Point Horror: Identity Theft Part 16

I gently tucked the photo back. More receipts. Then I found it. An index card with my pa.s.swords, my Social Security number.

My whole life.

I slumped down in my seat, aware that the man carrying the cat was looking at me strangely. Adrenaline surged through my veins. 167 Revere Drive. In my mind, I repeated the words over and over, the syllables the only thing I was sure of. Once I met my father, I'd have proof that there had been two babies. I'd have someone on my side. And then - then - I could go to the police with proof and confront my mother and make everything go back to the way it should be.

167 Revere Drive, 167 Revere Drive. The words lulled my brain, made me stop thinking of what Jamie would be doing now that she was in Bainbridge.

"Miss?"

A meow, followed by a hiss. The man with the cat carrier was trying to get past me.

"Where are we?" I asked.

"Concord," he announced.

"Concord? I have to go!" I leaped to my feet and raced down the bus steps into another dingy bus station. I headed toward the lone ticket window. The tired-looking clerk raised an eyebrow.

"Boston, please?"

"Bus doesn't leave until seven."

"There's nothing earlier?" I pressed.

The clerk shook her head.

"All right." I shoved a twenty through the metal grille of the window, then settled on a hard plastic chair to wait - while my sister was probably wrecking my life.

When the bus finally rolled up to Boston, my eyes were gritty and dry from being awake so long and my heart was hammering against my chest as though I'd downed two extra-large espressos - even though I hadn't had anything except the water at the restaurant last night.

I blinked as I wavered unsteadily outside the bus terminal. I'd been to Boston a few times before, on school trips, but never often enough to know my way around. All of my fellow pa.s.sengers seemed to have some sense of where they were going. I just had the Brookline address. I stumbled out to the taxi line, blinking in the weak sun. I flexed and unflexed my toes inside my shoes, then did the same with my calf muscles. It didn't help.

"Taxi?" A driver jerked his thumb toward the black-and-white cab idling on the corner.

I nodded.

"One sixty-seven Revere Drive?" I asked. "In Brookline."

The taxi driver nodded. My breath came in short bursts. James Thomson-Thurm was English. He had two children. He enjoyed parasailing, waterskiing, and opera. He had, at one point, been in love with my mother.

What if he doesn't believe me? The thought crept into my mind. Meanwhile, back in Bainbridge, everyone would believe Jamie was me.

"Right here?" The cab driver pulled up to a four-story Victorian house at the center of a circular drive. Or, house wasn't the right word. It was a mansion, straight from an architecture magazine. It wasn't the type of place I'd imagined a professor of medieval history would live. And yet ...

"Is this one sixty-seven?" I asked, squinting at the address.

"Yes, ma'am. That'll be thirty dollars."

I pulled out Jamie's wallet and peeled two twenties from the front of the stack in the main compartment. A sticky note was affixed to it.

And you think I don't care about your well-being?

Enjoy Ma.s.sachusetts.

The note was signed with a heart.

She'd known. She'd known I would come here. The computer history. Of course.

"Thirty?" the driver pressed.

I pa.s.sed the two crisp twenties toward him.

I balled my hands together, my fingers digging into my palms. It was now or never. My name is Hayley Westin. You knew my mother, Wendy. Almost eighteen years ago, I was born....

It was the speech of my life - literally. All I needed to do was look him in the eye and tell the truth.

Steeling my courage, I walked up the flagstone path and rang the bell. Almost immediately, as though I'd been watched, the door swung open.

I was standing face-to-face with my father. He looked more weather-beaten than the man in the picture on the back of the book jacket, but the piercing eyes were the same.

I took a deep breath. "First, I'm not Jamie. I'm Hayley. And I ..."

He laughed, a loud angry bark. "Don't even do this to us. Not now." He grabbed my arm and pulled me inside, through a gleaming hallway and into a large, well-lit kitchen. A beautifully manicured backyard was visible through the gla.s.s sliding doors, with trees wrapped in burlap sacks for the winter.

"Wait. Do you know who I am?" I yanked my elbow away from him. He grabbed it back.

"Deborah!" he bellowed. I detected the slightest trace of a British accent. In the very rare times I'd ever pictured us meeting, I thought we'd be introduced at someplace cozy, like the Ugly Mug. I never imagined him speaking to me in a hate-filled voice that made me tremble every time he opened his mouth.

