The Good Twin(64)

“Thank you, Poppy.”

“So, will there be a trial?”

“I suppose so, unless Ben agrees to a plea bargain.”

“And they’ll put him away for a long time?”

“Very long.”

I didn’t tell my grandfather that I thought no amount of time was long enough. Even though with Ben’s handsome face and buffed body, he would be considered prime meat for the prison population, and even though I knew he would be subjected to daily tortures there, it still wasn’t enough for me. I had given him everything, and he’d wanted more. Now, I wanted more.





CHAPTER 45

I had started to get bored silly when Detective Saldinger called. “Your sister has revoked your prenuptial agreement and started the process of settling the estate. It’s time to come home.”

“Okay, Detective. I’ll fly home tomorrow.”

I arrived at LaGuardia Airport at 2:30 p.m. the next afternoon and took a cab directly to my father’s apartment. I still had a key and had made sure to tell Mallory that she shouldn’t arrive before 6:00 p.m. That’s when the staff changed over. It wouldn’t do to have the doorman wonder how he’d seen two of us enter the building.

It was the first time I’d been there since my father’s funeral. After spending night after night for so many months by his side in this apartment, I felt a tug as soon as I stepped inside. The lights were all off and the curtains drawn, so I switched on the foyer light. Ben had let Tatiana go as soon as he’d received pictures of my “death,” giving her only two days to clear out her belongings. I never would have done that. She’d lived in this apartment for more than a decade. When Mallory told me, I sent a check to her at her sister’s apartment in Queens for one year’s salary.

I walked through the rooms of the apartment. The hospice equipment was gone, and everything was in place, as though my father was simply at the office, waiting to return home. It hit me hard, once again, that I was alone. The new people in my life: Mallory, perhaps my father’s parents, were just that—new. They didn’t share my memories.

I settled down on the living room couch with my iPad and surfed the Net, checking out the hot new artists, deciding which upcoming art exhibitions I wanted to attend, pretending that my life was normal. But I knew it wasn’t.

At 6:30 p.m., Mallory arrived, bags of Chinese food in her arms. “We could have had something delivered,” I said.

“I know. I wanted to test our twinness again—see if you like the same dishes I do.”

I opened the bags and pulled out a quart of egg drop wonton soup, shrimp chow mein, and chicken kung pao. “Perfect,” I said.

When we finished eating, Mallory asked, “So, what’s the plan?”

“I’m meeting with Detective Saldinger at the precinct tomorrow morning. He’s going to set me up with a Bluetooth device that’ll let them hear everything Ben says.”

“Probably a pen. That’s what they gave me when Ben took me to meet Clark.”

“I’ll come to the townhouse after Ben gets home, and we’ll confront him. Detective Saldinger and his men will be outside, listening, and when Ben admits what he’s done and sees both of us together, they’ll come in and arrest him,” I said.

“Some nights he doesn’t come home at all.”

“I’ll call him, pretend I’m you, and give him some reason for him to get back.”

Mallory nodded, but not with a great deal of confidence.

“Don’t worry. It’ll go fine.”

“I hope so. I want to get back to my life. That’s if I don’t get sent to jail along with Ben.”

“What? Waiting tables?”

She turned to me, and for the first time, I saw a flash of anger in her eyes. “I liked my life. It was a life I earned.”

I reminded myself that, despite our shared genes, my sister was a stranger to me. Briefly, I wondered if I’d been mistaken. If, despite her protestations that she didn’t want my money, that had been her aim all along. And even if it wasn’t, what was to say she wouldn’t want it down the road? She claimed she wanted only a relationship, but wouldn’t she also want the things I could do, the things I had? I know I would, and she was identical to me.



“I wish I could talk you out of this,” Saldinger told me the next morning. “I get why you want to do it, but what if he goes crazy and tries to hurt you?”

“You’ll hear it and run inside.”

“That gun that I saw you with. The night we got Clark. Can Ben get at it?”

“It’s kept in the bedroom upstairs. He won’t have a chance to reach it.”

He just shook his head slowly. “If I felt I needed a confession from him, I could have wired up Mallory anytime over the past week. I’ve told you, it’s not necessary.”

“I need to see the look on his face when he realizes I’m alive. That’s all.”

Saldinger sighed, then glanced around the precinct room uneasily. There were at least a dozen desks in the open space, half of them empty, the other half occupied with men and women busy at their computers or with open files. No one was looking our way. “It better not blow back in my face. That’s all I can say.”