Alter Ego

9

Serena sat across from Cat at a wobbly wooden table in the basement bakery in Canal Park called Amazing Grace. She ate a scrambled egg skillet with Yukon potatoes while Cat picked at a sugar-sprinkled blueberry muffin with her slim fingers. The girl didn’t look at her. The two of them hadn’t said much since they’d left the cottage. For Cat, the worst punishment was not knowing what her punishment was going to be.

“Drew and Krista asked me to baby-sit today,” Cat murmured after a long stretch of silence. “Can I still do that?”

“Of course.”

“They’re counting on me,” the girl went on as if Serena hadn’t said anything. “And I haven’t seen Michael in like a week.”

“Cat, I said it’s fine,” Serena told her.

“Well, I wasn’t sure if I was grounded or something.”

“You’re not. And regardless, I would never tell you not to see your son.”

Michael was now a fifteen-month-old toddler. His adoptive parents, Drew and Krista Olson, had encouraged Cat to play a role in his life. After months of reluctance, Cat finally had stepped up. Drew and Krista were busy rebuilding their camping shop, which had been destroyed in the marathon bombing, so they called on Cat regularly for baby-sitting duties.

“I’m sorry about last night,” Cat said finally, biting her lip.

“I know you are.”

“Is Stride mad?”

“He’s mad at Jungle Jack. Not you.”

“Yeah, but I was drinking,” Cat said.

“Well, you’re right, we’re not happy about that. I know it doesn’t seem like a big deal to you, but you have no idea what someone might put in your drink at a party like that. Plus, it’s easy to go too far before you even realize it. Look at that poor girl in Proctor this weekend.”

Cat nodded. “Rochelle Wahl.”

“Yes, her. She figured it would be fun to have a drink while her parents were out of town. And one drink led to a few more. She went outside to throw up, she fell down, she hit her head. She froze to death, Cat. Imagine her parents coming home to that.”

“I know.”

“So yes, you made a mistake,” Serena said, “but actually, last night was mostly my fault.”

“Your fault? How?”

“I brought you to the party. You weren’t ready for it. I shouldn’t have left you alone with those people. That’s on me, and I apologize.”

Cat looked up from the table and stared at her with wide eyes. “You can’t blame yourself.”

“Yes, I can.” Serena reached across the table to stroke Cat’s hair. “Sometimes I look at you and see a young woman, and I’m really proud of how far you’ve come. It’s easy for me to forget that you’re still a teenager. When I was your age, I wouldn’t have been able to handle last night, either. It was wrong of me to put you in that position.”

Cat pulled off a chunk of blueberry muffin and ate it. Her forehead crinkled. “I’m not a kid. I don’t like that you guys have to keep bailing me out when I do stupid stuff.”

“Give yourself a little credit,” Serena said. “Look at Michael. Look at all the right choices you’ve made with him. You made sure he had parents who could take good care of him. You’ve stayed in his life.”

The girl’s mouth pressed into a little frown. “Yeah, but I should be doing more to help you.”

“You do. Believe me.”

Cat went back to her breakfast, but she looked unhappy with herself. That was fine. Serena knew that Cat couldn’t recognize how much she’d grown in the last year. In the early days of living with them, Cat had acted out constantly. She’d tried to get Serena and Stride to throw her out, as if that would justify her belief that her life wasn’t worth anything. Now she was angry with herself for not living up to her own standards. That was progress.

Serena bit into another forkful of her Yukon scramble, but she almost choked as a hand slapped her sharply on the back. Her nose was filled by a sickly strong cologne, and a voice boomed in her ears. The noise was way too loud for the morning quiet of the bakery.

“Good morning, pretty ladies!”

Cat looked up, and her anxious face smoothed into a smile. “Curt!”

Curt Dickes pulled over an empty chair from a nearby table and straddled it backward as he sat down between them. His long wool coat was unbuttoned, and he wore oversized boots studded with rivets and chains. He grabbed Serena’s fork out of her hand and snagged a bite from her skillet. As he chewed the eggs, he nodded his head happily and shouted at her. “Hey, that’s good. Nice choice, Detective. I’ll have to get that next time.”

