Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

When she returned to her hotel, she sat down on the bed, opened the express-mail envelope, and pulled out the book. She slowly opened it, then began to leaf through it.

It was full of black-and-white pictures of various groups and activities and buildings, things she sensed would have been resonant to somebody who had been in that place at that time. She was an intruder who couldn’t know what the people in the pictures would feel if they looked at them. It occurred to her that she knew immeasurably more than these people between eighteen and twenty-two years old knew, because she knew what was going to happen in the next thirty-odd years. But then, all of these bright, cocky kids with smooth, unlined faces were in their fifties now, and they knew it too.

She reached the section where the rows of head shots were arranged alphabetically. She turned a handful of pages at once, first to the Ms, then to W, then back a few pages to the Vs. There were not many names that began with V. His picture was the first one her eyes settled on.

In those days he had been Brian Reeves Vaughn, from Weston, Massachusetts. He had worn his blond hair fairly short, considering the year. Then she scanned the pictures of other boys in the class, and discovered that her assumption had been wrong. A few had hair in curly halos around their heads, and a couple had straight, stringy hair to their shoulders, but only a couple. She had once heard somebody say that the sixties began in 1968, and she got the impression that she was holding evidence that it was true.

She turned back to the Vs and looked again at Brian Reeves Vaughn. He didn’t look naive, exactly, just young. She tried to see the picture of the boy who stared back at her as happy. After all, three decades later the man he would become had walked away from his home, whatever family he had, even his name, but he had kept the ring that would remind him of those days at Yale. He didn’t look happy. He looked a little bored, maybe just tolerating the photographer who was taking his picture.

She guessed that the assessment he must have arrived at that those days were the ones he wanted to remember had come in retrospect. That was normal, she supposed. For a runner, it was almost inevitable. No matter what a normal life had felt like at the time, it had certainly been better than whatever happened that could goad a person into trying to disappear, and it was also better than the experience of running.

She looked at Brian Vaughn more closely. He didn’t seem to be the type to go misty-eyed about his days at Yale, when the whole world had seemed bright and limitless. He might be the type who felt sorry for himself and got secretly bitter. Secretly bitter, she repeated. That was what seemed wrong.

Keeping a class ring with his initials on it was stupid. She knew almost nothing about him, but she knew something about Yale. They didn’t admit people who were stupid. This picture was taken in Brian Vaughn’s senior year. If he had gotten that far, presumably he was as intelligent as he needed to be for most practical purposes.

She began to move backward through the rows of portraits. When she found the Hs, she understood. There, in the middle of the top row, was James Walter Hardiston. Vaughn had not invented him. He had gone to school with him. He had probably known him, picked up details about him and his family that had made the impersonation convincing. The class ring wasn’t a sentimental souvenir. It was part of the disguise he had used to fool Sarah Hoffman and Richard Dahlman.

Jane picked up the telephone and started to call Dahlman in Carlsbad, then set it down again. What she had learned wasn’t worth telling him. She knew what B.R.V.’s name had been, and she knew why he had been so good at impersonating a Hardiston. But she didn’t know why he had wanted to.

The next morning she arrived at the big public library at ten, when the doors opened, and began to move backward in time. Christine Manon had seen the face-changers shipping C. Langer’s belongings to Santa Barbara about two months ago, and that must have been shortly after the man impersonating James Hardiston had become C. Langer. When had he chosen to become James Hardiston? Richard Dahlman had said the series of surgical procedures he had performed on James Hardiston had taken about eight months. So the transformation to James Hardiston from Brian Vaughn must have taken place at least ten months ago, and possibly as long ago as a year. If Brian Vaughn had begun to worry about being recognized a year ago, then his problems must have begun before that.

Jane couldn’t be sure how long it had taken Vaughn to get that worried, so she decided to begin with two-year-old stories and work forward to a year ago. She started by eliminating the possibility that he had been involved in something that had made national news. The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature would tell her if he had been the subject of a magazine article. He had not.

She tested the theory that if an old Yale graduate was accused of a serious crime, or simply disappeared, it would be considered local news in New Haven. She slowly worked her way forward through a year of the New Haven Register and found no mention of Brian Vaughn.

Brian Vaughn’s entry in the yearbook had said he was from Weston, Massachusetts, and that meant the big regional journals were the Boston papers. By the time she had scanned the local and domestic sections of a year’s issues of the Boston Globe it was evening. She was too tired to look at anything that had print on it, so she ate dinner and lay on the bed in her hotel. Whatever trouble had come to Brian Vaughn, it had not been the sort that sold newspapers.

Jane sank into a fitful sleep, and when she saw the empty sky around her, she was afraid. She was standing high above a wide river on the top of the steel arch of a bridge. She had never gone to see the bridge in Washington that her father had been building when he died, so this one looked like the Peace Bridge over the Niagara River to Canada. She cautiously turned her eyes to the south, because she was afraid that if she moved she would fall. She saw the river widen to become the endless expanse of Lake Erie. She tried to look in the other direction, and felt herself tottering, so she crouched and clung to the steel arch. Below her she could see the wide, blue river moving away from her toward the north.

The wind was strong up here, and she could feel it tugging at her hair. With her head down, she could see the concrete blocks where the bridge supports were anchored. They were shaped like boats with their prows pointed upstream toward Lake Erie, and from here she could see a wake of eddies downstream as though it were the bridge that was moving. Each block was as big as a house when you were down there on the river, but now the white gulls that glided high above the eddies looking for fish were so far down they were just specks of white moving against the deep blue.

Then a long, black shadow passed over her and she had to look up. There he was, standing on a steel I-beam. There were thick, twisted cables on the ends, and an enormous crane was moving him across her field of vision toward the bridge. She recognized his blue jeans, the yellow hard hat, and the bright red flannel shirt.

“Daddy!” she called, even though she knew he couldn’t hear her from so far away in this wind. He was so tiny and alone, surrounded by the blue sky with nothing but the blue water below him. He held one of the cables with his right hand, and raised his right arm to wave, but she knew he wasn’t waving at her. He was giving some signal to the crane operator. She could barely hear her own voice as she said, “Please, please don’t die.”

But the cable that held the I-beam snapped, as it always did. The big piece of steel tilted, then slipped out of the loop on the other end and dropped. He was free of it now, and falling more slowly because his arms and legs were away from his body and moving, and the resistance seemed to hold him back a tiny bit, the sleeves of his red shirt fluttering and flapping.