Брайан Фриман - Alter Ego

Stride squinted at the house through the darkness. He realized his eyes were becoming a casualty of his age. His night vision wasn’t what it once had been. “Does Zola still live here?”

“I think he winters in Scottsdale,” Maggie said.

“Well, if the place is empty, what was Haley Adams doing here?”

They both got out of the Expedition into the street. The air was cold, and the night was quiet. Stride trudged up the long sidewalk through the deep snow with Maggie following him. Tall trees rose around them, sheltering the house. They flushed a rabbit from the bushes, and it scampered away. At the front door, Stride rang the bell, but he knew that no one would answer. The house was clearly empty.

“Let’s check around back,” he said.

“Yeah, because my feet aren’t wet enough,” Maggie replied.

They went down into the snow, which was deeper in the yard, where it had been gathering with every storm since November. Stride followed the brick walls of the house to the other side, which butted up against a dense patch of woodland. Near the line of trees, he saw pockmarks in the snow that the latest storm hadn’t filled completely.

Footsteps.

Someone had made their way toward the Zola yard via the forest and then crossed to the rear wall. The back of the house was lined with windows. As they got closer, Stride saw that one of the windows on the four-season porch had been shattered and then covered with plywood and duct tape on the outside.

He shone his flashlight through the other windows.

“Someone broke in here,” he said. “I can see glass on the floor.”

“Do we check it out?”

Stride nodded. “Haley could be inside.”

Carefully, he peeled away the strand of tape and removed the piece of wood covering the window. The lock was already undone. He pushed open the window and helped Maggie squeeze through the frame onto the porch. When she was inside, she unlocked the rear door for him, and he joined her. They listened for noise, but the house was dead quiet. The interior smelled musty from being shut up for months.

“Haley?” he called.

There was no answer.

Slowly, they made their way deeper into the house. Other than the broken glass at the rear window, there were no signs of trespassers or vandals. Everything looked undisturbed. Stride passed through a formal dining room and noticed a bureau stocked with expensive crystal. The artwork and sculpture decorating the house were expensive.

“If Haley broke in here, she wasn’t trying to rip them off,” Stride said.

“And I wouldn’t order chow mein while I was doing it,” Maggie added.

They reached a dark wooden staircase that led to the upper floors of the house. Stride called out again. “Haley Adams? Haley, are you up there?”

No one replied. He climbed the steps, which creaked under his boots, and began examining the upstairs bedrooms. They hadn’t been used recently. The beds were made, and a thin layer of dust had settled on the furniture. He and Maggie took the rooms one by one, and then they found a last set of stairs that led to a finished attic below the sharp peak of the roof.

That was obviously where Haley Adams had been hiding. She’d spent a lot of time there.

Stride’s flashlight revealed a sleeping bag unrolled on the hardwood floor. The overflowing plastic garbage can included empty containers of pop and Chinese food. There were movie magazines on the floor. He saw a MacBook charging cable plugged into the wall, but the computer was nowhere to be found.

“What the hell was she up to?” Maggie asked.

He directed his flashlight at the tall, narrow windows overlooking the dense woods to the south. There the beam illuminated a tripod and a sleek high-powered telescope pushed close to the glass. A stool was placed in front of it where the viewer could sit and examine the stars.

“That looks like a hell of a telescope,” Maggie said. “Pretty fancy equipment for a college girl living on pizza and moo shu.”

Stride walked over to the window. The telescope wasn’t pointed up at the stars. It peered through the naked winter tree branches at the next house down on Hawthorne Road.

“She wasn’t interested in astronomy,” he said.

He bent down and brought his face close to the eyepiece. A bright world shot into focus. He was staring through the narrow gap of heavy curtains at the bedroom window of a house fifty yards away. The lights were on. He could see ornate, expensive furniture.

“I wouldn’t figure this girl for a Peeping Tom,” Maggie said.

Stride shrugged. “The question is what she was looking at.”

As he asked the question, the telescope answered it for him.

A man walked into the bedroom in perfect view. He had his lips clamped around a cigar, and as Stride watched, the man tilted his head back and blew a smoke ring into the air.

It was Dean Casperson.

“Thanks for meeting me on short notice, Chris,” Stride said.

Chris Leipold shrugged and drank from the bottle of beer in front of him. He gave Stride a mellow smile. His tie was loose, and his suit coat was draped over the chair next to him. “Why not? No one in L.A. ever says, ‘One more drink? Oh, no, really, I couldn’t.’”

They were in the upstairs bar at Grandma’s restaurant in Canal Park. In January, the midevening drinkers were mostly locals, not tourists. Frost clouded the windows of the glassed-in patio, giving a hazy glow to the lights of the hotels outside. Lake Superior was a vast dark stain beyond the city’s boardwalk.

While Chris drank beer, Stride drank coffee. He could see that Chris was a different man when he was away from the set and the movie stars. More of his Duluth roots came out. His Minnesota accent slipped back into his voice. You could take the boy out of the Midwest, but you couldn’t take the Midwest out of the boy.

“It freaks me out when I come back to Duluth,” Chris reflected in a slightly drunken monologue. “Seeing the old places. Seeing old school buddies from Denfeld. Of course, no one knows what to say to me anymore. Some of them think I’m a stuck-up alien because I live on the Coast. Some think I must be homicidal because I’m Art’s son. One of these days I’m going to wise up and remember that I just don’t belong here anymore. It’s all in my past.”

Except it wasn’t in the past. Not by a long shot. Stride knew that, but he let Chris get his frustrations out.

“And yeah, I know, it’s my fault,” Chris went on. “I did it to myself. I wrote the movie. I pushed to get the filming done here. Maybe you’re right, Lieutenant. Maybe this really is all about Art. I told myself all along that it wasn’t, but here I am. I’m right back where the son of a bitch wanted me to be.”

“No matter what he did, Art was still your father,” Stride said.

Chris took off his wire-rimmed glasses and cleaned them and positioned them on his face again. His brown eyes glistened. “I know. I’m stuck with that. When my mom called to say that he’d hanged himself, I actually cried. Not for long. One burst of tears and I was done. Mom didn’t cry at all. She knew he was a bastard long before the rest of us did. She was smart enough to get out of that marriage years ago.”

Stride kept silent. He hadn’t liked Art, not from the very beginning, but he didn’t need to say so.

“It goes without saying,” he told Chris, “but I’ll say it anyway. You’re not your father.”

“Maybe so, but it’s hard living with bad genes.”

“Art was careless about people’s lives long before he became a killer,” Stride said. “I saw him report stories that were reckless and wrong, but he never seemed to have any regrets about the collateral damage. That’s the kind of man he was. He didn’t have a conscience. But it’s not the kind of man you are. Anyone can see that in your movies.”