A Book of Double Lives

Mike tries to ignore the yellow police tape around his mother’s living room as he searches her house for a coffin trinket the night before her funeral. The cops don’t seem too concerned about a retiree killed during a break-in.

In fact, no one seems sad, and Mike can’t even squeeze a single tear out. He loved his mom, or he thinks he did, but they were strangers.

In a surreal daze, he leaves his girlfriend Cecily to field sympathy phone calls in the kitchen.

“I know it’s morbid to stay at the house where his mom was--” Cecily sputters and stops the word ‘shot’ from squeezing through her lips, a heroic effort for a chronic blurter.

Mike walks upstairs and shuts the door of the master bedroom to muffle the phone conversation. Restless with indecision yet still numb with shock, he shifts piles aside on the top shelf of his mom’s closet and sees the outline of a hatch on the ceiling.

At first glance it looks empty, but as he turns to leave, he spots a cigar box overstuffed with papers.

Cecily finds him standing at the foot of the bed with the box’s contents spread across the duvet. Postcards and business cards and mismatched keys sit beside a thousand dollars in small bills and eight fake passports.

“She even had some for us,” Mike says, handing her a pair of Australian passports.

He picks up a small black hardcover book brimming with scraps of paper and unties an elastic loop that has long since lost its stretch but still holds everything together at the brim of bursting.

Mike reads several pages of drivel about her boyfriend Frank and his buddies Little Carl and Georgie Q out loud. He never knew if his mom dated anyone after his dad died while she was pregnant.

“Someone named Georgie Q signed this postcard,” Cecily interrupts. She reads off the back. “‘New office in Seattle, call when you’re in town,’ but the return address is in Australia.”

“Like our fake passports,” Mike says. Papers shuffle as they hurry to confirm the match.

“Should we give all this to the police?” Cecily asks.

If he gives this to the cops, they’ll take it and he’ll be left out while they discover the truth about his mom.

He still hasn’t answered by the time he stands to deliver the eulogy the next morning.

Last night I found a bunch of fake passports in my mother's bedroom.

“Joanna Washington raised me on her own while balancing a career with lots of travel,” he starts, reading the notecards he and Cecily prepared.

Eyes remain dry and expressions stay blank throughout the church.

A well-dressed older man approaches Mike at the end of the reception, extending a hand. “My name is George Quellier. I was a friend of your mother’s.”

“Georgie Q,” Mike murmurs.

George frowns. “She told you about me?”

“No, I just saw your name on some old postcards.”

The warmth returns to George’s gaze. “Well, young blood, I'd like to buy you a drink sometime this weekend and tell you a few stories about the good old days.”

Mike accepts the number and promises to call, exhausted and numb from all the condolences and the sense of insignificance as the world continues on this Tuesday afternoon.

He and Cecily resume researching the box and book over sympathy lasagna that night.

“I think these are safe deposit keys,” Cecily says, holding up a small silver key in one hand and a business card in the other.

They set the book aside to match business cards with keys.

That weekend he ignores George’s call in favor of driving to a safe deposit box in Bethesda, which contains the deed for a luxury condo.

"I found the key," Cecily says.

The condo is much more stylish than the home Mike grew up in, the furniture sleek and modern, so they decide to stay in the condo for the night, searching drawers and closets until they find a wall safe.

Cecily opens it on the first try.

“The code’s your birthday,” she grins at Mike.

They open the safe to find a small velvet box with a wedding ring on top of a sheaf of documents.

Cecily skims the top sheet. “Mike, she signed this place over to you two weeks ago!”

“Is there anything there about when she got married?”

She shakes her head with sympathetic eyes. “Just divorce papers.”

Mike can’t sleep that night. He slips out of bed without waking Cecily and goes to the living room to read more of his mom’s black book. Musings about her social life fade in favor of plans for various jobs with Frank and his friends.

“They were thieves,” Mike tells Cecily the next morning. “My mom, Frank, Georgie Q and Little Carl.”

“I figured it was something like that,” she grimaces with sympathy.

“The cops will take everything,” he adds.

"What do you want to do, Mike?"

He hesitates to say aloud that he wants to keep searching.

"What if we take a few days off work next week to scavenger hunt?" suggests Cecily. "Then we can report it after we're back.”

As they leave the condo, a tall older man approaches in the courtyard while Cecily is on the phone with her boss a few feet away. He seems familiar, but Mike can’t place him.

“E-excuse me,” the man says with a slight stutter. “Do you know Joanna?”

Mike nods.

The man shuffles a little, his expression at once sad and hopeful. “She hasn’t returned my c-calls…”

“There was a break-in, and she died,” Mike says, his voice raspy as the surreal sensation pulses against the sides of his skull.

The older man staggers and Mike glimpses tears before he clenches his own eyes shut.

