Constance (Constance #1)(105)

“A look-alike,” she agreed, unsure which of them she was hoping to convince. She had terminated the clone of Abigail in the mountain, but what if she had only triggered yet another clone stored somewhere off-site? Say South Korea. It had been pure hubris to think her aunt hadn’t anticipated something going catastrophically wrong. This was a woman with a backup plan for everything—even herself.

“Exactly. That’s exactly what I told my friend,” Gaddis said. “But it’s a reminder of what a strange world we live in now. So hard to ever say when something is really over anymore. Things we think are dead and buried can come back to haunt us now.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Goodbye, Mr. Gaddis,” Con said and stepped back into the shop. “I hope lunch with your daughter goes well.”

“Please. Think about what you’re doing. It’s the greatest advance in the history of our species. It’s a gift. It belongs to the world.”

“I thought you said it belonged to Palingenesis,” she said and shut the door in his face.

From the window, she watched him cross the street to his waiting car. Was immortality really an advance, and if so, toward what? She thought she’d prevented it from getting out. Now she realized all she’d done was delay its arrival. Whether her aunt was alive or not made no difference. Now that Vernon Gaddis suspected that immortality was attainable, he would devote himself to finding the answer. Abigail Stickling was a genius, but there would be others who would stand on the shoulders of her work to glimpse what she had discovered. One day, the mind-body paradox would be solved again. It was inevitable. Con saw that now, but she wouldn’t be the one to unleash it on the world. What had Vernon Gaddis called it? A gift? Well, she had very different ideas about gift giving.



Elena, Stephie, and Dahlia returned a little after five with two large pizzas—Dahlia’s reward for the glowing reports from her teachers. She made a big show of counting the guitars in the shop and then lavished Con with a heartbroken face that could have been seen from orbit.

“Can I still have some pizza?” Con asked.

Dahlia pretended to think about it long and hard.

They went out to the courtyard. Elena ran upstairs for drinks, and they sat around the firepit and ate. The evening stretched out. A few friends arrived with wine. Elena arranged a pyramid of logs in the firepit and lit the kindling. The call went out, and still more friends arrived, bearing all sorts of food and drink. Con looked up and realized there had to be thirty people laughing and drinking and telling stories. That was how things usually went when Stephie and Elena entertained—nothing was ever planned, people just showed up until it was a party.

Con camped out by the firepit for most of the night, talking and enjoying the warm glow of human company. Abigail Stickling felt like a distant memory. She dismissed Gaddis’s story as cheap scare tactics. And if she were alive, what could she do to her from South Korea that she hadn’t been able to do in southern Virginia?

Someone asked Stephie if she would play. She declined, but by then it had already begun to circulate that she had agreed.

“Come on, give us a song!” someone yelled out happily, which was greeted with laughter and cheers.

“They’re calling your name, mi amor,” Elena said, resting her head on Stephie’s shoulder.

“I’m not getting up there alone,” Stephie said, looking over at Con.

“Oh no, no. No,” Con said, and then, in case anyone had missed it the first three times: “No.”

Dahlia, perched on the arm of her mother’s chair, was grinning at her. “You so are.”

“Why are you still up?” Con asked. “Isn’t it past your bedtime?”

“Straight A’s,” Dahlia said. “Fact.”

“What do you say?” Stephie said, taking Con’s hand and giving it a firm squeeze. “I will if you will.”

Con looked from Stephie to Elena to Dahlia and back to her oldest friend. How could she say no to any of these people? “One song.”

“One song,” Stephie agreed. “Your choice.”





Acknowledgments

One of the first lessons you learn as an author is that if you have a good idea while falling asleep, get up and write it down before you do. Because if you don’t, then in the morning, all you’ll have left is a faint chalk outline of that idea and the melancholic certainty that it was the best one you’ll ever have.

One night, nearly five years ago now, I was in that lovely halfway house between consciousness and sleep when a simple thought occurred to me: Wouldn’t it be cool if someone had to investigate their own death? I remembered the old Edmond O’Brien movie, D.O.A., in which he had to figure out who had poisoned him before he died. And I was sure there had to be hundreds of supernatural stories about the dead searching for answers, but how could someone living be in a position to solve their own murder?

I stared at the ceiling for a while until I wondered: What if the hero were a clone of the murdered person with all their memories except those of the murder itself? I executed a flawless movie sit-bolt-upright-in-bed eureka moment and somehow managed to make it to my desk without injuring myself. I spent the rest of the night jotting down pages and pages of world-building notes and wrote the first draft of what is now chapter four. Then I put it all in the proverbial bottom drawer and went back to work on the second Gibson Vaughn book. It would be four more books before I felt ready to return to Constance.