“Inside voice, Curt,” Serena said.

Curt cocked his head. “What?”

Then he realized that he was still wearing his AirPods, and he popped them out of his ears and buried them in his pockets. “Oops, sorry about that. I love me some Halsey.”

He stole more of her eggs, and Serena pushed the plate over to him. “Here, be my guest.”

“Thanks!” Curt replied, diving into her breakfast. “How’s the hubster?”

“Lieutenant Stride is fine.”

“Excellent, excellent.” Curt winked at Cat. “How about you, kitty cat? What’s with the sad kitty eyes?”

Cat shrugged. “Nothing. I’m fine.”

“Oh, yeah? Word is some hotshot was putting the moves on you last night. Everything okay?”

Serena leaned across the table. “How the hell did you hear about that?”

“Aw, give me some credit, Mrs. Stride. Nothing gets past me.”

That was true.

Curt Dickes had his fingers in everything in Duluth. He knew everyone, and everyone knew him. He popped up at every city event, usually with something to sell. He blended in like a chameleon all along the social scale, from the rich party crowd to the homeless hanging out in Lake Place Park. He always had money, but it never lasted long. Then he was on to the next scam to earn more.

Curt had been a part of Cat’s life since her days on the street. No matter how far behind she left that world, she always seemed to drift back into Curt’s orbit. It had taken Serena a long time to realize that Cat simply had a perpetual, inexplicable crush on Curt. The girl liked him.

The crazy thing was that Serena liked him, too. She didn’t want him anywhere near Cat, but she also knew that Curt didn’t have a mean bone in his body. Or an honest one.

He was twenty-seven years old but acted like a teenager. His musky cologne usually lingered in the room long after he left. He wore baggy clothes over a beanpole frame, and he sported shoulder-length stringy black hair. Today he had a purple fedora positioned low on his forehead, with multiple gaudy rings on his fingers. His teeth were stark white, and he flashed them as he grinned.

“So what’s the latest scam, Curt?” Serena asked.

Curt slapped an open hand dramatically against his chest. “Scam? Me?”

“There’s always a scam with you.”

“No, no, this is different,” he assured her. “What I’m offering locals and tourists today is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be part of history! I mean, we are having a big-budget Hollywood movie filmed in our very own backyard. When’s that likely to happen again? Iron Will was all the way back in 1994. You’ll Like My Mother was in 1972, for heaven’s sake. Plus, given that our beloved Lieutenant Stride is practically the star, I knew I needed to commemorate the event.”

Cat giggled.

“Commemorate it how?” Serena asked suspiciously.

“With this!” Curt dug into his pocket and produced a Rubik’s Cube and put it on the table in front of them. Instead of the usual solid colors, this version of the game had photographs on each side of the cube, broken up into small squares. Serena picked it up and saw two pictures of Dean Casperson on opposite sides, two pictures of Aimee Bowe, and a photo of the Duluth lift bridge with the caged girl and the month and year of filming printed across the sky.

When she turned it over, she saw a photo of Jonny — her Jonny — on the bottom.

“Are you kidding, Curt?”

“What? It’s professionally done and a bargain at $39.95. Do you want one? I use Square, so if you’ve got a chip card, we’re all set.”

“It’s also completely illegal. Did you license any of these photos? And where did you get a picture of Stride?”

“I took it myself. He’s a handsome man. You’re very, very lucky.”

Serena sighed in exasperation. Cat picked up the game and spun the segments repeatedly until all the photographs were fragmented around the cube. Then she started trying to put it together again. Having snippets of photos rather than solid colors made the puzzle ten times as hard.

“I think it’s supercool,” Cat said. “Can I have one?”

Curt spotted the look on Serena’s face and grinned. “For you, kitty cat, it’s free. A promotional sample.”

“Neat!”

Serena felt a headache coming on, which usually happened when she was around Curt. “Listen, I didn’t ask you to meet us here for a marketing pitch on your latest product line. I need information.”

“You want free merchandise and free information?” Curt replied. “Wow, you are an expensive date, Detective.”