Cecily joins a moment later and introduces them; it turns out the old man is Little Carl. She trades contact information and tells him where to find the grave so he can pay his respects.

“It’s weird that Georgie Q showed up to the funeral but didn’t tell Little Carl,” Cecily observes in the car.

Mike shrugs, feeling his exhaustion hit like a hurricane as she pulls out of the parking lot. “Maybe they stopped hanging out when my mom started dating Carl.”

On Monday, Mike calls the divorce lawyer while they drive to a bank in Virginia.

"Client records are confidential."

"I'm her son,” Mike says, feeling irritable. “And she was murdered two days after seeing you, so this might be relevant to the investigation.”

"I'm sorry for your loss,” the lawyer answers. “Of course I’ll cooperate with the police, but I wasn’t her lawyer for long. She had just filed to leave Frank.”

“Do you know where Frank is?”

The lawyer pauses for so long that Mike thinks the call might have dropped. Then: “Your father is serving a life sentence at Kolfax State Penitentiary.”

Mike’s ears ring and he lowers the phone. Cecily gets the phone number for the rural Pennsylvania prison and changes course.

“Of course Jo didn’t mention that I have a son,” Frank chuckles in a bitter tone.

“How long has it been since you saw her?" asks Mike. He can’t maintain eye contact with a convicted killer who has his face.

Frank shrugs. “It had been almost a year, so I wasn’t too surprised when the lawyer called.”

They don't linger at the prison, heading to Ohio to resume their hunt.

Mike feels Cecily stealing glances at him as they drive from state to state, but he isn't ready to process the emotional maelstrom of meeting Frank.

The next day, they find a battered atlas in a safe deposit box in Elkhart, Indiana. Post-it notes cover the pages, matching various postcards and business cards to different towns and cities. The trail leads to a red X on Crater Lake in Oregon with a photo of a lakeside cabin.

Cecily finds the key and they take turns sleeping in the passenger seat. They arrive 36 hours later and hobble to the door, stiff from the drive.

Heavy shades cover the windows and dust coats tarped furniture. They open windows and eat pizza out of the box on the porch while they air the house out. Mike gets the generator on and they fall asleep on the couch, too exhausted to trudge upstairs.

Mike and Cecily wake to the sound of heavy footsteps on the porch.

They stare with wide eyes for a moment, then Mike points to the tarp over the dining room table, miming for Cecily to go first.

She crawls across the floor and dives under the tarp a second before the door slams open.

Two armed men walk in, followed by Georgie Q.

"I'm going to make an offer a lot like the offer I made your mother,” says Georgie. His cronies split up to find Cecily with guns drawn.

“You fucking murdered her,” Mike spits with all the bitterness and fury he avoided acknowledging this past week.

George shrugs. “I offered her a drink and a chance to hand over her share, same as you. But you blew me off and I had to follow you all the way across the country.”

A gunshot interrupts.

“Cecily!” Mike screams as George draws his gun.

Her voice trembles. “There was a gun taped under the table.”

“That was very stupid,” George says, his face twisting with rage.

“I thought calling 911 and putting you on speaker was pretty smart," Cecily calls, her voice moving. “You don't have much time if you want to escape. Your friend needs a hospital, though.”

George turns to follow the sound, his gun raised.

Mike tackles him and wrestles for control of the gun when George looks away. He manages to knock the pistol under the couch by sheer dumb luck, then George punches him so hard his vision blurs.

The third man runs down the stairs shouting about Cecily and Mike tries to scramble after, but George gets a hand around his throat and slams his head against the floor.

Another gunshot cracks through the air and the third man falls. Red sprays through the doorway.

Cecily retches and sobs with sudden hysteria.

George chokes the breath out of Mike until black spots blot out his vision. He gasps back to consciousness seconds later, as George storms after Cecily.

Mike crawls across the floor as fast as he can, too dizzy and injured to stand. He digs under the couch until his desperate fingers find the gun.

Cecily screams from the other room, but a crash cuts her off.

Mike finds George choking Cecily and his hand moves before his mind gets through the surreal haze to recognize what he’s doing.

The gunshot deafens him and his ears ring with rushing blood as the fog clears away from his emotions.

Mike drops the gun and crawls over to Cecily, their faces bruised and bleeding. He slumps against her as the tears come at last.

Outside, red and blue lights flash toward the house.

A month later, when Mike and Cecily move into the condo-- one of the few things the police didn’t seize-- Little Carl visits with a gift of housewarming wine.

“Your mother left this at my house, but I think she would want you to have it," says Little Carl, pulling a new black book from his jacket pocket. “Make sure you have a glass of wine while you're reading it.”

Cecily peels the label off the bottle. “This is a storage unit in town.”

Mike finds a key taped inside the cover when he flips the book open.

The last page starts: “Carl and I moved twenty thousand to the storage unit today.”