on his way. If I happen to get caught, I’ll hire Trish to defend me.”
“I still think the courts would send him away, Mark. Murder is murder, and if Jane Doe is the best the cops can come up with, he’ll go down for the murder of Jane Doe.”
“You live in a world of philosophical perfection, James. The real world’s a lot more ‘catch as catch can.’ That’s why we have lawyers.” Then I remembered something and laughed.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“Chaucer got arrested once—back in the fourteenth century.”
“Oh?”
“He beat up on a lawyer.”
“Some things never change, do they?” he said, as we pulled out onto the freeway heading south.
When we got to the boardinghouse, James and I carried all my stuff upstairs and stacked it in my room. All in all it’d taken longer than I’d thought it would, so I decided to motel it for one more night. I’d already put in a full day, and I was feeling too worn down to start setting things up. I took the truck back to U-Haul, paid them, and retrieved my Dodge. Then I went by Mary’s place to check on Twinkie—I still felt guilty about the way I’d ignored her