“It will get even more expensive if I make a call to the film’s lawyers and you have to destroy all of your little pirated cubes.”

Curt nodded. “Excellent point. Proceed.”

“Obviously, you’ve got a pipeline into the film crew.”

“Sure I do. When strangers in our city have needs, I am a one-man tourist bureau.”

“What kind of needs are we talking about?” she asked. “Girls? Drugs?”

“My inventory and contacts are wide-ranging, Serena; you know that. Visitors from Los Angeles do not always appreciate the recreational opportunities that Duluth offers when it’s ten degrees below zero. So they look for alternative sources of entertainment to pass those long, cold evenings.”

“Girls. Drugs.”

Curt groaned and lowered his voice. “Sure. Yeah.”

“Do you supply?”

“No way! I’m just a go-between. People who need people come to me.” Curt glanced at Cat, who’d already solved the puzzle. It had taken her less than a minute. “Holy crap, kitty cat, how do you do that?”

Cat grinned and looked pleased with herself. She scrambled the cube and started solving it again. Serena was routinely amazed by the girl’s brain. It was the emotional side that still had some catching up to do.

“Has anyone approached you for information about the movie?” Serena asked. “I’m thinking about reporters. Tabloid writers. Paparazzi.”

“Yeah, there are a few of them scavenging around and looking for dirt.”

“What about a girl named Haley Adams?” Serena asked.

“Names really aren’t my thing. What does she look like?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. We think she changes her appearance a lot. But she had a spy setup with an expensive telescope next door to Dean Casperson’s rental house.”

Curt drummed his fingers on the table as he thought about it. “Well, I know one girl who was really, really interested in Dean Casperson. Midtwenties. Long, bombshell blond hair that was obviously a wig.”

Serena slid out her phone and found the photograph of the mannequin that Stride had texted her from Haley’s apartment. “Hair like this, you mean?”

“Yeah, just like that,” Curt replied, nodding.

“What did she want?”

“She knew people came to me to round out the guest list at crew parties, if you know what I mean. She wanted a tip-off when there was going to be a big party at Casperson’s place.”

“And did you give her what she wanted?” Serena asked.

“Sure, why not? She paid well.”

“Did she say why she wanted the information?”

“No.”

“When was the last party?”

“Saturday night,” Curt said. “Lots of people.”

“Were you there?”

“I may have put in an appearance, yeah. It’s good to keep up the contacts, you know?”

“Was Haley there?”

Curt shook his head. “I didn’t see her. Although you said she liked to wear different looks, so who knows? But if she had a spy setup, she was probably watching from the neighbor’s house.”

“And would she have seen anything interesting?” Serena asked. “Did anything happen at the party?”

“It was a little wild, but I didn’t see anything that was way over the line.”

Serena frowned. Then she thought of something else, and she picked up her phone again.

“What about this guy?” she asked, hunting down the photograph of John Doe from the traffic accident. “Have you ever seen him before?”

Curt glanced at the phone. He seemed unfazed by the blood or by the fact that the man in the photograph was dead. “Yeah, he was there.”

His response was so casual that Serena took a second to catch up. She pointed at the phone again. “Hold on; you’re saying you saw this man at a party at Dean Casperson’s house last Saturday night? Are you sure?”

Curt shrugged. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

“Who is he?”

“No idea. When I saw him, I was grabbing a smoke outside. He was loading a girl into his car.”

“Could the girl have been Haley Adams?”

“I don’t think so. Haley was short. This girl was pretty tall.”

“What did she look like?”

“Sorry, no idea. Her back was to me. She couldn’t even walk by herself, so I figured she was drunk. He was taking her out the back, like he didn’t want anyone to see her.”

“Then what happened?”

“He drove off.”

Serena tried to put the pieces of the story together just as Cat was doing with the Rubik’s Cube.

There was a party on Saturday night at the house Dean Casperson was renting in Congdon Park. Something went wrong, and a girl had to be taken away. Serena didn’t know who she was or what had happened to her. But the girl wound up in a car driven by John Doe, who bore all the signs of a hired killer.

And through the trees, Haley Adams was watching.