A thin woman made her way into the kitchen. She was wearing a pair of black slacks and a purple cashmere sweater. It was impossible to tell her age - she could have been anywhere between forty and sixty-five - but what struck me were her eyes. Large, blue, and flickering, making it impossible to hold eye contact. She was clearly James's wife, but why did she look so angry with me?

Unless ...

"You think I'm Jamie," I said slowly.

"We're not playing games anymore. Yes, we think you're Jamie. Yes, we think you're our daughter," the woman said, her voice low, musical, and vaguely threatening.

"I'm not Jamie. I'm Hayley. Her twin. Hayley Westin."

Deborah and the man - my father - locked eyes, but it was impossible to read what they were trying to tell each other.

"Hayley," Deborah hissed. "How convenient."

Jamie's father shook his head sadly. "Dr. Morrison said this could happen. It's called splitting. It's just another sign that she's a very sick girl. And, of course, knowing she has a twin makes it that much easier to imagine an alternate personality. That's why Wendy and I had agreed to keep it a secret." He shook his head angrily. "Anyway, that place he told us about up in Maine is supposed to be the best, and I think with the right therapy, and maybe some electroshock, she could resume a normal life...." he said, as though I weren't in the room.

"I didn't know about Jamie. Jamie was the one who found me, and Jamie's the one trying to take over my life. I came to stop it. And you have to help me. You have to at least believe me!" I locked eyes with James. I knew my voice was getting dangerously shaky, that I was on the verge of sounding like I was having a breakdown. I took a deep breath and went back to what I'd meant to say. "I'm Hayley Kathryn Westin. My mother is Wendy, and eighteen years ago, you and ..."

James's face crumpled, then hardened. He took a menacing step toward me.

"Stop it!" Deborah shouted. She put her hands on my shoulders. "Jamie. Hayley. Stop it," she said. The scent of her jasmine-and-honey perfume was overpowering. I tried to pull away, but she only tightened her grip. Behind her, a dark-haired boy padded into the kitchen. He was about my age, with s.h.a.ggy hair that curled over his ears. He had the same blue eyes as his mother, but the half smile looked like my father's on the book jacket. Which meant he had to be my half brother.

I stared at him, trying to get him to understand what was going on. I barely knew myself. "I'm not your sister, am I?" I asked, holding a wide, unblinking gaze and hoping he'd see something - a freckle, a gesture, a scar - that Jamie didn't have.

He turned away, his shoulders stiffening. "I thought she wasn't coming back," he said in a hard voice.

"Aidan, go upstairs. You don't need to see this," James said firmly.

"See what? See Jamie self-destruct ... again?" Aidan asked, sitting down at the kitchen table, his eyes flicking from Deborah to James, then back again. "Should we just call the police this time? Because I bet she did something she shouldn't have. It was the stolen car last time. What do you think it is this time? Murder? What did you do, Jamie?" he asked.

"I'm sorry," I said finally, breaking the silence. It was another Alice in Wonderland moment. I'd fallen down the rabbit hole and couldn't make sense of the information being presented to me. Was I Jamie? Was I Hayley? Or was I someone else entirely? "If you can just listen to me, I'll explain...."

"We don't need your explanations. And sorry doesn't work anymore," the man said in a low voice, as threatening as the sound of a far-off thunderstorm.

"James," Deborah said in a low voice. "Why don't you call Dr. Morrison. We can't talk rationally with her. It'll hurt her, and it'll hurt us. She needs help."

James paused, then nodded once. As he left the room, Deborah and I stared at each other.

"You stole from us. We're your family. This is trust. And I don't know if we'll ever get that back," Deborah said slowly.

"I know this sounds crazy. I know you don't believe me. But I'm Hayley. And if I can just call someone, I can prove -"

"Prove that you're manipulative? That you've found more people to pull into your web of lies? No. You won't do that. I know James believes in you, but I don't. I really don't. You turn eighteen in a few months, and then we're done. We can't be responsible for someone who's so willfully irresponsible about everyone and everything in her life. When I think back to you as a child ... the guinea pig -" She broke off.

"What guinea pig?" I asked, fear climbing up my spine.

"Only my favorite thing in the world," Aidan said. My mind flashed to the picture in the wallet, the childish handwriting.

