Сара Пинскер - Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea - Stories

The body wasn’t me, I told myself. I concentrated on the differences rather than the eerie familiarity. Her cheeks were hollower than mine. She had more freckles, close-cropped hair. My empty stomach lurched.

She was starting to cool to the touch. I felt for a pulse, though I didn’t expect to find one. Her eyes were open, her pupils tiny in the blue. For some reason it brought the 90s John Lennon song “Change Your Tune” into my head, lyrics twisted. You’ll change your eyes, dear.

I shook the song away. Focus. She slumped against the stage, half sitting, head leaning back against the stage. She wore a silk dress with a hibiscus flower print, louder than anything I’d wear, but not in a bad way.

“What’s your story?” I asked her under my breath.

I crouched to examine her hands and arms, trying not to move her too much. The nails had been bitten painfully short, but there was nothing under them that implied a fight. Some bruises and track marks on the insides of her arms, not all of them scabbed over, but nothing to suggest she’d tried to protect herself from the fall. I didn’t see any blood anywhere, but I didn’t want to move her until police or a coroner came.

Hotel Sarah stared at the body, absently chewing on her thumb.

“Why me?” I asked.

Not the question she’d expected, or else she’d tuned me out. “Pardon?”

“I know you said I was the closest thing to a detective, but why do you need someone to investigate? Aren’t the police on their way?”

She shook her head. “Gale winds on the Sound tonight. They can’t make it out here by boat or helicopter.”

“What about a medical team? Surely there’s a medic here.”

“We paid a paramedic team to come out to the island this weekend, but they turned around because of the weather, too. My staff have basic CPR and first aid, but, well…”

I finished her sentence. “But she’s obviously already dead.”

“Yeah. I thought maybe you’d be the next best thing to police, until they can get here. If she had a heart attack or stroke or just fell off the stage, it’s sad but nothing to worry about. If it was foul play”—the phrase sounded funny, like something on television—“we’re stuck with a murderer all weekend. If the police don’t get here in time, we can’t keep people from the portals. They’re timed precisely.”

“How about security? Surely you have security staff.”

She dismissed them with a wave. “They’ve never had to handle anything worse than kids setting off the fire alarms.”

“And I know I said this already, but you understand I’m in insurance? I investigate fraud. People lying about whiplash, that kind of thing. Not even the glamorous cheating-spouse stuff.”

She shrugged. I decided not to give her any harder time about it. She’d made a decision, never my strong point. She was probably already questioning herself, wondering what other option she hadn’t considered.

I was what they had. Right. So until police got here, I played coroner, law, and order. Not a role I was comfortable with at all, made weirder by the circumstance. Victim: Sarah. Investigator: Sarah. Suspects: all variations on the theme, other than the hotel staff. Hard to imagine one of us murdering; I knew I didn’t have it in me to kill someone. Also hard to imagine the hotel staff bothering; most murders involved somebody the victim knew.

I summoned up my inner TV detective. “Just to rule this out, nobody on your staff has any beef with you that you’re aware of? Nobody would be driven to kill by an entire hotel full of your dopplegangers?”

“I think we’re all weirded out by that, myself included. But I don’t think any of them hate me, and I don’t think I work with any killers, though I guess that’s what everybody says. ‘He was such a nice man. He kept to himself.’” She touched her nametag. “Anyway, if they hated me, I’d think they go after me, not one of you. I’m easy to spot.”

“True enough. I’ll put them aside for now.” Though that meant focusing on the Sarahs again. “Were you the one who found the body?”

“No. The DJ did. She called me.” She held up her walkie-talkie.

“The DJ is one of us, right? Not your staff?”

“All the performers this weekend are attendees.”

“And where is the DJ now?”

“She went back to her room. She was a little freaked out.” Understandable, if her reaction to seeing her own dead twin was anything like mine.

“Has anyone else been up here?”

“The Sarah running sound and lights came up to check the system earlier for the host’s speech.”

“The host. Have you told her yet?”

Hotel Sarah chewed at her thumb again. “That’s the thing. Like I said, I haven’t been able to reach her. The organizers are all on walkie-talkies since your phones don’t work here, but she’s not answering hers. Nobody on the committee is answering, actually. That’s why I took matters into my own hands. Last I saw her, she was down in the Operations room, but she’d been up here earlier, so she could have come back for something.”

I looked down at the body. Tried to remember the woman who had breezed through the lobby earlier. “Are you saying you think this might be the organizer?”

She didn’t say anything, so I continued. “Do you remember anything specific about her? Anything to differentiate her?”

Her look suggested the question was a pointless one. “She was a little thinner than most. I think she runs marathons. Most of the committee do.”

The body was freckled and thin. She could have been a runner. A runner with a possible drug problem seemed a little counterproductive, but maybe she had pain issues or something.

“How about her clothing? Do you remember what she was wearing?” The woman I’d seen earlier had been in a blouse and jeans, not a dress, but she’d had time to change her clothes.

She shook her head. “I have a pretty good memory for detail, but everyone’s blending together…”

“You don’t have a registration list, do you? That might be useful. We need to try to identify the body before anything else.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think to bring one up here. That couldn’t be her, right? Should I try to find her again? She’s going to need to notify the next of kin, and create a procedure to bring a body cross-world. Nobody’s ever died in the wrong world before.”

Infinite permutations. Surely someone must have. Except that for all the individual crossworld expeditions, according to the program this was the first gathering of its kind. Our host, one of us, the Sarah who had created the crossworld portal. It made me feel like I had wasted my life, in comparison. What would I have had to do differently to become a scientist? Her branch of science didn’t even exist as a field in my world. And now she was possibly lying dead in front of me.

Focus. If I hadn’t been carrying a backpack, I’d have put my ID and my keycard into my front right pocket. Her silk dress had a shallow pocket at the hip. When I slid my hand into it, I came up with a driver’s license. Her ID gave her name as Sarah Pinsker, which wasn’t much help. An address in Baltimore; the host worked at Johns Hopkins.

I held up the license. “Do you know how many here this weekend live in Baltimore?”

“Forty or fifty? There would be more if so many hadn’t been lost, from what I understand.”

“Lost? Baltimore?”

“A bunch of Seattles were lost in tsunamis or earthquakes. Some of us moved from Baltimore to Seattle or Seattle to Baltimore…”

I followed her train of thought, pictured a giant wave swallowing my house. Shuddered, brought myself back to the situation at hand.

“So this might still be our host. One in forty or fifty in that city, but maybe we can narrow it down when names and addresses come into it. It probably isn’t the sound person, since she’s dressed up a bit. Isn’t the DJ, since the DJ found her. The host wasn’t working alone this weekend, was she? The registration desk, entertainment, programming… She had a committee, you said?”