Lisa Scottoline - Think Twice

Alice took off, running full tilt. She tore down the street, but she couldn’t outrun them. They were shouting, right behind her. She took a right, then a left, down one dark street after another, bolting across the road.

Honk! Honk! A bus screeched to a halt, but she kept running. She spotted an alley and ducked inside. The bus had screened her from the men.

She hid in the shadow, watching. In the next minute, the men raced past the mouth of the alley and kept running away, down the street.

Suddenly she felt something press into the small of her back. Someone lifted her messenger bag from her shoulder.

“Turn around slowly,” said a voice. “I knew if I found an alley with a view of the bank, you’d drop by.”

Alice recognized the voice.

It was her own.

Bennie aimed the gun and forced Alice backwards, to the wall of the alley. There was only one way this could end. She was finally going to kill her twin.

“Bennie?” Alice put her hands up and stopped, her back to the wall. “Bennie? Bennie!”

Bennie didn’t reply or waver. She advanced with the gun. Her hand was steady, her concentration absolute. The gun was still hot. She lined up its sight on her target.

“No, wait. What’s the matter with you? What are you doing?”

Bennie didn’t answer. Police sirens blared nearby. They would come soon. She didn’t have much time. She cocked the trigger.

“Aren’t you going to call the cops?” Alice burst into tears. “Please God, don’t kill me!”

Bennie couldn’t live unless Alice died. It was that simple.

“No, wait, please!” Alice fell to her knees. “Please, no!”

Bennie stepped close enough to stand over Alice. She aimed at her forehead. It wasn’t a murder, it was an execution.

“Please!” Alice raised her hands, begging. “Please don’t kill me! You can’t!”

“Yes, I can.” Bennie sounded matter-of-fact, even to her. “I have you in me, and you have me in you. That’s why you couldn’t kill me. And why I can kill you.”

“No, please Bennie!” Alice collapsed in tears, doubling over, her forehead to the ground.

Suddenly there was the sound of footsteps behind her, and Bennie glanced over her shoulder. The figure of a woman appeared at the mouth of the alley. Lights from shops across the street silhouetted her.

“Benedetta, no,” the figure whispered, like a prayer.

Bennie blinked. Her mother was the only person who called her Benedetta. The figure was small, about her mother’s height. She could have sworn it was her mother, standing there.

Bennie shook it off. She must be seeing things. It was the pills.

“No, Benedetta,” the figure repeated, with the Italian pronunciation, exactly the way her mother had said her name.

Bennie felt the words washing over her, resonating within her. Something came loose in her chest. Tears filled her eyes. The figure was backlit like an angel. Bennie wasn’t imagining her. Maybe it was a vision. Her mother was an angel, come to see her. To stop her.

Then the angel stepped into the alley.

But it wasn’t a vision, an angel, or her mother.

It was an older woman, the same size as her mother. She had a similar headful of dark hair, but her eyes glittered oddly. She must have been crazy, because she came all the way into the alley, ignoring the execution in progress.

“Go away.” Bennie lowered her arm, hiding the gun. She tried to blink her tears back. “Go. Leave.”

“You don’t know me, but I know you,” the woman said, her voice firm and strong. “I saw you tonight, earlier, at the airport. I couldn’t go home and turn my back on you.”

“Go away!” Bennie kept shaking her head, bewildered.

“I saw you the other day, too. On the sidewalk, yelling. You need help, and I am here to help you. My name is Fiorella.”

Bennie didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t kill Alice, with the woman standing there. She shook her head. The tears wouldn’t go away. She was thinking of her mother. She was feeling her mother’s very presence.

“Benedetta, look at me. I see truth, and there is too much good in you to do this. Look at me.”

Bennie couldn’t look at her. She knew it was crazy. She was listening to a crazy woman having a crazy conversation, but she felt as if she were talking to her mother. She felt as if she were talking to herself. She was in a sort of dream, or spell, or maybe it was the pills, but none of it mattered any longer.

“Benedetta, look at me.”

“No.” Bennie was lost now, even to herself. She couldn’t come back. She had crossed the line. Tears slid down her cheeks. “I’m not good. Not anymore.”

“Yes, you are.” The woman took Bennie’s face in her hand and turned it toward her own. “I see you.”

Suddenly Bennie started to cry, hoarse, choking sobs. She felt like she was breaking down, out of control. All her emotions came flooding out, and she was unlocked, her soul set free. She was surrendering to something, and she didn’t know what, or who. The crazy woman. Her mother. Herself.

“I see you, Benedetta. See yourself, in my face. I look at you, like a mother. I see you, like a mother. Do you see the goodness here, and the love?”

And as impossible as it seemed, the woman was smiling at her, full of love, channeling her very mother, and in the next second Bennie felt herself collapse in the woman’s arms.

Police sirens blared near the alley, breaking the spell, and Bennie came to her senses.

Alice was climbing the wall and getting away.

“No!” Bennie shouted, raising a hand. But her gun was gone somehow, and Fiorella kept a firm grip on her arm.

“Let her go. She is dead already.”

Bennie heard the truth in her words, and it made her feel that she could come back, and that she already had, and she could become herself again. Because she had remembered who she really was inside, the little girl her mother had loved, all her life.

Benedetta Rosato.

And when she looked up, Alice was gone.

Bennie sat in a hard chair, alone in her third interview room, in almost as many days. She’d spent the night in a smelly holding cell, but the Bahamian police had fed her eggs for breakfast and fried fish for lunch, and they’d gotten her hands rebandaged, so she felt herself again. It was Tuesday afternoon, and she hadn’t had any more pills, which helped, too.

She was waiting for the cops to formally release her, and her gaze wandered idly over the mint green walls, beat-up black chairs, and a metal table covered with old newspapers, blank forms, and a 2007 Nassau telephone directory. There were bars on the window, and through them she could see it was beautiful outside. A tropical sun beamed onto a windowsill cluttered with files and an old-fashioned ink pad, for taking fingerprints.

She’d been talking to the cops for hours, because under Bahamian law they could question her for forty-eight hours, with extensions to seventy-two and ninety-six hours, which turned out to be unnecessary. She’d used her phone call to contact the Philadelphia office of the FBI, who had called the American consulate. The consulate official had gotten her a Bahamian criminal lawyer, and he’d blessed her cooperating with the authorities.

So the cops had read her “a caution,” their equivalent of Miranda warnings, and she’d convinced them that she’d shot the big man in self-defense, especially since eyewitnesses had seen him attack her and reported that he’d run away after he’d been shot. A search of doctors and the hospital hadn’t been able to find him, and under Bahamian law, if they didn’t have a complainant, they couldn’t charge her, anyway. She would be fined on the weapons charge and for illegally entering the country, and in the meantime, her bank accounts had been safely transferred back to USABank. The cops were still looking for Alice, based on statements from Fiorella and one Julie Cosgrove of BSB, but Bennie knew her sister would never be found.