"Peanut b.u.t.ter?" I asked reflexively, before I could stop myself.

"Good memory," Aidan said tightly. "Especially for someone who apparently has no idea who Jamie is."

I thought of the picture in the wallet.

Deborah shot a warning look at Aidan, then turned toward me.

"Stop it. For all of our sakes, just stop it." She'd grabbed a napkin from the center of the table and was shredding it into smaller and smaller pieces, which rained down like snow on the table.

Just then, James came into the room. "It's all set. They have emergency protocol for situations like this. They won't be long."

"So what do we do with her until then?" Aidan asked.

"We wait," James said tersely. He folded his arms across his chest.

"Can we talk?" I asked in a small voice. Being in this house, surrounded by Jamie's family, made it hard to think. I felt guilty, as if I were Jamie. Everyone was staring at me. No matter what I said, they wouldn't believe me.

And so I bolted. I ran toward the sliding gla.s.s doors and yanked. They wouldn't budge. I turned on my heel to run toward the front and was tackled by Aidan, who was six inches taller than I was. I lost my balance and fell, my head cracking against the floor.

"Ow!" I yelped. I frantically wrestled against his grip, while Deborah and James looked on.

"Let go! You don't want to get hurt!" Deborah called.

Aidan let go, and I took the moment to wipe tears of pain from my eyes.

"I'm sorry," I said helplessly. Everything I'd planned to say had disappeared from my brain. I'd walked into Jamie's trap. And the worst thing was that even though I knew it, I couldn't explain it to these people, who were staring at me with hate in their eyes.

"Sit down," Deborah said tonelessly.

I meekly perched on one of the wooden chairs at the kitchen table, watching the three of them. James kept clenching his jaw, while Deborah stared at the floor. Only Aidan looked at me. I turned away.

Finally, Deborah placed her hand on Aidan's shoulder. "Can you watch her? We'll just be in the next room," Deborah whispered as she and James headed through the archway into the dining room.

Aidan sat down beside me.

"You know you're so busted, don't you?" He asked.

I paused and gazed into his eyes. Could I make him my ally? It was a long shot, but at least he was looking at me. I opened my mouth.

"I know this sounds weird. I know it does. But I'm really Jamie's twin. I can -" The doorbell rang, cutting me off.

"That's them," James announced to no one in particular, dashing through the room toward the door.

"I hate you," Aidan spat.

"I'm sorry." It was the only phrase I could think of, and even though I kept saying it again and again, I knew it wasn't enough for whatever Jamie had done.

Just then, James came back into the room, two men in white coats behind him.

"She's getting violent," he warned.

That was all they needed to act. One of them lunged toward me, half dragging me from my seated position while the other grabbed my chin and placed two tablets on my tongue. Too surprised to spit them out, I swallowed, tasting their acrid, lawn-fertilizer-like taste.

I coughed to try to spit up the medicine, but it was too late. The pills had dissolved and were already making their way into my bloodstream.

"I'm sorry, Jamie. I hope you know that. And I hope you know we want ... we want a change. We believe in a change. But we can't live like this anymore," James said sorrowfully. "You can take her. Thank you."

Fight, a voice in my brain screamed. But I didn't have any fight left in me. I didn't have anything left in me. All I wanted to do was curl up into a ball and go to sleep - and never, ever wake up.

"I'm sorry, baby girl. One day, I hope you'll understand," James muttered as the two orderlies dragged me to an unmarked black car.

One of them opened the rear door and shoved me inside. I heard the click of the lock as the two of them climbed into the front, closing a barrier between the front and the back.

The car rolled away from the curb. Even though the windows were closed, I could hear garbage trucks beeping in the distance and the nervous chattering of sparrows in the bare tree branches around us. The world was just waking up, and it was impossible to reconcile the fact that my life as I'd known it was falling apart. And there was nothing I could do about it.

I awoke to commotion around me. The two orderlies were standing above me, unbuckling my seat belt and transferring me to a wheelchair.

"I'm awake!" I said, struggling to consciousness. "I'm fine!"

I wasn't. My brain felt like it was swathed in cotton and my tongue felt far too large for my mouth.

"Steady," one of the orderlies said. He stepped to the side, and I saw a wiry, short man rushing toward me, a stethoscope flopping back and forth on his chest.