The Identicals(3)

Harper sighs. Drew is working the beat tonight. He makes double time on weekends, but with all the bozos out drinking too much and enjoying the first days of the summer season, is it worth it? He’ll go on thirty calls, she bets, and twenty-seven of them will be drunk and disorderlies and three will be accidents involving taxi drivers who haven’t learned their way around yet.

The third man remaining in Harper’s life is her precious, damaged friend Brendan Donegal, who is exiled over on Chappy. Harper wants to let Brendan know that Billy has died, but Brendan can’t manage texting anymore. Like twenty-six killer wasps, the alphabet swarms him. He uses his phone only to tell the time.



Nothing from Dr. Zimmer. Will Harper be forced to call? She calls Dr. Zimmer all the time because she has had many legitimate questions about her father’s condition—liver failure, kidney failure, congestive heart failure. Billy Frost’s end has been a series of failures.

Surely no one will fault Harper for calling Reed now, after her father has died. But she has an uncomfortable premonition. She waits.



Billy Frost is dead at the age of seventy-three. Harper takes a stab at writing his obituary in her mind as the nurses come in to clean him up and prepare him for the fun-filled ride to the morgue. William O’Shaughnessy Frost, master electrician and avid Red Sox fan, died last night at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital, in Oak Bluffs. He is survived by his daughter Harper Frost.

And… his daughter Tabitha Frost… and his granddaughter, Ainsley Cruise… and his ex-wife, Eleanor Roxie-Frost, all of Nantucket, Massachusetts. What will surprise people the most? Harper wonders. That Billy has a daughter identical to but completely different from the cute screw-up who delivers packages for Rooster Express? Or that Billy used to be married to the famous Boston fashion designer Eleanor Roxie-Frost, more commonly known as ERF? Or will the shocker be that the other half of Billy’s family lives on the rival island—that fancy, upscale haven for billionaires? Harper’s twin sister, Tabitha, hasn’t set foot on Martha’s Vineyard in fourteen years, and Harper’s mother, Eleanor, hasn’t been here since her honeymoon, in 1968. Harper’s niece, Ainsley, has never been here. Billy had been sad about that; when he wanted to see Ainsley, he had to go to Nantucket, which he did, religiously, every August.

You sure you don’t want to come with me? he used to ask Harper.

I’m sure, Harper would say. Tabitha doesn’t want me there.

When will you girls learn? Billy would reply, and Harper would mouth along with him. Family is family.

Family is family, Harper thinks. That’s the problem.



Nothing back from Reed. Harper imagines him eating pie. Reed’s wife, Sadie, is famous for her pies; her mother used to have a stand along the side of the road, and Sadie has capitalized on that artisanal pie-making endeavor and turned it into a gold mine. She rents a small commercial kitchen and storefront in Vineyard Haven—it’s a scant mile from Harper’s duplex—and cranks out the pies: strawberry-rhubarb, blueberry-peach, lobster pot. A lobster pot pie costs forty-two dollars. Harper knows this because, near the end of his life, Billy Frost became a fan. One of his female admirers (and there were many) dropped off a lobster pot pie all warm and fragrant and filled with claw and knuckle meat in a thick sherry cream sauce under golden pastry, and Billy declared that he had died and, against all expectations, gone to heaven. When Billy got really bad but could still eat, Harper had felt it her duty to buy him a lobster pot pie. She had entered the shop—the Upper Crust—with trepidation, knowing she was most likely going to come face-to-face with her lover’s wife for the first time.

Harper was forearmed, but seeing Sadie had come as a shock. She was far shorter than Harper had expected; her head barely cleared the top of the pie case. Her hair was cut short like a boy’s, and her eyes bulged, giving her the expression of a cartoon character perpetually caught by surprise.

Sadie didn’t seem to have any idea who Harper was. She displayed no wariness, just a pleasant smile that revealed a gap between her two front teeth. Harper knew that some men found a gap like that sexy, although Harper never understood the attraction. If her own teeth had looked like that, she would have beat it straight to the orthodontist.

“Can I help you?” Sadie had asked.

“My father is dying,” Harper blurted out.

Sadie’s eyes popped a little more.

“He wants a lobster pot pie,” Harper said. “It’s the one thing he’s been asking for. Mrs. Tobias dropped one off last week for him, and he can’t stop talking about it.”

“Mrs. Tobias is an excellent customer,” Sadie said. She tilted her head. “Is your father Billy Frost, by any chance?”

“Yes,” Harper said. She felt like she was on a roller coaster, cresting, cresting…

“Mrs. Tobias told me he was sick. You know, he installed some light fixtures for me when I first opened this shop. He was the only electrician who was willing to do it. Everyone else said I had to call the contractor who had wired it back when it was a scented-candle place, but that guy had long ago gone to jail.”

“Buttons,” Harper said, almost involuntarily. Billy had absorbed much of Buttons Jones’s business when Buttons was indicted for tax evasion.

Sadie retrieved a lobster pot pie hot from the oven. For a second, Harper thought the pie would be free of charge, a gift for a man who had long ago done Sadie Zimmer a solid.